Speaking of the Rogatia project I mentioned last time...

TL/DR: The map I always wanted to do for ages is back with a vengeance--recent setbacks/events or not.

Words cannot adequately explain how much effort it's taken me so far (since yesterday afternoon, Friday 17/5) to draw back the coastlines from a raster backup whose vector counterpart has since disappeared with the comatose hard drive it was stored on. (Someday, I'll get enough money to retrieve what was on it.)

For those new to this feed (or Steem), or any if at all long-timers/ex-Plussers coming back:

Rogatia is a fictional island nation in the North Atlantic Ocean, and the partial setting for this contributor's forthcoming Sevton Saga (however soon that comes to pass). Located at 11°30' N/53°30' W, it lies some 250 miles south-southeast of Barbados and Trinidad, and 420+ miles north of the Suriname/French Guiana border. Measuring over 8,400 km² in area and comprising some 5,000,000 inhabitants, it is one of the West Indies' most densely-populated sovereign states and also one of the twenty most densely populated countries on Earth.

Rogatia is the only Anglophone Caribbean nation with provinces, viz. Shropshire, Elmshire, and Yorkshire--from whence the affectionate Tolkien-influenced nickname, the "Shires". (Over in the Greater Antilles, provinces also comprise the Dominican Republic--not to be confused with the contributor's homeland, the Commonwealth of Dominica--and Cuba.) In Rogatia, the provinces are divided into 14 parishes named after various Christian saints (par for the course with its CARICOM brethren), which are further divided into several dozen districts and hundreds of communes (the last two a relic from 19th-century French rule). All three provinces are connected by road: Shropshire and Elmshire through the Sherbrooke Expressway, and Elmshire/Yorkshire through the ambitious Yorkshire Causeway (built and financed by the same team who gave Denmark and Sweden the Øresund, after which the Caribbean counterpart was strongly modelled).

Trouvaille, French for "find" or "discovery", is both Shropshire's province seat and Rogatia's national capital. Elmshire's seat is Weymouth, and Maidenhall Yorkshire's. Other cities include Byahaut, Randstown, Hodgence, Castle Brook, and Estinda in Shropshire; Jouannigot, Briscoulle, Chaland, and Charlesbury in Elmshire; and Knavesbridge in Yorkshire.

Rogatia owes its name--along with its national motto and two of its urbanyms⊙--to John 16:24.

• In the Latin Vulgate Bible, King James' "Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name: ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full" translates to "usque modo non petistis quicquam in nomine meo; petite, et accipietis, ut gaudium vestrum sit plenum". The then-British government adopted the bolded part as their motto in 1907.
• Rogatia's national holiday, the Major Rogation (held every April 25, except on the 26th or 27th on rare occasions), stems from the Latin rogare ("to ask"), a reference to the verse in question (Melton (2011):748-49). The Rogation falls on the feast day of St. Mark, whose parish namesake (and seat, Young Pond) makes the biggest deal out of it. The tradition goes as far back as the realm's 17th-century Spanish settlers.
• Meanwhile, Shropshire's Gaudium ("joy" or "delight"; from gaudeō) and Elmshire's Vestrum ("yours"; from vester) are derived from said portion of the Scriptures. (There's also a Yorkshire locality named Uskemodo ["until now"; from the opening words].)

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But...looks like I'm getting ahead of myself. Cutting to the chase, here's what the so-called "Drop in the Ocean" first looked like, back during my early DeviantArt.com days (as "dcjc") in 2008; this also got some buzz back then at the Inkscape Forum. (Sadly, the original SVG went away with its host, PetaIMG.)

And then, four years later (just when it looked like Sevton was off the drawing board); the design "[reminded a deviant] of the Malta Islands", and in retrospect, that's not really far from the truth. (Good thing that survives on my USB decks.)

As you may have noticed, Yorkshire is absent in these earlier attempts. (Didn't enter the picture until ca. 2015, when I salvaged part of an older on-paper project of mine and incorporated its design into Rogatia.)

That very project was an attempt to emulate Dominica itself, back around early 2007, and that's what Rogatia grew out of; you'll know it once you realise Trouvaille is analogous to Roseau; Weymouth, Grenville, and Lagley stand in for Portsmouth, Glanvilla, and Lagon; Gabriel Point (to Weymouth's south) resembles the Cabrits; Jouannigot represents Marigot; and Castle Brook = Castle Bruce. You can thank a Bronx aunt of mine who, back then, suggested that instead of the real Nature Island, I should set my Sevton books in a fictional place. (That was during the project's slice-of-life phase, long before the storyline took a turn for the darker, more serious, more political, and more action-packed.) And now you know!

Fast forward to April 2019, when Rogatia (and notions of Sevton) bounced back into my thoughts thanks to the Article 13 debacle, which has rubbed off virtually its entire populace the wrong way in more ways than one. Thank goodness a 2015 backup on my old SD card--with Yorkshire therein--came to the rescue! (Sadly, yeah...only the high-res raster.) Too bad intensive manual work on the elevation points--over 1,600 all told--bogged down the early stage of reconstruction (plus the almost nonexistent disk space on my spare laptop). It only got more overwhelming from here this week, when I moved on with more points in the sheet area of its highest point, Mount Barome (681.58 m/2236.15 ft; in G4). (By the way, I only did so to curb a breakdown caused by the fallout from recent Referata hacking spree; I'll file a report on whoever's been responsible.) As proved my previous trials with another few QGIS projects: Way too time-consuming, and at the rate I was going, it would take 5-10 years before I could finish it!

So with that in mind, I scrapped all the point layers on Friday, set up a new "Coastline" layer as a replacement, and started all over in Freehand--one sheet area at a time. Starting in southern Shropshire--more specifically, what may or may not remain as the Trouvaille Metropolitan site. And that's because I finally know better by now: With Rogatia's design long set in stone, you can count on Wilbur--and its Fractal Noise feature--to do the rest. (Not Zuckerman's pig, mind you--a long-circulating terrain manipulation program that I adopted for my cartographic suite last northern fall. Quite a lot of work to figure out, but gets better at it the more you use and practice it.)

That said, you'll be greeted to a different landscape than before once things start settling down. And yes, I intend to keep Barome somewhere in Shropshire; the other two provinces have their own highest peaks to speak of. (Our Lady of Salvation in Elmshire, and Reda Hill in Yorkshire; guess which German Article 13 opponent I honoured here?)

Last but not least: Although a lot of the individual island names have survived (through memory or working notes stretching over a decade), a few may have slipped through the cracks. In this case, Wikipedia and its randomiser are starting to make up for it, plus my imagination; for example, the island north of mainland Yorkshire is now Jorvik (Old Norse for "York"), and one of the islets is also the surname of late fashion designer Ron LoVece. And on the fly, I myself provided "Mimosken" (off the coast of southern Elmshire) for the local Gazetteer. Well after I post this, five more cays (in Yorkshire's southeast) remain to be christened.

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So that's it for the Drop--for another few days. In our next post, your first look at the new Rogatian landscape, both here and at r/mapmaking (early-birding); in time to come, samples and sheets of Veritas (the gift map), Novissima and Vigesima (south of Jamaica), St. Isabel (north of Hispaniola, but smaller in scope than I anticipated), and Tovasala (where Relformaide, my conlang, is spoken). Until we meet again, happy exploring!

⊙ Before you ask, yes, that's a real word (according to various GBooks snippets).