Keeping track of Mortum Caelum has been a challenge these past two decades. I've used tools like Storyist, paper notebooks, and most recently a giant collection of markdown files with folders like "characters" and "nations". As the story grew and my concepts for the world became more developed those notes would shift out of sync. It was so hard to throw away old ideas, even when they were left dangling, remnants of some other story that might have been.

I'm looking at some complex rules for ritual magic here which will not make their way into this book. I have over 15,000 words written about a war with Qartago (the second one, actually) which is being removed. Qartago, by the way, was the old working name for Qadashur. The Hierophant was exploring a different genre at the time.

And these words aren't all for naught. There are character sketches in here who will transpose into this new reality and find life in a slightly different shape. I have set-pieces and theatrical moments which can be borrowed. In the war files I worked out many types of ship that traverse the Ioma, all of which can journey onward.

The difficulty of managing it all is still there, though. So I set out to try something new. I've created the Constellation, a living wiki built of the interconnected ideas across this site: in the map, in the world-building, in these blog posts, and even in the calendar. The natural ways these things link together is graphed in 3D and the nodes are clickable to explore. The format is a little strange and it may seem less intuitive than many wiki's you're used to but this has two big advantages for me.

1. I don't need to do anything to update it. The node graph builds automatically based on the site content I add. It will grow and evolve as my writing does. That's far more maintainable than using something like wikipedia's MediaWiki software.

2. And it allows me to visually see segments that aren't connecting. Are they old fragments of language or novelty? Are they ideas which I haven't developed enough to find connection? It's a framework for me to constantly improve the world.

I'll continue to evolve the interface for this as well as time permits. Maybe there's a way to make it easier to browse, or get those labels to feel more natural. In the meantime, play around with it if you feel like exploring new places. The way the map portion came together has been great.

I'm nearly done with my present focus area: renaming the world's locations. I have all the names and rough profiles in place. I'll be moving over to the graphical portion of the map next in order to sync it with this new vision. Slowly but surely the sources are becoming more trustworthy. That will give me so much to lean on as I move forward.