I took the week off, for a vacation; and, today, drove down to Springfield,IL, to put flowers on my Dad's grave and stop in at my old job at Barnes & Noble and see if anyone I knew was still there. Springfield and Bloomington are about 60 miles apart, so it is a relative short trip and I made good time and went straight to Camp Butler National Cemetery, after a stop to pick up flowers. It's been a while (since before COVID), so I was a little confused where his grave marker was and had to hunt for a bit. I could have gone over to the main building and looked up the specifics of the grave, but I was in the right area, I just struggled to recall the exact landmark that line up with his row. I started to just systematically go up and down rows, until I found it. My mother's ashes are supposed to rest there with his; but, COVID derailed that and my sister still hasn't made arrangements to come up and have her ashes interred with my father's. Not a big deal, just hasn't happened, yet. Just a few rows over lies the grave of my junior high history teacher, who was a veteran of WW2. The placement is rather fitting, as his classroom was just a couple of doors down the hall from my father's science classroom. My dad was a bit younger, a Korean War Era veteran, who served in Strategic Air Command, with a B-36 Liberator Squadron (as seen in the Jimmy Stewart movie, Strategic Air Command), but they were long time friends and colleagues.

After, I drove across town to Barnes & Noble. I was the original Receiving Manager, when we opened the store and had my first interview with an HR rep, from New York, before the Store Manager was even hired. By the time they had been, I had already had interviews with HR and the District Manager. I was pretty certain I had the job, before I ever met with the Store Manager. We opened that store in December of 1993, the first outside the Chicago area, in Illinois. Barb and I met there, for our first date, after meeting on-line. I later transferred to Champaign, to aid a troubled store and was there for the rest of my tenure, before being pushed out in advance of them selling the company. A lot of tenured people were purged at that time, including one of my original colleagues, who had about 25 years with the company, between B Dalton and Barnes & Noble. As soon as I walked in, I spotted an old colleague and friend, Chris, who at 6 ft 5 in is hard to miss. He looked right at me but didn't seem to recognize me (its been about 17 years), until I walked up and said hi. He told me his vision is declined and he doesn't see well at a distance anymore. We chatted for a bit and he told me another colleague, from Champaign, had been their store manager, but was fired. He said she was just horrible with the staff, treating them with disrespect. She wasn't like that in Champaign, though she wasn't the boss. Neither of us were sure if power went to her head or if she got stressed by the job and thought she needed to be dictatorial or what the situation was. She always acted professional, at the other store, though a bit standoffish and private. We had the sense that she had a different side when she was away from the store. She drove a Mustang convertible and was seeing a guy (or whatever their relationship was), who seemed to make odd jokes when he would call the store for her. At one point, she had complained about some of the younger women wearing skirts that were too short, yet then she wore one that was short enough to reveal the tops of her thigh high stockings, as she walked around the store. Seemed to be more of non-work outfit, to me; but, I just kept my nose out of it, though I did voice my opinion to the store manager that I hadn't seen anyone wearing anything I hadn't seen female managers within the company wearing, at several stores. Kind of felt like it was more of an age issue.

I also stopped at an old used book store I frequented. Sadly, you don't find many, around here, any longer and those you do tend to have the kinds of things you expect to get tossed aside, depending on your reading tastes. After 20 years bookselling and haunting used bookstores, I had or disposed of anything of interest I saw there. I did finally come across a pair of PG Wodehouse Blandings story collections, which I picked up. I had read the bulk of the Jeeves & Wooster material, but have not read Wodehouse's Blandings Castle stories (about an eccentric upper middle class family, in the country) or his Psmith stories (about a journalist. Wodehouse is just wonderfully comical, with an eye for eccentric, but mostly harmless characters (except Bertie Wooster's Aunt Agatha, who would make Thatcher cower, and Roderick Spode, his satire of Mosley, the British Fascist, in the 30s) and farcical situations. They are a joy to read in a messed up world.

Now I am flipping through my books, including a history book about X Troop, the German-speaking Jewish commandos, recruited from Jewish refugees to the UK, Antony Beevor's book about the Fall of Berlin and the two Wodehouse volumes, while the cats hang by my side (after being on their own half the day).

I'm intrigued by your map of the Thurian Age. Is it the one Marvel used, which I believe was conceived by Lin Carter?

I always thought that map severely limited storytelling potential, since unlike Howard's map of the Hyborian Age, it showed the whole of the Thurian landmass. (I have the same criticism for the "complete" map of the Hyborian Age, which sins even more by having a very small Africa). 

As kids, a friend and I both wrote fantasy stories set in our respective imaginary worlds. I had to grudgingly admit that his map was superior to mine, because it showed only a part of his world (leaving room for exploration and discovery).

Anyway... nice set-up! Are you left-handed, then?

The Thurian Age map was the one commissioned by Heroic Signatures from the same artist they commissioned to do the Hyborian Age map, both of which were variant covers on their current Conan series. The Hyborian Age map is currently available as a poster sized print form their Conan store. I believe they have plans to do the same for the Thurian Age map as well, but it just came out a month or so ago as a cover. I'm not sure if it's based on the Marvel map or whether they used just literary sources and did their own design, but it is a newly drawn and painted map.

And yes, I am left handed.

-M

Yeah but I am one of the few that is in my right mind.

-M

It looks a bit like the old map but is much better in that the south and east are not shown! It makes for a vastly bigger world.

I think I commented in my review of Killraven, that if you mapped out their journeys, they were circling back on themselves and covering way more ground than was possible, in the apparent timespan.

Don McGregor was from Rhode Island and the Northeast is a bit different than the rest of the country, in terms of proximity between major cities.  Once you get outside of that, states start spreading out rapidly and the get bigger as you move west.  That seemed to get a bit lost on some of the writers at Marvel (Hollywood, too).

Tamora Pierce spoke at our local library, some years back and she started her fantasy works by creating maps, a not uncommon guide for fantasy writers, to have some sense of the world.  I know Terry Pratchett had a basic layout of Ankh-Morpork; but also didn't let himself get tied too rigidly to it.  Certain neighborhoods, yes, but others were a bit more fluid.  he could always cover himself by saying it was magic leaking from Unseen University.

BTW Roquefort Raider the artist who did the maps is Francesca Baerald.

I couldn't remember the name (and the spelling) off the top of my head and had to check my follows on one of the social sites to get it right.

-M