This is a new series of articles wherein I give a little inside peek to where some of the ideas for the places, people, and plots for Maldene came from. A quick little tour of the inside of my mind. An odd place, so be careful of where you step.

For this first installment, I thought you might be curious of where the Sea of A Thousand Islands came from. A vast sea with innumerable islands, most of them little more than scraps and unmapped, though the sea-going race of the Thirdocians seem to love sailing through all its nooks and crannies. Where did the idea for this one come from?

As a kid I would watch the commercials for Thousand Island Dressing and wonder. Just where is this place called “Thousand Islands”? A fascinating enough name that conjured up a number of mental pictures, it had to be real or else why name a dressing after it, right? Thus was my thinking at the age of about six. Fast forward a few years as I’m drawing up the Maldene world map, and I start thinking of different things, including that dressing. Of course I’d learned by then that no such place existed, so I created one. Thus was the Sea of A Thousand Islands born.

You never know where an idea may come from, or at what age you’ll have had it to be much later used. I never took notes of this stuff from way back when, it just stuck in my memory like a lot of other things. A childhood fancy now a significant geological feature on the world of Maldene.