building from the plates up

I've taken a turn from local historical maps back into worldbuilding, which I will briefly summarize here because *I* think it's interesting to talk about the process. I love specificity in fiction, and I love the feeling that something couldn't have taken place anywhere else because it is so strongly rooted to its environment, and I'm … not very good at recreating either of those things. Or at least, neither of them are a strong suit of mine, I have to really work at it and it's easy to forget. My characters exist in dialogue-and-body-language only voids in my head. Anyway, I want to try my hand at writing something that is rooted in the landscape, rather than figuring out all the plot details first and then trying to make the scenery fit around that.

(Also, *I* have become much, much more aware of and interested in my own surroundings/landscape in the past few years.)

This is sort of the sequence of events that I've been following so far, with detours into reading about North American megafauna and insular dwarfism/gigantism, because the story is set on an archipelago a hundred miles off the coast of the largest local landmass, so I plan to have Fun With Flightless Birds.

1. what do the tectonic plates and ocean currents look like?
2. what kind of rocks and soil are in this part of the world? What kinds are absent? What's the temperature like and what are the seasons? (what's the USDA plant hardiness zone?)
3. what can grow and live in that sort of environment on a general scale? What cannot?
4. what are the locations where the scenes in the story take place?
5. what grows and lives in those specific locations? What are the common sounds, smells, sights during different seasons and times of day throughout the year? Think about:
   
   1. mammals
   2. reptiles
   3. birds
   4. insects
   5. fungi
   6. wild plants – trees, shrubs, moss, lichen

and for cultural worldbuilding, start out with things like this:

1. what materials are available in the environment for humans to use?
2. list categories of objects and what they're made of, where the material is found, and who produces the object.
3. what does access to a particular material mean for the supply chain and economy of the story?

Oh yeah, and here is a list of what I'm reading/have queued up to read for some worldbuilding specificity:

• John Josselyn (1672) New England's Rarities, Discovered!
• Jane Strickland Hussey (1974, Economic Botany) Some Useful Plants of Early New England
• Andrew F. Smith (2006, The Turkey: An American Story) "The Call of the Wild Turkey: Or, How the American Turkey Came To Meet A Fowl Ending"
• Emily W. B. Russel; (1983, Ecology) Indian-Set Fires in the Forests of the Northeastern United States