Writer's Grove

Hand Drawn Maps ROCK!

I recently Tweeted about this, but it’s too cool to confine to 140 characters. I found the Hand Drawn Map Association! Check this one out, the Blue Plate Map!

It’s a great site to explore. Some of the maps suck a little bit, but every single one of them has more character than anything generated by a machine. You can have your cold, calculated, stunningly accurate GPS maps; I’ll take maps generated by someone else’s set of spatial relationships any day! The possibility that you might not reach your intended destination by following them is a large part of their beauty! Every hand-drawn map represents a paradigm shift and the opportunity to visit someone else’s head space for a while.

I’m going to submit my own map soon, and rather than populate the dangerous, unknown areas with illustrations of sea monsters, I will sketch caricatures of social conservatives.