Mission Statement: "Kars Vandor controls the Trade of Half-a-Hundred-Worlds"

[Sample Draft Map of a few star system locations in the Varala Drift.]

When I started out with the "TransStellar Saga" series concept, I had this core idea:

A female scout who has pre-cognitive flashes. She lives in the far future of the 55th century. Her Name is Nisa Jax.  That is all I knew when I started writing about her during the "North American Novel Writing Month" (NaNoWriMo), 2014.

Each year, thousands of would-be novelists compete against themselves and procrastination to finish at least a Novella of a minimum of 50,000 words over the month of November.  For those without experience, it is quite a challenge.

I wrote about this character of the Far Future.

She grows up on the world of New Asia, a world that is stormy, it has a large moon.  Huge tides. It rains a lot.

She is sent for some religious training to a remote convent, on a desert world, called Anchoret.
Once she arrives, she chafes against the regimented harsh discipline and craves her freedom.

That was clear.

She is smart, a genius intellect. She reads technical manuals for fun, but her father is wealthy. She has a problem with arrogance and stubbornness.

I looked for images of characters, to get inspiration.

I found an artist on DeviantArt.com, Marin Atanasoski, that could do the style I wanted. Nisa came to life.  The artist worked for many days, to my specifications.  The image he executed for me, was exactly 100% perfect.

He finally ended up with this graphic, which sustained me for years as "The Space Opera Novel I want to write. 'Sunrise, on a Distant Moon' ".

Nisa Jax, by Marin Atanasoski https://www.deviantart.com/spirit815

My initial concept was this:

Nisa's father is Kars Vandor, a hard-core tough-as-granite business shipping magnate, who started his career as a neophyte pilot hauling garbage to reclaim sites, and water to desert worlds.

Later, he worked for the Orion Republic as a troubleshooter, the go-to-guy when you need something to happen off the books, for a fee.

 Over his lifetime, he makes the right decisions and gets lucky exploring and exploiting the vast resources of Known Space.  This phrase kept going through my process: "He controls the trade of half-a-hundred worlds."

* * *

When I mapped the Varala Drift subsector, I wanted an area that could encompass 50 worlds.

I looked at multiple tools that could do a decent "how far apart are the stars for this setting?" map quickly, and I came upon the site of Alex Schroeder's Traveller Subsector Mapper.
https://campaignwiki.org/svg-map

I requested what he wanted for rights or attribution via email, and he graciously permitted me to use his site's mapping functions, at no charge, for whatever purpose I wished.  I credit his help here.

I worked many days with his mapper site, using multiple science-fiction game books, moving main worlds from hex to hex, adjusting systems military bases, geophysical statistics, populations, trade routes, starport classifications, and technological progress levels, until I came up with something that seemed like astrography, and plausible as a setting at the edge of the frontier of Known Space in the far future. 

But it all became something I could believe in.

A setting I could understand and imagine. Outstanding art helped.