I read through that piece I "finished" yesterday again today, editing and tweaking things. Most importantly, I reviewed the scene where my traveling party crosses an international border. The narrator's friends live in a different country than he does, so I did some research on what borders look like around the world. One of the pages I was viewing had pictures of borders, labeled with which side belonged to which country. Some of them were pretty interesting, because countries have different policies on how they take care of the environment. There would be full, lush forests next to land that was bare, or next to dead trees that had been torn apart by beetles. The picture of what Australia's borders look like was literally just a snapshot of the ocean. Ha.
After thoroughly researching ports of entry and how to legally cross international borders (and trying to phrase my Google searches correctly so I didn't send off any alerts with questions like "What is stopping me from just walking into another country?" and "Are the borders between countries watched all the way across?"), I worked to convert that to the politics and magic system of my world.
It was really fun, and added another 1,500 words to the piece, so now it's 22,500 words. Ah, well. I'm very happy with the result. I joked with a friend that "I write about magical tax evasion and border control policies". I get much more excited by the bureaucracy of my magical worlds than about the adventures you would normally expect characters to be going on. That's why the narrators of the stories I actually enjoy writing are all major political figureheads, princes, CEOs, and ambassadors. Is good fun.
