I decided to spend today doing some much-needed worldbuilding for a story of mine whose working title is Asylum. It's about a private mental hospital for supernatural beings. The term 'asylum' has gone out of fashion nowadays because it has too many connotations of Bedlam and mentally ill people being chained to walls and mistreated. I prefer to keep the term because an asylum is exactly what it is in the original sense of the word--a safe haven, a place of refuge.
It is set on an island in the mid-Atlantic that has been owned by one family of magically gifted people for generations--several centuries. The island is home to the owners' estate, the mental hospital, which is located on the estate grounds, a neighborhood of the owners' fellow mages, and a small town with a harbor and a residential area and arable land for the town's residents.
I had decided a few things about this island. I wanted it to be about 36 square miles in area, I wanted it to look a lot like Inis Mór in the Aran Islands of Galway Bay--rocky cliffs rather than beaches and not volcanic--and I wanted it to be in international waters so that no existing nation could claim it and so that it was not answerable to any national or international health codes. This hospital is not listed in the Wikipedia of its universe. From the air it looks like a secondary mansion built on the estate, sort of like the Old House at Collinwood from Dark Shadows.
According to Wikipedia, Inis Mór is 12 square miles in area and supports a population of 840 people. I decided I wanted my island to be three times larger for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted for there to be plenty of acreage between the asylum and the town, and I wanted the owners' estate to act as a buffer separating the asylum from the town. The owners' estate must be large enough to encompass home farms for both the asylum and for itself. I also needed for there to be enough acreage for cattle grazing, to include beef cattle, goats, and sheep.
So where does the research come in?
I knew that I wanted the island to not be volcanic. According to trusty DuckDuckGo, this means that the island must be tectonic--created by an uplift at a point where two tectonic plates abut against each other. I had wanted this island to be located about 200 miles off the eastern United States coast, perhaps near North Carolina, where I know a lot of other islands exist.
Those islands, however, are too close to the US for my purposes. They are what Galveston Island is to Texas, and that won't do at all. Run a secret mental hospital on a private estate in the US, and all kinds of hell will come down on you if that is discovered. Dealing with US medical regulatory policy is not what I want to write about, so the island had to be in international waters. I wanted it to be close enough to the US that a plane could get to the mainland within an hour or so. But when I saw where the North American Plate meets the Eurasian and African Plates, I discovered that my island needs to be much farther away from the US than 250 miles. In fact, it will be closer to Europe, way out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
Another thing I had to figure out was cattle raising and land management. If the island is in the middle of the Atlantic, it can't easily buy its foodstuffs from the US or even from Europe; it will have to provide for its own needs, and items from elsewhere will be luxuries. This means extensive acreage being needed for home farms, cattle ranches, a small lumber industry, and mills. So I needed help from this handy site to teach me how much acreage I will need for raising cattle of various kinds.
I haven't done the acreage math yet, but it's something I know I must consider. So, lots of fun in store for me as I continue to build this little island world.
