NaNoWriMo Week 1

So I decided I was going to do NaNoWriMo a little differently this year. I've tried to do it traditionally in the past and it never worked out. I do very poorly when it comes to forcing words onto paper. At the end of the month I look back and pretty much nothing is usable because it was so rushed. Plus I never even manage to hit the word count, anyway. So with that in mind, and the fact that I have a story idea that I've been wanting to workshop for a while, November is now for me putting time into planning out backstory/history/lore/maps for the world I need to build for this story.

So far:

-I've made a very rough draft map of the continent the story would be taking place on, and while the continent is pretty small the story would be contained to a very small section. Planning out the entire area just helps with coming up with ideas on the interactions between the nations.
--Still to do: map out even rougher drafts of nearby continents. With the story ideas in place there would probably be at least some trade. How would that affect the history/current political interactions etc.
-I've made extensive notes on how to fix the map.
-I've learned that making maps is #@$!*&% hard. There's so much to take into account to make it look decent: What direction does the wind blow? If I want this region to be a different climate then how would the surrounding terrain change to accommodate that? Deserts don't happen out of nowhere, and the placement of large bodies of water with the wind direction and terrain does a lot to determine climate. Wind direction also affects the coastline shape, so then I have to rework the coasts for that to make sense as well. Rivers suck. God, trying to plan out rivers requires figuring out basic elevation levels and determining where they would dump into the sea. Rivers have a huge play in how the terrain changes and how climates form too, so then you have to make sure that rivers flow in sensible places or redraw region borders.
-I've made a lot of random notes about the main setting and the city that everything starts in and most of the story takes place in.
--Still need to start on the map of the city, but mapping a city is even harder.

Here's the very very rough draft of the map that still needs to be redrawn/fixed to account for changes for story/accuracy. Too lazy to scan it properly so I took a picture.

A couple of the bodies of water need to move, rivers need to be adjusted, the line of the mountains needs to be fixed to fit the terrain better, and the big city markers are only rough points that are nowhere near exact as they'll have to be placed near good rivers/ports/bodies of water to be more sensible. Cities don't just pop up randomly, they sit on good bodies of water or other strategic locations for a reason. If a city is breaking that rule, then what's the reason for that? How does that play into the history. Was that city an entrenched point from a previous conflict that grew into a city? If not, what caused a city to be dropped there? If there's no good reason, then it needs to be moved or considered if it even needs to exist.

P.S. At this point in time, this story is most likely not going to be pony, though it is a possibility. I could easily fit it into pony universe, but the main concern is whether that would be limiting my options by trying to fit this into a pony AU or not. Even though an AU gives a lot of freedom, there is a point where if you are going to be changing everything, then what's the point of making it pony?