Looking at Home Through Someone Else's Eyes

There’s nothing like reading to discover new places, but there’s something special about visiting places you already know through a book. I remember reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast while spending a summer abroad in Paris, and seeing the city through his eyes while I was discovering it through my own was an experience I’ll always value. It’s a rare joy to look through the lens of a gifted writer into a place you love, and see it in a whole new way.

I was born and raised in Louisiana, but for over a decade now, I’ve lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. I feel lucky that both places serve as settings for more than their fair share of stories, especially stories of the supernatural variety. Reading fantasy or science fiction set in San Francisco or New Orleans is like going through a rabbit hole to an alternate dimension.

One of my favorite ways to look at San Francisco is through the literary lens of William Gibson. He might be most famous for writing Tokyo and London, but his “Bridge Trilogy” (Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow’s Parties) takes place partially in San Francisco, and he does fascinating things with the Oakland Bay Bridge. It becomes a community all it’s own, filled in like a sideways skyscraper and populated with squatters and some near-future equivalent of food trucks. I never drive across it without remembering his gritty vision of its fate.

There are plenty of other takes on San Francisco and its surrounding towns. Christopher Moore delivers the whole Bay Area in intimate (and hilarious) detail. He even sets part of Bloodsucking Fiends and its sequels in the Safeway where I used to buy my groceries. Seanan McGuire (and her alter ego, Mira Grant) is another author who knows and writes the Bay Area beautifully. There’s a scene in her urban fantasy Rosemary and Rue that takes place in the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, and everything from the ticket kiosk to the landscaping was exactly as I remembered it. (Except for the faeries.)

I'm glad I haven't run into any vampires in the produce aisle or mischievous Fae in the botanical gardens, but imagining them there sure is fun. What are some of your favorite stories set in places you’ve called home?

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A.J. Larrieu is the author of Anchored and the upcoming Twisted Miracles, the first book in her urban fantasy series, The Shadowminds. She's a Southerner, a chocolate addict, and an incurable nerd. Find out more at www.ajlarrieu.com.

Fantasy Week - Enriching the Scene

When I read fantasy I want to be immersed in a new world, one that may resemble our own slightly, but that the existence of magic has made fundamentally different. One of the things I look for in fantasy is the depth and richness of the world and I strive for the same in my own writing. Writers call this world-building, and it is more than a history. It is clothing, food, architecture, language, culture and customs, often for several different peoples or races. It is geography and biology, flora and fauna, climate and a dozen other things.

Some writers spend months inventing hundreds of years worth of history for their worlds before they set pen to paper. I don't (okay, can't) work this way. World-building is something that I layer into my story, adding details and building up through successive drafts.

Here is an example of an early draft of a scene from chapter one of Gate to Kandrith:

EARLY DRAFT:

The uncobbled side street she was running down was almost pitch-black with only the moonlight gleam of puddles to guide her.  Her slippered foot slid and the skirts of her gown trailed in muck, becoming sodden and chilly.  They clung to her legs, slowing her progress. 

She started to edge backwards, farther away from Claude and his servants.  A sanguon ran up holding a lamp, panting.  "Here, milord."

"Don't wave it in my face," Claude said irritably.  "Go look for her."

How many others were there in the dark, searching for her?  Sara struggled to remember how many had ridden with the coach.  The driver, Claude's bodyservant and one or two guards.

The lamp was easy enough to avoid.  Sara backed steadily away from the splash of yellow light and listened hard.  Another curse from Claude as he stepped in something unpleasant and over there a small splash, someone moving through a puddle.

I liked the scene, but felt the setting was too generic. It could have been any muddy alley in any fantasy city or even a historical novel. I wanted to show that my world was different and new and interesting. More subtly, I wanted to show that my main character grew up in a different culture and has been shaped by her beliefs.

NEW VERSION

Sara ran, guided only by the moonlight gleam of puddles.  The skirts of her gown trailed in muck.  The sodden material clung to her legs. 

"Sara!"

Sara tried to speed up, but her foot slipped in the mud.  She found herself slowing, her drugged body unwilling to run any farther.  The jazoria inside her whispered to stop, wait, let herself be caught.  Let Claude take her.  Anything to make the horrible, clawing need go away.

No.  She would not give in.

Sara looked around, trying to get her bearings in the dark.  Which way lay safety?  She moved farther away from Claude and stumbled upon a raised path. 

"Lady, it isn't safe, not here."  Claude's slave, Gelban, spoke this time.  "Do you know whose temple you're at?"

Temple?  Most temples were scrubbed free of mud by diligent dedicants.  Only one--

"I don't want to say His name, Lady," Gelban said.

Vez, God of Malice.  She'd entered His temple.  Sara's heart jumped as her memory supplied an image of temple courtyard full of black mud with Vez's statuary facial features rising up out of them.  She must be walking on the obscenely long, lolling tongue, about to pass through Vez's mouth into the courtyard.  Although Vez's assassin-priests had been outlawed over one hundred years ago and his worshippers driven into hiding, no one had dared pull down the God of Malice's temple.

"You don't know who might be out here in the dark," Gelban said.  "Please, come back to the carriage."

Sara tried to think.  Was Gelban right?  The dark seemed suddenly malevolent.  All types of scum were rumoured to come out at night to search the mud for the gold coins thrown by those buying a curse.  She could end up with her throat slit or sold into slavery.  In comparison, the early wedding night Claude wanted was nothing.

"Where is the little twotch?  We've lost her."  Claude swore with surprising viciousness. 

Her determination to escape Claude hardened. Ducking her head to avoid the sharp statuary teeth, Sara entered the mouth and the Temple of Vez.

Inside, her foot came down in ankle-deep muck.  The mud in the courtyard was said to be studded with sharpened stakes.  Vez only wanted worshippers who hated enough to be careless of losing a little blood.  And if they died later... the God of Malice played no favourites.

Not only is the second version considerably more creepy, but changing the setting from an anonymous alley to the Temple of Vez gave me a chance to salt little chunks of world-building into the action like diced potato in a stew. If you try to shove a whole potato’s worth of information or backstory down your reader’s throat in one lump, they may choke on it.

Similarly, the world-building needs to be integrated into the scene: my character has a reason to be thinking about something that everyone in her world grew up knowing. Nor is the information included here a mere footnote: Vez is the force behind my villain and important to the story. Going off on a tangent about history or architecture is as off-putting as adding sugar to your stew.

What are your favourite fantasy worlds?

To boldly go where no woman has gone before

Or, travelling and how it influenced me and my stories and especially my settings. I love to travel. LOVE it. Being in Europe means that wildly divergent cultures are but a few hours away on a plane. Even France, which lies roughly 50 miles away from me, is a whole ’nother culture. And that’s what we travel for, me, the Old Man and the kids. We take in museums, and assimilate the history of places. They’ve been trained to point out interesting little titbits of information. We soak up the differences and revel in them.

Now, anyone who has read Ten Ruby Trick will probably recognise Marrakech in one of the cities. Not the culture, I hasten to add, because I’m pretty sure the Moroccans don’t have the same attitudes towards relationships as my pirates. But the place, the smells and sights and sounds, the atmosphere. A big influence on my settings. Wandering around and feeling like giants (really, I am NOT tall, but I felt it!) and being different…that was the inspiration for another book, Love is My Sin. Our outlooks were so dissimilar, along with our looks, I blatantly stole the inherent conflict of a relationship between two people of wildly differing cultures and what happens when they meet head on.

So in my head, Estovan looks much like this

Or this

And a trader’s shop much like this

For my next release (not a fantasy, an historical but being a Viking in 844, my hero believes utterly in magic, so it counts!) the inspiration was two-fold. One, my editor Deb asked is I’d ever thought of doing an historical. Two days before I left for Norway. And two, the atmosphere of the fjords. They are deep and stark and beautiful. With Deb’s words ringing my ears, I spent an afternoon wandering round a fjord thinking. ‘A place like this is made for secrets. And the jarl’s longhouse would be here and the blacksmith over there and…’

This fjord as it happens

And then, on the way out, watching the oily black water of the fjord at the bow, we noticed this

And my hero’s fate was sealed.

Atmosphere is something that I think is vital to both fantasy and historicals. To really find yourself steeped in another place.

Where do you find yours?

When in the Old West…

A funny thing happened on the way to publication of my upcoming steampunk/alt-history romance Badlands. The biggest one? It actually became a steampunk/alt-history novella.

When I first envisioned it, the story was a space western. Somewhere I still have all the initial background for the planets and the history and the politics. Then I started writing, and I discovered that I made the “world” too big. My crew had to hit multiple planets for the storyline to work and I never felt like I did any of them justice. Plus I felt my characters got lost in the shuffle.

So I shelved it.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I loved the basic storyline, and how much I loved Ever (the heroine). So after letting it sit for a couple months, I decided to take another crack at the story…as a steampunk. When I made the shift, I didn’t realize quite how much would have to change as a result.

The setting was a given, and it was the most simple change. I knew where Ever was going to come from and quickly figured out how to make the society similar to how I had originally envisioned it (with minor tweaks). But in order for that to work, I had to re-examine the political arena. As soon as I realized that America needed to be divided in more significant ways, that moved along smoothly.

So…the big stuff was easy enough. Then I tried to start writing. I never considered changing Ever’s name or appearance. The name fit her too well and I didn’t want every woman in this world to wear corsets and bustle skirts. I wanted her as wild and untamed as the land she grew up in. And since it was a new nation with its own societal rules, I could get away with it.

Not so with everyone else. Not only did I have to severely trim my character list (certain roles no longer made sense on a dirigible instead of a spaceship), but all of them needed new names too. So out went all my cool, wacky, original names, and out came websites with 19^th century monikers. As an author who has an obsession with names fitting characters, this was a big challenge since in my mind all of them fit their old names (in fact one I still think of as “Stone”).

Names took up far more time than they should have…and then I realized the gender of a key character had to change as it wouldn’t work historically to have them as female. It was a major *head-desk* moment. And then I had to think about fashion and character histories that actually, you know, fit history (I was changing many things but still wanted it to feel familiar to readers).

In the end, the story still dictated everything. I just had to work around the genre and time period a bit. It makes me wonder though, how many readers would have cringed at anachronistic names (particularly for the men: Brendan and Stone)? Would a female in a position of power in the late 19^th century US have made you roll your eyes and throw the book?

As the author, it mattered to me, but basically, how much does this stuff matter to a reader?

Location, location, location. . .

Whee! Today is release day for my first Carina Press release, DEMON'S DANCE. Here's the blurb:
Desire roused the demon within him...

Wanting to live freely as a human, half-incubus Tristan flees the Wardens. Broke and starving, he accepts Cory's offer of a paid photo shoot, never dreaming he'd find a man with whom he could be aroused and erotic in his own body without having to submit to his demonic half.

Psychically sensitive Cory didn't meet Tristan by accident; he volunteered to find the beautiful, exotic man for his patron. Cory had never before been able to touch a man without discomfort and soon can't stop, but the hotter the sex gets, the more he can sense the darkness Tristan is trying desperately to escape.

Cory will do anything to keep Tristan safe, even if it means going against both his patron and the Wardens. Cory must learn how to soothe the demon—and to love the man within.

One of the things I've discovered about writing is how important setting can be. The location can add all sorts of fun complications to the plot (like if your hero takes the subway in the wrong direction during an emergency, or a hurricane bears down on the tropical isle he's vacationing on) or it can add to the mood of the story.
The location for this series is San Diego. I lived there for several years and loved it, and one of the activities I enjoyed most was playing outdoors at the beaches (Coronado beach behind the Hotel del Coronado was my favorite) or visiting some of the state parks, such as Cabrillo National Monument.
You've probably heard of Torrey Pines with regards to the famous golf course, but there is also the Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve. It's a gorgeous place, quiet, peaceful, stunning views and several hiking trails, one of which takes you all the way down the cliffs to the beach. It's a rather fantastical place to set a few scenes of a paranormal romance novel.
Here's one of the namesake Torrey Pines. Looks a bit like a large bonsai tree, but these are special pines that only grow in a couple of places because of the particular climate they need.




And here's the rock where my protagonists--well, I'm sure you can guess what they might get up to when they find themselves alone on a gorgeous beach. . .



And here's the view from the top of the cliffs. How could one not be inspired by such an awesome view?



So now I'm curious--I've shown you one of the places that inspired me. What locations, real or not, have you put in your books, and why? Or what setting have you read about that you will always remember?