A Sense of Place

 I've lived a lot of places in my life. My father was in the Army, so at a minimum, that meant we moved every three years at the minimum until he retired. I traveled a lot as a kid, and visited a lot of other states and countries. Now, after five years in Washington state, I live as a digital nomade in Portugal.  Before my stay in Washington, I lived in Los Angeles for decades. L.A. was like no other place I'd ever been and I really loved it there. It became the setting for one of my long-running book series, and I also wrote a whole lot of short stories set there. L.A. had everything a writer could want.

When I moved from L.A. to Bellingham, it was a bit of a weather shock. I moved in January and it was the coldest day my new hometown had experienced in many years. It was 28, and the doors and windows were all open to air out the new paint fumes and allow the movies easy access. It was also raining. The last few years I lived in Los Angeles, it didn't rain much. It rained so much in Bellngham that if you took a shower and left your used towel on the towel rack--it wouldn't get dry. Things stayed damp. Mildew was a problem. Black mold was a problem. The house smelled of sporacide for a month after we started treating the mold we found everywhere. Bellingham was not beautiful in winter. 

But come the fall--it was the most magical place I'd seen in years. The oaks and maples and birch trees exploded wtih brilliant colors. I hadn't seen fall--my favorite season--since I left my parents' home in Virginia. I loved fall in Bellingham.  There were many other reasons to love the city. Located halfway between Vancouver, B.C. and Seattle, it had a park with a waterfall. The best indepedent bookstore on the West Coast, and tons of restaurants. It had a rich history that was literally embedded in its sidewalks--glass squares that provided illumination for the tunnels below--remnant of a dark past when Chinese immigrant workers lived in those tunnels. There was a road that ran adjacent to my bank that led to Canada. It was lined with trees and in the autumn, it looked like a road to some fairyland place.The city was criss-crossed by hiking trails that the deer also used. The deer were not shy and it was not unusual to see one passing. That also added to the fairytale atmosphere.

But for some reason, it was really hard for me to get a sense of the place.  I tried writing a short story set there for an anthology of Pacific Northwest stories called something like Blood and Rain. I failed miserably. I didn't know what was wrong, why it just wasn'tcoming. And then one day I started writing Deus Ex Magical, the first in my "Ostrander witches series, and I realized...my character lived in Seattle. I had taken the name of the series from a friend of mine who lives in Seattle, and I knew the city. And then, I wrote an spin-off story for my L.A. Nocturne series and decided my hero was going to be a guy who grew up in L.A. but hated it. Instead, he lived in the Pacific Northwest, in a town that's modeled on a place called Centralia. Centralia is home to about 18,000 people and it's full of Craftsmen houses and people who own guns and belong to White Nationalist groups. It also has fabulous thrift shops, a real community feeling, and a tiny, family-owned grocery store that showcases apples grown in Washington state. (Cosmic apples are the best I've ever tasted.) 

So the Rezso novels are set in an unnamed PNW town, which works just fine. But now I live in Portugal in a city with hills and cobblestone walks and grafitti and ruined places and incredible history and remarkable beauty. This is my sunset view from the terrace of the apartment I rent. The terrance "sold" the place. I spend more than I want to, but being able to look toward the ocean and see church towers is worth a lot. 

I've been here a little over a  year and I've already written two novellas set here. One is about a vampire killer who goes after a demonic vampire killing immigrants in the Algarve, the coastal area that's home to a lot of Brits and Americans who love it for its heat and similarity to So. California. The other was Second Honeymoon, which is a silly rom com of a story that takes place in a deserted apartment that's basically modeled on mine. Portugal and its second city Porto, don't have the same cachet of other European countries and cities, but it suits me fine. I am a woman of a certain age and the young ones call me Dona Caterina. I sort of like that. Learning the language has been tough. But I feel at home here, and that means I can write the city. Being able to do that tells me I'm at home.