A sense of place

I've been thinking a lot about "sense of place" lately. When I first started writing urban fiction, I was living in Los Angeles, and it was natural to set my stories and my first novel there. I have a love/hate relationship with the city where I spent decades of my life, and little by little, I incorporated both my favorite elements (the Griffith Park Observatory) and those I disliked (crazy celebrity culture, huge income disparity, ridiculous traffic) into the stories.

Photo: Matthew Field/Wikipedia

The Griffith Observatory is one of my favorite buildings in the world, and I turned it into a headquarters for the vampire family that runs L.A. and used it as the location of several pivotal scenes in Misbegotten, the first L.A. Nocturne novel. (It's currently available free in the collection After Midnight.)

Whatcom Falls photo by Ken Haufle/Wikipedia

When I first moved to the Pacific Northwest, it took me a very long time to get a feel for the place and write about it. I tried a couple of times to write UF set in Bellingham (halfway between Vancouver, BC and Seattle), even sketched an outline for something called Blood in the Rain. It just never quite happened for me. Then one day, when the wind had caused yet another hours-long power outage (a common hazard in Bellingham), I started sketching out a cozy Christmas romance and suddenly I realized I was setting it in an idealized version of the city where I'd been living for two years. And that made me happy.

I moved from Bellingham to another, smaller town nearly two years ago and from the first, I knew I wanted to use it as a setting for my Rezso and Witch War novels. My new hometown is not scenic most months of the year, but in the fall it is spectacular. (That's one reason Witch War is set in the fall.)
I am currently prepping for a move overseas. And I'm already wondering how I will write my very American books if I'm living in Europe. Under my cozy romance pen name (Katherine Moore), I already have ideas for a series of Expat romances, but I don't want to be a tourist...
Only time will tell.

New NoHo Noir--Cosmos

The story continues over at NoHo Noir with this flash fiction about a father and a son contemplating the mysteries of life. You'll see these characters again when the father is accused of murdering his ex-wife's new boyfriend. (The title of the series is NoHo NOIR after all.) The illustration by Mark Satchwill features my favorite building in the world, L.A.'s Griffith Observatory.

Here's an excerpt: The L.A. Observatory was Ty Garrett’s favorite place in the world so when the boy asked him to take him there, James was happy to oblige. Ty had been moody and restless all weekend, unwilling to open up about what was bothering him. James hoped a little star-gazing would make Ty feel better.

James hated that he didn’t know what was going on with his son all the time. He was 11 now, more little man than little boy, and it seemed like every time he saw him, Ty had changed in some subtle way. At least Erika had been good about the custody thing. But still, he hated her for breaking up the family, hated her for leaving him for the whitest man in Encino, a dentist who had billboards in three languages polluting the landscape all over the Valley.

It wasn’t the money. James was a good provider. He had parlayed a stint working in an Army motor pool into a business servicing temperamental foreign cars and their equally temperamental owners, people who pronounced “Jaguar” as three syllables like they’d been born in London, England and not London, Kentucky. In a good year, James pulled down six figures. Erika had no cause to complain there.

“Tooth guy wants me to call him ‘Uncle Tim’,” Ty blurted out, as if in answer to his father’s thoughts. Erika didn’t like it when Ty called Tim that and asked James not to encourage the disrespect. Most of the time he respected her wishes but now didn’t seem to be the moment for a lecture.

James glanced at his son’s anxious face. “Must be getting serious with your mother,” he replied neutrally.

Ty nodded. “We’re going to move in with him at Christmas,” he said.

READ the rest of the story here.