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.

Tsundoku no more Day #6

I was still living in Los Angeles when I downloaded this book and I can tell from the date I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. The city I’d lived in since I was 22 was becoming meaner and more expensive by the day and I was having a hard time staying afloat. I was balancing a crushing day job schedule with writing and a lot of time, if the choice came down to writing or sleeping, sleeping won.

200 Motivational and Inspirational Quotes that Will Inspire Your Success compiled by Kathy Collins

Downloaded August 21, 2015

Interestingly, this book is now “out of print,” but you can access Collins’ own quotes all over the internet. They seem pithy enough but back then? I’m not sure they would have raised me out of my funk.

Woman in the Rain: A Picture is worth a thousand words -- or more

One of the things I do on a regular basis is shop for images on sites like Bigstock, Dollar Photo, and the like. Sometimes I'll buy a month long subscription and download tons of images I think I might like to use for the blog or for one of the various content-provider jobs I have, or as the basis of a book cover.

I've been playing with the idea of a new paranormal series about a woman who can bring the rain. I have one novelette in the series (Let It Rain, see cover below right) that will publish this summer, and if people like it, there will be more stories.

I'm fascinated by rain. I grew up in a place that was ravaged by two hurricanes when I was in high school. I know how destructive water can be when it's unleashed on land, whether it's a tsunami or a hurricane, or just a flash flood. (In fact, WATER is the most destructive force on earth.) I lived in Los Angles for decades and the whole time I was there, the state was in a state of drought. Meteorologists promised that this, an El Nino year, would bring relief. It hasn't so far, not really. Instead, it's dumping water on Seattle, which has had its rainiest year in more than a century.

Define irony. Bringing more rain to the Pacific Northwest is like bringing coal to Newcastle. And I can't help but think that if there WERE such things as water witches, they'd be in high demand in L.A. I'm talking about people with powers beyond water diviners and water dowsers, a character who could literally make it rain. Where would the rain shadow be? What land would suffer drought in the wake of her magic-working?