Is it wrong that I'm giddy about today's post? Why, you ask? Because this week's question from the incomparable Brenda Margriet has posed a question that I adore: How do you choose the setting for your book? Does where you live inspire you?
Does it? Ha. If this is your first time time my blog you won't know this, but I set all of my books in Newfoundland, which is where I live. I don't do this simply because it's a place I'm familiar with. I do it because I believe Newfoundland and Labrador is one of the most romantic places on Earth. I do it because I want the world to know what about a half a million of us know: That there's something different and magical and inspiring about this wind-swept coastline of ours. To say I'm a proud Newfoundlander is sort of like saying Richard Simmons likes tight shorts. I think both of our feelings go much deeper.
But let's really dig into the why. Here are some essential things to know about this place. I'll start with a map so you know what I'm talking about.
Newfoundland is that awesomely shaped island with a lot of black on it. Labrador, which is also part of our province, is the other awesomely shaped land to the north, also black. This black means that it is very sparsely populated. So the first thing you learn is that Newfoundland is big (about the size of California), and we have hardly any people here. (Our official population for the entire province, including Labrador is 500,000.) You can see that most of the people live on the coast, and the majority of those live all the way over on the east coast, near St. John's, which is our capital city. I grew up in St. John's. I now live about a half hour away.
This means that we have a lot of undeveloped land, a lot of coastline, a lot of woods (which means a lot of wildlife) and a lot of room for the imagination. If you read Hard As Ice, there's a scene where Daphne and Jack drive from the west coast to the east coast. It takes them about 10 hours. It's a long drive from one end to the other. I loved writing that scene because it was a fun way to show distance here. Plus, they had some great dialogue. Let me share a snippet.
“It took another hour but when they picked Ida up from the hospital, Jack was sure she’d be comfortable in the spacious backseat of the brown Chev. That was before Daphne got on the open road. The woman drove like a demented race-car driver. At this rate they’d be home in five hours.
He tried to bite his tongue but when she pulled out to pass three transport trucks, his nerves just couldn’t stand it any longer.
“Sweet Jesus, woman. Are you trying to get me and Ida killed?”
She blanched. “No.”
“Then slow down.” He knew he’d raised his voice, but he’d never truly been this terrified in a car before.
“I’m not going that fast.”
“No, one hundred and forty is perfectly reasonable. For a drag racer.”
“It’s this truck. It has too much power. It keeps speeding up. And these hills don’t help.”
“Most people would ease off the gas going downhill, or even use the brakes.”
“Well, thank you for the driving lesson,” she said, her voice clipped.
They’d left the eighteen-wheelers far behind, and she’d slowed to a hundred and twenty kilometres per hour. He’d feel better if she were going closer to one-ten.
“I don’t know what the roads are like where you live, but here we have to watch out for things like moose, and potholes, and cops.”
She started to laugh. “You’d be hopeless driving in Britain. Your roads are so wide. Then again, a vehicle like this wouldn’t be able to handle them all that well.”
“Well, this isn’t Britain. It’s Newfoundland. And wide roads exist for a reason. So that we don’t crash into maniac foreign drivers.” He thought he smiled enough to show he wasn’t entirely serious. Although he was.
”
Another scene that came from real life for me was in Against Her Rules. There's a part of the book where Elsie has taken Cam out in a boat onto the ocean so that he can sketch some seabirds.Here's what she does.
“Looming out of the water was a huge jagged rock, about the height of a ten-storey building. Overhead a myriad of birds swooped and crested in the wind. He hadn’t noticed the sound over the motor, but now it was all around them. A cacophony of the soft purring uurrr’s of turrs underlay the screeching of the herring gulls and a hundred more varieties of birds.
It was both frightening and awe-inspiring at the same time.
“Get ready for this,” she said, pulling a small white bucket out of the pack.
“Holy shit. What is that?”
The reek that came out of the bucket was putrid.
“Fish guts,” she said, tossing them overboard.
The first bird to spot the bait, a small puffin, dropped from the sky in a death-defying dive, plunging beneath the water, presumably spearing a treat as he dove. At least Cam hoped the poor thing did, given its tenacity.
It was followed quickly by another, a gull this time, he thought. And then another and another until it was raining birds, and feathers. If one bird was lucky enough to have speared some food, another tried to steal it from its beak. It was awesome and terrifying all at once.
”
This happens. It's happened to me. Quite often I go out fishing for cod with my Dad. On our way in from fishing, he'll start to clean the fist, tossing the offal into the water. Here's a photo of how the birds react to this disgusting buffet.
That's my hubby steering the boat and my dad cleaning the fish. My editor was on this trip, and she took the photo. Trust me, when she was editing Against Her Rules, she didn't question that scene at all!
I could go on forever about this place and how it inspires me. But I'd like for you to go visit all the other authors who are taking part in today's blog hop, so I'll stop here. Elizabeth Janette is next. I'm not sure where she's from, so let's go together and find out how she answered these questions!
