Yes, it may be a fictional town, but its mine...all mine.
I couldn't write yesterday. I got a few sentences, which I know is better than nothing, but I wasn't able to concentrate. Hubby is on holiday, my daughter is being a brat (when I was her age, we were NEVER in the house in the summer. We played hide and seek, jumped rope, walked to the corner store for candy, I swear if she leaves the house it is only for baseball!)
and I am stressing just a little about my day job.
*sigh* When we were kids life seemed so simple didn't it?
Anyway, that's off topic. I got up really early this morning because I was supposed to drive into Toronto to meet with a client for 8 am, but the meeting has been cancelled (only this morning AFTER I was already up) so I grabbed my laptop, got my coffee in a nice travel mug to keep it warm, wiped the dew off my lounge chair, turned the cushion and am now sitting in my back yard, enjoying the cool morning, the sound of rush hour and the chirping of birds. Oh wait, then there is the sound of the screaming kid from behind us. If Johnny was my kid....yeah, he really is a Johnny.
So I went to sleep last night dreaming about my town. Not the town I live in, but my story town. I had a map in my mind of the location of my town, a nice name for my town, and it includes so many of the places I love about my own town...names have all been changed to protect the guilty *sly smile*.
I even drew a map.
It got me wondering, if your story contains a lot of geographical references, do you create a map too? Do you base your locations on real places, or maybe you envision a soap opera type stage. What's it like for you when you want to make references in your book to places of interest? I know that not a lot of novels in the romance genre really care about the location and the authors tend to keep place references generic, like "they drove to the hospital" or "she went to the corner and turned into the Market lot" or "She stopped at Jacqui's CoffeeBar" places, but no real locations if you know what I mean.
Tell me, what do you do about location?
