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This small town also allowed me few distractions as a child and plenty of land to explore. A person who has grown up in a large city may label this kind of living as boring but it gave me the freedom to spend days visiting a dragon that I imagined lived under the bluff behind my home or the fairies I was convinced lived in the enormous oak tree in my front yard. I remember clamoring to my smiling mom to tell her that I caught a glimpse of a tiny, winged lady peaking down at me while I was stretched across a tree limb reading a book. So when it came time for me to place Nicole into her fictional town it was very easy for me to see magical places fitting into my little two red-light town.
Why did I write about my home town instead of creating a new one? "Write what you know" is the first bit of advice that stuck with me as I started the Blood Burden Series and, though this may not be how all writers interpreted those words of wisdom, that's what I did. I used a version of my home town where I mixed its modern day layout with the layout of how it was when I was a child, added a few locations that were needed for my story's flow, left out any business names (for legal issues) or called them by nick names so that some of the locals might be able to say "Hey, I know exactly where that's at!", and before I knew it I had created a town in which to grow my story around. This way of world building has stayed with me with all the stories I've created since my first.
Now Nichole didn't stick around in that little town the whole story but by writing what I knew I had a great jumping point for when I needed to write about a location in Ireland or a airport hundreds of miles away. Being this was my first stab a writing a novel I was able to learn what details needed to be included for people to really feel, smell, and taste what it was like in Nichole's town and this allowed me to do better research when it came to locations I'd never been to. I learned from building the first location what small and big details were important to make the world believable and magical at the same time so the new locations flowed out a lot easier.
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Happy reading!
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