First things first! We have a winner for Ellen Byron's giveaway last week and it's...ALICIA!!! Congrats, Alicia, you can reach Ellen at: ellenbyronla at outlook dot com
Jenn McKinlay: Okay, I can't really talk about what I'm writing as yet since contracts need to be signed and whatnot before the big reveal. But I can talk about my research!
The setting of my work-in-progress is the Outer Banks, North Carolina. As you can imagine, the research is a real hardship (not). I was thrilled to discover our Lucy grew up there, so I have a first person source as well as my own memories of camping trips with my family on the beaches of North Carolina and of course I have a trip planned to do boots on the ground research while revisiting an area I love.
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| Outer Banks, NC My first attempt at writing a setting where I did not reside was the London Hat Shop Mysteries. In my original concept, my protagonist was British. It took me all of five minutes to realize I could never pretend to think/speak like a Brit and so Scarlett became a fish out of water American. Boom. The mystery wrote itself. Since then, I've gone on to write many locations that I've visited but do not inhabit and I have discovered that when I view a place through a tourist's eyes (mine), I can lean into a place's uniqueness. For example, when I wrote about Rhode Island for one of my Good Buy Girls mysteries (written under the name Josie Belle), I mentioned coffee milk - this is a pure R.I. thing as told to me by a college friend who had grown up there. And then I had readers from Rhode Island reach out and tell me how surprised they were that I'd gotten it right. Very rewarding!  In my recent release LOVE AT FIRST BOOK, which was set on the Emerald Isle, I went to Ireland to do research (yes, more hardship - lol) but the real insight into capturing the essence of the places I visited was to sit and observe and listen, talk to waitresses, bookshop clerks, cabbies and so on and let them tell me their stories. I have about an hour of video of Irish cabbies teaching me everything from the history of Trinity College to the rules of the sport called hurling to how to drive in Ireland. "Keep the bitch in the ditch" -- IYKYK. Needless to say, I am very excited to visit the Outer Banks and talk to the locals and learn the the oddities that only the long time residents know and as soon as I can share more, you'll be the first to know. So, Reds and Readers, when you read about books set in places you know very well, are you offended when an author gets it wrong? What oddities make up the places where you live? |
