Mistakes of the Past Blitz! - guest post about creating a fictional town

Thornwood: Creating a fictional town

I have a habit in my writing, I don’t often use real places. In my YA, Snapshots, the city Cyc lives in, I didn’t have a name until one of the very last drafts. I picked a name along the lines of Los Angeles and had a bit of meaning. In Path of Angels, and Abducted Life, there are no names for the towns the characters are from. It just wasn’t important to the story.

But when it came to Mistakes of the Past, I needed a town name because it matters to Rose. She wants to escape the town and the tragedy attached. Plus, the characters kept talking about the place. When I introduce Rose, she’s looking at the name to the town!

Many writers will use real places, but that has its downsides. You gotta get details right. That’s hard if you don’t live near the place. And trust me, someone who lives there will let you know. This is the main reason why I often make up the places where my characters live. I can arrange it how I need it to and don’t have to worry about getting it wrong and throwing readers out of the scene.

Of course, that’s not to say I don’t get inspiration from real towns and cities.

Thornwood is actually a mix of two towns I grew up around: Newberry and Curtis, Michigan. Curtis is a tiny, little tourist trap. You can drive through it in a minute. Newberry is bigger, but not by much. I mashed them together to get a small town where most everyone knows each other, but it’s also big enough for a hospital. Both aren’t too far from where I currently live, so the inspiration for the city (which I never bothered to name) is inspired by that. Although, that city is much bigger than the one I live in.

Will I ever use a real life place for a story? Yeah. It will probably be somewhere I have visited or can easily. That will allow me to make sure the streets I use are accurate and makes sense.

Luc seeks atonement for the actions that banished him from his home. Living as a priest in a small town, he strives to show how much he’s changed with the hope that one day he can return to his family.

Haunted by the guilt that destroyed her family, Rose has shut her heart off. She vows to never let anyone near again lest she hurt them. When she meets Luc, she can’t deny the draw she feels to him.

But the past is not easily forgotten. When Luc’s past finds him, Rose is caught in the middle. Forced to face who he used to be, Luc must decide if he’s willing to give up his chance at redemption to save Rose. But doing so means he won’t be able to hide who he is. Will Rose be able to reconcile the man she knows with the devil he used to be? Or are the mistakes of the past too damning?

Buy the book:

Amazon * B&N * Kobo * iTunes * Smashwords

About the Author:

Patricia Josephine never set out to become a writer. In fact, she never considered it an option during high school and college. She was all about art. On a whim, she wrote down a story bouncing in her head. That was the start of it and she hasn't regretted a moment. She writes young adult under the name Patricia Lynne.

Patricia lives with her husband in Michigan, hopes one day to have what will resemble a small petting zoo, has a fondness for dying her hair the colors of the rainbow, and an obsession with Doctor Who.

Find Patricia on: Twitter * Google+ * Website * Newsletter * Wattpad * Goodreads * Books

 

RPGs & Writing - guest post by Renee Cheung

I am honoured to be guest blogging at Christine’s and to follow up on her post about RPGs and writing. She and I go back quite a bit, to the days when we used to write together on Play by Email RPGs. (If you want to find out more about what they are, read her post here) and in truth, she was one of the people that inspired me to improve on my writing at the time, and she continues today to inspire and encourage me to write.

Maybe I’ll start at the beginning. Writing was always a bit of a chore for me, until I stumble into Yahoo Groups and found people writing together, controlling characters and creating stories. I immediately fell in love with the idea and joined in with an unholy enthusiasm that concerned my parents (I was in high school at that time).  Although I was really, really bad in the beginning, (some of my posts were literally one sentence!) I got better with practice. And that practice carried me well forward today in writing, whether it’s writing stories or technical documentation for work.

I won’t bore you with details about the latter. Really, it’s quite boring. Unless you’re writing it while drunk on champagne jello. But then again, I would think quite a few boring things would be fun if you were drunk on champagne jello.

Anyhow, back to RPGs! As Christine mentioned in her past post, playing in these forums forced players to be character-focused and to be flexible in how events evolved because you never knew what other characters would do or say or react. It also gave everyone a chance to form some pretty strong friendships through the storytelling. (Exhibit A right here!)

I also wanted to touch a bit on the mechanics of writing that these RPGs have helped me develop. Because everything was through the written word and because other players depended on what each other wrote, I had to be very descriptive as a player. If my character walked into a new room, I had better describe that room well. Anything not mentioned was fair game for another player to build on and describe. And so, every post became an exercise in making me consider what to write and what to leave out, how to describe everything from the setting, to the mood and tone, to my character’s expressions and actions. On the other hand, I had to consider how to do it without overloading the posts with so much detail that it would not give other people’s characters room to breathe and act? (No one likes a control freak, especially when it comes to these RPGs.) Now when I write, I constantly ask myself the same questions. What do I want the reader to picture? What do I want to leave up to their imagination?

Christine also spoke a bit about experimenting different writing styles and characters and I wholeheartedly concur. Very often, many players including myself played more than one character. An easy trap to fall into was to have every character sound and act the same way. However, when you have them all interact in the same RPG, it becomes very obvious and I grew to learn the importance of developing distinct characters. This included everything from the way they react, their values and back stories, to their mannerisms and the way they talk. It is something I am still working on to master, but it is something that RPGs have brought to the forefront of my mind.

Another mechanic is in setting up conflict and this was especially important when I started my own RPG. Portals to World was meant to be an ultimate fanfiction crossover RPG and as the owner/moderator of the group, I was the one that set up the premise, the setting and the overarching conflicts that came in the characters’ ways. (For those that play Dungeons and Dragons, it’s the equivalent of the Dungeon Master who sets up the quests that players with their characters go on, usually via NPCs or non-player characters.) It became an exercise of how to set up situations and how to present them to the characters. Is it an in-your-face earthquake (or in my case, a random portal just opened up!) or is it a more subtle sinister creeping hint of a big bad coming that would span over multiple posts? Still, sometimes the conflict becomes a dud because it was just too easy, or sometimes it becomes a corner that gets hard to write out of and as the moderator, it was something I just had to roll with. Being the moderator of a RPG taught me to set up conflicts well and also taught me to be flexible when something doesn’t quite pan out the way I anticipated.

As I pick up writing back up again after a long hiatus, I fondly remember what I learned writing in those PBeM RPGs and I sincerely hope that there would be a chance to do it again some day. Perhaps not in that particular form, but to experiment with some sort of dynamic real-time storytelling. Have you played in any sort of storytelling games and if so, how have those affected your writing style? I’d love to hear more!

* * * * *

Find out more about Renee on her website and blog.

Renee is one of the twelve amazing authors featured in this year's IWSG anthology, Hero Lost: Mysteries of Death and Life. Her story, "Memoirs of a Forgotten Knight" is set in the Physical/Digital world. A fantastic read! The anthology will be out at the beginning of May.

Check out her fantastic new release, Tales From The Digital.

Somewhere along the way, humans found a way to anchor magic into technology, bringing about the commercialization of once-mystic energies. Little do they know that by doing so, they also created a conduit for the fae and other creatures to migrate into a whole new land...