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Sunday, January 04, 2009

The Cabin

One of the questions I get asked with some frequency is whether or not I've used the places I've traveled to in any of my stories. The answer is yes. The Raft Cities were based on my experiences at Samarai Island which is part of Papua New Guinea and I've used Los Angeles a couple of times, but I only needed a real general kind of memory of those places. For the Work In Progress (WIP) I'm using a very specific location. The cabin.

Usually, if a Minnesotan says "the cabin," they're talking about northern Wisconsin or western Minnesota, but I'm talking about a cabin in Southern Wisconsin. Nearly in Illinois, as a matter of fact. It's a place I've only been to maybe a dozen times in my life, but it's perfect for the WIP because it's proximity to Chicago is going to cause my heroine some concern. :-) The problem is that while my memory is quite good, it's not good enough to remember the types of small details I need to insert into the book.

My parents have pictures. Somewhere. :-) I've asked them a few times now to look for them and today they finally turned up a few. All but one shot is taken outside. That isn't a huge help since the pictures are from September and the story is taking place in March. I need interior shots and lots of them. The search--I hope--will continue.

The shots I have aren't digital and the idea of scanning them in isn't exciting me. I'm thinking about taking pictures of the pictures with my digital camera to get them on my computer. The thing that's really amazing me right now is how quickly I've become used to all the shots being digital. I found a couple of disks in my basement last weekend and they were floppies! I'm like, OMG, I better hurry up and get them onto CD because if my laptop dies that has the floppy drive, I'm done. Technology. It's amazing. :-)