I'm through stashing bodies. It's been fun, alright, in a ghoulish kind of way, but also very enlightening. When you travel through a new city it's easy to be blown away by the awesome sights -- the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the incredible beauty of the cathedrals -- but that's only one level of the city.
It pays to look beyond and deeper. If you're playing tourist with a writer's eye to locations, you notice a different aspect of the place. The carved caverns on a hillside, the stillness of a turn in the river even with traffic zooming past only a few blocks away, the innate detail of a passageway beckoning the viewer into the unknown.
The mind takes flight, the ideas flow, and the city becomes a more complete entity.
Of course, there's also that urge to toss someone into that river or through the passageway...on paper, of course.The mind takes flight, the ideas flow, and the city becomes a more complete entity.
I doubt I'll ever set a novel in France. Well, certainly not my current series anyway. Ashton Corners, Alabama will never meet Lyon, France. However, the images are stashed in the brain and might surface in a short story or perhaps a flight of fancy for a protagonist in the future.
Time to get back to work and start in on book #3, which is due in 9 months. Yikes! I'll leave the travel and those inquiring thoughts until the next trip. Or, maybe not. It's to the Dominican Republic and I'll be there as the mother-of-the-groom. The two might not mix.
Or maybe they will.
What far away places are beckoning you?
Linda Wiken/Erika Chase
A Killer Read coming April, 2012
from Berkley Prime Crime
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