Please welcome my fellow Heart of Dixie writing friend, author Kira Sinclair. She's a Harlequin BLAZE author with a heart of gold. I'm excited to share my Veranda with her today as she shares about one of her favorite topics: Writing. Today's topic? Setting. And she's got setting nailed in her fabulous new novel, What Might Have Been. I hope you enjoy meeting Kira as much as I enjoy knowing her!!
One of my favorite topics to talk about is writing. Ask me a question, get me rolling and I can talk your ear off. I recently had a nice discussion with a friend about settings. Part of it started because of my bio – if you’ve read it you know I’m a self proclaimed city girl who’s been plopped down in the middle of the country. The transformation started when my daddy moved us from Michigan to Alabama (and I seriously asked him if we could still wear shoes. Hey, I was only nine). And continued with my husband’s penchant for bringing home critters...but that’s another discussion for another time. I’ve come to realize, during my talk of settings, that up until What Might Have Been I’ve focused my attention on fairly urban locations. Maybe I was feeling homesick. However, WMHB returned me back to my present existence. It’s set on a commercial peach orchard. Now, I don’t live on a working farm. At the moment the most we raise are goats and baby hamsters, but I do enjoy looking out my kitchen window and seeing the clear stretch of our land instead of my neighbor’s dilapidated trampoline and overgrown flower beds.
There are definitely advantages to living in the country. I just miss my pizza delivery guy sometimes.
I did love doing the research for WMHB though. Building a fictional small town where everyone knows your business. The kind where there’s only one funeral home and multiple Baptist churches. I enjoyed pulling out my learned Southern heritage and finally getting to use it.
So, do you find you gravitate towards a certain kind of setting? Do you read books where that feel familiar or do you like to change up the pace? Are you a city girl who likes to read about cowboys or a country girl who likes to travel to the urban meccas?
Kira
