FINDING A LOST TOWN by Sarah E. Glenn
When you’re writing a story,
you form a lot of mental pictures. Your characters, the furniture, the people
on the street. When you’re writing about real places, though, it helps to
actually see the locations you’re talking about. If you’re geographically not
close, photos and videos are a great help (Googlemaps, if nothing else). If you
can visit a place in real life, though, you really should.
The first short story with
Cornelia Pettijohn and Teddy Lawless was set in Cornelia’s home town, Fisher’s
Mill. At one time it was an important stop for riverboats, and had even earned
the nickname “Little Sodom.” In modern times, though, the town no longer
existed. It had been absorbed into the area around Midway, Kentucky. We’d
written some scenes with Cornelia’s farmhouse,
Mr. Scroggins’ “rustic cabin,” and Burgess’ Drugstore (none of them real
locations). We had an important scene, though, in which the ladies needed to
enter the town center after dark. Teddy used a cane, and it was important to
know how difficult this would be.
We lived in Lexington at the
time, so we hopped into the car and went in search of a place that didn’t exist
any more. There was supposed to be a stone house on the Register of Historic
Places, so we used that as a starting point. There were no directions outside
of “off US 421,” though, so we turned off at the most likely road and began
driving up and down.
There were some rural areas
left, but most of the area had been turned into fashionable suburbs for
well-to-do folks that wanted a place in the country. We traveled up and down
the roads, looking for the ones that were the oldest, not the cul-de-sacs of
recent construction.
The first thing we decided
was that Cornelia, the local person, should be driving. There were a lot of
curves with blind entrances from homes to watch out for. The area was hilly,
which needed to be taken into account as well. Walking to and from places would
not be easy for anyone, especially Teddy.
It was getting dark when we
turned up a gravel road that passed between two older houses—a steep climb—and
entered a flattened, grassy area. Across the expanse, close to the trees, was a
semicircular road flanked by old, rundown buildings. A sign, propped up against
one of them, dated to the 1880s. In the center of the grass was the rusted-out
shell of a 1950s Pontiac. We’d discovered a lost town, one that possibly no one
cared about besides us at that moment, but it made all the difference in the
world to how that critical scene was written.
Gwen and I have made it a
practice to visit the locations in all our stories—the town of Fisher’s Mill
for that first short story, the University of Indiana for another short story,
Homosassa, Florida for the first Three Snowbirds novel, and even what remains
of The Gangplank, Saint Petersburg’s first nightclub, for Murder at the Million Dollar Pier. The best part? It’s all great
fun.
Bios:
Gwen
Mayo
is passionate about blending her loves of history and mystery fiction. She
currently lives and writes in Safety Harbor, Florida, but grew up in a large
Irish family in the hills of Eastern Kentucky. She is the author of the Nessa
Donnelly Mysteries and co-author of the Three Snowbirds stories with Sarah
Glenn. Her stories appear in A Whodunit
Halloween, Decades of Dirt, Halloween Frights (Volume I), and
several flash fiction collections. She belongs to Sisters in Crime, SinC
Guppies, the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and the Independent Book Publishers
Association. Gwen has a bachelor's degree in political science from the
University of Kentucky. Her most interesting job, though, was as a brakeman and
railroad engineer from 1983-1987. She was one of the last engineers to be
certified on steam locomotives.
Sarah E. Glenn is a Jane-of-all-trades. She has
a B.S. in Journalism, mostly because she’d rather write about stuff than do it.
She also spent time as a grad student in classical languages, boning up on her
crossword skills. Past
occupations include: interning at a billboard company, helping doctors navigate
a continuing education website, and updating listings in telephone books. Her
most interesting job was working the reports desk for the police, where she
learned that criminals really are dumb. Sarah loves mystery and horror stories,
usually with a sidecar of humor. Her baby is the Strangely Funny series, an annual anthology of comedy horror tales
by talented authors. Sarah’s great-great aunt served as a nurse in WWI, and she
was injured by poison gas during the fighting. After being mustered out, she
traveled widely. A hundred years later, 'Aunt Dess' would inspire Sarah to
write stories she would likely disapprove of.
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