This is my weekly blog about life as an erotica author. These posts are suitable for general audiences, but probably not of interest to anyone under 50. Feel free to contact me with questions or for information about my 50+ erotica books. I Might even give tips regarding how to get involved. I encourage you to join my Patreon community.
3/30/25
Location, Location, Location
YOU’VE PROBABLY HEARD that the three most important things in real estate are location, location, and location. Of course, that was back in the days when an average single income for a family of four could buy a nice house in a good location. Was that ever even possible?
I’m not going to get into property values or the relative ability of families to afford safe and comfortable living spaces. When I was 23 years old, my wife and I bought a house in a small town, four miles from a larger town with a university, for $10,000. I had a ten-year mortgage at $100 per month. I was the only wage-earner. My, how times have changed. The property is valued at $39,000 today, but there is no longer a house on the lot.
What does that have to do with writing?
Understanding the area I’m writing about is extremely important to the stories I write. Even when I am disguising the exact location by using different place names and business names, I need to understand the location. Can Gee walk from his home to work in ten minutes? How long is Brian’s paper route? How present a threat is the SWARM when they invade the southern continent of Tara?
I love reading books that have maps in them. I believe The Hobbit was the first book I read that had a map in it. My daughter has a wall-size map of Middle Earth hanging in her study! But I recall some books from childhood that were so descriptive of their location that I still see it in my mind’s eye—like The Boxcar Children, which, when I read it in about 1959, was just three or four books. It’s now a series of over 160 titles.
Back when I started writing Living Next Door to Heaven, I realized I’d be following and tracking these kids through at least five years of school before they left for college. The first five books are set in or around Mishawaka, Indiana. But I didn’t want to be tied too closely to what was actually there. The high school was ten times the size of the one I wanted to write about, for example. So, I drew out the major roads I remembered from my own childhood in the area and then renamed them all. The map above was the ultimate result. Of course, it didn’t help when the clan all moved to the Bloomington area.
I had a great lunch with reader Phoenix23 a few days ago and he mentioned that he’d tried to locate where El Rancho del Corazón was when he was reading the series. Well, he didn’t have my maps. There’s a location I had in mind to have the little town platted, but the town itself isn’t on any map.
The entire Living Next Door to Heaven eBook series is available on Bookapy.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the help I received from the librarians at the Coe Library on the UWyo campus in Laramie. Blackfeather was to be set just after the founding of Laramie about 1868-1870. The librarians pulled out detailed plat maps of the city with the original street names, locations of shops and businesses, and helped me locate a place on the maps where my characters could have their dry goods store. I referred to the maps over and over while writing the story.
One of the most detailed maps I’ve ever composed was for the two “Man Without a Memory” novels, City Limits and Wild Woods. It was a complex setting that included the entire town of Rosebud Falls. It had a few unique features. The east side of the river was almost entirely occupied by The Forest, a carefully maintained rare hickory forest that provided much of the city’s livelihood.
A second feature was that it had been divided up by the seven founding families. They no longer owned all the property within the old family estates, but the districts of town were still very much present. Then, of course, there was the Wild Woods, fenced away from the Forest. Every street had a name. Every shop had a location on the map. Even the homes of specific individuals were marked out.
City Limits and Wild Woods are available as eBooks at Bookapy and in paperback at online bookstores.
Writers talk a lot about world-building when they are preparing to write. I suppose one of the most critical times to do that is when you are literally going to a different world, as in outer space. The temptation is always to simply make it ‘like earth.’ But the space opera version of other worlds is a little boring.
When I wrote The Assassin in Thinking Horndog’s SWARM Cycle Universe, I tried hard to imagine a world that was inhabitable by humans, but substantially different. Inhabitability is always the result of terraforming. Otherwise, humans wouldn’t survive except in isolated enclosed spaces, and many SWARM authors have done a fantastic job of creating different worlds.
When I created Tara, I needed to make it simple. It would be mostly a shallow ocean with three continents. I was told by learned people in the SWARM authors’ collective, that there were many reasons the layout wouldn’t work, that it was too sparse as far as land masses were concerned, and that the oceans would have tidal waves all the time.
For me, however, I figured what I had was the equivalent of Amerigo Vespucci drawing a map of the new world. The proportions weren’t necessarily right and people in the future would ultimately realize it wasn’t flat, that there were more undiscovered lands, and we would all shrug at the ignorance of the original mapmakers.
I had a planet with three continents, a big ocean, and enough information to start working on things like length of day, length of year, climate, topography, and wildlife. I’m sure one could devote one’s life to developing the world, but for me, it was good enough.
And as long as I stayed consistent with the map I’d drawn, people would accept the story as taking place on that distant planet.
The Assassin is available as an eBook on Bookapy.
One of my favorite maps seems to be missing from my files. The first story I wrote as a part of NaNoWriMo in November of 2004 was called Willow Mills. It’s really a collection of stories, character studies, and newspaper articles from a small town in Indiana that “has no corollary in the real world. In fact, it intersects with the real world in only one place—a rock about three feet across out in the middle of the Eel River within six or seven miles of North Manchester, Indiana. It’s a rock on which I sat some years ago writing poetry and dreaming of what I would do with my life.”
I suggested that it might have been any small town in Indiana, or might even have been all of them.
In order to create this village, though, I needed a detailed map. I knew exactly where on a real map the town would be if it existed, so I plotted roads and businesses, areas of town, and the stories of some of its population of about 400 souls. One day, I hope to locate that map, which I printed on a large sheet of paper, so I can share it and the story with you.
I find it hard to believe we are on the doorstep of April 2025. The world that will open to us next month will be as new as the one that opened to us this morning. And that is the subject of next week’s post: “Making it New.”
