…I promised a few days ago to share with yeez why certain locales appear in my Jack Calder crime thriller series… the scope of the stories themselves begs the need for international settings… my characters roam the globe protecting their International Security Partners’ high value clients and their goods… in an effort to avoid ‘formulaic’ writing when producing what became a series, for this ol’ scribbler it’s essential to try to make each book ‘fresh’… properly presented, the geography itself becomes as much a player in the narrative as do the other characters… Hong Kong features strongly in the initial book, THE VIOLIN MAN’S LEGACY, and it set the tone by providing a colourful backdrop, not only in the ‘mental visuals’, but also with the other senses – smells, taste, and sounds, particularly language…
…I lived and WURKED in the former British colony for more than ten years, and it’s easy for me to ‘re-engage’ many of my experiences there… transforming those into credible fiction became an enjoyable indulgence… one of my favourite passages in that first book is the chapter where the main female character, May-Ling, takes Jack and Malky to an old fortune teller’s divan… the mood in the room as the old man touches an emotional nerve for Jack took me back to a similar visit I made over 30 years ago… quite extraordinary… even now as I write this, I can feel the hairs on my arms and neck rise… the continent of Asia, particularly the South-East, doubled as my business tramping ground for 25 years…
…this gave me even more diversity in picturing, for example, different airports and hotels, large and tiny… I think many people visualize Asia as ‘one’ place, when in fact it is many, disparate locations, each infused with its own identity… more treasure troves for ‘backdropping’… in the same manner, Europe is prob’ly more identifiable as a patchwork of separate, distinctly recognisable countries, p’raps mistakenly as archetypical models… but further fodder for descriptive licence… so there yeez have it… the magical mystery tour of an Author’s writing geography… I’d be interested to learn how other writers approach their settings… next up, in a few days or so, I’ll tell yeez a bit about some of the minor characters in the books… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!
THE VIOLIN MANS LEGACY
myBook.to/theviolinmanslegacy
VENGEANCE WEARS BLACK
myBook.to/vengeancewearsblack
SAVAGE PAYBACK
myBook.to/savagepayback
KILLER CITY
myBook.to/calderkillercity
DEADLY IMPASSE
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Master Gallacher, Sir, I hereby confess that I envy you. Not only for the writing but for the Asian experience. That’s something that’s strongly missing in my curriculum. If only I would hate travelling less (a lot less, that is)
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..cheeers, that man 🙂
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I’m not looking forward to any flights in future with the difficulty of luggage these days. It gets harder all the time. Good post, Seumas. 🙂 — Suzanne
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..yes… the travel experience by plane is going to change radically… again 😦
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I’ve set all but one of my books in Africa as that’s the place I know best and I’ve been surprised to learn that lots of readers have ;earned stuff they never knew before, so I can only guess this knowledge is somehow imbedded inside me in some strange way – like osmosis I guess 🙂
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…I believe you’re right in that, m’Lady, Lucinda… subliminally and directly we take in most of what’s around us 🙂
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