A Writing Sirloin Tip: Making This World Fit

My background is in science fiction and fantasy, so I'm obsessive over the details.  While some authors design worlds from the ground up.  I prefer to take a world I know well and investigate the details so I can wrap them and entwine them into my characters' lives.

In writing for the Vampires in Manhattan series, I use familiar places.  It pleases me to have them in a museum standing beside humans, and the humans not notice.  Though I've heard that some readers of this blog have been looking for Vampire David Hilliard in Times Square.  All I can say is that David's on to you.  He took Laura to Cape Cod and they've been making love at night in the dunes, or so they have emailed.  Yeah, vampires email.  Funny.

To make a contemporary world fit a supernatural, you look at what your character can do.  You find the ordinary places like the planetarium show at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, and put an active-by-night supernatural there.  I'm actually using that in my next book.  You use the moments when their world and our world might blend.

My characters prefer to do things when others aren't around to see it.  Night is the time of illusion for humans.  We are tired.  The dark interferes with our seeing things clearly.  Creatures can hide easily in the long stretches of shadow avoiding street lights.  The later it gets the more dreamlike everything at night appears.  That's why most modern dates are at night.  This dreamlike quality spills over into a budding romance.  Supernaturals like to take advantage of how the human mind perceives things.  On a date, so do humans.

Now an exercise for your eyes.  Stare at that picture for a while.  Tell me.  What do you see reaching out of the water?

–Susan

Susan Hanniford Crowley

http://www.susanhannifordcrowley.com

 

Filed under: A Writing Sirloin Tip, Characters, paranormal, paranormal romance, romance, Settings, Susan Hanniford Crowley, Writing Topics