Places with a Pulse

Among some of the questions sent to me while I was finishing the manuscript for Where Grace Abides was one that eventually confronts most fiction writers. It has to do with ways to make the settings of our novels more interesting, how to "build the worlds" of our fiction so that they become more than just backgrounds or stages for the story but instead seem to take on a life of their own. 

One frequent suggestion to writers in response to this kind of question is to make the setting a character