I'm a stubborn person. If you didn't know this about me, hi! I'm stubborn (positive). I will get it in my head to do a thing and then I will do the thing, come what may. Sometimes to the frustration of my live streaming audience. Sometimes to their entertainment! I mean, hopefully it's entertaining, I don't do this on purpose.
So part of this stubbornness is that in my books (more on those later), even though most of the time they're set in a very specific place, I outright refuse to name it. I will give hints, I will make very carefully-worded statements about where it is in the world, I will constantly refer to landmarks and well-known characteristics of the immediate locale... but I'll never name it. Why?
Couldn't tell you!
But that's how my brain works. Maybe it's because I like the mystery. Maybe it's because it makes my stories a little more relatable since the person reading could fill in the blanks with their own surroundings. But it's a bit, and I'm doing it, so I'm gonna commit to it.
This culminates in Her Majesty The Prince, my current ongoing story-slash-hyperfixation-slash-longest book I've ever written, which takes place in the extremely fictional setting of "Video Game RPG Fantasy France", in a city only ever referred to as "the city" and a nation obliquely called "the nation" and obviously there's like kingdoms and other states and such in this world but I'll be damned if I give any of them names!
Maybe later.
I did name at least one of the regions of said nation, so that's a start. I've also begun to work on naming a bunch of the gods of the twin main religions, primarily so I can name months and days and have some language foundations for when I want characters to swear. Because that happens.
But naming a town? Never!
(Anyway if you're interested in knowing where some of my stories are set, here are some officially-not-official examples after the break. Provided the break works.)
Okay so in no particular order:
- Cat Wishes takes place in a fictional North American city, but the origin story flashback part of Tora's First Day absolutely takes place in late 1990s/early 2000s Okinawa, Japan
- Substitute Familiar's city is also fictional but in my mind it's a mix of everything I love about Toronto and Montréal (Torontréal)
- Plant Lamp is set in the Plateau-Mont-Royal neighborhood of Montréal. Full stop. The fictional convention at the end takes place in Parc Lafontaine, where MCAF used to be
