Wild, Wild West

Wild, Wild West

Settings, Scenery, and Savory & Supernatural

News:

  • I have another creative writing workshop coming up in Ōtautahi, this one aimed at adults! It's at the Christchurch Art Gallery, looking at how art can inspire and shape the written word, using the amazing exhibit Springtime is Heart-Break. 1-3:30pm, Sat 4 May.
  • As of yesterday, you can get Aphrodite Unbound and Hera Takes Charge (as well as Persephone in Bloom) in paperback! People have been asking for these for a while, and I'm delighted I can finally provide them.
  • You should hopefully be reading this email, because this is my first newsletter via Ghost! Free and paid subscriptions should stay the same, but drop me a line if anything goes suddenly weird.
  • Savory & Supernatural is coming out 30 APRIL!

Which brings me to this post.

Settings

The Movie Magic series is set on film sets, which are places where fantasy and practicality collide. The series our characters are working on is an adaptation of a (fictional) zombie fantasy epic set in the Victorian Era, where the supernatural elements are set in canonically well-researched alternate history. And the Movie Magic stories, both Bespoke & Bespelled and Savory & Supernatural are about the frictions between the magic and the mundane.

In other words, I like the tension between what I'm totally making up and what's really real, and that means I like to set my books in real places instead of inventing imaginary locations in Aotearoa for my characters to film. This worked out well for Bespoke & Bespelled, because I'm familiar with LA and Wellington, Oamaru is my hometown and... okay, I fudged it on the Catlins, but I did look hard at a lot of photos.

Savory & Supernatural, on the other hand, is mostly set in Hokitika, in the West Coast, and while I also looked at a lot of photos and read tourist websites and travel blogs and asked people nosy questions for the first draft, I knew that if I really wanted to nail down the feel of the place, I was going to have to visit.

And I did! My BFF and co-writer Robyn Fleming was visiting from the US, and one of the things we did on her visit was drive the beautiful but terrifying Arthur's Pass to Hokitika. I'd got notes from my editor before the trip, and had been letting them ferment in the back of my brain. And then I got there, and whole scenes blossomed in my brain.

The book got longer and the character relationships deepened, and I think it's much better grounded in a sense of place. It is unavoidably and unashamedly a tourist's sense of place. Both Kingston and Amalia are outsiders to Hokitika, and they experience the place as I did; aware of its beauty, intrigued by its natural wonders.

When Kingston visits the Glow Worm Dell and thinks it's fascinating that a creature so objectively disgusting can be so very beautiful, he's having my thought. Frankly, glow worms are inspiring. If a fungus gnat maggot dropping threads of sticky luminescent goo can wow people, so can you. Get out there and be the gross larvae of your moonless night!

Scenery

Picture time!

The beach, looking south, with various driftwood sculptures.
The beach, looking south, with various driftwood sculptures.

Rock sculpture, with rocks descending from teeny to big chonk
Just a bush-lined river walk, no ghosts here.
Podocarps, baby.
God, I love tuatara. If I were a living fossil I would totally bask under a sunlamp all day, perfect choices, no notes.
Okay, you got me, this isn't Hokitika or its surrounds. This is further north, at Punakaiki, where the pancake rock formations and blowholes do spectacular geological battle with the waves.

Some of these places turn up in the book, but you'll have to read it to figure out how. Pre-order now!