41 Landscape

This week I’m studying landscape in fiction when it’s done right, with Joan Aiken’s The Whispering Mountain as the template. It’s so good! It has a lot of similarities to A Cluster of Separate Sparks (aka The Butterfly Picnic) in ways I never noticed before recording this. Hey, that’s the same mountain with a castle on top and the same village by the sea and the same getting trussed up and carted around.

Such good books.

Landscape has to matter, that’s my conclusion. It can’t just be setting. The locations have to be integral to the storytelling. I find fiction infinitely more engaging when the landscape is essential to the story, the physical elements of that landscape.

Yes!

The Becca book is charging along. I’ve really got my work cut out for me. It was originally a pretty straightforward story but now she goes through all kinds of cool and difficult challenges and has to grapple with having this thing she adores change on her, plus losing her escapist fiction in favor of a much cooler reality. As I’m changing and developing things, everything is coming together the way a novel draft only can when you’re putting the work into it and pushing the story to be better and better and better.

Sacred cheese of life!