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Yesterday, I attended my chapter's monthly meeting. Our speaker talked about settings for your novels, and how important they were, regardless of the genre. As I always do, I let her words settle in my mind and attempted to see how they applied to my work. I've had five books now to describe the Fitzpatrick family brownstone in New York City in the mid-1800s, so I think I've done an adequate job there. I turned next to my contemporaries. Most specifically, Voice Of An Angel, my most recent release. For that setting, I used Washington, DC. I lived and worked in DC in my younger days. My best friend and former roommate still lives there, so I relied on her heavily to get the layout of the city right. But as for the setting? A large portion of the novel takes place in Evelyn's apartment. Like most big cities, apartments in DC come in all shapes and sizes. I think a good judge of character is the space one occupies, so I had to make Evelyn's apartment be truly reflective of her. I chose to put her in one of my favorite places--my first apartment on Capitol Hill. I shared it with the aforementioned roommate, and we made a lot of great memories there. The apartment was the bottom two floors of a four-story townhouse. The entrance to the top apartment was up a flight of steps from the ground, but the bottom apartment entrance was hidden behind this flight of steps, and was two steps down into an English basement.
I pictured the house and the apartment in my head, but the memory of the actual layout was a bit fuzzy to me. Using my artistic license, I put the living room at the front, the kitchen in the back, with a bathroom in between. It worked for my story quite well.
When my former roommate read the story, she got to the scene where the downstairs bathroom came into play and said to herself, "I know that bathroom!" I had, in my fuzziness, placed the bathroom in the exact place where it actually had been. In fact, the entire apartment was described as it actually had been all those years ago. With nicer furniture.
Not everyone is going to react as my former roommate did, but if I can implant in people's minds a believable setting, I've done my job as a writer.
Here's the cover blurb for Voice Of An Angel:
Max Bainbridge is an ace newspaper reporter who gets all the biggest assignments, most recently covering the fighting in Afghanistan. When he is shot on the battlefields, he is operated on and then flown home. The nurse responsible for his subsequent care is Evelyn Hammer, a 35-year-old woman who ran for her life from the musical spotlight, when she was 17 and on the cusp of fame. Her new identity has been in place, and impenetrable, ever since. Over the years, she’s found singing is a more soothing way to wake people from surgery, and they are usually so foggy they don’t realize she’s been singing to them. Until Max, that is.
Evelyn knows she’s breaking one of the cardinal rules of nursing by dating a patient, but she can’t resist Max. What begins as an innocent affair with a definite expiration date when Max leaves for his next assignment becomes a real threat to unmasking Evelyn’s hidden identity. Max can’t control his journalism instincts as one clue after another emerges and he realizes he doesn’t know the person he’s fallen in love with.
Only by uncovering Evelyn’s secret past can they move forward with their future. But her past is still there, and threatening. Some secrets are better left alone.
Praise for Voice Of An Angel from Loves All Things Books
