Monday 3 July 2017

There’s no place like Canada…and Fairy Falls…

Happy 150th Birthday Canada! I have so many happy memories living in Canada, and I’m proud to call myself Canadian, though truth be told, I was born in Illinois, USA, so I’m what you call a dual citizen. Not fun around tax season, but that’s another blog post. Still, my heart and soul belongs in Canada, and now that we’ve passed our milestone 150th birthday (I was also around for the 100th birthday!), I want to share why I’ve set my new teen psychic mystery series, Mysterious Tales from Fairy Falls in beautiful Canadian cottage country.
It began with what I knew based on the area where I was located at the time to create the fictional tourist town of Fairy Falls. You see, for over eleven years we lived on a small/medium-sized lake in the heart of cottage country. So I took in the sights, smells, sounds, tastes, emotions, and feelings of this beautiful place, and added the challenges and obstacles of what it would be like for an uprooted teenager possessing a psychic ability to adjust to the day-to-day living in Fairy Falls. Meagan Walsh, the protagonist from Lost and Found tells us what she thinks of Fairy Falls right off the bat: “This town sucks!”, and she goes on to describe it as ‘a small, boring northern tourist town’. If only Meagan knew what life had planned for her in this magical place!
Indeed, Fairy Falls could be any small tourist town that you may have visited during your youth (or adulthood) that invokes happy memories and simpler times. I wanted these feelings to emerge for the reader, and make my characters realize that there truly is no place like Fairy Falls. The town itself hosts a number of stores, services, and inhabitants that you’d be familiar with when visiting any small, tourist town. There’s a real estate office, a general store, a combined pizza shop and laundromat, a small theatre, a coffee shop where the locals hang out, a restaurant and bar (where tourists hang out), a marina, an arena, schools, the police and fire stations, town hall, a handful of churches, and of course the animal shelter.

I actually envisioned Fairy Falls from what I remembered of a tourist town during the early 1970s, while we were visiting our neighbor’s cottage. This town has since grown, but some small cottage towns never grew much, and when major highways were built to take on more traffic, these towns were bypassed, and much of their economy suffered. Call it the pros and cons of progress, but I think much of the innocence was lost to those quaint, tourist towns when change was forced upon them.

I didn’t want to lose that ‘small, tourist town feeling’ when I created Fairy Falls. True, change is good, but there’s something about going to a tourist town and connecting with the people living there that somehow leaves you feeling better than you did before you arrived. I also wanted to be realistic in the fact that growth is a necessary part of life, and Fairy Falls will have to deal with all kinds of challenges that will create conflict and divide the residents, believing that they are doing what’s best for their hometown.

The psychic teenagers in each of my stand-alone books in the Mysterious Tales from Fairy Falls series will have their fair share of adversity and prejudice to deal with. They truly believe they’ve arrived in a place so foreign, so backward, that they try so hard to find a way to leave, only to realize in the end that Fairy Falls has been waiting for them to finally come home to themselves. Welcome to Fairy Falls. Expect the unexpected.

Have you ever visited a small town while on vacation and felt at home there for some reason? Do you still think about a tourist town that continues to create happy memories for you? Would love to read your comment. Cheers, and as always, thank you for reading my blog!   

10 comments:

  1. I love small towns. There's so much character in them! Your series sounds interesting! Here's wishing you many sales!

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    1. You're right about that, Lisa, small towns have a life all on their own! Thanks so much for your kind wishes! Hugs!

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  2. Canada is one of my favorite places. It's top of my list for a place to live (if I ever moved away from Oz that is) ��������

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    1. I've always wanted to go Down Under, Steve! It's on my bucket list for sure. Cheers and thanks for stopping by!

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  3. Ah, life in a small town ... has a special set of ups and downs. :)

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    1. It sure does, Helen and Lorri! Growing pains happen to the best small places! Hugs and cheers, ladies!

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  4. I come from a small prairie town, where everyone knows your business and what they don't know, they make up!! It had its charms but I couldn't wait to move to the city. I lived in Medicine Hat (still pretty small), then Calgary and finally Vancouver. I am now back in a small place, but in Spain! I will always be a Canadian no matter where I live. Sorry to have missed the celebrations. I too remember the 100th birthday. So much fun.

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    1. Wow you were way up there, Darlene! Yes, there are pros and cons to small town living. Can't believe you lived in Vancouver! What a difference from both Medicine Hat and Calgary! Cheers, and hope you love where your are now!

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  5. I love visiting small towns, especially the people. Actually, I retired to a very small town in Tennessee, population 800 more or less. Probably more since a large clan of Amish moved in a couple of years ago. I've visited Fairy Falls in your latest book....Lost and Found. A lovely place indeed!

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  6. Ah, life in a small town ... has a special set of ups and downs. :)

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