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!
