Why Boston?
Why Boston.
A pretty good question all things considered. I mean, I’ve written stories that take place in New York because I lived there, and I know that city a lot better than Boston, where I’ve never lived. But so many stories take place in New York. You’d be hard pressed to find a lost in a big city story that doesn’t take place in New York when coming from an American writer.
A Place to Belong, or as I like to call it “Queen City by Night,” takes place in… well, the Queen City, Charlotte, NC considering that’s where I currently live. Though I didn’t live there when it started, I was quite a ways farther south down in Aiken, SC, which is not a place you would ever want to put a “lost in a big city” story because it’s probably the most rural place I’ve ever lived. Even when I moved to Columbia, it didn’t really have a city feel in the way that I was used to.
But Boston feels a little out of left field, I suppose, since I personally don’t have any ties to it. The thing is, I’ve been there a few times. My sister actually lives up that way and has ever since she moved there to go to BU. (Fun side note, I got into BU as well, though I’d be damned to spend 50K a year just to get my teaching degree. I only applied because my guidance counselor forced me to apply to a ‘reach’ school). But visiting her and visiting the city, I found that Boston is a beautiful place. I knew it was full of history, being the source of a lot of American History, and the content area my sister taught up there. Plus, it was on the east coast, so it was an area it was at least partially familiar with.
Now this left me with a problem, as I have a passing familiarity with Boston, and my move to the south made it a lot more difficult to go and visit the city itself. I had to use my working knowledge of the city as well as what I could research on my own. There were a lot of maps and red string in my plotting and planning of this campaign. I know the great pride that Bostonians have in their city, and despite being a Yankee fan, I still wanted to do the city justice.
That being said, I also needed to make sure I understood that:
1) I wasn’t going to make everyone happy
and
2) I was going to get things wrong
To that first point, I don’t really care. You can’t make everyone happy all of the time, you’re lucky if you can make some of the people happy some of the time. It’s not something a writer should ever let stop themselves from working on something. Do your research, do your best, but in fiction, you can make mistakes. If you’re not happy with the portrayal of your city in my book, get your friends and family to buy it so I can make enough money to come visit your city more to get a better feel for it. I’ll happily make the edits.
But to that second point, I will have to admit that there was a battle here. I don’t like to be wrong. I will admit when I’m wrong and try to explain how I got to the conclusion that I drew, but I really don’t like being wrong. What’s worse, is being wrong in something that cannot be changed. Someone can go in and edit something they wrote on the internet. Now, screenshots live forever, but if I made an error in this blog I could delete it, change it, or just nuke the whole site if I really wanted it gone. But a book? Printed? In your hand? That isn’t something I can take back, so there was a real fear of getting things wrong in this story that I couldn’t take back.
So why take the risk? Well it boiled down to one point in my mind that I kept circling back to. Boston just doesn’t get the attention it deserves in fiction. Outside of movies like The Departed and a few mystery thrillers, I couldn’t name many stories that took place in Boston. I just looked it up and found out that The Handmaiden’s Tale takes place there, which surprised me, but probably shouldn’t have, though that’s a dystopian future, much like Fallout 4, which takes place in the Commonwealth, and I don’t really count because it’s not getting to show people the beauty of the city.
Now, do I feel I’ve captured that beauty and charm? I mean… I try. I don’t really feel I’ve done it justice, but I keep doing my best to try to encapsulate the feeling I get when I go there on the rare occasions that I get to. But, read the book, keep reading as more come out, and then tell me what you think. If I didn’t do well, what can I do to improve? If there’s something that you liked, let me know and I’ll lean into it more as more books come out.
