Today is a wonderful day, and a terrib
le one: I’m headed to Hawaii for the first time ever! I’m going for my cousin’s wedding, with my husband and without our son (which is both awesome and terrible, of course). And, being a well-organized person, I obviously was up packing until almost 2am, up with the baby at 3:30, up for the flight at 6, patted down and bag-searched thanks to my breastfeeding supplies… and about to spend the next 14 hours on planes/in airports (if I’m lucky… if anything gets delayed, it’ll be longer!).
But, as I sat in the waiting area with Cameron, we were joking about trying to find a way to write off this trip on our taxes as a writing expense. Sadly, I’m not working on anything set in Hawaii… and none of my cousins are getting married in post-apocalyptic Siberia this year.
So, dear readers, where in the world would you go to research a novel if you could go anywhere in the world?
I actually would love to spend a summer in Boston, partly because it seems like a cool place and partly because I’m sort of semi-working-on a novel set there (this is my partner project, romantic suspense). Actually, if this is a magical dream trip, I’d spend fall there instead, because I bet summer’s a bit sticky, and in this dream scenario I don’t have to worry about taking days off work…
…and I really wasn’t entirely joking about the Siberia thing. I would love, love, love to go to Russia and take the Orient Express or a river cruise… Maybe not to actual Siberia just yet, since it’s still awfully cold there most of the time, but they do have some pretty awesome cats. I’ve been to a fair number of cities in western Europe, but never to any eastern European areas.
One can do quite a bit of online research, of course, and I could probably get pretty far based on reading, watching documentaries, tuning in to the news, and all that stuff…
…but wouldn’t it be better for verisimilitude to just be there??
For me, it’s Morocco. I might be disappointed when I arrived, but my sense is that it is a place where the present is still connected with the past, and the past still has meaning in day-to-day lives. Too many places have completely disconnected from their pasts – think the Great Pyramids, Angkor Wat, Macchu Picchu – or have mythologized their pasts (Europe or, again, Egypt), or the past has been marched over without preservation (most of sub-Saharan Africa). I’ve worked with a few Moroccans and I just get the sense that they live in a continuity that most of us have lost. Could be wrong…
…but wouldn’t it be great to find out?? I think Morocco sounds excellent. I had a friend who studied abroad there and she absolutely loved it–or so I gathered from Facebook (sadly, we’re a bit out of touch these days).
I’d probably just keep trying to find Rick’s… 🙂
Never show Moroccans “Casablanca,” I discovered the hard way. They were thrilled that there was a famous American film about one of their cities, until they saw the film.