Chapter 4, and San Antonio

(Image: Chapter 4, Bennie's hand with a small flame in her palm)

Chapter 4 is now online! 

Forgive me if there's glitches and errors in the chapter or this post; I just got back from a long weekend and a VERY long drive and I'm exhausted. I went to San Antonio to check on my grandmother and see some friends before I start a new job next week.

I guess, given the fact Shadowchild is set in San Antonio, it's an easy guess to tell I grew up there. My family moved from Seattle to San Antonio when I was a month shy of even years old and I called it home for the next two decades, before running away to Dallas.

The old adage "Write what you know" played an obvious role in my choice to place Bennie in that city--when I originally wrote the book I was fifteen and for all my memories of Washington State, I couldn't trust my knowledge of the area to be accurate enough to be convincing. Washington does play a role in these books, solely because I love the state so much, but I wanted to create a home for Bennie that was anchored in reality, so I chose what I knew, and combined it with my imagination, the second half of this formula will appear in the story shortly.

Many of the places mentioned in the book are real locations. So far we've only touched on Marshall High School (my alma mater, in fact), and Bennie's house (a real house I found intuitively a few blocks from the school). We'll see parks and other locations and if I can I'll have stories behind them to share.

After this last visit I will say that the San Antonio Bennie knows, that I know, may not be 100% accurate to today, as every time I go back something else has popped up or disappeared, but I'll update the setting as needed before the books go to print, so hopefully if you ever visit San Antonio (please do) you can have a passing knowledge of the city before you even arrive!