Priscilla Brown inhabits several houses

Mayor Anna's town and her farm are struggling.

 Is this sexy television entrepreneur financial salvation or major trouble?

Find details of this and my other contemporary romances on

http://www.bookswelove/net/authors/brown-priscilla-romance 

and visit Priscilla Brown at your favourite e-book store

Inhabits all those houses in my head, that is. In my real life, I have just one house, a small house in a small town in New South Wales: the design and appearance of this dwelling, nor any that I have ever lived in, do not appear in any of my novels. Where do I get the ideas for my characters' homes?

In my stories, the only house that owes its presence partly to an existing building is Anna's farmhouse in Sealing The Deal. Some years ago I used to visit this homestead, and my writer's mind stored its appearance, its timber construction and wraparound veranda for possible inclusion in fiction one day.

Other than this, I am not writing about houses I've met. I glean impressions from various sources, including observations while visiting other areas, travelling, magazines, and some of these fragments gel into composite yet incomplete images for my characters to call home.  Such snippets are merely a small part of the final pictures in my head. Imagination personalises the dwelling, ascertaining the size, appearance and location, adding details. Occasionally the character may have a suitable finished place to live when I begin a story's first draft, but usually this evolves as the plot develops. My aim is to create the home, outside and inside, appropriate to the personality and lifestyle of its inhabitant; it should also promote an atmosphere in which the storyline can flourish.

Each of my stories has a notebook, and among pages of scribble I sketch a rough floor plan of the plot's most important house, not attempting to design it anywhere near to scale. I do this to anchor some ideas for the story, perhaps since I don't devise a plot plan, rather let the narrative carry on. In most cases, the original layout needs adjusting to accommodate not only proceeding scenes but the workability of the whole floor. The sketch for Cassandra's cottage in Silver Linings had the bathroom squeezed into a corner with no place for a door, and much too small for the spa crucial for a significant scene; as a result, the kitchen got moved and reduced. (No significant scenes there and not much cooking either.)

When furniture and other objects are necessarily mentioned, their placement and style may or may not be detailed depending on how important these are to a scene; readers may arrange them how they wish. Furniture can suggest a facet of the occupant's taste and lifestyle: colourful or drab, tidy or untidy, overcrowded or short of seats.

The view from the windows may be critical to the storyline as in the ocean panorama from the Caribbean island cottage belonging to Cameron in Where The Heart Is; Cristina must leave the man and the view, but is finding it hard to say goodbye. In Silver Linings, windows are useful to indicate the weather, if it's suitable to go beachcombing on the blustery Southern Ocean beach (or if spending the day in the spa is preferable).


Physical  surroundings are important contributors to a home's overall ambience, and to the 'feel' of a story. Is the dwelling rural or urban, isolated or on a busy street, and how does this particular location affect the character both emotionally and practically? Is there a garden? If so, is it looked after? Anna's caring nature tends to her roses in Sealing the Deal; Cristina's mature Australian garden of flowers and fruit trees contrasts with Cameron's tangle of tropical vegetation.

While the settings of my novels are clear and complete in my head. I try not to over-describe, to allow readers to use their imaginations, thus perhaps feeling they themselves are inhabiting the story.

May 2019 be kind to you. Best wishes, Priscilla

http://bwlpublishing.ca

https://priscillabrownauthor.com

Home is Where the Heart is. by Victoria Chatham

AVAILABLE AT AMAZON.CA

For many of us writers, creating homes for our characters is par for the course. Think Downton Abbey, Tara in Gone With the Wind and the family hacienda, Las Tres Marias in Isabel Allende’s debut novel The House of the Spirits.

Elements of places we have lived or visited and loved, often form the basis of our fictional homes. Writing a book often means wearing many hats – one of them being an architect. Designing a home for our characters means that we, and the readers, know where in a house the stairs that the character might use are, where the windows and doors are so that if we involve a line of sight in our story, we know there will be no obstructions. Where are the bedrooms and how many of them, if a contemporary book, have an en suite?

Because I write historical romance, I have incorporated aspects of many stately homes that I have visited into building a home for my characters. The essence of my fictional houses, however, stems from my experience of living for eleven years in a 300-year old house.

My first view of it was in early April. Sunshine bathed its long roof, comprised of approximately 5-tons of Cotswold stone tile, and tall chimneys. In the garden, a profusion of daffodils danced beneath a row of cordoned fruit trees. For the non-gardeners amongst you, a cordon is a method of training the side shoots of the trees (usually apples and pears) at a 45-degree angle to promote support and ultimately fruit production. The lady of the house sat at her spinning wheel on the lawn, white hair drawn into a bun at the back of her neck and long, gray skirts spread out around her. It was like a vignette of the past, and I instantly fell in love with Ivy Cottage.

A cottage can be many things to many people. My impression of a cottage was a two-up, two-down home with a thatched roof. In Canada, what people refer to as a cottage is, to me, a house and so was Ivy Cottage. Its five bedrooms sprawled over a hodge-podge of levels. Two sets of stairs, one in the middle of the house and the other at one end, had different depth risers and half-landings in odd places. The house itself had started life as a stone build, but the second storey was of locally produced red brick. The windows and doors all needed replacing as none of them was a good fit.

I moved in in August, a long hot month when, once the windows had been pried open, dried the house out to the extent that wallpaper started peeling off the walls. There was much work to be done, but I was determined that the living room with its inglenook fireplace, parquet floor, and oak beams would be ready for Christmas. By then we were blocking draughts with heavy cotton velvet drapes at the doors with the additional application of kitchen plastic wrap stuffed around the window frames.

AFTER RENOVATIONS

My family and friends thought I was mad for exchanging a comfortable, modern, double-glazed and centrally heated home for this unheated, draughty rural pile. People came and went, shaking their heads at my supposed detraction from what was considered the norm. I didn't care. There was room for my kids to play and explore. There was room to grow vegetables. I left the far end of the garden wild, so we were visited by rabbits and hedgehogs, and a fox made a path in the long grass beneath the hedge. I never cut it, letting what flowers and wild plants grow where they would which in turn attracted bees and butterflies.

I had robins and wrens nesting in the hedge, along with noisy sparrows. The teasels, that self-seeded and came up in different parts of the garden every year, attracted goldfinches. I fought the bullfinches and chaffinches for the fruit blossoms and fixed bacon fat on the bushes for the blue and great tits to stop them from peeling off the foil tops on the milk bottles to get at the cream. Woodpeckers and thrushes, both song and mistle thrushes, the latter helping to keep the garden free of snails, were constant visitors. A one-legged black bird became bold enough to perch on my hand for breadcrumbs.

All good things come to an end, and the end for me was coming back one year from a late vacation in Spain to find the house empty and cold. By then my boarders, as had my two boys, moved on, leaving my daughter and I and our two remaining dogs. I thought of all the work that had gone into the house and what still needed doing. At that point, I had neither the heart or the funds for further renovations and with much reluctance but all practicality, put the house on the market.

It is still there. I drive by every time I go home to England, noting the changes, my heart bleeding for some of them, but understanding that it is no longer my home and hoping that the current occupiers are as happy there as I had been.