Welcome back to another Open Book Blog Hop!

Today’s topic is: Do you use real or fictional cities in your writing? How do you incorporate them into the story?

And remember to visit my fellow writers to see what they have come up with. You can find their works here!

I feel quite fortunate to be working in a completely fictitious universe. It allows me to create what I want, how I see fit. I love being able to build locations in my own vision. It’s great fun starting from something small, a room or a vehicle and building outwards exponentially, watching as the locale around it grows and expands. My creativity flows so much more freely when I have no constraints. I guess I have used concepts or ideas from real places in some of my short stories, but even then those are not set anywhere specifically.

That said, I have tried working on something set in the real world. In the past, I’ve spoken about my efforts to write Our Boy Jack, a historical fiction set in London in the late 1880s. London has a long past, stretching back to the times of the Roman Empire and the great city of Londinium. A lot has changed over the centuries. I took a walking tour around the Whitechapel area of London to get a sense of the locations that Jack the Ripper was terrorising. I purchased copies of London street maps. This was tough as they were only updated at intervals, so got hold of copies from either side of the time I needed and used these to build a picture of the city as it would have looked. Frankly, it was quite draining. The amount of work that went into making a realistic London took its toll on my creativity.

Right now, I much prefer creating my own settings with no rules or constraints to hold me down.