Do you know a single source that can answer all of the following story questions?
Your new story is a contemporary, and you want to set it in a small town not too close to a major city.
An important plot twist necessitates your romantic suspense be set in a location high enough in elevation to receive an unexpected snowstorm in September (for the clue that points to the murder suspect).
Your hero drives 300 miles across the state to meet a deadline and save the family business, but you've written the time elapsed as less than two hours.
You want to write about a certain era in America's history (gold rush, silver strikes, homesteading) which gives you the general region but you are looking for a historical event to base it around.
Your heroine visits a big city and you want to enrich the texture of her meeting with a former lover by having them visit a known art gallery or museum.
Have you guessed what it is yet? Which one of the items in the above list gave it away?
My family has used the Automobile Association of America tour books for years in planning our family vacations..
One day early in my writing career, I was trying to remember the name of the park that runs through the center of my college town where my first book is set. So I grabbed the California Nevada book that we'd picked up to use in making a motel reservation for visiting relatives. In the paragraph under the listing for Chico was the name of the park and a description of the services available. As I thumbed through the book, I continued to be surprised at the amount of additional factual information it contained
In outlining my current historical, I knew I wanted to write about the homestead period in American history. I read through the Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma tour book and this sentence jumped out at me: "In the late 1860s and 1870s Swedes settled the rolling farmland around Courtland [KS] which became a railroad shipping point for corn and other crops." I not only had my setting, I had the ethnicity of my heroine and her family and knew what crop they would be struggling to grow. Reading further about the geography, I knew they would have to build a sod house because this area lacked forests. I was off and running in plotting my story; research time involved was one evening's reading.
The tour book is published to encourage people to travel or vacation in a particular area. So, as much information as possible is included that can paint an accurate picture of what to expect. To appeal to the widest scope of tourists, all recreational and community interests are covered from Amusement and Theme Parks to Churches to Exhibits & Collections to Nature Trails to Wineries.
If you are an AAA member, these tour books are included in your yearly fee. I encourage you to take advantage of someone else's research and save yourself hours at the library or using on-line searches.
Linda gets no kickback from AAA; she loves getting the most from available resources and writing off the annual fee as a research expense. She is currently finishing the rough draft of the above-mentioned historical and polishing the contemporary manuscript that placed 5th in the 2001 Merritt Contest
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