Choosing the Setting: The Local of Fallen Ribbon
Good Morning Readers,
As the days quickly seep into being summer, it’s been getting hotter and more humid out, reminding me of how much I hate the humid summers every year. I’ve been on the east coast for almost fifteen years now and I still don’t feel used to the humidity. Thinking about how many summers I’ve been here, brings me to discuss how I decided on the setting of Fallen Ribbon.
By the time I started thinking of Fallen Ribbon, I had already learned of Massachusetts’ existence and was obsessed with it for years. Not long before that, I had come back into contact with my father after years of separation and learned that he’d been spending a great deal of time between Los Angeles and Boston. At the time I was about ten years old and thought, “If this place was cool enough for my dad to be there, then it must be cool!” That was the mentality I had at that point in my life. If someone I admired liked something, I trusted it to be worth enjoying so I decided I liked Boston as well. Guilty by association sort of thing.
In hindsight I think I just liked the idea of Boston until I was able to experience it myself, regardless, it greatly influenced the setting of my novel after I made my first trip out there when I was thirteen. When I visited, we explored the Boston Commons, Harvard Square in Cambridge, and explored other parts of Boston. Soon after, I became obsessed with the area; the historical brick architecture, the diverse population, the goth scene; to a teenager entering their adolescence, it was all very alluring.
Those were the very beginnings of the setting for Fallen Ribbon. In an original iteration of Fallen Ribbon, I decided to have it take place in both Cambridge and Los Angeles as well as a world of my own concoction originally dubbed as The Grey World. After a review with an editor/published author, I concluded that a lot had to be cut out to make it all fit synchronously as a first-time novel and have it read well. I wound up removing scenes focused on Lost Angeles, renamed The Grey World, and stitched up the story so the characters were only going to two different places. Reducing the setting significantly helped focus the story and give a sense of direction to where the story was headed and what the plot is centered around. I don’t regret removing some of the settings, and I’m hoping that I will one day be able to use Los Angeles in greater detail. That has yet to be determined though.
I think I had decided on California West Coast and Massachusetts East Coast areas for the setting of Fallen Ribbon because it was honestly the easiest for me to write about. I was already relatively familiar with Massachusetts and California was where I had grown up. Ironically, I delved more focus into the Los Angeles setting rather than my actual hometown in Northern California, but the north is at least featured in the book to some extent, with a plan of receiving more of a spotlight later in the series. Now that’s not to say I entirely deleted the scenes of Los Angeles from the story, there are small bits involving the West Coast in the story still, but it’s no longer a focus of the story. I do plan on revisiting the area within the series eventually, just not within Fallen Ribbon itself.
Hopefully, readers will pick up on some of the snippets I put in of my favorite places I included in Fallen Ribbon once they get their own copy of the book, out at the end of the Summer 2024! As always, you can look forward to more inside information and updates regarding its launch in my blog updates on Dark Nursery Diaries! Thank you for reading!
