As you all remembered, a few weeks ago I did a book review for the book, Embrace by Jessica Shirvington. Today Just Us Girls is a part of her book tour and today we'll be having Jessica guest post for Just Us Girls.
Where Are You From?
By Jessica
Shirvington
In my first
draft of EMBRACE (there were eight!), I didn’t set the city. I was in two minds
the entire time. I suppose I was drawing on all the places I have been around
the world. Although I now live in Sydney, when I started to write EMBRACE, my
family and I had just moved back from six years living in London. And prior to
that, I’d spent quite a lot of time travelling to many cities around the world
– so much so, that when I was writing scenes in EMBRACE, I found myself
thinking of different cities around the world and never being able to truly
decided which one most suited Violet’s world.
In my second and
third and fourth drafts, I chose different cities (I’ll never tell) from around
the world and set Violet’s story there. But each time, it felt forced.
I wanted her to
live in a city, as opposed to some small town where all these major apocalyptic
events just miraculously found her. To be believable she had to be in a
metropolitan environment, but which one?
In the end, the
answer was … any of them, and none of them. It wasn’t that the cities I chose
didn’t work; it was that in my mind I’d amalgamated them into what I needed for
her story to work for me. So I made the decision to give that option to all of
my readers and simply called her city, the City.
It isn’t the
‘done thing’ usually, but I believe for this story, it works. I want readers to
be able to put this story where they know. If they live in a city, it can be
there, if they live in a rural area, then it isn’t a stretch for them to imagine
a city nearby. It is an element of control that I wanted to give to the reader.
That said, I
like a little control myself … and I discovered that by giving this open
setting for Violet’s hometown, it also opened up the possibility to use other
locations around the world that would really pop off the page.
In ENTICED (the
sequel, out in September!), Violet and her friends find themselves travelling
to Jordan – on a quest to the place of Moses’ death – Mount Nebo. In EMBLAZE
(book 3, out March 2013) they travel to the island of Santorini in Greece,
which is small and stunning, and holds terrors that none of them are prepared
for.
Each book I take
the characters somewhere new and as I write the series, I have discovered how
very important this is to me. I want my characters to go to the world, to find
the problems and be part of the solution, rather than the fight always, and too
conveniently, finding them.
We'd like to thank Jessica Shirvington for taking the time to write a guest post for us and also if you'd like to know more about her series, Embrace, please feel free to check her website and Facebook page out!
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