Where do your characters live?

If you're writing in this world and not some other, do you have real places in mind when you write something like, Joe turned left at Nor'east Lane, and made his way down the sandy path to his cottage on the beach?  And is it ever a real place?  Some place you like?  Your favorite house in the world?

Do your characters live somewhere nearby?  Are you neighbors?  Maybe a better question: would you like to be?

For the longest time, one of my main characters, Kassandra, has lived in a great big house at the end of Atlantic Avenue in North Hampton, New Hampshire.  I've had a particular house in mind from the beginning, a place in Little Boars Head, one of my favorites along the coast of New Hampshire.  All completely fictional, of course, but this is the house I imagine when I need to think about where Kassandra lives.

We were renting a place in North Hampton for a couple years, and all of this seaborn stuff comes from that too short a time when I could hear--from any open window--the Atlantic tides coming in.

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Comments

[SMD]

This is a cool idea! I'm going to do it for my blog eventually. Thanks for the inspiration!

[Amy]

I love that house too. Every year we welcome in the New Year about four doors away to the west, in a house behind a line of evergreens. Friends, two fortune tellers and fireworks at midnight with the sea out beyond. It has snowed about half the years, at least in my memory.

[Chris Howard]

Cool, SMD!

Hi Amy! I love the whole Little Boars Head area, but that particular house has always been my favorite.

[Amy]

It's so big, I wonder what it would be like to live in it. The porches are grand.