Meme - Day 1

In an effort to get this blog going, I'm borrowing a writing meme from LJ user estarriel, also known as my friend Jessie. It's a 30 day meme, with a question for each day. Feel free to fill it out yourself - there are some really great questions.

01. Tell us about your favorite writing project/universe that you've worked with and why.

I have interconnected a lot of my writing. Sandy Cove and Brookline University, my two biggest projects, occur in the same world and actually crossed over at one point. In reality, they probably shouldn't have, as each could have existed just fine without the other.

It's hard to choose a favourite though. Sandy Cove was set in the city I live in, so there was something really fun about using real places and locations in my writing. It was my first big writing project, and I created characters based on people I knew or photos that I'd come across that spoke to me, so there was a very personal element in the fiction. It's also the only universe where I've used the character of Jessy, who had been in my head for many years in many different forms.

I think Brookline was more work though, because it required that I build the universe of a college campus, a Greek system and student body. That was a lot of fun for me. I think I enjoyed it so much because I was in college when I created it, and I set out to create sort of an ideal vision of an American college experience. Over the years of editing, I've turned it into a more realistic campus, but in the beginning I was all about making it my ideal place. I wanted to give readers a taste of my perfect college campus. After awhile it became too unrealistic to make it perfect, and the characters themselves were far from it, and the campus really turned into a real entity for me, complete with maps and pictures and floor plans. I love that part about creating universes.

In total I have used the Brookline U characters in seven books. If you count their appearance in Sandy Cove, it brings it to eight books. So I must have obviously enjoyed the characters in the Brookline universe quite a bit. They are probably the oldest surviving characters I created, and they were created at a time when I was able to think wildly about characters and not care about their realism. Because of that, there's an element of adventure in thinking about Joy and Libby for me. It brings back a lot of good memories from when I was young and thought about them all the time. I was fortunate in my twenties that I hit upon the perfect universe to place them in. I think the joy of finding a place for these characters I loved was a great feeling, and probably why I continued writing about them. They are the most real to me, and their universe pulls from a lot of my favourite things.