Everyone goes on about worldbuilding, but what if all you need is a town? Say a small town, population about 2,200, with an immigrant problem and burgeoning industry set at the very edge of the disappearing prairie, circa 1876. Or any town.

Design the Town You Need

It helps, of course, to have a plot line to build your town around, one that maintains historical context and is informed by the design of other small prairie towns. If this town is to be durable, say the focus of a series, you need to design it so that it can grow or shrink. Did the town spring up from a hell town (built during the laying of the railroads) or did it grow out of the land as people migrated west?

Define Its History

For instance, did it exist during the Black Hawk War? What happened when men, left wandering by the Civil War, who needed work, any work, were lured by the stockyards, coal vein, and wagonmakers to your town? Where do these men lodge? Does the town accept them, or must they camp or build somewhere else? Where? What other camp followers arrive?

Check out a Similar Small Town

Research a similar small town. If you’re lucky, you’ll discover an active historical society website. One with archival pictures and a town directory with business listings, goods and services available, and local surnames. Then picture your city center. What do the stores look like? Is there a boardwalk, or are the stores at street level? Are the streets paved? Is there a distinct residential area? A park? Schools? Do you see your town when you close your eyes?

Draw a Map

If so, sit down and draw a map. You’ll need it, whether for a series or a standalone, to maintain consistency across books and chapters as your characters interact in and with its spaces. Maybe the first map is a sketch, with subsequent maps providing more detail as the town grows or shrinks. The butcher shop needs to be in the same place each mention, until it burns to the ground.

Add Flora and Fauna

Now that you have your town, what trees grow there? Shagbark hickory, willow, chestnut, walnut? Check with the state agricultural organization to learn the native trees. Flowers? Bugs? Smells? Then study them until you can describe each accurately. Check the weather, too. Seasonal temperatures. Cycles of rain and drought.

“In a normal year, the creek would be ten feet wide and several feet deep, with water lapping the banks. But this was no normal year. It hadn’t rained in Wanee since early June, leaving the creek narrowed with eddies of blue-green growth where fresh water had once flowed.” From “A Confluence of Enemies”.

Or blanketed in snow.

“The porch of the Presbyterian manse threw light across the glimmering lawn to the walkway, where it bounced off the dancing snowflakes accruing at their feet, enough that they left tracks etched in the thin layer of white as they strolled.” From “One Horse Too Many.”

Define the Town Folk’s Perspective

Finally, how forward-thinking are the citizens? The 1870s were a time of heavy migration and industrial change. As a rule, small rural towns didn’t have city water, central heating, or telephones. But if Lyon and Clinton, Iowa, had a telephone exchange in 1877, why can’t your little town? With the new boiler plant, wouldn’t central heating be available to those willing to pay? And if an artesian water source produced sufficient flow to fill a raised tank, why couldn’t your town have city water despite small-town water systems being rare until the1890s? After all, Chicago had city water in 1842.

Bring It to Life

It’s your town; now do with it as you please. Add characters, the good and the evil and let them roam its streets, finding bodies in trenches for the new water system, floating in the town pond or dead in a dry riverbed. But mostly have fun discovering the mysteries lurking within your town limits.

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I was watching an Amazon movie the other night, and doing what I so often do, especially when I’m bored. I try to write the scene. It is a sort of mental exercise, meant, I hope, to sharpen my writing skills. Especially for action sequences.

I practice while watching boring scenes of mayhem. That night, the first description that came to mind was: “He landed on his feet in a hail of bullets and leveled everything and everyone standing.” But who is that guy on the right? “A man emerged from the shadows cast by the lowering sun. His assault rifle leading the way.” Why did the pillar just explode? “Another figure stepped into a sheen of light, a silver box clutched in his left hand, his index finger tapping a red button.” Why did he hesitate in his tapping? “A slim figure emerged, a revolver pointed at the back of his dark curls.” Then, he, I, the hero, leveled everything and everyone standing. “The structure roared with the sound of weapons. Ragged breaths and soft moans punctuated the silence that followed.”

I see the scene in my head as I write. My fingers pound it out on the keyboard. I mutter the next sentence, the words coming in a rush. I’ve been stopped by difficulty breathing from the effort of creating mayhem.

Then I read what I’ve written aloud. Is it even possible (cue the research)? Does any element fight the immediacy? Is it the scene I dreamed, saw, thought I wrote? Does it promote the emotions I want? What does it say about my characters? Good and bad, does it show what each character is willing to do to survive, win, be triumphant? Will the reader be caught up in the moment?

Here’s an action passage from “Saving Calypso”, which I’m glad no one observed me writing:

“Grieg elbowed downhill to the flipped travois, where it angled over Boomer’s broken body and considered the tools at his disposal. Rex. Frisco.* The broken branch from the travois. He searched Boomer’s pockets for anything he could use as a weapon. Nothing, except the arrow lodged in the dead man’s throat and Callie’s pocketknife.

Grieg steeled himself before yanking the arrow from Boomer’s neck. It was as awful as he anticipated; Boomer’s blood splattered the front of his shirt and his forearms. He wiped the arrow with leaves, not questioning why it mattered given how he planned to use it, then fingered the two-inch blade out of the pocketknife. Armed, he cozied up to Boomer’s cooling body for cover. A sharp whine descended. An arrow bored into the uphill side of the travois. Grieg counted the fletched shafts he’d seen in Bolt’s quiver. Six, maybe seven. He’d lofted three at Grieg the day before. One in Boomer. Two now. One left. Then, the knife or a bullet.

The next arrow pierced the blanket, lodging in Boomer’s right shoulder. Grieg grunted for effect. The third arrow grazed Grieg’s right calf. Okay, eight.”

And, in reverse, I cast the parts and imagine the scene on screen. In this case, Ryan Gosling, as my lost soul geologist with “a certain set of skills” and wry self-awareness, and Tom Hardy as the newly revealed arrow-launching predator. I have Gosling dye his hair, and Hardy grow his, then I play the scene in my head.  

Does it work? Is it too gross for the genre? Yes, I can get pretty gritty. That pops when you cast the parts and play the reel out in your head. If it works, it works; if it doesn’t, it’s back to retooling, jiggering, and writing.

In other words, writing a great action sequence is as easy as landing on your feet in a hail of bullets.

• Note: Rex and Frisco are horses. In Grieg’s words: “As for my buddy Frisco, make sure he gets a good scrubbing, groom him until he purrs and feed him as much as he can eat. Believe me, I’d stand him to a beer if I could.”

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I am sitting in my writing space in a cubby corner of our home, where if I stand up and lean to my left, I can see the hills that rim the ocean, but no water. I can also see banker’s boxes filled with drafts of the first book of the Cooper Quartet, Dead Legend. I envisioned it with three protagonists, all relatives, each with their own memories and so point of view, and the only way I could achieve the clarity I wanted was to write each person’s story from beginning to end in pencil (so I could erase) on college-lined paper before weaving the stories together.

Which I did. I even have the matrix indicating where each section or chapter belongs, even though the book is published, and I don’t need the matrix or pencil-written pages anymore.

I still have my first novel ever in blue ballpoint pen, also remarkably short and poorly written. Maybe not for an eight-year-old. I can’t throw it out. It’s the beginning.

I have the first manuscript of Perfidia. Not the published Perfidia, but the one I typed on a Smith-Corona electric typewriter in my apartment in a rainstorm one Labor Day weekend, closing in on a thousand years ago. I adored that typewriter. The feel of it, the click of the keys, the ka-ching as I hit the carriage return.

But, oh my, the difficulty of revising, correcting spelling errors, or changing or adding scenes that required a typewriter eraser with a brush and reams of 20lb paper. I still have those versions, as well as copies submitted to an agent and publisher.

I can produce the first dot matrix printout of Dead Legend, compiled (as in all the pieces merged) on my Zenith Computer, the kind that required one to load a floppy disk of the program and a floppy on which to save the text. I have the 5.25×5.25-inch disks. They were truly floppy. I printed out text daily because floppies failed all the time. Now, the dailies sit in those banker’s boxes daring me to throw them out.

Then came laptops. I wrote the published version of Perfidia on a laptop in a hotel room in Nevada one summer while my husband worked. I printed it out once at Staples to edit it. It was so laborious that I began editing on the computer and never stopped. The very first print copy turned out to be a proof because right there, right on the second page, there was an error. Still, I treasure the first time I held it and still love the cover.

Now there are drafts of my books everywhere on my computer in files designed to keep them organized. Files that allow me to track the version. Files with formatted books, files for submitted books, files for … I keep them all. Even after the book is published.

Do I miss that first pencil-written page? The first printout? The first notes from reviewers crammed in the margins? Yes. Though by relying on my Remarkable for plotting and reviews, I still get the pencil-on-paper feel and the crammed reviewer’s notes in the margins.

It has been a journey from the world of pencils. But here I am with boxes of manuscripts, untold pages of pencil-written text, thousands of computer files, proofs, and copies of twelve published books and too many dreams to count later, wondering what will I ever do with all the detritus, or for that matter, those who inherit it.

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In honor of all of us who have questions we wish interviewers asked us, I ask myself a few.

What possessed you to write the Cooper Quartet?

I served as an officer in the Navy at the bitter end of the Vietnam War. I was surrounded by Navy pilots on shore duty. Some of them were fresh home, as was a special SEAL, and my friends at Lemoore Naval Air Station, a mix of carrier pilots and rescue pilots. And they needed to talk. I often think that if the woman officers provided no service other than listening to and absorbing their tales before they went home to their loved ones, we deserved Purple Hearts. The moment I started writing Dead Legend was the moment I began to free myself. If you wonder whether the stories are true, I can assure you that Robin Haas speaks for me.  

Why aren’t they more widely read?

I suspect because they don’t fall into ‘the military thriller where SEALS win the war we lost’ genre that is so popular. Rather, despite some intense military action, the four books are about Vietnam’s effects on our country. Whether you were spat on, held a sign or just didn’t give a damn, the War fundamentally changed our society, our music, and our generation. I hope through the series, a reader sees the full arc of the War’s impact through one family’s eyes.

Why are your standalone thrillers set where they are?

I have always loved books in which the setting is a character, so naturally I was drawn to places I knew well.  

My first book, Perfidia, takes place in Barbados in 1972, shortly after its independence from England, and shortly after I lived there. It is a beautiful place, but, like most Caribbean islands, it has a darker side to its history. Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park provides a frame of reference. In Perfidia, one of the few remaining Barbadian plantations is caught in a tug-of-war over its existence.

Saving Calypso. I live part-time in the Sierra foothills, eleven miles from Yosemite National Park. When the idea for the story ripened, I needed a place for Calypso Swale to hide off the grid. It was only natural that the beauty and ruggedness that surround me would become a character in the book. It is more than a backdrop for what happens; it becomes a weapon when it is discovered that Calypso is alive.

As for Booth Island, my husband’s family owns an island in the middle of Bob’s Lake, Ontario. Families of French, English and Scots descent farmed this region of Canada since before the War of 1812. Post-World War I, Pennsylvanians surged in and bought up most of the available lakefront property and islands. It mattered a lot to the rural families, especially to those who didn’t benefit. And there you have a plot, hidden and roiling beneath the lake’s surface.

Why write a cozy mystery series set in the Midwest in the 1870s?

Madness. I was spawned in northwestern Illinois, about thirty-five miles due east of the Mississippi River. My father’s family farmed: my mother’s family lived in a small town, one that burgeoned with immigrants and industry after the Civil War. I couldn’t shake the thought that another small town, in the same place, would make a great setting for a series about a country in flux. So I did it.

If Cora Countryman had a theme song, what would it be? I Want to Be Free (Monkees) And Sebastian Kanady? You Belong to Me (Jo Stafford). What about Calypso Swale? I Need a Hero (Bonny Tyler), though I’m not sure why. Calypso is plenty self-sufficient. And Grieg Washburn? Can’t Get You Off of My Mind (Lenny Kravitz) I could go on, but I’ll stop here, no I won’t. One more: Laury Cooper? Paint it Black (Mick Jagger)

Why do you write?

I can’t help myself, never could. I worry that if I didn’t, all the voices in my head might rebel. And then, where would I be?

Find me and my books at https://dzchurch.com. 

One of the reasons I set my Wanee Mystery series in the 1870s was because even as new, disruptive industrial technology was being used to better life there were those who abused it. Ultimately, it tore apart the fabric of rural life. My newest Wanee Mystery, The Orleans Lady, among other things, is a story about greed. And, so, as it is launched, I struggle with the truth that “authors” are using AI to game the system for the almighty buck and wonder where it will lead us.

Amazon recently limited the number of books an individual could load to KDP to three per day. I don’t know about you, but unless I am updating covers, I don’t have three books to add in a month, well, honestly, six months. So why the limit?

Well, because persons, claiming to be “authors”, are using AI to write as many as, possibly more than, 100 books a month, most are non-fiction books, but others are fiction. Quoting James Blatch, of the Self-Publishing Formula, “Amazon understandably wants to protect the reader experience. They are up against AI-generated novels, thousands a day, and AI-driven marketing carefully balanced to produce a small profit per title. It’s a new business model that relies on quantity over quality. Twenty-five sales of a free-to-produce AI book with an AI cover and blurb, multiplied by 100 a day, is a very profitable business.”

Besides flooding the market, what does this sort of business model do to the discoverability of non-AI-produced books? You know, the sort we shed our sleep for and studiously nurture. Sure, we all write to market in our own way, but this is a different sort of beast. It is destructive to the craft and also to the reading public. Disappointed readers may become wary of buying books not published by established publishing companies, and, so, weaken independent publishing, the very thing these scammers abuse. What if romance readers quit buying romances because they couldn’t tell the wheat from the chaff until the money was spent? Or, horror of horrors, mystery readers?

These “authors” write an AI prompt using a standard structure. Say, the venerable Three-Act structure: Act 1. Setup (Exposition, Inciting incident, Plot Point 1) Act II: Confrontation (Rising Action, Midpoint, Plot point Two) Act III: Resolution (Pre-climax, Climax, denouement). Or any other plot structure that can be used repeatedly. Which is about 15 or so — some claim.

It may be a challenge at first to get the prompt just right, but each time it is used, it is refined until the output is predictable. Then:

The “author” need only change the names, the murder, maybe the town, and AI kicks back a book in the specified length, say just enough pages to result in a $2.50 royalty. It’s run through an AI grammar checker (which does actually require one to know some grammar). Slammed into some nifty formatting software, downloaded, and loaded to KDP, where 25 people read it and discover it is poorly written, has a stale plot, and the characters seem rote. If only three of these fine books are loaded a day, the “author” earns $5,625 ($2.50x25buyersx3booksx30days) plus a month, with no costs beyond software subscriptions and, maybe, a few courses from other scammers.

I call that theft. It’s cheating your “fellow” authors and stealing from readers, whether non-fiction or fiction. Mind you, I might see some advantage to developing an AI prompt to create a synopsis from which you write a book, actually write a book (as in type in your own words), especially if you hate creating synopses and/or if you normally rely on a synopsis while writing. I might even be persuaded that taking a raw work generated by ChatGPT or Claude and refining it into a quality product could be legitimate. Maybe? But new technology always serves two gods: the one who envisions the good of it and the one who manipulates it for personal gain (usually at the expense of others).

I’m old school, I started writing books, bad, bad, bad historical love stories, when I was eight. I’m talking tales seriously reflective of the last thing read or watched on TV. Yes, I followed the plot structures from those sources. Heck, that’s where I learned the basics of plotting. But I never cheated. Every, every word came from my head and flowed through my fingers first in pencil, then pen, then typewriter and finally computer.

Now here comes AI. God save independent writers and publishers from the seemingly endless opportunities AI offers hucksters, including the fake publishers, course pushers, and marketers (agents) using AI-generated emails to lure you into their traps. I swear I get twenty a day.

I’m a guarded optimist and pray this all burns itself out. But it makes me crazy. Especially when I’m looking at the venerable blank page, searching for my next word. Sigh!

Find me at https://dzchurch.com, where you can discover more about my books and sign up for my newsletter. To order The Orleans Lady, follow this link: https://www.amazon.com/Orleans-Lady-Wanee-Mystery-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B0GGY11CM5/.