Let us now give thanks for the Sanborn maps, a valuable tool for writers.

You’ve never heard of them? I hadn’t either, until I started working at the University of California Berkeley. I was a staffer in a research unit affiliated with the College of Environmental Design, which is where I first heard the term the built environment.

According to Science Direct:

The term built environment refers to the human-made surroundings that provide the setting for human activity, ranging in scale from buildings and parks or green space to neighborhoods and cities that can often include their supporting infrastructure, such as water supply or energy networks.

The Sanborn maps show a detailed view of the built environment. Great for writers, because if we’re writing about a particular location, it helps to know what building was on which corner. Fortunately, many of the Sanborn maps have been digitized. Which is great since the bound volumes are quite large and bulky—and not readily available.

Now for some background. The Sanborn Map Company created and published detailed maps of US cities and towns in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. The earliest published map shows Boston in 1969. The maps were large-scale, lithographed street plans, published in volumes, bound, and updated.

They were created so that fire insurance companies could assess their liability in urbanized areas, utilizing detailed information about properties and individual buildings in approximately 12,000 cities and towns.

The Sanborn maps contain an enormous amount of information. Once you get past the title page and various indexes, the maps themselves show the outlines of each building and outbuilding; the location of windows and doors; street names; street and sidewalk widths; property boundaries; fire walls; natural features such as rivers; railroad corridors; building use (sometimes even particular room uses); house and block number; as well as the composition of building materials including the framing, flooring, and roofing materials; the strength of the local fire department; indications of sprinkler systems; locations of fire hydrants; location of water and gas mains; and even the names of most public buildings, churches and businesses. Even brothels, outhouses and stables! A treasure trove!

You can access the maps through the Library of Congress, though I’m not sure they have the complete collection. What they do have is voluminous. Here’s a link:

https://www.loc.gov/collections/sanborn-maps/about-this-collection/

While writing Death Above the Line, the latest Jill McLeod novel, set in Niles, California in 1953, I consulted a Sanborn map for that small township in Alameda County. I learned that what is now called Niles Boulevard was called Front Street back then. There was a hotel on a corner opposite the train station, which served the purposes of my plot. I also found a large vacant lot farther down the street where I could locate my fictional warehouse-turned-movie-studio.

For my work-in-progress, which takes place in New Mexico territory in the late 1870s and early 1880s, the maps are invaluable. Even now, I’m looking at a digital map of Santa Fe in 1883 that points out the location of the post office, on a corner east of the Plaza, next door to a jewelry shop, an insurance office, and a barber shop—and there was a gambling hall behind that. On another downtown street, I find a bookstore sandwiched between a bank and another building labeled “Gambling Mdse.” I’m intrigued by that one.

Once I figured out that the legend “Dwg.” means dwelling, that gave me an idea of where people lived. Especially useful since my protagonist is renting a room in someone’s home. Now I know where to put that fictional house.

I love looking at maps and I could certainly spend hours with the Sanborn maps. Try them—you’ll get hooked!

If you are like me, the minute you log onto your email, social sites, or even play games on your phone, you’re swamped by all the little helpers who want to teach you to write, publish, do covers, and do advertising. They’d love you to sell your own books, or not. They want to help you discover the perfect genre to write in to make a bazillion dollars on the first day. They’ll fix your grammatical errors, check your writing against the great masters, tell you how to rewrite it to get closer to whoever you’re mimicking and if that isn’t enough they have AI that will do all of this for you.

Sheesh! How can you write with all this noise? It can make you skeptical of your skills, of your ideas, and well … everything until it mires, weighs, just crunches you into stasis. One of my favorite seminar offers was this … yes, I clicked on it, and, yes, I read it. A workshop that would assist you in toning up your genre, so that your readers wouldn’t be disappointed when they picked up your book. Then it went on to say, if you want to stand out you should change up the tropes. Make your hero a bit dopey, like the dwarf. Make your heroine slightly goofy, like the dog. Do something different. Am I the only one who finds this totally wacko?

Why on this green earth would I take time from writing to attend a seminar that purportedly teaches me about my genre and then promotes breaking form? Isn’t breaking form another word for originality, shouldn’t we all have a uniqueness about our books if we are any good at our trade?

Then there are the software folks who will gladly parse, slice, and dice your text. They will compare you to others in the genre you write. Either inflate or deflate you. Then offer to fix your text right up with their AI system. Am I crazy, is that writing?

I thought writing a book was about plotting, researching, sitting your butt on a chair and pounding on the keys. Reviewing what you wrote the day before, before beginning on the next day’s text. And when you finish, you edit, have it edited, edit again. Then tend to the cover and cover text — maybe not mimicking every darn cover in your genre, but break out there a bit, too. Here’s a random thought. Whatever happened to cover reveals? I admit I did a few. But where have they gone?

Yes, we all hope to sell our books, make some money, and gain some recognition … but when we swim upstream through creepy, sometimes badly written, pushy, flim-flam, how are we supposed to find the wheat in the chaff? Like for instance, those who can truly help us. There are people and sites I trust. And people and sites I use. But it seems like each time I use one of them, I am barraged by hucksters offering software, seminars, and surefire ways to increase my mailing list, outsmart Amazon, and find fame.

It’s enough to make one write a dystopian YA book in which the books in the library begin to randomly fling themselves off the walls, screaming as they fly at you, read me, read me, read me until you’re crushed by the weight of them.

Is that the definition of overwhelmed?

Despite this, the newest book in my Wanee Mystery series, “Of Waterworks and Sin,” will make its debut on April 15. Yes, tax day. And will be available for pre-order on March 15, not tax-day. That is if everyone in the Library of Congress isn’t fired first.

Here’s a brief, brief:

As a favor to the newspaper’s owner, Cora Countryman takes over editing the town newspaper. When two skeletons are found by diggers while trenching the new water main, she can’t resist investigating. As she digs deeper, she becomes fixated on the identity of a mysterious child connected to the victims. With the year 1865 and the memory of a shanty fire looming over her inquiry, Cora suspects a returned Civil War veteran, but which one?

Certifiably not written by AI.

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