Remember the TV Show Dragnet? In the beginning, the main character, Sgt. Joe Friday always said: “This is the city. Los Angeles, California. Well, I spent time (with the assistance of an office colleague) after publishing Take Hart and before working on Diaspora producing a map of Port Angel. So, this is the city:
I won’t tell you now where I got the model. Suffice it to say, I’d already determined that Port Angel was west of Chicago, had a large body of water to its east, and had about 250,000 residents. Looking at cities in the U.S., I found one that fit two of the criteria (it isn’t west of Chicago) and dubbed it Port Angel. Port Angel isn’t in any specific state. It does, however have neighborhoods, street names, and landmarks. Why go to all this trouble?
It isn’t so apparent in Take Hart, but in Diaspora, there are a lot of locations and streets that the protagonist, Mitchell Street has to drive through. In fact, far too many locations to just keep flinging street names into the books pages without knowing how they fit together. While making some of my finals edits in Diaspora before turning it over to readers, I found some street names that just had to be changed, because they were already on the map and in the wrong location. Actually, it’s kind of fun now. I wrote a short story featuring Stephanie Hart entitled “Saving Sky,” and it was really easy putting her in specific locations near her apartment and making it work in the story. In many ways it added a nice dimension to the story.
Who would have thought making a map could make that kind of difference?
