Writing About Places We've Never Been

For most of my fiction writing career, I have stuck with the idea of only taking my characters to locations I have visited. Even that can be problematic if you aren't careful. When I wrote my first Post-Cold War thriller in 1990-91, I had visited Hong Kong. But when I revised Beware the Jabberwock for publication recently, I discovered I had used a hospital that was too far from where my character had an accident.

While revising the second book in the trilogy set just after the Cold War, The Poksu Conspiracy, due for publication soon, I realized I had broken the familiarization rule. I had a few scenes set in Berlin and Budapest. These are places I've never been. I depended on some maps of Berlin and online information for the German capital, but not much was required since it only involved a drive in from the airport to a downtown office.

The Hungarian part was a bit more complicated. I had Burke and Lori Hill spending several days there. Budapest was Lori's birthplace. Luckily, National Geographic Traveler ran a feature on the city around this time. It included great pictures of various sites and an article that provided lots of information. I also read a book by someone who had lived there several years that gave an inside look at the area.

Among the places described in the magazine was a restaurant that had been restored to its pre-Soviet satellite name, the Cafe New York. It occupied two levels of the old New York Insurance Company building, and the Communists had renamed it Cafe Hungaria. The lavishly decorated upper level was a balcony that looked down on the lower level called Melyviz, or Deep Water. In the old days, the affluent gathered on the upper level to peer down disdainfully on the writers and artists who subsisted on the cheaper fare of Deep Water. Burke and Lori made an important contact there.

My work was validated when I submitted those chapters to my writers group. Turns out one of my colleagues had lived in Budapest while her husband was there with the U.S. military. She said my descriptions were right on.

I haven't begun revising the third book, which was originally written around 1993. Titled Overture to Disaster, it is the longest of the three, currently clocking in at 165,000 words. And much of it is set in locations that I've never visited. I was well versed in the activities of the CIA and KGB back in those days, and I did a great deal of research on areas where the story is set. In the early part of the book, I have scenes in Minsk and Kiev, capitals of two of the new countries that were formerly Soviet republics.

It was only later in my fiction career that I decided to stick with locations I've visited. I'm pleased with what I did in these first three books. I'll be surprised if any of my readers takes me to task for the way I described these places nearly a quarter of a century ago.

Lego Cities

By Mark W. Danielson

From thirty-five thousand feet, farmed fields become tapestries, cars move like ants. At night, Australian outback fires and Japanese fishing fleets look like cities, the aurora borealis dance, and constellations blend into the Milky Way. Up here, political borders are recognized only by their airspace restrictions.  Lego cities abound. I call them Lego cities because from my vantage they resemble stacked blocks. You can find high rise cities throughout Europe and Asia, but in the more remote areas of Russia, Kazakhstan, and China, the outline of some these industrial cities resemble Medieval walled cities.

 Many cringe at mass housing developments, but high rise cities are actually quite efficient. Their concept dates back hundreds of years when walled cities protected citizens and used the surrounding land for farming. Modern adaptations of this lower energy costs, require less infrastructure, and minimize commutes because people are closer to their work place. A side benefit may be a greater sense of community. No doubt Lego cities would cease to exist if they didn’t work.

Of course, the US has cities that fit this description. Manhattan certainly qualifies, and Boston’s row houses precede The Revolutionary War.  Mass housing works well in these cities because both encourage inner city living with convenient transportation, and nearby theaters, restaurants, and corner markets. The demand for inner city living has spread to many others cities, which has led to redeveloping abandoned warehouses as loft housing. Younger people crave these apartments not only because of their convenience, but because downtowns have become such happening places. What a great way to preserve historic buildings.

 In many cases, cities must go vertical development because there is no more available land. An island city such as Hong Kong (pictured above) is a prime example. Of course, this would apply anywhere that topography limits development. Paris is among those cities that perfected mass housing centuries ago and has minimally strayed from that course. Their concept of standard height courthouse buildings set the bar for beautiful architecture while remaining functional. High rise apartments may not suit everyone, but they can certainly be a model of efficiency.


No doubt more cities will go vertical because there is no room left to expand, but the amenities in these communities rival some resorts. Next time you’re surrounded by high rises, sit down and take note of how this microcosm functions. It might be helpful if you’re writing an inner city story.

(Hong Kong image courtesy YouCities)

Free Books - an Amazon Promo

By Chester Campbell

When Amazon first announced its KDP Select program, it looked like another effort of the 800-pound gorilla to throw its weight around. I had all of my mysteries set up on Amazon for the Kindle and at Smashwords for all the other ebook formats. The key to Amazon's program is the requirement that you make the book exclusive to the Kindle for 90 days.

The kicker to the deal is that the book is available in the Kindle Owners Lending Library. Amazon currently puts up a kitty of $600,000 a month to be divided among authors whose books were borrowed from the library. The kitty is divided by the total of books borrowed, and each author gets that amount times the number of his or her books checked out. According to the KDP Select FAQ, each book earned $1.70 per borrow in a prior month.  It isn't as much as the 70 percent royalty, but it isn't bad.

Only members of Amazon Prime can borrow books, and they're restricted to one per month. It costs $79 to be a Prime member, but you get other benefits like free two-day shipping on your puchases.

When I finished revising and getting my first Post Cold War thriller edited and ready for publication, I decided to try the KDP Select deal. I know several authors who have done well in the program. One of its features is the ability to make the book free for five days during the 90-day period. It's a good way to get word out on the book and encourage reviews. So here's the deal:

Today (April 27) and tomorrow (April 28), you can get a free Kindle ebook by going to this link: Beware the Jabberwock.

The book is set in the fall of 1991 and spring of 1992. As the Cold War winds down, former enemies on both sides of the Iron Curtain plot to retain power with a deadly stroke against top world leaders. Telephone intercepts hint at its existence. Veteran CIA spook Cameron Quinn finds it necessary to recruit an old FBI friend to assist in his investigation. Burke Hill, still trying to live down his dismissal by J. Edgar Hoover years ago, travels from Tel Aviv to Hong Kong and soon finds himself unable to trust anyone. He and Quinn's daughter, Lori, face one trap after another as they put the pieces of Operation Jabberwock together and find they're fighting against the clock to stop the slaughter.

Pick up your free ebook today or tomorrow and put a review on Amazon.

Unintended Consequences

By Chester Campbell

The so-called Law of Unintended Consequences is usually quoted regarding some unfortunate occurrence that came out of a well-intended action. In my case, however, the results were quite favorable all the way around. The case in point was a month-long junket about the Far East my wife, Alma, and I took in the spring of 1987 with our younger son and his Korean wife. Mark had just completed a tour as an Army Special Forces team leader based in Okinawa. He had spent most of his time helping train Special Forces troops in Thailand. We arranged to meet them in Seoul to begin our wandering journey.

I had retired a couple of years earlier from the Air Force Reserve and took a month off from my association management job (from which I would retire a couple of years later) to make the trip. With my new retiree ID card, we decided to travel space available to South Korea. At the time, it cost $10 each for the transportation. We flew commercial air to San Francisco and took a bus to Travis Air Force Base, the jump-off point.

C-5 Galaxy

Our experiences on the trip over would fill an article in itself, but I'll make it brief. We flew one afternoon to Hawaii on an Oklahoma Air National Guard C-130, lounging on web seats like paratroopers. After an overnight stay near Hickam AFB, we caught a C-5 headed for Tokyo. If you're unfamiliar with the aircraft, it's a monster, the largest flown by the USAF. Its cargo hold can carry five of the Army's huge Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and it has seating for seventy-three passengers on the upper deck. Looking out the window, you're nearly sixty-five feet above the runway. You have to climb spiral stairs to get there. I tried to swing Alma's carryon over my shoulder, but they said she had to be able to carry it herself. Though in the early stages of Parkinson's Disease, she made it like a trooper.

We overnighted on Guam for crew rest, then flew on to Tokyo the next day. After a few hours at the Military Airlift Command terminal, we caught a C-141 bound for Korea. Landing there, we spent the night in Suwon, then met our son at a Seoul hotel run by the American military. Although the calendar said early spring, the weather was cold. Our first visit was to the home of our daughter-in-law's parents in Inchon, the port city on the west side of the capital. It was a typical home of Koreans who shunned Western styles and lived as their ancestors had for centuries. Shoes were left at the entrance door and we sat on pillows on the floor, which was heated by ondol,under-the-floor brick flues that carried the warmth from a wood fire in the miniscule kitchen.

Mark and I Pun had married a few years earlier when he was stationed at the DMZ (demilitarized zone) separating North and South Korea. It was the only place where soldiers got combat pay at the time. The wedding was a civil ceremony. She took advantage of our visit in 1987 to have a full-blown ceremony at a Wedding House in Inchon, a place with chapels, room for many guests, and a videographer to record the event.

The visit to a Korean home and the wedding ceremony turned out to be among the unintended consequences of that trip. At the time, I didn't think of our tour as involving research for novels. It would be the middle of 1989, when I retired from the Tennessee Association of Life Underwriters, that I started to tackle the job of mystery writing in earnest. The first two manuscripts I wrote found a home for many of the locations and events I encountered while roaming about the Far East.

One of the more fascinating places we visited that I used in the second book was Chiang Mai, Thailand, which was known as Chiangmai back then. The first place my character saw on his arrival was ours also, the Top North Guest House. It catered to trekkers who were accustomed to roughing it. As a Ranger-qualified Special Forces officer, Mark had found it quite adequate on previous visits. We were used to a bit more upscale accommodations, but we toughed it out. The room had only enough space for two single beds. Jalousie windows opened on either side, and a large ceiling fan loomed overhead. Chiang Mai wasn't as bad as Bangkok, where the temperature hovered close to 100 degrees, but we didn't need any cover at night.

Steps to Wat Prathat Doi Suthep

We were fascinated with the local transportation, which was mostly a device called a samlor, a three-wheeled motorcycle with a canopy and a bench seat in back. The slang term is tuk tuk. We puttered around town on them, and for longer ventures took a samlor, literally "two benches." It was a pickup truck with a wooden bench on either side. That was our conveyance when we visited Wat Prathat Doi Suthep, the famed Buddhist temple high up the mountain west of the city. Getting there from the parking area required ascending 290 steps flanked by the undulating forms of naga, or serpentine, balustrades. Dragon-like multiple heads reared up at the base of the stairway.

I used all of this and more in the book titled The Poksu Conspiracy, much of which takes place in South Korea. I'm currently revising the manuscript with the intent of putting it up as an ebook. The first book featured a later part of our trip when we visited Hong Kong. During the month we went from South Korea to Okinawa, Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Manila in the Philippines. I shot scores of color slides, which helped greatly when I took my characters on their fictional journeys.

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Research in Depth

By Chester Campbell

I suppose I've become lazy the past few years while I continued to write PI mysteries set around Nashville. They haven't required much research as I'm writing about a city I've known intimately for most of my life. If I need to refresh my memory on something, all it takes is a little drive-by "research." I've also chosen subjects I'm familiar with that needed little more than Googling.

It wasn't always like this. When I started writing mystery novels in earnest, after retiring in 1989, I chose the subgenre I'd read avidly since the end of World War II, the spy story. I wrote a trilogy of international thrillers set at the end of the Cold War. They feature a disgraced former FBI agent who gets involved in espionage. None of the three sold, far a variety of reasons (I had a different agent for each of them). I've been revising them lately with an eye to putting them up as ebooks.

During this process, I've been fascinated at recalling the amount of research I did on these books. I had read extensively about the CIA and the KGB, and I bought several newer books for background. One major challenge was the variety of locations around the globe. I spent a lot of time at the library going over travel books and memoirs by people who had lived in the areas.

Locations my characters visited in the first two books included Tel Aviv, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Chiang Mai, Thailand. At the time I wrote the stories, I had never been to Israel. Having toured the country and seen Tel Aviv in 1998, I was quite pleased at how well I had described the setting. I only made a few tweaks based on firsthand knowledge.

I toured the Southeast Asian locations in 1987 when my wife and I joined our younger son (then with Army Special Forces) and his wife on a 30-day junket that included Korea, Okinawa, Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. Of course, I had also spent a year in Seoul at Fifth Air Force Headquarters in 1952-3 during the Korean War. I did additional reading on the areas while researching my spy stories.

Most of the U.S. cities in the books were ones I was familiar with. One fictional location I created was a small island off the Florida Gulf Coast. I visited the area and consulted with seamen at the Apalachicola, Florida Coast Guard Station to keep things realistic.

The last book in the trilogy has the most areas I've never seen. It includes a remote corner of Iran, parts of Ukraine, and Minsk, Belarus. It is set in the early nineties, and I did extensive research on conditions in the areas.  I also used parts of Mexico, some of which I had visited. The stories include many technical details that I researched extensively, much of it in cooperation with my "technical adviser," brother Jim, an electrical engineer.