Photograph Your Novel Settings

Thanksgiving blessings from Gail Gaymer Martin. A holiday is a strange day for me to blog, but I was assigned the date so I thought I would share one of my ideas with you. One thing that I love to do is write about real places. My seven book Loving Series was set in a fictitious town of Loving, Michigan but it was close to the real town of Grand Haven on Lake Michigan and the characters from those books often went into Grand Haven for a variety of reasons.. Since I enjoy the area so much, I spent a few days there researching for the Loving Series, and while there, I took photos. When the books were so popular, I decided to make the photos available on my website so readers could see the real places that my characters worked and visited during the seven novels.


Recently I had the pleasure of doing the same thing for a three book series set in the Monterey area of California on the central coast. The three titles were And Baby Makes Five, Garlic and Roses, and Butterfly Trees. Now Barbour Publishing has put these three novels into an anthology titled, Monterey Memories and it’s presently in stores now.

Since my nieces live in Salinas, I had visited this area many times, and while visiting there, I was inspired to write this series. But after I had written the three novels, I decided to visit again with the intention of taking photographs to put on my website for readers to enjoy the real places the characters live and visit. I had a great time putting these photos up with a sketch of the stories. Though you may not have this anthology, you might enjoy seeing the photos and hearing a little about the locations in the anthology. The link to the photos are found on my website at http://www.gailmartin.com/ or you can go directly to the photo page by clicking this link: http://www.gailmartin.com/The%20Real%20Monterey.htm.

When your favorite authors use real life settings, let them know you’d love to see photographs of the real locations. Maybe you’ll see some of your favorite novels come to life in photographs.