Landscapes of My Mind - Creating Fictional Settings
The round robin this month is a wonderful subject... creating fictional settings. Creating fictional settings is one of my favourite things to do. I've always loved reading about landscapes of the mind- p laces that don't exist- so long as the author makes them seem as if they do. The whole concept has a long and grand history. Plato did it so convincingly that even two thousand years later some people choose to believe Atlantis once sank beneath the waves rather than rose from a Greek man’s imagination. I've never invented any place as ambitious as Atlantis, but I've been creating my own settings for almost as long as I remember. Back in the 1970s, I created a farming district I named Springford as a main setting for my first published book, a collection of linked stories called Her Kingdom for a Pony. I didn't use the real farming district in which I lived, because I wanted freedom to use features that didn't exist. Having developed a taste for it, I...
