The Adirondacks

Sometime in the early writing of Festival Madness, I decided that the exciting climax would take place in the Adirondacks on a lake that is accessible only by float planes. My protaganist and her French pilot lover (with an ex-gang member from Chicago as muscle) will chase down the murderer. Oh what a tangled web we weave! The story demands such an ending, never mind that I know less than nothing about float planes, the Adirondacks, or anything else related to those closing scenes. So how does one go about creating believable scenes out of pure imagination?

I have contacts with several pilots and people who know the Adirondack region. The web is also helpful for locating lakes where bush pilots land and take off. In the fall, about the time that the denouement (love that word) takes place, S.O. and I will take off for the Adirondacks, to find the right lake, local color, and all the little details that will make the scenes believable.

In the meantime, I have been reading about the Adirondacks and am now absolutely keen to go there. In many years of living in the Boston area, we have never ventured to that vast wilderness, which now seems a shame. Trips to Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire and the Berkshires, even the area just north of NYC, but not to the upstate NY area of lakes and forests. And me a Colorado kid! So the excitement of actually going there is really building, and I am hoping I can do justice to capturing the killer in this setting.

Writing takes you down some strange paths, and life is always richer for having taken them, whether its a pub crawl through Goettingen, Germany or Cambridge's Central Square, slumming in Berlin's seedier districts, the North Woods of Wisconsin, or the Burning Man festival on Nevada's Black Rock Desert. Researching scenes for a book opens up new vistas, roads you would never travelled if the story, with a will of its own, had not taken you there. Where else would you find out that a "bad day of muskie fishing beats a good day at the office."

Onward,

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