Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Heat Wave: Burlington

What did I say... this summer is going to be hot hot hot!



I knew I wanted to write about Champy, the Lake Champlain monster (loosely related to Nessie, from Scotland...) and I worked on getting Scott, my photographer, all mapped out, and how I was going to do the meet cute...

(small spoiler alert, but only small because this happens in literally the first paragraph of the story)

I knew I wanted Scott to fall off his bike, so I was writing that scene out... and he rolls into the ditch... down here in Virginia where it rains a FUCKING LOT of the time, the roads and ditches are designed -- especially here in the Tidewater area -- to carry that water away from people's houses and the roads and whatnot. I advise NOT falling off your bike around here. Or, for that matter, running your car off the road. Those ditches are a good way to break an axle...

But I was thinking -- because that's what I do -- I wonder if the roads are the same in Vermont... I mean, I've spent a lot of time up in that area growing up, but I wasn't driving at the time, so things like road structure and drainage hadn't come up as being important...

Welcome to the world of Google maps... I used the map program to pull up a likely biking spot, zoomed in, and then used street view to look around... ah, look! Ditch! I pulled back the camera to see what the area looked like around the road... what shops or houses my intrepid biker might pass by...

And there was a self-storage, right there... self... storage. I'd been watching some tv around that time that had advertising for Storage Wars, and, being me and being curious, I'd done some investigation on Storage Unit auctions... which led to an interesting idea.

And thus, my other hero, Brandon, was born...

Coming July 26th. (Which is, coincidentally or otherwise, right around the time that the story takes place...)



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