Jaycee Woods

Unlike some writers who are geniuses and live IRL in the setting of the book during drafting, I am unlikely to do so. It lets them fashion the location into a character within their books. Edward Cline and Richard Gleaves are my favorite examples of such.

My recently discovered cheat code is to use Zillow to see how people live in other communities. Within Ohio, how do Marion, Port Clinton/Sandusky, and Cleveland feel different? Does architecture and furnishings tell me something about how people there are different from me?

An example from WV, I was perplexed about why so many houses had safes featured in the room photos. I wondered if meth burglary was so rampant that people needed safes for their valuables. Silly me, they were gun safes because of how important hunting still is there. In my retro-mind, rifles are kept on display in beautiful wooden cabinets or hung on walls; I wasn’t aware of how insurance and regulatory policies had nudged gun owners into ugly bulky containment instead of sensible small footprint controls on ammo storage.

This may help me add a small detail of authenticity to a story during editing. Like Zeke from the deer stand locking up his rifle in the safe after returning home. Or Hunter in his remote cabin having his rifle on display to characterize him being beyond contemporary regulation.