Welcome to the Sparkyverse

Writing a novel, especially one that follows certain events that come from the experiences in your own life, is a mine field of technical hurdles. In the earliest drafts I didn't have a good idea how to weave around that explosive shrapnel, and ended up doing too much of a literal translation of the World As We Know It, which is to say I didn't allow myself a whole lot of artistic freedom. Through revision I started to figure out that the story was what was important here, and not how closely I represented the actual workings of the Franklin Medical Center or all the logistics of travelling from Greenfield to Amherst, and so forth. I got totally bogged down by all that sort of thing instead of just telling the story.

Then I started to modify certain details to better suit the story, and that loosened some of the tension on the gears. Now, a lot of what appears in the book is my own creation, and that allows me greater freedom. What I'm going to do here is discuss some of the ways in which I reshaped the universe so that I could tell the story of Emma, Alyssa, and Kelly in a clearer fashion.

-- There is no such strip club as The Fuzzy Peach. I would bet a lot of people just assume I modelled it after Anthony's, or even Castaways, but the Peach doesn't resemble either of those clubs very much at all. If anything, it's closest to a strip club I visited exactly once, in San Francisco. While that's true, the basic structure of that chapter and the Fuzzy Peach already existed on paper before that trip to California. The Fuzzy Peach is my own creation.

-- I've had good relationships with several strippers over the years, Chrissy notwithstanding, but I've never had *that* sort of deal with any of them. Sylja is based on Chrissy, yes, but nothing like that ever happened to me inside of a strip club. Outside of one .... ?

-- Annville and the whole of Lapham County are also pretty much my own creation, with additional inspiration provided by a couple of other sources. I decided early on there was no way I was going to try to represent any actual Texas area, since I've never set one foot in the state, and considering the content of Chapter 2, I thought it best just to create my own county wholesale. Without that conceit, writing this chapter would have been impossible.

-- This same line of thought led to taking key people from my life and inserting them into the book in brand new roles. For instance, Guinevere shows up as a waitress at the Diner. A character based on Krysten appears throughout as Laurel's best friend, although she only met Colleen once (for about 10 seconds). One of my all-time favorite waitresses from Anthony's shows up as the other prominent Diner waitress. Four characters who are very closely based on FMC kitchen staff show up as stand-ins for Melissa's friends during the famous card game chapter. Markwell shows up as my cousin in another chapter. And that's only scratching the surface. There's a ton more.

-- Keeping the story in Massachusetts was a creative dead end, too (sorry, Guinevere). Moving events to New Hampshire freshened up everything, and gave me a better field of movement in which to move the various players around. It just feels right, so I'm going for it. To get this to work, though, I've had to make some alterations to the Upper Valley. For instance, the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center is far too monolithic to try and use as a setting, at least for my needs, so I tore down the much smaller Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital, which is right here in Lebanon, and I'm replacing it with a smallish hospital of my own creation (to be named later), although it's going to be little more than a duplicate of good ol' FMC. I may have to do something similar with Lebanon College as far as making it a little more GCC. Artistic license is a wonderful thing.

-- Instead of beginning in 1990 and ending wherever I end it (with all the telescoping of other things I haven't figured that out yet), I moved the start date up to 2004. Trying to make all the details specific to the early 90's was just another distraction, since it doesn't matter a bit when this story happens as long as I get all the important things emotionally correct ... if that makes any sense. It makes sense in my brain, at least, even if I can't quite explain it here. Having a more contemporary feel to the story opened up a number of other creative possibilities as well. I expect the span of the main part of the story to be about three years, with some aftermath to follow.

Is that everything? I feel as though I've missed something else worth listing, but I'll be damned if I can think of it. You get the point, though. The book is still what it was originally intended to be (Erin's story), but it's grown into a whole 'nother thing also during the process. That is to say, it started out as my account of something I wanted to write about, and along the way it turned into a novel.

It's neat how that happens.