Setting the Scene

Driving around my home this time of year is a deep pleasure.

The corn is coming out of the fields, see the picture above, the bit of green left? As soon as that's gone...and it is in some fields, the harvest begins.

It made me think about scene setting.

My new book Aiming for Love just released and this is one of the few times I've actually taken a research trip, specifically got on an airplane and flew to the place my book was going to be.

I'm putting up these pictures because I'm enjoying 'setting the scene' for my home in Nebraska...for you.

This is a bean field but what I enjoy about this picture is the rolling hills stretching as far as the eye can see, covered in soybeans. I know people consider Nebraska a flat state, but honestly, where we live in the bluffs near the Missouri River, it's not flat anywhere. One of the reasons we have beef cattle is because there are so many steep, rocky stretches. Good for grazing but impossible for farming, but lots of farming goes on in the 'friendly' stretches of land, like that in this picture.

When I sent to Durango, Colorado...in January...I got a good dose of winter in that part of the world.

We had a really lovely day in Durango. Inspired by a train trip through the mountains the day before...that didn't go up very high...we rented a car and headed for Silverton with a notion to go all the way to Telluride. You understand I've almost never heard of any of these places before I started setting my book. We're near Mesa Verde...but we managed to pick a time when the GOVERNMENT was shut down and couldn't go there.

But the mountains called to us and we set out, only to discover that as we climbed, the snow began to fall. YIKES. OH YIKES.

I'm not kidding YIKES!

We reached Silverton after a LONG TREACHEROUS RIDE. Winding mountain roads, cliffs lining the road that seemed to drop FOREVER. 

My cowboy driving, knuckles clenched tight on the wheel.

Me with my usual wit and wisdom saying things like, "If we survive this, it's gonna be a great story." (and here I am telling it).

But my heroines, the Nordegren sisters, have to contend with winter in the mountains and it really helped to see it. (I kept telling myself that as we drove!)

We reached Silverton...Telluride was farther and higher and well...we decided to eat and then go back down. When we finally waded through the heavily falling snow to a charming little restaurant,

the waitress told us we needed to get out fast before the roads closed.

OK she may not have said those EXACT words but we got the message!!!

sigh

agreed

I love, love, love this stretch of land along a highway that stretches south of me. Flat land with crops and up behind them beautiful bluffs, covered with trees. In a few more weeks these trees will be on fire with burning red maples and vivid sunlight colored cottonwoods, burnish oak and walnut, mountain ash covered with bright orange berries, each tree turning on it's fall colors, side by side, making the most beautiful landscape.

Golden rod, the Nebraska state flower, growing in the road ditches. A weed that exists to make us sneeze and make the world more beautiful.

I'm talking about snow in the mountains and using pictures of autumn colors in the bluffs just because I wanted to share these pictures and test my own skill at setting a scene.

The road ditches this year were a particular delight, layers of tall sunflowers and short ones, then the golden rod in front. Soon the Sumac will bloom and it's a stunning bright red.

Sunflowers...they were particularly bright and plentiful this year.

As we made our way down, down, down that mountain from Silverton to Durango...well, it was honestly terrifying and pretty stupid to have gone up there.

We're too old to live a risky life!!!

I swore that off long ago.

Oh, who am I kidding, I swore that off when I was about six.

But we made it down. Here I sit typing as living proof.

And as I wrote my books for this series, I remembered snow so thick you could barely see a dozen feet in front of you.

Snow that comes in feet instead of inches.

Mountain roads with drop offs so sharp, if someone fell off one it's conceivable they could vanish until spring...maybe forever.

These are cattails. 

Sharp, pointing reeds and a heavy, woody spike bearing that soft, furry brown head.

They grow in wetlands and this year ditches have stayed wet most of the time. And as they go to seed in the fall, that fur breaks open as if the insides were swelling, and a puff ball of 'cotton' emerges. After a time this hot dog shaped cotton ball all blows away, seeding next years crop. As soft and pretty as dandelion fluff.

A closeup of a bean field ready for harvest. They are green bushes as they grow.

But in the fall, all the leaves are shed leaving a single stock with soybean pods clinging, waiting for a combine to come and rip through them.

Soybeans are in so many things. Soy sauce, but soy oil, if you check labels, is almost everywhere. It's also a near perfect animal feed. And the hulls holding the beans and the chaff inside the hull, can be collected and sold as soy hulls. It's a major component of our cow's diet. A big truck comes loaded with soy hulls, they are full of nutrition and roughage that helps make their bellies work better.

Setting the scene.

It's tricky because you don't want to linger overly long. That gets boring and a reader will often set the book down during a long stretch of scene description.

Setting the scene..just like all other aspects of the writer's craft...needs to be done just right. Enough but not too much.

Selecting the words with skill. Adding, cutting, revising, painting pictures with words.

Tell me about your work in progress.

Describe the scene, whether it's a pretty drawing room, a rugged mountain pass, a small town bakery, a day care, a hospital ward from the 1920s.

What words do you choose?

Leave a comment to get your name in a drawing for a signed copy of

Aiming for Love

Josephine Nordegren is one of three sisters who grew up nearly wild in southwestern Colorado. She has the archery skills of Robin Hood and the curiosity of the Little Mermaid, fascinated by but locked away from the forbidden outside world--a world she's been raised to believe killed her parents. When David Warden, a rancher, brings in a herd much too close to the girls' secret home, her older sister especially is frightened, but Jo is too interested to stay away.

David's parents follow soon on his heels, escaping bandits at their ranch. David's father is wounded and needs shelter. Josephine and her sisters have the only cabin on the mountain. Do they risk stepping into the world to help those in need? Or do they remain separated but safe in the peaks of Hope Mountain?