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As this was my very first piece of fiction, I had no idea what I was getting into. But I realized quickly that a fictional story set in modern-day Los Angeles had to be built upon facts – beginning with the locale. In the opening scene, Anna is stuck on a freeway trying to get from downtown to the BMW dealership in Beverly Hills. Which freeway? Mapquest is my friend. There it is – Interstate 10. Oh, but it isn’t called Interstate 10. It’s the Santa Monica Freeway, or to locals, simply “the 10.” Okay, I made it through the first paragraph. When I was writing this piece, I lived in the Bay Area, where everyone had at least one frightening earthquake story, thanks to the Loma Prieta quake of 1989. Their tales lent substance to my fictional account of a devastating quake striking Southern California. As the story proceeded, I found myself almost obsessed with fact-checking. What’s the waiting period in California after filing for divorce? How much is a new BMW with the sport package, and when did Toyota first produce the RAV4? How long does it take to drive to Tahoe from San Jose, and what’s the top university in the state for mechanical engineering? To some, these may seem like trivial details, but to those familiar with such information, an error can be jolting. Just ask the folks who wrote me about my thriller, Malicious Pursuit, to let me know that Baltimore is not the capital of Maryland. |