For me, there is nothing like a road trip. Jetting off to faraway places is not my cup of tea, never has been. I prefer terra firma, and seeing everything there is to see along the way.
Don’t get me wrong. The views from up in the air can be pretty amazing. But you can’t really pull over and investigate if you see something interesting, now, can you?
And I prefer out-of-the-way places, not major cities.
In other words…give me wide open spaces! Because you never know what you will find out there, where there is supposedly nothing.
In this case, it was an abandoned resort up in Canada, situated next to a huge, peaceful lake. I wish there’d been more identifying information. I tried to find something about it on the Internet, without a lick of success. (My BF and I saw another abandoned resort on that same trip and at least found other people’s pictures of it, and its name. But for this one, not a thing. Just adds to the mystery, right?)
Looked like a really nice setup, back when it was alive, anyway. Eight rooms in one single-story building, some other common building overlooking the lake, and some other building (Café? Storage? Not sure. Not about to trespass to find out.)
So. A cool little place. In the middle of nowhere. Set on a lake. But abandoned and aging. Just the thing to set off my weird little imagination. Who stayed there when it was operational? What was their story? What stories could the walls tell? I knew right away this place had the potential to make an appearance in my fiction. Just a matter of when and where.
Different stories start with different seeds. For another of my novellas, Skinshift, it was the animal skulls we found in an abandoned campsite on another road trip. For Ash and Bone, it was a noir-ish mental image I had of a waterfront at night. And so on. My stories aren’t always inspired by an irresistible setting. But some are. Like Moon Over Ruin.
The Quarry Resort is a fictionalized version of this abandoned resort. Peter Watson takes a solo road trip to escape a very painful loss. Or so he thinks. Then he winds up at the Quarry Resort, alone, at night. And he gets more than he bargained for. Way more.
Thanks for reading!
And may I wish you:
Pleasant dreams…or not…
Lisa
The Official Site of Lisa von Biela 