Authors Electric

Many of my novels are set in a completely fictitious small town. I realised it would be sensible for it to be fictitious soon after I started writing the first in what is now a long-running mystery series. To begin with I was planning to use South Queensferry as the setting, but I'm very glad I changed my mind.  Although its location is interesting, with the original Forth Bridge looming over it and the two newer road bridges at the other side of the town, I don't know it in enough detail to be able to write about it confidently, and then there is always the problem with a real small town that you might inadvertently use a real person's name or invent a restaurant or shop that's in the same position as a real one, or has a very similar name. This was brought home to me forcefully only a day or two ago as I worked on the 20th in the series. For this one - and I don't think this is much of a spoiler - I had to invent a wedding venue that had to be situated...

This is a place called Capel Curig, in Wales. What's that got to do with 'Hiraeth' I hear you ask, and what does the word mean, anyway? Well, I'll get to that in a moment.  An on-line friend and I were talking about one day returning to the land where our roots are - hers in Virginia,  mine in rural Wales. It made me think of the old song I remember from my childhood: 'We'll keep a welcome in the hillside, we'll keep a welcome in the vales, we'll kiss away each hour of 'hiraeth' when you come home again to Wales.' We were both feeling a bit 'homesick'.  That's what Hiraeth is - it's Welsh for being homesick for Wales - but more than that - it's a deep longing, really homesickness doesn't come close to the intensity of feeling that 'hiraeth' invokes. For various reasons, shortage of affordable housing in the area where I grew up, and marriage, being two,  I now  live in a beautiful part of England, cl...