Hi MaryEllen! Thanks for having me on your blog today. For those of you who don’t know me, I am Perrin Pring, author of the Ryo Myths. My first book Appointment at the Edge of Forever and my second book, Tomorrow is Too Late are both available on Amazon and Barnesandnobel.com. The Ryo Myths is a science fiction/fantasy trilogy that even people who aren’t sci fi nerds seem to enjoy. (Think Star Wars or Firefly.)
Today, MaryEllen asked me to talk about how my sense of place affects my writing. If you haven’t checked out MaryEllen’s paintings, place is a very important theme in her work. In fact, she’s helped me develop my ability to see where I am (If you scroll down to the blog titled Glory Days, you will notice a quote at the bottom there, “You see things I miss when I walk to work looking down.” Yup, that’s me. I’m not so good in the mornings. Good thing MaryEllen paints what I miss.
The question MaryEllen posed to me is, when I create planets and other places in my writing, am I writing about places I know, or am I creating places from scratch?
I’d have to go with the former on that. I take places I’ve traveled to or lived in and augment them to be whatever I want them to be. That’s the beauty of writing science fiction. I don’t have to write reality as I see it. Some of the most inspiring places I’ve ever been are volcanic landscapes. I love hot springs and mud pots and cinder cones. I just can’t get enough. In the final book of the Ryo Myths (still unnamed at this point) my characters all end up on a volcanic planet. I created that planet kind of like Thomas Moran created some of his famous paintings of the West. I put together a lot of features I enjoy about a volcanic landscape and had them all exist in the same place. I made the sky a sweet color I’ve never seen before and blew out the color on the rest of the landscape to make it what I wanted it to be, which is based off of what I know but is in no way a replication of it.
This being said, I could not, in anyway, create any meaningful places in my writing if I hadn’t traveled or lived in so many places. For example, I’d always heard the American North West was rainy, but I didn’t really get it until I lived there for a winter. In my first book, Appointment at the Edge of Forever, one of the main characters ends up on a planet called Bok, which is a very rainy planet. While Bok is only a stopover for the character, I know the details I included about Bok are much more meaningful and realistic because I spent a third of a year in constant rain.
As I said, I’m Perrin Pring, author of the Ryo Myths. Check out my writing, follow my reviews, and get my books at:
www.perrinpring.com, Facebook, G+, Goodreads, Twitter, Instagram, Amazon.com, and Barnesandnoble.com
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