Behind The Scenes: Locations in The Art of Lying

I thought I would start a new series here on the blog called Behind the Scenes.  I’m finishing up my final round of revisions on my current novel, The Art of Lying, and I will be sending it to an editor before self-publishing later this year.  I thought it might be fun to do this Behind the Scenes look at my book and how I’ve been writing and revising it.  Today I wanted to start with Locations.  My book is set in Manhattan, mostly, with some scenes in New Jersey.  When I started this book, I was living in Manhattan so I don’t have a ton of personal pictures to add, but I will add some links to the NYC parks department pictures, Wikipedia, and my own personal Pinterest folder for the book. 

My main character and her family live on the Upper East Side in a fancy high-rise apartment building.  I lived for many years among those buildings and looked online for a few different types of floor plans before drawing my own – see below for the one I sketched of the apartment.  I adored the UES, Park Avenue with its median parks, and the historic feel to the area with the older buildings and store fronts.  I thought my main character’s Mom would have chosen the UES as the area to move from NJ once they had some wealth, ala The Jeffersons from the 70s sitcom.  When you’re moving on up, you move to East Side. To a deluxe apartment in the sky…..sorry, I was totally singing there, but I’m done now.

  

My main character, Rachel, is an up and coming modern artist with her own gallery show, new money, and a funky artist loft in Downtown Manhattan.  See below for the quick sketch I made of her loft setup.  Her favorite park in the city is Union Square Park.  This park is always bustling with activity from families, shoppers, tourists, and the like.  It has a weekly farmers market that has a ton of stalls and a very active community and neighborhood surrounding it.  Rachel goes on a first date with a young man in the book which I based on an actual restaurant that my husband took me to for our second date (after we saw one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies).  It has diners, bookstores, subway access, and many coffee shops around the area.

So, Rachel has her artist loft in downtown and she lives uptown, so she spends some time either walking around or on the 4-5-6 subway trains.  This was my old train system that I basically spent my whole commute on so I didn’t need much help here either.  She’s addicted to coffee and right now, Starbucks is the name of the game (I mean, there are at least two spots in the city I can think of that have competing Starbucks either right across the street from each other or down the block from each other) so she does go there quite a bit, or have coffee in her hand from there. Manhattan, where I lived for 10 years, always felt like home and it seemed the perfect place to set my novel.  

Rachel and her family came from a small town in New Jersey, but she’s only there two times to visit her Grandfather, so I spent more time on research for the one scene where she visits an old familiar family haunt, Wildwoods Amusement Park. I’ve never personally been there, but I have been to various Six Flags and Disney parks so I understand the basic theme park concept.  I did use their website and pictures found online for layouts and a few ride names. 

Pinterest has been amazing in terms of finding images and maps to use for this project.  If you click here you will be taken to my The Art of Lying board which has images of artist lofts, Union Sq Park, and other images that help me with my novel, including some celebrities that I chose to “cast” and help me “act” out my characters.  It will give you a bit of an idea about what my book and the characters are all like and some ideas about Rachel’s flavor of modern art.  I used this amazing site for everything and will be doing it again on my next big project (hint: it’s set in the circus). 

What else would you like to know about me and my writing process?  I have plans to talk about the music I write to, my favorite Modern Artists and how they inspired me (and Rachel), and possibly my writing space setup (which is still a mess, even though we moved practically nine months ago).  What else would you like to know more about?  Let me know and I’ll see what I can do.  Thanks!