Today The Storytelling Blog is excited to share some thoughts about story location from mystery author and publisher Mira Gibson. Gibson recently established Mystery Royalty, an independent publishing imprint dedicated to publishing all sub-genres of mystery. Her new release, Who Killed Leeanne? is a small-town murder mystery that tackles controversial subject matters.
Use this private discount link to purchase the paperback for $12.99 (reduced from $16.95). The link will be live from May 14th to June 15th as part of her blog tour. For lovers of ebooks, you can grab this title for free on Amazon Kindle for a five-day period starting on May 15, after which the price will return to $3.99.
Location: New Hampshire
When I was a little girl, I grew up in a town so small that residents in neighboring towns had never heard of it. This was in New Hampshire, where you’ll find more lakes than land.
I didn’t fall in love with fiction at school or at the library, even though I was introduced to great literary works there. The grocery store, however, was where the magic happened. I never missed a trip with my mom to the A&P. Ditching her at the entrance, I made a beeline for the little aisle that held paperback novels. I wasn’t always allowed to get one, but on those rare occasions when I brought a novel home, I dove right in, escaped the world around me, and felt all kinds of emotions I never had access to before.
Growing up, I knew I wanted to be a grocery store author.
I didn’t have the cultural wherewithal to comprehend that being a “grocery store author” meant I wanted to be a New York Times top ten bestselling author. I only knew that those riveting stories printed on cheap eggshell paper that smelled strangely of glue and ink and other peoples’ hands had inspired me.
New Hampshire had, as well.
Inspiration: New Hampshire
My neck of the woods was full of huge houses with penniless people living inside. There were ghost towns and marshes, drugs and dreams, and a distinct kind of stranger danger that I soon came to find out didn’t exist anywhere else, or at least not in the same way as it did in Sanbornton.
As a place, Sanbornton was a character. It was beautiful and mean. The winters were brutal. Springtime could make a dirt road so muddy you couldn’t drive down it. There were snow days and mud days—my school existed at the mercy of Mother Nature, and she wasn’t all that merciful. The Laconia Indian Historical Association was nearby, although everyone in those days just called it “the Indian Reservation.” Gawkers, tourists and locals alike, bought funny little items at their pow-wows. One of my school friends once claimed to have seen a leprechaun while waiting for the bus, and that sounded about right to me.
Writing Location Memories
I had no idea any of this was unusual until I left the state as a young adult. And it wasn’t until I started writing seriously as an author that I realized the locations where I had lived were the foundational characters of my novels.
New Hampshire—the memories I collected from there and the personality of the place—inserted itself into my first novels. The harsh weather reflected my characters’ moods. The attitudes of the residents that I noticed as a kid had formed a kind of entity in my mind that demanded to be written about alongside the plotlines I was crafting.
The good, the bad, and the ugly that I experienced and observed growing up never left me, and also never sat quite right in my mind. I had to figure it out, wrestle with fragmented memories that refused to make sense until my imagination took over and did the explaining. This was how The New Hampshire Mysteries were born, a three-novel series about the lakes region where I grew up.
Location: Liberty, NY
As I continued writing, I continued drawing from the places I had lived. I had blossomed and wilted in Brooklyn, NY, for ten years. When I moved away, I had enough perspective to write about the place in The Kensington Killers. And the trend continued when I moved to a small town in upstate New York called Liberty.
I had moved to Liberty because I liked the name and because I was deeply desperate to live freely, not knowing at the time that the prison I had locked myself into was mental and entirely my own doing. While living there, I wrote a story about a woman who was murdered by the hand of one killer. But really the town, that location, the character that “Liberty” was, had taken her life. It slowly ate her alive, while she clung to optimistic aspirations and attempted to escape who she had become. The novel I’m referring to is Who Killed Leeanne?
I’m not Leeanne, and I didn’t live her experiences when I was in Liberty, NY. But many of the settings are the same. I used to hike Walnut Mountain. I briefly worked at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, which I fictionalized in my novel. What was most inspiring about my years there, and what made it into the story, were the impressions I gathered from those places and the people I encountered.
Inspiration: Liberty, NY
Like the small town in New Hampshire where I had grown up, Liberty and the surrounding towns in that corner of the Catskills were depressed. There were ghost towns, failing businesses, and condemned houses that were literally rotting and collapsing before my very eyes. And there were also very wealthy areas where people drank eighteen dollar bottles of water with their pinkies in the air and wore black turtlenecks as they admired rare artwork in the heat of summer.
It made me wonder how a person living there might cross that divide, make a dream come true, and gain financial security after poverty. For my character, Leeanne, the attempt ultimately cost her life.
I was reminded of Sanbornton where I was raised, all those huge houses with penniless people inside, struggling under the financial burden of the massive acreages they couldn’t afford. What dreams did they have? I’m not sure I ever asked them. I only knew of my own—to become one of those grocery store authors. I had to leave New Hampshire to make that dream come true and it’s not in the bag yet. But for Leeanne, who ran to Liberty to do the same, gaining a foothold among the wealthy quickly became the story of why she was killed.
Location as a Writer’s Inspiration
This is why I love being a writer. A location can inspire me. When I sit down to write a story about a place, it seems to write itself, as long as I lived there long enough. I can’t even claim that I’m being accurate or truthful when I write about these locations. But somehow, my memory and perception work in concert with my imagination, and soon the fictionalized location, as a story, becomes more real to me than the town itself.
Right now, I live on Long Island, a place where salty sea air and a lazy tide could lull a person into feeling safe. But in my imagination, there will always be another body and a dark murder mystery to solve.
Don’t miss Who Killed Leeanne?
Mira Gibson’s new release, Who Killed Leeanne? is a small-town murder mystery that tackles controversial subject matters. Use this private discount link to purchase the paperback for $12.99 (reduced from $16.95). The link will be live from May 14th to June 15th as part of her blog tour. For lovers of ebooks, you can grab this title for free on Amazon Kindle for a five-day period, starting on May 15, after which the price will return to $3.99.
About Mira Gibson
Mira Gibson is an author, playwright, and screenwriter. She graduated from Bard College as a playwriting major and quickly garnered attention in the New York City theater scene. She received a commission from The Sloan Foundation for her one-act play, The Red, White, and Blue Process, and won the 38th Annual Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Play Competition with Old Flame. As a screenwriter, she penned the feature-length arthouse drama, Warfield, produced by Summer Smoke Productions, which is available to rent and buy on Amazon Prime. Mira has authored dozens of mystery novels. She lives in Oceanside, NY, where she continues to author novels when she isn’t attending ballet class, making homemade soap, or hanging out at the beach.
About Mystery Royalty
Mystery Royalty is an independent publishing imprint. Established in 2024 by Mira Gibson, Mystery Royalty is dedicated to publishing quality stand-alone and serial novels within every sub-genre of mystery—small town & rural mystery, amateur sleuth & women sleuths, cozy mystery, hard-boiled detective, police procedural, and psychological thriller. Visit www.MysteryRoyalty.com to learn more.
Connect with Mira Gibson
Facebook @AuthorMiraGibson
Instagram @AuthorMiraGibson
Twitter @MiraGibson
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Amazon [https://www.amazon.com/stores/Mira-Gibson/author/B00I1KA768]
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Who Killed Leeanne?
Passionate, wounded, and fiercely alive, Leeanne Hessinger has never felt free. She wants something more, something bigger than the life she’s stumbled into, but fleeing to a town unknown to her with a single promise in mind—to finally write a novel—comes at a very high price.
When she’s found brutally stabbed to death a year later, a small town’s darkest secrets come to the forefront as the sheriff investigating the crime covers up her own treacherous involvement with the dead woman.
Full of twists and turns, WHO KILLED LEEANNE? reconstructs a year in the life of Leeanne Hessinger, as she walks the brink of her own destruction and inches closer and closer to death. The cost of freedom, for Leeanne, is ultimately her life.
If you found Location for Inspiration interesting, you might enjoy reading my review of Who Killed Leeanne?
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The St. Louis Writers Guild Members Anthology 2024 includes a new Sean Joye Investigations short story, “The Haunted Guild,” a fun Halloween-themed piece.
The Guild’s Love Letters to St. Louis contains my first science fiction story, “Welcome to Earthport Prime: A Self-Guided Tour.”This adorable letter-shaped volume of short stories, poems, essays, and illustrations. Profits benefit the guild’s young writers’ program.