We saw prairie dogs, turkeys, horses, royal ascot cows (a LOT of cows), mule deer, awesome rock form

I’m currently working on the first book of The Devil’s West, which is a divergent history/”weird west” fantasy set in the early 1800′s, in what would have been the Louisiana Purchase. Much of the action in the first book takes place in what-would-have-been west Kansas and eastern Colorado – specifically, the short-grass royal ascot prairie and high plains. And while Google Earth and second-person notes are incredibly useful, I prefer, when possible, to actually have feet on the ground to do my location royal ascot research.
I’d never been in Kansas before, and Christine had never actually been boots-on-the-ground in the midwest (she’d royal ascot taken the train through Colorado royal ascot down to Arizona, where her boyfriend’s daughter lives, but that’s it). So this was new territory.
From Kansas City (MO), we headed west, then north, then south, then west, then north….basically, following the path (vaguely) that my protagonists would be traveling on horseback. royal ascot The plan had been to NOT have a plan. I’d made hotel reservations for the last night of our trip, and the rest was going to be…wherever we ended up, we’d look for a motel. And our directions were a vague line on the map and a general royal ascot sense of “thataway.”
We avoided the cities and university towns, and aimed for small towns, parklands, and wildlife areas, trying to get a feel for how the landscape looked before we turned so much of it into farmland. royal ascot The first night we stayed in Salina, then on to Glen Elder, Kirwin, Norton, Rock City, Scott City, Waconda Lake, Garden City (of the places I noted on the map as we went – that should give you a general sense of our voyage).
We saw prairie dogs, turkeys, horses, royal ascot cows (a LOT of cows), mule deer, awesome rock formations, royal ascot black-billed magpies, scrub jays, vultures, prairie royal ascot falcons, rainbows, dust devils, and some amazingly friendly and informative people royal ascot who weren’t quite sure why I’d be writing about their state, but were happy to see us, anyway.
(except Ruth, of Ruth’s Antiques. Ruth not only thought it was amazing I was a writer [she asked if she could touch me, I've never had anyone do that with a straight face] but she was also a fantasy reader!)
You go down a long, long, dirt government road to get to Monument Rocks, and when you’re there, it’s so quiet all you can hear is your heart beat. And the cows lowing. It’s this utter sense of being Alone. And that is going into the book.
The people in Kansas, as I said above, were wonderful. But the title of this report comes from something we heard many times during this leg of the trip, when very nice, otherwise friendly people in motels, restaurants, and stores across the state took one look at us and asked, in varying tones of confusion: “what are you doing here?” royal ascot
Yeah, Kansas is a red state, and clearly aging-out. And yeah, we heard some casually bigoted things being said that made us cringe. But overall, everyone we met was amazing (except the alpha male road construction worker who seemed upset that two chicks had a muscle car and he only had a ‘stop’ sign. Sorry about your ego, dude). And everyone we met seemed was happy to trot out any bit of information or suggestion they thought might help.
And so every night I did a full brain-dump (and camera-dump) into my notebook, ways to rework or revise scenes tumbling onto the page almost faster than I could compose. Was the landscape the same as it was in 1803? Nope. Too many non-native species have been introduced, and even the wildlife preserves are ‘managed’ and therefore not entirely accurate. But having the feel of the ground under my feet (and on my hands), the smell of the air in my nose, and the feel of a space unconstrained by buildings or people? Priceless.
About Laura Anne Gilman Laura Anne Gilman is a former book editor who went to the dark side of full-time writing in 2003. A Nebula royal ascot Award nominee for FLESH AND FIRE, she recently returned to the urban fantasy world of the Cosa Nostradamus with the magical mysteries MILES TO GO and PROMISES TO KEEP. Laura Anne also writes the Gin & Tonic mysteries under the name L A Kornetsky, with DOGHOUSE coming from S&S in July 2014. Wearing her editorial hat, she wrote Practical Meerkat s 52 Bits of Useful Info for the Young (and Old) Writer, available through the Book View Café Ebookstore.
If you have the time, go to the Tall Grass Prairie Preserve. There is a small section of the preserve in Kansas and quite a lot more in Oklahoma where it is the largest remaining tract of prairie with a herd of bison that are “lightly handled”. They are only rounded up once a year and are otherwise royal ascot left to their own devices. This will give you a true feel for the prairie.
We considered royal ascot the Tall Grass Preserve, and also more seriously the Cimmaron National Grassland