I’m writing this blog from South Dakota, where we’re currently in the early research stages of two new WIP’s set in the tall grass prairie. I love this stage of the work. Even before we’ve developed character sketches and plot outlines, we talk over the places we’d like to set our next works and share what draws us to them. We like to ground our work in its geography, so we get to know our setting intimately and deeply. We’ve never set a work in a place we haven’t been.

Prairie speaks to me. I can hardly find words for the visceral response I felt when we crossed into South Dakota last week and I saw the tall tipi skeleton that decorates each Dakota rest area -- but I’ll have to try. Our job will be to set that feeling on the page in a character’s body, to pull that feeling into the reader’s direct experience.

Our recent Extasy release The Diary is no different, though it’s far from the windswept prairie. We’ve lived in Chicago and we love its blustery personality and pace. We gave our art-curator heroine a north suburban home and handed her a Professor of English at a downtown college as her erstwhile hero. But we knew they’d have to travel, and our bedroom farce based on mistaken identities took on a Comedy of Errors flavor as it unfolded, so what better place to send them than to the Bard’s back yard? We added internet information to our memories of Stratford Upon Avon, and set the story’s pivotal moment at a secluded rental cottage just after -- oh, but if I tell you just after what, I’ll give away too much of the plot!

So let me return to Dakota. At this season the grasses and wildflowers that make up the tall grass prairie are going dormant; colors are subdued and the seven foot tall stems and grains are flattening in the incessant wind, lying down for winter’s onslaught. One of our stories has its roots in that deep winter, and we will work hard to pour our experience into the setting and the blood and bones of the characters as they live out their story.

I’m eager for comments. More information about who we are and what we’re writing is at our website, and I’d love to answer questions here, too, once we’re done driving for the day.

Adriana Kraft