How I decided where to put my fictional high school and where the adventures of Jake Fisher and his friends would take place.
HUNTER’S RUN HIGH SCHOOL— Obviously not a real place–in fact, at the time of this blog, there are no high schools in Emmitsburg at all… but I definitely had some schools in mind when writing about it. Century and Winters Mill High Schools in Carroll County, Maryland are twins. They share about 90-95% of the same architecture–and though smaller places within them have their own unique touches and colorations, it was the blueprint of those two schools (in which I have spent a lot of my real life working time) that I began with in my head. When I describe locations (in both currently published books–and also now in Book 3–“First Months After”), it is Winters Mill that I am describing for the most part.
Why Emmitsburg?
EMMITSBURG, MARYLAND is a small town just north of Carroll County, where I reside. It’s just over the county line into Frederick County, and is surrounded by farmland, creeks and rivers, and the beautiful Catoctin Mountains. It is the home of the Shrine of Elizabeth Seton, the Grotto of Lourdes, and Mount St. Mary’s University–all of which are some of the most sacred and beautiful places you’re ever likely to set foot in. I visit there all the time when I need to get away and reflect. The town itself has the kind of architecture and “main street layout” that you see in many small Pennsylvania towns–and in those border counties, the “PA influence” can be seen for miles. The Emmitsburg of The Cataclysm Series, however, is totally of my own making. The fictional Church of Many Blessings and its proximity to Hunter’s Run High School are handy for my plot–but don’t look for either when you go to Emmitsburg. You also won’t find a Wal-Mart there, either–but I needed one for the plot as well. You have to travel a good twenty minutes in any direction to find one.
MT. ST. MICHEAL’S UNIVERSITY— Let’s not kid ourselves–with such an influential, gorgeous place like the real-life Mt. St. Mary’s, I couldn’t leave out a college in the town, so I created a fictional one to take its place, not wishing to offend the real school with anything plot or theme-related in my stories. You can’t go to a college town for your novel and omit the college–so I morphed one into another for fictitious purposes.
FORT DETRICK— Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland is a real place that actually focuses on the same types of things I put in my book. Other than that, however, I didn’t want to spend much time in a government institution for Book 1, First Days After. It’s a place that would undertake the study of biochemical weapons defense, the kind of place that both the real and the fictitious Colonels would work. It is also a major employer and phenomenon in the city of Frederick.
LEXINGTON, VIRGINIA— Lexington is the town I lived in for five years while studying for my Bachelor’s Degree and my teaching certification. As an alumnus of Washington & Lee University, I spend a good bit of time at both W&L and Virginia Military Institute, (VMI) literally next door. Both wrestling teams would work out together, and I got to know coaches and athletes well there over the years. Both schools are fantastic and historically significant institutions, and Lexington remains one of my favorite places in the whole world–I just couldn’t leave it out of a book that I wrote. Virginia Tech–where Jake’s youngest son attends on a wrestling scholarship, is a place where I took my high school wrestling team to camp back in 2016. It’s also gorgeous–“big school gorgeous”–in ways that VMI and W&L are “small school gorgeous.”
FRONT ROYAL, VIRGINIA— another of my favorite towns. I used to stop in there on my way home from school from time to time, and where I took my family a number of times on day and weekend trips around Skyline Drive and Luray Caverns. Front Royal would be an awesome place to have settled down had I lived in Virginia. It truly has it all from traditional rural attractions to burgeoning development as a small city. I needed a place on the way to Washington, DC from southwestern Virginia in order to create the setting behind my post-Apocalyptic, convict-led town. For those scenes, I was thinking a little in my Mad Max mentality. I wanted a place where lawlessness ruled, and the real danger to post-Apocalyptic thinking could germinate and take hold of the imagination. It is there, ironically, in First Days After, that the last shred of decency in one of the convicts–Nick–is exploited and used by the Colonel, who recognizes his own influence on the young man, and talks him into considering a coup d’état to overthrow the tyrannical and diabolical leader, Lawrence.
THE ANACOSTIA RIVER, THE PENTAGON, AND THE NATIONAL MALL
The areas along the Anacostia, featured in Book 2, First Weeks After, are again of my personal preference, and ones that–in my personal opinion–are undervalued. I have been to the National Arboretum many times, and loved it with each visit. I always wondered why the place wasn’t mobbed with people, its beauty so evident to me. I think perhaps it needs a publicist–but then, massive crowds might mar the beauty of its gardens, paths, and creations. As for the Bladensburg Waterfront–I have never been there. I needed a place for Jake to grab boats to make it into Washington DC proper, and a quick check on Google Maps did the trick. From there I backtracked to potential stables outside the DC Beltway, and created one in Glenmont near the real-life Wheaton Stables, which I have also never visited. Google provided both of those places for me. Like Jake, I needed to plot a path from outside the beltway to the National Mall, and the on-line maps helped me create that path. The National Mall is a place that probably millions have seen over the years, and I thought it would just be a really, really cool place to chase down some mutates. The monuments and buildings there are so well-known and iconic, I thought they might really fire up the imagination of the readers. The Pentagon is well-known too–though I have never been there. My research on it, along with Google Images and Maps, allowed me to put just enough there to make it realistic–and the real life Colonels tales of CBRNE’s abilities filled in the rest.
HORSES AND BOATS— Growing up in the country on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, I spend the bulk my youth on the back of a horse or in the hull of a boat. We had what my dad called a “Gentleman’s Farm,” which, by most accounts, would equate to what we now call a “homestead” today–albeit one with running water and electricity. We had, at our peak, eight horses, three beef cattle, five goats, four geese, and a hundred chickens–not to mention a vegetable garden that was well over an acre in size by itself. We had two ponds and waterfront on the Chesapeake Bay’s inlet of Cummings Creek. We hunted, fished, crabbed, gathered oysters, farmed, and planted. It was a lifestyle that I’m now thankful I got to experience as a kid–though admittedly, that kid didn’t like having to shovel all that manure quite so often. I’d love to devote one of the books to the Eastern Shore one day. It’s like no other place on Earth, in some ways a land forgotten and a lifestyle that is dwindling and endangered. At any rate, it was that background that pushed me to put horses and boats in First Weeks After. Those two methods of slipping past barricades would immediately appeal to me–so I had them appeal to Jake Fisher as well.
Writing with Jay Vielle 