New Hampshire will always have a special place in my heart. When I was a girl, my grandfather owned a cabin near Lake Chocorua, and we usually spent a few days there each time our family traveled to New England to visit our relatives. I even hiked to the top of Mt. Washington back in the 1970’s.

During an October in the early 1990’s, I took my mother back there to see the “fall colors” and visit familiar sights. Driving through the region as an adult was a very different experience than seeing it as a child. When you’re a kid, you just want to play with your cousins and splash around in the lake; as an adult you can actually enjoy and appreciate the remarkable scenery.

Not surprisingly, the trees were the “stars of the show” during the trip. The fall countryside was as beautiful as all those guidebooks claim. (One of my favorite tree pictures is included on the “fun photos” page of our website. It was taken in Maine, not New Hampshire, so I did not use it in this post.)

The trees were also my writing inspiration for today’s blog. When you grow up in Southern California, there are not a lot of forests, except in the mountains. As a general rule, if you climb a hilltop, you can see for miles. Even when you are driving out in the backcountry, you can easily tell when you approach a town.

New Hampshire was an entirely different experience. You could be driving through what appeared to be a thick forest and then suddenly, like magic, a town would appear. After going through the town, the road would head back into the woods. Then a few miles later, the trees would give way to another town. It felt as if I was driving through an enchanted forest where things kept materializing out of nowhere.

While I can’t pinpoint a specific scene in a book based on that “enchanted forest” experience, it has undoubtedly influenced some of the forest scene in my writing. As a fantasy novelist, I always appreciate the places where one can find “magic” in the real world.

As I started scanning pictures from my photo album for today’s blog post, I recalled another thing in New Hampshire’s White Mountain region that inspired my writing. In fact, it directly influenced a scene in the current manuscript that John and I are writing. That location, however, is a story best left for another day. Several different places influenced that scene, most of which had nothing to do with New Hampshire, so it deserves its own blog post. (For now, I’ll just leave the location a mystery — consider it a preview of coming attractions.)

Talk to you next Friday!

-Susan 12/17/2021