Today I am welcoming my good friend, the wonderful author Paula Martin. Many readers, including myself, have loved her Mist Na Mara series set in beautiful Connemara. If you haven't read these yet, I highly recommend them.
Setting my novels in
Ireland
I prefer to set my novels in places I know, or at least have
visited, and as I’ve done quite a lot of travelling, I have a wide choice of
possible locations. In a sense, however, I don’t actually ‘choose’ because as
soon as I start thinking about a story, it seems to decide its own setting.
That was certainly the case with ‘Irish Inheritance’. Although my original idea grew from an article
about a Paris apartment which had been abandoned over 70 years ago, I knew my
story would be set in Ireland, not in Paris. I even had the first few sentences
in my mind:
“A house in Ireland?” Jenna Sutton stared
over the mahogany desk at the lawyer. “Someone I’ve never heard of has left me
a house in Ireland?”
I then had to make a
decision about exactly where in Ireland this house was going to be, but that
was fairly easy to decide, as the part of Ireland I know and love most is the
west coast – especially the counties of Galway, Clare, and Mayo.
 |
| Connemara |
 |
| Clifden Bay |
I deliberately
kept the exact location of the house fairly vague, apart from saying it was a couple
of miles from the small town of Clifden in Connemara, the western part of
County Galway.
Even though I knew there were no large Victorian houses in the specific
area I was actually imagining, I used artistic licence to locate ‘my’ house
overlooking Clifden Bay.
 |
| Killiney Bay, near Dalkey |
When Jenna and Guy,
my hero and heroine, take a trip across Ireland to the east coast, I was able
to draw on my own similar trips, and so they visited some of the places I’ve
visited, such the remains of the medieval Glendalough monastery, the wild area
of the Wicklow Mountains, and the small town of Dalkey.
 |
| 'Skelleen' |
For ‘
Irish Intrigue’, the first spin-off
story from ‘Irish Inheritance’, I needed a small village not far from Clifden,
and so I ‘invented’ a village and named it Skelleen. When one of my readers
said she had studied a map but couldn’t find Skelleen, I had to admit that I’d actually
amalgamated two different villages by ‘moving’ one from County Mayo and linking
it to another in Connemara! Artistic licence again.
 |
| Clifden |
I used my own photos
of various Irish locations to help me set the scenes, and Google’s ‘Street
View’ was a godsend for refreshing my memory of many places. In fact, by the
time I visited Clifden again while I was writing the fourth book in the series,
I’d ‘driven’ around the town so many times with Street View that I knew the
place like the back of my hand.
I did, however, take
my friend on a ‘special excursion’ to a retail park in Galway, simply because I
wanted to see where one of my characters would need to park his car to watch
for someone leaving the cinema! Fortunately, she’s a fan of my Irish books so
she didn’t mind.
Knowing my setting
allows me to see places in my mind while I am writing and, hopefully, that
helps my readers experience these places, too – just like one of the first
reviewers of ‘Irish Inheritance’ who wrote, “I felt that I was there with them.”
Bio:
Paula Martin lives near
Manchester in North West England and has two daughters and two grandsons.
She had some early publishing
success with four romance novels and several short stories, but then had a
break from writing while she brought up a young family and also pursued her
career as a history teacher for twenty-five years. She has recently returned to
writing fiction, after retiring from teaching, and is thrilled to have found
publishing success again with her contemporary romances.
Apart from writing, she
enjoys visiting new places. She has travelled extensively in Britain and
Ireland, mainland Europe, the Middle East, America and Canada. Her other
interests include musical theatre and tracing her family history.
