Places you've made up

Oops! Og got it wrong!

oggbashan said:

Apart from Sci-Fi world building, and I've done several of those, my first creation (for The Bridesmaids' Revenge) was the town of Silverbridge for my stories about the Ladies football team The Silver Vixens. The town of Silverbridge and the town of the Vixens' rival team Hogstock are based on Thomas Hardy's Wessex. Silverbridge and Hogglestock were his names for real Wessex towns. An editor of Hardy's works provided a useful map in a preface showing the correlation between many of Hardy's place names and real locations.

I have visited and walked around the real "Silverbridge" but I have made it about twice the size of the real town.

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49greg said:

I love the map, I only heard of Barchester from Anthony Trollope's stories? I didn't know if Barchester is a real place or fictional. It gives me the idea of mapping the towns and countryside for my stories that take place in my fictional places. After all, forty six years ago I took a class in cartography.

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Of course Barsetshire is Trollope's creation, NOT Hardy's!

Some people have identified Barchester as Salisbury, but it and the whole county of Barsetshire are Trollope's invention.

My series "A Very Private Beach" features a sex-friendly nude beach near Fort Bragg, California. I still get requests to disclose its location, even though it never existed except inside my head.

And I made up a chain of sex-friendly resorts called New Arcadia for a series that was published on another site, since it didn't meet the guidelines for this one. But that's about it for made-up places.

Then there's the Masturbatorium, a happy-endings massage parlor, but I don't know if that counts as a place.

My Elizabeth series mostly takes place in not only a fictional place but a fictional time. Westfordshire City is probably somewhere in England or possibly Scotland, but this is never quite spelled out. It's a fairly idyllic small city, in any event, and sounds like it was a very nice place to visit when the bulk of the stories take place. In the as-yet-unfinished series finale, we learn it went to seed at mid-century but has since undergone urban renewal and has a tourist-trappy downtown like most of the capitals of Europe have nowadays.

What's more intriguing to me is just when these stories happened. They seem to take place in a parallel universe in which the sexual revolution took place about 75 years before our world: despite the late Victorian surroundings, the women are unapologetically sexually active and are mostly judged none the worse for it, and evidently birth control already existed then. There was at least one great world war in their world, but it's unclear whether there was a second.

Somewhere Beyond the Lighthouse takes place in Sauraquid, an island somewhere near Nantucket, which has a magical island off its coast. I'd certainly love to visit Sauraquid if I could get past the ladies of the island, but that's a big if!

Most of my other stories take place in unidentified cities and towns that could be anywhere. I mostly prefer it that way; it lets the readers imagine whatever they like of the surroundings.

I've created a restaurant in Birmingham, England, called 'The Guilded Lily'. Also created a rock band called 'The Twisted Ravens' and another called 'Dickie Hart & The Cardiacs. Recently added a warehouse on the Birmingham Main Line Canal called 'Blake's Wharf'.

Oh, and the stories are posted as 'The Guilded Lily' currently chapters 1-10.