Y’all, I’m not a man-hater. Truly, I’m not. But, as people discover and read Mermaid of Venice, I do expect a lot of questions about why many of Gia’s victims are named after my ex-boyfriends.

Revenge? Maybe.

A more accurate explanation would be that I’m infusing a lot of people and places into my the world I’m crafting and its storylines. I won’t give away spoilers, but I will tell you that the barber shop featured in the book is based on Jeff’s Barber Shop in Carrollton, Georgia, where my brother got his very first haircut––and where my father received a shave and a trim about every two weeks (except for the time that my father and Jeff got into an argument over some trashy piece of gossip, and my dad had to slip over to Little Jem’s Barber Shop until they made up). Jeff’s place was covered, floor to ceiling, in coke memorabilia. Flying from a fan, attached to some fishing wire, was a prop-engine plane made of coke cans. He assembled a wall of bottles featuring labels in French, Arabic, Spanish… clients brought him bottles from their trips all over the world. I believe my father bought him a bottle in Costa Rica. Old Jeff never took vacations and never traveled, so his shop was his fantasy escape, a sip of what he considered to be sophistication.

Neil Gaiman, one of my favorite writers––if not the favorite––always talks about taking places you know and twisting them. He set The Ocean at the End of the Lane (I could honestly cry thinking about how much I love that book) in his childhood home. In the rare moments when I’m not writing the Mermaid of Venice Series, of which I’m currently working on Book 2, or marketing the current book, I tinker with another story, an embellished family saga/ghost story based on my very own family and its generations of closet skeletons. There’s plenty of borrowed history in that book.

This is a short post, a bit of a teaser, to address the concept of what is real versus what is make-believe. Let me assure you, Gia is entirely fiction.

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