Wednesday was an ordinary day down on the banks of the Ohio in southeastern Indiana. The sky over Madison was a brilliant cyan punctuated with puffs of cloud. A gentle breeze carried the fragrance of southern magnolias down the historic streets, through secluded courtyards, and around early nineteenth-century homes.
It would have been a perfect day to stay home and clean the bathroom, catch up on the laundry, brush up on my transformational grammar, and dust doodads, indeed, but I felt compelled to leave all that behind. After all, I'm a hard-working writer with research begging to be done. So I collected a couple companions and we headed off for the river town to visit the library, locate a good site for a second-hand bookstore for the aunt of my protagonist, get a feel for the neighborhood, and take some reference photos.
Enjoy some of the photos that will hopefully enrich the sense of "place" in The Second Cellar, my middle-grade historical fantasy in progress. (If you've followed this blog for long, you've already seen several reference photos for both of my manuscripts.)
I selected this cream brick home across from the library to be the site of the used-book store.
Kristi Rice, Photographer
