map – Jennifer Hallock

The Writer’s Toolbox: Setting Development

In another post, I showed you amazing free sites online that can help with character development. For some books, though, the physical environment is a character itself, and it needs to be developed just as thoroughly—but differently.

Here are some tools for where (and when) your story might take place:

On my character development page, I talk about the usefulness of Timeanddate.com for moon phases, but—oh my—move over T&D because there’s a new web technology in the house, and it’s awesome, in the traditional grand scope of that word. Meet the Stellarium online star map.

First, choose your setting: click on the left corner rectangle that probably starts with “unknown” or maybe your current location. You can add in an address, or even just a city, and move the pointer exactly where you want it. Below is the location for my fictional San Honorato chapel.

Then choose your date and time with the controls that pop out of the bottom right corner. The slider shows you how the sky changes over the course of the evening.

And then, wow. You’re there. Just like your characters. Amazing! You can ask the program to draw constellations for you, to represent them artistically, or even to take the ground away altogether.

I have just barely scratched the surface, and no doubt there are many other amazing features. For example, if you want to take this outside to use for your night sky, choose the night view button that makes the screen red and black to help your eyes stay adjusted and avoid light pollution for gazing. Go play.

Tides4Fishing will give you detailed information on the rising and setting of the sun, solunar activity, moon phase, and astronomical observation data. However, it is best used for tidal data like the name suggests. How many beach-set books forget to talk about high tide or low tide? Yet it is the first thing you notice when you are actually on a beach because it determines how much sand you have right in front of you.

This site only has historical data back a few years, but I find that if you generally get the right time of year and the right moon phase, it works well enough.

I have found no better weather site than WeatherSpark.com—not for your immediate forecast, but for average historical data? You bet. (You can also check out the Farmer’s Almanac website here.)

The diagram above has a little of everything they offer: from clouds in the sky to precipitation, humidity, temperature, and “beach/pool score” (defined as the number of “clear, rainless days with perceived temperatures between 75°F and 90°F”). Honestly, it is also useful for vacation planning.

Have you ever thought to yourself, “How likely would it precipitate on such-and-such a date?” Now you can snow in your couple at a lovely cabin in Aspen over Thanksgiving, assured that this plot device is totally plausible. I love forced proximity romances, by the way, so gimme.

If you are in the United States or its territories (or former territories), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration allows you to search historic weather data. Great stuff! There is also a Climate.gov database.

For those outside the United States, there are some excellent sites to consider.

For those writing in the UK, climate policy and history writer Kate Zerrenner suggests the following two amazing sites. They share data sources, but are arranged a little differently. First there is Weatherweb.net & Martin Rowley’s “Weather in History” which is organized by many increments, making it easily navigable. The Isles Project uses Rowley and other historical sources on weather to put everything in one place. It only has four date indices: (1) 11,000 BCE to 1099 CE; (2) 1100 to 1598; (3) 1600 to 1849; and (4) 1850 to 2007 (July). [I suppose nothing happened in 1599?]

A resource I have used a lot for my books in the Philippines is the Selga Chronology on typhoons. It has two pages: (1) 1348 to 1900; and (2) 1901-1934.

Most other “historical” weather sites reach back only to the 1970s, but if you have found some that dig deeper, please contact me on social media or via email and let me know. I will add them here!

Everyone uses Google Maps, and so do I. But for authorly things I often prefer Mapcarta. This free service uses OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia, but this is one of the clearest topographic maps I have found, especially as the topography can be laid directly over a street map.

mapcarta-topography-detail — A slice of the mountain ridge east of Bais, shown in topographic detail from Mapcarta. This is where Andres heads up to barangay chapels to offer mass and hear confessions.

Or . . . what if you do not know exactly where you want to locate your story? You need someone to lay photos over the map, like VH1s old Pop-Up Video, so you can choose a location. Mapcarta has done exactly that but (sadly?) without the 80s music. As you linger over one of the circles, the site will enlarge it and even give you a big close-up.

location-map-photos-mapcarta — Here is a Mapcarta photo slice of Lebanon, where I used to live, extending into Syria, which was one of my favorite places to travel. Yeah, it’s too bad.

Mr. H found this one for me called Orbis: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World. I will use it more in my teaching than my writing, but it may be useful to you. If you write in ancient Rome, this allows you to calculate journey times and costs of travel. That’s wicked cool.

Making up a place? We can reuse a source mentioned in the character tools section, only this time it will help us create town names! And it is not the only one available. Check out this one for fantasy, which even has a Southeast Asian town generator, along with other geographical regions. Or this one from ChaoticShiny. And use this one for real (but lesser-known) places around the globe. Use them appropriately, remembering that if you use a real place (Google it!) then you need to do the work to represent it accurately.

Don’t forget the obvious. YouTube is owned by Google, which is why I recommend using the Google Video search bar. This gives you more tools to limit your results, though beware that date refers to date uploaded. I searched “New York 1900” and look what I found:

Another quick tip: use social media like Instagram and Facebook to search places for user photos too!

For historical authors, detailed maps of how cities used to look are essential. For example, Locating London’s Past, with GIS-compliant data-rich maps is a great resource for those setting their book there. For other cities, a specific Google search may be your first stop. Your second stop? Your target city’s library and any digital map collections they might have.

But where next? Try the University of Texas at Austin’s Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection. They have maps from all over the world, on topics from population to transportation to history. You can start by browsing their curated collections:

Or you can search for a particular country and look at everything they have. This is the current collection of historical maps on the Philippines:

Most of these maps are government publications, which means they were never in copyright and can be used in commercial publications.

If you want privately published maps—many of which are out of copyright and may be downloaded in high-resolution files—check out David Rumsey‘s collection. Most of the downloads are free, but you can purchase prints, even framed prints, directly from the site. With maps like this one from Time, I can see the appeal.

There are also maps that function more like posters, like this one from the Gay Freedom San Francisco movement in 1980:

I found excellent historical maps of Boston in this collection, and I used these to help construct the backstory of my first heroine, Georgina Potter. I knew her address before the story began, though it never once came up in the book itself. Does anyone else go a little too deep into their characters’ backstories, even if just in their heads? Okay, maybe it’s just me.

And if you are not writing historicals? What about science fiction. This site has interactive planetary maps, too, like this one of Venus.

What if you don’t want to use a map but make a map? Stamen is a “data visualization and cartography design studio” that has worked for pretty much every major museum and Fortune 500 company. For the rest of us, they have made some great tools for downloading open-source maps for our own illustrations. First, choose among many different options, three of which you can see below:

Then, enter the place you want—and, yes, it has to be a real place. This is Columbus, Ohio, my own hometown, and the origin of my next heroine, Dr. Elizabeth Shepherd.

Click on <image> and you are given options for downloading a portion of the map. Check out the watercolor base for my Sugar Sun series map of Bais:

Amazing, right? It’s actually even prettier in the download.

Another amazing map resource that pulls from open source data is City Roads. Better still, you can download maps from this site as .svg files to reformat and reuse in your own illustrations.

Do you want to disappear down a museum rabbit hole? Google’s got that. They have digitized collections from over 100 global museums and cultural sites, particularly useful for the budget (or pandemic) constrained.

While nothing here can be downloaded, obviously screen grabs work pretty well.

I particularly appreciate Google’s work with non-profit and academic institutions to bring ancient sites to life. I plan to use these in my teaching.

And, of course, they have both world wars pretty much covered:

I have just scratched the surface here. Go lose yourself.

One of the most important aspects of setting is what flowers you smell or what animals you see crossing the road. Whether flora or fauna, the GBIF database is incredibly powerful. If you know the species name of what you want, this site will show you where and when it has been sampled or observed. It will also give you a lot of data that I cannot really explain what to do with, but maybe you will figure it out. (The lack of science in my post-secondary education is obvious.)

Global-Biodiversity-Information-Facility — Dolphin populations in the Philippines from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.

In order to find the record of any particular specimen, you cannot just click on the dot, which is not the greatest user interface. But if you use the limit tool underneath the zoom out button, you can find the information you want.

If you are just looking for plants, Plants of the World Online is another excellent metasearch engine.

Because my character Liddy is a fern fanatic, I have been using a few fern sites, like Ferns and Lycophytes of the World and the Pteridophyte Collections Consortium. But the first site above, GBIF, is a one-stop-shop, and I wish I had found it earlier.

There is one other important type of map, and there is only one person making them: sensory maps. You got it: what does your scene smell like?

You can read more about artist Kate McLean and her project on Atlas Obscura. If you want the maps themselves, you have to go to her own website, SensoryMaps.com. There you can find illustrations that ask questions like, “What did ancient Rome smell like?”

Smell is the sense too often forgotten in writing. See if Kate McLean can help you fix that.

Thank you for checking out this blog post. I hope the tools I have found are helpful to you, and feel free to contact me if you have other suggestions. Thank you for visiting!

Sugar Sun series location #11: Manila Port

Have you heard romantic stories of evenings strolling on the Luneta, once upon a time? Or racing along the Malecón? Did you wonder where these entertainments took place? Maybe all you know is the enormous port that eats up Manila’s shoreline. If you look at the 1902 map above, though, you will see that port is not there. Not yet.

North shore of the Pasig River. Photograph in the public domain and archived with the University of Michigan, Philippine Photographs Digital Archive.

Before 1908, a visitor’s steamship would anchor two miles offshore in the rough seas of Manila Bay. The passenger would transfer to a lighter, known as a casco, and ride with their luggage into the city this way:

[Della’s boat] pulled past a large fort flying the American flag and headed into the mouth of the Pasig, a river as wide as the Potomac but ten times as crowded. Bossy American steamers, lighters heavy with food and livestock, outrigger fishing boats, and single-man canoes fought upstream for a space at the north-side dock. Her boat won a place and tied up in front of a huge warehouse marked Produce Depot.

— Hotel Oriente

This original port was on the north shore of the Pasig: in front of the San Nicolas fire station and across the river from Fort Santiago. The Yankees did not like this lighter system, though, because they thought it was dangerous and inefficient. Something had to be done, they said. Hence, one of the first major infrastructure projects of the new century was born. (The other from this time was the Benguet Road to Baguio.)

Between 1903 and 1908, the Americans would add 200 acres to the shoreline through land reclamation. The breakwater was expanded, and numbered piers lined the bay.

It was supposed to cost $2.15 million, and certainly no more than $3 million, but—as with all infrastructure boondoggles—it ran to $4 million before the construction was over. (That is $108.4 million in 2016 dollars.) Compared to Boston’s $24.3 billion for the Big Dig (a highway and tunnel project), you still might say that Manila port was a bargain. But before you believe this an example of American largesse, remember that all expenses of the Philippine Commission were paid from local tax revenues.

Moreover, the real cost would be paid by the Filipino families who used to enjoy a safe, leisurely promenade on the beach. At what expense, progress?

(This post was originally published on the outstanding website, Filipinas Nostalgia, where I will be a guest contributor. Photographs from the Philippine Photographs Digital Archive at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor.)

Sugar Sun series location #5: Hotel Oriente

In Hotel Oriente the establishment itself is a character—but decidedly not a romantic one. The American guests cannot figure out how to sleep in the beds, the manager runs out of eggs at breakfast, and water pours down the walls when an upstairs couple gets too frisky in the bathtub. I embellished, but I was not that far off the mark: the first two happened at the real Hotel Oriente in the Escolta area of Manila, and the last one took place at the Army hotel my father-in-law managed during the Vietnam War.

US Library of Congress photo of the Insular Cigar Factory (foreground) and the Hotel Oriente (background) on the Plaza Calderon de la Barca. Public domain image scanned and uploaded by Scott Slaten.

When the real Oriente opened its doors in 1889, it was the place to be. José Rizal himself stayed in Room 22, facing Binondo Church. Even the food was good. According to a contemporary journalist, a 21-year old woman from Maine: “Its chicken, chile peppers, and rice are a revelation…[and] it dispenses a curry equal to the finest productions of Bombay or Calcutta.” (Are you thinking, “What does a 19th century Mainer know about curry?” Me, too.)

The 83 rooms were always the hotel’s best feature. Another American account said: “I expected to find a regular hole, but really I have a nice large room, hard wood floor, electric lights, etc, etc. The bathrooms are all tiled, sanitary plumbing, fine large court, [and] tropical plants.” By the way, those plants entangle both Georgina and Della in their turn.

The Hotel Oriente rooms as photographed for a contemporary travelogue. Read more about the Oriente’s history at Lou Gopal’s fantastic website.

Of course, if you are getting the picture that Americans were difficult to please, you are right. Moreover, they never recognized their own provinciality. They especially had trouble with the mattress-less bed. The perforated cane bottom allowed the contraption to breathe, logically trading coolness for softness, but one guest had so much trouble figuring the thing out that he slept in the wicker chair by the window instead.

Still, the Americans thought that they improved every place they went, and the Oriente was no different:

What an establishment! How shiftless and dirty, and how it smells! The building itself is well enough, being large and airy, but it is conducted on the Spanish plan of dirt and sloth, by a manager whose watchword has evidently been mañana for all the years of his life. Now, he is forced to deal with a people who insist that all things be done, completed, finished, the day before yesterday. The result to his dead brain is almost insanity. He looks at us in a dazed manner and moans out that he has no rooms, muttering constantly the one all-expressive word: Americanos, Americanos.

I might have been muttering the same thing, too, and I am an Americano. While the Yankees had only been in the imperialism biz a few years, they had already adopted all the ennui and petulance of experienced Great Gamers.

An advertisement from the 1901 Commercial Directory of Manila and a close up of an 1898 map of Manila and suburbs.

One Minnesotan did try to whip the hotel into shape: West Smith, a volunteer who had fought the Spanish in the Battle of Manila in August 1898. He took over the Oriente in late 1902 and continued to manage it until it was transformed into the Philippine Constabulary headquarters in 1904. After that he worked for The Great Eastern Life Assurance Company. He met his wife, Stella Margaret Case, in Manila while she was visiting her sister, a stenographer for the Insular Ice Plant. If you see similarities in names here—Moss North from West Smith, and Della from Stella—you would not be wrong. It’s how I do.

And, speaking of names, the hotel itself had many. Hotel de Oriente was the name plastered across the exterior molding, but all of the following were used: Hotel d’Oriente, Hotel el Oriente, Hotel Oriente, Hotel Orient, and then every single one of these in reverse order. I keep with the American tradition by using two names interchangeably as if I don’t know the difference. Ignorance is bliss, right?

Menu excerpts from the Hotel Oriente, 1900-1902. The top three are each relevant to a different scene from either *Hotel Oriente* or *Under the Sugar Sun*.

Sugar Sun series map(s) #2: The Visayas

Sugar-Sun-series-Philippines-Visayas-map — Most of the Sugar Sun series takes place in the Visayan Islands in the central and southern Philippines.

While most of the action in Hotel Oriente takes place in Manila itself; and Tempting Hymn is centered in Dumaguete; Under the Sugar Sun and Sugar Moon bounce around: from Manila to Dumaguete to Bais to Cebu to Catbalogan…and a little more. (What bang for your buck! What punch for your peso!) With new books in the series, there will be even more locations to explore. Still, this should help you set your itinerary for now. Enjoy!

Maybe I should get a kickback from Negros tourism? I’ll take my pay in bodbod, tsokolate, and rum, please.

Sugar Sun series map #1: Manila 1902

Explore Manila in 1901-1902 through my books, Hotel Oriente, Under the Sugar Sun, and Tempting Hymn. Note that the shoreline looked quite different back before the land reclamation and port expansion that ran from the side of Intramuros all the way down to Malate.