<em>The story of the writing of </em>Semana Santa<em> continued</em>

So I'm going to write a book, secretly, at home in England. It's going to be set in Spain but I can't afford to go back there and do proper research. Simple: make it up. Holy Week happens all over Spain. Seville just happens to be the most famous. Make it in an unknown, unnamed city and take it from there.

Seems sensible? But oh no...

The problem, as ever, is readers. They don't just swallow what you tell them. They invent something of their own as they're reading and consume that too. Most readers had no knowledge of Spain (<em>Semana Santa</em> was a stupid title for this reason -- so many people can't pronounce it let alone know what it means). To them a story set in Holy Week was a story set in Seville in spite of these clues to the opposite liberally scattered through the text of the book...

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<ul>
	<li>A line saying that someone had arrived in the city <em>via the road from Seville</em></li>
	<li>Names for the various <em>barrios</em> of the fictional city that were nothing like those of the real place</li>
	<li>A geographical description that cannot possibly be applied to Seville (and was actually a mix of Cordoba, Seville, Granada, Cadiz and... Durham)</li>
</ul>
There's more but I won't bore you with it. None of that stuff mattered. People believed the book was set in Seville. When it came out in Spanish the edition even had a note from the publishers -- of which I knew nothing until it appeared -- saying that they knew the description of Seville contained 'errors' but they thought it a great book anyway!

Then along came the movie people who just <em>knew</em> it was Seville and I gave up.

I'll be hunkering down for the rewrite later this week. There will be substantial changes to the story, which I hope to make darker and scarier than the original (though that was pretty dark and scary). One of the ways I will be doing this will be by bowing to public opinion and setting the damned thing in... Seville. Real places for lots of the story, real history, real culture. With some made-up characters and culture too because <em>this is fiction after all.</em>

Does location matter? Obviously. But not in the way I must have imagined when I first wrote this book sixteen years ago. The fictional city I invented had a kind of reality for readers that seemingly grabbed their imagination. The book did very well and was a WH Smith Fresh Talent winner for a best debut novel. But what I seem to have tapped into was something as much in the readers' heads as in my own. Their image of a place they knew as Seville, even if they'd never set foot there.

In short something that's unreal can be more real than real if it hits the right nerve. And whether it's actually real or not may or may not matter. Clear to you?

No, me neither. From now on I'm going to keep things simple: set adult fairy tales in real locations. If a place is fictional it seems to me it must be made to be clearly fictional, not like somewhere real, somewhere that may intrude into the reader's mind and swallow your invented city whole. Which is what Seville did to me with <em>Semana Santa.</em>

No complaints mind. And I'm hoping this reimagined book will be bigger and better than the original.