[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="447" caption="Back street near Rialto - click to go to Flickr gallery"]<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/hewsons/sets/72157623122797633/" target="_blank"><img src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/rimg0020.jpg" alt="RIMG0020.JPG" width="447" height="336" /></a>[/caption]

Setting a book in Venice raises challenges an author will meet nowhere else in the world. You can't -- unless you're James Bond -- pretend this is the place for action. No cars, not even bikes, but boats, and in real life they are severely restricted on speed. In Venice everything happens slowly which forces you to generate pace and suspense through characters, not big, noisy events, which I happen to like by the way.

Another challenge is the simple visual reproduction of the place. Venice is like nowhere on earth. A city in the sea, usually without horizons -- though on a clear day at this time of year you may see the Dolomite mountains from some parts -- Venice demands that a writer represent at least something of its strange, otherworldly appearance. Or why be here?

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Nor is that representation universal. It depends upon the individual perception of the viewer. Take Canaletto, for example. He was a Venetian determined to record the power and glory of his beloved republic. That's what near-photographic canvases such as the one below, the Doge's vessel on Ascension Day, are about: the physical beauty and mighty presence of the state.

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The English artist JMW Turner came along a bit more than a century later and found the place in decline: crumbling, sad, strange. This is one of his many views of it -- a view that strikes more of a chord with me to be honest.

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Turner is painting more than the architecture, and certainly not the pomp and glory of Canaletto. He's painting the <em>world</em> of Venice, its extraordinary lagoon light, its powerful sky, and the water itself. That, I think, is one of the challenges I face in this new book. To ignore history and the glorious buildings. To try to find the unique visual aspect of the city and let that form the canvas to the story.

At the moment I'm doing this in a very simple way: taking photographs. Much of this story will take place at night. There's no night quite like the Venetian night. So I'm shooting it in black and white, since colour drains from these buildings immediately once the sun goes down. You can see my rough and ready shots by clicking the photo at the top of this article or the one below. Please note -- these are raw and unedited and occasionally repetitive. I'm simply storing my raw 'films' here, not trying to produce some fancy slideshow.

Now to the bigger challenge. To try to capture Venice in colour during the day. Below is one of my rare night colour shots by the way -- fog creeping onto the spire of the campanile in the Piazza San Marco.

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/hewsons/sets/72157623122797633/" target="_blank"><img src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/san-marco.jpg" alt="san marco.jpg" width="480" height="360" /></a>