I had a brilliant start to this entry in my head and then I went and finished the work I had to do today before writing it down and now I've forgotten it.

Story of my life.


I really should put something in here about how much I hate classic worldbuilding. Because I hate it so fucking much; it's so fucking boring and seriously I do not give a fuck what major events happened before the beginning of the story and how they influenced my characters.

(In case you are curious, that is how far I got into worldbuilding before I threw up my hands and stomped off.)

What I do care about, apparently, is those ridiculous fucking stories old people tell. I mean the boring ones where you're like "Jesus grandpa, I just want to go into the store, I do not have time to listen to you yammer on about the Blizzard of '78." stories. The "Everyone knows a bobcat and a coyote can't mate and anyway the Jenkinses were dead before then so what are you even talking about??" stories. The "Seriously I do not want to know that you saw my mom naked once." stories.

So hey, let me introduce you to my world. Because I'm too lazy to come up with a different setting for everything I want to write, I shoved everything into various non-existant towns in Massachusetts. I want a Lovecraftian universe, you see, but I don't want to be forced to write Lovecraftian stories, if that makes sense.

To start off, there's Lowestoft, where Abby set up her PI business, Red hangs out down by the docks, and Sam is one of the summer people. It's a city in the same sense that Leominster, Gloucester, and Salem are all cities. It's located on the coast somewhere between Salem and Gloucester. It's set up somewhat like Newport, RI, where there are mcmansions on the cliff for the summer people, but the rest of the city is a dirtpoor fishing community.

Abby lives and works in two different rundown buildings by the docks, both of which stink of dead fish and the wind blowing off the sea.

(She has more heart than good sense, you see, and thus is willing to take pay as a portion of the day's catch. While this keeps her in good food for most of the year, it doesn't help pay her rent.)

If you're willing to sit long enough for the old men on the porch of a bait shop to get chatty, they'll tell you about the spring things crawled out of the sea, or about the well on the Foggarty property that screams when the temperature drops below zero, and how the sea eventually takes everything back.

Everything.

No one talks about it anymore, but when Hurricane Bob rolled up the coast in '91, entire mansions on the cliff slid into the sea. Driftwood teemed along the shore for weeks afterward. No one really likes to talk about how none of the bodies were ever found, not even a fish-eaten limb. Some of the summer people stopped coming up after that. They just left their mansions sitting blind sentry over empty cliffs, paint flaking and broken windows gaping like eyeless sockets.

Lots of things are broken in Lowestoft, from the people to the buildings, but Abby wouldn't give up living there for the world.

Tune in later to hear about Grimsby and Barnstowe.