Challenges with Setting: Yuletide Bride

The Yuletide Bride presented me with both challenges and interesting parameters when I went in search of its setting.

Since the original title was “Eleven Pipers Piping,” and those pipers played a role in the inspirational romance, I needed to find the right setting where the pipers could get their instruments.

As in, a place where the reeds grew that enabled them to build their reed flutes

I first consulted with my friend Linda Livingstone who has made Native American flutes in the past. Here’s a sample of her work:

Beautiful, isn’t it?

But these were flute-like recorders made of reeds, suitable for children.

So, I hunted reed flutes and found plenty of spots that showed me how.

I was attracted to this page, which explained how to make a bamboo flute. I used this one as the basis for the reed pipes made in The Yuletide Bride.

If you examine that link, you’ll see it’s for a bamboo flute. So, where in the United States does bamboo or thick enough reed, grow for my story?

Did I mention there’s a snowstorm?

I spent a lot of time on weather and topological web sites, hoping to find a place that could accommodate both needs. Linda helped me look and made suggestions–she’s driven across the United States more recently than I have.

We finally settled in the southeastern corner of Nebraska which is warm enough to grow reeds, but liable to have a snowstorm now and then.

What a relief!

Setting is important for any story.

But the location has to be realistic–it needs to work with your story line.

I’ve not been through Nebraska in 17 years, but I remember a pretty countryside of rolling hills in some sections and lots of corn. Tornadoes travel through now and then, which became important for the sequel, The Sunbonnet Bride (releasing as an ebook in July, 2015).

Because I hadn’t been there lately, however, I turned to literature, specifically a book written about the same time and setting as The Yuletide Bride: Willa Cather‘s O Pioneers.

A sweet love story of breaking the wild prairie, Cather includes vivid descriptions of the countryside and the types of plants grown there. The land is central to Cather’s writing and it helped me “see” my own setting better. Some of the birds in my two Nebraska stories came from Cather’s descriptions.

I also remembered Laura Ingalls Wilder‘s stories of life on the prairie and nodded to them in several places. The big sky, the gentle creeks, the reeds growing along the riverbanks. It all appears in my work, as well.

“Farmers worked their fields preparing for the harvest. A torrent of jackrabbits scattered as they passed. Calling birds sailed on the wing as the sun rose slowly in the eastern sky.”

Nebraska is a beautiful place. You can see photos of it on my Pinterest board: The Yuletide Bride 

What comes to mind when you think of prairie lands? Click to Tweet

Reed flutes and snowstorms–oh my! Click to Tweet

Location has to be realistic in a novella. Click to Tweet