Amy Plum visits… Paris
24/07/2012 by David Maybury · No Comments
When I began writing the Die For Me trilogy, I knew who my protagonists Kate and Vincent were. I knew a little bit about the undead being that he and his kindred were, and I was certain of where their story was set: Paris.
Why Paris?
Because I wanted the setting to be somewhere utterly romantic and creepily magical. Every city has a different flavor, and my trilogy’s gothic romance and the struggle between good and evil forces demanded a location that would illuminate the story and make it come alive. And, having lived in Paris for five years when I was younger, I knew that it was the perfect place for Kate and Vincent to meet.
Paris is a small city with a long and colorful history. So every inch is packed with memories: with beheadings and love affairs and drama and grief. I used to live on a road where medieval tournaments took place: knights jousted right outside my apartment. And two blocks away is a bare patch of land where a building occupied by Jews was razed to the ground during World War II. The ghosts of Paris are just jostling for attention—there are so many of them, all you have to do is observe and listen and you can’t help but be inspired.
My books are about undead beings called revenants, and there is quite a lot of magic and supernatural creation involved in their kind. So it was important to me to set them in a very realistic world in order to make the new mythology believable. So I chose places in Paris that I already knew well as the backdrop.
Vincent and Kate’s first kiss is on the Pont des Arts, where I once kissed a boy. Jules’s art studio is in my old apartment in the Marais. I often wandered the Village St. Paul where Kate and Vincent go on their first date. And I’ve ridden through Paris on the back of a scooter being driven by a crushingly handsome French boy, just like Kate did.
I used my own experiences of Paris to make the story come alive. To make the readers feel like they are inside the story—that they too know the places I’m talking about. I wanted to plunge my readers into the dangerous and romantic city where Kate finds herself falling in love.
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Amy is in Dublin tomorrow @ Easons O'Connell Street, signing books, bodies and boys named vincent. Catch her at 3pm!
