This weekend I finally took the opportunity to visit Extraordinary Mans’s physical birthplace.
Now, I think I should add a little bit of history here. A little note for future clarification as I have so recently learned from the late Douglas Adams.
When I started writing the first book (Whatever Happened to Extraordinary?) I knew that the town he grew up in and that Thomas Johnston did live in was for the most part completely fictitious. I lived in Iowa, as I still do today, and so I had an idea in my head of what the town should look like. It needed to have a couple of key elements.
First off it had to be small, really small. Now I can hear the scoffs now about Iowa being filled with nothing but small towns. To an extent that is very true. I live within twenty miles of a town that consists of 3 maybe 4 houses and a sign that says welcome to our town. By many standards the town I live in now is small having a population around 9,000 and being roughly four square miles in size. I needed something even smaller, but not 4 houses small. There are two small towns close to me both within 15 miles. They served as my template.
Second, I wanted a big tall white grain elevator. Again most would think that’s not too hard to come by but you would be surprised by the number of modern steel bin storage containers that are used today. Just outside of town one of the more successful farmers has this huge shiny silver monstrosity of a complex that takes up more room than his house, and he has a big house.
Third, the town needed to look… old. It needed to look like parts of it have been around for over 100 years. Again, this is no small feat in the modern age. Even in my town where I live in a house over 80 years old modernization and restoration takes place all the time. Some try to keep the look as authentic as possible while others just slap new siding on it and call it a day.
Finally I needed an old water tower that looked like something out of an old west movie. My town has been around for over 150 years and has no such thing. We have 3 very modern water towers, the largest of which was repainted with the new town logo a few years ago. Oddly enough the town just south of me has such a water tower and so to an extent this town became shell so to speak of what his town would look like.
Then a couple years ago when I started on book 3 (Extraordinary Times) I realized that it might be good to figure out where his town was. I had an idea of where I wanted it located in the state so that distances would feel right in the story. As I searched maps and the internet for pictures and images in the hopeful area I quickly discovered that my ideal town just didn’t exist. I had created in my mind a town which by all rights could exist in Iowa (in fact my wife was convinced it had to be a town in Iowa based on the imagery and she was born and raised here) but in reality didn’t.
In the end I did what I thought was best. I compromised on a location that seemed at the time for all purposes to be the best location. I looked at images of the town, studied maps and then during the initial editing of book 1 changed the scenery to fit what I thought the town looked like. And it seemed at the time that my target town (which will go undisclosed for the time being) was perfect except for one thing. From what I could tell it had no water tower at all.
I still decided to use the town, I made notes in my files to its location, and then looked around the surrounding area to see the best location for the farm. And then this weekend on a trip up to Lake Okaboji for the first time I suddenly found myself in Clay County Iowa where Thomas and Extraordinary Man were born and lived.
I quickly pulled up my notes on my phone (thank you cloud technology) to find the locations I had written down 2 years ago and we decided to take some time and find the locations on our trip back home. Needless to say maps and pictures on the internet do no fully capture the fell of some locations. The biggest surprise was that the town I had picked out was practically in a river valley, something that a map on Google didn’t portray at all.
So now I am back home with a lot to think about. Ultimately this means I am going to go back into book 1 and change a few things. While the town may not have been perfect it provided a lot of very interesting elements that I now want to incorporate into my story. Since book 1 has not gone to formal editing yet there is still time for a couple of changes. I think these changes will be for the best.
