(This was originally my guest post over at Ruff Drafts during the recent blog tour. I like it so much I wanted to repost it on my own site. Thanks again to Debbie De Louise for highlighting Driftless Spirits!)

There’s a social icebreaker game called “Two Truths and a Lie.”  If you’re unfamiliar with it, the idea is simple.  Each person at a gathering writes down three statements about themselves.  As the game title suggests, two are true and one is not.  The object of the game is for other participants to guess which is which.  Curious truths are interesting gems to learn and can also misdirect players from the lie.  Clever lies can go undetected nestled amongst truths that subvert or balance expectations.

I love reading books that use similar tactics, especially if the story gets a little otherworldly.  Take me down a well-known road past two weird but real tourist traps before insisting there was a little magical bookshop on the far corner all along.  Walk me through a World War II battle with strange-but-true coincidences before a subtle shift changes history.  True is adjacent to plausible.  Plausible is adjacent to possible.  Even if I don’t believe in magic or time portals or what have you, I stay immersed in the story if the writer told me two truths before the lie.

Driftless Spirits starts with Charlotte taking a roadtrip and looking for signs that might lead her to a house she’s only seen in a recurring dream.  She drives out of the Chicago area towards Wisconsin.  She takes I-90 West and crosses the border.  She stops at the rest area near Beloit.  Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, my family took that exact route on camping vacations almost every summer.  It’s very real…

…Until it’s not.  Charlotte finds something at the rest area that doesn’t exist as far as I know.  But it’s very believable it could.  Her route diverts from real roads to plausible roads.  One subtle sign leads to another, more and more peculiar, and suddenly she’s in my fictional town of Casten’s Horn.  The town is entirely made up but it’s nestled in the very real Driftless Area of Wisconsin.  As I live here, I’ve taken my time to build Casten’s Horn inspired by the true history of the region.  From ancestry to industry, I’ve tried to make it as convincing as possible.

Casten’s Horn has all the trappings of the type of cozy town found in the Driftless.  Homespun traditions, friendly residents and a local police chief all cross through Charlotte’s story.  I hope the reader is so drawn into the plausibility of Casten’s Horn that the crime Charlotte unravels there and the secret of the house from her dream are easily accepted.  It’s the first secret of many buried in the town.  Charlotte will have to use her instincts to discern what’s true and what’s a lie.

If you’re interested in Charlotte’s journey, and the mystery she becomes entangled in when she reaches a small town in the Driftless, here are some links: