If you follow me on Facebook, you may have already seen these pictures. If not, here’s the photographic evidence of my search for the French Kissing characters in Paris. 😉

The arty (and pricey) neighbourhood where Margot lives.

The spot on le Champ de Mars where Margot and Claire kissed for the first time. (The shoes belong to neither one of them.)

The Palais Bourbon, where députée Dominique Laroche regularly summons Steph.

Just to remind you that Paris is gorgeous. 😉

The Métro station closest to where Nadia & Juliette and Claire live. They never take the Métro though. (I do.)

If they feel like walking to the Barbier & Cyr office (located on a side street of the Champs-Élysées), this would be a common sight for Claire and Juliette.

We only had three days and I didn’t have time to snap pictures of Steph’s neighbourhood (Père Lachaise is a bit out of the way.) I did, erm, find the location of Nadia and Margot’s hospital, but don’t have pictures of that. 😉 The plan is to go back this summer (because we have to go to Belgium anyway to meet the newest member of our family), so I’ll be sure to take some more shots then.

It was so much fun to be back in Paris. We drank a lot of wine, ate a lot of food and walked until I couldn’t feel my feet anymore. Now, we’re back in Hong Kong, battling jet lag. (If the sentences in this blog post are not very well formed, it’s because my brain still thinks it’s the middle of the night and I never write after dark.) I’m giving myself a few more days to find my bearings, but as of next week, it will be full speed ahead.

I have two short stories to write. One for a Sex at Work mini-anthology I’m putting together and another so I can finally submit to Cheyenne Blue. (Authors, the deadline for Forbidden Fruit is 15 May!) I have to whip French Kissing: Episode Four into shape and get cracking on the remaining two episodes of the season. (Just an early disclaimer, as of Episode Four it’s a good idea to have tissues nearby.) 😉 Then there’s an idea for a novel that’s been stuck in my mind for weeks that I have to deal with. (I Still Remember meets Summer’s End but longer and even more dramatic.)

It’s good to be back. Loads to do. Jet lag be gone already!

The short answer is because I wanted a big city I knew well enough to set an entire (hopefully long-running) serial in. The long answer may turn into a love letter to Paris. 😉 I ♥ Paris and when I lived in Belgium it was only a three-hour drive away (and we had easy access to some digs), so we drove to Paris once every two months, which easily makes it the city I visited most in my life.

If a city is going to play a large part in a story, I need to have been there. Not because I want to indulge in descriptions, but because I appreciate knowing a bit of its geography, the distance between certain places and the general vibe. In the background, it helps me that I can actually picture where my characters are going. I know many authors can pull this off with Google Maps and internet research, but for someone with zero sense of orientation (i.e. someone like me), it’s important to have been there and to have walked the streets myself.

Additionally, no city is more ‘our city’ (our = my wife’s and mine) than Paris. To me, Paris equals romance. When I met my wife (a long, long time ago) I was a twenty-two year old who’d barely crossed the Belgian country borders. The first trip we took together was to Paris. We weren’t an item yet (she was still playing hard to get), but something was definitely blooming and I vividly remember staying up late, talking and joking until deep into the night, the guy who hit on her when we queued for the ferris wheel at the Place de la Concorde… (We officially got together a few weeks later, because no one can resist the romance of Paris. ;-0)

When writing this, I’m about to start on the last act of Episode Three and it has become very clear to me that French Kissing is deeply romantic. It’s all about love, the quest for it, losing it, fighting for it, not understanding it, the pain of it. ‘My ladies’ (that’s how I call them now) suffer for love, but they also revel in it (and have hot first-time, make-up and break-up sex because of it) and they desperately crave it, too. Because of all of this love, I couldn’t imagine any other city being the backdrop for my dramatic lesbian romance opus.

And now all I want to do is go back to Paris myself (but a thirteen-hour flight is a bit more of an obstacle than a three-hour drive.) So, in the end, I’m glad I at least get to write about it (and when I go home for my bi-annual family visit in March, I will, for the sake of research, make a small detour.)

P.S. ARCs of French Kissing: Episode Two will be available in a few days. E-mail me (harperbliss at gmail dot com) if you want one in return for an honest review.