There are, by my count, three general categories of locations in fiction —  real places, fake places that could be real, and fake places that could never be real.

In the first category, real places, examples are the London setting of many Dicken’s novels such as “Oliver Twist,” and, on the opposite side of the world, Cannery Row, a real street in Monterey, California, as portrayed in Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row.”  These locations are depicted at a particular time, and readers may find their presentation to be accurate or inaccurate, but we recognize that they are real places.

In the second category, fake places that seem like they could be real, examples are the fictional city of Zenith in Sinclair Lewis’s “Babbitt,” or Yoknapatawpha, the fictional county, in the works of William Faulkner.  They may be thinly veiled portraits of real places, or wholly made up, but we accept them as realistic, if not real, places.

The third category is places that are obviously not real.   Examples are Oz and its capital, the Emerald City, in L. Frank Baum’s “Wizard of Oz,” as well as C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, in a series of books.  There is also Wonderland, in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” by Lewis Carroll.  These places would never be mistaken for real.  Often you can’t even travel to these unusual places in the usual ways.  To get to Oz you need to be delivered by tornado, to get to Narnia you must pass through a crowded wardrobe, and you crawl down a rabbit hole to get to Wonderland.

In the book SOCKWORLD all three categories of locations are present.  Some of the action occurs in real locations like Phoenix and Tucson Arizona, and, more broadly, in the Sonoran Desert.  Most of the book, however, takes place in the fictional small town of Casi Nada (Spanish for “almost nothing”).  Though it is not a real town, it is enough like real small towns that it falls into the second category of places that seem real.

In the third category is Sockworld itself, a realm that cannot be seen from the real world but generally shares the same space.  It is also not entered in any usual way, but I won’t elaborate as I don’t want to dole out too many spoilers.

While I admire writers who do the research to portray real places, I usually prefer to build my worlds from the ground up.  There is a puzzle-solving aspect to it that I enjoy.  For example, a short story I wrote a few years ago takes place in an America that has been taken over by China.  That is never stated outright, but you infer it from little details like the diploma on the wall, or by a character referring to the “Iowa province.” 

Readers are travelers.  Happy journeys!