Home Boy Disclaimer

For the record, I don't write about real places or real people in my novels. All the characters in my novels, as well as their names, are fictitious and the towns, townships and counties in which they live are fictional places in Pennsylvania and do not really exist.

In addition, there are no composite characters in my books, no "take-offs" on or "rip-offs" of people I have known, although I occasionally give certain "tics" and eccentricities to older characters for humorous effect and in gratitude for the source of childhood wonder they provided. However, in my novels I never write about Snow Shoe, my hometown, or Centre County, my home county, or any of the people who live there now or who ever lived there before. The only similarity between those places and the places I write about is the coal and lumber history, which is fairly commonplace in much of Pennsylvania's Allegheny Plateau Region.

In my novels, my focus is on a quadrangular, fictional part of Pennsylvania that would lie somewhere between the following real places: Smethport in McKean County and Wellsboro in Tioga County as the northern border and between Clearfield in Clearfield County and Lock Haven in Clinton County as the southern border. This is the fictional vicinity of the Pennsylvania I write about. I picked this part of the state for my fiction because this is the part I know the best and love the most.

The only exception to this rule is in Deeds of Destiny, my 5th novel. The first half of this story takes place in a fictional part of southeastern Pennsylvania that would lie somewhere between York and Philadelphia, if it were real. The second half of this story takes place in a fictional section of the above-mentioned area of Pennsylvania's Allegheny Plateau Region.

So, while my novels are fiction, they also pay homage to the rich history and the beautiful topography of Pennsylvania's Allegheny Plateau Region.

link to same post on Thinkers' Corner