What Inspired Old Faithful Plot?
Two years ago our Labrador Retriever, barely more than a puppy, was playing inside the walk in closet in the master bedroom. He found an enticing, rolled up big piece of paper that he thought looked like a stick, and you can imagine what happened to it after that.
What the dog did not realize was that the rolled up paper was a souvenir from our visit to Yellowstone National Park. It used to hang in the shed in our former house as a map of the park.
We tried to find a similar map of the park. Yellowstone didn’t sell them anymore. Neither did anybody on eBay.
However, what we we did find offered for sale turned out to be even better than the original map. We located a Motorists Guide Yellowstone National Park 1936. The antique map had an illustration of a bear looking over a precipice dropping to the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone.
Inside was a treasure house of information to the way the park used to be for visitors in a more polite, more elite time when most of the visitors were wealthy tourists who came West on the train. It led Dora Benley to think of an episode of the Edward Ware Thrillers concerning this antique map of Yellowstone. Thus Old Faithful Plot was born.
This story underlines the importance of real life maps in our thrillers about map plots.
Old Faithful Plot is soon to be published by Cheops Books LLC on June 16.
