One of the most important parts of creating a new book/series is creating the settings. In all my previous books, I’ve used real life places – London, France, Canada, the USA for The Luke Bright Series and London once again in The Signs Are Coming. However, with The Snowflake Series, I decided to do something slightly different – I decided to make my own alternate England, but with some very familiar settings.

One thing you may, or must, know about England is there’s certain aspects of our culture that everyone recognises and the country is pretty diverse. We have big cities, small quaint villages, coastal towns, towns with forests and woodland, national parks, all that kind of stuff, so world building around all that was pretty easy to do. Most of the places in this series are in fact based on places that I already know, and that’s because this series is not just a love letter to my millennial life, but also to this country and places I’ve been to that have inspired me and many others my age. You’ll see more of them later in the book series, but for now, I’ll start with the central location of The Snowflake Trap: a town called Leasford.

Leasford is a place that most English people will recognise in terms of the type of town it is. It’s a small, dead-end place with limited opportunity, a high-street that’s become run-down due to a larger city not too far away stealing all the trade, and although there’s plenty of residential areas, it’s pretty small and insignificant. It does however have a beautiful forest on the edge of town with a river and waterfall which is truly one of its only attractions. It’s a quiet, dull place, and that’s what makes it an absolutely cracking location to set a generational war in.

It’s not secret that The Snowflake Series has kind of had inspiration from The Cornetto Trilogy, namely Hot Fuzz and The World’s End, and I see Leasford quite like those towns. Somewhere that seems so normal and dull which contrasts the crazy situations going on within them. It makes for a fun, relatable setting and really brings in the realism that I wanted to express in this book series.

Leasford was however inspired by a real place called Limpley Stoke which is just on the outskirts of Bath (which also inspired the city of Wacherton which is about half an hour away from Leasford). I was visiting there about a week or so before I started writing The Snowflake Trap, and whilst Limpley Stoke is much smaller, there’s certain aspects of it that feature quite heavily in the book. Leasford also reminds me quite a lot of my own home town since I feel plenty of similar emotions towards it that my leading trio feel towards Leasford. I feel like growing up as an English millennial in one of these towns really shapes you as a person and makes you hungry for something beyond the boundaries.

So, with all that in mind, I hope you’ve got a good idea of the setting we’ll be going into, and I can’t wait to show you what else I’ve created in books to come. But get ready for a bit of a nostalgia trip is all I can say about these books, because if you’re from England, you’ll know exactly where you are.

The Snowflake Trap will be released on September 19th and the remaining two books of The Snowflake Series will be released in the next couple of years. In the meantime, check out my other books The Signs Are Coming and The Luke Bright Series which are all available to buy! Check out the individual pages for links so you can grab your copies. Thank you for taking the time to read this blog post.

N.A.K.