I see stories before I write them.

Usually not entire stories. Scenes.

A room.

Somebody walking through a door.

The view behind them.

A hand moving.

The distance between two people while they’re talking.

Sometimes I know exactly what they’re wearing before I have any idea what they’re going to say.

It probably explains why setting matters so much to me.

I don’t particularly enjoy writing rooms that exist only because characters require somewhere to stand.

If they’re in a place, I want to know why that place matters.

What does it tell me about them?

What changes because they’re there rather than somewhere else?

Would the scene feel the same if I moved it?

If the answer is yes, the setting probably isn’t doing enough.

New York was always part of No Names, No Titles.

Not postcard New York.

I didn’t want the Empire State Building appearing every few pages to remind everybody which city they were in.

I wanted the version of New York the characters would actually experience.

The movement between worlds.

A serious financial meeting in one part of the city. Music somewhere else. A quiet apartment high above streets that never really become quiet. Water visible through glass. Restaurants, hotels, cars, pavements, crowds.

The ability to be surrounded by millions of people and still remain remarkably private.

That last part interested me particularly.

New York can make you visible and anonymous at exactly the same time.

You can be standing among thousands of people and nobody knows who you are.

Then walk into the right room and everybody does.

That suited CJ perfectly.

She has different parts of her life that exist very comfortably beside each other because she has decided where the boundaries are.

The city allows that.

You can leave one version of yourself in an office, travel twenty minutes and enter somewhere nobody cares what you do for a living.

Of course, the versions don’t stay neatly separated forever.

That would be a much shorter book.

Music works similarly for CJ.

She loves rock and rap for different reasons, and I knew that quite early.

Rock gives her something physical.

Noise.

Movement.

Release.

There are moments when music is not something you want to sit politely and appreciate. You want it loud enough that it takes over the room and your body with it.

CJ understands that.

Rap gives her something different.

Words.

The intelligence of somebody fitting an idea into a line you didn’t see coming. The pleasure of language used precisely enough to make you go back and hear it again.

She isn’t interested in genres because of the image attached to them.

She likes what they do to her.

That distinction matters.

Music is often used in fiction as character shorthand.

Give somebody a playlist and apparently we know them.

I wanted it to do more than that.

What somebody listens to tells you something, but how they listen tells you considerably more.

Do they need music in the background or do they stop talking when a particular song comes on?

Do they know every lyric?

Do they care about the guitar, the voice, the production, the words?

Do they want to watch from a seat or be somewhere in the middle of the crowd?

Those details tell me who a person is.

The same is true of homes.

I loved building CJ’s apartment because it could reveal things she would never volunteer in conversation.

We all do that with our homes, whether we intend to or not.

What we spend money on.

What we keep.

What we display.

What gets hidden in a cupboard.

The photograph nobody else would understand.

The books that are actually read rather than arranged because the spines look attractive.

The ridiculous number of shoes.

The object that has survived three moves for no obvious reason.

You can learn an enormous amount about somebody by being left alone in their home for ten minutes.

Probably more than they would like.

Chase’s spaces tell you things about him too.

So do the places he chooses to take somebody.

Setting becomes another form of dialogue.

Nobody has to say, This matters to me.

The place says it.

Travel gives me another version of the same thing.

People behave differently away from home.

Routine disappears.

You don’t have the usual objects around you reminding you who you’re supposed to be at nine in the morning.

Time changes shape.

A breakfast can last two hours because nobody has somewhere else to be.

You walk more.

You notice more.

You talk because there is less administrative life interrupting you.

That makes travel useful in romance, but only if the destination has a reason to exist beyond providing a beautiful backdrop.

I want the place to affect the people.

Water does that for CJ.

So does music.

So does New York.

Different settings pull different things out of her.

And because I write visually, I often understand the emotional temperature of a scene through the place before I understand it through the dialogue.

A boardroom has one kind of silence.

A bedroom has another.

A crowded room can create privacy if two people are only paying attention to each other.

An empty room can make distance between them feel enormous.

A city street can be romantic.

A beautiful hotel room can be lonely.

The physical setting doesn’t dictate the emotion, but it changes how the emotion lands.

That’s why I spend time seeing the room before I write what happens inside it.

I want to know where everybody is.

What they can see.

How close they are.

Whether there is somewhere to retreat to.

Whether the windows look over water or another building.

Whether the music is loud enough that somebody has to lean closer to speak.

Those things change behaviour.

And behaviour is where character lives.

Perhaps that’s also why I struggle to separate the world of No Names, No Titles from CJ and Chase themselves.

Take them out of New York and they would still be CJ and Chase, but the story would change.

Take away the music and something would be missing.

Take away the contrast between private rooms and public ones, noise and silence, professional spaces and places where titles mean absolutely nothing, and the emotional landscape of the book becomes flatter.

I didn’t want a flat world around them.

They were too alive in my head for that.

I wanted the reader to know when a room changed.

To feel the difference between the city outside and the quiet inside.

To hear the music when it mattered.

To understand that sometimes where somebody chooses to take you tells you something they aren’t ready to say.

And occasionally a place that should mean absolutely nothing becomes permanently attached to one person.

That’s the irritating thing about memory.

It doesn’t ask permission either.