LOCATION: The Lodge

The lodge is a place I would love to visit.  It is based on a number of hidden lodges / hotels I have been in located in northern Minnesota.




First, where is this lodge?  More importantly where does this story take place?

The lodge is in a mountainous area, but not high in elevation.  It is difficult to get to.  At least this was my original concept.  I have never stated where it was.  Initially it could have been in the western portion of the Appalachian mountains or the eastern foothills of the Rockies.  But since I put the town of Eckler in Western Nebraska, about 6 hours to Dan's home in an agricultural region it is implied that it is the Rockies.  The city with the sex club and Randy's store needs to figure in.  I didn't want to start to look at atlases to find locations that will fit.  So I kept everything vague, which helped when I got questions from readers about where to find the rest area.  So all this fit into the ambiguous world of Tate.

Also, I wanted to create Tate's world to be impervious to the outside world, kinda like Disneyland doesn't have any views of anything outside.  I wanted the lake and its island to be like Lake Kananaskis where the "I wish I knew how to quit you" speech from Brokeback Mountain.  (That is a pic of me on the same shore above.)  That island served as that idyllic paradise for Dan.

Initially the lodge had only two floors, but that evolved into three floors.  I envisioned it to be very masculine and decorated without being a candidate for LuridDigs.com.

I wanted most of the action, at least sexually, to take place in three rooms: The Master Bedroom, The Office, and The Dungeon.  Yes things happened elsewhere, but these three rooms have a lot in common: they are all one on top of the other, they share the same fireplace chimney, and the Bedroom and Office have, but not the Dungeon the same view of the lake and its island.

It's funny; when I first started writing, I did not have a sense of the Lodge at all.  By the end, I had nearly a complete floor plan of all three floors.  I should do some diagrams.