Capen Hall

12 Oct 2014 … Walking the streets of Forks

I’m finally back home after my two-week road trip up North. Outside of visiting family and friends, I visited a lot of the places I wrote about in my books. I think it was on Facebook that I made the comment that as I was walking up and down the main drag in New Paltz, NY, I felt like Stephanie Meyer walking the streets of Forks. (Twilight author/town it takes place in)

It’s an odd feeling, one very difficult to describe. Halfway between fantasy and reality as you walk past places where events in your books take place. No, in reality they never really happened, but in my mind I’ve pictured those events dozens upon dozens of times so they’ve taken on a reality all their own … in my mind at least.

It wasn’t only in New Paltz that this happened, but up at the Mohonk Mountain House and most assuredly in Stonington, CT. I was completely overwhelmed with deja vu when I walked into the Lighthouse Museum. I hadn’t been back to Stonington since before I started to write book 3 (the one that mostly takes place there)

It also happened when I was in the Hopkinton Town Clerks office doing genealogy research and was looking through land transactions of Randall Wells and wife Lois Maxson, actual characters in my novels! Talk about the blurring of the line between reality and fantasy!

Anyway, I had a wonderful trip and did some good research for the fifth novel. I got some good details to really tighten it up to a place I’ll be happy with.

I’ll leave you with a few pictures from my vacation.

SUNY New Paltz … AKA New Paltz University

Lecture Hall at SUNY New Paltz

View of Mt Mohonk from the top of the Faculty Tower of SUNY New Paltz

Me in front of Capen Hall

New Paltz in the rain.

Stonington CT: The Old Lighthouse Museum

Stonington CT: The Old Lighthouse Museum … view from the Top

Stonington CT: Omega Street

Stonington CT: The Old Lighthouse Museum

1 Oct 2014 …. You can’t go home again … or back to your old dorm it seems as well

I was disillusioned yesterday when I went back to my old college dorm only to find that there are boys living in my old room! They switched the layout of the floor around and the boys are living where the girls were and vice versa. Imagine my surprise when I went to knock on my old door and found a man’s name on it. It was shocking. Here I am writing my books, figuring a girl was living in there. It’s true, you can’t go home again. Sigh.

Anyway, for you readers out there, here’s some pictures of the “new” Capen Hall of SUNY New Paltz.

Capen Hall

2nd Floor Capen Hall

Capen Hall Front Hall

Good ole’ Capen Hall

In this series, my main character Sara attends NPU or New Paltz University and lives in Capen Hall. Capen is based on the ‘real’ Capen Hall that I lived in while attending SUNY New Paltz (or The State University of New York at New Paltz for those of you who live outside the state of NY) Unfortunately SUNY New Paltz doesn’t exactly drip off the tongue so I changed the name of the school to NPU for short. Sara lives in my old room on the second floor girls’ hallway with windows looking in on the quad. My room would be about dead center in the photo below. Of course, Sara attends NPU about two decades after I did, but I have to assume dorm life doesn’t change a whole heck of a lot. I mean we didn’t have vampires roaming the quads in my day, but who knows what goes on there today, right? So to give you a visual of what Capen Hall looks like in my mind, I though I’d share these photos from my days at New Paltz.