Throwback Thursday: Conwy

Now that I'm back in high gear, writing my novel, I've recently expanded on a character that was briefly mentioned in my first book, Songsaengnim: A Korea Diary, but who takes on a more solid character in the sequel, Gyeosunim.

And I have to admit that when I started writing about this character, again, I had totally forgotten his name. I literally had to pick up a copy of my last book and flip through the pages in search of him. In the first book, he is simply known as Brian, Siobhan's boyfriend with whom she lives on a posh street in New Town, Edinburgh.

In the opening chapters of Gyeosunim, Roland finds himself back in Scotland, where he visits his family while he's between contracts in Chŏnju, South Korea. Roland had originally gone looking for his mother, who lives in the Sandy Hill neighbourhood of Ottawa, but the ice storm of January, 1998, made her decide to ride it out with her daughter, Siobhan, and her boyfriend. And that's where he finds his family.

Because Brian plays a bigger role in the sequel, I needed to give him a last name. I also needed to give him a bit of depth, so I decided that Brian is a Welshman, from the town of Conwy, in the north of Wales.

DW and I drove through the Welsh countryside in 1991, and Conwy was one of our favourite stops. This small town was fortified in the 1280s, when Edward I waged war against the Welsh. A castle guards the mouth of the river that empties into Conwy Bay, an inlet of the Irish Sea. The old town is enclosed by a high, strong wall that stands to this day.

When DW and I visited this town, we toured the castle and then walked the entire length of the wall, which runs west, from the castle, for about a half kilometre or so before it cuts to the northeast and ends back at the river. At the elbow of the farthest point, where the wall changes direction, you have climbed a slope that gives a commanding view of the old town and the castle.

Continuing around the battlements, I stopped and captured some of the chimney stacks of the houses that butted up against the Medieval wall.

Wales still rates high on my list of places I've seen, and among our many stops, as we drove from the north, through Snowdonia, and all the way to the south, Conwy rates among the top.

It's only fitting that I create a character who comes from this historic place.

Happy Thursday!