For a reader, unusual settings may represent an escape from current reality, a sort of virtual vacation to a place that may be out of reach in the real world.

For a writer, exotic locales may require research to get details as accurate as possible.  Some avoid them for that reason.  Others with means to travel see them as an opportunity to actually visit faraway places to get a feel for the land, the people, and the culture.  And setting a story in another country may lend a certain excitement to the writing of the tale that a local setting could not inspire.

Most of us write our tales in places familiar to us, or at least accessible if we have the time and the funds.  “Real” places.

But some prefer to invent locations such as fantasy lands or otherworld colonies, with landscapes, creatures, and cultures unlike anything in the mundane world in which we live.  And some readers prefer fantasy or science fiction precisely because such stories transport them to an undeniably alien environment full of possibility beyond our own limitations and outside our day-to-day boxes.

Do you prefer down-home tales or those set in distant lands?  Do you like your adventures to occur on earth, or in a mystical world, or on another planet?

[Featured photo courtesy of Freeimages.com/ZeeshanQureshi.]