I may have a story idea brewing. I don’t yet have specifics like characters, but I have a setting and situation. It started with a house I walk past on my way to downtown.

On the main street through town, my end of town has Victorian mansions on one side. They’re uphill looking downhill, and when they were built they must have had a mostly unobstructed view of a valley and the hills beyond. In the early part of the 20th century, they built smaller houses across the street, more packed in and without much in the way of front yards, and the valley got filled with houses. Most of these mansions are now apartment buildings. There’s one in particular that calls to me. It’s a gorgeous brick Queen Anne house, complete with turret, and it seems like a good setting for a romantic comedy series. There could be a story for each of the tenants in the building, and then if the earlier main characters move out when they get married, new characters could move in to keep the story going. I find myself pondering this idea every time I walk past, so maybe eventually I’ll come up with some specific characters.

The town is also a good setting for this sort of thing. It’s very “Hallmark movie,” or, as a lot of people here call it, Stars Hollow, as in the TV series The Gilmore Girls. We’ve got our quaint little local shops and restaurants, our quirky characters, and our unique festivals (so each book could take place during a festival). But I might have to tone it down a bit because if I wrote the way the town actually is, I’m not sure anyone would believe it.

For instance, the quirky characters. I’ve mentioned our local Spider-Man, the guy who dresses up in a Spider-Man costume to do good deeds. He’s a big force behind charity work in this town and has a way of rallying people to solve problems and get stuff done, even while he’s wearing a costume and doing parkour around downtown. Spider-Man is currently the director of the downtown cooling shelter, a place people without access to air conditioning to go on hot days. It’s hosted at a church, and it offers drinks, snacks, games, books, and WiFi. Since he took it over, they also have things like resume-writing clinics and job fairs.

Then there’s the dapper gentleman who dances his way around town while carrying tambourines. He wears pleated trousers, a dress shirt, waistcoat, tie, and a flat newsboy cap, and he doesn’t just walk anywhere. He dances as he walks while playing the tambourines. And he walks everywhere as his main form of transportation.

The shops and restaurants tend to keep what I refer to as “whimsical” hours. There’s the really cute coffee shop that has a beer garden in back — that closes at 2 in the afternoon. Yes, a beer garden that closes in the early afternoon. There was a cupcake and cookie bakery near a school that closed before school let out. It’s a private school, so kids with money, and the bakery closed before dozens of kids with money would be passing by after school. That one went out of business and there’s a bagel shop there now that’s actually open for the hours when they’re most likely to sell bagels (it’s open for breakfast). There’s a waffle shop that’s closed on Saturdays, when there are people downtown looking for brunch. Business hours here tend to be “whenever I want to be open.” A lot of the downtown shops are side hustles, so the owners have regular jobs and open their shops or restaurants when they have free time.

There are a surprising number of actors in a relatively small town, since there are two professional and semi-professional theater companies, and there are a lot of musicians of all genres. There’s a big folk/bluegrass scene and apparently a really thriving punk and metal scene.

So, lots of opportunity for characters.

Then the festivals. This week has been the classical music festival, and I work as an usher for that. This festival is like a small town went “hey, gang, let’s put on a major classical music festival” and pulled it off. They bring in musicians from all over, and they sort of function as a repertory company, being mixed into various ensembles, depending on the music being performed, for several concerts a day. They get put up in homes of people around town (putting the extra space in the Victorian mansions that aren’t apartment buildings to good use). That’s necessary because all the hotel and vacation rental space in town gets taken up by festival goers, many of whom get season passes and spend a whole week and a half here, going to every concert. The old churches in town serve as concert halls, with my church being the main one, as the biggest with the really good acoustics you get in a building built before amplification. They don’t just do the standard classical repertoire of the biggest hits. At the concert where I ushered Sunday afternoon, there was a world premiere orchestration and two pieces with the composer present. Monday’s concert had a Chopin piano concerto (played on fortepiano) and an avant garde piece.

Then there’s the fantasy festival. It started as a Harry Potter festival and has grown beyond that (this year’s theme is on The Wizard of Oz/Wicked). There actually aren’t that many real activities (part of the way they keep the lawyers at bay). It’s just something like ten thousand people coming to town to wander the downtown area while wearing costumes. It’s basically an open-air comic con without panels, with the vendors being the regular downtown shops.

There are also festivals in the park, lots of arts events, concerts at the old-timey bandstand, etc.

So I think I could have fun with a series of humorous romances set in a town like this, with the heroines all living in this one apartment building (until I have to branch out if it’s successful enough). To be on-brand, I think I need some kind of magical element, and I have some ideas in mind. I just need to come up with specific characters and stories. Then I may run it by my agent, since this sort of thing is hot right now.