I visited Heidelberg, Germany once before I started to live there. In the summer of 2018, I took a trip with my dad to visit a number of World War I battlefields– Verdun, Ypres, and the like. My dad is a history professor, which is why he gets to be Dr. Weller and I’m just That Guy Who Writes Fantasy Books.

We flew into Frankfurt, so we spent the first day relaxing in Heidelberg before traveling on the autobahn to more relevant historical sites. That day, I was pretty zonked out from jet lag, so it all passed in a blur. I remember visiting the schloss, eating some decent weisswurst, and seeing the enormous beer tun, which inspired the one in the finished book. Fun fact: it’s also mentioned in Little Women!

See the stairs you have to take to get to the top? Some details are too good for me to make up wholesale. I should note that while the Scarlet Keep is based somewhat upon Schloss Heidelberg, some of the exterior and most of the interior are fabricated by yours truly. The ballroom with the skylight? That’s me.

(Also note how there’s not a waterfall, much to my chagrin.)

But you’ll also notice something else if you’ve read the book: that yellow house is the closest thing to Stern House that exists in the real world. The street is as I described, the dimensions are as I described, and the interior is very similar, down to the cellar. That’s because I lived here for a bit!

See, while I visited Heidelberg for a day in 2018, I came to stay in 2019. I’d been accepted to Universität Heidelberg for my Masters studies, but the university didn’t have much in the way of campus housing. I was assured that was perfectly normal, and that I would be able to find some, but I was needlessly pretty stressed when I boarded a plane for Germany without my lodgings squared away. That was when the Turnerschaft Ghibellinia stepped in and offered a room in their old fraternity house for about 250 euros a month. I was one of the first to arrive, so I had my pick of the rooms, and when I realized there was a room overlooking the courtyard, with a view of the schloss, I felt like I was home.

Yeah, that made it into the book too.

Because I got homesick. See, when I said I came to Heidelberg to stay in 2019, astute readers might be able to figure out what happened next. In early 2020, I went back to visit my dad in the States and to write my end of term papers, and I was due to fly back for the next term in March.

I don’t know how well you remember March 2020, but uh… there wasn’t a whole lot of international travel going on then. Which is the story of how I have half a Masters from a prestigious German university, as well as how I came to fall in love with the city.

I loved the beauty and walkability of the altstadt (to say nothing of how easily I could take an affordable bus to an affordable train and be in another part of the country by midday), the people, the food (the real Dundel’s bakery is Cafe Gundel, right where I describe it in the book in relation to Stern House, and you should absolutely visit), the weather, and the sense of history.

Oh, and because I lived there around Christmas, I also loved the weihnachtsmarkt.

The city was bustling, but in a way that felt cheery instead of overcrowded. It looked like the way Christmas was supposed to look, if that made any sense. That windmill carousel is like a model my parents put out every Christmas while I was growing up, and it had to find a place within the pages of Rapscallion. That meant the book would take place in the autumn and winter– the seasons I knew Heidelberg the best. The book would be a love letter to the city I called home for far too short a time, and through it I would be able to relive that city at its best.

My books tend not to be written as calls to action, but if you take any from them, let it be this: visit Heidelberg, particularly in this time of year. I can think of few more welcoming places I have ever been.

Once I had an outline, and my setting compelled me to write, I started to get excited about the book. Not immediately, mind you. I was knee-deep in a 200,000-plus-word epic fantasy saga spanning 1,200 years of history, with deep lore and world-shattering magic, and I was writing it like a madman. I finished in early 2021, and when I looked at it… it was a mess. The only person I’ve let read it so far is my dad, and that’s probably not going to change anytime soon. I think there’s a lot of good stuff in that book, and hopefully someday I’ll be able to shape into something that earns all that good stuff, but in the aftermath of that battle with a book, I wanted something easier to subdue. Something fun. Something that reminded me of happier times.

I hope that if you read Rapscallion, some of those happy times will be yours.