Which comes first, setting, characters or plot?

Without question, for me it is setting. When I find myself in an intriguing or particularly beautiful or historic place, somehow characters suggest themselves. And once they have, the story unfolds, often very completely, in my mind. In a sense, the setting and the characters tell me the story. 

In The Memory of Roses, (scheduled for late fall release by Rebel Ink Press) it was the view from my balcony at a little inn perched high on a hill on the Greek island of Corfu. I looked out over masses of olive trees with their clusters of ripe fruit, a sea of dark green, and thought “What if…”

Then later, on the island of Crete, wandering though the ruins of Knossos, a Bronze age society predating Christianity by two thousand years, again I thought, “What if...?”

So my hero, a gorgeous free spirited young Greek archaeologist, and my heroine, a tense unhappy young woman whose archaeologist father left her a villa on Corfu and a deep family mystery to resolve, were born.

      
The view from my balcony on Corfu. Such a setting breathes romance. Andreas, the young archaeologist in The Memory of Roses, was born and grew up near here.
   
   
     

This hilltop inn on Corfu, the Lavant, where I stayed for a week, was the inspiration for the villa left to my heroine, Brit McQuaid, by her father in The Memory of Roses.