Readers sometimes ask me why Cordell Logan, the reluctant sleuth of my mystery series, makes his home in Rancho Bonita, California—a town that does not appear on any map, travel brochure, or DMV registration form, yet somehow exists vividly enough in at least some readers’ minds that they’ll insist they once drove through it. This question is usually followed by a comment from them that Rancho Bonita looks suspiciously like Santa Barbara, where I live in real life. Yes, I see the resemblance. Yes, it’s intentional. And no, Logan will not be moving to Santa Barbara anytime soon.

To start with, fictional towns don’t get mad at you. Real towns, on the other hand, absolutely do. Santa Barbara is full of lovely people—cultured, friendly, and quite capable of reading—which presents a problem. If you describe a café whose coffee tastes like warm hydraulic fluid filtered through a gym sock, someone here will inevitably ask if you meant their café. Then they’ll squint at you every time you walk in, forcing you to start tipping like a drunken Rockefeller. In Rancho Bonita, nobody confronts you. Nobody says, “Hey, you know that one really snarky guy in Deep Fury? Did you base him on…?”

Truth be told, it’s a town constructed entirely of plausible deniability.

Then there’s the airport situation. Rancho Bonita Municipal is an aviator’s dream: sun-soaked and a little rough around the edges. It’s the perfect home base for the Ruptured Duck, Logan’s noble and occasionally cantankerous Cessna. Santa Barbara has an excellent airport—clean, civilized, and busy with commercial airliner traffic—not exactly the kind of facility that would appreciate the kind of hijinks that tend to follow Logan. If I’d placed him at the Santa Barbara Airport and written half the things that happen at the fictional Rancho Bonita airport, TSA and probably the FBI would’ve already asked to “speak with me” by now.

Rancho Bonita also lets me bend geography with the kind of creative freedom the real world stubbornly refuses to allow. When you set a story in an actual place, you are beholden to maps, landmarks, and people who know where everything is. Readers will happily message you to say the alley you described is not actually behind the bakery, and that the sun cannot possibly set at the angle you suggest unless the Earth’s axis shifts. But Rancho Bonita? I can slide the coastline a little closer when I need an ocean view, conjure an industrial district for a chase scene, or create an alleyway where two thugs can corner Logan without interference from tourists wielding frappuccinos. Fiction lets you remodel the world without filing a single zoning request.

Another key reason Logan doesn’t live in Santa Barbara is simple public safety. If I put him here, the city would by now have endured: multiple explosions, a handful of high-speed chases, a suspicious number of aviation incidents, and enough gunfire to prompt federal intervention. Hotels would empty. The Chamber of Commerce would despair. The mayor would ask me in a very calm voice to leave and never write about the place again. By sending the mayhem to Rancho Bonita, I spare Santa Barbara the annual destruction that comes with being home to a trouble magnet like Logan.

Perhaps most importantly, Rancho Bonita lets me hide in plain sight. I get to borrow the best parts of the place I call home—the stunning coastline, the mountains, the airport camaraderie, the laid-back beach-town rhythm—without dragging my neighbors, local officials, or favorite restaurants into Logan’s orbit. Santa Barbara provides the inspiration. Rancho Bonita takes the blame.

Ultimately, fiction lets you capture not just the look of a place, but the feeling of it. Rancho Bonita is Santa Barbara seen through a slightly mischievous lens: a little quirkier, a little stranger, more dramatic when the plot needs drama and more peaceful when Logan needs to lick his wounds. It’s shaped not by accurate cartography but by mood, character, and the kinds of people who drift through small coastal airports and stick around because the weather is good and the trouble is interesting.

So why does Logan live in Rancho Bonita instead of Santa Barbara? Because one is where I live—and the other is where I get to play.