Virginia Montanez has written Pittsburgh commentary for nearly 20 years. An area native and current resident of North Huntingdon, it seems natural her first novel is set here.

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“Can you imagine if I wrote a book not set in Pittsburgh, what people would do?” she says. “They would just be like, ‘What the hell is this?’”

“Nothing. Everything.” published this year, is a work of fiction about an author named Ellis Sloan. Like Montanez, Sloan is divorced with two children, but Montanez says all of her characters are fictional.

“People have been reading me forever so I know their first thought was going to be, ‘It’s happened to her.’ Then it’s not fiction. Then I just might as well write a memoir. No, this is clearly meant to be a story I see in my head that I loved,” she says.

Even the fact that Montanez is a big fan of Pittsburgh-born David Conrad of CBS’ “Ghost Whisperer” and Ellis’ love interest is also a TV star on a CBS show?

“I know everyone was … going to wonder if that’s him, and what it really was … I needed [the character] to be someone that went away to a really big life … so I said, I’ll make him an actor,” she says. “But I didn’t want him to be someone [Ellis] followed along with, so I needed it to be kind of an actor that older women liked, so I was like, it’s got to be a CBS show.

“When you’re a writer, you take it from everywhere, here, here, here, here, here, and then what ends up is a story that’s fiction.”

That applies to the entire novel, including the main character.

“When I’m thinking about Ellis, I’m not thinking of myself. But she does seem real to me because I fleshed her out so much that it’s almost a sadness that she doesn’t exist. So that tells me that I separated myself from her.”

The book is unapologetically Pittsburgh, taking no pains to explain references to Oakmont Bakery, Eat’n Park and Kennywood. Montanez says Pittsburgh is alive in her book but always as a general setting, nothing more.

“Sometimes you hear people talk about their book and they’re like, ‘Yes, New York City is its own character in the book.’ I just didn’t want that,” she says. “So I was intentionally not describing where [Ellis] lives. In my head, I saw a duplex, but I was like, it could be Oakmont, but it could totally be those cute duplexes in Homewood. I was careful not to give away too much regarding stuff like that.”

The book’s publisher, Winding Road Stories, often translates its works onto the screen, but Montanez says she doesn’t know what will come of her book.

“I can only do so much because I can’t become a publicity machine, it’s not in my nature,” she says. “So here’s my philosophy: Get it into as many hands as I can right now and then just step back. I can’t be this person who’s checking reviews, I have grad school, I have a lot of stuff I have planned. I feel like I’ve succeeded in what I wanted to do which is I published a book, it’s on my shelf, people like it and it’s out there. Everything else is gravy.”

Montanez has several appearances scheduled in the coming weeks, including a book and author talk at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at Norwin Public Library. She’ll be at Connolly Ballroom in Alumni Hall in Oakland with the University of Pittsburgh’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at 10:30 a.m. on Oct. 6 for an author talk and book-signing; at noon on Oct. 7, she’ll have a book signing at City Books OcTBRfest; and at 6:30 p.m. on Oct. 12 she’ll have a book and author talk at Sewickley Public Library.