We Can't Rewind, We've Gone Too Far

I’m thinking about writing and specificity and place.

There’s a fanfic writer whose works are great and just to my taste, but one issue with them is that - probably because she’s an Australian writing about Americans - is that usually her fics aren’t set anywhere. They’re set in a city, and we never get the name of that city, let alone the neighbourhoods or parks or nearby areas. It’s just “the city.”

And this means, of course, that you can’t get things wrong - I’m sure I’ve gotten things wrong about London in my fics. And it definitely throws a reader out of a story when something about a place they know is obviously wrong.

But this lack of any sense of place is also a flaw, or at least the extreme absence of a virtue. One of the reasons I love Scott Pilgrim so much is because it is so extremely specific about place that I have literally stood where the characters are standing - which is easy to get across in a movie but much harder in comics. It’s Torontonian like almost no media is Torontonian, and for that I will forgive it everything.

And we have the internet now. If I want to know how long it takes to get from Harlem to Queens I can find out in ten seconds. For that matter, if I want to see whether a specific park has park benches my characters can sit on while they have an angsty conversation, I can literally look at those exact benches in Google Streetview. It’s much easier to, at least, not get things staggeringly wrong, as long as you know what kind of things you might get wrong and remember to look them up.

I've been blocked on writing for the last two weeks for RL reasons (the kind that come with an extra bonus round of More Anxiety, yay, just when the drugs were working) but I know what's going on there, at least. But I've realized that I have the beginning and end of this Canadian feminist modern AU Irene Adler fic basically done ... and pretty much no middle in between. It's very irritating.

So here's something that's not going to fit anywhere else.


Be My Clash At Demonhead


I got the door, as usual.

There was an absolutely tiny teenage girl standing outside, with huge intense eyes. "Hi. Are you Xu-lai Ho?" she asked.

"No, I’m Jane Wang. Xu-lai's downstairs. Come in. Can I take your coat?"

"Sure, here, thanks. Can I take my shoes off? So are you her, um, assistant? I guess you're both usually chasing after people, right?"

She kept on like that all the way down the stairs. I sadistically looked forward to handing her off to Xu-lai.

Xu-lai was leaning back on the futon smoking, her feet on the coffee table, an ashtray in her lap. At least the window over her head was open, I thought.

"Um, hi," said the girl.

Xu-lai opened her eyes. "Hello."

The girl took a deep breath, then whipped out a phone. "I'm Knives Chau," she said, calling up a photo of a pink-haired girl, "and I need to know everything about her."