(no subject)

*blinks* I keep having bizarre dreams. First it was LotR/BSG, now it's BtVS/Narnia, but in the most bizarre way possible.

Also, I would like to know why people keep fleeing death in my dreams, it is starting to freak me out. Stress, probably, although at least this is new and exciting, though a little too exciting for my tastes. I am still dealing with anything I see as a sudden-onset anxiety attack by throwing myself at Latin, which, you know, at least I'll learn the language and hopefully not have a nervous breakdown. Whatever works! (Better than Japanese, which I think was well on its way to giving me an ulcer at age 19.)

I am reading this book which is...well, it's interesting, which is why I'm still reading it, but it's really, really obvious that the author is a city-slicker, and also a journalist, and there are a couple of points where my head threatens to explode because she's just wrong, sometimes in hilarious ways, and sometimes in insulting ones. I mean -- yeah, I don't think I'd notice some of it if it wasn't for the fact that I live in cattle country, so I grew up knowing some things that she either glosses over, gets wrong, or utterly ignores. Also there is the comment about "out here, people still cook." Lady apparently lives in NYC, so I don't even know what to make of that comment. A lot of the atmosphere in the book is, "Oh, how quaint. How archaic! How adorable," which makes me look at the book and go, "Lady, you do know this is people's lives, right? And they don't do it because it's quaint or archaic?"

Gah, city-slickers. I have been feeling especially country this week; a couple days ago I used the word "townies" unironically, as in, "Gah, townies! Calling 911 for a raccoon in the road, not even dead? MUST BE WEST-SIDERS." (Frequent appearances in the police blotter: "the cows on such and such road appear to be ill fed." Every. Freaking. Day. "Fifty head of cattle were in the roadway on [] road", which actually happened to be my road, leading to me and my parents looking at each other and going, "We didn't see any cattle, and...no one on [] road has fifty cattle. There are a lot of people with a few cattle, and one herd of sheep, but not fifty cattle. So...someone probably saw five cattle and overestimated.")

sense of place

I have had an epiphany. I've been starting to wonder, lately, if there's something wrong with me -- I read a lot of author blogs, and obviously I watch metafandom and follow links and so on, and one of the things that's come up continually is, "I started writing so I could read stories about people who look like me," or variations on that theme. And that's a great theme! People should totally write books or stories on that theme. But the thing is that it's never a theme that's driven me; maybe I don't have a really strong sense of self.

I realized today, driving from Ellensburg to Yakima, through rolling hills covered with sagebrush and sparse brown grass, that it wasn't stories about people that looked like me that I wanted, but stories about places that looked like the place where I live. And that's a much rarer thing to find especially in the genres I read. (Which is not to say that Japanese-American fantasy is common, because, ha, no.)

It strikes me that that's what I've been trying to do lately in my writing: build up a sense of place, a sense of setting as character, as essential to the story. But where I live, the land doesn't look anything like the generic western European fantasy land that tends to show up in novels: neither place I live, Washington or Louisiana. And that's a crying shame, because -- if the land is different, how does that change the story?

(One of many reasons I love S.M. Stirling's writing: the Emberverse is set in my neck of the woods, and Stirling uses the geography, and not only that, but he does it for my favorite kind of warfare. <3)

If my Narnia didn't look western enough before, just wait until the sagebrush shows up.