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the contest, and research
Just to bring you up to date on the contest, a couple of points:
1. Ten people still are hanging in limbo because they haven't replied to the confirmation email. If that's you, get in touch so we can fix it, okay?
2. Right now there are 83 people signed up, not counting the ten mentioned above. So put out the word, because we have to hit 300 before I'll schedule the drawing. You'll notice the box to the right with a link to the sign-up page. Point people to that.
3. I finally added up what it would cost to buy all four books on unabridged cassette. With shipping, tax, etc, it would come to $492 for me. Also, I get a limited number of these things from Books on Tape. This is not a piddly paperback giveaway we're talking about, just so you know.
Change of subject.
Two mornings a week I work on Pajama Jones. I'm still in the preliminary stages, drawing town maps and writing up character reports and struggling with names -- which is shorthand for the most important thing, getting to know the characters. I get a great deal of pleasure out of all this. I love planning the town. My daughter says I should get SIM City, so I could really go crazy putting it together (the town's name, at the moment, is Greenbriar, Georgia).
When I was very young I remembering going to play at the house of two girls my age who lived around the block on Larchmont Street. They had a playroom in their basement, and the whole thing was taken up with a city they had built out of shoe and candy and jewelry boxes, cans of all sizes, and blocks. I was enchanted, and also, I was infected with the city building bug. I've always done this, but it didn't become legitimate work until I started writing novels.
So I said to my daughter, I said: speak to me more of this SIM City. And she went on to tell me about the possibility of growing my city from the ground up, starting with major geological events to get the land formation features I want. Apparently the software would remind me about the need to locate the sewage treatment complex someplace appropriate, along with other crucial but generally invisible matters. There are discussion boards where people wax philosophical about everything from schools to public parks. The SIM City website makes it sound like a career move:
As you build a city, the regions around you become important as you can set up deals to provide water, power and more. You can even work to build industrial parks and bedroom communities!
I admit, it sounds kind of interesting. It also sounds like the mother of all procrastination techniques. I'd have to upgrade my mac, because SIM City is ravenous when it comes to RAM. I'd have to learn it. I'd be obliged to go foraging for information and background and samples on the internet. Then there are the forums. I'd end up doing so much research that I'd most likely be qualified for a degree in urban planning. So, no. I'm not going to go that route, no matter how interesting it seems to me. I'll use pencils and graph paper and sometimes Photoshop, as is my usual approach.
On other research fronts, these are some of the topics I've been going after for Pajama Jones: Swedish car manufacturers in the U.S., how car factories are planned, historic building laws and procedures, architectural firms and how they work and get paid, famous philanthropists, what kind of education a head buyer for a high-end specialty store would have, designers of bed linens, designers of pajamas, the treatment of phobias, psychiatrists who specialize in phobias, the causes and treatment of bacterial endocarditis, heart transplant support groups, heart transplant procedures.
If you've got some good information to share on any of these topics, please do speak up.
September 9, 2005 11:51 AM
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Comments
SIM CITY? Oh, no -- Flee! FLEE while you can! I loved that game so much that I finally I had to remove it from my hard drive. (This was several versions ago, I'm sure.) My wondrous husband had shown me how to "pause the disasters" (so, you know, no tornados could strike, and Godzilla remained under the ocean, so what you built stayed built) and how to type in a cheat to "get a grant" so you had almost unlimited funds to build with. It was divine.
Posted by: robyn at September 9, 2005 04:25 PM
Now see, Robyn, you only make it more appealing. Suddenly I have this picture of a city built by women working together. Even naming it would be such fun.
Posted by: sara at September 9, 2005 05:19 PM
I'm not sure if I'm one of the 10 you're waiting for a reply from(?), but i didn't receive a confirmation email. In any case, I've used the box to sign up again. :-)
Posted by: Jaq at September 9, 2005 06:07 PM
I wonder what the correlation is between childhood city-building and eventual novel-writing? I used to use our entire patio: wooden blocks, plastic blocks, bricks, chalk, twigs and sticks, pot covers, toy cars, shoe trees, cardboard, magazine pics, fabric, watercolors, magnetic letters, big dolls, little dolls, ice cube trays, marbles, dominoes, plaing cards, empty condiment bottles. And on and on. What fun. Sim City, tempting as it sounds, couldn't really compete with the raw materials, could it?
Posted by: Karen at September 9, 2005 06:46 PM
Jaq -- I'll check to make sure all is well with your entry.
Karen -- interesting question. Now I'm envisioning an authors' conference where we rent out the ballroom in a big hotel and build a city out of found objects. Then everybody goes off and uses that city as the setting for his or her next novel, of whatever genre.
Crickey, that sounds like fun.
Posted by: sara at September 10, 2005 02:36 AM
oh the nostalgia this raised in me.
At primary school age, my sister and I used to spend hours and hours and then days into weeks building first houses with families, then towns. It all started with Lego blocks, but as we didn't have enough Lego to build models of all the houses, we ended up just laying out the floor plans in Lego and certain blocks represented the men/women/children in that house. Then we could move the house plans around the sitting room floor to lay out the town, where the bakery was etc. Then we lived the lives of the inhabitants. It was even better when our cousins came to stay - more characters, more houses.
We all used to spend our summers together running riot outdoors making dens and inhabiting those as various charcters too. One summer we spent 6 whole weeks on a 'wagon train' (thanks to local council workmen who abandoned some fencing materials on a playing field).
I agree that SIM City sounds very dangerous indeed.
Posted by: Alison at September 11, 2005 06:03 PM
You're looking at this SIM thing the wrong way. Sure, it would be time-consuming. But you could use it as research for a book about...uh...women working together to build a city. Or about a woman who becomes addicted to SIM City and never does anything constructive ever again.
Posted by: sarandipity at September 12, 2005 11:02 AM
sarandipity -- such a simple solution, really. Thanks, and if I disappear from the blogosphere, you'll know where I am.
Posted by: sara at September 12, 2005 11:34 AM
No need to disappear. You'll just have to change your site's subject from storytelling to citybuilding.
Posted by: sarandipity at September 13, 2005 08:08 AM