Real and Imaginary Cities

[tim_pratt]

A few weeks ago I officially delivered Blood Engines, the first book in my series (which I guess for convenience I'm calling the "Marla Mason" series, after the protagonist). I also got a look at the cover art and copy (it's lovely, and I'll post it soon -- my editor asked me to hold off until she can send me high-res versions of the art).

Comments

[oneminutemonkey]

Haha. That reminds me of my shameful time of playing on World of Darkness MUSHes. (text-based online games, for those scratching their heads...) And what got me were the number of games that tried to invent ficticious cities set in Maine, or in Washington State, and by golly, there's only so many places you can -put- cities of the sizes they were claiming...

I know I can get away with inventing a small(ish) town in Alaska, especially if it sort of spills over into other realms, because there's a lot of room for small(ish) towns as long as you're relatively logical about it. And I can even invent a medium-sized city in Missouri, because I'm from the East Coast and we don't believe anything exists between the East and West Coasts. :>

[buymeaclue]

>I'd buy a medium sized city in the midwest simply because there are lots of medium-sized cities in the midwest...

I was going to say, isn't there already at least one mid-sized city in Missouri? *g*

[alanajoli]

This is what I'm considering doing for my next book--inventing a small "village" (not even a township) near New Haven, CT. There are enough little communities that have their own specific names (Stony Creek and Indian Neck are parts of Branford, for example) that I think I can get away with this, but as I need to invent specific things about the setting (a private school being one of them), I don't want to place it too concretely.

That said, having just spent three novels in a shared-world setting (albeit one to which I contributed the details for the cities), I'm looking forward to leaving high fantasy behind and writing in a world where there are *cell phones.*