The Arkham down the street...and other tales from the House of Extraverts!
Greetings from Maine! I have a folder full of lovely, lovely bookmarks from LJ, and every day I find time to check out maybe one or two of them at most. This folder has become my Happy Place, and when things get too extraverty, I close my eyes and imagine the wonders within it. Ahhhh...
Largely I survive by finding little "hooks" in my life that I can link to fandom in the privacy of my own head. For example, I live just ten minutes or so from what was once the Maine Home for the Feeble-Minded at Pineland, until it was closed in 1996. As a child, this place filled me (and most local children) with an entirely understandable terror. It was a complex of mouldering brick buildings with ominous, dark fir trees all around them, and the most terrible abuses took place there. My church youth group went to visit when I was in junior high (long after the worst of the abuses had been exposed and halted), and it left a major impression on me--I most strongly remember seeing a patient in a bed with untreated water on the brain (I don't think they knew treatments then), his head massively distended and huge, his eyes blank. I remember hearing people moaning and screaming in the corridors. I vaguely remember seeing shackles on the walls, and barred windows, but that might be imagination--but certainly they had been there.
The place was closed down in 1996 and the buildings left to rot for almost a decade. Then a nonprofit foundation bought them, ripped out all the insides of the buildings, redid all of them, and turned it into basically a beautiful community center--office spaces, organic livestock and gardening, the works. It's lovely...and it still terrifies me every time we go there to have lunch. If ever a place was haunted with the souls of those who suffered and died there, it's that place.
So I've been doing research on the Pineland Home and thinking about Arkham quite a lot, as well as exploring various old Victorian houses and gardens when possible and thinking about Wayne Manor. I'm probably going out boating Friday and will be thinking about how to work that into a story. I haven't really had any time to write, but part of my brain always seems to be thinking, "How would I describe this if I were writing it as part of a story?"...even things I know couldn't possibly become an S/B story, like playing with my nieces on a playground. It's kind of nice, actually, and keeps me relatively sane.
All of which is to say I miss you all and am very far behind but am finding a little time every day to at least make sure I bookmark what I'm missing! Come Sept. 3, I'll be ready to start catching up in earnest...
Largely I survive by finding little "hooks" in my life that I can link to fandom in the privacy of my own head. For example, I live just ten minutes or so from what was once the Maine Home for the Feeble-Minded at Pineland, until it was closed in 1996. As a child, this place filled me (and most local children) with an entirely understandable terror. It was a complex of mouldering brick buildings with ominous, dark fir trees all around them, and the most terrible abuses took place there. My church youth group went to visit when I was in junior high (long after the worst of the abuses had been exposed and halted), and it left a major impression on me--I most strongly remember seeing a patient in a bed with untreated water on the brain (I don't think they knew treatments then), his head massively distended and huge, his eyes blank. I remember hearing people moaning and screaming in the corridors. I vaguely remember seeing shackles on the walls, and barred windows, but that might be imagination--but certainly they had been there.
The place was closed down in 1996 and the buildings left to rot for almost a decade. Then a nonprofit foundation bought them, ripped out all the insides of the buildings, redid all of them, and turned it into basically a beautiful community center--office spaces, organic livestock and gardening, the works. It's lovely...and it still terrifies me every time we go there to have lunch. If ever a place was haunted with the souls of those who suffered and died there, it's that place.
So I've been doing research on the Pineland Home and thinking about Arkham quite a lot, as well as exploring various old Victorian houses and gardens when possible and thinking about Wayne Manor. I'm probably going out boating Friday and will be thinking about how to work that into a story. I haven't really had any time to write, but part of my brain always seems to be thinking, "How would I describe this if I were writing it as part of a story?"...even things I know couldn't possibly become an S/B story, like playing with my nieces on a playground. It's kind of nice, actually, and keeps me relatively sane.
All of which is to say I miss you all and am very far behind but am finding a little time every day to at least make sure I bookmark what I'm missing! Come Sept. 3, I'll be ready to start catching up in earnest...