Writing Meme, Day 13
Apr. 13th, 2010 09:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
valarltd13. What's your favorite culture to write, fictional or not?
Tough question.
I'd say it's the Disunited States in my dark future. Each of the countries has its own cultures and subcultures. But Dark Memphis is a nastily fascinating place.
Things we haven't seen, yet, in the Nikolai books.
At the corner of Danny Thomas and Poplar, on a little wedge of land, stands a fading two-story house. It's painted yellow, with rust trim right now. It has a razor wire fence because the neighborhood is not a good one. It was, in its Victorian heyday, a brothel. It is the oldest former brothel still standing in Memphis. The Revenants street gang uses it as a boarding school-cum-brothel. Nick lived there for about a year before he got busted and sent to reform school.
The gay district in Memphis is Cooper-Young. They intersect. Good dining. Art galleries, the GLBT center, etc, all in that neighborhood. Dan from the Gay Christmas Werewolf series lives in the area. In the Nick'verse, there is a three-story high cairn of rocks and bones in the middle of the street, where the citizens of Memphis cleansed the city of gays. Daddies take their gentler sons down there to remind them what happens to queers.
The buses still run. FedEx still hires. Black people work under the table, because they cannot be legally hired by any company. They are not allowed weapons. They are not allowed on the streets after dark. There is no welfare, no assistance of any kind, including unemployment. Nor is there public schooling. Private school is limited to white boys. Doctors cannot attend women, because it's immodest. Birth control is illegal. Make-up is illegal, a tool of deception, a form of witchcraft.
Nikolai has a lot of culture shock to deal with when he is introduced to the rest of the world.
Tough question.
I'd say it's the Disunited States in my dark future. Each of the countries has its own cultures and subcultures. But Dark Memphis is a nastily fascinating place.
Things we haven't seen, yet, in the Nikolai books.
At the corner of Danny Thomas and Poplar, on a little wedge of land, stands a fading two-story house. It's painted yellow, with rust trim right now. It has a razor wire fence because the neighborhood is not a good one. It was, in its Victorian heyday, a brothel. It is the oldest former brothel still standing in Memphis. The Revenants street gang uses it as a boarding school-cum-brothel. Nick lived there for about a year before he got busted and sent to reform school.
The gay district in Memphis is Cooper-Young. They intersect. Good dining. Art galleries, the GLBT center, etc, all in that neighborhood. Dan from the Gay Christmas Werewolf series lives in the area. In the Nick'verse, there is a three-story high cairn of rocks and bones in the middle of the street, where the citizens of Memphis cleansed the city of gays. Daddies take their gentler sons down there to remind them what happens to queers.
The buses still run. FedEx still hires. Black people work under the table, because they cannot be legally hired by any company. They are not allowed weapons. They are not allowed on the streets after dark. There is no welfare, no assistance of any kind, including unemployment. Nor is there public schooling. Private school is limited to white boys. Doctors cannot attend women, because it's immodest. Birth control is illegal. Make-up is illegal, a tool of deception, a form of witchcraft.
Nikolai has a lot of culture shock to deal with when he is introduced to the rest of the world.
