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Post by Ralph058 on Dec 2, 2016 21:18:07 GMT -5
When you mentioned Round Lake, I pictured the real Round Lake a few miles south of here. Without going back and rereading, I picture the college as being Milton College and the town they are from as Richmond. I'll ride on this for a while until you throw me for a loop.
But, that means the rock climbing would be in a quarry or in the Driftless Area.
Ralph
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Post by Boyd Percy on Dec 3, 2016 0:59:21 GMT -5
Wes seems to go out of his way to avoid using "real" names for places or locations. That being the case, I asked him recently if he would use Spearfish Lake if he had to do it over again. He said he would. He had no way of knowing how popular his series of books would be when he first used it in Snowplow Extra 35 years ago. I wish I had some knowledge of the Upper Midwest so I could picture the locations that Wes is writing about. I do like the fact that he used a historical event, the Palm Sunday tornadoes of April,1965. He would probably have been the age of Joe/Joan at the time so he may have some direct knowledge of what happened in that area.
If you look at a road atlas of Colorado, you'll find many place names that Wes uses in his stories. He probably flew over them sometime in the past. All these things seems to make his stories come alive for me.
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Post by Wes on Dec 3, 2016 10:56:46 GMT -5
I went through the Palm Sunday tornado -- actually tornadoes. There were two that hit the local area about half an hour apart. I was at home in the basement a couple of miles away for the first one but was out in my car and probably within a couple hundred yards of the second one although I didn't know it at the time. I spent the next couple weeks helping with cleanup. So, yes, that much of Joe/Joey's experience reflects reality.
The big reason I use imaginary places is to keep people from being able to confuse them with real places. I don't want to get someone writing me protesting, for instance, that the pizza joint in some small town is on the north side of the street rather than the south. What's more, it keeps people from thinking that I'm writing about a real person in those places. In my early years I occasionally wrote a real person into a story but I learned not to do it.
Getting realistic place names for imaginary places is always a challenge since people are going to try to connect them to the real world. Round Lake? There have to be hundreds by that name, like Blue Lake in Promises to Keep. There are two "Round Lakes" in the township I live in, separated by several miles, so go figure. A few years ago I came across a web page for "most common place names" and I often refer to that list. I sometimes have to use real places -- it would be difficult to write about an imaginary Grand Canyon for example, although I have used at least one imaginary site there.
I often use real places as models for my imaginary places. For example, Venable College is based on three different real-world colleges in that era. The name? When I was reaching for one my wife mentioned that she had to visit her dentist, and his name sounded like a reasonable one to me. I could say more about that, but it gets into spoiler country.
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Post by Ernest Bywater on Dec 6, 2016 1:38:56 GMT -5
It's a smart move NOT to mention names of real institutions. When The Scot asked me to finish Shiloh the version of what he'd already done had named a real life US institution of higher learning. I had to change all references to the name, and the one now used in the story is only lightly hidden, but by not using its real name I was able to fend off the legal threat they made about diluting their real name because it's a brand name. Anyone with half a brain can work out what it's based on, but that's not the same as using their real name. Since then I've approached three other educational organisations in the US about using the name of their institution in a story, and got the same answer - "Sorry, we can't allow you to do that due to legal reasons concerning brand names and existing contracts with support organisations." Which is why you'll see I often have unnamed colleges and schools in my stories, or they have totally fictitious ones. Mind you, in most cases the fact I set them in real cities and describe some of the local area means most people can tag them with the real name, but also they accept I'm not using the real name.
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Post by Boyd Percy on Dec 6, 2016 23:23:24 GMT -5
Wes is still having fun with us. Not only a bouldering and climbing class but also a nude modeling class. I can buy into the idea that they had "mandatory" chapel. Maybe Joanie should have read the college handbook/catalogue while she was recuperating. I don't know if colleges still give them out nowadays anyway. Probably everything is on-line. What will Wes think up next? Joan is more than a little bit of a rebel and Cat seems to be in sync with her. Couldn't ask for a better roommate. Since Joan didn't want to go back to Simsville for the summer, Cat mentions about going to France. By the way, I wonder if Wes derived the name Simsville from the computer game SimCity. In Alone Together, Tanisha suggests to Jon that they could play SimCity together instead of Duke Nukem like he suggested.
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Post by Wes on Dec 11, 2016 21:02:00 GMT -5
I can't remember where I came up with Simsville but it definitely wasn't from Sim City.
Changing topics: put yourself in Joan's position, since she still has an awful lot of Joe in her. Considering the proposition of going to bed with a guy has got to be strange indeed. It is nowhere near the same thing as Eve in Girl in the Mirror!
Actually, while I think that's an interesting question, I was talking about this story with a couple of women friends about my age tonight, explaining it a little -- they haven't read it (at least yet.) I told them, "Think of all the ways that life for women has changed since we were that age, and you would know more about it than I would. Now, Joe gets to go through that whole era again with the view of the other side of the coin. That's a real different perspective."
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Post by Boyd Percy on Dec 13, 2016 1:47:14 GMT -5
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Post by GaryDan on Dec 13, 2016 18:53:04 GMT -5
Not sure if this is a spoiler, if there is more detailed information in a later chapter about that Airline from Iceland.
Quote from Joan in Chapter 13. “But there’s this airline out of Iceland that we’ve heard has some pretty cheap rates, so it might be possible.”
This brought back an old memory/experience. In 1968 I flew on Loftleiðir Icelandic Airlines, based out of Reykjavik Iceland, on what I believe was a Canadair CL-44J, a big 4 engine Turboprop usually used as a freight carrier, but purchased and converted for Loftleiðir as a passenger aircraft. I flew from New York Kennedy International to Reykjavic, then from Reykjavik to what I swear was a cow pasture in the middle of Luxembourg. One helluva a noisy and long flight, somewhere in the neighborhood of 14 hours of flight time. I think the round trip ticket at that time was $220.00 US.
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Post by Boyd Percy on Dec 14, 2016 17:42:37 GMT -5
From my point of view, it's only a spoiler if you purposely let the cat out of the bag though it was probably good that Wes added possible spoilers on the title line. I was glad to read about your experiences with Icelandic Airlines in 1968.
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Post by Andrew on Dec 23, 2016 2:19:38 GMT -5
All those references to Chamonix, a decent sized town which has a road and (narrow gauge) railway heading North over a mountain pass to Martigny in Switzerland. I don't know when the road was built but the railway was completed shortly before WW1. Nowadays there it is also an Ice Climbing centre. I had a Ski Guide there a few years back who taught/guided Ice Climbing in summer. He indicated that there were a lot of fatalities, even amongst the Guides.
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Post by Jon on Jan 8, 2017 22:27:29 GMT -5
Joe/Joan mentions traveling on the Interstate as to how Joan & Cat got to & from their western adventures. I-80 was not completed until 1974 on the western portion. East of Keith County, home of Ogallala and to the east were completed by late 1968.
If the timelines in the two universes are similar, much of the journey westward would have been on US30 or the Lincoln Highway. The Lincoln Highway parallels the Union Pacific Railroad mainline across Nebraska and eastern Wyoming, separated by only a hundred feet or so.
When traveling to Denver, I jump off I-80 around Grand Island and go north to US-30 for the journey westward. Following US-30 gives a break from the sterile monotony of the Interstate. On US-30 as you leave a town, you can see the grain elevators of the next town in the distance. While one must observe the lower speed limits in towns, but this is a much more satisfying way to travel. We use I-80 at night and when time is critical. It's amazing to be traveling at the 55 mph speed limit and have a train pass you. The speed limit (restriction) on the UP mainline is 79 mph.
When Joanie & Cat were going across Nebraska the remnants of the UP's "Cities" passenger trains and some rather heavy duty locomotives ran this portion of the railroad.
I-70 across Kansas is another matter. It's simply flat and boring. Best time to cross Kansas is night. On only one trip on I-70 did I rather "enjoy" the ride. The trip was returning from the Denver area and I wanted to travel along the southern edge of Kansas near the Oklahoma state line. I was heading east of Denver late in the afternoon into the evening and dusk. Off to the north and east I saw a thunderstorm (this was early August) and thought I would be "into" the storm soon. All I can say is eastern Colorado and western Kansas is big! I never caught up with the storm, but followed it for at least 4 or 5 hours into the night. The light show was amazing.
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Post by Leo Kerr on Jan 8, 2017 23:15:24 GMT -5
Although not directly appropriate, but sort of responding to Jon's comment; it was mostly "Dawnwalker" that inspired me to give up flying to various trade shows and factory events, and started driving around the country. Yes; most of my coworkers think I have the hole through the head for driving from Maryland to Nevada -- three times, so far! -- or to Wisconsin and around Lake Michigan a couple of times.
And even taking "the sterile interstates" is a huge learning experience over being crammed into a purple aluminum can hurtling through the sky. (I live near a Southwest Air major hub. Probably 60% of the passenger flights out of my air-port are SWA. I wonder how hard that is to look up..)
Leo
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Post by Boyd Percy on Jan 11, 2017 0:30:14 GMT -5
Wes, some of your characters have pulled very clever stunts for a variety of reasons. Joan and Cat's silencing of the bell ranks up near the top of the list. Did that come from a real life incident that you once heard about or just from your vivid imagination?
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Post by Wes on Jan 11, 2017 12:30:51 GMT -5
It came out of my imagination, not as a story, but from being around an irritating bell and thinking about how it could be silenced. Unfortunately I never was climber enough to deal with the problem.
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Post by Boyd Percy on Jan 11, 2017 19:44:08 GMT -5
That's a perk of being an author. You can create stories and characters that can do things you wish you had done without suffering the consequences.
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