This map hung up on the truck stop hallway door

I forgot to mention this before, except on truepenny's journal, but my story "Nutmeg and Limestone" has been accepted for Say . . . what's the combination? This is a story with which I am peculiarly pleased, because it's not set in New England or even the generalized Northeast. I am not sure that I write stories to which place is particularly crucial, so most of the cities are nameless and even street names or specific conjunctions of stores don't often turn up, but I think it's fairly clear from the seasons, flora and fauna, and the occasional landscape or skyline that most of mine take place in Boston or New York or some plausible amalgam.* "Nutmeg and Limestone" is likewise never specifically located, but it's set in Gainesville, Florida.**

I don't know if this will be perceptible to anyone else. It may be one of the facts that I know about a story, but that makes no difference to the audience.*** But because I have never lived in Gainesville, I care. I couldn't throw the visual description off the top of my head; I don't have that gift, either for historical fiction or fiction set in unfamiliar locations. For a period of about two and a half years, thanks to dgr8bob, I had visited Gainesville about twice a year; but "Nutmeg and Limestone" was written in August 2004. I had to double-check what trees the main character would see when he looked out the window. (I had to look up some of their names.) I'm sure I got all kinds of small details wrong: colloquialisms, speech patterns; like American writers who set stories in London, but all their characters sound like New Yorkers. I probably mixed up details I hadn't even known to notice. When the story comes out, anybody who lives in north-central Florida should feel free to correct me. But I'm still not unhappy.

It's a very small point, I know. Most of what I've mentioned is peripheral detail: the story itself takes place more or less all in the main character's living room. But given how neurotic I am about not being able to make place and time and atmosphere and detail feel right—there's a reason I haven't yet been able to make historical fiction work—I'm immensely relieved that "Nutmeg and Limestone" exists in its current form at all.

And Christopher Rowe likes it, which really pleases me. He's cool. And he doesn't live in the Northeast, either.

*There are skyscrapers. There are maple trees all over the place. There's usually a river and sometimes a harbor and colorful autumn and lots of bookstores. I make an exception for stories like "Till Human Voices Wake Us" and "A Ceiling of Amber, A Pavement of Pearl," which I envision in Portland, Maine: so there's ocean, and lots of bookstores.

**I don't know why it's set in Gainesville. The main character lives there, that's why: for no reason except that when the words started, that's what turned up. The story had to accommodate. In the end, I'm glad it did; I like the geographical contrasts that grew up as the plot progressed. But don't ask me to explain more than that.

***For example, I know that in the last scene of "Little Fix of Friction," when Blake is waiting for Niko outside the theater, he's come to see a production of Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream in which Niko played Puck—a tumbler's role, non-singing. This is nowhere in the text. So far as I'm concerned, the knowledge doesn't even change the story: the trickster nature of Niko's character is noted, and that's what's important. Whatever readers visualize for the performance is their own affair. But Britten's opera was in my head while I was writing the scene, and so no matter what other operas or musicals or straight plays may require a children's chorus, with sequined hair or without, from my perspective Niko will never have been in anything else.

First you pound the fish flat with a mallet

Is it a bad sign if my first reaction to the discovery of a new crustacean is "Aww . . ."* and my second is "I wonder if it's edible?"

*So fuzzily Lovecraftian! Also, the fact that there's a Polynesian goddess of crustaceans simply rocks.