Housing Code

I may very well have written something like this before, because I spend so much time thinking about it. This is going to become an issue at some point. I don't really know now to make sure and not repeat myself. But for now, onwards and upwards.

One of my favourite things to do in fiction writing is to think up strange living situations for characters. I like to put them in converted strip and shopping malls. In all sorts of sundry family and communal living structures. It fills me with honest to goodness glee to think about the detritus of consumer culture and the strange American landscape we have in front of us, to think of all that being converted into something awesomely human and positive and grand.

Yay for that. But how about we think of doing something like that. Converted warehouses is a great example, but at far too bourgeois in most cases. But what about all those other empty buildings and run down spaces. Old barns? Churches? My sister almost got a place in a converted schoolhouse.

My point is that place influences life. Obvs. And that places that are not structured like the standard house or apartment create different ways of interacting. Like if you lived in a shopping mall (e.g. the whole mall is now an apartment complex) you would necessarily having a different relationship with your neighbors than say in a suburban cul-de-sac. And what is more, because these places have an aire of whimsy about them, it isn't just different, but completely reflecsive on the nature of houses and homes and communal interaction. That is, the context is so different that you have to think about the basic premise just as a matter of course.

I think these are good things. You don't have to. And you also don't have to live in the shopping mall with me if you don't want to. You can just go buy a townhouse and pretend you don't know the people through the wall who sleep mere inches from your head.