Making it Up As I Go

Was just wandering around the magical internet looking at other people’s blogs when I had a thought- how many of them are completely and utterly fictional? I mean, I know people use blogs for all different reasons, some as journals, places to just write, or a place to put their fiction. But I wonder how many are completely fictional while appearing not to be? You see, after seeing a blog my friend created that was “written” by a character in his upcoming novel, I decided to try the same for my main character Claire. Figured it would help me get inside her head to write posts as her. And it’s kind of fun, considering that no one looking at it would realize necessarily, that Claire Sawyer doesn’t actually exist. So I was reading another website, written apparently by a femme del nuit, and started wondering if this is a real woman talking shamelessly about her life and profession, or is she a character, made up by someone somewhere? And how would you ever know? The blurring is fascinating. People become characters become people become characters.

Almost finished with Hell Hath No Fury– 40 pages to go, and my previous comments still stand. One very interesting chapter/ subgenre however was the “perscriptive letter”- examples of breakup letters from manuals on how to write letters. Most come from manuals from the 1800’s-early 1900’s. The subject headings of these letters are so specific that they’re kind of funny. For example- “Reply to a letter sent by a Stranger who saw a Woman at Church” or “Unfavorable Reply to a letter regarding a Reverse of Fortune and the Duty arising therefrom”. I think my favorite was “A reply to a letter of courtship from an elderly man to a girl of nineteen”. The best part about it really is that the letter attempts to pawn off the old guy on a woman of 28- how old is “elderly” that 28 is so much more appropriate than 19? And how many girls of specifically nineteen were getting hit on by elderly men that they had to create a letter specifically for it? I think I may need to see if any of these old letter writing manuals are still around, I think they’d be fun to read. Considering their age they’ll probably be hard to find, but I’ll take a little look see.