Hey, L.A. types...

How long does it take to get from "what used to be the heart of Hollywood." to Reseda?

Also, anyone have some Reseda details to share? What was the weather like in July last year?

Much appreciated.

What used to be the heart of Hollywood? I drive through Reseda, pretty much. It's in the west Valley, and it's hotter than hell, but less hot than Ventura county.

Also ... time to get there depends severely on time of day, what with the 101/405 up in there.

People? Is it a really bad idea of me to ask Gaiman in his journal FAQ thing about whether he'd be upset, hypothetically speaking, about people writing fanfic based on his works?

What used to be the heart of Hollywood?

Beats the fuck out of me. Whatever mythic place just west of Cordelia's Silverlake apartment they declared as the Hyperion's location.

We drove through Reseda on our way out of L.A., but I can't remember how long it took us to get from Burbank to Reseda because I was fiddling with the MP3 player so we could play Screenwriter's Blues. (There was a vague temptation to get off the 101 to look around, but as we were on our way to Camarillo for the night, it didn't happen.)

People? Is it a really bad idea of me to ask Gaiman in his journal FAQ thing about whether he'd be upset, hypothetically speaking, about people writing fanfic based on his works?

IIRC, he has been asked that before, and I think he's slightly wigged by the notion. But, this is old memory working. I'd email the divine Roz, and ask her instead.

That's probably a good idea, actually. Or, with me being shy and all, maybe I'll just ask her when I hook up with her in a couple of weeks. Yes. That's probably a better plan.

How long does it take to get from "what used to be the heart of Hollywood." to Reseda?

Theoretically? 30-40 minutes. Actuality? I'd say an hour and a half.

Theoretically? 40-45 minutes. Actuality? I'd say an hour and a half.

Thank you kindly.

As I recall, Gaiman's not utterly anti-fic. He thinks it's an acceptable way to learn to write, but he's more supportive of original work.

He's not Anne Rice, for instance. And he has written fic, since he wrote a story set in the Matrix universe, although that was, as I recall, upon request.

The thing of it is, though, that The Sandman is totally about storytelling, and about playing with narrative - blurring the lines between symbolic and literal, between fact and fiction. Gaiman doesn't just incorporate other people's fictional characters (from comics and from myths and folktales and plays etc) but he also incorporates real people. It's like an Uberfanfic thing, in a way. And A Game of You in particular plays games with reality and dream and reshaping other people's narratives and shit like that, but it's all about that, all the time. And the fact that Thompson's At Death's Door pulls a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on Season of Mists underlines this for me - that storytelling and narrative games are explicitly what it's all about. Jebus, Gaiman's even a character in the comic himself, and I know they've drawn other Vertigo people into it too - and with The Tempest you've got Gaiman, Morpheus and Shakespeare all explicitly working as mirrors of one another. And the reader is sucked in as a character at times, with the use of the second person. It's all a big multilayering viewpointy thing. Um.

I'm not being very articulate, but I am being very soapboxy. Hmm. Sorry about that.