So...names for our version of Winesburg, Ohio. Bindleton sounded like a good name for a kind of mellow town with a humdrum sort of life. I guess by having an underlying mundane nature for the town I figured we could have fun unmundane-ifying it. Milderweicht just sounded cool, and apparently it means "mild softened" in German.
. . . so I guess I secretly know German. Anyway, Wesley over at Genre Whiplash mentioned something about how Winnebago made him think of "lose a bagel," so I decided that since our little city is going to be on the coast, why not make it Luza Bay City, with a local bird being the Luza Bay Gull. Yeah. Aren't I clever. (edit: apparently Wesley put Luza Bay in his post too, but whatever)
Besides names, I think it'd be cool if part of what creates tension between the two sides of the river was the fact that one side was developed much later than the other. For example, a bunch of people started building houses on one side of the river, but that side ran out of building space, so people were forced to spill over into the other side, which ended up much more modern because time moves and technology improves. One side could consist mainly of the old-timers, with hip teenie boppers and young, stressed working people on the other side. Or something.
As for how the two sides are connected, I like the idea of having the public square spanning the river. I feel like the public square represents a lot, even as much as a microcosm of the town as a whole. It could be the place where friends from the two sides of the river meet after school. It could be the sea of people who seem to prevent you from going to the other side, a warped perception created by your mind's need for a physical embodiment of your reluctance to visit the father that left you before you could even say "papa." It could be the place where your mother had taken you once when you were a child to see the big clock tower, Little Ben, up close; the place where you recalled that memory, then broke into tears, unable to jump the railing into the river whose current would have carried you into the bay, and from there, nowhere. It could be the place where a little scuffle started when a carefree teenager bumped into an old man, but then transformed into a town-wide brawl as residents from the two halves came in to back up each side's fighter. It could be the maze of bodies through which the postman must navigate in order to deliver the forbidden letters between lovers separated by the river . . .
A ton could happen with a huge bridge, since it represents so much. As for haunted things, why not make Little Ben haunted? Maybe there's a popular legend among the high school crowd that details how a madman who once ravaged the streets of the old town went inside the clock to escape the sheriff. But as all the kids nowadays know, the sheriff's corrupt. He was to hold a secret meeting with the madman that night, after the madman took out the do-gooders from the old town, but instead of paying him off, the sheriff simply shot him in the chest three times, once in the head, knocking the madman over the edge of the maintenance platform and into the gears. Time stopped, and so did the madman. That's why his ghost is there, even today . . .
There's my two cents. Honestly, it's in my personality to sit back and watch everyone else argue over everything, just because I find it amusing. I think if we can at least agree on some basic things, even like what we have now, it would be best to stop there and let each of us all just come up with our own stories from that point. We would all be able to just write what we want and have fun with it, without needing to hold back our creativity to accommodate someone else's idea.
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