Writing Exercise: What Does Your World's Wikipedia Contain?

[elfs]

I actually have been writing, and pretty steadily the past couple of days. Not fabulous amounts, maybe 500 words a day or so, but at least I'm getting somewhere. At least, I think I am. There are moments where I turn to Muse and say, "Where are we going with this story?" and she puts her hands up and with that "I don't know, I thought you knew" look.

Right now, the story du jour is a Yowlerverse story about a married couple living in Seattle who decide to rent out their mother-in-law basement apartment (hey, it's seriously "write what you know" time!). Their first inquiry is from a woman named "Leema," and the protagonist, Tracy, spends the first few paragraphs trolling through websites trying to figure out what questions would scare off even legal hispanic apartment renters. She's more than a little stunned-- and feeling a metric boatload of liberal guilt-- when a pair of beautiful Bastet show up on her doorstep.

The looks-younger, is-older character, Meer, is an exotic model with her own website. She reveals this to Tracy because she wants to "borrow" Tracy's husband as a chaperone for her first photoshoot in six months. Meer reveals that she's not like most Bastet-- she's not bisexual, and really is madly in love with Leema. She shows off an ugly scar along one shoulder and down one arm where a former fan stabbed her after she admitted to a reporter that she really wouldn't be interested in a male lover, ever. That was eight months ago.

I'm not sure where the story goes from here. I'm not even sure who the protagonist is. It might just die on the vine, but after 4,000 words or so, I hope not.

But it occurred to me, as I was writing the story, that I needed a lot more backstory. I needed it to go somewhere permanent and stop residing within my brain.

As an exercise, I decided to write the Bastet Wikipedia page. It's not anywhere remotely done, but it's a fun exercise. With headers like "Definitions," "Distinctions from H. Sapiens", "Origins," "Culture," "Sexuality," "Health and Life Span," "Issues Facing Bastet Today," "American Bastet," "European Bastet," "Bastet in Asia," "Bastet and Muslim Societies," "Population," and "Prominent Bastet," there's a lot to fill in.

So, if your characters live in an Alternative Earth, what do their Wikipedia pages look like?

Comments

[sirfox.livejournal.com]

Have any of these been released yet? i'd be interested to read some.

[solarbird]

Somebody in France beat you to it. ^_^

[duskwuff.livejournal.com]

And not only in France (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastet).

[(Anonymous)]

As far as I know there hasn't been anything new on the Pendorwright site for some time. Just my luck, Elf just got to one of my favourite topics too (dickgirls) and catboy/girls would be every bit as good.

[rapier.livejournal.com]

Ugh, if there's one thing I really need to do, it's write a wikipedia-esque thing for the world knocking around in my head. The prospect of building the ... infrastructure (for lack of a better word) is frankly daunting. I think I looked up how to create a wiki once upon a time, but all the Apache this and webserver that frankly scared me off.