Going to Mythcon and thoughts on setting

I'm going to Mythcon! I had started out with the assumption that I'd have to skip it this year because I was spending all my travel time and budget for my sister's wedding in North Carolina, then the week-long TNEO writing workshop, which gets done only a week before Mythcon.But Stephan found a flight for a really good deal, and it occurred to me we could combine this with a visit to my Uncle Bill in Berkeley and a visit to our favorite castle of kitsch, the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo. We stayed there one time when we were still having a long-distance romance and once after we were married, when he used to go to California in the spring to hold auditions in San Francisco and Los Angeles. San Luis Obispo is right in between. It's not far from the coast and convenient to some of the central coast wine country. The Madonna Inn is completely over-the-top in a way that only exists in California. If I try to describe it in two words, the best I can come up with is "tasteful kitsch." If you go to the website and look at the pictures, you'll see what I mean.I'm getting caught up on my critiques of novel chapters for TNEO. We're expected to give very detailed critiques, and I'm generally spending two hours on each one. Part of that is because I'm just not a very fast critiquer and I have to mull things over to figure out what's not working for me and why. Because I'm reading lots of first chapters of novels, I've been thinking a lot about setting and what things help establish one.So here are some of my musings about setting:Setting for a writer of fantasy has its own peculiar difficulties, because you have to build your own world from scratch. Well, not really from scratch. You can't just make up whatever you want if you expect the reader to believe and understand your world. Your reader lives on earth, and is going to make certain assumptions based upon this.For instance, if on the first page of my novel, the character is going to the market to buy lemons and olives, but I say nothing about the setting per se, the reader will likely still begin to picture a certain type of climate, terrain, and maybe even culture. If my location turns out to be very different from the Mediterranean region, my readers might go along for pages with false assumptions and then get annoyed with me.Fantasy writers can and do write in worlds that are radically different from earth, but again, this has to be made clear. You don't want the reader to throw the book down in disgust and say, "wait a minute, last week, there was water up to everyone's doorstep, this week, the town is in a desert!" If you've established the fact that this area has rapid climate changes and short seasons, or some sort of magic that controls the weather, I can buy it.If your tribes living on the frozen tundra, wearing fur, and following the elk herds also have coffee-colored* skin and a hair style that sounds a lot like dreadlocks,* these physical details should come as soon as possible to when the characters are introduced, so the reader doesn't get to page 10 and have to completely re-envision the picture they had conjured up.I'm not suggesting that any of these examples I present are good ones, they are just what sprang to mind.When I started writing The Willow Maiden, I knew that the character Aldric came from a northern setting. I chose Rovaniemi, Finland as a starting point, because it is right on the arctic circle. Using its coordinates, I printed charts of the times of sunrise and sunset throughout the year. I researched the climate, growing seasons, flora and fauna, and so forth. The character only stays in this location for a chapter, but it is where he grew up and the place that formed him, so I felt it was important enough to get it right. The place where I chose to take more liberties was with the culture.If I were a more advanced writer with encyclopedic knowledge of world history, geography, and culture, perhaps I would not need to do this.Short stories may not need as much setting detail, but the details have to be the right ones. My short-story-turned-novelette For the Love of Trees began in sort of a generic fantasy-land with a village, a forest, and so forth. I am much happier with it now that it decided to happen in the Indiana Territory around 1800. I had avoided getting into too much setting detail because it was already longer than I wanted. But looking at the current version, the setting shift is not what made it get longer. The plot already had too much for a short story.Well, for what it is worth, these are my writing thoughts for the day. I really learn a lot about my own writing by reading the work of others.*Obviously you wouldn't want to use either of these terms to describe your arctic tribes - they've probably never heard of coffee and wouldn't call their hairstyle "dreadlocks" even if you describe it in a way that the reader recognizes it as such.In other news I had the church choir over for lunch on Sunday. Of course, Athena thought it was a meeting of her fan club, and greeted the visitors accordingly. She received admirers from her throne (the couch), and got lots of pats and laps to sit on and I think a few morsels of food she wasn't really supposed to have. I'm sure she'd be glad to have them back every week.