Paper Towns

I was thinking, in the shower, about paper towns. Really, I just said, out loud, "What if they were paper towns?"

By "they" I, of course, mean the weird locations in The Long Road. Obviously. I think a lot about stories even when I'm not actively working on them. I'll randomly come up with new ideas for stories I wrote five or ten years ago. This is by no means a stretch.

But anyway. If you're not aware, paper towns are towns that exist only on paper. They're fake.
Mapmakers put them there to catch other mapmakers who try to copy their work. So you make a fake town, put it on your map, and if it shows up on someone else's map, you go all, "Gotcha!" and sue their ass for plagiarism.

So I thought, what if Maranatha and any other places I come up with were never supposed to be real places. They were on the map, but they shouldn't be there. But they are, because weirdness.

After doing a little (probably way too much) research on the subject, I found that what I probably want is a trap street. Same principal, but it's a road rather than a town. Because, see, they take a shortcut, that should cut a few hours off their drive and reconnect with the highway further down. But it doesn't. Because maybe, it's not supposed to exist. It only exists in some pocket dimension created by cartographers, like when you unfold a road map, and there's no way you can fold it back up again. You've pulled all those extra folds out of the pocket dimension, and you can't get them back in.

My god, that actually kind of makes sense.

It also occurs to me that some kids these days may have no concept of the paper road map, because maps only exist in the GPS on their smartphone. These kids are unaware of the struggle of refolding maps in the confined space of a car. I'm too young to feel this old.

I feel like I had some other thought before I got onto folding maps. Oh! So the idea of this trap street is that if you saw a road on the map, thought you might take it, then got there and there was no road, you'd just chalk it up to the dumb map being inaccurate. But if you see a road, and you get there and there is a road, well, you take the road and it never crosses your mind that it shouldn't be there.

Also, you can't get out again, because it's a trap. Ha! Puns!

You know, this opens up a whole other realm of possibilities regarding cartographers creating pocket dimensions and spaces outside of space. Does this extend to something like blueprints? It shows a room, but there's not a room, but maybe somewhere, in some reality, there is a room? Consider old maps of the growing Known World. Here there be monsters. Here they may be. What about the Bermuda triangle?

I'm going to write a whole series of seemingly unrelated stories where weird shit like this happens, and it all turns out to be orchestrated by a secret cabal of cartographers.

I'll see you Wednesday.