PS: not that “we” like to talk about it… but I “died” once too. And it was A LOT more drama than Yordie’s simple farewell. I guess the whole beginning, middle, end of it isn’t all under any one tag on iRez, but this should get you a flavor of the event:
http://irez.me/tag/avatar-suicide/

Meanwhile, YES!!!! Lizzie’s duodecad of Goatswood moments is fantastic! It’s so great to have your “fiction” set in “real” “virtual” places… the mind reels on that bit of resonance alone. Our lives today are so many generations of copies of distant, romanticized originals…

I really love going to the places Lizzie wrote from / about. We’re all so busy and obviously it takes a lot more time than just to read it – more so since you have to dress period for Goatswood. I’d like to try to have a deeper experience of less. Our media, I think, encourage wide, shallow experience. And I am curious about so many things. But it’s all so frantic. To slow down and really, you know “smell the flowers” that’s worth missing a few other tidbits for.

Anyway, you know that old saying that a place can be “vacant,” but it is not “empty” until someone you love has passed through. That’s the thing about places, physical ones and virtual ones. They hold trace memories. I’m sure if Yordie should ever find herself at one of the gas stations she stopped at during “The Hitcher” it wouldn’t be “just a gas station” as it would be to anyone else stopping there. It would be a touchstone for the unraveling of people and ideas and feelings and questions and mysteries.

And so with Lizzie’s virtual place “remapping” it’s so remarkable to go sit in a big cozy chair by the fire at The Inn and then read the experiences that Lizzie has mapped onto this canvas of place.

When you go see a summer movie, whether it’s Superman at the planet Krypton, a place we can never go, or The Interns at Google, a place we actually could go, either way, it’s just “some place” that this story that I might like or not, takes place. But sitting at The Inn or any of Lizzie’s other locations, it’s as though you can hear the echos of the voices of her characters living and breathing in these spaces. Living and breathing in their moments.

You can’t exactly “touch the leather of the chair,” but with camera and avatar we have such powerful ways to experience and touch this space.

I read a bunch of Lisa See novels this spring. When “Shanghai Girls” Pearl & May have experiences in Shanghai or Hong Kong or San Francisco or Los Angeles, these are all real places, places See has lived in and researched and experienced deeply. But no matter how well she, or I, know these places, they still are backdrops to the narrative. And you can’t realistically go on a “Shanghai Girls Tour” reading each chapter in the appropriate part of each city.

With Goatswood and the Blind Jump Into stories we have a unique opportunity to experience a kind of presence in the adventure. It’s kind of a new medium. Or like a Janet Cardiff audio tour, a remapping of a place with new, imagined moments.