Choosing the setting for an original m/m story

[cimorene]

DILEMMA.

Hypothetically, if I ever wanted to publish an original gay romance novel, it wouldn't be wise to set it in the town where I live. Finland isn't very big, and setting anything here - even if it wasn't in town here; there just aren't that many universities and it would certainly be recognisable, maybe even to people who haven't even been there - is as good as giving the characters the names of the real people who inspired them.

So, you know, there are universities everywhere, right? Just set it in Anycollegetown USA at Anonymous University? EXCEPT that my experiences of universities in the US are confined to on the one hand, a small and exclusive liberal arts college, entirely in the language and literature departments (Amherst), and on the other, a not-so-great state university... mostly in the science departments (Alabama, ranked 150-somethingth).

But the only single thing I've spent any length of time studying is sociology, and my experience seems to indicate that the discipline is treated differently in North America. Certainly Alabama doesn't even have a department, and Amherst lumped it in under anthropology (which... well... *insert debate*). For that matter, my idea of how a large North American research university handles higher degrees in the social sciences is... practically non-existent, because I'm 100% certain it's really not like it is here, where the department has only one full professor and like, six lecturers and six doctoral candidates, or something like that, and the entire institute is held in a house (rather, an ex-residence) the size of the house I grew up in (no seriously - no, seriously).

So if I want to set it at Anonymous University, I'd probably have to change the department that my characters work in, and then I wouldn't know enough about the academic side of their subject. I could just recruit a full-time North American informant with experience of some university subject or other, of course. Volunteers to the left. And if I want to set it at a New England liberal arts college, I'd have to change the department, too. I could probably manage something, though. I have a bit of knowledge of the academic side of anthropology and folkloristics, I suppose. It would be fun to write about someone writing their thesis on, like, the black metal scene (someone's doing that in folkloristics at Åbo Akademi, or they were a few years ago).

Comments

[phineasjones.livejournal.com]

i know someone writing on a similar topic (not even sure what his is exactly... some kind of metal stuff) for musicology.

he's also going to talk about bandom at a musicology seminar in the fall. :)

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Folkloristics would probably have a totally different focus. Although I'm not sure what musicology entails, I assume the folkloristics part would be about the culture - the rituals, clothing, signals, maybe even the verbal folklore of the group... their social interaction - although the music would have to be described as well, in the tradition of classical anthropology.