Place

This fun thing – The Tom Waits Map – making the rounds among my friends got me thinking about place. In most of the daily stories I write, I don't pay much attention to where something is happening.

Actions, plot, dialogue, quotes, characters, those things are a given. I watch for them. But place? I don't look for it every day.

Then I read things like Neil Swidey's "Trapped Under the Sea"

Imagine you are venturing into a tunnel that's been bored into the bedrock underneath the ocean and that continues straight out, hundreds of feet below the seafloor, for almost ten miles. There is no light, besides the faint glow coming from the bulb on your helmet. There is no sound, besides the water…