All Comments on 'Jacaranda's Naked College Journey Ch. 01'

I found the “digs” regarding Florida to be very amusing.

I hope there is more to come - loved it. Thankyou.

@Anonymous from 3/31/2023: Ha, the Florida stuff just sort of came out randomly when the character did something silly. I kept going with it, and then as I was going to write a plot for Jasmine's background in Florida I came upon a map that showed the world if the Greenland ice shelf melts - something that could randomly happen at any moment now as it's on a trigger that could go either way. If it does, the seas will rapidly rise as much as 30 feet - and there will be no more Florida or Caribbean. Coastal California is mostly above the water level - it will lose some of the San Francisco shore but not much else. This story does NOT touch on what the loss of things like the Everglades and all would mean. But I did change direction a little there and instead shift Jasmine's background to a mystery and decided to go full tilt with the dark humor of denialism. So far, for Jasmine, it seems she just says "so Florida" as a way of saying "I'm acting without thinking again..." ;)

@Anonymous asking about more to come: Yes, that is the plan. I only stopped where I did because the chapter was getting silly long. I had some smaller breaks in there but the 'end of the day' seemed like a good point to pause. I've got a lot more ideas for this. Despite the fact that Jacaranda was a 'sudden whim inspiration' (I was in mid sentence of writing a café scene for her grandmother's tale in the modern day when I got hit by an idea, opened a new window, and started writing this story), her story is flooding my mind and I know I've got more to get out there. The 'Blanke Schande' setting has always fascinated me but it always felt under-developed - it comes from a thing about 20 years ago where people started adding captions to photos that described a crazy college, then a few stories appeared on sites that no longer exist, then it went dark). But the setting has been stuck in my head for years, and I've always wanted to use it somehow. Eventually I will also take Jacaranda off campus and show that the USA is not as she's been raised to fear it is. Sort of like how her grandmother's story shows a side of Latin America than people in the USA don't see, this story will show a USA that is not what people outside it think of or fear. But first I had to describe her perceptions of it, before I get to taking them apart. :)

Your Utopian campus is where I would have applied to teach if it existed 50 years ago. As a 3rd generation native of California (a state whose lax intrastate immigration policies have tarnished it somewhat in recent decades) I appreciate your take on my homeland and on that other “sunshine state.” I look forward to more peeks into your cosmos.

@Biologo : I've got a lot of plans for this series. Of course I'm also showing through the eyes of a Mexican national, who is likely to interact a lot with the Indigenous and Chicano communities I grew up around. But as told a bit more than a century from now, in a world that also has Aliens, and on a crazy CMNF campus.

There are a lot of Blanke Schande stories and snippets out there, that always say they're set in this one spot, but almost all of them made by people who have never been here and don't know what this part of Los Angeles is like, or that this place was part of Mexico for 300 years - so while the folks in the big houses in the hills or the trailer parks may not have Latin American roots or connections, those of us 'down in the hood' usually do, even when we're Chinese, Black, or White. So I want to show that.

While I will be doing a more upbeat story than some of my older work, this won't be a Utopia. The campus might claim it is one, but Utopias have a way of not being what they claim to be. ;)