Brain Dump: Doug's Alabama Mythos Towns

BLOT: (15 Jul 2014 - 02:43:40 PM)

Brain Dump: Doug's Alabama Mythos Towns

I'm the kind of guy who writes an ok amount of stories and essays, but then shelves them and never looks at them again. Since this means a lot of my ideas sit around in something like an "unpublished" [for various definitions of published] state, some of them risk being fairly lost over time. So...I've decided to start doing a series of "brain dumps" here where I can go back and get the data and use it later, probably in an evolved form.

The first braindump will be about towns I've "created" around Alabama in some of my musings and RPG'ing and suchwhat. This should be an interesting glimpse into my mind.

Brichester County, Sort of North-East Alabama

Brichester County is roughly where Marhsall County is in real 'Bama. There are only two (sort of three) towns associated with it and two colleges. The first town is Armitage, AL. It is has about 10,000 people, and is a suburban town with a lot of people commuting to Huntsville or Birmingham or Tallowood to work, giving it some funky property value stuff [bigger houses than would have been there had people worked local]. The town has a series of old caves and underground rivers that stretch under it [note: some of the rivers come up from very deep underground], and has been a bit of a locus of weird activity in the area. It's nearest neighbor is the somewhat larger Tallowood, AL, bordering on Tallow Lake, which was once a fair sized industrial town [never as big as Birmingham, mind]. While it is clinging some to its better days, it still has the large Brichester Community College, which is one of the biggest in the state, and the private Nahum College in the related but slightly separate Nahum, AL. Frankly, I've not done much with Tallowood [pronounced "tallo-wood"] and what I will do will likely be in conjunction with Tallow Lake [which also runs down near Armitage].

Campbell County, South Alabama

Campbell County (which, like Brichester County, is a Ramsey Campbell reference) is a mashup of Conecuh and Covington Counties, and would lie as sort of a slice of both of those with Butler on the north and Escambia to the south. Some of my earlier stories were set in unnamed spots in Lower Alabama, ostensibly the backroads and such near my old rural home, and lately I've thought it interesting to work out a few of these. The main city is Cresthill, AL, which is something of an Evergreen stand-in. It is generally nondescript, poor and crumbling, and best known for being the biggest town around Long National Park [which is the home to my version of the Gnoles and is sort of based on Conecuh National Forest]. The second biggest town in Campbell Co is Bridgeton, a town separated in three by rivers, and a source of river-boat traffic. Long, AL is a very small town that was largely evacuated when some dumped chemical drums trigged lead in the soil to bubble up into the streams and water reservoirs. Otherwise, there is Travis, named after a bridge near my home, which is like Owassa in that it's an old community that no longer has much in the way of businesses but an old gas station. I'm thinking of using the "dead town" of Hamden Ridge, as well.

Others

There is also Sasafrass, AL, which is best known as a town that disappeared in the 1940s. Vanished entirely with the road heading through it also disappearing. Some of the bodies were found fused in the trees and rocks, and some of the house foundations were found in the woods, deeply aged. The actual city of Mobile showed up in a Skarl-the-Drummer related story, though my Mobile is perhaps a bit more "hippie" than real Mobile. Likewise Huntsville is a bit more...Huntsville. A tad tech-heavier. A tad more sprawly.

Will any of these ever show up? I don't know, let's see.

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: July 2014