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ANNIE HSIAO-CHING WANG

ARTIST

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this might be the most poignant review of a doctor’s office i’ve ever seen and it makes my heart hurt

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was waiting on an emergency plumber, decided to smoke by my car instead of stare at my fucked up kitchen. he pulled up next to me, leaned out the window and goes "i'm assuming you're the client" like yeah buddy, read that one right

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mid-flight

Dana/Robby | E | 11k words

A few passengers gasp audibly when the plane dips. Dana isn’t one of them—she wasn’t jolted from sleep when the altitude shift happened, and she’s used to sudden surprises, and she’s practically too tired to move or react or care. (Dana's good friend Robby invites her to join him on vacation.)

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i love how specific you are in fic. do you have advice for researching places so the fic feels realistic? thanks so much!

Hi! Thank you so much. I really appreciate the compliment!

Since I'm assuming this ask is correlated with my new fic ("mid-flight," The Pitt, Dana/Robby), I'll chat through the research process for it as an example, but I think everything I did with this story applies broadly to how I approach place-based research when writing.

It's super important to me that a story feels really grounded in a physical location, and it's honestly so much easier (and more fun) to write something very specific than something more vague where your brain has to make up all the necessary details and articulate them to the page. I made up one business, McCall's Diner in Pittsburgh, because I had a very specific vibe in mind and had no problem making up a nurse/doctor hangout that's as fake as the PTMC itself is.

For everything else, I relied on a blend of knowledge and research. I'm lucky enough to have traveled to Seattle, Tacoma, and Bainbridge Island, but it's been nearly ten years since I was last there, so I needed to fact-check everything I wrote and research places that exist there today. I chose the Seattle area for Dana and Robby's vacation because I love it and felt like I could capture the vibes reasonably well, but more importantly because it felt like a place Robby would be drawn to and would realistically book to get way the fuck away from Pittsburgh for a while, and like a place Dana would immediately feel comfortable in as a first-time visitor.

In terms of seeding the story with specific locations, it helps to remember that your characters would be googling for places to stay and stuff to do just like you would if you were traveling! I looked at a map of Bainbridge Island and spent some time on AirBnB/VRBO/etc. Although I don't talk about it in the story, I selected a rough location for the cabin based on the location of a real AirBnb and used images of a few others to create a physical description of the cottage Robby books. I chose to put them in walking distance of the ferry. I wanted to feel confident that two travelers who'd opted not to rent a car would be able to find a decent amount of stuff in walking distance. I also looked up public transit on the island and verified the accessibility of the various spots they visit.

For the coffee shop, Pegasus came up at the top of the search engine for me when I searched something like "best coffee bainbridge island," just as it likely would have for them. While I didn't write about them entering a query into the phone (I don't want my readers to need to stop for a quick snooze before we've even gotten to the first sex scene), my own googling revealed that Pegasus is famous, highly-rated, and bills itself as the first true craft coffeeshop on the island. And it's in walking distance of the cottage. For two caffeine-deprived travelers on the travel day of their vacation, this would seem pretty damn appealing, even if they'd likely venture out farther and do more research later in the week. (Or they get attached and go to Pegasus like five times that week. Choose your own imaginary adventure.)

Other specific spots—collected via internet searches as well as my own travel memories—allowed me to flesh out the vacation more concisely than if I had to patiently describe a bunch of scenes without being able to rely on proper nouns. The highlight reel approach (Top Pot [because omg I do still remember my donut from so many years ago]! The monorail! Pike Place!) was kinda challenging to write, but it let me zoom in on what really matters, the conversations they have about their families, against a backdrop that is realistic enough to convey that they're moving about the area.

(Realized after posting that this post takes up a lot of space, so editing to add a cut here!)

The site Top Left Adventures (found via a search on Duck Duck Go) was clutch for planning Robby (and Dana's) hikes. The list of 5 hikes on Bainbridge Island includes details like how to travel to each trailhead and whether you need a car or not, so I didn't have to worry about whether it would be realistic for Robby to have booked this trip without booking a car because he could have used the exact same internet resource to determine that most of the stuff he'd want to do would be accessible without one. This allowed me to very quickly write the sentences about where they hike; sure, many readers might not need to understand that he could take a bus from the ferry terminal to get to the Grand Forest, but knowing that this was really true in the real world allowed me to get out of my head and write it so much quicker. I didn't need to ponder how many hours he'd be gone from the cottage, how much time Dana would have to read, etc., because the facts were all there for me to use.

I think there is such a thing as too much concreteness, though: I didn't mention the Space Needle because I didn't want to venture into travel brochure territory, and likewise I didn't make every single spot they go specific because I didn't want the fic to read like a laundry list of name-dropped locations. For instance, I didn't bother naming (or even deciding on) the specific restaurant Dana tries to book when the reservation site gets messed up because that didn't really matter--the point of that paragraph was to talk about how amused she is by the only problems of the week being cushy vacation problems, and what a relief it is to have that contrast from the very real problems she's experienced over the past year.

If this sounds like a ton of research, keep in mind that:

Time you spend researching is time you can procrastinate on writing :)

The internet searches each took only a minute or two, plus a bit of time to cross-check transportation opportunities and ensure everything they did was possible (this is important to me, but YMMV). I probably looked at dozens of sites, but I doubt I spent much more than an hour total on travel research.

Looking at photo galleries online and plotting characters' journeys is so dreamy. The sheer amount of time I've spent just daydreaming about Dana and Robby gallivanting about...you don't wanna know. But it's brought me a lot of happiness during a difficult time!

Feeling knowledgeable of specific locations makes it much easier to choose how detailed to go in a description, when to keep something vague, when to pull out a concrete detail to add texture. It's a lot easier to describe something as blue because it is blue than to cast about for all the colors in the rainbow and choose one.

LOL, this got long...but then again, you asked, anon. ;-)

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Right now here in my country it's reading-love-square-again hours friend, hope you're doing well

Ack, I forgot to reply to this. (I was not, in fact, doing well when you sent this, but I'm OK.) It made my day to receive this ask when you sent it and it's making my day all over again to see it now. I hope you're doing well too!

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I haven't watched The Pitt but I do like your writing (and I am from the PNW) and your latest fic was the essence of the PNW. I'm sure I missed a ton w.r.t. character backstory, but you got the smell, the grey sunshine, the perpetual presence coniferous trees and salt water, and the general overall vibes that all these elements combine into, especially in a cottage on an island. It was a lovely warm hug of a fic. Thank you for posting it here, I would have missed it otherwise.

Ahhhh, thank you so so much! Everything about this ask means so much to me—that you'd read the fic even without being familiar with the source material (I highly recommend The Pitt by the way, but I'm sure as a person on the internet you've seen it recommended 8000 times or more) and that you'd take the time to reassure me on the accuracy of the PNW vibes. It's truly one of my favorite regions of the country and I've been hoping to make it back to Seattle ever since getting to go there for business and academic reasons a couple times in the 2010s! <3

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vintage photos of paper moon portraits

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mid-flight

Dana/Robby | E | 11k words

A few passengers gasp audibly when the plane dips. Dana isn’t one of them—she wasn’t jolted from sleep when the altitude shift happened, and she’s used to sudden surprises, and she’s practically too tired to move or react or care. (Dana's good friend Robby invites her to join him on vacation.)

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ACGAS Related Vintage Posters from the 1930s and 1940s

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Jean Smart as Deborah Vance in HACKS (2021) ∙ 3.04 | 3.03 | 4.10

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the pitt + (mostly) text posts pt.6 (the robby special)

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Honestly this gets at my chiefest complaint/frustration/discomfort with fandom as a whole. Which is: in their rush to defend the artistic merit of fanworks I think a ton of people have really valorized transformation and remixing and reinterpretation in and of themselves, when imo those are all quite neutral actions. When done well, they can expand and build upon and subvert meaning in really powerful and thought-provoking (and fun!) ways. When done poorly, they are just as likely to flatten and oversimplify and decontextualize and completely erase meaning. The simple act of changing something does not imbue the choice to do so with creative validity. It is entirely possible for a cover song to be bad (or just boring!). To exactly the same degree that it is possible to transform a pretty shallow and straightforward work into something deeper and more nuanced and subversive, is possible to transform a work into a vastly shallower and less interesting shadow of itself. As with nearly everything in art, it's all about the execution!

But the second you voice this position (which should honestly be a pretty uncontroversial one imo), you get people shrieking at you about being gatekeep-y and pretentious and betraying the sacred fandom etiquette of Don't-Like-Don't-Read.

And like...listen. I was not raised in a barn. I am 150% capable of quietly back-buttoning out of a fanfic I think is bad or boring - which is exactly what I do when I encounter them - and I am obviously not advocating for stupid ships wars or any kind of harassment or leaving hatemail in people's AO3 inboxes. (Which some people will also accuse you of the second you say anything less than lavishly positive about fandom, in true piss-on-the-poor fashion.) Literally all I am saying is that you can't have your cake and eat it too - that if fandom and fanworks (in the broadest sense) have artistic merit then fandom and fanworks (in the broadest sense) are fair game for artistic critique. Which means, in practice, that I can go on my own blog and make a post exactly like this one - critiquing broad trends, or stating that some interpretations are bad actually, or pointing out that subverting or talking back to or reading against the grain of canon is very different from simply ignoring it, or saying "fandom's culture of collage/remix/fuck-canon-I-do-what-I-want can lend itself to to really creative and interesting art but also to a lot of really bland homogenized cut-n-paste art, not to mention some pretty troubling decontextualization." And that if you feel this rains on your personal parade, you are then free to DLDR by back-buttoning out of my blog and/or blocking me so you never have to see my hot takes again, rather than clamoring in my notes about how I should let people enjoy things.

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They hate it when u dont abide by the same imaginary rules that they force themselves to live under

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Saw some lady at the train station with a long flowing white skirt, walking a dog with a long flowing white fur, and they both were glowing equally in the contre-jour light of sunshine. Had to draw a rough sketch of them and then shittily shade it on my phone so I'll remember to try to draw them later.

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I was not ready for the husband's costume