Writers' Salon!

[isana]

All right, guys, let's get this started.

This is a post for members to post their burning questions to each other. They can be simple, like "when is Character X's birthday," or not so simple "how would you define the relationship between Character X and Character Y?" If there's a story you want that author to talk about, throw in the title (and some points you'd like covered!) and if said author's willing, they can write their answer in a separate post, since I have no idea what the comment word limits are.

Here's how it'll work: an author who's up for answering questions/writing commentaries about stories will leave their name in a comment. Readers who want to ask questions or request stories reply to that comment, and hopefully we'll have some good conversations going!

If you guys request stories, it may be best if you limit them to rainbowfic for the time being, unless the story you've got archived outside the comm is in a public entry.

EDIT: If it's not already obvious, you can ask authors more than one question in however many comments you like. The point is to have a discussion, and it wouldn't be very lively if it stopped at one question per author! Just give the author a chance to finish answering your previous questions, of course.

Comments

[subluxate]

This is...kind of convoluted.

In 2006, we started an RP based on House, as you know. That November, the fourth then-member of our little contingent was playing the non-canon older half-brother of Chase. She wanted him to be gay and wanted me to play Michael 1.0's boyfriend. At the time, I'd been watching lots of Rescue Me, so I decided to use Mike Lombardi and named him Johnny. Then I came up with the last name Corlioni (which is pretty much made-up). She laughed and went, "He has to be Mafia." So he...sort of was. (That version of Johnny had quit the business.)

Except I'm also a true-crime nerd and know a fair amount about the Mafia. Johnny as he was then (and is now, for that matter) would not function within a Mafia structure. He'd end up dead or killing everyone. And he always had a huge family--his very first thread involves a call from his mother in which his father is with a mistress--so I figured that could be a basis. David, from the start, was also involved, as was Nicoletta. But Johnny is the main reason the family cannot be part of a Mafia family.

And they can't be their own Mafia family because there are the Five Families in New York. I'd already planned, when crime started coming up, to use the existing families, and there are, firmly, five. Then there's the fact of the Commission, which regulates (to an extent) the New York Mafia. The Corlionis would not abide by outside regulation. At the time, David and Nic were the two in charge of the business, and there is no way Nic or David would go for that. They'd blow the Commission up.

All that meant they had to be a crime family, and a crime family in the sense that it's run by the blood family, and could not be Mafia. And they had to be based in New York because they always were. So the business came to be that way. (And then we added the legit side, just to complicate things.)

[bookblather]

Why would Johnny end up dead in the Mafia? Because he's gay? *knows zilch about the actual Mafia and will be doing research before writing the Mafia AU thank you very much* *recommended books much appreciated*

[subluxate]

Because he would not work well with their command structure. Being gay wouldn't help him, but starting out at the bottom of the totem pole means Johnny would probably kill someone out of sheer frustration, and then he'd probably end up dead.

Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi is a good one. So is Donnie Brasco by Joseph Pistone (the book, though the movie is well-researched too), and I like Mob Cops by Greg B. Smith.