31 Oct 2013

Lethal Ladies #12 - Commentary

As always, please read the chapter before continuing.

The location for the beginning, Riddle's Penultimate Café & Wine Bar. was a real place in St. Louis.  It closed in 2010 apparently over a rent dispute.  Good thing the time stamp is still in 2007.  Time just has not been nice to the story's details.

Yet, some details are a little prescient.  Who'd have known that the National Security Agency, the NSA, would get caught in a massive spying scandal?  In 2006, the NSA was a known agency who kept a tight reign on what the public knew what it was doing.  In 2012, Edward Snowden changed all that.  Makes my plot look tame, really.

Allison's boast of not being connected is a little much.  It would take effort, but she knows the difficulty of maintaining online privacy.  Her Thursday nights are kept apart from her friends, family, and co-workers, and maybe Amber would have a chance at finding her.  It's easier now with Google's image search, but that would require Amber to take a photo of Allison.  Amber would find doing that rude and Allison would find a new place for Amber to keep her camera.  As for Allison updating her website, if there's no obvious link between Allison and her Thursday evenings, no one will think to look for an update to the site.  How do you look for someone in a comic store when you don't have any indication that the person reads comics?

The second scene turns out to have a bad address, now that I look it up for the commentary.  If I use 41 North 2nd Street, I get what I found before.  Again, it's possible that development and road construction over the past seven years have changed things.  The experienced spies dash off in grey, again based on advice from Burn Notice.  Black clothes are harder to explain because of past use of the colour in popular media; grey, however, can be explained away as work clothes and works in dim light as well as darkness.  Michael Weston is a font of useful information.

Also useful, distractions.  Something to keep the attention away from the action.  Allison's idea will get attention.  She probably should have mentioned her idea to Amber first, though, but Allison needed the geek to react the way she did.  Allison doesn't have great hopes for Amber's acting ability.  The nervousness on Amber's part is real and should sell the scene to anyone watching them over a security camera.  A good guard should figure out that the make out session is a distraction, but girl-on-girl is hot.  Yes, it was also fanservice.  Later chapters, though, will show Amber's reaction.

Tomorrow, Rose and Elena's break-in.
Saturday at MuseHack, methodology in my last Lost in Translation before Typhoon NaNoWriMo hits.
Coming up, NaNoWriMo updates, plus some sanity checks.

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