#pick a more familiar setting and maybe drop the mc's grad school background so i wouldn't have to worry as much about getting things wrong

[fictionadventurer]

I know Cardinal's Map is fake but I'm obsessed with the idea of it so much

Me too! And the worse part is that I like the fake version so much that it feels like I've already read it, so there's no way to make a real version that could live up to it. At best, it would be an inferior adaptation.

Even if I get past that, and try to think of how one could adapt it, I realize just how little actually exists of the story; I've got two character names and a basic premise, but no idea what the portal fantasy world is like or what the plot of the story would actually be. Plus, Cardinal's portal fantasy would show up as passages of a book-within-a-book, which would nicely maintain the Imaginary Book Recs atmosphere, but would require one to make up a whole other book with its own literary style (because even if we only see pieces of it, we'd have to know what happens). The book is a nice little daydream, but turning it into an actual story would require so much work, only to wind up with something that wouldn't live up to the book as it exists in my imagination, and that makes me sad.

#answered asks #imaginary books recs #cardinal's map #yesterday i was stuck in a 'i want to write but can't write anything' mood #which combined with an 'i'm just a fanfic writer and not an author because all my ideas are fairy tale retellings' mood #which made me upset that i have no original ideas #but then i'm like 'i do have cardinal's map' #and i did do a half hour or so of daydreaming what it would look like if i tried to adapt it into a version that i could write #pick a more familiar setting and maybe drop the mc's grad school background so i wouldn't have to worry as much about getting things wrong #but even then i ran into the roadblock of 'you've got nothing kid' #a moodboard and a one-paragraph summary do not a book make #no matter how much my imagination pretends that they do