On Casting While You Write, the Realty Division

By Brenda Clough

Laura Anne Gilman has posted about shopping for real people, especially actors, to cast your book. But wait, there’s more. You characters wear stuff, don’t they? Use armaments? Drive pickup trucks? Live in houses? There are limits to what can be done about all this if you are writing a far-future space opera set on a FTL starship orbiting Beta Centauri. But suppose you are not?

Due to the exigencies of time travel plotting, my characters are spending a lot of time in the north...