I'm a little brutal when it comes to establishing time period and locale in my work. Many readers of illustrated fiction are accustomed to the reassurance of an introductory caption that says something like "Macedon, 297 BCE..." and transitions that comfortingly lead the reader around by the nose: "Meanwhile, in the royal bedchamber of Darius III..." and so forth. I just toss readers into the stories on the assumption that they're smart enough to get it (they are), and that it's much more interesting to collect the necessary clues than to have it all handed over (it is, at least for me as a reader). I like to use captions as voices within the story rather than as the intonations of an omniscient narrator. This might be me being a hack or using the medium in unintended ways, but I've liked the results and generally the response has been good.

In Garlands of Moonlight, for example, I don't say anywhere that it's 1910, or that the story takes place somewhere in Java. I want the reader to suddenly appear in the village and to some extent to be a villager, and Javanese villagers in 1910 wouldn't have thought of their time and place through the frame of reference of a reader looking into their world from the here and now. The captions were useful in giving the reader a little link to Marsiti's feeling of impending danger rather than to explicitly describe where she was and what she was doing (thereby pulling the reader out of her setting).

Inevitably, this has led to some very pointed criticism. "It doesn't say anywhere," one commentator told me archly, "that this takes place in ancient China. You should have used captions to explain that." As I tried to stammer out a response, the deconstruction continued. "It's cute and everything, but as a writer, your job is to explain to the reader what he's looking at." Most damning of all: "The kimonos are drawn wrong, and the people look monkey-like."

So yes, my methods (and selection of subject matter, and the interpretations of that subject matter by my chosen artists) are lost on some. But not on those who don't mind working a little for the meat of the story, and every comment from one of those kinds of readers is worth twenty condemnations of my insensitive treatment of "ancient China"--may I one day write something on this subject.

The most treasured review of a Malay Mystery I've yet received was from a young woman who said that Marsiti reminded her of her grandmother, and that told me that I was on the right track. I would much rather achieve that than write according to a set format just because it's the "way things are done" (to wit, the absence of sound effects in my work as well). I think it's worth the risk of breaking a few (arbitrary?) rules to try something new.