Y’know how some movie quotes are so… adaptable? Like, they can either be used as-is or, with only minor changes, be warped into whatever a situation calls for?
The following is derived from a bit of dialogue in the movie Scott Pilgrim vs. the World:
P: Is he gonna geek out on us?
T: He’ll just sit in a corner and read the manuscript, man.
P: I mean, I want him to geek out on us.
T: He’ll geek. He geeks. He has the capacity to geek.
He, in this context, meaning the beta reader who’s been a fan of my clone-sibling’s fiction since the beginning. Paul had asked me about hearing from any of the beta readers, and although he knew it was far too soon to expect anything, he has been (in his own words) hoping for some geeking out from “Loyal Reader,” at least. His word choice — geeking out — is what made both of us spontaneously warp-quote lines from Scott Pilgrim.
The title of this post is also more-or-less a warp-quote from that movie: the opening lines from it, actually. “Once upon a time, in the mysterious land of Toronto, Canada…” Lacking any other title ideas, that’s what I went with. *shrug* (The Land of Enchantment, of course, is the nickname for New Mexico. Says so on car license plates and everything.)
