From a review of Paper Cities at Post-Weird Thoughts:

Stephanie Campisi’s The Title of this Story has many things to do with Borges. Metafictional, it tells the story of an onomastician who’s asked to translate and then name a religious book. The story is, of course, about the power of naming and ultimately questions if something might exist without a name, or a classification. For this reason, this is a good story, but could have been better if more things have happened. For instance, the city portrayed in it, though visually very interesting, is too static. But it has enough good ideas to entertain many readers.

The city in question is the same as that in which my novel is set, and as I was merrily editing away today, removing frightful hyphenation and surplus adjectives and a frankly egregious use of, well, pretty much everything, I realised how important this city has become to me.  Not, perhaps, the city as a city, but as a character in and of itself, something that interacts with my other characters and forces them to do the same.  The way it needs to shape the way they act, and the ways in which they can act.  The city is my world in miniature, the little sphere through which I’ve chosen to represent an entire universe, and that’s quite a daunting realisation, I think.  I know which streets intersect which, where to buy great doughnuts and hawker food, which areas the gangs patrol, who shops at Helltricks, who uses Trenton Mueller as a tailor, and the areas the Mils watch especially closely.

Sometimes, though, one can’t help but think that it’s a purely academic knowledge (and it is, of course), and how much of that actually does come across on the page.  And lo!  A writer neurosis is born.

One of the things that has been bothering me about my city is how inhabited it is, and how it feeds into and from other entities.  I want to create a dense, tropical feel, overcrowded, humid, swarming.  I want there to be stories and history and families that stretch back into illiteracy and tall retellings.  Stories that are too dull or too strange not to be true, and with always that little bit more that is omitted or forgotten for whatever reason, but that lurks there at the fringes nonetheless.

Can there ever be enough people in a novel city, really?  I feel as though I’ve had to dial down population density so that my characters can see each other in the crowds and interact without being lost in a torrent of random interactions and relationships.  Maybe, like the RGB scale or an eyebrow-raising cleavage and short skirt combination, one thing, or more, has to be dialed down for something else to come through.