my favorite moment from Sorcery and Cecelia

[truepenny]

Spoilers! Spoilers bigger than your head! Go buy the book!

But if you've already read it ...

     He took my right hand in his left and put his other hand on my waist. With a monotone but rhythmic buzz, which I took to be his attempt to hum a waltz, he led me into a dance in the middle of the dark street.
     "You and I and Lady Sylvia," I said, obeying his lead.
     Thomas stopped humming to say, "And James."
     "And Cecy," I added.
     "But not Aunt Charlotte," said Thomas, as he changed direction.
     "Definitely not," I said, following him through a sophisticated turn.
     So in the dark, to music only Thomas could hear, we waltzed the rest of the way up Berkeley Square.

Closely followed by Cecelia breaking the chocolate pot.


Sorcery and Cecelia is a fun, light book, ideal for those of us who wish Georgette Heyer would have turned her hand to fantasy. I love epistolary novels when they're done properly, and the whole idea of the Letter Game is just brilliant. And it's clearly a lot of fun, whether you end up with a novel out of it or not.

---
WORKS CITED
Wrede, Patricia C., and Caroline Stevermer. Sorcery and Cecelia: Or, The Enchanted Chocolate Pot. Orlando: Harcourt Inc., 2003.

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Oooh, yes, both wonderful moments.

I love that book. I think it's balanced just right. I'm really looking forward to the sequel.

And I've wanted to try the letter game since I first heard of it, but my practical attempts to organise it have never seemed to work quite right.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Ooh, hey! You can comment again!

And I've wanted to try the letter game since I first heard of it, but my practical attempts to organise it have never seemed to work quite right.

If that's a veiled hint, or even just a wistful remark, I'm certainly willing to give the letter game a go. I think we could have a lot of fun with it.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Theoretically, I'd be fascinated, but in practice, it would be complicated, because I need mode first, which means I need a whole chunk of stuff that normally comes under worldbuilding first. Alter (dhole and I had some lovely stuff worked out for doing a letter game, but when it came to putting words down and doing it to start, I couldn't get them to come out.

What I need to know is weird.

I wonder if S&S works so well because it is a genre romance and therefore constrained/helped by that. I've talked to them about how they did it, and the only thing they talked about that was a technical writing thing (aside from gossip about the minor characters and the world) was pacing -- about how much story was left.

I suppose you could start.

(I can comment in KFM, but it won't let me stay logged in, so I'm reading in netscape and keeping kfm loaded as well, and switching to it if I want to comment, and logging in each post, unless it's a Friends Only post, in which case KFM can't see it so I can't comment. It's irritating, but it's better than nothing. LJ say they're working on the netscape problem, so we'll see.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, I thought immediately: Victorian! Governesses! Gothic! But I can see that you would need more than that.

Really, Sorcery and Cecelia is Georgette Heyer with magic added in, so it came, so to speak, preassembled. Which is not in any way a slam. Good Heyer is hard to write.