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First, although no one has actually asked this in the form of a question yet: if you think you spot an allusion, you're probably right. Poe, Lovecraft, Eliot, Samuel Daniel, Shakespeare, The Cat Came Back, Coppélia, Sayers, Milton, Dickens, Tolkien, various Brontës--basically, anything I've read or seen or heard has been treated as fair game if I could warp it into the appropriate shape.
Here's another question that's been asked more than once:
Q: Is there any way possible we could hope (possibly years from now) for more to the story, either a precursor dealing with younger versions of Felix & Mildmay or post-Corambis incarnations?
A: Anything's possible. By which I mean, if I get an idea for another story about Felix and Mildmay (or Mehitabel or Kay or anybody else), I'll write it. But I don't promise that I'll ever get more story ideas for them.
Q: ( I suppose this is a spoiler, or an anti-spoiler, as it's about something that DOESN'T happen )
Q: How did you develop the Corambin/Caloxan way of speaking? Does it adhere to some other set of speech patterns (Jacobean, Elizabethan, something else) or was there more invention there?
A: The Caloxan dialect is--obviously--based on Early Modern English (i.e., Shakespeare's English). However, I realized very early on that if I actually wrote Kay's narrative in EME, very few modern readers would have the patience to wade through it. (EME prose is, um, stately at best. Also convoluted. And just plain difficult for modern readers to parse.) So I cast about for other ways to make Kay's voice sound strikingly different from Felix and Mildmay, and also archaic. The inverse-contraction thing (where he and other Caloxans drop subjects instead of contracting the verb) is an occasional feature of EME; I just extrapolated it out into a dialectical principle. So, yes, Caloxan is mostly EME, modified to suit my purposes.
( several questions' worth of spoilers for Corambis )
Q: In one of the previous Q&A's you talked extensively about accents and, in particular, Mildmay's. I've never had any trouble "hearing" him, but Felix eludes me despite your descriptions. Is there anyone his inflection is modeled after, or could you possibly point me in the direction of someone whose voice I could use as a jumping-off point to get the gist of how he sounds?
A: My two best models for Felix--David Bowie and Jeremy Brett--happen to be English, and I suspect it's very easy (especially for Americans?) to hear Felix with a British accent, because we associate that with snotty upper-class intellectualism of the kind Felix specializes in. But he doesn't sound British. None of them sound British. If you've listened to my podcasts, in them I'm "doing" Felix as best I can, given that my voice is the wrong register. So if you can imagine Jeremy Brett doing an American accent--American as spoken by the dominant culture in the Midwestern states, with occasional undertones of the mid-South--that's what Felix sounds like.
And one more, because it's connected to an earlier question in this post:
( more spoilers for Corambis )
[Ask your question(s) here.]
Here's another question that's been asked more than once:
Q: Is there any way possible we could hope (possibly years from now) for more to the story, either a precursor dealing with younger versions of Felix & Mildmay or post-Corambis incarnations?
A: Anything's possible. By which I mean, if I get an idea for another story about Felix and Mildmay (or Mehitabel or Kay or anybody else), I'll write it. But I don't promise that I'll ever get more story ideas for them.
Q: ( I suppose this is a spoiler, or an anti-spoiler, as it's about something that DOESN'T happen )
Q: How did you develop the Corambin/Caloxan way of speaking? Does it adhere to some other set of speech patterns (Jacobean, Elizabethan, something else) or was there more invention there?
A: The Caloxan dialect is--obviously--based on Early Modern English (i.e., Shakespeare's English). However, I realized very early on that if I actually wrote Kay's narrative in EME, very few modern readers would have the patience to wade through it. (EME prose is, um, stately at best. Also convoluted. And just plain difficult for modern readers to parse.) So I cast about for other ways to make Kay's voice sound strikingly different from Felix and Mildmay, and also archaic. The inverse-contraction thing (where he and other Caloxans drop subjects instead of contracting the verb) is an occasional feature of EME; I just extrapolated it out into a dialectical principle. So, yes, Caloxan is mostly EME, modified to suit my purposes.
( several questions' worth of spoilers for Corambis )
Q: In one of the previous Q&A's you talked extensively about accents and, in particular, Mildmay's. I've never had any trouble "hearing" him, but Felix eludes me despite your descriptions. Is there anyone his inflection is modeled after, or could you possibly point me in the direction of someone whose voice I could use as a jumping-off point to get the gist of how he sounds?
A: My two best models for Felix--David Bowie and Jeremy Brett--happen to be English, and I suspect it's very easy (especially for Americans?) to hear Felix with a British accent, because we associate that with snotty upper-class intellectualism of the kind Felix specializes in. But he doesn't sound British. None of them sound British. If you've listened to my podcasts, in them I'm "doing" Felix as best I can, given that my voice is the wrong register. So if you can imagine Jeremy Brett doing an American accent--American as spoken by the dominant culture in the Midwestern states, with occasional undertones of the mid-South--that's what Felix sounds like.
And one more, because it's connected to an earlier question in this post:
( more spoilers for Corambis )
[Ask your question(s) here.]
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