Still here.

[truepenny]

Deep in the throes of book hate. Have some links.

My second monthly essay for Storytellers Unplugged is up.

rivkat reviews Mélusine and The Virtu. (Also The Queen in Winter.)

strangecreature also reviews Mélusine and The Virtu.

The Time Traveler Show #20 is the podcast of the panel John Scalzi, Nick Sagan, and I did at Penguicon 5.0 about lost SF Grandmaster Godfrey Winton.

Speaking of John, he reminds us that the voting for the Hugo closes Midnight (2359 hours) Pacific Daylight Time, Tuesday, July 31, 2007. John's up for Best Fan Writer. I my own self, as you may recall, am in my second second year of eligibility for the Campbell.

Enough about me. How are you?

Comments

[larryhammer]

Mostly okay, though I'm dragging my feet on getting started writing. I have to replace a chapter with another set of scenes with the same name, as it were. Retooling a protagonist's immediage motivation and giving another character a personality means all but the entrance and exit no longer obtain, and I'm never enthusiastic about that sort of change.

Good SU column. Good food for thought. My metaphors tend not to be either listening or strife, but vocal, which can get me in trouble sometimes.

Time to turn off the WiFi card and get too it. After more coffee.

---L.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Retooling a protagonist's immediage motivation and giving another character a personality means all but the entrance and exit no longer obtain, and I'm never enthusiastic about that sort of change.

Ugh. Right there with you.

[larryhammer]

I've made some forward progress, but not enough I can stitch the ragged fragments onto the framework around the panel.

BTW, I've been meaning to ask. When writing in first person, how conscious are you of when and to whom the narrator is relating things? (Or does it vary by story and narrator?)

---L.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I've found--at least with these books--that I have to ignore that question entirely, or at best pretend that they're relating events to me specifically. Because so many of the things that happen to my poor protagonists are things they'd never tell anyone if they had the choice. That question also leads me into the Clarissa problem (as she fends off her rapist with one hand and writes her letters with the other): why are they writing these things down? When? In what form? Or who are they telling? Why is that person writing it down? Are they editing? Silently or otherwise? (Like the Flashman books where his sister-in-law or niece or whatever she was has gone through and dashed out all the obscenities.) Are they stopping to ask for clarification, or are they misunderstanding things? Et cetera et cetera et cetera.

So mostly I try not to think about it. With these books. Some other project, I could really get my teeth into it. I know enough about the transmission of manuscript texts and the slippage between oral narrative and textual narrative, not to mention things like bad quartos and so on ...

Right. Some other project. Ahem.

[larryhammer]

Thanks. (I'm kinda wrestling with a similar issue on the current project, as the person I thought, at the start of the first draft, the narrators were telling it to turned out to be impossible. So now they're still relating it just after the events conclude, to no one. I'm ignoring it.)

I'll look forward to that some other project.

---L.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

Sweaty, partly from having worked like an ensorcelled thing for several hours at a necklace which is truly one of the demanding ones, and partly from having thereafter come downstairs, reread Bear's "Hacking the Grey Jelly" post, and promptly hauled out the old rowing machine that lives in the basement, wrestled it upstairs, and then tranced out to large muscle movement for a while.

The necklace makes me think a bit of "Somewhere Beneath Those Waves Was Her Home." Where did your work from that one wind up, again? Is it out? Have I got it? (Do I sound like a cartoon meerkat?)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

"Somewhere Beneath Those Waves Was Her Home" is in the Fantasy anthology. Which you have, because I remember signing it for you.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

I can has new clutch! Let me show you it!

[maki-to13.livejournal.com]

Firstly, great essay.

Secondly, hi. No, you don't know me. Stumbling across your journal was the result of a twisted chain of events that began with my picking up Melusine literally an hour after I finished Harry Potter 7 last Monday. My friend had chucked her copy of Melusine and The Virtu at me, screeching at me to READ THEM NOW.

So. I thought, seeing as how I found your lj and all, that I'd pop in and say "hi" and that I love your books. Book. I'm actually only a hundred-or-so pages into Melusine at this point, and I'm already in love, though I'm not exactly sure where the story is headed. Felix just ran away from Robert, who visited him at the crazy-house, and the Dogs just found Mildmay at Margot's. I'm still waiting for Felix and Mildmay to meet, because I know it's going to happen eventually (IT HAS TO!!!). I hope you don't mind my ranting. Except for the friend who shoved your books in my face, who is currently unavailable for communication, I have no one to rant at who would have the slightest clue what I was talking about. So. I'll end with saying that I adore Mildmay, I'm still not sure how to feel about Felix, and I want to kick Malkar in the face multiple times.

Thirdly, I'm going to add you to my flist. Hope you don't mind.

I'm off to find out what happens to Mildmay now. Ta!

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

You are very welcome to add me to your reading list.

And if you're looking for somewhere to talk about my books--since I tend to bitch talk about my writing process a lot, but not so much about the books themselves--may I suggest the_mirador? Which is the fan community for my stuff.