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]

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.