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truepennyA clarification, just in case: you are entirely welcome to ask questions about things other than the Doctrine of Labyrinths.
Q: I originally thought when Zephyr that perhaps Mildmay was the apprentice that he mentions when he tells the story of Zephyr's fate. Do you know who that apprentice was (was it a character that shows up in the books)? I am guessing now that it wasn't Mildmay since Mildmay doesn't have any magic at all.
A: The apprentice certainly wasn't Mildmay; I don't know who he was, or if he escaped the witch-finders. He very well may not have.
Q: Do you think that Mildmay and Cardenio ever meet again?
A: That would depend on whether Mildmay ever goes back to Mélusine. And I have no idea if that will ever happen or not.
Q: Now here is my question: Is it ever revealed why Felix's right eye is bad? Was he born with this or did he have some kind of accident?
[and later]
I now guess that he was born with it because otherwise it wouldn't be a different color than his good eye. I think. What I really would like to know is how much he can see with his bad eye. Because sometimes it is mentioned and then there are long passages where it doesn't seem to matter at all.
[and]
Q: Why does Felix have one blind eye? Both within the world of the books, and as an authorial choice?
A: Felix's bad eye isn't completely blind. He can certainly see shapes and colors with that eye, although probably not much more. And, yes, it's a congenital defect. (The vision in my right eye is markedly worse than my left, so there's some experiential basis here, although my vision overall is much much worse than Felix's. And, yes, it's something that I only notice occasionally, much like with Felix. The good eye compensates a lot, and since he's not completely visionless on that side, he doesn't have the trouble that people who are entirely blind in one eye do, of having this huge blind spot. He's got bad peripheral vision on that side (another trait I have experience with, although my peripheral vision sucks on both sides), which is why Mildmay's figured out not to approach him from the right, but also to guard that side in a crowd.)
As to why Felix is half-blind ... ::sigh:: A lot of this has to do with the Mary Sue Reform School Dropout icon that I'm using for this post. Felix has an embarrassingly large number of the identifying traits of a Mary Sue: red hair, unusual eyes, unusual height, childhood trauma (with scars!), exceptional powers, charisma to burn, the terrifying temper which he cannot control (okay, yes, a Byron Sue more than a straight Mary Sue, but still), still more trauma ... The only significant difference between Felix and a Mary Sue is that Felix is an asshole. And I, as his author, am very well aware of it. (He's also a geek. But I think that in my particular case that makes him more of a Mary Sue rather than less.) But the half-blind thing fits into the Mary Sue-ism: a quote-unquote "romantic" disability. Felix bears the brunt of having been made up when I was 19.
I chose that specifically, though, because it's something he could learn to hide, and the idea of hiding weaknesses is very important to Felix's character as we first meet him.
Q: Is Cymellune a reference to Atlantis?
A: Cymellune of the Waters (as I said in the last round of Q&A when this came up--just to let you know I'm quoting myself) is a lot Atlantis and a little bit Venice and maybe a smidgen of Sodom & Gomorrah. Also Minoan Crete.
Q: There is a common thread running through all four books of half-siblings, starting with (obviously) Mildmay and Felix themselves, but also Mavortian and Bernard, Shannon and his siblings (though it's also mentioned in Mirador that they might not even be that). In Corambis, it's mentioned once that Kay and Isobel are half siblings. Is there any significance to this?
A: I suspect there is, but my brain has never bothered to explain it to me. By which I mean, I, too, have noticed that my narrative generates a lot of half-siblings, but I don't know why. Part of it is because the specifics of the families of these characters requires that they have (in Felix and Mildmay's case, as an example) different fathers. I also seem to have a fondness for the Cinderella-ism (both Kay and Shannon are youngest sons of different parentage than their older siblings), but again, I don't know why, aside from the exigencies of generating the narrative, which needed Shannon to be scandalous for reasons other than being Felix's lover. (Kay's complicated and fraught family history is one of the things that had to get excised from Corambis for lack of space, but again, there were reasons for him to have two elder half-sisters that had nothing to do with my brain saying, "Ooh, more half-siblings! Awesome!")
So yeah. It's a thing. But I can't tell you what it means.
Q: You said in Q&A 9 (I think) that the choices you made about Felix back when you first started writing him aren't the choices you'd necessarily make now. If you were writing him now instead of them, would you do anything differently and if so what?
A: This ties back into the question of Felix as a Mary Sue. If I were writing him now, he'd be considerably less quote-unquote "romantic." (Unusual coloring, traumatic past, disability, exceptional talent: PICK ONE, or at most TWO, since I doubt I'll ever train myself out of writing characters with traumatic pasts. And there's this deaf wizard I need to find a story for.) To be fair to myself, a lot of the narrative of the Doctrine of Labyrinths is about de-romanticizing Felix, but the fact remains that, well, I'm 34 now instead of 19. I see things differently. And this is, by and large, a Good Thing.
And one about Mildmay:
Q: How good a thief is/was Mildmay? I get the impression from his narration that he was very good, yet, at the beginning of Melusine, he's living in poverty and seems to be getting poorer.
A: Mildmay's precarious lifestyle at the beginning of Mélusine isn't a reflection on his abilities as a thief. It's because he's wanted for the murder of Cerberus Cresset and thus there are only a very few fences who will deal with him. Ditto finding clients.
[Ask your question(s) here.]
Q: I originally thought when Zephyr that perhaps Mildmay was the apprentice that he mentions when he tells the story of Zephyr's fate. Do you know who that apprentice was (was it a character that shows up in the books)? I am guessing now that it wasn't Mildmay since Mildmay doesn't have any magic at all.
A: The apprentice certainly wasn't Mildmay; I don't know who he was, or if he escaped the witch-finders. He very well may not have.
Q: Do you think that Mildmay and Cardenio ever meet again?
A: That would depend on whether Mildmay ever goes back to Mélusine. And I have no idea if that will ever happen or not.
Q: Now here is my question: Is it ever revealed why Felix's right eye is bad? Was he born with this or did he have some kind of accident?
[and later]
I now guess that he was born with it because otherwise it wouldn't be a different color than his good eye. I think. What I really would like to know is how much he can see with his bad eye. Because sometimes it is mentioned and then there are long passages where it doesn't seem to matter at all.
[and]
Q: Why does Felix have one blind eye? Both within the world of the books, and as an authorial choice?
A: Felix's bad eye isn't completely blind. He can certainly see shapes and colors with that eye, although probably not much more. And, yes, it's a congenital defect. (The vision in my right eye is markedly worse than my left, so there's some experiential basis here, although my vision overall is much much worse than Felix's. And, yes, it's something that I only notice occasionally, much like with Felix. The good eye compensates a lot, and since he's not completely visionless on that side, he doesn't have the trouble that people who are entirely blind in one eye do, of having this huge blind spot. He's got bad peripheral vision on that side (another trait I have experience with, although my peripheral vision sucks on both sides), which is why Mildmay's figured out not to approach him from the right, but also to guard that side in a crowd.)
As to why Felix is half-blind ... ::sigh:: A lot of this has to do with the Mary Sue Reform School Dropout icon that I'm using for this post. Felix has an embarrassingly large number of the identifying traits of a Mary Sue: red hair, unusual eyes, unusual height, childhood trauma (with scars!), exceptional powers, charisma to burn, the terrifying temper which he cannot control (okay, yes, a Byron Sue more than a straight Mary Sue, but still), still more trauma ... The only significant difference between Felix and a Mary Sue is that Felix is an asshole. And I, as his author, am very well aware of it. (He's also a geek. But I think that in my particular case that makes him more of a Mary Sue rather than less.) But the half-blind thing fits into the Mary Sue-ism: a quote-unquote "romantic" disability. Felix bears the brunt of having been made up when I was 19.
I chose that specifically, though, because it's something he could learn to hide, and the idea of hiding weaknesses is very important to Felix's character as we first meet him.
Q: Is Cymellune a reference to Atlantis?
A: Cymellune of the Waters (as I said in the last round of Q&A when this came up--just to let you know I'm quoting myself) is a lot Atlantis and a little bit Venice and maybe a smidgen of Sodom & Gomorrah. Also Minoan Crete.
Q: There is a common thread running through all four books of half-siblings, starting with (obviously) Mildmay and Felix themselves, but also Mavortian and Bernard, Shannon and his siblings (though it's also mentioned in Mirador that they might not even be that). In Corambis, it's mentioned once that Kay and Isobel are half siblings. Is there any significance to this?
A: I suspect there is, but my brain has never bothered to explain it to me. By which I mean, I, too, have noticed that my narrative generates a lot of half-siblings, but I don't know why. Part of it is because the specifics of the families of these characters requires that they have (in Felix and Mildmay's case, as an example) different fathers. I also seem to have a fondness for the Cinderella-ism (both Kay and Shannon are youngest sons of different parentage than their older siblings), but again, I don't know why, aside from the exigencies of generating the narrative, which needed Shannon to be scandalous for reasons other than being Felix's lover. (Kay's complicated and fraught family history is one of the things that had to get excised from Corambis for lack of space, but again, there were reasons for him to have two elder half-sisters that had nothing to do with my brain saying, "Ooh, more half-siblings! Awesome!")
So yeah. It's a thing. But I can't tell you what it means.
Q: You said in Q&A 9 (I think) that the choices you made about Felix back when you first started writing him aren't the choices you'd necessarily make now. If you were writing him now instead of them, would you do anything differently and if so what?
A: This ties back into the question of Felix as a Mary Sue. If I were writing him now, he'd be considerably less quote-unquote "romantic." (Unusual coloring, traumatic past, disability, exceptional talent: PICK ONE, or at most TWO, since I doubt I'll ever train myself out of writing characters with traumatic pasts. And there's this deaf wizard I need to find a story for.) To be fair to myself, a lot of the narrative of the Doctrine of Labyrinths is about de-romanticizing Felix, but the fact remains that, well, I'm 34 now instead of 19. I see things differently. And this is, by and large, a Good Thing.
And one about Mildmay:
Q: How good a thief is/was Mildmay? I get the impression from his narration that he was very good, yet, at the beginning of Melusine, he's living in poverty and seems to be getting poorer.
A: Mildmay's precarious lifestyle at the beginning of Mélusine isn't a reflection on his abilities as a thief. It's because he's wanted for the murder of Cerberus Cresset and thus there are only a very few fences who will deal with him. Ditto finding clients.
[Ask your question(s) here.]
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Date: 2009-04-18 04:07 pm (UTC)Claudia from Cologne
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Date: 2009-04-18 05:07 pm (UTC)That is, not to necessarily imply that it would have made him a bad character, but some of my favourite characters from various books (and this includes Felix) are what I guess one could call Mary Sue-ish in nature, or at least characters with some traits common to Mary Sues. But, I think they're all well-written Mary Sues, and I don't tend to see a Mary Sue as an inherently bad thing (though perhaps as something that can very easily go very wrong).
This probably has something to do with how fond I am of well-written angst (and "romantic" male characters; 19-year-old me and 34-year-old agree on a lot of things) and how the emotional impact of a book tends to come a step or two ahead of the intellectual appreciation.
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Date: 2009-04-18 05:11 pm (UTC)I just wanted to say that I understand what you mean when you say that the good eye compensates for the bad one. I once had an inflammation of the optic nerve of my right eye. (yeah, another right eye. ;-), and yet another one: the horse I owned about 20 years ago was blind one the right eye, too.) Due to that inflammation the vision in my right eye was very bad. I had a big white spot in the middle of the field of vision in that eye. The inflammation and the white spot went away and my eye-doctor tells me that there's nothing left of this episode. But I still notice that there's something different from the vision in my left eye. But that is only noticeable when I look with my right eye only. When I look with both eyes I don't notice anything at all.
Sorry for rambling. :-)
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Date: 2009-04-18 08:23 pm (UTC)Minor spoilers for Corambis:
I don't want to get into too much detail, because I will be writing a review at some point, but I read Corambis yesterday and loved it. So much. I was a little thrown off by Kay's idiolect right at the beginning (it took a few pages to really get used to it,) but I started smiling about two sentences into Mildmay's section, from the sheer happiness of spending more time with characters I like so much. I loved the first three books, but Corambis is now my favourite (although of course now I have to re-read all four from the beginning to be sure.) I don't know what words to use to say how much I appreciate that you wrote these books, but I thank you for doing it.
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Date: 2009-04-18 11:40 pm (UTC)Mildmay fits into some of the Mary Sue tropes. He's beautiful(according to Felix, and maybe innkeepers' daughters), but doesn't realize it. He has a scar that doesn't detract from his beauty(again according to Felix). He also had a tragic past, but he's still relatively a good person.
And that's when the resemblence to a Mary-sue ends.
I think it just comes down to Mildmay's not quite as developed(but not underdeveloped) as Felix. In the sense that because it's not really his story, he doesn't change through the story like Felix does. Since essentially, Mary-sue's are horribly underdeveloped characters, I think Mildmay is closer to a Mary-sue than Felix. He's not one of course. Just closer than Felix.
I completely adore Mildmay by the way. His voice is what captivated me in the series.
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Date: 2009-04-19 03:30 am (UTC)Hamlet? Angsty backstory, check. Went mad, so that's romantic disability, check. Mad swordfighting skills, plus sees ghosts, so there's hoopy special powers, check. Named after someone the author knows, Hamnet, check. Dresses unusually (in mourning, beyond the time that is considered appropriate), check. Love interest dies a romantic death, check. Dies a romantic death, check. Royalty, check. Difficult relationship with parents, check.
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Date: 2009-04-19 07:16 am (UTC)No doubt there are people who would call Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond a massive Marye Sue, or why not most of Guy Gavriel Kay's main characters ... and for me those sorts of characters are why I read.
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Date: 2009-04-19 03:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-19 03:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-19 07:20 am (UTC)Some interesting commments towards the end of the page about the negative impact of the Mary Sue-idea.
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Date: 2009-04-19 12:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-21 02:55 am (UTC)ETA commas....