Out of the Loop, Back in the Loop

[dr_pretentious]

Last time we visited friends in Pittsburgh, I surprised myself by keeping up better than usual with email and lj. So I figured I'd catch up a little on this trip. Nope. Never had a moment to take my laptop out of its bag, let alone power it up.

I'm now a week behind. Two days is really the biggest flist backlog I can catch up with. This means that, unless you're in a crisis that (A) I've known about since before last Monday, and that (B) involved a hospital, a courthouse, or a breakup before last Monday, I have no idea what's going on in your life right now.

Here's hoping you're all having a fabulous time. Please comment or email if there's anything, fabulous or otherwise, that I really ought to know about the past week.

We had a delightful trip, though we didn't manage to cross paths with everybody we were hoping to see.

And now, back to work. I'm finally making headway into Clausewitz, and On War turns out to be exactly the book I needed to sort out the blurry bits of Traitor of Imlen.

Comments

[tokeiwakamidesu.livejournal.com]

I meant to mention this earlier, but I've had midterms...

about two weeks ago, I finished the first half of the ms, it really is amazing. It's hard for me to come up with any criticism without having seen the whole piece, but I do wonder why the exposition of the Ythrae Rebellion is going so slowly. I'm more willing to accept that with the bigger plot elements, I think, but since everyone is having these extremely personal reactions to this historical event, I would have liked to at least know the outlines of it somewhat earlier. Not knowing it made it hard to find the characters believable, but they got a lot sharper once I started to figure things out.

I'm about ten pages into Atlantis Cranks, and it's kind of brilliant. I'm debating just bringing it to Con Law lecture and letting my grades slip further. One thing; when you give the principal parts of blapto, spelling it eblabein isn't quite right. That's the transliteration usually used for an epsilon and iota, no? I usually write the eta as an h (eblabhn), but I can see how that might look odd... eblaben? It's nitpicky, but hey.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the placement of that bit of exposition is really problematic. There is a scene coming (about 200 pages from where you are now) in which Haldur has occasion to tell the whole story to someone who doesn't know it, but characters who don't already know about the massacre are few and far between, so it's tricky to come up with a way to blurt the whole thing out for the reader's sake without botching the dialogue for several pages. It was less of a problem in the version of the ms in which none of the current Part II existed. Same scene, but less delay.

I've been comforting myself by thinking about George R.R. Martin's current series, and how he's been holding out on analogously important bits of exposition for three or four whole books--when his volumes are even longer than mine. It seems to be a game for him, to see how long he can get away with postponing pieces of background that he obviously must put on the page sooner or later, in order to finish telling the story at all.

That's not my schtick. It's just that, any time I do the showy thing and put a play within a play on stage, it had better be under conditions that the characters would experience as organic. Maybe I could have Derris tell the story while he's in Efa. Rildis can't really be the one to tell it, even in Jhislain, because all her Jhislaini relatives are so distressed by what they know about the massacre. Laurebes could explain it to his colleagues at the university, but he's functioning as the engine of exposition in too many scenes already, and is in danger of becoming more function than character as it is. Besides, the memory of the massacre pains the Ythrae characters most, so one of them should do the honors. Well, I'll figure something out.

Letting your grades slip further? Are you trying to bring about my untimely death? If your parents do me in for sabotaging your college career by deluging you with manuscripts, that will really put a crimp in my writing habits.

The Greek texbook I had in college transliterated eta as ei, but I can see why it's a weird choice for them to have made. Eblaben is probably better. I think you're the only person on my flist who's able to pick that particular nit.

Anyhow, if you're ten pages into Atlantis Cranks, you'll be all out of story within two reading hours. Time for me to send you Parts III and IV of the big book. That thing I keep saying about how the second half is much, much rougher than the first half? Still true.