I like it when he talks about writing books, which he doesn't do often, because he says smart things when he does.
And this bit here is important for reasons of things writers need to know about craft:
Ah well. My next children's book, the one I'm currently writing, is very unlikely to have any rude words in it at all, but people I've read the first few pages to tend to look at me with a concerned sort of look and say "Is this really a children's book? I mean it's scary and then that stuff..." and I say yes, and I'm sorry but that's how the book goes and there's nothing I can do about it. Of course there is -- I could cut it out and write a book that wasn't as good. And I can hope that anyone who gets past the first couple of pages will find it very hard to put down. I can hope. But I'd understand any school librarian who was worried.
And that's all for today, from the scrota rota. Time to go work on my own, scrotum-free novel, which nevertheless may still have value.
- Mood:
sympathetic - Music:NPR - Morning Edition
The bloody bastard. That's freaking genius.
That is how omniscient works. Narrator, character, slip, slip, slip. I can almost hear a click when he transitions. And he's exploiting symbols, and undermining them, and doing it all in this really unsettling and fascinating way. Which of course is the same thing he's always been doing--he's just much more subtle and tricky now.
He's using really precise telling detail, instead of costumery and pageant. And he's doing it live on stage.
Damn.
I comfort myself again that writing is not a performance art. But if it were? Done really well, that's what it would look like.
(why yes, I have just spent two days blogging about pop stars grabbing their junk. but damned if I didn't just have an epiphany. so it was worth it.)
*
- Location:I am so damned smart.
- Mood:
blown the hell away - Music:David Bowie - I'm Afraid Of Americans (live) seven thousand
A Londoner is visiting his kin in eastern Massachusetts, where the family owns a cranberry bog. He happens to visit during the harvest, and is amazed by the variety and number of cranberry dishes on the table. He asks his cousin, "How ever do you deal with all these cranberries?!"
"Welp," his cousin answers, "we sell the most of 'em, and then for the rest we eat what we can and we can what we can't."
Well, the Londoner thinks this is the funniest thing he's ever heard, and when he returns his home, he tells his mother about the cranberry bog, and the cranberry chutneys and mustards and stuffings and breads and biscuits and salads and glazes. "How ever do they deal with all those cranberries?" she cries, amazed.
"Well," says the Londoner, drawing himself up with a twinkle in his eyes, "they eat as many as they are able, and tin the rest."
I probably should keep my mouf shut on this issue, but I can't resist saying Just One Thing: the most amusing thing about the Sekrit Anonymous Mail that Certain Star Writers of the Blogosphere have been getting regarding A Certain Fandom Plagiarism Flap is that I apparently missed a memo where pro writers are somehow supposed to care about unpaid fan writers borrowing our words, but be okay with them borrowing our characters and settings.
Yeah. Think about that for a minute and get back to me on it.
Here, have some reviews:
livejournal comment on B&I:
http://pmrabble.livejournal.com/8164.htm
IROSF (Lois Tilton) "recommended" review of "Ile of Dogges": (free registration required, but they're nice)
http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/1030
Finally, somebody loffs Sarah's Ben Pastiche as it should be loffed.
And Booklist reviewed The Chains That You Refuse:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1597800
I've been telling anybody who will listen that I may have
"bright moments of storytelling....extraordinary"--Booklist
tattooed backwards on my forehead so I can see it in the mirror every morning.
- Location:new england, ayuh
- Mood:
indescribable - Music:Depeche Mode - Policy of Truth
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
limyaael's recent post and my own on the topic of writing nookie. Some of you will recall, back in March, that I posted the original comparison of one of the worst and one of the best sex scenes I'd encountered in my wide-ranging reading of the soft underbelly of Elizabethan historical fiction. And I posted a bit of my own period smut, because it only seemed fair when I was trashing other people.At that time, I bemoaned the fact that I did not have local a copy of Tamburlaine Must Die, which contains still more Marlowe/Walsingham smut, and what I then described as "a somewhat tragic irrumation scene."
Well, ladies and gentlemen, guess what I copied when I went back to Las Vegas?
( The moment you have all been waiting for! )
And, just because I am a completist, a bit of Mignon.
( Not enough beer in the world, Spleen. )
...okay, I'm swearing off semicolons forever.
Here, go read the Burgess again. You'll beel better.
***
- Mood:
melancholy - Music:Marilyn Manson - This Is the New Shit
sovay) on Assassin of Gor. A brief feminist reading. With footnotes. (Also, sovay has fantastic taste in music.)How many feminist points do I lose for admitting to having read several of these, and also having thought the tarn races and pirate ships were pretty cool? The prose is so terrible it actually kind of flows, in a 1930's pulp era fashion. You only have to read about every tenth word. (Pursuant, actually, to a recent discussion of exergasia over at
nineweaving. Ahem, commodorified and angevin2)...they are very silly books.
And, not to damn them by association but rather to elevate them through comparison,
tomsdisch and desperance have joined the March of Livejournal. (You can probably figure out who the first is; the second is Chaz Brenchley; love and fear them.)sartorias posts a longish poem by Ursula Fanthorpe that made me smile, a lot.GENESIS
(for J.R.R. Tolkien)
In the beginning were the words,
Aristocratic, crypic, chromatic.
Vowels as direct as mid-day,
Consonants lanky as long-swords.
(more if you link-clicky.)
***
- Location:somebody pry me out of this taxi
- Mood:
chipper - Music:still the Cure. I'm stuck.
Okay. Several people who shall remain un-named (*cough* skeetermonkey, stillsostrange *cough*) challenged me to back up my assertion that the sex scene in Young Will was really as bad as all that.
I'm going to do them one better. A Real People Slash Trifecta! I'm going to throw in some smut from Anthony Burgess' A Dead Man in Deptford and--to prove that I won't expose anybody else to ridicule I'm not willing to face myself--an equally out-of-context chunk of my own The Stratford Man. WHICH I will put after the Burgess passage, so you can get the full effect of how much he kicks my ass.
(Although no, you can't have the Tom Walsingham/Ben Jonson/William Shakespeare threesome, and I'll tell you right now that any smut involving Edward De Vere takes place safely offstage. Because even I can't stomach that....)
Because Bruce and Anthony are dead, and can't defend themselves.....
1) Bruce Cook, Young Will: The Very Long Title pp 175-177 (quoted under fair use, etc etc)
Now, because I am lazy, please note that I am not actually starting this scene where I should for its full facepalm value, in the Elizabethan molly-bar. (cheshyre and angevin2 just has twin myocardial infarctions, and truepenny and skeetermonkey are bringing up the train with a burst blood vessel and a fit of the vapors, respectively. But what's two hundred years of queer history between friends?)
For context, also, it's important to note that this is supposed to be a first encounter between two people who have just more or less fallen in love across a crowded room, a read that's enforced by the first-person narrator (Shakespeare) quoting a rather infamous line of verse of Master Marlowe's, which Shakespeare later used--attributed, directly ["dead shepherd, now I find your saw of might--"] in As You Like It.
literary victims: Will Shakespeare (POV) and Kit Marlowe
( Who ever loved that loved not at first sight? )
*pauses to gulp scotch and regroup* (arcaedia, mcurry, I couldn't have done this without the Bunnicula.)
*rummages through the Burgess for a suitably smutty passage*
1) Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford pp 49-50 (quoted under fair use, etc etc)
literary victims: Kit Marlowe and Tom Walsingham, who have just met in Paris, having been on different ends of a mission for Sir Francis Walsingham, spymaster to the queen. (POV is first person omniscient. Yeah, I know. Ye gods and little fishies, I love this book)
Nonstandard dialogue punctuation sic. Kit speaks first.
( I'll frame me wings of wax, like Icarus )
Damn, I wish I could write like that.
What's striking to me is that the situations here are exactly equivalent. We have two young men who have met and ostensibly fallen in love, and one of them is going to eventually, inevitably destroy the other. One of these writers knows what he is doing. The other... can't even quite keep his line of direction straight.
...bad choice of word. Sorry.
Okay, I haven't got an equivalent scene in The Stratford Man. Sorry. What I can give you is this: a scene in which Master Marlowe, recently murdered, finds himself in Faerie, at the tender mercies of a mother and son team who will be troubling him for quite some time to come. I can't give you the sex scene that will inevitably lead to Master Marlowe's death, because TSM starts on May 30th, 1593. But I can get you the first one after he dies. *g*
Mine has het in it. Oh Noes!
( And burnt the topless towers of Ilium )
ETA: Additional commentary on Tamburlaine Must Die and Mignon. Because I care.
***
- Mood:
mischievous - Music:John Gorka -- Grand Larceny
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