In which the author reveals the reason he is so chary of certain words.
It wouldn’t do to have one of these taken and replaced in the middle of the night, now, would it?
—Her birth is one of the reasons why it’s been so quiet hereabouts, and certainly the greatest or at least easiest to blame; the other of course being that we’re currently between fits. —No. 6 having come to an end, there’s naught to do but wait for no. 7, and while I’d like to say I’m busy writing it, well: I’m also busy changing diapers, painting walls, going back to work, and anyway, writing no. 7 right now still looks a lot like staring at the monitor. (It’s gonna be a complicated one. I’ve actually had to prepare an outline.)
While we’re waiting: Nick wants to know whether “the sentence-level prose is somehow optimized for an episodic format.” —Well, says I, not to speak overly of why the words that got written got written and not some other words, but: the sentence-level prose (I stop a moment to ask with only a little lilt: is there any other kind? —But we know what he means) is jiggered to reflect the experience of watching something happen. To the extent, then, that when we watch something happen the resulting narrative is optimized for an episodic format: yeah. (Maybe.) (The fine folks at Shadow Unit had much the same end in mind, but look! How our means have diverged!)
Other words, seen at sentence-level:
To their right, a long building roofed with felt.
Hardly enough to get a grip on anything at all, but still: I wanted to scratch at the translation with my red pencil:
To the right a long building roofed with felt.
Rude, perhaps, to want to tinker so with someone else’s words—much less someone else’s idea of yet another person’s words in a language one doesn’t know—but it is an occupational hazard, and if you’re going to do that to expository description, why not do it up all the way?
I’m willing to allow as how maybe it’s mostly just me.
—I’m also curious now to read and see if Stasiuk has as much contempt for his story as Esposito seems to think; I hope not. You ellipticate like this—you loop the lupine, as Algis Budrys or maybe it was Philip José Farmer once said about Gene Wolfe—not when you’re telling a dull tale whose details you find not terribly interesting or original (though that is a loaded term, here), but precisely because you’ve started to realize you love what you’re writing not wisely but too well.
Also? I do sometimes regret that I decided to go ahead and use quotation marks. (Honest. I do.) —Then, I am trying to be maximally accessible. Right? Aren’t I?
—posted 5831 days ago
