| Yay! |
[May. 19th, 2008|11:00 am] |
Incarnation is finished, at 119,200 words.
I ended up more satisfied with it than I thought I would at first. In the middle, the plot went all bendy, and I had to chase the characters around to figure out what they were doing. This is definitely the section in need of the heaviest revision.
But I managed to find an ending that suited the characters without resorting to the violence that seemed inevitable for a little while- fitting, since Incarnation is largely about politics, diplomacy, individual choice and sacrifice, fudging "inviolable" standards, and other means of avoiding war. It's set among a nation of religious dissidents who left their native country, went into uninhabited country, and used magic to make themselves native to that country instead of invading someone else, and who have very strict prescriptions against killing one another. Anything is better than war and its consequences, murder and torture and the waste of life and land. I've always been interested in writing a novel like this, since so many fantasies do assume that war is necessary, even if sadly so, and the characters tend not to make more than token gestures toward preventing it.
I like it. |
|
|
| Hee. Sometimes I love nineteenth-century reviews |
[Apr. 26th, 2008|01:14 pm] |
They say scathing things in such an uptight manner.
This is from a review by J. W. Marston, in 1862, of Meredith's "Modern Love" (his long poem on the failure of a marriage, based on his own desertion by his wife):
"We are not sure that, after great labour, we have arrived at Mr Meredith’s drift; but we are quite sure that, if we have, we do not care for it…We have already intimated that ‘Modern Love’ contains passages of true beauty and feeling; but they are like the casual glimpses of a fair landscape in some noxious clime, where the mists only break to gather in again more densely. Besides, the best gifts of expression would be wasted on a theme so morbid as the present." |
|
|
| These books sound so horrible, but the review is so funny. |
[Apr. 18th, 2008|05:31 pm] |
OH JOHN RINGO NO!
aka, a review of John Ringo's SF series starting with a book called Ghosts in which there is constant rape and an unending fascination with whores and politics so far to the right that, no, they don't actually make any sense even if you are Republican.
Now I know what straight men read for porn instead of bad slash fanfic. |
|
|