"It feels a little like a Cherryh novel structure only I hope I'm doing slightly clearer setup for what's going on so the actual resolution doesn't hit like an entire keg of wtf."
I now wish to do this illustration. Which requires me to collect the art skills required to do this illustration, though I wanted to do that anyway....
At least the background can legitimately fade out and be dim!
Have you ever encountered the Ian Banks non-fiction book Raw Spirit? It's about whisky and it's autobiography and it's really not at all inappropriate to the idea of WTF in quantity.
There's an anecdote in it about losing the key to one of the wine cellars for a couple generations and how you could tell they were toffs because no one did anything until the key happened to be found again. (Most of the contents of the cellar gained value in the intervening years...)
I love Cherryh unreasonably but I have collected a number of entire kegs of wtf.
Jenett suggested, rather more kindly, that I was aiming more for your Tam Lin arc development, in which all of the increasingly less subtle weird becomes Very Concrete at the end. (Which is a nice comparison, because Tam Lin is one of the components in my 'if book met book' elevator summary of this one.)
Oh, yes, I love Cherry unreservedly. I think partly it's just that I love so much watching her get away with things one is always sternly enjoined not to do. But I try to remind myself of something that Roberta MacAvoy said at a Worldcon panel in 1987. She was talking about Tolkien, but it applies to many idiosyncratic writers. She said, "To write like Tolkien without having been Tolkien is to write badly." Ooof. Of course, then you can consider and discuss to what degree reading a writer's oevre repeatedly may stand in for having been the writer in a few regards.
I am charmed and honored that Tam Lin is part of the meeting of books in your elevator summary. And of course you know that its arc development is not universally approved. But then, almost nothing is.
The full elevator summary is something like "Tam Lin meets Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell in a thinly secondary world steampunkish setting that tries not to neglect the actual diversity of late Victorian London."
This tells me something; I'm not sure what, but something, because I can't think of a Cherryh novel that gave me any WTF at all.
Near-fatal loneliness, yes (Wave Without A Shore) and often enough some concern for what I might be missing, but it more feels like watching the gears of some substantial clockwork rise from opaque oil.
The really big hit on that effect for me was the resolution of Cyteen, which shifted very suddenly to high action for me. Looking back at it I can see the building tension and the not-quite-sublimated power struggle that was certainly going to erupt in violence sometime, but on first reading it was very AND WHAM.
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Have you ever encountered the Ian Banks non-fiction book Raw Spirit? It's about whisky and it's autobiography and it's really not at all inappropriate to the idea of WTF in quantity.
There's an anecdote in it about losing the key to one of the wine cellars for a couple generations and how you could tell they were toffs because no one did anything until the key happened to be found again. (Most of the contents of the cellar gained value in the intervening years...)
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P.
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Jenett suggested, rather more kindly, that I was aiming more for your Tam Lin arc development, in which all of the increasingly less subtle weird becomes Very Concrete at the end. (Which is a nice comparison, because Tam Lin is one of the components in my 'if book met book' elevator summary of this one.)
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I am charmed and honored that Tam Lin is part of the meeting of books in your elevator summary. And of course you know that its arc development is not universally approved. But then, almost nothing is.
P.
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Mostly I am tickled that I have one.
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Near-fatal loneliness, yes (Wave Without A Shore) and often enough some concern for what I might be missing, but it more feels like watching the gears of some substantial clockwork rise from opaque oil.
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The really big hit on that effect for me was the resolution of Cyteen, which shifted very suddenly to high action for me. Looking back at it I can see the building tension and the not-quite-sublimated power struggle that was certainly going to erupt in violence sometime, but on first reading it was very AND WHAM.
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Wave Without A Shore is an entirely perfect something. I don't know what. It might not be good to meet over-many examples thereof.
How are you with viewing Regenesis as a light romantic comedy?