Don’t harass me. I’m delicate It’s not done yet. When will this torture end?
I've read/re-read all of Bard Wars up to the end of Chapter 11, and I was out of line and just parroting your own self-criticism, I don't think the characterisation is so bad. Fellport is the sort of place where everyone wears masks behind masks, and the 'real' characters of most of the players are hidden under so many layers that they have doubtless suffocated and died. Like Amanda said on first meeting an acquaintance of mine from work, 'he had so many layers that there was no point even starting to find out what he was really like'.
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Don't get too fond of the Saints - like (I imagine) the vast majority of revolutionary heroes, they were basically a pack of desperate and violent guerilla warriors who used what the peacebringing and benevolent Lephali Empire regarded (of course) as terrorist tactics to make the occupation unsustainable. Not that I'm trying to draw any parallels or anything.
Don't worry, I'm in no danger of being fond of them- I envision the Saints as something like Oliver Cromwell's mob, humourless fanatics who knocked off the established nobility and left the field free for a crop of opportunistic oligarchs to get the commoners under their boots...
Pretty much spot-on.
Monday, August 16, 2004
Discovering whole new realms of tiredness this morning, after a sleepless weekend of writing, painting and watching the Olympics instead of sleeping. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking staying up until about four o’clock on Saturday night to watch the men’s road race (although it did have quite an exciting ending, as such things are measured). And this morning I was up at 5:30 to put Fi on a plane. Guh. Brain so fuzzy that even my second coffee is having no appreciable impact.
My pain and yours persist as the draft of “Bard Wars” continues to meander towards a conclusion without ever quite reaching it. I missed the deadline (but so did Ev, so no harm there) but had every intention of knocking it over by the end of the weekend anyway, just to be done with the damned thing. The 13th chapter, in which I had intended to wrap everything up, refused to come to any sort of conclusion (despite several convenient deaths) and so I was forced into yet another extended scene.
Now I find that one of the characters, perhaps sniffing the blood in the air, has the (not unreasonable) suspicion that the final act of the story will be his richly deserved slaughter, and so has taken over the scene and is literally holding it hostage while he draws out the inevitable. So it’s still not done yet, and with Jimbo and Chris coming over for games this evening it won’t be done until tomorrow night at the earliest, at which point I will post the last two chapters up, pour myself a scotch like a real writer, and then club the entire manuscript over the head and bury it in the backyard compost heap in a primitive midnight exorcism ritual (like a real writer).
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I'd like to see more about Beyda Chur, though- so much of the opening chapter takes place inside his head, and then he sort of disappears and becomes a cipher. There are those few hints about his past already, and he isn't a native, so he ought to bwe given space to develop a proper character. More trivially, it is hard to beleive Jedlow could have remained as callow as he seems to be, if he grew up in Fellport. And- more trivially yet- Nana is described as Murbish when she first appears, and yet she has this outrageous foreign accent. (I have been cataloguing instances of niceness and references to the Saints on this run through, and will write learned essays on them at some future date...)
(No, really, I wasn't, I just made a reference to them once and then kept expanding on it a bit at a time).
In my head, Jedlow actually grew up in a farming community on the fringes of Fellport. I might not actually have said so, mind you. I think in a future version he'll be a bit more streetwise (but not so much he stops being essentially decent).
And yeah, the bit about Nana's accent is a very public victim of the "don't go back and re-do anything" policy. Bey was a victim of the fact that nearly everyone else in the story is more proactive than he is after he gets what he wants by the third chapter. Oops.
