"Serpent!" screamed the Pigeon.
Apr. 9th, 2010 01:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greygirlbeastA rainy day here in Providence, and the high today is forecast at 58F, which is something of a change from the freakish low nineties of Wednesday. The sun will be back tomorrow, and the world is going green.
Yesterday, I wrote only 581 words on Chapter 1 of The Wolf Who Cried Girl. I'd have probably made it past a thousand, had I not felt the need to rewrite Everything Thus Far, so that the narrator is delivering her tale in past tense, instead of present tense. "This is what I remember about the night I met Eva Canning. She is walking down the road." became ""This is what I remember about the night I met Eva Canning. She was walking down the road." These are not actual sentences from the book, but rather rough approximations to illustrate the edit. I intended to explain here why I made the change, and how it was not necessarily the right thing to do, but I find I just don't have the requisite motivation. Too few people comment, which leads me— perhaps fallaciously —to suspect far fewer read the blog than once did. And, besides, I've never been much for talking shop, talking the mechanics of writing.
And there's this other matter. For the record, speaking as the author, The Red Tree does not have a "twist ending." Of course, that fact, and my stating that fact, will not prevent Amazon.com "reviews" of this sort:
I was able to figure out the twist ending less than halfway through.
Which is a neat goddamn trick, I'll admit, given that even I don't know precisely what happened to Sarah Crowe. I'm not usually fond of "twist endings," and I almost never employ that device in my own fiction. At the end of the novel, the reader is left, quite intentionally, with an inability to determine what has and has not been experienced by Sarah, what she might have imagined and what might be "real," where reality begins and ends, and all manner of other things. But a twist ending would require a concrete outcome of one sort or another (Bruce Willis is dead, To Serve Man is a cookbook, etc.), and that sort of ending is plainly lacking, by design. So...this "reviewer" is, at the very least, mistaken. Revelations of uncertainty do not a "twist ending" make.
I fucking hate snitty readers who are more interested in appearing world-weary and cleverer-than-thou than in paying attention to the book they're reading. I do not write books for these sorts of people.
I should wrap this up before I dig the hole any deeper.
Here are a couple of photos from Tuesday, a breath of spring after a hard winter:
Photographs Copyright © 2010 by Kathryn A. Pollnac
Yesterday, I wrote only 581 words on Chapter 1 of The Wolf Who Cried Girl. I'd have probably made it past a thousand, had I not felt the need to rewrite Everything Thus Far, so that the narrator is delivering her tale in past tense, instead of present tense. "This is what I remember about the night I met Eva Canning. She is walking down the road." became ""This is what I remember about the night I met Eva Canning. She was walking down the road." These are not actual sentences from the book, but rather rough approximations to illustrate the edit. I intended to explain here why I made the change, and how it was not necessarily the right thing to do, but I find I just don't have the requisite motivation. Too few people comment, which leads me— perhaps fallaciously —to suspect far fewer read the blog than once did. And, besides, I've never been much for talking shop, talking the mechanics of writing.
And there's this other matter. For the record, speaking as the author, The Red Tree does not have a "twist ending." Of course, that fact, and my stating that fact, will not prevent Amazon.com "reviews" of this sort:
I was able to figure out the twist ending less than halfway through.
Which is a neat goddamn trick, I'll admit, given that even I don't know precisely what happened to Sarah Crowe. I'm not usually fond of "twist endings," and I almost never employ that device in my own fiction. At the end of the novel, the reader is left, quite intentionally, with an inability to determine what has and has not been experienced by Sarah, what she might have imagined and what might be "real," where reality begins and ends, and all manner of other things. But a twist ending would require a concrete outcome of one sort or another (Bruce Willis is dead, To Serve Man is a cookbook, etc.), and that sort of ending is plainly lacking, by design. So...this "reviewer" is, at the very least, mistaken. Revelations of uncertainty do not a "twist ending" make.
I fucking hate snitty readers who are more interested in appearing world-weary and cleverer-than-thou than in paying attention to the book they're reading. I do not write books for these sorts of people.
I should wrap this up before I dig the hole any deeper.
Here are a couple of photos from Tuesday, a breath of spring after a hard winter:
Photographs Copyright © 2010 by Kathryn A. Pollnac
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no subject
Date: 2010-04-09 09:39 pm (UTC)Caveat: Your books do not do this.
I hate reading a book and paying attention and feeling world-weary about it. I'm reading a book from the "mystery" section right now that has a slightly Gothic "deep-dark-secret" feel to it, but: Some of the "secret" is in the back jacket copy. More of the "secret" is in the first few chapters if one pays attention to dates and facts.
I'm only hoping all these obvious bits are meant to distract me away from other portions of the plot, but so far, if this is just leading up to a fact I already know of, it's like the staggering surprise of finding 4 on the other side of the equals sign from 2 and 2.
Your books are a bit more like algebraic formulas with unknown variables, and possibly no equal sign at all.