"Do the dumb stuff I gotta do. Touch the puppet head."

[mrissa]

Well, the chairs are here, and so is timprov's new anti-death machine. I feel like gaaldine in the chairs: my feet don't quite touch. (They are not for me to sit in mostly anyway.) They were not the hugest ones in the store, not by a long shot. There are some mighty huge chairs out there. Our living room will not contain them. Happily, it doesn't have to.

I managed to get back to sleep after taking markgritter to the airport. I'm getting to be an old hand at this. The key is for me to eat breakfast before trying to go back to sleep. It's good to know the tricks and secrets.

I'm hoping to spend my fountain pen store gift card today. Mostly I'm being useful, but also I'm working on "At the Sign of the Fish and Amulet" and reading Lord Byron's Novel: the Evening Land, which was going so well until it got to the damned e-mail. I almost got up and ran upstairs to put it on my list to buy for the nearest gaaldine-related holiday. And then, the e-mail struck. Blerg. Very few people can handle epistolary novels or sections of novels so that I don't want to fling them out the window, but the existence of Sorcery and Cecelia and Freedom and Necessity and Laughin' Boy does not mean it's generally a good idea. And in this case -- LOL OMG i like totally cant use caps or punctuation now that im writing an email section of this book ROTFLMAO -- it's just wretched. I hope it improves fast, because I really liked the previous section, and I hate those books where I'm tempted to skim one section to get to the other (I'm looking at YOU, Margaret Atwood!).

Comments

[callunav.livejournal.com]

As someone currently in the middle of at least one 'letter game' collaborative story project, I can only say, "Eep."



I do capitalize properly, honest.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think that epistolary style needs to serve a purpose in perspective and information revelation/concealment, and also that the characters need to have a plausible reason for being separated, and also it needs to not make me want to kick their heads in.

Really it's a pretty low standard, and yet.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

And yet.

What's funny (to me) (mildly) is that I love Freedom and Necessity, but really didn't have much use for Sorcery and Cecelia. (I don't know your third example.) But it wasn't....

...I had to stop and think about it, but no, I think it really /wasn't/ anything to do with the epistolary style in Sorcery and Cecelia which made me so impatient with it. I just didn't like the book.

I think I'm fortunate in that I haven't read very many epistolary novels, and the ones I have read have met at least the first two items in your set of criteria. You reveal to me great worlds of novels I badly want to avoid.

(I could imagine wanting to kick in the heads of some of our characters, but not, I think, because of their letter-writing skills.)