![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I am amazed.
Oct. 8th, 2003 10:42 pmIf I address a specific problem in my writing, and spend a bit of time discussing it with Someone Who Is Smarter About Writing Than I Am, the next thing that happens is usually that I read a story that is a fantastic example of doing what I need to learn right, and so wonderfully right that I have to wonder how that happened.
TheTale, and Tangentially Told:
I hit the mailbox and discovered my copy of On Spec a few days back. I dropped it in my purse (a purse that is too small to carry at least one paperback and one of my notebooks is a dealbreaker) and declared that I would get around to it. I was finishing off a reread of London and then I had to read a copy of The Secret Chief, lent to me by the Pastor of Disaster, the Right-on Reverend Craig Strukoff.
Well, I tore through The Secret Chief quickly - it's only a buck and change for pages, and it's not chemically thick like PiHKAL. I could see what Craig was saying about the journey portions of Scaredy feeling like it symbolized the secret psychotherapy he's so fascinated by, but I think that you can read it that way and also that what these cats are doing is symbolic of what I've got for the journeys in Scaredy. They sort of run into each other, like a wheel. And I'm totally off track.
Anyway, I finished that book. And so I got out my On Spec and started at the very beginning (no, I won't say it.) And there, right there--
The Children of Port Allain, by A.M. Dellamonica.
Captivated, Gentle Reader. The sun hardly shines on Stephen Avenue, but Zephyr loves to pretend he's beating Bullet Hayes, Jesse Owens, Florence Griffith Joyner, and Coroebus of Elis down this canyon of stone and dyed mirror glass. I blocked dead leaves hurled like missiles as my vinyl coat caught the chill and gave it a big old hug, and I read a story where convicted pedophiles and child serial killers live with their public identities in a town that feels so *much* like where I grew up it gave me the wigguns...
A town that took me back to Eleven years old and Simon Partington on the news every night. Eleven, and the conversation I had with Pam and Shawna about how we could stay together walking home, except for the last one -- and the compromise that meant I stood on the road in front of my house and watched Pam walk two houses over, go inside, and open the drapes so I could see that she was all right. To the rumours that stirred up about the old men we once visited, their candy and songs on the piano and old photographs shunned. Eleven was the summer when "Don't Talk To Strangers" took on an awful, explicit realness.
And she did this without explaining to me, without making sure I was still with her, without telling me three times to make sure it was sledgehammered into my head. She just picked me up and dropped me back to a place where I could watch being Eleven again, but from far enough away that I could go back there.
She declined exposition in favor of showing us Port Allain, by knowing Port Allain and its people and what it was like to stand on a blacktopped road and watch your friend go two houses down, waiting for the drapes to twitch open.
And wonder what you'd do if they didn't.
TheTale, and Tangentially Told:
I hit the mailbox and discovered my copy of On Spec a few days back. I dropped it in my purse (a purse that is too small to carry at least one paperback and one of my notebooks is a dealbreaker) and declared that I would get around to it. I was finishing off a reread of London and then I had to read a copy of The Secret Chief, lent to me by the Pastor of Disaster, the Right-on Reverend Craig Strukoff.
Well, I tore through The Secret Chief quickly - it's only a buck and change for pages, and it's not chemically thick like PiHKAL. I could see what Craig was saying about the journey portions of Scaredy feeling like it symbolized the secret psychotherapy he's so fascinated by, but I think that you can read it that way and also that what these cats are doing is symbolic of what I've got for the journeys in Scaredy. They sort of run into each other, like a wheel. And I'm totally off track.
Anyway, I finished that book. And so I got out my On Spec and started at the very beginning (no, I won't say it.) And there, right there--
The Children of Port Allain, by A.M. Dellamonica.
Captivated, Gentle Reader. The sun hardly shines on Stephen Avenue, but Zephyr loves to pretend he's beating Bullet Hayes, Jesse Owens, Florence Griffith Joyner, and Coroebus of Elis down this canyon of stone and dyed mirror glass. I blocked dead leaves hurled like missiles as my vinyl coat caught the chill and gave it a big old hug, and I read a story where convicted pedophiles and child serial killers live with their public identities in a town that feels so *much* like where I grew up it gave me the wigguns...
A town that took me back to Eleven years old and Simon Partington on the news every night. Eleven, and the conversation I had with Pam and Shawna about how we could stay together walking home, except for the last one -- and the compromise that meant I stood on the road in front of my house and watched Pam walk two houses over, go inside, and open the drapes so I could see that she was all right. To the rumours that stirred up about the old men we once visited, their candy and songs on the piano and old photographs shunned. Eleven was the summer when "Don't Talk To Strangers" took on an awful, explicit realness.
And she did this without explaining to me, without making sure I was still with her, without telling me three times to make sure it was sledgehammered into my head. She just picked me up and dropped me back to a place where I could watch being Eleven again, but from far enough away that I could go back there.
She declined exposition in favor of showing us Port Allain, by knowing Port Allain and its people and what it was like to stand on a blacktopped road and watch your friend go two houses down, waiting for the drapes to twitch open.
And wonder what you'd do if they didn't.
