[REV] End of Month Reviews #13 -- January 2005 [spoilers]

[saxon.brenton at uts.edu.au]

Martin Phipps (phippsmartin at hotmail.com) replied:
>> End of Month Reviews #13 -- January 2005 [spoilers]
>
> Eh?  I didn't expect this.  I thought you'd be busy with the RACCies.

By rights I should have been, but as I mentioned before, I'm in the
middle to two weeks rec leave, so I had extra time to noogle around
with both. Not that there wasn't stress on both, since we still haven't
replaced the home computer and I had to do most of the last minute work
in internet cafes and suchlike. Hence why I effectively ignored ASH #55
when it turned up in the last half day, etc etc.

[...]

> This part was inspired, in part, by Arthur's comment in TDSSSS
> about God placing fossils on Looniearth just to confuse
> everybody about their origins and also in part by Gotta Luv Me
> Lad's comment that God was an "asshole", the latter comment
> which also inspired the anti-atheist camps for you and, in
> turn, cemented my take on the Teen Fascists.  I fully expect
> that there are people out there who is expect me to go to
> Hell but I'm not worried because God is a fictional character
> in Looniverse Y. ;)

For the most part that's my attitude as well, admixed with some
'do you really want to be collaborating with a maltheist deity anyway'?

> I feel sometimes that I am writing a cascade all by myself when
> I write.  I come up with an idea, write it down and then move
> straight to the next idea.  I try to preserve the feel and energy
> of classic LNH stories.  Sometimes the result is pure crap, such

Yes, that's a risk. I've learnt the hard way - both from RACC and the
Torg mailing list - that my stuff typically needs editting, which is
why I have Jamas and his virtual shoji mallet to remind me not to try
and pass off doctral theses as stories. See, in many ways I have the
opposite of what you have, I love to play around with the genre cliches
as well, but I tend to write too long - brevity or length alone is not
a determining factor in what's good.

>                      Actually, I put a LOT of planning into
> the first Teen Fascists and Google.mesh arcs but they
> didn't get the same sort of response as Lagneto or Generation Y.
> Feh. I'd rather be hit and miss than put in a lot of work and yet
> get little or no feedback.

Unfortunately that's a risk in a community as small as this one. I
still remember Mystic Mongoose's vent about the lack of response to his
friend's _Three World Tour_ series.

>> The point is that while I find this style readable enough, it
>> does leave me occasionally vexed and wanting to see more of the
>> characters and their lives.
>
> You know, I've been getting this complaint since elementary
> school. :)  There's a fine line I suppose between not wanting
> to do a Spielberg and let the story go on too long and ending
> the story too quickly and, as you say, leaving the reader with
> an anti-climactic "Is that all?" reaction.

Yes. And a frustrating part is, because people often have different
tastes, there's no one way to try and overcome that.

---
Saxon Brenton    Uni of Technology, city library, Sydney Australia
saxon.brenton at uts.edu.au