[REPOST/LNH] Saviours of the NET #7: 'A Fight Scene! A FightScene!'

[Saxon Brenton]

On Friday 21 April 2006 Tom Russell <milos_parker at yahoo.com> gushed:

[...]

>But here's the thing: reading this story, I liked these two characters,
>and I cared about them.  And Saxon didn't do it by altering the
>characters I had written; he did it by reading the atrocious crap that
>was MANGA GIRL and extrapolating gems from the seventeen
>fecal-encrusted installments.  He took the quirks that didn't work and
>made them work, made them gel, made them cohesive.  He took the
>concepts behind the characters and made them sing.
>
>And if it looks like I'm reading too much into this story, if I'm
>making a big deal out of it, it means that
>
>a) you've never read MANGA GIRL (you're one of the lucky ones), and
>
>b) Saxon's character work was seamless and didn't call attention to
>itself.  Which was my point: he made the two of them seem like real
>people.  Which, for a couple of cartoon characters (in both senses of
>the phrase), is quite a feat.

Thank you for the praise.  But really, my philosophy for writing LNH is that
if you're going to play in the sandbox with other people's toys, then you
have to play *in* the sandbox *with* other people's toys.  And that
brings with it a commensurate responsibility to know how to write them
(or at least, make a plausible attempt at faking it).  And a minor bugaboo
of mine from watching the various cascades over the years is that
sometimes people don't pick up on the plots and characters who have
appeared before, and there are times when I get my proverbial knickers in
a twist and have to include previous appearances and advance seemingly
forgotten plots (there is a *reason* why Anal-Retentive Archive Kid was
eventually upgraded to my second Writer Character).

That said, there are times when I've tried reading through past stories
and can't make head nor tail of them - Tom will recall how I pestered
him about Apocalisp's status from _Manga Girl_ for his appearance in
_Limp-Asparagus Lad #55_.

Actually, running off on a semi-tangent from that: Tom, I apprecaite that
you're embarrassed by a lot of your early work, but I have yet to be
convinced that this *persistent* self-flagellantion is productive or 
healthy.
Just saying...

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

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