pameladean | The book is empty from the sparrow's point of view

The last time I wrote a large post with multiple cuts and subjects, LJ ate it whole and did not even belch. I don't know if I'll try to recreate it or not.

In the meantime, I was settled in for an evening of revising the Amazing Expanding and Shrinking Novel. I think, the last time I wrote an uneaten entry that mentioned the book, I was avoiding Chapter 7.

I just finished Chapter 11 and started work on 12, but it fell apart in my hands. It was short anyway, but it just shrunk from eleven pages to five. This is all right as far as it goes, since I am, after all, supposed to be shortening the book. However, this annoying gimmick of alternating viewpoints means that I need to either put more material in 11, new material, or else that I need to change the viewpoint of part of the next chapter. The next chapter is thirty pages long and can stand to be shorter, but I'm not sure there is a good breaking point. On the other hand, there really is not any new material that wants to go into 11.

I have been rereading the Vorkosigan books backwards, and I think I might just go sit with Cetaganda for a while.

Pamela

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Yay Dave and Tracy! Boo LJ. Beady eye to chapters. Yay again Cetaganda.

To quote my mother when I was dissertating, "Can't you just use blood and a fingernail?"

I liked Cetaganda, but I got the impression that only the author and I found the idea of breeding/genetically engineering people (and other living things) for beauty a tempting form of evil. Was I wrong? I still find myself thinking about poor Ivan and the kitten-tree (which felt very much like an author gently wounding a beloved character). Also, if I were an evil overlord in an alternate universe, I would start with Dayna and Tarrant from Blake's 7 and work towards a strain of long-legged, cheekbony people with taupe skin, teal-blue eyes, and long black eyelashes. Just me, right?

Oh I love Cetaganda.

This way, Cordelia gets her own ship at the end.

*snork*

Thanks for the beady eyes. Maybe by tomorrow the chapter will have blinked.

P.

Oh, dear. *splort*

Can't grow mine long enough, alas.

P.

Hahah I'd never thought of it that way. On the other hand, she loses her true love.

Mmmmm, maybe not just you. About the Dayna and Tarrant bit, I mean.

I don't think anybody else in the book really got it, but I think other readers did. Though it's complicated. Because what you have, when it's done, is still people, and they have their ways, and it's hard to untangle something like that. Jackson's Whole's clone factory is much more evil, but Mark had trouble even untangling that.

P.

Me too. I'm so glad she did some earlier history after she got really good with the writing part.

P.

Ack, that was supposed to be a reply to the following comment. How weird.

P.

YES!

I have never, ever gotten over the waste of Cordelia. Enrique's rant in A Civil Campaign is cold comfort.

P.

I don't have a Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer icon, but I approve of your subject header.

Enjoy Cetaganda.

I don't think of it that way--like she herself says when she is basically given custody of Gregor till he goes into school, "Don't they realise?" She has probably done more to alter the future of Barrayar than anyone except Aral. Even discounting the whole Pretender's Head thing, which of course you can't do.

Do not despair. All chapters do not have to be equal. Think of a short chapter as an "amuse bouche." Chefs use such a thing to "awaken the palate."

xxxJane

Do we really need chapter delineations? I've been trying just writing the story and sticking chapter divisions in after it's done.

We don't invariably need them. But I'm using alternating viewpoints for various purposes, so I do need them right now.

P.

I don't want just one short chapter hanging there, though, when most of them are very long. I'd have to have maybe half a dozen scattered about, and since the main purpose of this revision is to cut the book by about 60%, I don't think I want to do that.

P.

For reasons opaque to me even now, two of their albums are the main soundtrack for this book. The characters can't even quote them -- they left our world in 1987.

P.

It's the long years after that really get to me, rather than the flurry after her marriage.

Besides, I'm a bit dubious about Bujold's point. I can mostly just barely manage to decide that things would work like that on Barrayar, but in the real world? The real world seems better described by Mariotta's remark in The Game of Kings -- "I could stuff a child I could fill a fifteen-year-old as full of moral precepts as a sponge, and I doubt he'd keep them long in the sort of world you've made for him."

P.

Sorry, that was a very muddled comment and didn't answer what you said.

Skipping over a lot of other muddle, I'll just say that there's a huge difference between commanding a Betan Astronomical Survey ship and doing the biology you were trained for, and working behind the scenes in a vast almost single-handed sociological experiment with no public acknowledgement whatsoever, which bugs me, though I can quite see Cordelia making the choice. And also, it's far too hand-waved for me. I really wanted to see her doing it, just as I really wanted to see Ekaterin perform her miracles in Diplomatic Immunity. Cordelia's life is not wasted, in the terms of her universe, but I feel she's wasted as a character.

P.

Now that I've whined at you, however, I realize that the real problem with the remaining material is not that it's short, but that it has no structure -- the chapter basically wove three subplots together so they played off one another, and since I am having to take two of them out, the third one just dangles there forlornly. Thank you, mighty editor!

P.

Whining is allowable. Short chapters are allowable. Remember that the first rule of good writing is BE GOOD. You can get away with anything IF YOU ARE GOOD. And in case no one has mentioned this lately, Pamela, dearling, you ARE good!

xxxJane

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Short Chapter

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Small and whining