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Talking to Unitarians
Dec. 7th, 2008 09:20 amYesterday I gave a talk to the Women's Group at my mother's Unitarian church. They were extremely nice to me and full of questions. Since I've spent the last week or two working on and agonizing over the talk, I decided to post it. This was the first time I've ever addressed a group of people that wasn't part of science fiction fandom.
The most interesting part of writing the speech wasn't exactly what I'd have expected to be interesting. The files for The Secret Country and The Dubious Hills are corrupted, so I had to type those extracts in by hand; and while the files for Tam Lin and Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary are intact, they're in an obsolete format and did not arrive in Open Office unscathed, so I had to go over them carefully.
I was appalled at the shoddy writing in the particular piece of The Secret Country that I quoted. Bad pronoun reference, viewpoint glitches -- argh. The others were better, but the only one I was really able to view with equanimity was Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary.
Very sharp-eyed readers may notice a few discrepancies between the text as presented below and the text in the books. I refrained from correcting embarrassing errors, but did alter things here and there for better comprehension when the scenes were being listened to rather than read. I personally don't believe that these two means of apprehending fiction are interchangeable, so I'm unmoved by the need to change minor aspects of the text for clarity. But that's a separate issue from simple mistakes.
( Speech below the cut -- possible minor spoilers for <i>The Secret Country</i>, <i>The Dubious Hills</i>, <i>Tam Lin</i>, and <i>Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary</i>. )
The most interesting part of writing the speech wasn't exactly what I'd have expected to be interesting. The files for The Secret Country and The Dubious Hills are corrupted, so I had to type those extracts in by hand; and while the files for Tam Lin and Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary are intact, they're in an obsolete format and did not arrive in Open Office unscathed, so I had to go over them carefully.
I was appalled at the shoddy writing in the particular piece of The Secret Country that I quoted. Bad pronoun reference, viewpoint glitches -- argh. The others were better, but the only one I was really able to view with equanimity was Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary.
Very sharp-eyed readers may notice a few discrepancies between the text as presented below and the text in the books. I refrained from correcting embarrassing errors, but did alter things here and there for better comprehension when the scenes were being listened to rather than read. I personally don't believe that these two means of apprehending fiction are interchangeable, so I'm unmoved by the need to change minor aspects of the text for clarity. But that's a separate issue from simple mistakes.
( Speech below the cut -- possible minor spoilers for <i>The Secret Country</i>, <i>The Dubious Hills</i>, <i>Tam Lin</i>, and <i>Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary</i>. )
