Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Assay and essay are radically the same word; but modern usage has appropriated assay chiefly
to experiments in metallurgy, and essay to intellectual and bodily efforts. –Webster’s, 1913

Freeshell’s back, and I bet you didn’t even notice it was gone.
Here’s something I found on-line and saved for Lori:

Catpan
Picard?

I’m just trying to write a little Garak/7 fic here, and I can’t find the DS9
Encyclopedia. It used to be at
http://ds9enc.www2.50megs.com/ds9enc.htm,
but if you go there now and wait ten minutes you’ll get a message claiming it’s
moved to
http://ds9encyclopedia.0catch.com/,
the catch being that the encyclopedia exceeded 0catch’s bandwidth limit and has
been blocked.

So where is it? What kind of fandom can’t find bandwidth for its biggest
website, the one that’s linked everywhere? It’s as if Delta Blues
were down and out and no one said a thing about it.

Seema, I’m holding you personally responsible.

Well, no one’s going to listen to me if I criticize Snow Crash, which was, I admit, a funny book. The dystopic future was spot-on; I especially appreciated Uncle Enzo. The characters didn’t rise to the same level of development - no surprise for sci-fi.

There was one twist of non-characterization that’s really beginning to annoy me, though - I call it lover ex machina. The last time I spotted it was in The Eyre Affair, in which the heroine’s ex-boyfriend is alluded to ad nauseum until the author finally produces him at the end. In Snow Crash, the hero’s ex-girlfriend makes a few cryptic remarks before disappearing for most of the novel. In the end, if you’ll pardon the spoiler, the known lead character is united with the unknown ex for happily ever after.

I object. If you’re going to write a romance, you should write it - with both characters on-stage for a significant amount of time. If you don’t want to write a romance, then don’t try to cash in on the happily-ever-after by pulling the ex out of a bag and awarding them to the hero as a literary bonus prize. It’s sheer laziness, and it’s jarring to the reader who has been rooting for the best supporting character of the opposite gender - not for some off-stage no-good ex who left Our Hero for an inadequately explained reason long before the novel began.

I would have thought that one was obvious.

I made a killing at the library last week: I snagged a copy of Diplomatic Immunity, Lois McMaster Bujold’s latest Vorkosigan novel. I have to admit, I was disappointed. I noticed about halfway through that the novel wasn’t going anywhere in particular - it really was just another case for Miles’ unique blend of detective work and one-man space operatics. At that point I thought the pacing was off; I had to finish the whole thing before I realized I was looking for something that wasn’t there. My other pacing problem came near the end, when Miles spends what could have been a significant portion of the novel semi-conscious. Instead of following Ekaterin’s actions, LMB just let the whole section drop. I wonder if she intended to all along, or if that was an unfortunate cut.

I think Diplomatic Immunity is a triumph of the series over the novel - there is nothing new here, either in plot or characterization. Instead, everything from the sidekicks to uterine replicators to lovable misfits from Jackson’s Whole to Cetagandans is taken, in whole or in spirit, from earlier in the series, and the setting is from Falling Free. A Civil Campaign was also heavy on series background, but at least it featured some character development.

The novel, people who write how-to-write books say, is the hero’s evolution under outside pressure. Miles does not evolve here, and neither do the secondary characters. That doesn’t make Diplomatic Immunity any less entertaining as space opera, but LMB herself might admit it’s not a real book:

If anyone (and it would probably have to be Liz) can tell me what Diplomatic Immunity was about, I’d love to hear it.

I’m always a day behind the news because I read it in the Metro
instead of watching on TV or paying attention to the radio in the morning. No
sooner had I found out that we’re all going to die of
Asteroid 2002
NT7 than the sky was declared less likely to fall. Armageddon amuses me,
so I’m glad there are other signs of the End out there.

In the doom and gloom news, a Korean woman is
pregnant
with a human clone. One probably shouldn’t trust a news service called
Pravda - it protests too much, as it were - but one part of the
article I know to be true from other sources: The big force behind cloning is
the Raelian sect, which believes mankind
was left here by aliens. Besides their
cloning projects, they’re also into
crop circles and hedonism.

The most disturbing man bites dog story I read this week was about the
new centipede
in Central Park. There should not be anything new under the mulch. The
Wisconsin plan to kill
25,000
deer with Mad Deer Disease pales by comparison.

The only book which doesn’t take place in Narnia
at all, per se,
you’re the story of a voyage to find the end of the world and hopefully the
Seven Lost Lords (remember Rhoop!). You contain some of the most unique
people and places and beautiful descriptions of the whole series.

Find out which Chronicles
of Narnia book you are.

The answers were a bit of a giveaway, even after many years out of Narnia.

For something more practical, see the latest issue of
zendom, in which Christine
gives helpful advice on evolving from a tree sloth into a writer.

The numbers of VOY bloggers seem to be increasing. I was checking out
what I believe is
Astrogirl’s blog, but she doesn’t
exactly sign it anywhere. From there I found some of the old J/C crowd, like
JinnyW and
Yael, and also
this lovely J/C fic quiz:

take
the fic quiz.
because sara said to.

I might as well be C/7, indeed. You can check out the other possibilities
from the results
page. It certainly says something about JetCdom that the only insulting
result (”Creation of Braga”) is the one for canon.

And I was about to get all sentimental about the bad old days. I think I’ll
get back to that Garak/7 fic, instead.

Here’s a link for Veronica, compliments of Seema:

I’m a proponent of they as the neuter singular pronoun in English.
I came across defenses of singular their back when I used to read
Jane Austen fanfic. In fact,
this page is
probably the very one I came across in my fateful search for Jane
Austen-related material. Many fanfic addictions must begin with such nebulous
desires for more, though most don’t lead to
The Derbyshire Writers’ Guild.

I think Liz was recommending new fandoms as a way to revive flagging
muses. Maybe I should go back to my first fandom - maybe I should write
Jane Austen fic. (For an amusing JA metafic, see
Charlotte’s
Complaint. The grass isn’t any greener on the other side of 1900.)