When Urania was young/ All thought her heavenly/ With age her eyes grow larger/ But her form unmaidenly

Sunday, August 08, 2004

More Peter Beagle Blather

So, reading Tamsin, on a day of early-spring cool and freshness. Supernatural blah-blah - and a hundred pages in before we see a ghost - and then it's only of a cat, though eerie enough. And he has to write like a teenage girl, who's trying to remember herself as an even younger teenage girl, and so doubly loses the opportunity to use all the verbal pyrotechnics he would otherwise be able to use. But no in media res - no real suspense, since there's ample evidence that things have gone well for the protagonist and all her loved ones since the events that will be related. Remember: all the calls for action immediately, for the magic to appear early, big-bang openings. These are all commercial decisions, not aethetics one. Not to say they're wrong, but nobody carried them down the mountain inscribed on stone tablets.

And a shot of description, from the first sight of the old English manor which will be the setting: "And I remember the windows. There were so many of them - round and long and square and pointy - and because the sun was slanting down behind us, all those windows were blazing up as though the house was full of fire, you couldn't look straight at it. There was one small, sharp window on the third floor that didn't reflect the sun at all. It looked absolutely black, surrounded by all those others, like a hole in the sky, with the darkness of space showing through."

Look at what you can do, even with a first person narrator with limited skills herself - look at "pointy," "full of fire," a full-on comma splice, and - the best a "sharp window" - that last with a total suspension of literal meaning of "sharp" but the hint of menace is not lost - dangerous!

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