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Coat of Many Cupboards
May. 7th, 2005 04:03 pmDoing this sheep from the Nth time because of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
haineux:
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth full sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don't search around for the coolest book you can find. Use what's actually nearest to you.
The nearest book happens to be The Art of Romance Writing, which my wife picked up from the library, I brought downstairs with my CDs and haven't brought back up to her yet. (No, it's not a purse! It's a shoulder-bag!) Anyway:
Having an agent won't guarantee acceptance.
Not that the actual book I'm reading would have been much better. I finished The Face In The Abyss, which is an uneven book. The beginning, with the main character and his three amoral treasure-hunting companions discovering a lost civilization, is a bit annoying. Once the companions are gotten rid of, then it picks up a little bit. It's still a bit paternalistic(the Indian characters are strictly cannon fodder and servants, for instance), and though Merritt couldn't have known Clarke's Law(Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic)when he wrote it, he certainly seemed to be operating under that assumption. Though most of the explanations for the magical occurrences are ludicrous by the standards of today's science. I guess this isn't technically a fantasy novel, then... Overall, dated but occasionally fun.
It has occurred to me that one of the conventions of fantasy that we have thankfully lost is the necessity with starting with a character from our world. The "lost world" genre basically works that way, but for some other novels it gets somewhat strained, like Phantastes, or most laughably, The Worm Ouroboros. In the latter, it starts out with a man who's having dreams of a far-off land, and he starts to describe those dreams, which is our main world and main plot. We never get back to him even at the end of the book.
Anyway, I've started reading The Waste Lands, third book of the Black Tower series, of course by Stephen King. I really enjoyed the first part of The Drawing of The Three, but around the middle it got less interesting to me; it's too early to tell if this one follows the same pattern, because I'm only about a third of the way through it, but so far it's ingeniously imaginative and tantalizing. King gets a slot on my "to-be-read" shelf these days, but I've decided that, since the last three books aren't out in mass-market paperback yet, I won't put Wizard And Glass on my shelf yet. I've got many, many other Kings to catch up on, you see, so I put Needful Things on there instead.
haineux:1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth full sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don't search around for the coolest book you can find. Use what's actually nearest to you.
The nearest book happens to be The Art of Romance Writing, which my wife picked up from the library, I brought downstairs with my CDs and haven't brought back up to her yet. (No, it's not a purse! It's a shoulder-bag!) Anyway:
Having an agent won't guarantee acceptance.
Not that the actual book I'm reading would have been much better. I finished The Face In The Abyss, which is an uneven book. The beginning, with the main character and his three amoral treasure-hunting companions discovering a lost civilization, is a bit annoying. Once the companions are gotten rid of, then it picks up a little bit. It's still a bit paternalistic(the Indian characters are strictly cannon fodder and servants, for instance), and though Merritt couldn't have known Clarke's Law(Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic)when he wrote it, he certainly seemed to be operating under that assumption. Though most of the explanations for the magical occurrences are ludicrous by the standards of today's science. I guess this isn't technically a fantasy novel, then... Overall, dated but occasionally fun.
It has occurred to me that one of the conventions of fantasy that we have thankfully lost is the necessity with starting with a character from our world. The "lost world" genre basically works that way, but for some other novels it gets somewhat strained, like Phantastes, or most laughably, The Worm Ouroboros. In the latter, it starts out with a man who's having dreams of a far-off land, and he starts to describe those dreams, which is our main world and main plot. We never get back to him even at the end of the book.
Anyway, I've started reading The Waste Lands, third book of the Black Tower series, of course by Stephen King. I really enjoyed the first part of The Drawing of The Three, but around the middle it got less interesting to me; it's too early to tell if this one follows the same pattern, because I'm only about a third of the way through it, but so far it's ingeniously imaginative and tantalizing. King gets a slot on my "to-be-read" shelf these days, but I've decided that, since the last three books aren't out in mass-market paperback yet, I won't put Wizard And Glass on my shelf yet. I've got many, many other Kings to catch up on, you see, so I put Needful Things on there instead.
