lindenharp | FIC: The Guard's Tale (Valiant Tales)

Title: The Guard's Tale
Series: Valiant Tales. Read them in order here.
Rating: PG
Characters: The Master (Simm), other characters
Genre: drabble
Spoilers: Minor spoilers for The Sound of Drums and Last of the Time Lords.
Summary: A series of drabbles about the people who lived, worked, and suffered on the Valiant during the Year That Never Was. 100 words according to MS Word.
Disclaimer: The sandbox belongs to RTD and the BBC. I'm just playing here, in the corner, making little sand-TARDISs.

It’s the best job ever. Lots of chances for fun, just don’t touch the Master’s pets. Put a finger on the old guy – you die. The Freak is invitation-only. I’d love to watch a session. Techs are all off-limits. Pity. Turner in engineering looks like a poof who’d jump if you gave him a hard look. We can’t even talk to the admin staff. There’s one real hottie -- snobby university bitch, but I bet I could make her moan. Maybe she’ll make a mistake, piss ’im off. A bloke can dream, yeah?

Nobody calls Jimmy Stone a loser now.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Some of you folks may want to click back and read something else, not because this is getting personal or private, but because it's going to be long and possibly uninteresting. Despite being a woman who has developed a reputation as a drabble writer, my natural style -- in conversation and in writing -- has much in common with the Mississippi River. It is lengthy. meandering, and sometimes murky.

Wendy, I don't think you sound patronizing, and I hope I don't sound fawning, because I certainly don't mean to. I don't truly want to be you -- but I do envy some of your writing skills. Your gift for bringing characters and relationships alive -- especially the OT3 -- in simple, lovely language, stirs envy in my soul. High on the list is Dimensionally Transcendent, especially the first four chapters.

You are not the only writer I envy, I confess. DameRuth's ability to describe the Doctor's essential alien nature in just a few words is wonderful, Glass Houses being my favorite example.

There are others, but it's 2:00 in the morning, and my mind is not as clear as it might be. I should mention that I'm talking about authors whose writing skills I envy -- there are many others whose work I enjoy and admire, but I don't particularly want to write like them, because it doesn't fit my style.

Some of this feeling is for reasons I've alluded to in email, after you've beta-read a chapter for me. Let me see if I can explain it coherently. I sometimes have trouble writing about the process of writing.

There have been some chapters that I was not sure of. They seemed dull, or lacking action or suspense, and yet you found them exciting. Or a cliff-hanger which seemed fairly predictable to me, left you startled. Because I trust your honesty, and your judgment as a writer, I have to believe that this is so.

So, it comes down to what I call "authorial blinders". It's hard for me to have a clear perspective on my own work. The surprise at the end of the chapter isn't much of a surprise to me, since I've written it, re-written it, and read it three dozen times over. I can appreciate a nice turn of phrase or a clever bit of dialogue in my own fiction, but I see them "through a glass darkly". Then I read someone else's story, and it's all fresh and new, and the language jumps out at me, and I think, Wow! I want to make people feel like this when they read my fiction. Apparently, some people do feel like that when reading my stories. The paradox is that I can't read through their eyes.

I'm not sure there's a solution, short of taking some retcon just before reading my own story.

I don't know if this makes much sense, but I wanted to say it. And although it was Wendy's comment that triggered this meandering epic, anyone else is welcome to jump in and discuss the author/reader paradox.

So, it comes down to what I call "authorial blinders". It's hard for me to have a clear perspective on my own work. The surprise at the end of the chapter isn't much of a surprise to me, since I've written it, re-written it, and read it three dozen times over. I can appreciate a nice turn of phrase or a clever bit of dialogue in my own fiction, but I see them "through a glass darkly". Then I read someone else's story, and it's all fresh and new, and the language jumps out at me, and I think, Wow! I want to make people feel like this when they read my fiction. Apparently, some people do feel like that when reading my stories. The paradox is that I can't read through their eyes.

You've captured so perfectly here the feeling I think just about any writer has, both in respect of their own work and of the work of writers they admire. I can name off the top of my head several writers whose work makes me react like that:

dameruth,

dark_aegis,

rallalon (particularly with her At Thirty Paces series), to name just a few. And, of course, yourself.

And, no, we can't see our own work in that same light. The element of surprise is rarely there because, of course, we tend to know what's coming. We know if character A will be a villain, or if character B is going to make a decision that will shock readers (even if it makes perfect sense to us, because we've laid the threads leading to that decision, but often in a way that only makes sense to the reader in retrospect).

I think this could be a really interesting discussion and, with your permission, I may post about it on my own LJ :)

I think this could be a really interesting discussion and, with your permission, I may post about it on my own LJ :)

Please do. I half-considered posting this -- or re-posting this -- as a separate item on my LJ, because I think it may be lost amongst the other comments which are story reviews. I think it's an interesting meta-topic, and I'd love to see what other writers think about the issue. It doesn't matter where the discussion takes place, and you have many more writers on your Friends list who will see it and perhaps join in.

FIC: The Guard's Tale (Valiant Tales)

Rambling about writing and writers -- LONG

Re: Rambling about writing and writers -- LONG

Re: Rambling about writing and writers -- LONG