Gift?

[telophase]

Someone seems to have purchased me 179 WAYS TO SAVE A NOVEL from my Amazon wishlist. However, the 3rd party seller who shipped it did not see fit to include any paperwork at all, so I have no idea who it was. If it was you: thank you! (It might have been my mother, who shopped on Amazon for Christmas and had it all shipped directly to us, but who knows?)-- Sent from my Apple ][e

Comments

[yhlee]

It was me. XD Glad the book arrived eventually! I didn't have an option for a gift message because 3rd party seller. XD

[telophase]

Then thank you! XD I started reading it last night and while it's coming from a bit of a literary viewpoint, it's so far inoffensive. We shall see how useful it becomes!

[yhlee]

Let me know how it is! I'm curious. :)

[telophase]

I will! It's kind of hilarious in one section at the beginning where he's talking about student work and a (fictionalized) version of the beginning of some obviously epic fantasy battle saga, and he complains that it's all about the battles and it needs to be about PEOPLE. And while I'm like "I agree with you!" there's lots of epic fantasy battle sagas out there that I think don't really match his definition. XD

[yhlee]

I'm reminded of the upper-level Narrative Writing class I took in college and most of the class was English majors writing literary fiction of the "grad student has affair with lonely professor" genre *eyeroll* and one girl wrote a perfectly ordinary reasonable urban fantasy vampire story. Cue all the English majors telling her she needed to explicitly tell the reader Basic Vampire Tropes like "vampires can't go out in the sun" and so on. I took her aside and told her to ignore them because they didn't know the genre and its baseline tropes!

[telophase]

I took a creative writing course in undergrad with a prof who was all about his unfinished novel about his time in Vietnam*, and wrote a silly vaguely fantasy story that had a setup of the "strangers meet in bar and one tells the other his story" type, which he dinged for cliche. If I'd known the phrase "genre conventions" I'd have thrown it at him, because the People Meet in Bar and Tell Stories is pretty much a genre in SF/F!


* Which I never read after it was published, figuring it was probably going to be about a local girl having an affair with a lonely soldier.