BCS 12 in blogs

[Aliette de Bodard]

Fabien Lyraud goes on reviewing BCS at his blog, Propos Inconoclastes (http://propos-iconoclastes.blogspot.com/):
"Two stories:
The Orangery by KD Wenworth: A group of children discover that the orangery of their parents' house allows them to communicate with another world. A very beautiful story on the themes of childhood imagination, and of coming into contact with the otherworldly.
Unrest par Grace Seybold makes us follow a young man enrolled in the army against his will. But the story is rather difficult to sum up since so many things happen within. There's an impression that we have there the first chapter of a novel rather than a true short story."
(the transation is my own and rather hasty)

[Scott H. Andrews]

Thanks very much, Aliette, for the post and the translation. :)

I agree with his comments about "The Orangery," but not so much with his comments about "Unrest." It is a challenging story, but I think that once a reader figures it out, it's more like an entire novel, not just one chapter--actually eight or nine chapters, all packed into an incredibly dense story. I realize that not all readers will get it, but I think it will be very rewarding for those who do.

[Aliette de Bodard]

"Unrest" is very challenging, definitely, and I had to read through it twice before I got it. I think the rotating first person makes it even harder to figure out, because you don't know the narrator's name or if they're male or female (my first go-around, I assumed the first section in the magician's POV was that of a female, which made it very confusing afterwards when the magician was referred to. Same for the Bound, which was male almost all the way through). It took me a while to understand that the same people were coming through the narration over and over.

[Grace Seybold]

Thanks Scott! The multiple-first-person-narrator thing was very much an experiment for me. I remember first seeing that technique done with great skill in Theodore Sturgeon's "Godbody" (one of my all-time favourite writers, although I like his short stories a lot better than his novels generally). The idea of doing something structurally similar stayed in the back of my head for the next several years until I came up with a plot that it would work with.

In one early draft of the story, each section was headed with the speaking character's name, but I took that out because I felt like it was beating the reader over the head a bit. Reading the comments now, I wonder if I should have put it back in.

(I can't stop editing. It's a terrible habit.)

[Scott H. Andrews]

I think short fiction is a form that allows more experimentation and/or "weirdness," so I think the story works quite well without name headers for the scenes. There is a brief moment of uncertainty, especially at the start of the second scene when the reader doesn't yet know that there is a pattern of changing narrators. But as you recall, we tweaked some of that in the line-edits to try to make it as clear as possible while still not giving anything away.

And I do love stories that hold more for me on second and third read. I can be dense as a reader and miss things on first read, but I love any fiction that, like music does for me, offers more new things on subsequent readings. I know some genre readers don't like that--they want everything laid out for them on first read, so they can then sell the novel back to the used bookstore and never read it again. But I love deeper subtlety that's not always apparent on first read.