> > My first novel was barely long enough to fit
>>into the "novel" publishing category (usually >>defined in "mainstream" fiction as 40,000+ >>words...)
>
> Yeah, but can you count the words used by the
>opening info dump? (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Ah, your bruddah blows bubble gum.

If I cut *that* out, how would anybody know what happened in the six original Dragonlance books without actually *reading* them? Sheesh.


>
> > Also, his novel is the first in a trilogy, so
>>even though the book tells a complete story, he
>>still has *more* to say, and has plans for the
>>other two books in the series.
>
> Yeah, but we both know the rest isn't happening
>any time soon. *sigh*

True, but that's beside the point. You do have *plans* for those novels, am I correct? You know basically what they're going to be about and what "loose ends" from the previous novel(s) they'll cover? You have more to say. And that's my point--I finish a story at the point at which I have nothing left to say. And when I'm trying to write a novel, that point is usually somewhere smack in the middle of the "novella" length category.


> I was going to respond to Issachar's post with
>the exact same thing. That story inspires my
>imagination. I'm not sure how it does so, but
>each time I read it, I'm triggered into imagining
>what kind of daily life the residents of this
>city must lead. What kind of life is it to life
>in an only partially inhabited city, where
>artists must be sanctioned and the police drive
>up to buildings next door and blow them up.

Set fire to them, not blow them up ;-)

Jump-starting the imagination is something every good speculative fiction story should do, I think. I'm glad this one succeeds on that level. Of course, this kind of "wondering" may be exactly what caused Issachar to want me to "continue" the story. He seems to be thinking about the same things you are thinking about after you finish the story. For one of you, it's a "good" thing, while the other wants me to do more work. :-)


>
> The other reason I think it's good that you
>don't bother to explain things like the grunts is
>that it wouldn't be natural for a story written
>in the first person to do so. The narrator is a
>character who was obviously born and raised in
>this world and would not think to explain those
>things that differ from the world we know. Try
>to invent an excuse to explain things, and the
>storytelling mechanics will become visible and
>distract from the story's focus.

In every writing class I ever took, we always learned about how "hard" it is to do first person narrative "correctly." (Of course, we also talked about all the evils of first person narrative, and how we should just use third-person limited, since that's what the prof liked... Idiot. But I digress.) One of the issues that was raised about first person is exactly what you talked about--in a first-person narrative, every single word in the story must come directly from either the narrator's mouth or his/her mind. If the narrator wouldn't stop to speculate on the nature of his grunts, then the *story* can't stop and speculate on the nature of his grunts. It was something I already knew, of course, but it was one of the few lessons I really took away from those classes in a codified, succinct manner (the only thing I ever *learned* from those writing classes was "never start a story with an alarm clock ringing." But again, I digress.)

This is part of the reason that first person is seen as "hard to do", especially in SF. But for some reason, I always seem to naturally start a story in the first person. I think it has to do with the fact that in a first person story, you only have to deal with one characters inner thoughts--everyone else you only have to deal with their actions. So it just seems easier to me, in that respect--that way, I can just use the one character I know best, like I always do. (A running "joke" between Sam and I--which isn't much of a joke because it's pretty much true--is that in all of my serious writing, I've never once created a character that wasn't based in some non-trivial way on myself. We all know about Darius, but just about all the main characters in all of my stories carry a part of me in them--Jim Kunkle, for instance, has about the same amount of guitar skill as I posess, or that I did posess when I wrote that story; I've gotten better since then. I make light of this in the still-unfinshed third installment of the "Duel of the Ages" trilogy.)

>
> > One of the few criticisms I personally have
>>about this story is that it's not really much of
>>an SF story--it's just the story of a guy in an
>>SF world. That's not really a *bad* thing,
>>unless you're trying to submit to Analog, but it
>>is one thing that bugs me a little bit.
>
> Don't let it. It may bother an exclusionary
>genre fan, but as far as actual storytelling
>goes, personally I think this is better. No
>matter what the setting, no matter what the
>genre, most of the best stories are about people.

Well, the problem lies in the fact that editors of genre magazines are usually (at least for the purposes of their jobs) exclusionary genre fans.

Oh well. I still like the story. In fact, I like it more now than when I agreed to post it.