I get maudlin at night. Watch.
Reading is a sort of nested puzzle; you've got the fictive present, fine; you also get any flashbacks or flash-forwards; unless it's a 1st person pov, you get the narrator's opinions and that implied time. And behind that, or under it, is the writer. To read the work of a friend is to peer through a window and into the parts of a your friend you can't see any other way. And while they give the window to any who read the work you ought to be able to see deeper and kinder, recognize the texture of landmarks you've heard in conversations, felt beneath the surface. Greater contextual knowledge and all that. On a macro level writing is, to a certain extent, about themes, and themes are also obsessions. Things you think about at night when the windows rattle and the heater ticks. This room you've been invited into. Stars like wet white apples hung from a friend's skull, and shining.
I read in an review/essay lately that speculative fiction--especially science fiction--is often about loneliness. You know, the lone survivor of this or that disaster, the ship alone in the vastness of space, the alien, the other, the strangers with no common language. Fantasy is about making metaphor a tactile reality of the fantastic world. Vows and hatreds and loves become physical realities, physical bonds; the impossible becomes merely improbable, unlikely, or highly difficult. Urban fantasy, aka magic realism, further blurs things. There are unicorns in Central Park, there are elves in the SCA, the fantastic is brought into our world, closer but still out of reach. Writing is all about inhabiting the space between one's reach and one's grasp.
I read in an review/essay lately that speculative fiction--especially science fiction--is often about loneliness. You know, the lone survivor of this or that disaster, the ship alone in the vastness of space, the alien, the other, the strangers with no common language. Fantasy is about making metaphor a tactile reality of the fantastic world. Vows and hatreds and loves become physical realities, physical bonds; the impossible becomes merely improbable, unlikely, or highly difficult. Urban fantasy, aka magic realism, further blurs things. There are unicorns in Central Park, there are elves in the SCA, the fantastic is brought into our world, closer but still out of reach. Writing is all about inhabiting the space between one's reach and one's grasp.