Predictability, Emotional Rooms of the Mind, Meta-Brands

[justbeast]

This post of Seth Godin's, The Places You Go talks about how, very often, emotions are like rooms in our mental houses -- they are places we seek out because we want to be in that state, rather than something that happens to us.

Being a marketing philosopher, he of course connects it to brands, and mentions that the best brands figure out how to

Comments

[sinboy]

Four strangers are bound together in adventure, love and occasional sorrow in this parable from Tiptree winner Valente (The Orphan's Tales). The city of Palimpsest exists somewhere outside our reality, accessible only during the sleep that follows sex. The immigrants to Palimpsest, marked forever by the tattoo-like impression of a map on their skin, seek out one another for real-world sexual adventures that function as passports to new otherworldly quarters. In outstandingly beautiful prose, Valente describes grotesque, glamorous creatures sometimes neither human nor animal, alive nor dead, and mortal travelers who pursue poignant personal quests to replace the things (and people) they've lost. Valente's fondness for digression at times makes for a difficult read, and her fable of quest and loneliness is less an engrossing fairy tale and more a meticulous travelogue of a stranger's dream.
- PW's review

[justbeast]

Whoops! Sorry. Yeah, different review :) I'll edit.

[sinboy]

No worries. It's easy to get things mixed up. And sometimes a PW reviewer might not like Cat's books. It happens. But I have reason to suspect that the reviews editor who assigns the books to anonymous reviewers is as far as can be :-)

[theferrett]

So at one point you call a reviewer foolish for expecting your wife to write the same book over and over again... And then you call an entire writing style bullshit for not writing like your wife? Unwise, sirrah, unwise.

EDIT: Ah, I see you've edited. Still, while I agree that transparent prose isn't a standard to be applied to science fiction as a whole, I personally have a strong preference for it.

[justbeast]

I do call that reviewer foolish! I seriously could not believe my eyes, reading the review in question.

As for transparent prose, sure, lots of people have a preference for it.

[catvalente]

I at least read it as him summarizing what I preach, which is pretty much that. The unwiseness is mine.

[catvalente]

And I don't even think that it's bullshit so much as I think it bores me as a reader and it has so many defenders--nay, crusaders! That deriding it at all has become a quasi-criminal act in the eyes of a lot of readers. But honestly, it had better be the best story in the world if the writing is as plain as crusaders would like it to be--and it almost never is. It's amazing how insistent folk are on plot, plot, plot, and yet good plots are damn hard to find.