Word.
I've just read 'Lost In A Good Book', by Jasper Fforde, and am about to start the sequel, 'The Well Of Lost Plots'. They're very good, very funny (first book in the series is 'The Eyre Affair', FYI). Jasper Fforde reminds me of Terry Pratchett in that they both play around with the nature of books - the reality of text on paper. In Jasper Fforde's stuff, someone has invented a Prose Portal - a means of actually getting into a book. They run around in the background of Jane Eyre (one of my favourite novels), and Great Expectations (I loathe Dickens), and suchlike, trying not to disrupt the action of the book they're in, because it will appear in print... And because of this interaction between books and reality, he's come up with loads of lovely things, such as the footnoterphone.1
Exactly. And the 'real' characters have conversations with...2
It's quite confusing at first.3
Terry Pratchett plays about in similar ways - sometimes quite subtly. 'Reaper Man', for instance, has two different storylines going on at the same time, for which he uses two different fonts. And there's Death, of course, who talks (without speech marks) LIKE THIS. I borrowed one of his inventions - a sort of fading out, fading back in of consciousness, done with ellipses - for my own short story, 'Safe And Sound'.
.....
...
.
...
.....
Like that. I'm a great fan of the written word, myself, so these slightly nerdy things please me.
In other news... I had no time to write in my lj yesterday, due to work stuff that's too dull even to write about. Bah to it - it's spoilt my record. No doubt obsessive-compulsively of me, I'd managed to write in it every day (except weekends) so far. Oh well. Pattern broken. It's probably healthier.
And next week I'm going to see the Mediaeval Baebes' London Christmas concert, with my mum. So, recently, I'll have been to see alt-country, comedy music, and pop-choral.
Eclectic.
1. Sort of the literary version of a telephone.
2. ...the fictional characters.
3. But you get used to it.