The heresy of paraphrase
I had two opportunities to talk about writing today with writers, which is really weird and unusual and lovely and should happen more often. Both of these too-brief conversations were held before the beginning of a class, and inevitably there were other (non-writer) people listening. In my Clarissa seminar the guy who sits across from me noticed my NaNoWriMo travel mug, asked about my history with NaNo, and was sincerely impressed that I'd managed it for seven years (this last year was his first). Of course my seminar leader/advisor/all around awesome person Jenny is a novelist in addition to being a professor and she started talking about writing too and it was awesome.
I was thinking about NaNo so when I somehow got onto the subject of writing fiction with a girl in the MA before my next class, I ended up mentioning a couple of my novels-in-progress. I gave her the flippant/irreverent/shorthand description of The Printer's Tale and she sounded interested, but one of the other girls in my cohort, who was sitting in front of us, turned around and made a disparaging comment that implied I was following up on the popularity of Twilight, of all things, simply because my less-than-one-sentence synopsis mentioned werewolves.
And the thing is, yes, my flippant, irreverent, shorthand description of the novels I write will always leave something out. And if you're not already into the few things that show up in the shorthand, that kind of description isn't going to interest you. But if you are? Then I can convince you in less than a sentence...or at least get a laugh out of you. In fact hopefully that's exactly what these will do!
Lunar Reflections (2005): teenage angst on the moon
Kes Running (2006): unpremeditated gap year in space
The Printer's Daughter (2007): Beauty and the Beast meets Jane Eyre with werewolves
Gil and Leah (2008): feminist fantasy cross-dressing farce
The Inconvenient Dreamer (2009): woman travels to alternate universes in her dreams
Beneath Strange Stars (2010): gender-swapped Pride and Prejudice in space
Chasing Ghosts (2011): Possession meets Neverwhere with cross-dressing
The moral of the story: I need to find more fantasy/sci-fi writers (or at least writers who are sympathetic to these genres even if not writers of them) with whom to talk about my novels.
I was thinking about NaNo so when I somehow got onto the subject of writing fiction with a girl in the MA before my next class, I ended up mentioning a couple of my novels-in-progress. I gave her the flippant/irreverent/shorthand description of The Printer's Tale and she sounded interested, but one of the other girls in my cohort, who was sitting in front of us, turned around and made a disparaging comment that implied I was following up on the popularity of Twilight, of all things, simply because my less-than-one-sentence synopsis mentioned werewolves.
And the thing is, yes, my flippant, irreverent, shorthand description of the novels I write will always leave something out. And if you're not already into the few things that show up in the shorthand, that kind of description isn't going to interest you. But if you are? Then I can convince you in less than a sentence...or at least get a laugh out of you. In fact hopefully that's exactly what these will do!
Lunar Reflections (2005): teenage angst on the moon
Kes Running (2006): unpremeditated gap year in space
The Printer's Daughter (2007): Beauty and the Beast meets Jane Eyre with werewolves
Gil and Leah (2008): feminist fantasy cross-dressing farce
The Inconvenient Dreamer (2009): woman travels to alternate universes in her dreams
Beneath Strange Stars (2010): gender-swapped Pride and Prejudice in space
Chasing Ghosts (2011): Possession meets Neverwhere with cross-dressing
The moral of the story: I need to find more fantasy/sci-fi writers (or at least writers who are sympathetic to these genres even if not writers of them) with whom to talk about my novels.