Splat.
I've come to the end of "Time of Daughters" book two. Emotionally and physically exhausted--and I can't even contemplate all the stuff I shoved aside to get this done.
Plenty of hard word ahead to get it into shape, of course, but meantime I was sitting here too tired to get up to get a snack, thinking back over my face to face book group's recent discussion of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
It occurred to me that Shelley (the poet) was the first modern editor. I realize that some (often, but not always, male) academics and critics claim that it was mostly written by him. Feminist scholars pooh pooh his any involvement. Recent works, from writers who have examined the actual pages, observed his distinctive handwriting tightening a sentence here, adding one there, transforming a clumsy adverbial phrase into a single sharp verb. He had a poet's eye, and when you compare this story to the unreadably turgid prose of her subsequent novels, I think it's clear that he edited with a deft hand. But the story itself was hers, and he left it alone as she wrote it.
It's astonishing to reflect that she was a teenager the summer she commenced writing it. He was all of twenty-three. I think it can be said that parts of the book are incoherent, and there are plenty of hoary tropes super popular in novels of the period (like wedding night murders), and outright melodrama.
Id-vortex, actually. It's the idtastic bits that consistently show up in all the various films through the entire twentieth century. But it also incorporated the hottest, newest tech of the time, the early notions of electricity, and how that might intersect with the mystery of life. And all the consequences thereof, philosophical, ethical, cultural . . . and of course, as Viktor Frankenstein earnestly warns Walter before he dies, the cost of overweening ambition.
I don't actually like the novel at all. But I adore the story of its composition.
And it reminded me that those of us not geniuses need editors.
This entry was originally posted at https://sartorias.dreamwidth.org/1011339.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Plenty of hard word ahead to get it into shape, of course, but meantime I was sitting here too tired to get up to get a snack, thinking back over my face to face book group's recent discussion of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
It occurred to me that Shelley (the poet) was the first modern editor. I realize that some (often, but not always, male) academics and critics claim that it was mostly written by him. Feminist scholars pooh pooh his any involvement. Recent works, from writers who have examined the actual pages, observed his distinctive handwriting tightening a sentence here, adding one there, transforming a clumsy adverbial phrase into a single sharp verb. He had a poet's eye, and when you compare this story to the unreadably turgid prose of her subsequent novels, I think it's clear that he edited with a deft hand. But the story itself was hers, and he left it alone as she wrote it.
It's astonishing to reflect that she was a teenager the summer she commenced writing it. He was all of twenty-three. I think it can be said that parts of the book are incoherent, and there are plenty of hoary tropes super popular in novels of the period (like wedding night murders), and outright melodrama.
Id-vortex, actually. It's the idtastic bits that consistently show up in all the various films through the entire twentieth century. But it also incorporated the hottest, newest tech of the time, the early notions of electricity, and how that might intersect with the mystery of life. And all the consequences thereof, philosophical, ethical, cultural . . . and of course, as Viktor Frankenstein earnestly warns Walter before he dies, the cost of overweening ambition.
I don't actually like the novel at all. But I adore the story of its composition.
And it reminded me that those of us not geniuses need editors.
This entry was originally posted at https://sartorias.dreamwidth.org/1011339.html. Please comment there using OpenID.