It is no secret that when I started out writing "The Herbalist's Apprentice," it was a novelette for the Jim Hines/Cats Curious Press fairy tale retelling project
( Read more... )
You'd also be throwing every medievalist out of the story, too. So I, personally, am grateful. (Does this mean I shouldn't read the one you gave me at Penguicon?)
It's fine, as long as you accept that when we get emails from medievalists (and gun nuts, and horse crazies, and amateur astronomers) we roll our eyes and say, "Yeah, I'd like to see you write a novel." *g*
Which doesn't excuse the author from getting it right, of course. But it'd be nice if Fixated People realized that every single aspect of a work of fiction has Fixated People staring at it in incredulous horror, and it's humanly impossible to get every detail correct. Especially when you are talking about something controversial.
I especially like the emails from people who want to bitch me out about something they're wrong about.
Just realized that I should clarify. My point is not that one should not sweat the details, because details are what make a story pop.
But rather that at a certain point the artist just has to relax and accept that the point is good art, not a treatise on hemming techniques in the 15th century.
Because worrying about this stuff, frankly, can be paralytic. At a certain point, if you think about it too much, you lose the forest for the trees, and the narrative for the buttonholes. Assuming buttons have even been invented yet. Maybe they're still using points. I guess I need some primary sources....
Well - changing the princess dresses is a PITA, but it's less so than, say, if you found that your entire plot needed to be pulled out and fixed. So there's that...
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Which doesn't excuse the author from getting it right, of course. But it'd be nice if Fixated People realized that every single aspect of a work of fiction has Fixated People staring at it in incredulous horror, and it's humanly impossible to get every detail correct. Especially when you are talking about something controversial.
I especially like the emails from people who want to bitch me out about something they're wrong about.
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Besides, try to get two geeks to agree.
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But rather that at a certain point the artist just has to relax and accept that the point is good art, not a treatise on hemming techniques in the 15th century.
Because worrying about this stuff, frankly, can be paralytic. At a certain point, if you think about it too much, you lose the forest for the trees, and the narrative for the buttonholes. Assuming buttons have even been invented yet. Maybe they're still using points. I guess I need some primary sources....
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