BTW, the gang there just started a podcast, and for episode #2 (recorded night before last) they had me on as a guest. I'll let you know when it gets published. (There'll also be a blog post, but that might lag the actual YouTube post.)
I did like their way of introducing characters, kind of a 'here they are, ill tell you more about them when it matters' kind of thing, I always go a little overboard trying to perfectly describe all of them the moment they are introduced
@MonicaCellio yeah i dropped a few comments in on each chapter
@RhysW I sometimes go too far in the other direction. In The Sisters' War I haven't provided physical descriptions of any of the characters, and now in the chapter I'm finishing up now I throw in a bit of description for a new character and it feels out of place. The perils of publishing serial fiction; I can fix this in an editing pass for version 2, but right now I just have to live with it.
@MonicaCellio I have a flip-flop relationship with character descriptions. On the one hand i like knowing what the author is envisioning, on the other hand, as a reader, i end up assigning them all their own looks in my head anyway regardless of how they have been described
also i think "A picture flashed into my mind of a tribal warrior standing at the shore of the sea, spear in hand, waves crashing ashore, moons overhead in the night sky" would make a great cover for the book if you didn't already have one in mind :P
In the Imperial Radch trilogy, physical descriptions are very limited because the narrator just doesn't care much. Because of the series' themes of body politics, this means the readers find themselves eagerly lapping up every little detail that is provided.
In the Earthsea series, contrariwise, Le Guin was very sparse with her descriptions of the main character because she wanted the reader to very gradually notice it was a person of color.
She's said in interviews that she knew it would be a hard sell for publishers because they didn't think the presumed target demographic would buy into a non-white protagonist, so she snuck it up on them.
@RhysW thanks! I'd like to eventually publish this as an e-book, which will require a cover, which will quickly bump up against my own artistic limitations. I'll need to figure out how to address that.
I enjoy Margery Allingham's character descriptions, because she usually only gives a brief simile for the overall form and then details a specific notable feature which is representative of their presence in the room.
@MonicaCellio that could be an interesting experiment, get a bunch of people to read it then describe one of the characters, see how closely they match what you were thinking
@BESW clever. :-) I remember reading an interview with, if I recall correctly, Orson Scott Card, 20+ years ago, where he said something like "I never provide physical descriptions unless they're necessary for the plot. And then I wrote (title) where it was important that characters had blue eyes, and everybody knew it was important because I specified." Or something like that.
@RhysW I've actually seen some instances of that... can't remember where, but it was a collection of portraits by various artists all going off the same set of character descriptions.
Now he's the best friend and manservant to a bright but very unassuming younger son of a noble family, who has been disowned because he makes a living solving crimes. Lugg keeps trying to work on his upward mobility, much to the horror of Albert who likes Lugg fine just the way he is.
(Albert's primary physical quality is looking foolish and ignorable.)
Ok so im tempted to put my story on a planet thats tidally locked to its sun, everyone lives in the portion thats lit up. I wanted to make it so that the population has never been to the dark sides, i wanted to do that by making it too deadly to them, e.g they are cold blooded, so leaving the sun basically spells death by freezing to them, but then i don't leave myself any space to send the protagonists out into the dark, any ideas?
Superstition, dangerous dark-only creatures/events, NO TRESPASSING signs...
(Pedantically, a tidally locked planet is uninhabitable on both light and dark sides, as they boil and freeze respectively, so your folks would be stuck in the dusk zone.)
my other two ideas were either 1) religious reasons, they worship the sun, to leave its rays has been spread around as basically something you just don't do, especially if you want to live. 2) the governing body has decreed that it is inhopsitable, set up walls around the whole thing, etc etc
> Magersfontein Lugg’s lush personality pervaded the room like a smell of cooking. He was in deshabille, appearing at first sight to be attired as the hinder part of a pantomine elephant, and was holding out in front of him a mighty woollen undervest. The “impossible voice” to which the great lady had referred recently was after all only a matter of taste. There was expression and flexibility in that rich rumble which many actors might have sought to imitate in vain. - More Work for the Undertaker, 1948 Margery Allingham
@RhysW oh, fun idea. Worldbuilding has some questions about the environment on such a tidally-locked planet, btw (temperature regulation, plant life, that sort of thing). Between the light side and the dark side there is the twilight band, which could be survivable but super-risky -- but if there's something driving your people into it...
> The beady eyes peered out from their surrounding folds with a truculence which did not hide the reproach, or even the panic, lurking there. [...] The place where Mr. Lugg’s eyebrows may once have been rose to meet the naked dome of his skull.
@MonicaCellio i was thinking about making it an older universe, so the suns a lot cooler than usual, and the planets only recently slowed its spinning enough to have been locked (in planetary terms of recently), though im not sure that even that solves the issue
@MonicaCellio ah good idea, thanks, ill definitely check it out tomorrow, i actually need to sleep now though, well, as of about 40 minutes ago but i got a bit lost in blog posts :P
The Overlook Hotel
The Overlook Hotel