Finally got that ophthalmology appointment. Everything worked out. I'd timed it almost perfectly from work, those silly sunshade inserts were enough to navigate (with difficulty) the freeway towards home. Which took me past work so I stopped, clocked back in, made up the lost hour the appointment had taken and by the time I left the sun was no longer painful.
Oh, and everything looked good. That last impatient and uncommunicative "doctor" had left me the impression that I had glaucoma. Well, turns out not so. No glaucoma, no cataracts to worry about. So now I can get some new lenses (sigh...more money).
I feel younger than I have felt in a while.
The New Mexico novel is finally in outlining. The gaps are bigger than I thought. But I had a useful thought this morning. Okay; I woke up, (after a very strange dream in which my brother and best friend had gone Edo-punk; instead of dressing up in top hats, they were dressing as Japanese feudal lords for daywear, taking an afternoon stroll in hakama and swords while composing haiku to each other)...anyhow, I woke up with yet another new bit of dialogue in my head.
And realized that the important thing wasn't that Penny not be able to talk to anyone for this desert solitaire. But that she feels like she doesn't have anyone to talk to. As long as I get some good solo sequences out of her (and she's got enough driving back-and-forth between Alamogordo, Albuquerque and Roswell to achieve that, easy), I can still have her do enough necessary dialogue to, well...
...indulge too much in all that lovely background world-building. Sigh. Well, if any reader has made it this far into the series, they already know what to expect.
Hell, they might even like it. There's a small counter-revolution going on over in BookTube right now, with some readers and authors expressing that, just maybe, not everybody wants a short book with nothing but dialogue (and probably fist fights...it's hard to tell). Also threads on Reddit and conversations on Quora and of course several of the blogs I follow...this is in the air.
Speaking of which.
It strikes me that the Murderbot Diaries play with another expectation. I already talked about the way it uses a quirk of English to largely take gender out of the question. We have pronouns, and "it" is equally weighted as "he" and "she"; it is making a judgement (and "they" just stands out, although for different reasons.)
But Murderbot is told in First Person. And it doesn't care about gender, not its own, not anyone else's.
Thing I realized today is that in most books, when we have a bunch of characters to keep track of, we tag them by description and manner. He's the short, excitable one. She's the moody blonde. It helps in our inner filing systems.
I am thinking this because I have trouble keeping track of the human cast. And that's because they don't get these tags. Many readers, however, apparently do find these characters easy to remember, clear and distinct. And I think that is because they are looking at social cues, and remembering them via the relationships they have.
That's how my female relatives talk. Every conversation has a "June, who is Cecily's mom, who is one of Sally's friends. June was at Sarah's wedding, you probably saw her there."
All of that is there, just not highlighted. Because SecUnit professes not to be interested. SecUnit is an untrustworthy narrator. It enjoys and seems to take actual comfort in Sanctuary Moon, a sort of future-equivalent-of a telenovela.
So we aren't getting in an obvious way the stuff we usually think is necessary to track our casts. But, at least for some readers, the information is still there.
Well. Pretty soon we'll be able to watch Sanctuary Moon ourselves.
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