Setsuled's Journal

Once again, I saw the sun--an hour earlier too.

I was made to remember what a bright and annoyingly warm thing the sun is. I gained a new appreciation for my customary sleeping schedule.

I went to see The Two Towers for the forth time, and greatly enjoyed it, despite feeling like I was probably going to fall asleep at any moment.

When I got home, I found that my aunt had gotten me some old books at an estate sale. Books by Ogden Nash, Nathaniel Hawthorne, W. Somerset Maugham, and Alexander Dumas. I haven't read any of these authors, but it's neat having books this old--the Nash was printed in 1944 and the Maugham in 1915. Unfortunately, there's no year listed in the Dumas or Hawthorne, but both look extremely old and I can easily picture this copy of Dumas's The Black Tulip on a shelf in an average Victorian home.

Also when I got in, I found my aunt reading some of my novel. She seems generally to be enjoying it. The closest thing to a criticism she gave me was, "It's kind of wordy,"

I asked if she meant that in a bad way. Her reply was kind of incoherent.

"Are you saying there's something wrong with my language?" I asked--bear in mind here that my aunt's a former high school English teacher.

"No," she said, "It's just . . . wordy,"

I frowned and thought hard about that. Finally I was forced to say, "I don't understand . . ."

Here my grandmother, who's never read any of my writing, interjected, "She means you use a lot more words than you need to, that you could say the same thing with a lot less,"

"So it is my language,"

"Oh!" said my aunt, "I thought you meant language like 'foul language'. I can tell you what I like--I like your characterisation very much . . ."

But I was still kind of bothered. I explained that I try to be as succinct as possible. I have a lot of exposition that simply has to be there since my novel takes place entirely in another universe.

"If there's anything extraneous in the exposition," I said, "it's there because I'm trying to make the information flow better with everything else . . ."

They didn't respond to this. I find that people are usually only willing to go so far with criticisms, generally they prefer being polite to me to being useful to me.

I guess I was comforted a bit by the thought that J.R.R. Tolkien's works are full of exposition, and no one seems to seriously hold it against him.

But then I read over the part of my novel that my aunt had just read and decided that she was just plain utterly wrong. So phooey!