Guess What I Noticed? // VOID-STAR.NET

Guess What I Noticed?

I loved Chainbreaker, and I think you’re both brilliant writers for your own individual writing styles.

Quoted From: ‘Chainbreaker’ review #1

I think that this was a great book, I truly enjoyed the trip.

Quoted From: ‘Chainbreaker’ review #2

Ooh yeah, Chainbreaker rocks dA! Yes yes, I’m excited over our news post placement. So shoot me.

I think the suspense on this damn book thing is truly gonna kill me. We’ve had our first two private crits come in, of which I have shamelessly appropriated some key marketing phrases from and posted above. You’ll have to forgive me for the pimping, but right now I am my marketing department.

Plus I’m, yanno, excited.

And even though it’s only been two people so far, we’ve had some really invaluable feedback. Places where the story seemed slow, plot twists that maybe needed some more foreshadowing… interest in a sequel.

Oh yes, there is a sequel! It’s called Dead on Arrival and is about two thirds written. I need to get off my butt and get back to work on it, but first I’ve gotta get my brain in the right gear; it’s still stuck in Smallville at the moment, but my usual Obsession Interest Cycle is about due to kick over and when it does it’ll hit the ground in Pandemonium City running.¹ The page at the site is a placeholder for now, but DoA kicks off exactly where Chainbreaker leaves us, so for those of you who’re wondering what happened to Loki and Sigmund, what’s wrong with Miriah and what the deal is with Tara… don’t worry, we’ve got it covered.

One of the things that gets mentioned a bit is the way the book switches between first and third person POV. I guess the style is a bit jarring if you haven’t encountered it before. I picked it up when I was in high school after reading Waking the Moon, and it’s also the style favoured by my super-favouritist author of all time, Michael Marshall Smith. The reason I chose it for Corner — and therefore carried it over to Urban Nordica — is flat-out a cheap trick to get Loki to be more sympathetic to the reader. Because from an outside POV he’s not sympathetic at all which is kinda rough for a hero protagonist. Luckily for me, he’s also an extremely flawed narrator and the first-person also kicks down his alienness factor a lot because his in-head narration is pretty human, even if his outside actions aren’t. When I deliberately want to play up Loki’s otherness, I write him third person; and he can get hella Other. Stuff that Loki takes for granted in his head — everything from the way his appearance changes to how certain things just ‘work’ for him to his actual Godly Godness — is all a goldmine of WTFness from the point of view of a third person observer, and this is where the series slips into horror territory as opposed to the modern dark fantasy action romp default state.

So the POV-switching is a risk, and I’m still trying to decide in my head whether it’s a justified risk or I’m making up excuses for something that really doesn’t work. Heh.

1. With profuse apologies to everyone waiting on UIP. I haven’t forgotten it, I swear! ^

4 Comments

1. 

   702 days ago
   199 comments

   chelle

   Well, you’ve sure gotten me pumped up. After having read just what was last on your Dead On Arrival lj comm a couple years ago (I think?), the beginning confused the fuck out of me but I enjoyed the hell out of reading it. Thank god I “get it” now, rofl.

   I thought the POV-switch was weird at first (but not totally new — you’re doing that in DoA too, right?), and I’ve never liked first-person (for the fact that it just looks so egocentric), but for me it’s always just seemed so “right” for the fact that he is a god, and a very self-oriented one at that. In your chapters, you write the way Loki sees it, in Random’s it comes from the way the others see it. I was going to say it felt jarring, but then thought “but it works for me anyway, so I take that back”.

   That, and it reminds me of the awesomeness of Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper in that, while in Picoult’s novel the the whole thing is first-person (and the character in question has their own font/chapter name), there were clearly different flavors between the heads the chapters came from. Reading that book was like discovering a new favorite alcoholic beverage for me.

   I’m pretty sure I gushed about that somewhere else, and that you pointed out either book/author in response to said gushing. Pardon me if I’m being redundant. x3

   • Reply
   • 

     702 days ago
     1,568 comments

     Dee

     Haha, I’m glad DoA makes more sense to you now. ^^”

     you’re doing that in DoA too, right?

     Yeah. Where Loki’s a main character I always do him first-person, and switch to third for scenes he’s not in.

     but for me it’s always just seemed so “right” for the fact that he is a god, and a very self-oriented one at that.

     You know, it’d never ever occurred to me before and now you’re the second person to’ve pointed this out! Very strange. I guess it’s because I don’t (can’t?) see first-person narration as egocentric. I mean, academically it is but… that’s the point. I guess I can’t ascribe a value-judgement to it any more than I can any other literary tool. Like, who is the egocentricism supposed to reflect on? The author? But they’re not the character. The character? But they don’t choose the perspective. I dunno. It’s an interesting way to look at it, but not something I’ve ever thought of before…

     • Reply
     • 

       702 days ago
       199 comments

       chelle

       It more or less reflects on the character for me. A great example is somewhere on fanficrants, in which someone is quoted for saying “He stares into my beautiful blue eyes” (only using strange words and sounding like an idjit, hence it was on ffrants), and it was just so… silly sounding. Like, the character was under the belief that her eyes were beautiful? Pssh, what if they’re just plain ugly? But of course, the character’s blue eyes were canonically considered beautiful, so it was “right” but it looked “wrong” to me.

       Then, when you’re trying to roleplay with someone who insists on using first-person POV, it’s just plain creepy. : (Especially once when I was trying to do a mature scene with one such individual, and things started sounding more like personal threats than actual roleplaying. Eek!)

       I got very few “hueg ego” vibes from Loki since he doesn’t monologue for three years about his appearance; more like “omnipresent” if that makes any sense. It’s when the character starts going on and on about his perfect face and chiseled abs that I start rolling my eyes.

       • Reply
       • 

         702 days ago
         1,568 comments

         Dee

         Oh, okay. Haha, yeah that’s just Grade A bad writing rather than a POV thing. The Mirror Trick (where a character describes themselves, first or third person) is pretty universally reviled by ‘real’ writers. And I dunno, but to me the fun of first person POV is the fact that because you’re in a character’s voice, you have to think about what sort of things they take for granted and therefore wouldn’t explicitly mention in narrative. Appearance is probably the number one thing; a character knows what he looks like, thus would probably only describe features that were unusual (e.g. injuries, fatigue) or were relevant to the situation (Loki often introduces the fact that he has horns by mentioning he has to duck to get through doorframes).

         Like, the character was under the belief that her eyes were beautiful? Pssh, what if they’re just plain ugly?

         This is actually called the Unreliable Narrator and when it’s done properly it’s a great trick. The best example I can think of off the top of my head is ‘Jack’/the narrator from Fight Club; Jack is unreliable because he doesn’t know the one salient fact of the plot (that he’s Tyler). However because the story is told through his POV we, as the audience, assume that the story he’s telling us is ‘correct’. We might guess that there’s something funny going on (because good writers usually leave clues to the Big Reveal), but we don’t know. His narration is unreliable, but we treat it as if it is; thus the Reveal is either a) just as shocking to the audience as it is to him, or (if we’ve seen it before) b) caught somewhere between pity and an in-joke as we spot the clues he doesn’t.

         Other examples are The Sixth Sense (we take Bruce Willis for granted that he’s alive), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (the narrator is crazy) and the song “Sympathy For the Devil” (the Devil is probably lying).

         I got very few “hueg ego” vibes from Loki since he doesn

         • Reply