In the am, an editorial paring job on Far Arena chapter 11 - taking out nearly 2000 words. I hope you're still talking to me, Lynda. Though with "track changes" you have the option of putting them all back in. Then to the library, and I've come home with "Ornament: an illustrated handbook of motifs", and "Tiles in architecture" and "The Art of Glass: Integrating architecture and glass", all of which will help with building cities. I need to be able to visualize, or I feel as though I'm describing with my specs off. It's all coloured fuzz. I hate coloured fuzz in descriptions. Gorgeous pictures in all of them, a feast for the eyes. I have to remember, though, whose eyes I'm looking through. Those tiles are going to mean something different to everyone.

I was rereading - or reskimming Marge Piercy's "Braided Lives", which is probably my favourite of her mainstream (as opposed to SF or historical) novels. I regret the plot-compulsion of genre at times, since I rather like the Bildungsromane and the social novel (at least the contemporary social novel) as forms. In Piercy's "Small Changes" there's a street party scene, depicting the multiple overlapping threads of various lives; I tried to capture that flavour in the opening section of a never-to-be-finished prequel to Legacies, years ago. That and "Children of Paradise". Never mind romantic triangles, I had at least a pentangle.

Something dawned upon me about my writing a few days ago. I have my sense of drama from a love of drama. And I don't mean film, I mean drama: Shakesphere, Shaw, Bolt, Osborne, Synge, Miller, Williams ... those guys. And from opera. I find argument inherently dramatic. Storytelling is suspenseful. I like speeches and arias. I don't have a modern genre mindset AT ALL. No wonder I'm accused of slow pacing and talkiness. If I didn't love the worldbuilding, the thought experiments and the opportunity to write about politics, morality and creative passion on a large scale, I'd give up SF and take up a form in which the love of drama and argument was an asset rather than a liability.

But then there are nights like tonight when, after I had beat upon the scene futilely (neither sleep nor swimming having inspired), repeating arguments in different voices, realising I'd repeated myself, cutting out the repeats ... My protagonist suddenly obliged me with a great big whopper of a lie! Bless his black heart. So now I'm off to pick up the scene (already mostly written) in which the graveyard gets dug up. The Law of Dramatic Economy demands that there be Consequences to the GBW, and that those arrive at the most inopportune moment. But that shall be relegated to mental composting.
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