Help
Link: http://www.tor.com/b...6-and-17#127676
I'd even suggest we make a sticky post for these re-read on each book forum once we get at it. I'm sure it can be useful for readers to find another place for discussions and one looking here may not know there's a reread abut GotM. Keeping the links here and sticky would make them easy to find even in the longer term.
EDIT: Being at it I'll link another reread that will probably take forever. The more the better. On that site there's also a well done ASoIaF reread.
EDIT2: Erikson wrote another article on characterization and dialogue examining a scene in Chapter 7 of GotM. Here's the link: http://lifeasahuman....aft-of-writing/
EDIT3: More comments on GotM, the meaning of the title of the novel, and the use of "magic" in Fantasy: http://www.tor.com/b...2-and-23#131814
Quote
Hello all,
The great thing about having a cold is the privilege of sitting round for days doing nothing and not feeling guilty about it. Having read through the chapter commentary from the beginning, I'd like to take you all back more than a few pages, and talk about why these novels seem to thrive in the context of re-reads, and why first-time readers are often left feeling bewildered. I think the two are very much related.
It goes back to how I first started writing fiction. I was in a Master's program in archaeology when I came second in a local short story contest in Winnipeg, a tale called 'Wooden Trucks.' On the weight of this one venture into writing I applied to attend a creative writing program at the University of Victoria. I recall being in a sweaty phone box in Belize, on the phone with my mother back in Winnipeg, as she opened the envelope telling me I'd got in. From that moment onward, my entire world changed.
The writing program at Uvic at that time was at its zenith. When I showed up it was as a wide-eyed neophyte with a secret love of genre fiction (one keeps these things secret if one wants to be taken seriously). What I learned, almost from day one, was that I knew nothing about anything; that my writing to that point had only 'worked' because I was instinctively consistent, with emphasis on the word 'instinctively.'
Uvic taught me the craft of writing; it taught me to be mindful. The key though is this: it made me a short-story writer. Short stories are a particular beasts. In them, not a single word is superfluous. Everything carries extra weight, or at least that's how I saw it.
Track forward a few years and scores of short stories later, and I begin writing novels, only to discover that my 'muscle memory' is now absolute -- the obsessive adherence to multifunctional, multilayered writing (line by line, word by word) is not something I can relax -- when novel writing in fact demands just that: an ease with wandering, with transitive passages, with a gentler hand taking hold of the reader, etc. Instead, novel-writing for me is the building of ever more elaborate structures, designed to carry ever more weight.
A long ramble to get to this: on one level details in making a setting carry the more obvious virtues -- placing the characters somewhere, giving them things with which they can interact; in creating an atmosphere and a tone; and in painting a picture for the reader's imagination. But other levels are possible. Setting as 'animated environment' can feed your sense of the characters in it; can foreshadow elements of plot; can reveal theme.
Take some opening scenes in Gardens as examples, and see how they relate to subsequent scenes for those select characters. Whiskeyjack and Fiddler on Mock's Hold: high above a burning city, in a place of power. There's smoke and the smell of carnage -- they are above it but only moments from descending into it. But we don't see that bit. They are on stonework, but it's cracked, and their backs are to the sea. All of these details shapes the reader's sense of them to some extent. When next we see them, they are on the ground, far away from Malaz City, surrounded in destruction and desolation. It's a different place, but their descent began in the prologue, if you see what I mean. And even then, they were only a short time earlier under the ground itself.
If we look to Kruppe, things get a little more complicated. Kruppe and his city are the same things; just as his language and attitude (and mystery) reflect the exotic, byzantine confusion of Darujhistan, so too his half-mocking smile and spark in the eye invite you into the labyrinthine cityscape (and the literally over-the-top assassin/Crokus chase). Kruppe is both flashy but on close examination somewhat scuffed, stained. He has a cherubic face, but plenty hides behind that. And so on. His voice is the city's voice, and it begins in a dream, as all great cities do.
Where is all this going? It goes here. Three storm clouds converging over Lake Azure, into which Whiskeyjack and co. are headed. A reader comments that I'm too smart to now say that there was deliberate portent in the detail of three clouds warring over the lake. Hmm. It's been too many years since that for me to be more specific than this: I could have written 'there was a storm over the lake,' and left it at that. The foreshadow is obvious enough. But, if I'd written that description, I would have immediately seen the foreshadowing element -- it's almost too cinematic and verges on cliche. I could then have changed it to two storm clouds, but then, that wouldn't have made sense; or rather, it would have been suggestive but inaccurately so. There are three forces converging on the city. Two storm clouds would have been lazy and misleading; careless.
Of course there are three storm-clouds. Of course this detail is relevant. It's how short stories work.
Uh oh. This ain't a short story though, is it? And therein lies the problem. I know what I'm up to; I know how I think and how I write. And to make matters worse, everything I put into a narrative is saying (pleading, begging) 'you can trust me, honest.' But I'm not taking the reader by the hand. I've invited them into a place, left them standing, looking round, wandering a bit but not far, not far at all. And every now and then I tap a shoulder, point, nod to over there, or here. And that's it.
Re-readers will nod and smile. First-timers will blink, bewildered -- and will decide to either trust me or not. I really want them to trust me, but I don't know how to manage that... beyond making sure that everything fits, that everything has meaning.
A virtue or a flaw in my writing? Maybe both. You see, I already know that world, but the only details I show you are the important ones. There's no filler. And that's not fair.
And the structure is such a crazed, manic machine, an engineer's nightmare, a spider's acid trip, it's really no wonder that readers will doubt, and on occasion give up on the effort, on the trust I so desperately ask for.
So, to all you new readers on this, I am ever amazed and slightly astonished to find you staying with me. I tell myself that what is happening is a kind of education process: read me this way, it's the only way. Pay attention! You will be tested on all of this, I guarantee it. Stay with me and in turn I will promise you that it will be a blast.
And even better, then you'll have all those re-reads, when things will really get wild.
Cheers for now
Steve
The great thing about having a cold is the privilege of sitting round for days doing nothing and not feeling guilty about it. Having read through the chapter commentary from the beginning, I'd like to take you all back more than a few pages, and talk about why these novels seem to thrive in the context of re-reads, and why first-time readers are often left feeling bewildered. I think the two are very much related.
It goes back to how I first started writing fiction. I was in a Master's program in archaeology when I came second in a local short story contest in Winnipeg, a tale called 'Wooden Trucks.' On the weight of this one venture into writing I applied to attend a creative writing program at the University of Victoria. I recall being in a sweaty phone box in Belize, on the phone with my mother back in Winnipeg, as she opened the envelope telling me I'd got in. From that moment onward, my entire world changed.
The writing program at Uvic at that time was at its zenith. When I showed up it was as a wide-eyed neophyte with a secret love of genre fiction (one keeps these things secret if one wants to be taken seriously). What I learned, almost from day one, was that I knew nothing about anything; that my writing to that point had only 'worked' because I was instinctively consistent, with emphasis on the word 'instinctively.'
Uvic taught me the craft of writing; it taught me to be mindful. The key though is this: it made me a short-story writer. Short stories are a particular beasts. In them, not a single word is superfluous. Everything carries extra weight, or at least that's how I saw it.
Track forward a few years and scores of short stories later, and I begin writing novels, only to discover that my 'muscle memory' is now absolute -- the obsessive adherence to multifunctional, multilayered writing (line by line, word by word) is not something I can relax -- when novel writing in fact demands just that: an ease with wandering, with transitive passages, with a gentler hand taking hold of the reader, etc. Instead, novel-writing for me is the building of ever more elaborate structures, designed to carry ever more weight.
A long ramble to get to this: on one level details in making a setting carry the more obvious virtues -- placing the characters somewhere, giving them things with which they can interact; in creating an atmosphere and a tone; and in painting a picture for the reader's imagination. But other levels are possible. Setting as 'animated environment' can feed your sense of the characters in it; can foreshadow elements of plot; can reveal theme.
Take some opening scenes in Gardens as examples, and see how they relate to subsequent scenes for those select characters. Whiskeyjack and Fiddler on Mock's Hold: high above a burning city, in a place of power. There's smoke and the smell of carnage -- they are above it but only moments from descending into it. But we don't see that bit. They are on stonework, but it's cracked, and their backs are to the sea. All of these details shapes the reader's sense of them to some extent. When next we see them, they are on the ground, far away from Malaz City, surrounded in destruction and desolation. It's a different place, but their descent began in the prologue, if you see what I mean. And even then, they were only a short time earlier under the ground itself.
If we look to Kruppe, things get a little more complicated. Kruppe and his city are the same things; just as his language and attitude (and mystery) reflect the exotic, byzantine confusion of Darujhistan, so too his half-mocking smile and spark in the eye invite you into the labyrinthine cityscape (and the literally over-the-top assassin/Crokus chase). Kruppe is both flashy but on close examination somewhat scuffed, stained. He has a cherubic face, but plenty hides behind that. And so on. His voice is the city's voice, and it begins in a dream, as all great cities do.
Where is all this going? It goes here. Three storm clouds converging over Lake Azure, into which Whiskeyjack and co. are headed. A reader comments that I'm too smart to now say that there was deliberate portent in the detail of three clouds warring over the lake. Hmm. It's been too many years since that for me to be more specific than this: I could have written 'there was a storm over the lake,' and left it at that. The foreshadow is obvious enough. But, if I'd written that description, I would have immediately seen the foreshadowing element -- it's almost too cinematic and verges on cliche. I could then have changed it to two storm clouds, but then, that wouldn't have made sense; or rather, it would have been suggestive but inaccurately so. There are three forces converging on the city. Two storm clouds would have been lazy and misleading; careless.
Of course there are three storm-clouds. Of course this detail is relevant. It's how short stories work.
Uh oh. This ain't a short story though, is it? And therein lies the problem. I know what I'm up to; I know how I think and how I write. And to make matters worse, everything I put into a narrative is saying (pleading, begging) 'you can trust me, honest.' But I'm not taking the reader by the hand. I've invited them into a place, left them standing, looking round, wandering a bit but not far, not far at all. And every now and then I tap a shoulder, point, nod to over there, or here. And that's it.
Re-readers will nod and smile. First-timers will blink, bewildered -- and will decide to either trust me or not. I really want them to trust me, but I don't know how to manage that... beyond making sure that everything fits, that everything has meaning.
A virtue or a flaw in my writing? Maybe both. You see, I already know that world, but the only details I show you are the important ones. There's no filler. And that's not fair.
And the structure is such a crazed, manic machine, an engineer's nightmare, a spider's acid trip, it's really no wonder that readers will doubt, and on occasion give up on the effort, on the trust I so desperately ask for.
So, to all you new readers on this, I am ever amazed and slightly astonished to find you staying with me. I tell myself that what is happening is a kind of education process: read me this way, it's the only way. Pay attention! You will be tested on all of this, I guarantee it. Stay with me and in turn I will promise you that it will be a blast.
And even better, then you'll have all those re-reads, when things will really get wild.
Cheers for now
Steve
Quote
Well now, things are heating up nicely. Meanwhile, was doing weights last night and something pinged in my neck and now I need to spend the day in bed to keep the vertigo at bay. That said, it's given me time to read through all the comments here.
Where to start? I think I'll talk about the whole magic thing, referencing Parker's observations in the SubPress interview. While I'm a great admirer of Parker's works, I have to disagree here with the notion that magic is difficult to write; and as for Martin's comments on the same subject, well, we are writing very different things, with different intentions, so comparisons are not very useful, even from a techincal standpoint. It's all very well to compare what one of us does versus what the other does, but really, it only seems to obtain when the one doing the arguing has an agenda that needs supporting, at which point the intention itself becomes suspect.
No matter. Back to Parker's observation (and it's worth noting that magic is not a subject Parker will continue to avoid, if you read the last bit of the interview). Here's how I approach the subject: I speak often of points-of-view and the notion of walking in someone else's shoes. That applies well to this topic. I'm hoping you will recall a photo a few months ago that made the rounds; it was shot from a helicopter, looking down on a bow-and-arrow wielding Amazonian Indian, and the accompanying article related to non-contact policies regarding remote indigenous peoples. The photo made clear to me a number of things: the first being, that is abrave man down there. The second being, in his shoes (bare feet) he is witness to something inexplicable and terrifying. Now, if you care to, think about similar isolated peoples in the jungles of Cambodia in the 70's -- for them the napalm and cluster-bombs raining down from the sky were likely even more terrible; all the worse for that the B2's were flying so high as to be invisible. Stand in their shoes for a while. Then make the switch to the pilot high overhead; he can probably explain the mechanical process whereby the bombs drop when he flips a toggle and then presses a button, and he probably thinks nothing of it, mechanically. One thing he is very aware of, however, is the awesome power at his fingertips. Two very distinct points-of-view, and both perfectly useable when it comes to thinking about magic, efficacious magic, frightening magic. Now, is that just my background in anthropology that gives me that stuff which I can then use? I doubt it. It's all down to being willing to wear someone else's skin.
One of my mentors in the writing program at UVic once addressed the class with respect to writing believably about something the writer has never experienced (as in, say, war); and he said what's needed is the process of taking an imaginative leap between, say, past experience in a car accident -- and those excruciating instances of recognition and helplessness -- and transferring them to whatever you then write about; or, by way of another example, if you want a sense of what it's like to be shot at, recall the baseball racing for your head on a line-drive back when you were a kid.
While most writers of action-filled fiction are not likely to have lived the life of James Bond, there are aspects of daily life experience that can be called upon, because all we're really doing is reaching for certain emotions, and those emotions are universal. Fiction writing is about faking it.
That said, getting shot at is far more confusing as far as feelings go than watching a line-drive try to dent your forehead. (And yes, I do think about confusion a lot, and take that comment however you care to.) But you get the picture, I hope.
Magic-wielding characters? I don't see a problem. In fact, I don't see them as being any different from non-magic-wielding characters. Picture that pilot shot down, bailed out, landing in the jungle. Dazed, confused, frightened. Checks the pistol at his belt, turns at a sound, and takes a poisoned arrow through the eye.
There's all kinds of ways of looking at power.
Now, I'm sorta warmed up. Before I get to the matter of DEM's and all that ... now that the series is done, and now that I've already said elsewhere that Toll the Hounds provides the cipher for understanding the series, it probably does no harm to reveal what was going on in my mind during the writing of Gardens of the Moon, and how my reality (and sense of it) shaped what I wrote, and gave me the reasons for writing it the way I did.
As any beginning writer well knows, the future is filled with soaring hope and crushing despair. Yes, there are bestselling writers out there making a decent living (or even filthy rich), all happily writing full-time. But they are a minority; and most even published writers need to supplement their habit with 'real work.' So, you hope and you fear. You want but you also need to be realistic. And in the bookshops you pick up titles and read a little bit and wonder how in hell did this ever get published? Or you think, ah, here I am in good hands.
And you daydream. A lot. These days they call it visualisation. So, there we were, living on Saltspring Island, unemployed and on welfare (starving in paraidse, we still call that phase of our lives). A baby about to arrive and scant prospects on the horizon.
But I kept looking at those books in the stores, trying to work out why some ever made it into print; trying to figure out the rhyme or reason of publishing. It looked like the biggest crapshoot imaginable. Seemed to me that luck played as big a role as talent. Who you knew, that kind of thing.
Luck. I sat down to write this fantasy novel, thinking about chance and mischance. Thinking about a life in anonymity and a life that wasn't (refer if you will to Circle Breaker in the epilogue and the novel's last line). Thinking about writing a tale filled with magic, high adventure and a wild, if not insane, climax. And dreaming of getting it published and actually making a living as a writer.
Lots of dreams went into Gardens of the Moon (hence the title, too, and the invented mythos surrounding it), along with ambition. And the writing thereof became on one level a dialogue with myself (as is the entire series). I wasn't there to write a war-of-the-roses kind of fantasy novel; I wasn't there to slide elves and demons and vampires into the alleys of our city streets: I was there to write high fantasy, even as I actively dragged it down to ground level.
George and I share one thing when we get together: with all the comparisons we both want to scream.
Finish the draft, package and send it off blind to a publisher. And then wait, and wait. And wait. You see, I knew I was taking huge risks (that's why the novel is about chance! Who spun the first coin? Me); but I had one thing going for me at the time -- the sheer enthusiasm of having had a blast writing the novel. And the last few chapers, well, this wasn't just watching dominos fall, it was lighting firecrackers under them. For what it's worth, I was mentally grinning throughout the finale of the novel. I was having fun.
So, I dreamed of an end to anonymity. Who doesn't? For eight years the laugh was on me. Nobody wanted it, and to be honest, I'd pretty much put it away by the time I landed my first novel sale, in the UK, as a writer of contemporary fiction. But even for that sale, the advance was nothing to live on, and I was beginning to think it was time to look elsewhere in terms of a career.
And then luck stepped in. Seems that coin had been spinning for so long I stopped even hearing it.
The Azath was never a DEM. Amazingly, even back then I knew what DEM's were. No plot issues jammed up or needed spur-of-the-moment fixes or inventions. Take away the Azath and nothing actually changes: the cusser could have done in Raest. And yes, it's an acorn, not a stone or marble or jeweled ring; and from tiny acorns mighty trees do grow. And the sword's intercession on Paran's behalf was set up earlier.
And yes, 'release the seven...' is simply awful as far as lines go. The old shit-detctor was on stand-by last revision, with that one. Sincerest apologies to all. Mea culpa.
Anyway, this is what happens being propped up in bed all day. I go on and on. I'm happy to discuss themes and literary aspects; and to answer questions and all that, and I promise I will come to the site next week for the wrap-up, etc. In the meantime, I hope I have not ruined any of the romance or mystery regarding Gardens of the Moon. It's still an adventure tale, and I had plenty of fun writing it, and it's crammed with set-up details, and while I understand why for some readers the Azath arrived out of the blue; alas, for me and Cam, well, we were old hands with the Azath, there was nothing new to it at all; we understood its function and we'd made use of it countless times in our gaming. It never even occurred to me that it would pose a problem: just one more detail, one more invention, like Hounds and Decks and risky swords and Moranth munitions: the world was there; we used what was in it.
Cheers for now
(seeing if I can make it down to the garden -- sun's out, hoo rah)
SE
Where to start? I think I'll talk about the whole magic thing, referencing Parker's observations in the SubPress interview. While I'm a great admirer of Parker's works, I have to disagree here with the notion that magic is difficult to write; and as for Martin's comments on the same subject, well, we are writing very different things, with different intentions, so comparisons are not very useful, even from a techincal standpoint. It's all very well to compare what one of us does versus what the other does, but really, it only seems to obtain when the one doing the arguing has an agenda that needs supporting, at which point the intention itself becomes suspect.
No matter. Back to Parker's observation (and it's worth noting that magic is not a subject Parker will continue to avoid, if you read the last bit of the interview). Here's how I approach the subject: I speak often of points-of-view and the notion of walking in someone else's shoes. That applies well to this topic. I'm hoping you will recall a photo a few months ago that made the rounds; it was shot from a helicopter, looking down on a bow-and-arrow wielding Amazonian Indian, and the accompanying article related to non-contact policies regarding remote indigenous peoples. The photo made clear to me a number of things: the first being, that is abrave man down there. The second being, in his shoes (bare feet) he is witness to something inexplicable and terrifying. Now, if you care to, think about similar isolated peoples in the jungles of Cambodia in the 70's -- for them the napalm and cluster-bombs raining down from the sky were likely even more terrible; all the worse for that the B2's were flying so high as to be invisible. Stand in their shoes for a while. Then make the switch to the pilot high overhead; he can probably explain the mechanical process whereby the bombs drop when he flips a toggle and then presses a button, and he probably thinks nothing of it, mechanically. One thing he is very aware of, however, is the awesome power at his fingertips. Two very distinct points-of-view, and both perfectly useable when it comes to thinking about magic, efficacious magic, frightening magic. Now, is that just my background in anthropology that gives me that stuff which I can then use? I doubt it. It's all down to being willing to wear someone else's skin.
One of my mentors in the writing program at UVic once addressed the class with respect to writing believably about something the writer has never experienced (as in, say, war); and he said what's needed is the process of taking an imaginative leap between, say, past experience in a car accident -- and those excruciating instances of recognition and helplessness -- and transferring them to whatever you then write about; or, by way of another example, if you want a sense of what it's like to be shot at, recall the baseball racing for your head on a line-drive back when you were a kid.
While most writers of action-filled fiction are not likely to have lived the life of James Bond, there are aspects of daily life experience that can be called upon, because all we're really doing is reaching for certain emotions, and those emotions are universal. Fiction writing is about faking it.
That said, getting shot at is far more confusing as far as feelings go than watching a line-drive try to dent your forehead. (And yes, I do think about confusion a lot, and take that comment however you care to.) But you get the picture, I hope.
Magic-wielding characters? I don't see a problem. In fact, I don't see them as being any different from non-magic-wielding characters. Picture that pilot shot down, bailed out, landing in the jungle. Dazed, confused, frightened. Checks the pistol at his belt, turns at a sound, and takes a poisoned arrow through the eye.
There's all kinds of ways of looking at power.
Now, I'm sorta warmed up. Before I get to the matter of DEM's and all that ... now that the series is done, and now that I've already said elsewhere that Toll the Hounds provides the cipher for understanding the series, it probably does no harm to reveal what was going on in my mind during the writing of Gardens of the Moon, and how my reality (and sense of it) shaped what I wrote, and gave me the reasons for writing it the way I did.
As any beginning writer well knows, the future is filled with soaring hope and crushing despair. Yes, there are bestselling writers out there making a decent living (or even filthy rich), all happily writing full-time. But they are a minority; and most even published writers need to supplement their habit with 'real work.' So, you hope and you fear. You want but you also need to be realistic. And in the bookshops you pick up titles and read a little bit and wonder how in hell did this ever get published? Or you think, ah, here I am in good hands.
And you daydream. A lot. These days they call it visualisation. So, there we were, living on Saltspring Island, unemployed and on welfare (starving in paraidse, we still call that phase of our lives). A baby about to arrive and scant prospects on the horizon.
But I kept looking at those books in the stores, trying to work out why some ever made it into print; trying to figure out the rhyme or reason of publishing. It looked like the biggest crapshoot imaginable. Seemed to me that luck played as big a role as talent. Who you knew, that kind of thing.
Luck. I sat down to write this fantasy novel, thinking about chance and mischance. Thinking about a life in anonymity and a life that wasn't (refer if you will to Circle Breaker in the epilogue and the novel's last line). Thinking about writing a tale filled with magic, high adventure and a wild, if not insane, climax. And dreaming of getting it published and actually making a living as a writer.
Lots of dreams went into Gardens of the Moon (hence the title, too, and the invented mythos surrounding it), along with ambition. And the writing thereof became on one level a dialogue with myself (as is the entire series). I wasn't there to write a war-of-the-roses kind of fantasy novel; I wasn't there to slide elves and demons and vampires into the alleys of our city streets: I was there to write high fantasy, even as I actively dragged it down to ground level.
George and I share one thing when we get together: with all the comparisons we both want to scream.
Finish the draft, package and send it off blind to a publisher. And then wait, and wait. And wait. You see, I knew I was taking huge risks (that's why the novel is about chance! Who spun the first coin? Me); but I had one thing going for me at the time -- the sheer enthusiasm of having had a blast writing the novel. And the last few chapers, well, this wasn't just watching dominos fall, it was lighting firecrackers under them. For what it's worth, I was mentally grinning throughout the finale of the novel. I was having fun.
So, I dreamed of an end to anonymity. Who doesn't? For eight years the laugh was on me. Nobody wanted it, and to be honest, I'd pretty much put it away by the time I landed my first novel sale, in the UK, as a writer of contemporary fiction. But even for that sale, the advance was nothing to live on, and I was beginning to think it was time to look elsewhere in terms of a career.
And then luck stepped in. Seems that coin had been spinning for so long I stopped even hearing it.
The Azath was never a DEM. Amazingly, even back then I knew what DEM's were. No plot issues jammed up or needed spur-of-the-moment fixes or inventions. Take away the Azath and nothing actually changes: the cusser could have done in Raest. And yes, it's an acorn, not a stone or marble or jeweled ring; and from tiny acorns mighty trees do grow. And the sword's intercession on Paran's behalf was set up earlier.
And yes, 'release the seven...' is simply awful as far as lines go. The old shit-detctor was on stand-by last revision, with that one. Sincerest apologies to all. Mea culpa.
Anyway, this is what happens being propped up in bed all day. I go on and on. I'm happy to discuss themes and literary aspects; and to answer questions and all that, and I promise I will come to the site next week for the wrap-up, etc. In the meantime, I hope I have not ruined any of the romance or mystery regarding Gardens of the Moon. It's still an adventure tale, and I had plenty of fun writing it, and it's crammed with set-up details, and while I understand why for some readers the Azath arrived out of the blue; alas, for me and Cam, well, we were old hands with the Azath, there was nothing new to it at all; we understood its function and we'd made use of it countless times in our gaming. It never even occurred to me that it would pose a problem: just one more detail, one more invention, like Hounds and Decks and risky swords and Moranth munitions: the world was there; we used what was in it.
Cheers for now
(seeing if I can make it down to the garden -- sun's out, hoo rah)
SE
This post has been edited by Abalieno: 27 September 2010 - 12:17 AM
