Thursday, July 3, 2014

Conditioned

I think I’m too conditioned to be Eurocentric in my reading tastes. I’m reading the first Horseclans book, and while I am enjoying it, I have to admit that the Hispanic vernacular, names, titles, and everything kind of throws me off a bit. It almost feels like Adams took a basic Medieval European-style world, and threw a 19th century Mexico skin over it. All of the names and titles bring images of Zorro into my head. It’s taking some getting used too.

In the meantime, I picked up a recently acquired copy of Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria the other day, and casually started reading it. Before I knew it, I was hooked into it, and it has become my primary reading now. I had never read any Thongor before, but in my quest to get at least a little experience with all of the “Clonans” of the 60’s and 70’s, I decided I need to give it a go. Pretty cool so far. Lin Carter wasn’t an extraordinary writer, nor was he all that original, but he did weave a fun yarn.

On a side note, I have the edition pictured above. Obviously the cover artist was working from a basic description, because the “flying boat” in the scene depicted isn’t supposed to look anything like a spacecraft, the way that one does. I saw it more like the flying ships in the Barsoom novels. Basically, a flying boat, but with a sail.

Anyways, with the long weekend (I took Monday off too), I hope to have some reading time. Maybe even some writing time, though I’m not holding my breath.

Speaking of writing, struggle as I might, I don’t think I am going to be able to get that Gorus story up to 17k+ like I’d hoped. The story is just too simple, and would require way more fluff than I’m comfortable with at this point. The downside is that, as it stands now, it will probably still be about 12-13k once completed. That’s too short for a novella, but too long for most short story markets. So, the plan is back to finishing this one, and then write another story of similar length, with a bridge story in between, thus creating a (short) novel-length narrative.

1 comment:

Charles Gramlich said...

I have a couple of Carter's books where the "flying ships" are shown as spaceships rather than more Barsoom type vessels. It's disconcerting.