Polter, you should take that to spoilers and delete here.

On the said issue, I've always preferred an attribution by action.

"No," the conductor's baton descended in a savage stroke and he turned to the first violin. "Did you study music in a cave? Play that line again."

No "said" in sight.

Also, as much as I love Cherryh's sf, she's one of the few writers who can do lyrical mythology and fantasy just as well as hard-edged science.

On the "said" debate, I was an English major and I'm in favor of variety or nothing. Said for every single quote is boring and often just plain inaccurate.

As Lyra said (commented), a good many words have a subjective meaning. Consequently, context is everything. I work right now for a mainstream daily newspaper. We're pretty insistent on using "said." And really, there's only so artsy you can get when covering a zoning commission meeting. Other places I've worked, most notably alt. weeklies and other places where the flavor of the moment is more important than pinpoint objectivty, my subjects were free to guffaw and caterwaul and spit through clinched teeth.

One of the joys of screenplays. No "said" anywhere.

Randomly dropping in to add my two cents....

One of the joys of screenplays. No "said" anywhere.

Abso-fucking-lutely.

It's like Literature for the Attention Span Deficient.

As Lyra said (commented), a good many words have a subjective meaning. Consequently, context is everything. I work right now for a mainstream daily newspaper. We're pretty insistent on using "said."

Absolutely. Said in newspapers is just fine by me. Newspapers ought to be striving for objectivity and language is a huge part of that. (Although there are times when I think newspapers should give up on the objectivity thing and just go with their biases, trusting the readers to recognize them and adjust their understanding accordingly.) In literature, though, I generally expect and want subjective meaning.

Crichton is Stephen King

OK Gus -I know took some heat for this. I think though in a way King deserves. Not King at his best - at his best, King can take the conventional horror tropes, and use them in first rate writing - good character, good dialog, sometimes even convincing world building. I though Carrie and Firestarter were fine pieces of writing. Stand By Me imay be one of his best short stories (and I know - conventional wisdom here. What can I say? Conventional wisdom is sometimes right.)

But the worst of King is as bad as Crichtons stuff. The Green Mile, in addition to everything else had the most offensive Magical Negro ever - [Green Mile Spoiler white fonted]on top of childlike gentle simplicity, saintlike ability to forgive, and magical superpowers exclusively at the service of white folks - he also was willing to die for a crime he was innocent of, obstensibly because he was "tired", but really cause he would have inconvenienced a lot of kindly white folks who would have had to take some heat for letting him live. [Ok he got even a little bit - one of the most gentle, saintlike bits of revenge in literary history. I get the feeling that ,given the choice, the "victim" would not have undone it.]

Crichton is apparently incapable of doing better. King has done better. When he produces that level of crap, maybe he deserves MORE heat than MC does -certainly no less.

Crichton is Stephen King

I had a moment there where I imagined the human from Farscape replaced with an odd looking writer in his 50's.

Ok, to jump off of the Crichton sub-thread. I just wanted to say I watched my first (actually the Pilot) for Dead Like Me. I had high hopes from Bryan Fuller's involvement in it. I must say it pales in comparison with Wonderfalls.

Like so many other series running on the cable networks it seems to be obsessed with adolescent ideas of adulthood. It was like Wonderfalls without a soul. I think that is why I always loved the Buffyverse, Firefly, and Wonderfalls. I almost immeadiately connected with the characters as people, whereas on the cable shows the characters on the shows are people I would never make an effort to know. Most of their lives seem screwed up because they are so self-involved that the empathy I would naturally have toward intelligent characters is entirely lost.

I hope that pay networks are not the last hope for genre television, because I have yet to find one that I find remotely compelling. Talent without soul just isn't worth watching.It reeks of missed potential.

Thanks Tim for your involvement with the other producers. It was enough to give them a shot of being writers I would follow. I guess I stuck with people that had some real tie to the Buffyverse.