Actually, my abandoned Lucy edit is an alternating first person POV between Lucy and James. Which wouldn't have made this judge any happier, because no way was I going to swap back and forth between them in that particular 10-page scene. I like to stay in one character's head for awhile. IMO frequent POV shifts are often a cop-out--to me it's more interesting and just better to show what your non-POV characters are thinking and feeling through actions and dialogue than to hop into a new head every few paragraphs.

But that's just me.

Susan, I meant to say, that whole "changing their voices" thing reminded me all to vividly of the idiot line editor I got saddled with for "Weaver" - the one who did her very very best to make my musician from Edinburgh and my producer from London sound like Tony and Carmella Soprano.

Oy.

Hee, hee, hee. Of course, the fact that this amuses guarantees I'll get one who'll want to make my retired Chicago-transplant detective a Brit so maybe I'll just STFU now.

Fall drabble. It's 11 words over, but I can't decide which 11 to take out, so I'm leaving it for now. Also, extremely influenced by an essay I read a few days ago.

------

By the time she came along, he had already given everything a name. He named her, too; named her for her origins, her past. He had the power to name, to define, to say, "This is all that needs to be known."

She was tempted, not by sin, but by knowledge – the craving to understand. Lilith, who had known, had run away, leaving only the shadow tracings of her presence on the word. But she didn’t run. She stayed, and she taught.

And she was renamed, reborn. This name also came from him, but it was a name of life, of the future. A fall from definition; a fall into possibility.

Hil, that is MARVELLOUS. Really. I'm not sure there are 11 words you could take out.

God, I *love* it.

Thanks, Steph.

(The essay I mentioned was "You Take Lilith, I'll Take Eve: A Closer Look at the World's Second Feminist" by Yiskah (Jessica) Rosenfeld. I feel I ought to mention it, since almost all of that came from the ideas in that essay bouncing around in my head.)

That's cool, Hil.

Hil,

That reads as an excellent opener to a short story I'd love to read. I couldn't help but read this line as sinister at first:

He had the power to name, to define, to say, "This is all that needs to be known."

Which made this turnaround especially intriguing.

A fall from definition; a fall into possibility.

Susan: I see how flip-flopping could be a cop-out ie, why have the characters learn anything about themselves or what others think of them when you can easily answer that by switching perspectives. Dangerous indeed. Could breed laziness. I guess I have a more idealized view of what it could yield... Like such diverging character interpretations of an event that the basics of what occurred get blurred. I see this less as a novel and more of an idea for a sequence in a short story where characters argue about an event. A cute plot point, maybe.

It's true; she cannot be struck speechless.

I particularly loved that bit too, Erika. And Hil, that's lovely.

Hil, that's a beautiful, beautiful piece of work, there.

I'll like something, and someone Smarter Than Me will sneer at it, and explain all the reasons it was awful, and I'll feel dumb and unsophisticated and defensive.

Zenkitty, it doesn't make me feel remotely dumb. Part of my intense loathing for it, however, is that I suspect a lot of the practitioners out there of desperately wanting their interlocutors to feel dumb, which in turn makes me want to point at them and say rude things. It's not a pretty impulse, but it's there, so I just try and push the entire subject as far away from me as possible.

The other part of that is that, with my seventh novel coming out in 2005 and one of them sniffed at for a major award, I'm not quite so easy to dis (or disregard) on the issue. I also honestly don't care if people have problems with my wine tastes, or my reading tastes, or my art tastes or food tastes or any other form of taste.

I just don't have a lot of time for the sacred cow of culture (sorry, P-C, it's the old phrase), is all. People create things, or they don't create things. Other people react to the created things. The majority of people seem to enjoy doing that second option; I do it differently, and don't think my way is any less valid than anyone else's. Yes, I know, frighteningly arrogant. Such is life. But this is an old, old conversation, and I'm an idiot for jumping back into it.

And me out the door. Happy New Years, all.

Hil, I loved that.

leaving only the shadow tracings of her presence on the word.

Should that be world? (I honestly don't know, since both kind of work)