auctorial unfairness

Very sad: weightlifting Saturday, rowing (14 km in a double) Sunday. I have sore muscles all over the place, but only two actual injuries: scraped knuckles on both hands. From making the bed. Sheesh. There’s a hysterically funny bit in one of Bill Bryson’s books about common causes of injury in the home. Apparently sofas and beds are high on the list of causes of injury – it was funny when Bryson riffed on it, but now I know better.

We got a new insulating pad for the water bed, because the previous one was either way too small or shrank when we washed it. Shoving in the sides of the pad, the cover, and the sheet was apparently too much for my knuckles. There may be a better way to do that, but with luck and a little forbearance from the cat (who was both root and proximate cause of the need to wash the previous pad), I won’t ever have to change anything but the sheet again.

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Even though I’m not thrilled with the direction For Better or For Worse is taking, I have to say that in one way I approve of today’s strip. It’s about time someone pointed out to Elizabeth that moving to Toronto was likely to be much harder for Paul than staying in Mtigwaki was for her – after all, he never tried to leave his home area, never had any reason to move but her, and if love of him wasn’t enough to overcome a sudden attack of homesickness for her, why should the converse be true? (Note: I am NOT so thrilled at the implication that a man can only serious with a partner who shares his culture.)

Maybe my last reading of The Dark is Rising should tell me something. Maybe I’m becoming less tolerant of unfair authorship – that is, where an author allows a POV character, or a sympathetic one, to get away with behavior that would never be condoned authorially for a character who arouses less sympathy. I don’t mean that an author should never allow a POV character to behave badly; they’re supposed to be three-dimensional. However, when they do, in a less subtle setting we need to be able to tell it’s not condoned and in a more subtle one we need enough information to judge for ourselves. (I suppose this is the tricky thing about writing an unreliable narrator; the reader needs enough clues to figure out the unreliability. It can’t be just a matter of disbelieving the account of the one questionable action.) I like the move toward holding Liz accountable for her unthinking unfairness, but this could possibly do horrible things to my enjoyment of the Harry Potter books.

I blame the authors, all those ones on LJ who talk about their craft so persuasively. How sneaky of them to teach me something that influences my reading!

I’ve said often that I am *not* a fiction writer; once in a rare while I get attacked by a plot bunny, but if I don’t defend myself by writing it out immediately the bunny loses interest and moves off to more fertile targets (which seems logical, for rabbit behavior). The problem is then I’ve got a half-written story languishing. It’s pure slog to finish it at that point, but leaving it undone feels wrong too. The current case is just fanfic (another Holmes/Potterverse crossover), but it began when I was enmeshed in the coils of the Annotated Holmes some months ago, and it’s the most ambitious thing I’d started in that it’s an actual story rather than a vignette. It’s more than half done, really; I think I’ve figured out what needs to happen and how to elide the hard-to-write parts (the same way Conan Doyle did, which makes me suspicious of his skill level in the early stories). Now I just need to dig in and finish it. I suspect that the writing that’s a slog for me isn’t as good as when it flows, but I have no real way of telling, except that my endings get abrupt, and that’s fixable. I’m mentioning it all here just to give myself some accountability.