Jade Cahoon > Recent Status Updates

"The accepted position seemed to be that religions were normally a mere farrago of nonsense, though our own, by a fortunate exception, was exactly true."

I had to call out this sentence because it is so perfectly exactly precisely what I thought as a kid. "Of course this is nonsense," I thought. "Why should ONLY OURS be true?" And nobody ever tried to explain it.

it is d.e.l.i.c.i.o.u.s. knowing Roddenberry wrote this

quit. boring.

This is either ridiculously naïve or purporting to be naïve.

"And this was how it would always go, whether in a real conversation or an imagined one, whether in this shuttle or on some planet or some romantic confession or that planet he’d found Norah Bernal on. It would always, always, come back to her."

This is still one of my most favourite scenes that I've ever written:
-
"It’s undemocratic?” she beamed. “Really? I’m the empress of a galactic empire and you’re saying I’m acting in an undemocratic way?”
“It’s not right,” he said, but he was still laughing.
“Next you’re going to break out some Milton. ‘The power of kings is only derivative,’ or whatever.”

"Loren had been like that too, of course. Once. He did not shy from the fact any more than he shied from what he’d done to throw it off of himself, a smothering blanket woven of other people’s lives."

Did I seriously write that?

Yes I'm rereading my own novel why do you ask?

The first 1/3rd was engrossing... unfortunately last night it started to really drag... bloated middle. I'm finding some weirdly dropped plot threads that should have been snipped.

Wtaf. Someone tells me Daphne gets a damned comeuppance!

I am attempting (for the 2nd time) to read this. I don't know why; it's not well-written.

Annoyances: doubled words ("very very"); telling me when characters are funny; I Have Four Brothers (I can't believe this exhausted trope is played straight!)

"His voice had the single toned flatness and the luminous simplicity of an accountant who reminds a reckless purchaser that cost is an absolute which cannot be escaped."

Oh come ON, this is parodying itself.

The next book in the Nine Hundred series is going to be absolutely bleak.

Just hit this bit and it sums up where Rand and I fundamentally diverge.

'By their own statement, you must support them because they cannot survive without you.'

To force a person to support you, to force them into the furnace or the basement (Omelas makes this argument quite succinctly in about 570000 less words) is an obscenity.

To give support as a gift -- to give support to one's loved one -- is not.

Rand is attacking a strawman.
What about love? I don't mean hangers-on. I don't mean need (you know, if you've read Lewis, the need-love and the gift-love and whatnot). I mean just love. "I love you; although you are causing me grief just at this moment I love you; I hope for better clines ahead" love?