![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
[...Eew. :) ]
I walked over to the branch library today to pick up a book I'd had them send over from wherever the heck the last existing copy of it in the system had crawled off to (the CPL is awful for the books you're needing always being Somewhere Else, which is why I have a nonresident card for Evanston so I don't have to go to the CPL if I can help it). Now, the reason this is of interest to the main thrust of this Journal is that the book in question is part of a project I've been undertaking for myself, to go back and reread books that I recall as having been Formative Experiences in my literary life, to see if they still pass muster to an older and presumably more educated eye. And I shall warn you now, I have dreadful taste. ;)
What I've been engaged in rereading lately is what might be described at the granddaddy of mass-produced commercial fantasy-fiction-as-Product, the original Weis/Hickman titles of the "Dragonlance" saga. This is, to be sure, crap fiction at its finest, and I mean that in a good way {G}. But I was just the right age, when they first came out; I was at that now-legendary GenCon reading, by whatever fates decide these things, and that, for good or ill, has had a surprisingly large hand in determining the course of my life. I was captivated. I was hooked. I wanted to see more. Particularly that one character, the one who was time-sharing his reader with his twin, on and off with the hood of the red robe...
These days, I suppose I would have been a Goth, although while I can do "pale", "emaciated" will never be in my genetic cards. Back in the Reagan administration, I focused my adolescent angst on a bright guy who was even more isolated and geeky than me. Call it the Crysania Complex, perhaps; the bad boys are always the most interesting, and Raistlin Majere was the ultimate anti-hero bad boy. For a loner who was enduring a particularly ghastly teenhood (yes, yes, I know, everybody's teen years are ghastly to them, but I would have to insist that mine were objectively ghastly... I may tell that story someday, but not until I know you better ;) ), it was perhaps not so strange after all to find a teenaged girl fixating upon this Black Robe, upon the promise of love and redemption dangling just within one's reach if only one could manage not to be quite so messed up...
The first trilogy, the Chronicles, was, well, okay. And it's still, well, okay. From the vantage of hindsight, it's too ambitious; the plot sprawls and keeps escaping, interesting bits happen in flashbacks while the reader has to sit through the boring bits, and there are simply too many characters running around to draw many of them with any complexity -- Raistlin and Tasslehoff are the chief standouts of the original cast, with Tanis having his moments. It could have run to six books quite easily, if it had been meant to be taken seriously. But it wasn't; it was Product, for AD&D's mostly YA audience, and for those purposes it was perfectly adequate, even a mite better than some of what was being marketed in YA at the time. (Sort of as if one were doing 'Lord of the Rings' as the children's story it was originally meant to be, I suppose -- never having gotten all the way through LotR myself, which I still feel rather guilty about but not guilty enough to buy the damn thing.) The annotated edition of the Chronicles is quite interesting in what it reveals about the backstage business of crafting and selling the work... and particularly in that it mentions that the second trilogy, the Legends trilogy, was already a glimmer in their eye while the Chronicles were being written.
For the Legends trilogy is a whole different animal. It was book three of Legends that I had to have fetched out of the far reaches of the CPL system, much as I had to wait on tenterhooks for GenCon 1986 to roll around so I could snatch up and devour this finale still steaming from the presses. I read it in the car on the way home then, and I gobbled it up in five hours now, seventeen years almost to the day later; and, to my surprise, it's still good enough to sock the reader in the gut. The Legends trilogy, overall, is vastly more sophisticated as a work of fiction; the focus is tighter, with most of the Chronicles' cast of thousands locked in a closet somew here, and the plotline is actually coherent and manageable. Notably, the primary reappearing characters from the first trilogy are those very ones named above -- Raistlin, Tasslehoff, and Tanis in a supporting role -- and Caramon is finally given a chance to stand out without the rest of the cast cluttering up the place, having been lost in the crowd in Chronicles.
But the real surprise was how well the emotional depth of the story held up. I had expected to find that my reaction to Legends had been tied up in the overwrought romanticism of Teenaged Girlhood, geek or no; but here I am, thirty-three years old and knowing 'what comes next' thanks to the occasionally ill-advised followups, and I still want the story to have come out differently. I st ill feel bad for how this collection of inkmarks on paper got treated. I still want the bad boy to have gotten the girl after all.
Yes, fanfic was committed. No, I'm not going to show you any of it. Most of my juvenalia I've deliberately destroyed, and what Mum may have hidden from the flames may as well be in code anyway because even I can't read my handwriting. So there. None of it was of any quality, I'm sure, but it was a valuable Learning Experience: fanfic, when done as an exercise in taking the original apart to see how it was put together and then seeing how well one can cobble together something new from all the spare screws and extra wires, can have a place in one's studies of the craft, if only because one has a known-good example (IE a work that's been passed by an editor) to test the results against.
So what does any of this have to do with what I'm working on now? It's debatable; if anything, what I've written comes far closer to a romantic-comedy than an epic. But the 'bad boy' gets the girl, even if he's not so bad after all, so I guess I'm still trying to make it come out right. And I could just be talking out of my butt again; we'll have to wait and see what the professionals have to say about it... now, where's that pink highlighter?
I walked over to the branch library today to pick up a book I'd had them send over from wherever the heck the last existing copy of it in the system had crawled off to (the CPL is awful for the books you're needing always being Somewhere Else, which is why I have a nonresident card for Evanston so I don't have to go to the CPL if I can help it). Now, the reason this is of interest to the main thrust of this Journal is that the book in question is part of a project I've been undertaking for myself, to go back and reread books that I recall as having been Formative Experiences in my literary life, to see if they still pass muster to an older and presumably more educated eye. And I shall warn you now, I have dreadful taste. ;)
What I've been engaged in rereading lately is what might be described at the granddaddy of mass-produced commercial fantasy-fiction-as-Product, the original Weis/Hickman titles of the "Dragonlance" saga. This is, to be sure, crap fiction at its finest, and I mean that in a good way {G}. But I was just the right age, when they first came out; I was at that now-legendary GenCon reading, by whatever fates decide these things, and that, for good or ill, has had a surprisingly large hand in determining the course of my life. I was captivated. I was hooked. I wanted to see more. Particularly that one character, the one who was time-sharing his reader with his twin, on and off with the hood of the red robe...
These days, I suppose I would have been a Goth, although while I can do "pale", "emaciated" will never be in my genetic cards. Back in the Reagan administration, I focused my adolescent angst on a bright guy who was even more isolated and geeky than me. Call it the Crysania Complex, perhaps; the bad boys are always the most interesting, and Raistlin Majere was the ultimate anti-hero bad boy. For a loner who was enduring a particularly ghastly teenhood (yes, yes, I know, everybody's teen years are ghastly to them, but I would have to insist that mine were objectively ghastly... I may tell that story someday, but not until I know you better ;) ), it was perhaps not so strange after all to find a teenaged girl fixating upon this Black Robe, upon the promise of love and redemption dangling just within one's reach if only one could manage not to be quite so messed up...
The first trilogy, the Chronicles, was, well, okay. And it's still, well, okay. From the vantage of hindsight, it's too ambitious; the plot sprawls and keeps escaping, interesting bits happen in flashbacks while the reader has to sit through the boring bits, and there are simply too many characters running around to draw many of them with any complexity -- Raistlin and Tasslehoff are the chief standouts of the original cast, with Tanis having his moments. It could have run to six books quite easily, if it had been meant to be taken seriously. But it wasn't; it was Product, for AD&D's mostly YA audience, and for those purposes it was perfectly adequate, even a mite better than some of what was being marketed in YA at the time. (Sort of as if one were doing 'Lord of the Rings' as the children's story it was originally meant to be, I suppose -- never having gotten all the way through LotR myself, which I still feel rather guilty about but not guilty enough to buy the damn thing.) The annotated edition of the Chronicles is quite interesting in what it reveals about the backstage business of crafting and selling the work... and particularly in that it mentions that the second trilogy, the Legends trilogy, was already a glimmer in their eye while the Chronicles were being written.
For the Legends trilogy is a whole different animal. It was book three of Legends that I had to have fetched out of the far reaches of the CPL system, much as I had to wait on tenterhooks for GenCon 1986 to roll around so I could snatch up and devour this finale still steaming from the presses. I read it in the car on the way home then, and I gobbled it up in five hours now, seventeen years almost to the day later; and, to my surprise, it's still good enough to sock the reader in the gut. The Legends trilogy, overall, is vastly more sophisticated as a work of fiction; the focus is tighter, with most of the Chronicles' cast of thousands locked in a closet somew here, and the plotline is actually coherent and manageable. Notably, the primary reappearing characters from the first trilogy are those very ones named above -- Raistlin, Tasslehoff, and Tanis in a supporting role -- and Caramon is finally given a chance to stand out without the rest of the cast cluttering up the place, having been lost in the crowd in Chronicles.
But the real surprise was how well the emotional depth of the story held up. I had expected to find that my reaction to Legends had been tied up in the overwrought romanticism of Teenaged Girlhood, geek or no; but here I am, thirty-three years old and knowing 'what comes next' thanks to the occasionally ill-advised followups, and I still want the story to have come out differently. I st ill feel bad for how this collection of inkmarks on paper got treated. I still want the bad boy to have gotten the girl after all.
Yes, fanfic was committed. No, I'm not going to show you any of it. Most of my juvenalia I've deliberately destroyed, and what Mum may have hidden from the flames may as well be in code anyway because even I can't read my handwriting. So there. None of it was of any quality, I'm sure, but it was a valuable Learning Experience: fanfic, when done as an exercise in taking the original apart to see how it was put together and then seeing how well one can cobble together something new from all the spare screws and extra wires, can have a place in one's studies of the craft, if only because one has a known-good example (IE a work that's been passed by an editor) to test the results against.
So what does any of this have to do with what I'm working on now? It's debatable; if anything, what I've written comes far closer to a romantic-comedy than an epic. But the 'bad boy' gets the girl, even if he's not so bad after all, so I guess I'm still trying to make it come out right. And I could just be talking out of my butt again; we'll have to wait and see what the professionals have to say about it... now, where's that pink highlighter?