Adam
asked
Lois McMaster Bujold:
Hi. Thank you for the many many hours of entertainment you've provided me over the last 20 years! I'm thouroughly enjoying the penric stories now. I noticed that unlike the first 3 penric stories, the 4th one (which I'm still reading) happens just after the 3rd one. Just curious, is there a plan to continue in that way, or did that just happen for this story that wasn't finished at the end of book 3?
Lois McMaster Bujold
Glad you are enjoying Pen & Des! So am I, thus far.
Part of my, hm, not plan but hope for the Penric tales is to keep the series structure as loose as possible. (Think how, say, the original Sherlock Holmes stories work by accumulation while stitching back and forth in the characters' lives, although they have the card-up-the-sleeve of Watson's after-the-fact narration.) I'd like to be able to jump around in Pen's timeline at will, although my prior experience does show if one jumps too far forward too fast it tends to block off sectors for development, so there are some limits on that score. But not nearly as many as with more rigid sequential-chronological structures. See The Sharing Knife tetralogy for a worked example at the opposite end of the spectrum.
I do plan/hope to do more with Pen in Cedonia, but those ideas aren't quite ripe yet.
Ta, L.
Glad you are enjoying Pen & Des! So am I, thus far.
Part of my, hm, not plan but hope for the Penric tales is to keep the series structure as loose as possible. (Think how, say, the original Sherlock Holmes stories work by accumulation while stitching back and forth in the characters' lives, although they have the card-up-the-sleeve of Watson's after-the-fact narration.) I'd like to be able to jump around in Pen's timeline at will, although my prior experience does show if one jumps too far forward too fast it tends to block off sectors for development, so there are some limits on that score. But not nearly as many as with more rigid sequential-chronological structures. See The Sharing Knife tetralogy for a worked example at the opposite end of the spectrum.
I do plan/hope to do more with Pen in Cedonia, but those ideas aren't quite ripe yet.
Ta, L.
More Answered Questions
Ben Newton
asked
Lois McMaster Bujold:
Your descriptions of Miles' bones breaking are very visceral. Have you suffered many broken bones?
Laura
asked
Lois McMaster Bujold:
I've been watching Building Great Sentences by The Great Courses. It's diverting, but some illustrations leave my head spinning. My question is... when writing a first draft, do you consider sentence construction (cumulative vs periodic vs other structures) or do you simply put the story out, to be revised later. Do your sentences find their final structure instinctively or are they nudged into shape later on?
SMB
asked
Lois McMaster Bujold:
I have noticed a good number of similar names across your various books: multiple Dubauers/Dubro, Nikki/Nikys, Illvin/Ilyan, etc. Are any of these an hommage to a particular person, just personal preferences for certain syllable combinations, or merely coincidences across so many richly peopled books? Many thanks for so many hours of happy (re)reading over the years.
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