Suzette Haden Elgin's Blog, page 5

Thursday...

The thing that fascinates me most about CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series -- the technique that just awes me and that I most want to learn how to do -- is her ability to write dialogue that ought to come across as an infodump, but doesn't do that at all. She'll have a character speaking for half a page or more, explaining some aspect of the alien culture or alien politics, going on and on and on about it. Sometimes the character is only thinking, doing self-talk, not even speaking aloud. That oug...

Wednesday...

I'm sorry to have gone so many days without posting; I apologize. I'm just having a hard time at the moment. Some kind of minor virus, I suspect. Or maybe just Elderness. I'll be back soon.

Wednesday...

For those of you who've asked for it, here's the set of example sentences [for fieldwork:] that I've put together for the ET languages in Alien Tongues:

Panglish

1. I saw the baby.
DECLARATIVE/PAST/PERFECTIVE/SUBJECT/OBJECT

2. I didn't see the baby.
DECLARATIVE/PAST/PERFECTIVE/SUBJECT/OBJECT/NEGATIVE

3. I saw the baby that was eating.
DECLARATIVE/PAST/PERFECTIVE/SUBJECT/OBJECT/PAST/PROGRESSIVE/RELATIVE CLAUSE

4. I know that you saw the baby.
DECLARATIVE/PRESENT/PAST/PERFECTIVE/SUBJECT/OBJECT/COMPLEM...

Tuesday...

I am now re-reading all of the Foreigner series, with my full and intense attention -- this time with the goal of learning how, precisely, CJ makes the world of the atevi so real, and how she makes the stream of consciousness of her characters so utterly gripping. I need all the help I can get with the new novel, and I can think of no better source. If I could internalize any part of her technique, I'd be far ahead. How does she do what she does, and do it in book after book after book? That'...

Monday...

My bad -- my dreadfully bad. Yesterday was Father's Day, and I completely forgot about it. I didn't find out that it was Father's Day until an e-mail wishing George a happy one arrived from our older daughter [plus an offer to come out and help us pack:]. George and I don't give each other gifts except for Christmas and our birthdays -- we already have everything we could possibly need or use -- but I always make him a card for the other occasions. Not this time. I had no idea it was Father's ...

Sunday...

We have had an incredibly easy summer this year, in terms of heat and humidity. Many days the temperature has only gone to 91 degrees, with humidity at fifty percent or less. For this area, that's remarkable.

The year we came here and built this house, in the summer of 1980, the heat and humidity were just unbearable. We lived in a small rented trailer in a local trailer park, and had to keep three floor fans blowing on the refrigerator just to be sure it would keep running. The crew of men b...

Saturday...

I am just awed by the writing skill CJ demonstrates in the Chanur books. How can she possibly make the ships and all their activities so incredibly real? You would swear she was someone who had served twenty years in those activities, that she had internalized every smallest detail of them; it doesn't seem possible, otherwise, that she could make them so vivid and so detailed and so gripping. Without actually experiencing all those things her own self, I just plain cannot understand how she d...

Friday...

I've been enjoying your comments about the CJ Cherryh books; thank you for posting them. I think that what fascinates me most about the Chanur series -- other than the pidgin, which of course fascinates me -- is the absolute clarity of CJ's presentation of a culture where women are totally dominant. Not feminist, just totally dominant. And her account of the reaction the protagonist has to anything at all her husband does that strikes her as evidence of mature/adult behavior. And then there's...

Thursday...

Yesterday afternoon was a hard time for me; we had four thunderstorms, one right after the other. Thunder, lightning, hail, heavy rain... Hard for us to get any work done. We were lucky; the power didn't go off.

I spent those hours reading some CJ Cherryh novels I'd never read before -- the Chanur series. And was fascinated by the pidgin the characters spoke in those books; if I'd known about that pidgin, I would have read them long ago. I kept stumbling over the characters' names, and the na...

Wednesday...

As Ken Rolph writes in his comment, we've had a tragic storm event here in Arkansas recently -- nineteen, perhaps twenty, people drowned and swept away in a storm. It happened in the middle of the night, and they just had no time to get away, and nowhere to go if they'd had time. We have a river at our place, but it's never a threat to us. For one thing, the river is more than thirty feet down a cliff; for another, it's fast-flowing, and when it does rise a bit it sometimes comes up into the ...