Topic: Meta: Discussion of Meretrix Becoming (Read 137 times)

(Reserved for links to any commentary or critique which particularly catches my attention.)

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Hereby, I commence what I consider to be a most dangerous experiment.

A well-written novel places its author in the position of a god outside time, for whom the rules of causality are inverted.  What is written on the first page must be affected by what shall come on the three hundredth.  Plot is a law of physics.

Wherefore a serialized novel cannot hope to succeed as literature unless it is either fully written in advance, or at least planned carefully from its first pages.  Yet here, I have done neither:  I have in mind character development, scenarios, and a general goal, but no plot.  With all due irony, I know not when, why, or whence our anonymous heroine comes to climax!  She is begun without ends.  How could I do such a thing?

For to blur the line dividing fantasy from reality.  Should I be so lucky as to meet minds with suitable readership, they will be woven into a story which grows and evolves to fit their presence.  Perhaps this could include you.  [Editor’s note:  A more specific statement will be expanded here as the story unfolds to a degree which may attract the right persons.]

This leaves me for now with character development through a string of scenarios which shall lead in a general direction.  As thereto, I wish to be clear up-front as to the direction this character shall take.

If I were to draw my protagonist as a two-dimensional caricature of every crypto-nerd’s fantasy girl, women would dismiss the story with cold contempt—as would intelligently discerning men.  I promise instead, she shall be endowed with emotional depth and a complex personality.  She is not so much a vision of someone I fancy meeting as a reflection of a part of me, melded with my real-life experiences.  Her first letter somewhat cribs the style of a highly literate female correspondent I’ve actually had—with the substance being a quite unusual obsession, admittedly all my own.

What she becomes shall surprise her, much as it may you.