It’s interesting how much Twitter and comic-writing, together, have changed my writing style; once I would have described the twin pressures as “bi-Procrustean,†but no longer. Comic-writing is murder on the verbose. You can see the ghastly diminishment of my prolixity by comparing the word-count of Chapter 1 to Chapter 12. I’ve even increased the font size so I’m not tempted to ramble. It’s like that one Asimov story where a robot learns to write more fluently than the writer who owns it, but in reverse. Or like degenerative brain damage.
Actually I shouldn’t complain. The world doesn’t need another Jack Vance, because it got another Jack Vance and his name was Gary Gygax and that guy couldn’t fucking write let me tell you. But the change is especially noticeable to me because Chapter 12 takes place in a room full of sorcerers (and sundry), and sorcerers, at least, were supposed to be the last remnants of my dreadful faux-Vancian patois…in fact, it’s intended as something as a joke that Anthem sounds like a sorcerer. But of course, Anthem does not sound like a sorcerer because sorcerers, for the most part, don’t sound like sorcerers, because I’ve ruthlessly pared their utterances down to the bare minimum necessary to tell the story and convey nuances of character. (Vance, of course, has only one character, and the same picaro speaks through everyone.) To me it feels like a more significant loss than it probably really is, but I miss the wide-open spaces of novel-writing, where my sorcerers can engage in all the pedantry and pettifoggery they want.
I don’t know. Varaxunax seems to be doing a fairly good job of pettifogging away. Aside from bringing us up to speed I can’t help wondering where he is going with all this psudo-cooperation. Unless he’s simply stalling for time. But he seems motivated by more than that.
Still that may be an adequate explanation. While he’s talking he’s not dying.