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edenfallingI am being sneaky and using my writing icon even though this post contains no actual fiction.
It's really an announcement that Chapter 3 of First You Have to Get There is now up at FictionAlley. Go! Read! Review!
*begs shamelessly for feedback*
Um. And in RL, I spent the day napping, grousing about the icky rain, splitting logs, learning to use a chainsaw, and starting to read Nabokov's Lolita, which I'm finding very interesting. Then again, I'm approaching it as a Russian novel rather than as smut, which I think will keep me going where a lot of other people give up because it's not all that pornographic really, and has a lot of flowery language.
It's interesting to read works written by people for whom English is not a native language. In some ways, Nabokov reminds me very much of Joseph Conrad, who for some reason decided to write in English rather than his native Polish. I occasionally get the sense that, not knowing the exact word for a certain object or impression, they looked one up in the dictionary and didn't have a native speaker's sense that their chosen word is... well, not common and not understood by native speakers of English. There's also a certain careful cadence to their sentence structure, something that feels almost on the edge of poetry rather than standard English prose of whatever genre.
Of course, this goes to show that both men knew English very well. When I try to write fiction auf Deutsch -- yes, I have tried that once or twice -- it doesn't have that careful, delicate sense of the perfectly chosen word. It just sounds stilted and grammatically awkward at best.
My few bits of German poetry, however, came out better. Poetry, being oddly structured to begin with, is perhaps more forgiving to foreign speakers than prose.
It's really an announcement that Chapter 3 of First You Have to Get There is now up at FictionAlley. Go! Read! Review!
*begs shamelessly for feedback*
Um. And in RL, I spent the day napping, grousing about the icky rain, splitting logs, learning to use a chainsaw, and starting to read Nabokov's Lolita, which I'm finding very interesting. Then again, I'm approaching it as a Russian novel rather than as smut, which I think will keep me going where a lot of other people give up because it's not all that pornographic really, and has a lot of flowery language.
It's interesting to read works written by people for whom English is not a native language. In some ways, Nabokov reminds me very much of Joseph Conrad, who for some reason decided to write in English rather than his native Polish. I occasionally get the sense that, not knowing the exact word for a certain object or impression, they looked one up in the dictionary and didn't have a native speaker's sense that their chosen word is... well, not common and not understood by native speakers of English. There's also a certain careful cadence to their sentence structure, something that feels almost on the edge of poetry rather than standard English prose of whatever genre.
Of course, this goes to show that both men knew English very well. When I try to write fiction auf Deutsch -- yes, I have tried that once or twice -- it doesn't have that careful, delicate sense of the perfectly chosen word. It just sounds stilted and grammatically awkward at best.
My few bits of German poetry, however, came out better. Poetry, being oddly structured to begin with, is perhaps more forgiving to foreign speakers than prose.
