Nov. 28th, 2004

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There are times when, reading people's reactions to JKR, I wish to hug Lois Bujold's website. (Proposing to hug her seems a bit personal, what with being total strangers and all.)

People are tired of her saying things in chats that do not necessarily fit every last detail of the books. People are distressed by Flints, or else search them out with predatory glee. People hope that she did not make up names and birthdates off the top of her head.

People. I read too. I write fanfic too. I realize that it is frustrating, to varying degrees, to have canon that Does Not Quite Match Up, although I was inoculated by starting out in Marvel Comics, in which it is entirely possible to make a case that certain characters have, in every single major appearance/plot they make, been out of character with respect to previous appearances of significance -- and then to write a fic trying to explain what the heck was going on. I realize that JKR said she had the whole plot planned out, or something to that effect, and that some of you think she's an overrated hack, and some of you think she has every detail of her universe figured out because it feels so real to you, and some of you think she's an overrated hack if she hasn't figured out every eye color, middle name, and suspicious mole on each character, if she hasn't consciously intended every bit of significance or symbolism you can find, or if she has planned a plot element that somebody figured out the clues to or hasn't planned the plot you want or one with enough soap opera and overpriced cheap angst "bang" for your tastes.

I think that I really like Bujold's comments. She said that she and Patricia Wrede write backstory very differently -- evidently Wrede works everything out in massive detail, Bujold scatters hints gleefully throughout her story and figured out the details when they become important and/or sprout their own story, and they'd probably drive each other insane should they attempt a cowrite. She has been asked questions about later-written stories that contradict a minor point in previously written ones.

She says, "The author always reserves the right to have a Better Idea."

I do not think JKR is likely to change the main course or critical details of her intended plot. I do recognize that the type of series she's writing -- all to take place in a specified term, the course and many details planned ahead -- is fundamentally different in certain ways from, say, Bujold's Vor books or Duane's Young Wizards series, which are both much more open-ended (and which I don't think suffer from sometimes episodic plotting once you recognize that they're a different structure, certainly no more and perhaps less than HP suffers from the annually scheduled springtime plot resolution). And I realize that when there is a mystery element to a plot, it is fair to expect the author to lay consistent clues. (Perhaps this indicates that inconsistent bits aren't that important.)

But I would like to say that I do not CARE if she makes up middle names and eye colors on the spot, and if she eventually tells us that Tom Riddle's eyes used to be blue, gray, brown, yellow, polka-dotted, or the ultimate horror of velvety purple, I refuse to obsess over having once declared them to be green.

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