Rob, I've read some of your work and, like Shecky said, rules are made to be broken. I trust your writing! In this case, the narrator is still making mental decisions. It might be effective to have those non-concrete contradictory assumptions rolling one off the other in rapid recession. I'd love that wild ride! Yes, it would drive me crazy, but also extremely sympathetic to the character, whereas too many of those seems for several pages would make me mad at the author?  Does that make sense? I'd consider it an honor to share that ride with the character, but irritating to be held off by the narrator. I mean the narrator is having to act and respond on what he thinks each statement is or action that happens.

*sigh* again, I'm not expressing this well. Let me just say, that I would absolutely love to read this work and get lost in translation hand in hand with the characters, but if it were several pages of 'seems' where I was observing instead, then I might walk away from it?

To be honest Rob, the seem would be okay, even good, but can you imagine the awesome impact on the reader the other way? Freaking award level maybe...

BUT it is the author's choice and rules are made to be broken. I kinda trust you on that Rob...  :-)

Looking through the statistics for the manuscript, the narrator "seems" (seemed, seeming, etc) a lot more than I'd thought. About 254 times in what would be 568 paperback pages.    The narrator, I think, needs to do more straight observing/reporting and leave the interpretation to the readers. There is definitely room for the "eight words for three" trick in a lot of places in the narrative, as well.

Having more than one character around to guess at the meaning(s) across the language barrier means we don't have to rely solely on the narrator's guesswork. Now that I've written that, I need to remember to use that device more often.

Got slapped with a headful of ideas all falling into place a couple weeks ago on an existing project I'd been writing. The original Untitled work weighs in at roughly 130,000 words. I'm two weeks and a little under 30,000 words into the rewrite, (very) tentatively titled "The Shores of Dreamland."

I've been wanting to get back to this particular story for quite some time, but the muses had been silent for a very long stretch. Figures, they'd open the floodgates all at once on me....

It feels very good to be writing again.

Been there, doing that.

I read tons of fantasy fiction and a bit of sci fi. I try very hard to write the same type of material, because I like those types of stories and have my own I want to tell.

... so why is it that my best material is contemporary and (only slightly) magical-contemporary...?

My wife tells me it's because I'm boxed in by the "rules" of all the material that I've read and absorbed over the years, and the contemporary stuff I've written isn't penned in (pardon the pun) by such boundaries.

I think she's on to something... which is why I don't read much contemporary fiction.

Oh, also, not so much a book on writing, but one that's handy to have read at least once--Strunk and White. I forget the actual title, just the authors, but it's pretty much a grammar handbook.

Elements of Style

On the iPod at the moment, but Googling "Jim Butcher Livejournal" should turn up his writing advice articles.

My mom read me some Stephen King for a bedtime story one night when I was a wee lad...


And I scare myself with my writing, but it's more about form and structure, rather than the subject matter

What kind of story do you want to tell? Let that decide where society's view of the supernatural fits along the spectrum.

Are your main characters among then 'enlightened'? Or are they hapless schmucks dragged into a whole new world view, and now having to cope with all that (in addition to whatever plot-related goodies you're throwing at him/her/them)?

If the supernatural coverup is a conspiracy, which side is perpetuating it?

Is it an X-Files-ish "The Truth is Out There" type of tale, where creepy-crawlies lurk in the sewers and basements and air conditioning ducts? Or are the "creepy-crawlies" as benign as a simple patch of garden gnomes that animate at night to do the weeding?

How severe your branding of the supernatural is in the story will contribute a great deal towards how society mainlines it. Does the supernatural want to be in the open? Do schools conduct regular "Zombie-drills"? Or do the things that go bump in the night watch, content from their closets, and from under the bed?

Maybe there are patches of the world where the supernatural frolic and play, away from the prying eyes of muggles normal folks. Maybe the normal folks' airplane comes apart in midair, and they find themselves washed up on a beach of one such remote isle of mystery.