Words words words words...
Jan. 20th, 2010 09:03 am21,000 words.
I came up with a way to avoid the Horrible Escape Scene. I hate escape scenes; almost always they make the bad guys look like total doofuses (doofi?). It's hard to fear a villain who leaves unnecessarily large air vents in all his prison cells, and doesn't even use them to pipe in poison gas or ninjas.
Also, I've been going back and forth on the word "kvetch." I'm almost positive some people will dislike its use in a fantasy novel, although really, why? Presumably the speakers of fantasy languages steal words from foreigners. It's one thing to object to an expression that's anachronistic (put a sock in it, in a world without phonographs), or obviously refers to an Earth person (Machiavellian, though I can't let it go without pain), but objecting to words because they have a less-than-purely-Anglo-Saxon etymology seems silly.
I came up with a way to avoid the Horrible Escape Scene. I hate escape scenes; almost always they make the bad guys look like total doofuses (doofi?). It's hard to fear a villain who leaves unnecessarily large air vents in all his prison cells, and doesn't even use them to pipe in poison gas or ninjas.
Also, I've been going back and forth on the word "kvetch." I'm almost positive some people will dislike its use in a fantasy novel, although really, why? Presumably the speakers of fantasy languages steal words from foreigners. It's one thing to object to an expression that's anachronistic (put a sock in it, in a world without phonographs), or obviously refers to an Earth person (Machiavellian, though I can't let it go without pain), but objecting to words because they have a less-than-purely-Anglo-Saxon etymology seems silly.