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all those came in short supply
Feb. 9th, 2011 09:29 pmDespite cutting my hair off (nothing like a freshly shaven head...) and joining Twitter this afternoon, I still got all my homework done in good time.
Time, that is, enough to let me actually open the file on A Returning Power and start shuffling bits.
Which brings me to my question. A Returning Power is set in a secondary fantasy world. However, the main character--Shannon--lives in a community that's sprung up in the ruins of a university (devastated by a war). The war left behind remnants, musket balls and bits of magic.
Problem is, several people reading the beginning have gotten the wrong idea, that this is in fact a post-apocalyptic landscape. That the 'magic' is misunderstandings of nuclear radiation, et cetera.
The university is the only place like this, everywhere else has moved on, which seems like it'd be easy to make clear... but to Shannon it's her whole world and so I've been having trouble figuring out how to represent that in the very beginning.
Halp? How do you read genre/setting from the beginning of a novel? What signifiers could I stick in to make this seem more secondary-world, or take out to make it less post-apocalyptic? (I realize that this is partially an exercise in futility, 'cause few of you have read it, but in the general sense.)
Time, that is, enough to let me actually open the file on A Returning Power and start shuffling bits.
Which brings me to my question. A Returning Power is set in a secondary fantasy world. However, the main character--Shannon--lives in a community that's sprung up in the ruins of a university (devastated by a war). The war left behind remnants, musket balls and bits of magic.
Problem is, several people reading the beginning have gotten the wrong idea, that this is in fact a post-apocalyptic landscape. That the 'magic' is misunderstandings of nuclear radiation, et cetera.
The university is the only place like this, everywhere else has moved on, which seems like it'd be easy to make clear... but to Shannon it's her whole world and so I've been having trouble figuring out how to represent that in the very beginning.
Halp? How do you read genre/setting from the beginning of a novel? What signifiers could I stick in to make this seem more secondary-world, or take out to make it less post-apocalyptic? (I realize that this is partially an exercise in futility, 'cause few of you have read it, but in the general sense.)
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