Guess I'll find out if it deserves the name Windy City

[bironic]

If a person were going to be in Chicago for the first time for, say, 6 hours and possibly a few evenings, in February, what might one do? Sears Tower? Field Museum? Pizza?

ETA: Also, if a person had basically the entirety of the English sci fi and fantasy literary canon at one's fingertips, what might one try next? Short stories and compilations are a personal favorite.

Comments

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Heh. I guess I would just be reading along, enjoying all the creativity he'd put into each story-universe, backgrounding the plot, but then a passage or whole section would come along that'd be like, "after the apocalypse, which was caused by X, such and such happened, and then such and such followed, and now here we are," which I thought took away from the storytelling. Same in the one about the investigators who take drugs to suppress their disgust and focus their attention to details, where we *got* that that's what was going on, but he stopped to talk about how the cops were trained and what the drugs did. Stylistic differences, maybe. Didn't stop me from reading more.

[daasgrrl.livejournal.com]

Hmm, that's really interesting - remember when I was writing the vamp sequel to your fic and you didn't like the way the backstory was exposited? That kind of explains a lot, possibly, as to the difference of opinion there.

[Although, I have to say in retrospect I think you were completely right regarding the fic - because I do regard fanfic as a separate genre of its own - and if I'd done it again I would want it fleshed out into a flashback *g*]

[bironic.livejournal.com]

That must be it -- Greg Egan skewed your brain. Or didn't skew mine in time. ...No, he must have skewed yours. *g*

In Egan's case, anyway, I appreciated the thought he'd put into it, and I didn't need him to spell it out for me. And yours, ya, good point -- I like when things that happened before the story are told in the beginning instead of in the middle, or in a prequel, like you say, or alternating sections or something. My ex-boyfriend told me all the past-perfect tense in a flashback took away from the drama in a Star Trek story I wrote in high school. I was kind of bitter about it for a little while, but soon enough I realized he was right, and now that sort of thing strikes me whenever it shows up in fic.

Blah blah blah preachcakes.