(no subject)

[baloonworld]

Ursula LeGuin keeps world-building at me. First she did the short story in the Tiptree anthology with the wholey gratuitous familly structure (That took 10 pages to explain and then had no baring on the plot) and now I've started reading "Always Coming Home" which is explicitly world building for its own sake with really gratuitious use of "alien" words just for the hell of it*. It has poetry and song and instructional tales for children and keeps talking about the dance festivals and all the things you have to write to really flesh out a semi-agricultural civilization (which had the utopia). I was starting to wonder if I was going to give up on reading it. Then! Suddenly! inter-village RAP BATTLE!

Unfortunately, their rhymes were not phresh, which may have been due to the utopia. Full marks for the inital conception, sadly it was stillborn.

I'll keep reading her books due to The Dispossessed, which was superb.


*He travelled 50 yomps** to the yatterstall*** and performed the havening****

**about 5 miles
***temple
****sacred dance, or a journay

Comments

[elmyra.livejournal.com]

Chili says *purr*.

I say I shall pick up some her less obscure stuff at some point. Also, do read "The Birthday of the World" - I greatly enjoyed a lot of it.

[writerdahling.livejournal.com]

Hmph. I shall have to see who her editor is who lets her do all this stuff, since editors keep telling me that world building doesn't sell novels. Glad you're enjoying it though - I shall have to pick up something of hers at some point.

[baloonworld.livejournal.com]

Literary Agent

Virginia Kidd Agency
P.O. Box 278
Milford, PA 18337
Voice: 570-296-6205
Fax: 570-296-7266
Email: agents (at) vk-agency (dot) com

Dramatic Agent

William Contardi
244 Madison Ave.
Penthouse L
New York City, NY 10016

Also from her website:

[baloonworld.livejournal.com]

A Rejection Letter

A copy of a rejection letter my agent received for the first book of mine she handled. Because I am a very kind person, I have omitted the name of the Editor and his publishing house. This is included to cheer up anybody who just got a rejection letter. Hang in there!



Dear Miss Kidd,

Ursula K. Le Guin writes extremely well, but I'm sorry to have to say that on the basis of that one highly distinguishing quality alone I cannot make you an offer for the novel. The book is so endlessly complicated by details of reference and information, the interim legends become so much of a nuisance despite their relevance, that the very action of the story seems to be to become hopelessly bogged down and the book, eventually, unreadable. The whole is so dry and airless, so lacking in pace, that whatever drama and excitement the novel might have had is entirely dissipated by what does seem, a great deal of the time, to be extraneous material. My thanks nonetheless for having thought of us. The manuscript of The Left Hand of Darkness is returned herewith. Yours sincerely,

The Editor

21 June, 1968

ALSO:

[baloonworld.livejournal.com]

thank you for making me look at her website. I'd have never know she'd won awards for her choreography or the dances of the imaginary people :)

Re: ALSO:

[writerdahling.livejournal.com]

YOu're welcome :)

Thanks for looking all this up. You know that famous authors all over get rejection all the time, but actually reading an actual rejection letter is amazing and kind of puts things in perspective.

[almosthonest.livejournal.com]

Just read the Wikipedia entry for ACH. So basically it's written to be world building - the rest is sort of incidental. Apparently the book originally came with a tape of music and poetry of the Kesh. I admit to being in awe. ;-)

[baloonworld.livejournal.com]

the best thing is that she has prizes for /dance/ from the Kesh. Every shitty made up tribe ever has a few made up words and proberbly some poetry and maybe a few songs. The Kesh have real-world prizes for dance, a (soletary admittedly) children's counting rhyme, a handful of instructional tales for children and (proto-)RAP BATTLE (its more like what Cormac the skauld did than true rap battle, but the principle is there)

ACH is very very good at what it is. However, it is a nasty shock if you wanted to read a damn story.