Eccentric Flower:199908/An annoyed missive

I was going to send this as a private email. Then I realized I was saying something that I wanted to defend to other people as well. My apologies to Mary Anne, who now has one free ticket to flame me back at will.

Dear Mary Anne:

I really wish you'd correct that 8 August entry or amend it. I didn't see it until Karen wrote me and mentioned it ... I use your monthly links on the top page and you haven't added an August one yet ... so I went to look at it and I was a tiny bit annoyed.

For what it's worth, your finger-wagging would be completely justified ... if you didn't have a few assumptions wrong.

My gripe was never whether my novel was "fantasy" or "SF." Sure, I'd like "fantasy" better ... but one of my fundamental points in the Tolkien rant was that the word "fantasy" has now evolved to mean something I can't personally use for my own works.

If "fantasy" still meant a tale of the fantastic, I'd be arguing that my novel was "fantasy" to anyone who'd stand still. But that day is long past. So "SF" is the best place to put it, and I know/knew that perfectly well.

I was never, not once, "resistant to that term" as you say I was.

Second, I corrected the part about how Tolkien imitators have dragged down fantasy, in the next day's entry - I agreed that was wrong. Certain correspondents made me realize that what I'm watching is just Sturgeon's Law in action, that a great deal of any genre is c**p.

But fantasy never really meant a genre to me - it was a descriptive term that crossed genres - and seeing how it has come to mean a single genre makes me unhappy.

Third, I know what a MacGuffin is, doggone it! I can even tell you where the term originated and the story Alfred Hitchcock used to tell reporters about it.

The MacGuffin I refer to in the book is not the alien setting, but the device used to achieve that setting - the idea that Earth kids and Seth kids are going to swap places for six years. This is solely a device to make the story happen. It could have been replaced easily with a different device - Aedie could have crash-landed on the planet or what-have-you. You know it's the MacGuffin when what it actually is doesn't really matter. As Hitchcock said.

The story is about Aedie's experiences on Seth. The exchange (the original title of the novel was Exchange Student) is the MacGuffin that enables that to happen. Okay?

Sorry to be such an evil b**ch, but I hate it when people say I said things I didn't say. Of course, that seems to be happening a lot lately (viz. the Diarist Awards Rant), so maybe I'm just going through a period where I lack verbal clarity.

Or maybe I'm just picking fights a lot more often.

Love and apologies,
Columbine