home_and_away: (Raven)
home_and_away ([personal profile] home_and_away) wrote2006-10-29 07:21 am

Open Letter to Charles deLint:

Thank you.

From a technical standpoint:
Thank you for creating a world and then telling its stories, in no particular order besides usually sortof chronologically. Thank you for writing books that are best when consumed in quantity, but capable of being read by themselves.
Thank you for bucking the current trend of telling one big huge story over three or five or ten books.
Thank you for making the only differences between your Young Adult tales and your Standard Issue the age of the main characters, the way they interact with their situations, and their voices. I hate it when writers talk down to the generation behind them; you never have. At least not that I've read.

From a personal standpoint:
Thank you for magic in concrete-and-steel places.
Thank you for Mysteries, Great and Small.
Thank you for things that ARE, and both sides of how they are.
Thank you for not flinching from the ugly parts of fantasy or reality.
Thank you for not sensationalising them, either.
Thank you for Maida, Zia, Bones, and Katherine. And Jilly.
Thank you for the heads up on MC Solaar and "Le Bien, Le Mal". ("Shining Nowhere But the Dark", in Moonlight and Vines and I think a Gaimen Endless compilation, though be damned if I remember which at the moment...)
Likewise Kiya Heartwood and a double handful of Celtic tunes. God knows where I'd've found them, otherwise.

I look at the world differently since finding your books.
I like it.
Gives a girl just enough hope and faith to walk large as trees, when she thinks of it.

Bless you.

[identity profile] ex-karthwyn.livejournal.com 2006-10-29 07:23 pm (UTC)(link)
i crawled partially through his first book at one point. Its one i always intended to pick up again, but then was distracted, and distracted, and distracted...
right now i'm about 100 pages into Kushiel's Scion (you should read these books. Kushiel's Dart, Kushiel's Chosen, Kushiel's Avatar, Kushiel's Scion.. and she's still writing. Author Jacqueline Carey) and about 200 pages into Lisey's Story (Stephen King's new book, and possibly one of my favorites short of the Dark Tower series. I love the way the man tells a Love Story) All recomendations i would hand to you.
But Charles deLint, i shall again scoop up when i find myself at blank pages at the end of my current stories.

Very Corbie books...

[identity profile] ladywind.livejournal.com 2006-10-29 07:32 pm (UTC)(link)
Part of me says reading deLint chronologically is good, but it's the same part that says alcohol's unhealthy--it's a little right, but not totally.

Moonheart is good, but I found the world a little harder to crack than Newford. Moonlight and Vines is the first one I found and my favorite--short stories that're quite complete in and of themselves, and a feel that (for me) is inextricably entwined with my time at TIHA. The other Newford short story collections are also worthwile. The point is never the magic or the city--always the people.

Someplace to be Flying is SO something I keep coming back to...

~notes down the Kushiel series and new King~
Danke, mein Katzchen. ~nosekiss~