The Mechanical Bride Thread

[Michael Bailey]

hopefully my comments only skirt flippancy, the niche I am aiming for
is somebody who
is happy to lend an ear - but who starts thinking (and posting) from
anecdotal, personal or story-derived premises

since anything and everything can be, or have, a story, that seems to
be the way to go!

However, I think that more professional litterateurs may be
theory-driven to the extent that a story is just something to get at a
theory thru -
which to me is like scooping out the potato and eating the skin.
People do it, and they can be tasty...
but it sure isn't the first approach I prefer

Last July I wrote that whole thread about deriving justification and
the beginnings of a critical
language for stories, which was interesting for me but didn't draw a
lot of responses.

That doesn't usually stop me, but I did end up wrapping it up - I sort
of implied, from these premises,
the results (that you should care about Slothrop, eg) are trivial and
left as an exercise for the reader...
- wrapping it up in silliness, since this is an informal forum

Early on, though, I was fairly sincere and trying to delineate the
grounds from which I build -
trying to construct a critical machine.  And for awhile, I was at
least as interested in doing that as in any story

(of course, thereby hangs a tale...)