News You Can Bruise for 2013 October 14 (entry 0)

(1) Mon Oct 14 2013 10:14 Reading After-Action Report: In preparation for my reading at Enigma Bookstore I asked people on Twitter which bit of Constellation Games I should read. I decided to read Tetsuo's review of Pôneis Brilhantes 5 from Chapter 18, both by popular Twitter demand and because Sumana had reported success reading that bit to people.

I practiced reading the review and also practiced another scene: Ariel's first conversation with Smoke from Chapter 2. No one suggested that scene, but it's one of the last scenes I wrote, so I personally haven't read it a million times and gotten tired of it. I abandoned this idea after a test reading because it's really hard to do a dramatic reading of a chat log, especially when most of the characters have insanely long names. So, Pôneis Brilhantes it was.

However, shortly before the reading I learned that Anne and I were each going to be reading two excerpts! Uh-oh. On the spur of the moment I chose to read a scene I had never practiced and that only one person (Adam) had suggested: the scene from Chapter 11 where Ariel meets Tetsuo and Ashley and they go visit the moon.

That scene has three good points: a) it introduces Tetsuo, increasing the chance that the Pôneis Brilhantes scene would land; b) it's full of the most gratuitous nerd wish-fulfillment I could write; c) it ends strongly with the call from Ariel's mother, which unlike a chat log is very easy to read because it's a Bob Newhart routine where you only hear one side of the phone call.

This was a really good idea. People loved the moon scene, even though my unpracticed reading stumbled and ran too quick. But when I read the Pôneis Brilhantes scene, it wasn't such a great hit! The room wasn't really with me. That's the scene I had practiced, and I think it's the funniest, most incisive thing in the whole book. Not a big hit! I think if I'd only read that scene I wouldn't have sold many books that night.

So, thank goodness for the moon scene, is all I can say. But what was going on? How had I misjudged my audience so badly? Sumana said she'd read Pôneis Brilhantes and gotten big laughs.

I think you have to be a very specific kind of computer geek to find Tetsuo's Pôneis Brilhantes review funny as a review of a video game, rather than as an expression of the personality you've just spent seven chapters with. That's the kind of geek that Sumana and I habitually hang out with, but it's not representative of the SF-reading population as a whole. I think that computer-geek population hosts a lot of the readers who wish that the second half of Constellation Games was more like the first half. Whereas someone who really digs the moon scene is more likely to stay with me the whole book.

I guess you could say the moon scene is just more commercial. And I guess I subconsciously knew this, because my current project gets more of its humor from the plot-driven character interaction found in the moon scene, and less from high concept Pôneis Brilhantes-style set pieces.

Comments:

Posted by danima at Tue Oct 15 2013 14:41

I wasn't quick enough to the draw on that one. I meant to sift through the scenes in which Ariel thinks he knows what's what with Curic and gets corrected by Tetsuo or Curic and see which of them would make good reading pieces. Off the top of my head:

* The conversation at the end of the frat party.
* "That's why ambivalence used to be considered a mental illness."
* Pairing Ariel's and Curic's accounts of Curic's visit to Austin.
* "Love is what I feel for my cross-self"--though this last may need too much background.