On Wed, 5 Mar 2003, Steven Brust wrote: > At 04:47 PM 3/5/2003 -0800, Philip Hart wrote: > > >On Wed, 5 Mar 2003, Steven Brust wrote: > > > > > At 05:33 PM 3/5/2003 -0500, Gaertk at aol.com wrote: > > > > > > > >So what was the reason behind the stream-of-3-consciousnesses > > > >bit in _Issola_? > > > > > > If you don't know, then they didn't work. > > > >Couldn't it (they, whatever) have worked without his consciously knowing? > > Well, I dunno. If the reader goes, "What the hell was *that* doing in > there?" then I have to say it didn't work, at least by my standards. >From a poetry-writing perspective one is happy if something works, whether it works transparently or not. If as I speculated above in the snippage you were describing a brief dislocation from the normal flow of experienced time then a bit what-the-hellage seems quite appropriate. Also note that trying to describe an experience well out of the human norm in the space of a hundred words is probably quixotic, especially in prose. - Philip