Alexx S Kay wondered aloud to the group:
>> This scene, while fun to think about, wouldn't appear in the book,
because,
>> of course, the audience already knows what Vlad's got, and that's a false
>> payoff.
>
>Not necessarily. After all, you don't need a "payoff" in the first chapter
>so much.
Well, I'll disagree. A book isn't so parsimonious as a movie or a comic
book or a short story, but still, it isn't good storytelling to include
anything that's not necessary or anything that the audience already
knows. (Insert rant about page inflation in Giant Fantasy Series
here.) Generally, you don't want the audience to wait for the story to start.
Including the Vlad/Demon scene is, in a word, fannish. It's a scene that's
only about giving the reader a chance to feel smug, as is common in fanfic.
I think Brust wouldn't want to write it unless he could confound our
expectations of it and make it part of the story of the book. If its only
purpose is to create a truce between Vlad and the Jhereg, it can be
disposed of in a few words of exposition: "Since the Jhereg had opted for
discretion in dealing with the wielder of a Great Weapon...." [1]
> And it *would* be a handy way to explain the current situation to
>the unfortunate reader who has not yet delighted in reading _Issola_.
Now, that's a possibility. However, the necessary exposition would
probably work better folded into the scene where non-spoiler-"it" "wakes
up", since that scene would naturally have a lot of exposition on the same
topic.
[1] Although their treatment of Morrolan in _Jhereg_ would seem to make
this unlikely.
--
"And I still don't get the `drawing straws' plot development. They drew
straws, and then as far as I can tell, the heroes _all_, every single
one of them, went. And by `went', I apparently mean, `walked across the
room to talk to Darkseid.' "--Michael Blakeman Cleveland on Genesis
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