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Cool interactions
If you don't follow me on Facebook or Google+ you may not know that I work at Google now. I started 2 weeks ago, this is my third week there. It was a long and fun process getting hired there, but essentially I got the offer in the middle of my Japan trip and accepted, planning to start a week after I came back to the US (with of course a trip to DC to staff the Famine Game). So far Google is awesome but overwhelming. There are a ton of people I hadn't seen in ages who work there and it is very exciting to reconnect. But that is not actually why I am writing this entry.
So four years ago![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jcreed mentioned a short story called Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. (The story is now located here.) I loved it, even if Jason did not. I've forwarded it to many people since.
Today, Robin Sloan, the author, gave a talk at Google. He had gone off and turned the short story into a real book, which I didn't even know until I saw him listed in our Authors series. He read from the book a little and then did a Q&A. I got up and told him how even though I didn't even realize there was a book version, I had *loved* the short story, especially how the protagonist never actually speaks in dialogue, only in thoughts, and the other people reply to him in dialogue... and did he try to approach the book that way, and what happened? And he was basically like "Aha, you have just moved into the 'inner circle' by noticing that, a lot of readers don't pick up on it and even rarer will ask about it, and possibly nobody else in the room will know what we're talking about so this is for you, but anyway, yes, the style is on purpose, partially just because you know how sometimes we're not quite sure whether we think something or say something? And I mean, writing dialogue can often be so tedious, too?" and so on. It made me feel really happy both as a writer and as a reader, since I really did feel that the style was distinctive and well-used and it really gave us a feel for how the protagonist thought and felt... but also it was like, cool, this author gets that I really truly read his work and got it. I asked him to sign my copy of the book afterwards, and then it was like "ah, and you're left-handed too. That totally doesn't surprise me!" He said to let him know if I like the book, I wonder if he was serious.
In other cool interactions, speaking of Jason, he visited me at Google and we went around and met tons of CMU people randomly. It was awesome. And it also reminded me that it was actually his fault I read that story at all in the first place. Good times. :)
So four years ago
jcreed mentioned a short story called Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. (The story is now located here.) I loved it, even if Jason did not. I've forwarded it to many people since.Today, Robin Sloan, the author, gave a talk at Google. He had gone off and turned the short story into a real book, which I didn't even know until I saw him listed in our Authors series. He read from the book a little and then did a Q&A. I got up and told him how even though I didn't even realize there was a book version, I had *loved* the short story, especially how the protagonist never actually speaks in dialogue, only in thoughts, and the other people reply to him in dialogue... and did he try to approach the book that way, and what happened? And he was basically like "Aha, you have just moved into the 'inner circle' by noticing that, a lot of readers don't pick up on it and even rarer will ask about it, and possibly nobody else in the room will know what we're talking about so this is for you, but anyway, yes, the style is on purpose, partially just because you know how sometimes we're not quite sure whether we think something or say something? And I mean, writing dialogue can often be so tedious, too?" and so on. It made me feel really happy both as a writer and as a reader, since I really did feel that the style was distinctive and well-used and it really gave us a feel for how the protagonist thought and felt... but also it was like, cool, this author gets that I really truly read his work and got it. I asked him to sign my copy of the book afterwards, and then it was like "ah, and you're left-handed too. That totally doesn't surprise me!" He said to let him know if I like the book, I wonder if he was serious.
In other cool interactions, speaking of Jason, he visited me at Google and we went around and met tons of CMU people randomly. It was awesome. And it also reminded me that it was actually his fault I read that story at all in the first place. Good times. :)
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I am not sure if I would have noticed the lack of narrator dialogue had I not read this first, but I think I might have, in part because I feel like I [used to] write like that a lot. For the reasons that he described. :)
I also noticed, and I don't know if it was intentional or not, that with the exception of two phrases by Mr Penumbra, the narrator could have been either gender. I also like that. Reminds me a little of a first person short story I wrote years ago where I never gave the narrator a name.
Although I have to admit that from reading the title of the story I was initially convinced it would be about a bookstore that only existed for 24 hours at a time, before disappearing. I still think that would be a really nifty story.
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Apparently the entire story came down to a tweet from the author's friend saying "I just misread 24-hour bookdrop as 24-hour bookshop and was horribly disappointed" or something like that.