Inklings on paper
Jul. 6th, 2006 10:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacDespite having been to a couple social events over the holiday weekend, which is a couple more than I normally get to on any weekend, I've been mostly in hibernation over the last couple of weeks. When not at my job I've been sweating my way to the conclusion of my long overdue article on the Inklings for a forthcoming C.S. Lewis encyclopedia.
This was the chance that I'd been waiting for, and thirty years of research has been poured in to 13,000 words. Usually when I write an article as large and deep as this, I like to spend the better part of a year on it, digging things up here and there that I might not otherwise have seen or have forgotten. But in this case I didn't have the time. So the works cited of this paper consists of "what I could remember offhand while I was writing it."
But it's done now, with nothing but the tinkering left - the easy part, for me - and I have been rewarded with some ecstatic comments from my editor, whom I gather was not happy with some of the other contributions. "...scholarly writing at its best, instructive, inspiriting, informed in its judgments, masterly in its command of the primary and secondary sources," this is a little embarrassing to quote.
I hope, too, that it will be entertaining to read. I've decided to cut out the comment about the early critic who said that the Inklings wrote books with men behind them ... by which he meant, he explained, "man" in the sense that you'd say, "Now that was a man!" My comment was going to be that the word this guy was looking for was mensch. But I doubt your average Lewis reader would be helped much by that observation.
But that's my goal ... informative, provocative, and entertaining non-fiction. Which is my long way of getting around to paying my tribute to a master of such prose in the fannish realm, a man always enjoyable to read or to talk to, who died today: rich brown. [who decapitalized his name so that any description of something as being "rich (and) brown" would be a reference to him]
This was the chance that I'd been waiting for, and thirty years of research has been poured in to 13,000 words. Usually when I write an article as large and deep as this, I like to spend the better part of a year on it, digging things up here and there that I might not otherwise have seen or have forgotten. But in this case I didn't have the time. So the works cited of this paper consists of "what I could remember offhand while I was writing it."
But it's done now, with nothing but the tinkering left - the easy part, for me - and I have been rewarded with some ecstatic comments from my editor, whom I gather was not happy with some of the other contributions. "...scholarly writing at its best, instructive, inspiriting, informed in its judgments, masterly in its command of the primary and secondary sources," this is a little embarrassing to quote.
I hope, too, that it will be entertaining to read. I've decided to cut out the comment about the early critic who said that the Inklings wrote books with men behind them ... by which he meant, he explained, "man" in the sense that you'd say, "Now that was a man!" My comment was going to be that the word this guy was looking for was mensch. But I doubt your average Lewis reader would be helped much by that observation.
But that's my goal ... informative, provocative, and entertaining non-fiction. Which is my long way of getting around to paying my tribute to a master of such prose in the fannish realm, a man always enjoyable to read or to talk to, who died today: rich brown. [who decapitalized his name so that any description of something as being "rich (and) brown" would be a reference to him]
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Date: 2006-07-08 01:52 am (UTC)