Now that my book has been out for a week, people have started mentioning that they've gotten around to finishing reading it (which is very exciting!). However, since places like Twitter are less than ideal for having literary discussions, I thought I'd make a thread where people can talk about it and have room for, like, words and stuff
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(Also, I just worked out where Nusquam came from. Well played. ;))
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Arasiel's name is supposed to be evocative of the names of angels (e.g., Uriel, Barachiel, etc.) but also still sound feminine. Shoön is more of a phonological thing that's kind of hard to explain.
Also, Katherine is a family name. My father's mother was named Catherine, and my sister's middle name is Kathryn, in honor of her, so I thought I'd use another different spelling to sort of carry on the tradition.
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Anyway, you made no secret of the fact that Summerhill was originally a short story that your friends and fellow group members kept pressuring you to expand on until your original, core idea ended up surrounded by a whole novel, and since reading it I wanted to ask this. The scene where Summerhill, feeling trapped by his imminent relationship commitment and craving freedom, split his self in two so he could be free without hurting the one he loved: was that the core, the seed that grew into the novel? It felt the most... visceral, I guess, the most emotionally charged part of the whole book, so I've always imagined that that was where the story grew from ( ... )
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First was the idea of an alien stowaway dancing in a ballroom with a hostess aboard a cruise ship in space. This scene made it a few drafts into the process before being cut, because it just didn't fit with the Katherine/Summerhill dynamic that eventually developed.
The second was the concept of otters that made you hallucinate if you licked them. Which, okay, the "cloning and separation" thing still happened even in the original short story, but mostly as a weird hand-wave to just keep the story going I guess.
Hope that doesn't ruin the mystique too much.
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