Pomegranates are very efficiently packed.

[thanate]

Although I find that I fail at the whack-with-a-spoon trick, which is sad. I did manage to de-seed the fruit pretty easily without, however. I was taught that one should never eat pomegranates alone; they are a food to be shared. At the moment I can't help but share anything I eat, but we let grauwulf have some, too.

I also find that my GPS is confused by Pennsylvania; it apparently doesn't believe in the road I used to live off of, and routed me two streets up and back around to get to the tea shop yesterday. And of course, due to the way it gives directions one at a time, I didn't know it was taking the long way around until too late. But after that moment of confusion I spent a nice weekend catching up with heuchera-- tea, followed by the Bujold reading (which was half Q&A and half a scene from an in-progress Vorkosiverse novella), a brief mall detour to replace the pin which abandoned my watch last weekend, and then more talk and meals and things. Fairly low-key except for driving to the far side of Philly and back. We both completely failed to have proto-baby gifts to exchange, but there's still some time on that one.

One of the things that came up in the Q&A session was Ms Bujold's theory about series structure as a separate concept from short story or novel structure; this is something I'd kind of thought about in a couple ways but not gotten nearly far enough to connect up and articulate. As she pointed out, it isn't the sort of thing that's easy to study in an academic context for reasons of scale and class length. Anyway, she identified four types of series:

*A set of stand-alone novels that combine to form the life-arc of a character/set of characters (for instance the Vorkosiverse books, or Horatio Hornblower)

*A group of novels that explore different aspects of a theme, or related themes in the same world. (Her Chalion/5-gods books, which is what started the subject)

*One long novel broken up into book-length bits (LOTR, The Sharing Knife)

*One book for each of a group of people, where the main characters of the previous books show up as minor characters in subsequent ones (She identified this as a romance thing; from my shelves I would start with Sharon Shinn's 12 Houses books or maybe something like The Dark is Rising or NK Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy, though those seem a bit more complicated and heading off in other directions structurally.)

Aside from trying to categorize the mess I'm presently working on (which is about half of the contemplations I was already contemplating on the subject, though I now have a new framework to think about it in) my first thoughts include trying to categorize things that sit between or off to the side of some of these-- what does one do with The Dalemark Quartet? Or Discworld, which is several semi-overlapping series of various types? Should there be a semi-series category for things like the Chrestomanci Chronicles, or Martha Wells' Ile-Rien books, or Sharon Shinn's Samaria books, which are all scattered about time- and place-wise without the unified focus for a life-arc particularly, but form a bunch of world-snapshots, sometimes with the same characters? (Can one argue that fantasy worlds potentially deserve a life-arc? If so, that would cover Narnia, too.) Do the more recent huge sweeping fantasy epics (Robert Jordan, George RR Martin) actually count as type 3, or do they need a subtype of their own based on the insane proportions? (Why am I not capable of remembering what question I was about to ask next after typing the last one? Ok, don't answer that...)

Is this something that other people have talked about? It seems like the sort of thing that might come up someplace like Fourth Street. In any case, I'm curious what other people think on this one, if anything.

Comments

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

I recall Jo Walton having talked about a topic similar to this (http://www.tor.com/blogs/2009/04/so-what-sort-of-series-do-you-like) on Tor.com. She doesn't get too much into the weeds re: thinking about whether worlds have a comprehensive arc or not.

I tend to resist taxonomies and creating buckets to shove things into, myself. That said, I think that there's something to the notion of a world having a narrative arc rather than just individual characters. Will have to think about that some more.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Huh-- I think I'd actually read the Jo Walton post a while ago, but it hadn't quite clicked with how I was thinking about things at the time. Her categories definitely seem more spec-fic based... but then I've been starting to wonder if I want a different set of categories for the childrens' section, too.

Like all categorizing of things, it's only useful so long as it's a helpful tool for thinking about stuff, but as "this thing is like this other thing" is also a large part of how our brains organize themselves, I think it can be a good mental exercise. (In my case, I tend to go straight from "here are some categories" to "ok, what doesn't fit neatly in them, and how does that affect my understanding of how this categorization system works?") Coming framed as being the next scale up from the structural categories people study, I was primed to start thinking about the next scale up again: grouped/interlocking series such as Discworld, or things that are only loosely "series" in the market category sense, but which fit together to create a greater world-building sense like the Samaria books, or Sherwood's Sartorias-deles (which is kind of both of the above, really. See also hybrids & breaking out of my own category concepts...)