Comments

The Silmarillion Writers' Guild is more than just an archive--we are a community! If you enjoy a fanwork or enjoy a creator's work, please consider letting them know in a comment.

This is epic, Dawn. And so confident and ambitious well beyond its length. It for me is an object lesson in what it means for a writer to know and be comfortable in their own invented characterization and world building. This could, in many ways, be said to contain all of the theoretical underpinnings of your construct for the story of Feanor and his family--perhaps even more strongly so than Another Man's Cage.

It's brilliant. It makes me feel like a bit of a copycat and a hack to read it though. Of course, I read it years ago and I did not know how thoroughly I had assimilated. crawled into and inhabited your canon. Oh, well, I will have to content myself with believing I do it well enough to make it worth my time and that of my readers and that mine is not without interesting departures, which represent the ways in which my world view really does vary from yours.

I want to pimp it widely (although I wish I could do so with the proviso that writing internal monologue is not as easy to do rightwell as it might look reading yours!).

How do I characterize it: Vintage Dawn, Required Reading (rating: excellent, stood the test of time).

Your method of posting old stories and back-dating them makes them difficult to find.

I'm really flummoxed! Of four Silm novellas-or-longer over the years, this is the one that I always thought of as the throwaway, maybe because I was so underconfident about it in the first place and it didn't seem to have the lasting impact of the others, nor was there the level of interest in it when I initially posted it that there usually was in my stories at the time. I assumed it was weird and esoteric and probably mostly enjoyable to me as a way to put to paper the thoughts in my head at the time. I was actually surprised on rereading it that I liked it but again figured that would be just me!

So thank you thank you thank you for the boost of confidence on this one. :) I'm really still bowled over by your comment.

"I did not know how thoroughly I had assimilated. crawled into and inhabited your canon."

I don't know that I can take credit for that. I read widely before writing my own stuff and am sure I absorbed a lot from the excellent "first-wave" Silm writers. And much came from the then-endless Tolkien-related conversations post-movie. And since we generally have a similar worldview, it's possible we just have the same ideas independently! :)

"Your method of posting old stories and back-dating them makes them difficult to find."

I really am sorry about this because I feel kind of torn on this one. I'm trying to post one per day and don't want to overttake the Most Recent page from actual new stories with my moldy oldies. But then I think that if a writer I liked with very old stories wanted to archive them, then I'd want to know about it so that I could reread them! There are some classics I'd be thrilled to see here. I am planning to compile a list of those I archive here once they're all posted and post it to LJ, DW, and Tumblr. Or maybe I could scale back to posting one or two per week instead, not backdating, without feeling guilty. I really am open to thoughts on this if you have any!

Thank you so very much for this comment, truly.