thene | i am so overdue for a linklist

In which Z explains how to edit fiction. This is really interesting and I'm sure will be useful to many of you, and to me it's also loaded with comparison and nostalgia; the fancy prose style is most of what I care about and I hate all the literary fiction I've ever tried to read, but hey, in a very real sense, that is what fandom's for; doing what matters, where it matters, to hell with industry. I'm reading China Mieville's Embassytown right now; it's a sci-fi story about philosophy of language, complete with aliens and FTL and Kant, and all the words are smooth and perfect. I still remember Mieville's defence of adjective chains (superbe, sanglant, charmant?); they can defer our access to nouns, steer us down weird and radical paths to reach them. What he said was, "Who are you to say you know what a cat is?"