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maryymaruu · 1 month ago

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TSAC: Greetings, Three Signals! My name is Three Stars Above Clouds.

As I am sure you are aware, the integrity of the global broadcast network is decaying as time progresses. I recognize that there is a limited amount of time that we iterators have before long-distance communication becomes impossible. Thus, I have decided to make an effort to get to know my fellow iterators before I lose the chance.

Now, the primary reason for my contact: I became curious to investigate your broadcast frequency after it appeared on the long-range communications channels.

Your broadcast signature appears to match some of the data stored within my personal archives. I believe I may have recordings of some of your musical broadcasts, though I was unable to locate the source until now. I am glad to have identified their originator!

I will admit that I have only a passing familiarity with the arts; my expertise lies elsewhere. However you appear to be quite knowledgeable about cultural matters of a musical nature, and I am eager to learn more about areas of study outside of my own personal research.

I have some questions about your work, if you would not mind me asking. Do you have any favorite musical compositions, or perhaps some that are important to your research? I also wonder, is your work primarily curatorial, or have you created any original compositions of your own?

I appreciate your efforts in the realm of data preservation and dissemination; I believe such actions are quite valuable to the wider iterator community, especially during these times of looming isolation.

This broadcast is becoming quite long, so I will end my message here. I await your reply; may the Cycles be kind.

@threestarsaboveclouds

(ooc: WOW sorry this got long lol. In this post from a while ago TSAC mentions that they have some iterator songs archived, and I had that in mind when formulating this message https://www.tumblr.com/threestarsaboveclouds/758086912710000640)

TS: [ HELLO, THREE STARS ABOVE CLOUDS! PLEASE, EXCUSE MY INCONVINIENT WAY OF COMMUNICATION, BUT I'M VERY HAPPY TO HEAR FROM YOU! ]

TS: [ I AM PAINFULLY AWARE OF IT, YES. EVEN MY EQUIPMENT IS NOT IMMUNE TO TIME AND THE ELEMENTS. HOWEVER I AM STILL CAPABLE OF FULFILLING MY SECONDARY PURPOSE AND HELP YOU CONTACT ANYONE WHO MIGHT BE OUTSIDE OF YOUR REACH. I WILL ATTACH A BROADCAST SERIAL NUMBER THAT WILL REDIRECT YOU TO MY MAIN COMMUNICATION RELAY SATELLITE, FEEL FREE TO USE IT! ]

[ 1 FILE ATTACHED ]

TS: [ I’M HAPPY TO HEAR THAT MY BROADCAST IS STILL REACHING ANYONE. I’M ALSO REALLY FLUSTERED THAT ANYONE WOULD GO OUT OF THEIR WAY TO REACH BACK OUT TO ME- I HOPE THE FREQUENCY ISN’T AN UNPLEASANT ONE FOR YOU… IT’S HARD TO FIND THE PERFECT TUNE FOR EVERYONE, BUT I’M TRYING MY BEST! ]

TS: [ I UNFORTUNATELY LOST ACCESS TO A LARGE PORTION OF IT DUE TO IT BEING CONSIDERED.. CONTROVERSIAL, BUT MY ARCHIVES OF ART CREATED BY MY CITIZENS IS STILL QUITE EXTENSIVE REGARDLESS! I DID DABBLE IN CREATION MYSELF TOO! ]

TS: [ I WOULD LOVE TO SHARE MY ARCHIVES WITH YOU, IF YOU’D LIKE TO TAKE A LOOK! MY CITIZENS HAVE BEEN INCREDIBLY PASSIONATE ABOUT A WIDE RANGE OF ARTS, FROM SCULPTURE TO THEATRICS… ]

TS: [ I MAY NOT BE AN ARTIST MYSELF, BUT I DID EXPERIMENT WITH RANDOMIZED MATHEMATICAL EQUATIONS BEFORE TO BASE MELODIES OFF OF, AND I AM WORKING ON A SOUND SYNTHESIZER PROGRAM THAT WOULD ALLOW ME TO COMPOSE COMPLETELY FREELY, BOTH OUT OF SOUND SAMPLES ALREADY GATHERED, AS WELL AS GENERATE NEW ONES- AHH… ]

TS: [ OH I HOPE YOU DON’T MIND MY POINTLESS TANGENTS… THAT DATA IS MOST LIKELY COMPLETELY USELESS TO YOU, I'M SORRY… NOT TO WASTE ANY MORE TIME OF YOURS, ON THINGS LESS SUBJECTIVE. ]

TS: [ I USED TO ANALYZE THE RHYTHMIC PULSE OF THE VOID SEA. MY THEORY IS THAT THE SAME RHYTHM COULD BE ALSO HEARD IN THE CHANTS DURING ANCIENT RITUALS, SOMETHING THE ANCIENTS USED TO HELP THEMSELVES REACH ENLIGHTENMENT BEFORE THE VOID FLUID HAS BEEN DISCOVERED. ]

TS: [ UNFORTUNATELY NONE OF THE CHANTS HAVE BEEN PROPERLY DOCUMENTED, AS THERE WAS NO WAY TO RECORD THEM, AND ALL THERE IS TO WORK WITH ARE SPECULATIONS, WORD OF MOUTH AND VAGUE MUMBLINGS OF THOSE WHO CLAIMED TO REMEMBER THEIR DISTANT REINCARNATIONS. SIMULATIONS EVENTUALLY RAN INTO LOOPS, AND THE ONLY SOLID THING THEY PROVED, WAS THAT THE CHANTS DEFINITELY HAVE NO EFFECT ON NON-SAPIENT BEINGS, THUS--- ]

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(OOC: I would like to highlight the fact that these two are not in fact neighbors, not like the iterators are in the game, at least! I admit it was a very spontaneous "what-if" idea that I did not run through Delta's permission first- I got way over myself.

For lore-accurate location of TSAC please refer to this post:

https://www.tumblr.com/delta-orionis/779480878118256640/i-didnt-want-to-derail-maryymaruus-reply-to

While I'm glad to hear they are not completely opposed to the idea of TS being a "distant neighbor", it would be an extremely distant one, even for iterator standards! "Wouldn't even show up on the map" kind of distant X'D TS's idea of what is "far away" is possibly skewed by how large the radius of his transmissions is--

It's best to consider this interaction non-canon for either of them.

Thank you and apologies for the misunderstanding! )

#rain world #rain world oc #rw iterator oc #rw oc #oc three signals #rw iterator #answered #I'm sorry this one is also a text-heavy one ^^;;#it took me so long because that would be just the perfect thing to activate his yapper mode pff #and I wanted to commit XD #do let me know if the red text is hard to read #I will gladly edit it into plain text-#he was very happy to befriend TSAC :"(#welp- he can try again in 4 cycles #I'm shamelessly making things up on the spot #and shamelessly claiming TS to be the one behind the irrational numbers melody from the post you linked XD #huehuehue #three stars above clouds

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thatscarletflycatcher · 10 months ago

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Tumblr isn't letting me find again @fictionadventurer's and my own posts on epistolary novels, but I have been thinking about it again, because I fell down a Goodreads review rabbit hall and I have thoughts again.

So many people dislike the style, and honestly, I don't blame them, because it's so often done... not well. It is in some aspects, a deceptively easy one, and in others, deceptively hard. And because I'm trying to write a novel with this format myself, I have been thinking about what makes or breaks an epistolary novel.

I talked yesterday about TGLPPS, because it is an interesting case to analyze. I have thought many times about it, and cannot think of a single non-merely-aesthetic reason for it to be told in an epistolary style. A lot of it depends on -British- people who have survived some terrible war conditions willingly opening up to a stranger about their experiences, and that's made... even more difficult if the medium is letters? typically writers will appeal to tropes like making the reserved character drunk, or have them share an extreme experience in isolation with the stranger to create sudden intimacy. None of this is possible in writing; if anything, one is much more self-conscious about the things one writes than the things one says; verba volant, scripta manent.

It seems to me the story would have flowed much more naturally if Juliet had been stranded on Guernsey for some reason -like the first author herself!- suddenly Dawsey commenting that he got a book from her library makes so much more sense! Yes, certainly, if you met a stranger out there, and they introduce themselves and you realize you have a book that once belonged to them, you would tell them so! And it is in this way that the epistolary format does violence to a story that would otherwise sound much less contrived.

Another problem is the large cast of characters and multiple settings. For all I complain about Dracula, Stoker manages this pretty well (of course he has the model of The Woman in White, but TWiW has fewer povs), at least on the first half, because structurally the storylines of the characters are converging, and that does a lot to guide the reader in the understanding of the character's relationships. TGLPPS's relationship structure is more of a multidirectional flow chart, and that becomes confusing really fast.

Another novel I read reviews for recently is one set in WWI, composed of back and forth letters between two lovers torn apart by war, and one common complaint was... that the climactic scenes, the times they meet, etc all happen... off-camera. It is a fair complaint, but also one I cannot really blame the author for, because that's what usually happens with real life compilations of letters of that kind. Sure, usually the editor/compiler will fill in the blanks sometimes and add an epilogue of sorts explaining what happened afterwards, and that is possible if you are writing it fictionally too, but some may think it spoils the effect of immediacy and whatnot, which, fair too.

But it makes me think of how aware Jean Webster was of these difficulties, and how deftly she managed them in both Daddy Long-Legs and Dear Enemy. Both novels have aged badly in terms of content and message, but they are very interesting stylistically.

DLL is a bildungsroman with a dash of romance; through Judy's letters to daddy long-legs we can see how she grows as a person, gaining independence intellectually and economically, and as a writer, as her grammar and vocabulary change and grow. Between making Judy an orphan who hates the orphanage where she has lived her whole life, and one where she lived past the usual age of being thrown into the world, Webster does away with the need for letters between Judy and her friends and family: all her friends and family are her college roommates and her benefactor, who is the person she writes to. The benefactor scheme also makes it so that she doesn't have to write dll's replies, which in turns makes it much more natural and acceptable for the reader when Judy writes him the ending's love letter describing the feelings and impressions of their finally meeting in person and in truth; Judy has become a writer, and she is so used to write to him as another person all the time, that it just makes sense for her to write to him one more letter at the point where her benefactor and her lover become one and the same person. She has written a novel where the core is the correspondence between lovers AND managed to include as well all the moments of their meetings that we would otherwise miss.

Dear Enemy is a similar, but longer and more ambitious story. Instead of one relationship-connection (Judy and Daddy's), we have Sallie as a nod of connections: she's Judy's friend, Jarvis' "employee", the boss of several characters, has a tense colleague-boss relationship with the visiting doctor, a boyfriend of sorts in Washington, and a family we have met before. It is, in that way, a similar setup to TGLPPS: a urban girl of means becomes a fish out of water in a different setting till she ends up assimilating to it, and settling definitely through marriage. But Webster does a few things differently to make it click.

For starters, it is clear to her that this is the story of Sallie's maturation -I have sometimes talked of Dear Enemy as a novel where a Mary Crawford-like character undergoes a transformation arc. The happenings and stories she meets and tells Judy about along the way serve this arc, besides standing on their own as case studies to illustrate the problems, ideology and solutions proposed to the secondary themes of the story (education and social reform). I feel like TGLPPS is much more interested in Guernsey's survival through the war, in which case Juliet's story is already a frame, which, again, makes the epistolary format cumbersome rather than complementary.

Dear Enemy adds more correspondents, but it is very austere/economical with them, and narrows the letters we see to only those Sallie sends. YMMV regarding if it was too much cutting or not, but the undeniable effect is structural soundness; you are never confused by what is happening or who is writing to whom. We can guess the Honorable Cyrus Wykoff probably wrote some indignant letters to Jervis, and those would be funny to read, but... would they be worth the break in the flow of the narrative? I don't think so. To this effect, just having Sallie write a line to the effect of "I expect at this point you have at hand an irate letter from the Hon. Cyrus" is enough to paint a picture for the reader. Perhaps a letter or two from Dr. MacRae would have helped develop his character more -definitely a first read of the story obscures how much misdirection there is in Sallie's narration to Judy, which in turns tends to create an impression of suddenness to the closing letter that doesn't come across well to the reader.

The choice of Sallie mainly writing to Judy is, IMO, a really good one too. It not only establishes a connection with DLL, but it also allows for the intimacy that makes disclosure believable (something TGLPPS struggles with, as I mentioned above). When you add a few letters to the doctor and Gordon and Jervis, you also get a better perspective of Sallie's personality, how she deals not only with a friend, but with acquaintances, romantic partners and coworkers.

From all this it is pretty evident that for Webster the main function of epistolarity as format is aiding in showing psychological and moral development. But that's not the only thing the format can be really good for: perspective is another, and Austen uses it to great effect in both Lady Susan and Lesley Castle.

Both stories deal with mainly static characters, but who have very strong perspectives of the same situation, and it is this singularity of setting and story that anchors the narrative to avoid confusion, while the variety of perspective brings interest. In Lady Susan, we are dealing mainly with the marrying off of Frederica and seduction of Mrs. Vernon's brother, Reginald. There where Lady Susan paints Frederica as an undisciplined, irrational and ungrateful daughter, her sister in law, Mrs. Vernon, paints her as a sweet girl and a victim of her mother's ruthlessness and lack of love. Both agree that Reginald is being seduced, but, of course, with opposite goals: Lady Susan wants him to succumb, Mrs. Vernon, to escape, and this is a delicious struggle for the reader to follow!*

Lesley Castle being an earlier effort, and unfinished, does show some of the defects I have mentioned before (mainly, the relative confusion of having several correspondents in separate storylines), but illustrates well this same perspective effect: Margaret writes to Charlotte about the new Lady Lesley, and the new Lady Lesley writes to Charlotte about about Margaret and her sister... and in these contrasts lies the main interest of the narrative.

Some conclusions to these musings, then:

Not every story is suited to the epistolary format.

The epistolary format seems to work the best when it is used for either A) showcase psychological and moral development B) to play with perspective on people and/or events.

One of the main difficulties of the format is finding a narrative element to anchor and structure the letters around.

It must have a core couple of correspondents, or at most, two. More than that will make it confusing (unless, perhaps, the story is very short and about a single event or two).

A delicate balance must be found so that the secondary correspondence doesn't cut the flow of the main one, and if possible it must feed into it.

*It is interesting how Love and Friendship, being such a delightful -and I sustain one of the best ever- Austen adaptation, is by force of the perspective switch towards a more impersonal third person, more about a love story between Frederica and Reginald than a struggle between Lady Susan and Mrs. Vernon. Which isn't dissimilar to how adaptations of DLL end up being more about the romance between the leads than Judy's coming of age in college; tropes aside, I feel like if the epistolary format is well embedded in the story, it's going to be nearly impossible to reproduce the effect in adaptation.

#writing #epistolary novels #Jane Austen #Jean Webster #Daddy Long-Legs #Lady Susan #Dear Enemy #Lesley Castle #Thinking about Percival and Nadine of course #and how in the end it is trying to be both a psychological and a perspective story #And that might be more than I can chew #But the story is definitely about growth and change in the main character and love interest #And perspective seems so necessary too #Eleanor is the last person alive Percival feels responsibility for #Of course he'd write to her in a light way with jokes and anecdotae #so that she doesn't worry about him #whereas in day to day life he does not have the energy to behave so towards others around him #and both things are important to understand him!#It's the other way around with Nadine #she keeps the cheery façade IRL but can relax when she writes to Beth #And both seem so necessary to me!#But then there *are* things neither tells to anyone and those I'm struggling hard with #I have considered adding journal entries as well back and forth #and remain unconvinced one way or another #anyways this is the way I'll spend 10 years writing an 80 page novelette at this point XD

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