Just finished an interview about The Stephen King Illustrated Companion for an Italian publication. I expect it will get translated, so I’m looking forward to re-translating it to English to see what route my words take.
I started Against All Things Ending (The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Book 3) and observed two things: First of all, the opening few pages is a crash course in how to write a synopsis. Eight long novels, probably amounting to a few thousand pages, are summarized in four or five pages. Summarized thoroughly and comprehensively, so as to bring entire novels back to life in my mind. Second: I don’t think I’ve had to reach for the dictionary so many times in so few pages as I did reading the first chapter. My vocabulary is decent, I like to think, but I am humbled by Donaldson’s. I was pretty sure I knew what “carious” meant, relating it to “caries” as in dental cavities, and I associated “frangible” with “fragile,” which was close but not exact, but I was baffled by “bedizened,” “surquedry,” “minatory” and “orogeny,” though the context of the sentence explained the latter, which is the action of plate tectonics that causes mountains to form.
When I was writing my one-line summary of “The Bank Job” for a press release, I called the main characters “schmucks.” I was advised by the person preparing the release that the Word Police did not approve since that word means “penis,” so I ended up having to call them bunglers, a perfectly serviceable word, but one without the chewiness of “schmuck.”
New things we know about the alternate universe in Fringe: Manhattan is spelled with only one “t” over there, and there’s a place called New Yonkers. There are three major political parties in America and two of them strongly favor a law to limit the number of children each family produces (though it’s not a popular stance among the public). Red Vines licorice was just introduced. Ronald Reagan starred in Casablanca. The FBI was disbanded 10 years ago, The Shadow is still on the radio, and the Peter Bishop act of 1991 means that all child abductions are treated as Fringe events.
This was a nice Broyles episode. Fake Broyles, in fact. Over there, people seem to call him Philip more than just Broyles as they do “over here.” He has a wife and a son who was taken by the Candyman. He may wield an iron fist at Fringe division, but his wife can over-rule him at home, as she did when she allowed Olivia to interview their son. And he’s a good man, despite some of the things he’s been forced to do. When Olivia brings the abductors to justice, she earns serious brownie points with him. Enough to encourage him to overlook her little slip about the FBI, a slip that told him she knew exactly who she was. Maybe enough to help her out next time, too, now that Walternate has her. I didn’t realize before that it was the Liberty Island gift shop Olivia was jumping to. Guess that’s why the camera lingers on the statue when they transition from one universe to the other. Good to see Henry the cab driver again. Funny guy. “Cast off? What? Oh, yeah, do that.” That was a helluva hole left behind Olivia when the first culprit shot at her. Now that Peter got the message from the cleaning lady, wonder what he’s going to do. Unfortunately, we have to wait two weeks to find out.
