Oof I really hate how hard it is to quote Bujold’s books — there are so many stunning, jaw-dropping lines and moments, but her stories are intensely character-driven (which is a very good thing by the way), so like, it’s rare to find a line that can be presented entirely free of context and retain much if any of the grandeur and impact found in the initial delivery. So you have to instead quote a whole paragraph of leadup and then the graceful conciseness that she set up the moment or line to have is gone. Like I just spent 15min literally, doing nothing else, but trying to find a graceful way to trim and quote Ekaterin’s incredible line about the bird that was going to walk every step and just gave up in the end.
It’s so frustrating trying to describe the true amazingness of any given Vorkosigan moment/line. I instead just find myself flailing around and urging people to go read the series. My god these are so good, I wish internet/fandoms had coincided with the time of writing of most of these so that there could be a huge HP/Hunger Games/ASOIAF type fandom for these books, because do they ever deserve them.
This is what Jo Walton calls a spearpoint; the idea being that a spearpoint has the impact it does because of the weight of the spear behind it. LMB can spend books building the spear.
I’m interested in the mechanics of the spearpoint—is the idea to work backwards from that point you know you want to hit? Surely not; I feel like the idea behind building the spear is to whittle away the concept until only that single point remains. The amazing thing about LMB’s series is that they always seem to have their spears pointed in just the right direction for me.
http://papersky.livejournal.com/143157.html
There’s the original lj post. It is good stuff.