for any Brust readers who may have missed it

[rushthatspeaks]

In which Steven Brust demonstrates why Paarfi should not write erotica.

Or possibly why he should. That... that happened. And exists. Oh, my head.

Comments

[zeborah]

I had no idea that this is a thing I wanted.

[rushthatspeaks]

Me neither. And yet, when I saw the link and clicked on it, it seemed I had been wanting nothing else for the last hour.

[eagle]

I missed that the first time when Brust mentioned it in his journal. Thank you for the reminder to go read it. That was something that I wanted to read.

I think.

[movingfinger]

That seems uncharacteristically direct for Paarfi. Perhaps some lesser author is "borrowing" Paarfi's name to lend a gloss of respectability to the work.

[rushthatspeaks]

I believe, upon reflection, that this is what happens when Paarfi is being paid by the story and not by the word.

Maybe.

I agree it is uncharacteristically direct-- almost unseemly in its haste.

[punchdrunkard]

*drive-by* Thank you for the head's up!

...I think.

[aedifica]

Oh my! Thanks for the link, I hadn't seen it yet.

[gehayi]

*confused* I'm...not sure I get it. It's stilted when one person asks if he or she wants to take his/her clothes off, but that sort of thing seems like that part, at least, is meant to be a parody. The rest of it reads like pretty much every other porn I've ever seen--people going on and on and ON about sex.

Then again, I don't know who Paarfi is. I don't know who the characters are, outside of this story--or if they've appeared outside of this story. I don't even know who Steven Brust is. Maybe this makes more sense if you know all of the above.

Could you please explain the joke?

[rushthatspeaks]

This is a very context-dependent joke. Steven Brust is a fantasy writer, and a good one, whose work I recommend. One thread of his major series is, in his fantasy world, written by a fictional writer called Paarfi of Roundwood. The books Paarfi writes are pastiches, set in that world, of Dumas' Three Musketeers trilogy. The joke with Paarfi's voice is that he is incredibly round-about, drawn-out, and pompous while describing action-packed scenes which could easily be told in simple and short words. He's also erudite, funny, and endearing, which is why one can read books and books of him. If he says he will say two words about a thing, it's always at least two hundred, but they're very interesting words.

So this is Paarfi applying his going on and on and on and on and on to the simplest possible erotica encounter, one which most erotica writers would have described in like half the length, if they had bothered to describe it at all because it's too mundane. He uses all his usual descriptors, insists that he is doing this Because Etiquette, works in a genuinely funny stab at the classically terrible Heinlein description of a woman's nipples going 'spung', and leaves out everything people who might want to read something for erotic titillation would usually expect. And, as movingfinger said in the comments above, he's being unusually direct for Paarfi.

It's hard to tell a person where to start with Steven Brust, because the chronology of his series is very, very complex, but the Dumas thread begins with The Phoenix Guards. The main thread, which has a completely different first-person badass snarky narrator with one of my favorite fictional voices ever, is traditionally approached via Jhereg but would probably also work if begun with either Taltos or Dragon.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

So... because the characters are of different Houses? Surely that is the only possible problem.

(I read the Firefly novel last week. It is not so good.)

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I figure the inter-House nature is what makes it porn. The rest is etiquette.

(I bounced majorly off the Firefly novel and am glad to hear it's not just me. Haven't seen Firefly, but I'm used to that not mattering for fanfic.)

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Hee. I would expect to see the Houses fetishized more if that were really the angle, though, and it almost seemed more like a convenience so he'd have something else to call them. I may be overanalyzing.

What do you figure, it went "I need to write an elaborate [spoiler] diss; clearly the voice to do that in is Paarfi's; oh this is going to be just wrong and I am writing the hell out of it"?

(The Firefly novel's beginning was the worst bit. I was low on ebooks so persisted, but none of it was inspired or really interesting at all. Maybe a good grounding in fanfic techniques is what he needs.)

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Nono, it's Paarfi, you're supposed to overanalyze. Which is why I figure he's fetishizing it by not fetishizing it-- he has that bit where he goes on about why he's writing this (bless you, SKZB, for the joke about nipples going spung) and he mentions anatomical accuracy and delicacy of description and not one word about the actual taboo-breaking.

The whole thing has the air, on both Brust's and Paarfi's ends, of being the sort of thing that happens because someone has a very interesting conversation with you in a bar, possibly containing the words 'I dare you'.

(I'm glad to hear the Firefly novel improved a little, but sad it turned out the way it did overall. And yeah, a grounding in fanfic techniques could actually have helped with the issues I noticed before I stopped-- I don't remember in any specificity but there are ways one can hook into writing established characters that work and ways that don't, and this didn't.)

[jinian.livejournal.com]

While that is disturbingly plausible, unless Paarfi turns up Pinkwater-like to confirm your hypothesis I don't think I'm entirely convinced.

("The one who'd been addressed as sir (a title he accepted as if used to it)" on page 6 was my only actual facepalm moment.)

[rosefox]

That is incredible.

[enleve.livejournal.com]

That is so much better than most erotica that I've read.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

That is the single most accurate use ever of, "I have desired nothing else for an hour!"

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Yes. Yes it is.