The dating game
Aug. 4th, 2012 04:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceMost of the time you don't notice, because the last thing you want to do is reread your own fiction; but every now and then you have to, when a new edition looms, and if your fiction ever was contemporary, it can slap you in the face how fast books date, and how many ways there are to date them.
I was on the verge of making this a question, of going to the internet for advice, whether I should update as I go to keep Dispossession the contemporary urban fantasy it was meant to be, make it contemporary again when it was written nearly twenty years ago; I was going to offer an example - it speaks of the Five Nations, I was going to say, ought I to make that the Six Nations, so that people who follow rugby football don't trip over an archaism and so fall out of the story? - only then I remembered that if I updated the reference, then to be consistent I'd need to update a hell of a lot more. I'd need to introduce the internet, eg. And mobile phones, no doubt. And one way or another the plot would surely fall on its face, because why didn't they just...? is a question that seems more and more obvious to readers, and becomes harder and harder for a writer to address, as you pull a book further and further from the mind-set and the milieu in which it was created.
And no, I don't want radically to rewrite it; so no, I shall not update. It is a historical novel now. Some of you were barely even born, good grief.
I was on the verge of making this a question, of going to the internet for advice, whether I should update as I go to keep Dispossession the contemporary urban fantasy it was meant to be, make it contemporary again when it was written nearly twenty years ago; I was going to offer an example - it speaks of the Five Nations, I was going to say, ought I to make that the Six Nations, so that people who follow rugby football don't trip over an archaism and so fall out of the story? - only then I remembered that if I updated the reference, then to be consistent I'd need to update a hell of a lot more. I'd need to introduce the internet, eg. And mobile phones, no doubt. And one way or another the plot would surely fall on its face, because why didn't they just...? is a question that seems more and more obvious to readers, and becomes harder and harder for a writer to address, as you pull a book further and further from the mind-set and the milieu in which it was created.
And no, I don't want radically to rewrite it; so no, I shall not update. It is a historical novel now. Some of you were barely even born, good grief.