[QUOTE]Originally posted by Fox


Fox : I too agree with Mr. Beale's original thought. I skip over most fiction with space aliens and 44 DDD mammaries, and supermales with 14" appendages, and housewives who secretly want their husbands to beat the crap out of them.

GB: I agree completely; but there's a difference between outlandish settings and characters and exotic settings and characters, I think. Certainly 'making the ordinary interesting' (a fine phrasing, that) is challenging; but making the exotic credible -- as with Clavell, to name a fine modern example -- is also deserving of praise.


- Fox

<aside to bocaccio: Dickens, like Shakespeare, was writing for the mass market, of his time, hence the caricutures. But that does not demean the quality of the writing. >

GB: I didn't mean to suggest that it did. The success of those two writers gives us all something to aspire to, in our own little way. The great lesson we can learn from them is that it should be possible to write for a mixed audience (as we have here) without dumbing things down for them. There's no reason (save for the example set by a few generations of plain-brown-wrapper pornographers) that an erotic story can't have colorful well-motivated characters, interesting dialogue and a page-turning plot, while still generating enough sexual excitement to hold the interest of the most jaded reader.

Boccaccio