Author Topic: PC003: Run Of The Fiery Horse  (Read 57624 times)

Roland

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Reply #50 on: April 30, 2008, 07:35:17 PM
Thankyou for a wonderful story full of wonderful imagery and well developed characters brought to life by great narration.
My favourite episode so far(yes I know there have only been 5).


Roney

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Reply #51 on: April 30, 2008, 09:18:49 PM
The only part of the episode I didn't like was the fan introduction.  For me, it was like hearing a toast at the wedding of someone you don't know very well -- you realize that there was something very meaningful there for them, but it just doesn't carry over.

If you're going to add material to the intro/outro, I'd like to see author comments.  One of the things I like about buying anthologies of previously-published stories is that they usually add comments from the author about where they got the idea, how it fits into the larger scheme of their work, details of their life at the time, etc. that sort of thing would interest me, but a relatively spare intro/outro may be the best choice. Length does get to be a problem, at least for me.

I agree with everything Windup said, but I want to second this.  Forewords aren't a problem in print because the reader can skip past them and return to them later if they're interested.  I strongly prefer an afterword in audio: even when I trust the podcast not to include any spoilers, a foreword is X minutes of chat that won't really mean anything to me until I've heard the story.  An afterword can be stopped if I wasn't interested in the story, paused if I want to think about it some more myself before continuing, or played if I know I want to hear some reaction.

So I'd prefer extra comment at the end, and I'd prefer it to be something really worth listening to.  Author comment should be the gold standard, insightful analysis is silver and a distant bronze is general praise.

Of course the risk is defusing the forum comment by saying all the clever stuff in the podcast.

I loved the story, by the way.  And the telling.



Rachel Swirsky

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Reply #52 on: May 01, 2008, 11:39:55 AM
The paragraph or so that HMM gave us on Fiery Horse when we asked (we always ask) is actually included in the introduction.

--R



Archie

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Reply #53 on: June 20, 2008, 12:38:15 PM
Interesting story. Is it just me or was the main character very luck to get away with her plan? It didn't seem likely and then 'with one might leap' she was free...not so sold on the ending but a nice ride.



yicheng

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Reply #54 on: June 23, 2008, 07:17:18 PM
I was completely surprised that it didn't end tragically. Tempest said " It still has the ability to make me cry" in the intro, and the story was based on a Chinese legend, so I fully expected the heroine ( I won't attempt to spell her name ) to die.
I'm mostly kidding, but I'm glad she didn't.
 :)

I was expecting a very sad ending as well.  Most chinese legends (like Irish stories) have either sad endings, or at least not the happy fairytale-endings.



Unblinking

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Reply #55 on: November 13, 2009, 06:11:35 PM
This story was alright.  I don't want to reopen the whole can of worms of whether this was feminist or not, but it did seem a tad message-heavy for my tastes.

The main reason I couldn't really get into the story is not really the author's fault, but my disbelief in astrology, particularly astrology that is so coarse-grained (classifying people by the year of their birth as opposed to the individual day).  That would mean that everybody born in 1981 would have the same personality traits as me, which would be half of my senior class in high school, which wasn't the case at all.  Classifying by date I can at least believe in somewhat because I don't know many people with the same birthday as me.  I did go check out to see what my birth year is classified as, and I'm a metal rooster, in case anyone cares to know.  :D

Two things that are terrible to me were the foot-binding (which I'd heard of), and the killing of girls born in a particular year (which I hadn't heard of).