Back from vacation.

I've been attempting this thing, with dialogue, wherein if two animal-people are talking to each other, and both belong to a species that has a very sensitive nose, I try to work that aspect of their lives into the dialogue. Essentially this means a lot of things go unsaid, at least in terms of words spoken.

So the attempt was to make dialogue that was very choppy and often hard to follow unless you think about that aspect of it. Is this a good thing or a bad thing, I don't know (nor do I particularly care... someone besides me will find it amusing, surely), but in going back and re-reading some of it the other day I do at least know that I succeeded. By this I mean it took me a while to remember what the hell was actually being said during the conversation, even though I wrote it.

Writing dialogue that way does take an awful long time, of course, since I have to stop every so often and think about all the other stuff going on behind the scenes, and decide what words to include and what words not to. But at the same time, it's a great relief when I allow humans (or related species) to enter the conversation, because then I can just write it all naturally again (at least the words coming from them; the other species still has to think about how to communicate with someone who doesn't get all the subtle scents and things and has different body language). Just recently I used this as a device; one of the characters is not real bright, so the conversation involving this character reflects that in how vastly more simplified and obvious it is than the rest of the dialogue in the book.

These are the things that keep this fun for me. I'm probably never, ever going to sell this book. ;-)