Since people wanted more...

One of the things that came up in the last panel at Readercon was Beckett's difficulty in figuring out what to write after Joyce. For a Joyce fangirl like me, after all, Ulysses is basically the perfect book, and the book that proves that the written language is insufficient for expressing the depth of human emotion despite the fact that it comes closer than any other. How do you follow that up? Beckett's answer was to write about nothing --- my answer is to focus in very narrowly on specific things that Joyce's broad brushstrokes missed or that we've learned as a discourse (oh god they've got me talking like them) since. Thus, the Simon novel, which is sort of a feminist critique of Dubliners and epiphanic healing (and a couple of other things). Beckett's answer is arguably more awesome --- though lucky me, I get to roll it into my fiction as well. I mean, I don't think you'd have "Will you marry me?" "What's your real name?" without the influence of Waiting for Godot. I should also give the obligatory shout-out to Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, which may influence my characters even more than Joyce. [1]

( Here are all of my notes from the Cleverness in Fiction panel, transcribed. )

[1] Come to think of it, a lot of my inspirations/references are plays; there's also some No Exit in there, and a dash of The Cryptogram. I actually had the Readercon workshop two years ago where I took part of the Simon novel (yes I've been working on it for EVER) tell me it read like a David Mamet play --- I'm pretty sure it was a compliment?