Read:"Biographical Notes..." by Ben Rosenbaum

Charlie Finlay suggested I read Ben's All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories tale, "Biographical Notes to
"A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-planes by Ben Rosenbaum" You can read this for free online. And here's the first paragraph, which really sets the tone for the whole piece:

On my return from PlausFab-Wisconsin (a delightful festival of art and inquiry, which styles itself "the World's Only Gynarchist Plausible-Fable Assembly") aboard the P.R.G.B. Śri George Bernard Shaw, I happened to share a compartment with Prem Ramasson, Raja of Outermost Thule, and his consort, a dour but beautiful woman whose name I did not know.

First, honesty time. I have tried to read this story a couple of times before this. I've been having a hard time expressing why I am irritated by this story. Because it irritates me. It's a clever story. It has a fun plot. I think it irritates me because it illuminates how I am not a Cool Kid (tm) and it illuminates my faults as a writer. But I'm also irritated by the insider-ness of the story. The jokes that only other writers get, like naming a character after Paul Melko and referencing WisCon in his strange alternate reality. I'm sure there are even more Wiscon jokes in this that I don't get, and that's really where I get irritated especially. I know he's having fun, and I'm not in on it. Because I'm not cool. I don't get to hang out with these people. I can't and don't go to WisCon. The whole story makes me feel like an outsider from my own genre. Sometimes, not a bad place to be, but still.

And as far as making me feel my faults as a writer, it's in the character's voice and intelligence. This is a very sharp character, with a working vocabulary four times the size of my own. I think the character thinks too much and goes off on long tangents, but they're sharp tangents, intelligent observations. Well, and there's the cuteness about who is the writer, this Ben or the real Ben, and that level of meta stuff doesn't usually work for me much, but overall, I know I can't write a character this smart because I am not this smart. It's like an itch I can't quite reach, witnessing someone smart and clever in a way that leaves you in their dust.

I feel like if I think about this too long, it's going to depress me, so really, I should just leave it at this. No offense to Ben or anyone else. It's a good story, but I can't read it as a stand alone piece. I'm enough in the know that everything else in the story distracts me from the cool world-building and the action-filled plot.