Penny wrote:
I find it hard to imagine how one would use emoticons in dialogue, though. "Vila, you're an idiot, colon hyphen right round bracket," Avon said.
I think the text equivalent would be 'Well, hurrah for us,' said Avon, heavy sarcasm evident in his tone.
(And, by the by, were any of said proofs connected to any paranoid types whose pseudonyms mean "trashy Victorian literature"?)
To be strictly truthful, I haven't a clue exactly what *he* was reading. *I* however was reading proofs by a paranoid type whose pseudonym ponces around with a certain line of TS Eliot dialogue. Neil wrote (regarding my suggestion of internet and e-mail usage influencing style):
It might be a contributory factor, but this style of writing seems to
stretch
way back into the dawn of fanfic history (well, early Horizon zines
anyway),
certainly way before internet use was commonplace (which has only happened over the past five years or so).
Internet usage might be recent, but I seem to recall overusing e-mail, a precursor to chatrooms and a certain bulletin board which shall be nameless way back in 1989 or so, and plenty of others were doing so many years earlier than I. (I learned to touch-type in order to be able to hold several simultaneous notify (chat) conversations and do some work.)
I think Betty's explanation is closer to the truth - an attempt to recreate the tone of the series, and especially the characters, as exactly as possible. What someone recently described as 'reprographic mode'.
I think it was me who described it as the 'reprographic mode', but I was deliberately quoting you, Neil.
It's strange, most writers have a fair idea in their heads what their characters sound like and how they pronounce their lines, but they (we) don't seem to feel the necessity to point them quite so strongly when putting them in the mouths of original characters, despite the fact that nearly all readers will know what Blake or Avon sound like and their nat ural manner of delivering lines, while our own original characters don't start with that advantage.
Tavia