"Journeyman" is available online (link to PDF) and shockingly is competent. Or perhaps not shockingly: Flynn has been writing and selling since the '90s.
ETA: hee to the flashbacks. But yes. It can be done so well! But a lot of times authors use it . . . to cram in backstory which ought to be otherwise clear if the author is doing the job correctly.
Yes. There are ways to use that structure, especially if there's an unreliable narrator in play. I'm thinking about Ancillary Justice, but I also wonder if Gene Wolfe's Severian novels might also be considered a similar structure, although the story is told as Severian's memoirs. It wasn't even a bad choice for "Big Boys...". But if you're doing flashbacks like that, why are you also including random faux-historical documents? Why are there additional PoVs? What's your core story, and how do these elements serve it? The examples I am thinking of generally have the flashbacks in order, except when the author breaks sequence for deliberate and significant reason (unreliable Severian is unreliable, reveals information out of sequence). That's not the feeling I got from "Big Boys..." which is disappointing, because I think there's a decent story thread somewhere in all those loose ends.
(And I owe you a reply to that email. Real soon now!)
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baggyeyes
(no subject)
Date: 2015-06-26 06:09 am (UTC)ETA: hee to the flashbacks. But yes. It can be done so well! But a lot of times authors use it . . . to cram in backstory which ought to be otherwise clear if the author is doing the job correctly.
Yes. There are ways to use that structure, especially if there's an unreliable narrator in play. I'm thinking about Ancillary Justice, but I also wonder if Gene Wolfe's Severian novels might also be considered a similar structure, although the story is told as Severian's memoirs. It wasn't even a bad choice for "Big Boys...". But if you're doing flashbacks like that, why are you also including random faux-historical documents? Why are there additional PoVs? What's your core story, and how do these elements serve it? The examples I am thinking of generally have the flashbacks in order, except when the author breaks sequence for deliberate and significant reason (unreliable Severian is unreliable, reveals information out of sequence). That's not the feeling I got from "Big Boys..." which is disappointing, because I think there's a decent story thread somewhere in all those loose ends.
(And I owe you a reply to that email. Real soon now!)