# Macavoy, Gene Wolfe *The Usenet list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 11 Jan 1984* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### ddb%Shasta *11 Jan 1984, 18:23* (Caro.PA at PARC-MAXC.ARPA) I liked Tea With the Black Dragon very much, but I thought the writing was only mediocre (compensated for, in my opinion, by the quality of the characters and concepts; plot was also pretty vanilla). All in all, a very satisfactory first novel. Now, Damiano may not have any flaws. I can't think of any. I find this particularly pleasing because of the increase in writing skill from first to second novel (of course, I don't know when either book was actually WRITTEN, just when they were published). (duntemann.wbst at PARC-MAXC.ARPA) Actually, Castle of the Otter is a book containing a collection of essays by Wolfe about the writing of Book of the New Sun, and it's out now (it has been an SFBC selection). The title comes from an interesting sequence -- Locus mistakenly reported that the last volume of Book of the New Sun would be called Castle of the Otter (it's actually Citadel of the Autarch -- I presume Locus got its information verbally in this case). Gene Wolfe liked the title, so he used it. ---