# Did Horn Have "Help" With BLS? *The Whorl list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 14 Oct 1999* > 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. --- ### Jim Jordan *14 Oct 1999, 10:56* > Vizcacha wrote: > The Writing of TBotLS. Speculations on how Horn might have had help writing > _The Book of Silk_ seem to forget that he did have help, from his wife > Nettle. > He also describes how they reconstructed scenes where they weren't > present, by > inventing "typical" dialogue that led to the outcomes they knew. I might > also > mention that the style in TBoS is quite different from that of OBW, and I > attribute that to Nettle's influence. Horn, on several occasions, laments > that > without her organizational ability, the present work will be inferior. How dare you imply that I'd forgotten Nettle's help? Don't forget that Nutria's eat Vizcachas alive bite by bite (whatever Vizcachas are)! Hyoomr aside, I still find it hard to understand how either of them could have known many, many of the things in TBLS. Inventing "typical" dialogue is a long way from the large stretches of material they had to learn from other people, and I'm having trouble thinking of how they might have learned all this stuff, and from whom. But what I really need to do is re-read the Quartet through Horn's eyes, and see if it is really possible that he and Nettle could have written it without "supernatural" help. Has anyone done this? It's a bit like going to see "The Sixth Sense" a second time, and noticing how everything is completely different the second time through. Does it work to re-read TBLS this way? Sorry to bring this up if it has already been discussed on this list. I've got all the old posts filed but I've been too busy to stay active for many months, and I've not had time to read them all. Enraged Nutria *This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun. ---