One word wrong...

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From John C Wright's blog:

http://www.scifiwright.com/2012/12/retrophobia/

Storytelling is the art of casting a magical spell to enchant your audience so that the false story you are inventing will seem real, if not to the listener, at least to his imagination...

The magic spell is beautiful and brittle like glass. One wrong word can shatter it.

I have been happily reading a ‘magical realism’ story set in the 1960′s upstate New York, and then the author gives a date not in A.D. but in A.C.E., a terminology no one used in the Sixties, and which was obnoxiously politically correct.

Even though I was on the last chapter of a four book series it had taken the author decades to write, it was too late. The spell was broken.

I realized I was not in the magical faraway hills of New York in the Summer of Love, but listening to crap propaganda from an enemy of Christ who was so bitter against Christendom that he could not even bring himself to refer to the Gregorian calendar honestly.

I was yanked out of that mysterious fairyland back into the quotidian realm.

Even thought I had only a chapter to go, I put the book on the shelf, and have not been able to bring myself to open it again.

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