umm... maybe so. It's kind of at the stage where I know WHAT is going wrong, I just don't know what the heck to DO about it, except maybe to acknowledge that I'm no good at writing this kind of thing. I'm gonna try to go through one more draft and then we'll see..

Vaguely related, have you read Cherryh's short story "The Unshadowed Land"? (Reading Cherryh -- and Bujold, and I'm sure a bunch of other people I just haven't picked up really recently -- makes me despair of ever writing anything. Bah.)