Cimorene

I try to avoid epithets, except in the case of Fennish stories, where the source material uses them like there's no tomorrow. "The young private," "his officer," "the younger lad" and so on and so forth. I do sometimes think that people reading my Mars stories will think I don't know any better than to say things like "the young soldier," etc - but then I reflect that no other fandom of mine offers the chance to have the narrator weigh in and quasi-innocently describe one character as another's "particular friend", and I cackle a lot.