So are you ever reading a book (or watching a movie) and the hero is captured by the villain, and the villain proceeds to tell the hero all his (or her, I suppose) evil plans before killing the hero? And then the hero manages to escape, and thwart those evil plans. (Happens a lot in James Bond movies.)
Especially if you are writing a novel, but even if you just enjoy reading novels and get exasperated at stupid villains, check out Peter's Evil Overlord List.
Actually, I'm glad I found this. There's one item on it (#8) which I need to think about in terms of my own manuscript. It's not quite so simple, as the princess *isn't* kidnapped and the man who holds her prisoner is already married, but I probably ought to at least change the wedding timeline. I mean, really, the whole incident is over in a couple of hours. Well, I haven't gotten to that part in my current round of editing, so I have a little bit of time to think of a way to change it. I really do want to be as original as possible, and it's damned hard.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Even More E-Books Versus Printed Books
Found a couple of recent posts about e-books versus printed books. Here they are:
Where E-Books Fall Short, Print Delivers from the Huffington Post
The Beauty of the Printed Book from The New York Times
Some thoughts:
Where E-Books Fall Short, Print Delivers from the Huffington Post
The Beauty of the Printed Book from The New York Times
Some thoughts:
- The idea of primary sources versus multimedia is something I hadn't thought of. But yeah, there's something to the idea that actual newspaper clippings having a different impact than PowerPoint slides.
- I also like the idea of the book "as an object in itself." When someone is staring at a screen on a bus or an airplane, it's not a friendly invitation. For all you know, he/she could be playing Angry Birds or looking at pornography. With a book, there's no doubt, and it's safe to strike up a conversation.
- I hope printed books don't become part of a niche market. (Granted, I'm holding onto them in a way I never did with music. But then, if I was walking around with a Discman, you had no idea what I was listening to -- unless the volume was too loud -- and you still don't know what I'm listening to with an iPod. Books are different, there.) I'll keep buying printed books for as long as I can.
Monday, February 27, 2012
YA Fantasy Recommendations
With the upcoming release of the first movie in The Hunger Games trilogy, YA fantasy is getting a lot of attention lately.
Here's a list of young adult fantasy recommendations I found on the Huffington Post website. I seriously haven't read any of these, though I've got The Hunger Games and the two sequels and I plan to read them. I do read some YA fantasy on occasion, and might check out a few more of the recommendations on the list. (I notice the commenters to this piece suggest some of my own YA favorites.)
Here are my favorite young adult fantsy novels and some fantasy for beginners. Note: not all the fantasy for beginners is YA appropriate. But some of it is.
Here's a list of young adult fantasy recommendations I found on the Huffington Post website. I seriously haven't read any of these, though I've got The Hunger Games and the two sequels and I plan to read them. I do read some YA fantasy on occasion, and might check out a few more of the recommendations on the list. (I notice the commenters to this piece suggest some of my own YA favorites.)
Here are my favorite young adult fantsy novels and some fantasy for beginners. Note: not all the fantasy for beginners is YA appropriate. But some of it is.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Overuse of Words
You may have seen this on the New York Times website, lately:
Next Time, Try 'Unflagging'
The author of the piece mines classic literature for use of the words "tireless" and "tirelessly" and suggests an alternative. It's not the only word that gets overused.
I've written about this before, from a slightly different perspective -- examining phrases that are used commonly in novels but not in other forms of writing or speech. I've also posted about some web tools that scan your text and help you find such problems.
There are a lot of words in the English language. Many of them get used too much. Some don't get used at all. As writers, we really should be trying to choose the right word for every circumstance. A thesaurus can be a big help, but beware of choosing a word from one without truly understanding the meanings of the synonyms. Synonyms are similar words, and sometimes they have exactly the same meaning. Except when they *don't* have exactly the same meaning, only a similar one.
At any rate, the piece I link to up above is an interesting read and the issue raised is an important one, for writers and readers alike.
Next Time, Try 'Unflagging'
The author of the piece mines classic literature for use of the words "tireless" and "tirelessly" and suggests an alternative. It's not the only word that gets overused.
I've written about this before, from a slightly different perspective -- examining phrases that are used commonly in novels but not in other forms of writing or speech. I've also posted about some web tools that scan your text and help you find such problems.
There are a lot of words in the English language. Many of them get used too much. Some don't get used at all. As writers, we really should be trying to choose the right word for every circumstance. A thesaurus can be a big help, but beware of choosing a word from one without truly understanding the meanings of the synonyms. Synonyms are similar words, and sometimes they have exactly the same meaning. Except when they *don't* have exactly the same meaning, only a similar one.
At any rate, the piece I link to up above is an interesting read and the issue raised is an important one, for writers and readers alike.
Common Writing Mistakes
I've been big into the grammar and formatting thing lately. I've posted a bunch of grammar pet peeves (just search in the Google box on the right-hand side of the page, if you're interested).
Here's an essay I recently found online. Honestly, nothing that's mentioned in the piece is enough for me to rant about, though I wholeheartedly agree with the author. Well, now that I think about it, I take it back. One of my grammar pet peeve posts was about subject-verb agreement and prepositional phrases.
If you're writing your own novel, and you're not confident about your grammar skills, seek out blogs and websites about self-editing, grammar, punctuation, etc. You're really doing yourself a service. (Or, for that matter, find a friend who knows grammar and is willing to read your manuscript.) If the writer of the essay I linked to earlier wouldn't do business with a company that produced incorrect grammar, what in the world makes you think an agent or publisher would give you a second look, if you can't, well, write properly?
Here's an essay I recently found online. Honestly, nothing that's mentioned in the piece is enough for me to rant about, though I wholeheartedly agree with the author. Well, now that I think about it, I take it back. One of my grammar pet peeve posts was about subject-verb agreement and prepositional phrases.
If you're writing your own novel, and you're not confident about your grammar skills, seek out blogs and websites about self-editing, grammar, punctuation, etc. You're really doing yourself a service. (Or, for that matter, find a friend who knows grammar and is willing to read your manuscript.) If the writer of the essay I linked to earlier wouldn't do business with a company that produced incorrect grammar, what in the world makes you think an agent or publisher would give you a second look, if you can't, well, write properly?
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Grammar Peeve: Fewer versus Less
People get this one wrong all the time. "Fewer" and "less" are different words, and they're absolutely not interchangeable. Honestly, I don't even think people know that they're using the words incorrectly. So read this, and you'll know, and you won't make this mistake yourself. And yes, I *have* seen this in print, recently.
According to the dictionary on my MacBook Pro, this is what you should do:
Fewer: used for people or other countable things (Fewer snowflakes fell on Christmas this year...)
Less: for mass nouns (Less snow fell on Christmas this year...), also for numbers and time
Wikipedia disagrees on the countable thing...says it's singular versus plural (less for singular, fewer for plural). The examples given in both cases make sense to me. (I like, by the way, how Wikipedia mentions this is "in prescriptive grammar" -- I wholly approve of prescriptive grammar, though I probably sometimes make prescriptive grammarians cringe with the sentence structures that appear in this blog. Rest assured I'm much more careful with my novel manuscript!)
According to the dictionary on my MacBook Pro, this is what you should do:
Fewer: used for people or other countable things (Fewer snowflakes fell on Christmas this year...)
Less: for mass nouns (Less snow fell on Christmas this year...), also for numbers and time
Wikipedia disagrees on the countable thing...says it's singular versus plural (less for singular, fewer for plural). The examples given in both cases make sense to me. (I like, by the way, how Wikipedia mentions this is "in prescriptive grammar" -- I wholly approve of prescriptive grammar, though I probably sometimes make prescriptive grammarians cringe with the sentence structures that appear in this blog. Rest assured I'm much more careful with my novel manuscript!)
Literary Agents
So I'm working on the fifth draft of my fantasy novel. I've started thinking about publishers and literary agents. I don't know if this is a sign that I think I'm finished writing, or not. I figure there'll be a sixth draft, at least, but after that, I don't know.
Anyway, I'm transitioning my thinking from "what am I going to focus on in my next round of editing?" to "where am I going to submit this thing?"
I've read all sorts of advice. Lots of published authors don't sell their first books, first. They go on to write 3 or 4 or 5 novels, and maybe never sell the first one. I've got to be prepared for this.
I've also highlighted some self-publishing success stories on the blog, or people who got discovered on writing-oriented websites. But I have to think those people are the exceptions to the rule.
The thing that really frustrates me is that a lot of publishers won't accept unagented submissions. But agents won't touch you (at least, that's the conventional wisdom) unless you've been published. It's circular logic. I guess, at some point, you've just got to dive in.
So, here are some websites I've found lately, with more information on literary agents. If you're in the same boat I'm in, maybe you'll find something of use here:
Literary Agents advice from the Science Fiction Writers of America
Why a Writer Needs an Agent from SFWA
The Case Against Reading Fees
AgentQuery (help finding literary agents, including lists and contact information)
Publishers and Editors Who've Worked with Debut Novels
Anyway, I'm transitioning my thinking from "what am I going to focus on in my next round of editing?" to "where am I going to submit this thing?"
I've read all sorts of advice. Lots of published authors don't sell their first books, first. They go on to write 3 or 4 or 5 novels, and maybe never sell the first one. I've got to be prepared for this.
I've also highlighted some self-publishing success stories on the blog, or people who got discovered on writing-oriented websites. But I have to think those people are the exceptions to the rule.
The thing that really frustrates me is that a lot of publishers won't accept unagented submissions. But agents won't touch you (at least, that's the conventional wisdom) unless you've been published. It's circular logic. I guess, at some point, you've just got to dive in.
So, here are some websites I've found lately, with more information on literary agents. If you're in the same boat I'm in, maybe you'll find something of use here:
Literary Agents advice from the Science Fiction Writers of America
Why a Writer Needs an Agent from SFWA
The Case Against Reading Fees
AgentQuery (help finding literary agents, including lists and contact information)
Publishers and Editors Who've Worked with Debut Novels
Friday, February 24, 2012
Miscellaneous Amazon News
Couple of web stories about Amazon lately, that I thought I'd pass on:
Amazon to open retail store
3 Elephants in the Amazon Room
Every time I see an article about Amazon, it makes some predictions about Amazon's business prospects. Then I read another story, and it says something completely different. All that we can say for sure is that there is a lot of turmoil in the publishing and bookselling industries lately. Amazon fights with Barnes and Noble, Borders closes, e-readers are on the way up, there's illegal downloading, there's copyright infringement and fake books on Amazon, etc., etc., etc.
I just hope the readers (and writers) aren't the ones who get screwed here, regardless of what happens in the end with Amazon.
Amazon to open retail store
3 Elephants in the Amazon Room
Every time I see an article about Amazon, it makes some predictions about Amazon's business prospects. Then I read another story, and it says something completely different. All that we can say for sure is that there is a lot of turmoil in the publishing and bookselling industries lately. Amazon fights with Barnes and Noble, Borders closes, e-readers are on the way up, there's illegal downloading, there's copyright infringement and fake books on Amazon, etc., etc., etc.
I just hope the readers (and writers) aren't the ones who get screwed here, regardless of what happens in the end with Amazon.
How to Write Online Reviews
Note: This is not advice I wrote, nor is it advice I follow. But if you've ever wanted to write a review, and haven't been sure how to start, the article linked to below offers one way (of many) to approach the topic.
How to Write Genuinely Useful Reviews Online
Some thoughts (these are mine!):
How to Write Genuinely Useful Reviews Online
Some thoughts (these are mine!):
- Exclude extraneous information. This is a good idea. Whenever I do a "reviewing the reviewers" post, I complain a lot about 3-sentence reviews where one whole line is how the person found the book at the library. Sometimes I mention in my own reviews how I came across a book, or I get wildly off-topic. But then, I've never been known to write a 3-sentence review and I think I include enough information for a potential purchaser to evaluate the novel I'm reviewing, too.
- I don't know how a person's real name makes a difference. It's still possible to be a troll or a fake with a real-sounding name (Harriet Klausner, anyone?). Or even to impersonate someone real. Because chances are, no one is going to know who the hell you are, anyway. Now, there are a few exceptions. I've seen reviews of fantasy novels on Amazon by other fantasy authors, and there, maybe the real name has some currency and importance. But even if I put my real name out there, most people wouldn't have any idea who I was. (And if I ever get published and meet other authors, I haven't exactly made a lot of friends with what I've written on this blog.)
- Write more than three lines. Really, write more than three paragraphs. Even the Klausner-bot can write three paragraphs. But be sure to actually divide your review into paragraphs, with line breaks. And make paragraphs longer than one line. The advice in these last two sentences will make your review easier to read. Trust me. (I've skipped plenty of reviews where there were no line breaks.)
- Use proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation. In particular, make sure you know how to spell the goddamn character (and place) names. If there's anything you have the least little doubt about, look it up.
- Some plot summary and introductory information may be necessary. But plot summary does not equal a review. Same goes for lists of character names. If what you've written sounds like it belongs on a book jacket, it's not a review.
- Don't be 100% positive or 100% negative. If someone out there has written a perfect book, I haven't seen it. And if you dig enough, there will likely be something nice to say about any work. Even if it's just that a particular work is better than the author's last effort.
- Examples are nice. Give plenty of them. Don't just say some character is too evil. Say why. List some reasons (rape, torture, animal abuse, etc. are all acceptable reasons to say a character is too evil).
- If you don't like the book, suggest some alternatives, if there are any. If there are familiar elements, other books you're reminded of, list those. If the author makes you think of another author, make mention of it.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Illegal Book Downloading, E-Textbooks
Ha, the subject will never be something I do because I don't like reading on a computer screen. Well, not long things. I can do a newspaper article or a blog or something. But a book? No way!
I do know some people who are into that sort of thing, and Library.nu (which I have not visited and will not visit in the future) is one website that I have heard mentioned. Most of the people I know who go there are looking for textbooks. And science textbooks are expensive. And yeah, the college bookstore (doesn't matter where you are, as this is a universal phenomenon) doesn't give you jack crap back in resale value. Not that I've ever sold back a textbook, but this is what I've heard.
With respect to selling back textbooks, I read a forum on Amazon.com the other day with tons of posts with people asking if they could sell back e-books. Really? Let's think this through, people. There are obviously some costs associated with producing an e-book. I mean, you have page layout which may be different from a physical book, and I'm sure there are some other things as well. But once you have done this, you can sell as many goddamn copies as you please, at no additional cost to produce (whereas with a paper book, there's paper and ink and printing and shipping and so forth). So why on earth would you buy back an e-textbook, when you can just sell the next person the same file and not have to pay the original purchaser anything? Also, I'm sure there are some enterprising people out there who can copy files and circumvent permissions and keep copies of the books as well as sell copies back. So from a publisher's or bookstore's perspective, e-book buyback makes no sense. Unfortunately, this may drive more people to illegal downloading.
Personally, I like to write in and highlight textbooks. For the way I use textbooks, e-books just wouldn't make any sense. Though I understand the appeal of not lugging around 3 or 4 science textbooks in a backpack.
Anyway, found this the other day on the Huffington Post, about Library.nu and how 17 publishers in three countries have filed injunctions against it and another book downloading website.
People, really, don't illegally download books. (Or movies or music, for that matter.)
I do know some people who are into that sort of thing, and Library.nu (which I have not visited and will not visit in the future) is one website that I have heard mentioned. Most of the people I know who go there are looking for textbooks. And science textbooks are expensive. And yeah, the college bookstore (doesn't matter where you are, as this is a universal phenomenon) doesn't give you jack crap back in resale value. Not that I've ever sold back a textbook, but this is what I've heard.
With respect to selling back textbooks, I read a forum on Amazon.com the other day with tons of posts with people asking if they could sell back e-books. Really? Let's think this through, people. There are obviously some costs associated with producing an e-book. I mean, you have page layout which may be different from a physical book, and I'm sure there are some other things as well. But once you have done this, you can sell as many goddamn copies as you please, at no additional cost to produce (whereas with a paper book, there's paper and ink and printing and shipping and so forth). So why on earth would you buy back an e-textbook, when you can just sell the next person the same file and not have to pay the original purchaser anything? Also, I'm sure there are some enterprising people out there who can copy files and circumvent permissions and keep copies of the books as well as sell copies back. So from a publisher's or bookstore's perspective, e-book buyback makes no sense. Unfortunately, this may drive more people to illegal downloading.
Personally, I like to write in and highlight textbooks. For the way I use textbooks, e-books just wouldn't make any sense. Though I understand the appeal of not lugging around 3 or 4 science textbooks in a backpack.
Anyway, found this the other day on the Huffington Post, about Library.nu and how 17 publishers in three countries have filed injunctions against it and another book downloading website.
People, really, don't illegally download books. (Or movies or music, for that matter.)
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Review - Den of Thieves
I gather David Chandler is a well-known horror author who writes in that genre under a different name. I don't read horror, so I won't get into that. But he's decided to try his hand at fantasy with the Ancient Blades trilogy. I plan to read all three books in short succession; they were all released a few months apart, is my understanding. What this means is that Chandler may have been working for years on these manuscripts, as they're not exactly short books. (I'm totally guessing at the pace of his writing. He could have been much faster, for all I know.)
Why this is important is that, goddamn it, I feel like I've read Den of Thieves about 200 times lately. There was Shadow's Son by Jon Sprunk. There was Theft of Swords by Michael J. Sullivan. There was The Night Angel Trilogy by Brent Weeks. And probably a few more that I haven't managed to purchase yet. Now I'm going to give Chandler the benefit of the doubt -- if he had, in fact, been working on these books for awhile before they got published, he might have actually thought he was being original. At the time he was writing, there wouldn't have been 200 other books like this. But when you have a thief or assassin, who is in a guild in a dark, dirty city, who is the friend of prostitutes with hearts of gold, blah, blah, blah...anyway, originality is not the first word that comes to mind these days. Even Malden's non-corporeal sidekick, Kemper, is a bit like Kit in Jon Sprunk's work. Not exactly, as Kemper does have more of a physical presence, but there are definite similarities.
I read a review of this book on Amazon that celebrates the fact that Chandler embraces dwarves and elves (well, I haven't seen any elves yet, though they are alluded to). This reviewer further says that incorporating these elements is a great throwback to the old days of fantasy, because people have been avoiding dwarves and elves in their writing lately. To which I would say, "what rock have you been hiding under?" Slag the dwarf is almost an identical character to Magnus from Michael J. Sullivan's work. (Elves aplenty exist in fantasy work, as well, but since Chandler hasn't included any in this volume, I won't talk about them here.) Chandler's dwarves like to make things -- they're very good at it -- and live in big excavated structures underground. You know, exactly like the dwarves in every other fantasy novel out there. Chandler's dwarves do curse a blue streak, which I found amusing (probably because I personally also have this tendency).
The next thing I want to say is that Den of Thieves could have used an editor. A real, honest-to-goodness editor to catch horrible grammar mistakes like "between you and I." (No! A pronoun which is the object of a preposition is in objective case, not nominative/subjective case.) And a copy editor to catch the myriad of typos. (I believe they must've run a spell-checker, at least.) Although I am reading Science Fiction Book Club editions of Chandler's books, and I have seen some horrendous typos from them in the past. Granted, that's usually the SFBC-produced omnibus editions that have the typos, and I'm reading Chandler's books as single volumes. But please, people, have a care.
I've already bemoaned the guy-in-a-hooded cloak cover art thing, so I won't say anything about that right now.
I found this book oddly difficult to get into. I mean, I read it in just a couple of days -- it wasn't a difficult read at all. But I found that I just didn't care all that much about the characters or what happened to them. While Malden is the son of a prostitute, as we are CONSTANTLY reminded, and Caim from Jon Sprunk is a noble, they're like the same guy. (Combine Royce and Hadrian from the Riyria books and you've got their triplet.) Malden doesn't quite get to Mary Sue territory, but he's close. The reason I say he doesn't quite get there is that he is frustrated by social pressures. His life is constrained at first -- he doesn't leave the brothel where he was raised until his mother dies, at which time he's too old to apprentice to an honest tradesman. If he leaves the city, he's liable to get pressed into service working the fields somewhere. So he's not free -- again, as we are constantly reminded -- and he's forced to invent his own ways to make money.
Where Malden approaches Mary Sue territory is that he's like, the best thief, and he kept the books for the brothel where he worked, and taught himself to read, and practiced running over the rooftops to get away from the city watch, and all this sort of thing. (I do like that he's never had to kill anyone in his line of work, and that he's not allowed to carry a real blade, so the fighting part gives him pause. That redeems him to a good degree.)
Malden's adventures are often implausible and remind me of playing the dungeon levels in the early Super Mario Brothers games. (You know, on the NES...and then you finish the level, and find out the princess is in another castle. I still have these, by the way. Never could get past level 8-1 in the original, and that's with the warps. But that's because I have no hand-eye coordination, and now I'm really off-topic.) Ducking under falling portcullises to get to the prize, and all of that. In particular, this is a problem when he steals the Burgrave's crown. Twice. (The Burgrave is an apparently hereditary ruler in the "free" city of Ness.) I suppose this creates some excitement, though the problem is that you never really question that Malden is going to succeed. He does run into plenty of obstacles, so it's not smooth sailing for him, exactly.
All right, so I had to stop writing this review in the middle and start back up again the next day. So I apologize for any disjointedness. I notice, looking over the previous text, that I haven't mentioned the other two main characters, Croy and Cythera.
Croy is a knight, and he's the super-good kind of knight who is an excellent swordsman and loyal to a fault. He has one of the ancient blades, which are swords that were forged to do battle with demons (argh, demons, I really wish people would stop using demons as generic evil beasties in fantasy novels...). These blades are passed down among the generations, and at the current time, aren't really needed as most of the demons in the world have been defeated. Croy has been banished from the city of Ness under threat of execution if he returns, but he keeps coming back (one time having to be rescued immediately prior to execution) because the object of his affection (Cythera) is held in thrall by the evil wizard Hazoth.
So I should probably introduce Cythera at this point; she is the daughter of a witch and her mother put some spell on her where any time she (Cythera) is the object of malevolent magic, it manifests itself as moving nature tattoos (plants, vines, and such) on her skin. She's mostly covered for the duration of the book. Hazoth holds Cythera's mother captive and tortures her (the mother) to keep Cythera in line; further, Hazoth has made it so whenever someone directs malevolent magic at him, Cythera gets more tattoos. Further, if Cythera is subjected to physical violence, the tattoo magic will discharge itself into the perpetrator. Any contact, really, other than a light kiss, causes the magic to discharge. (This precludes intercourse, by the way. So Cythera's relationship with Croy is pretty chaste.) Spoiler alert, but Hazoth is Cythera's father, though Cythera doesn't seem to have inherited any magic, despite being the daughter of a witch and wizard.
Anyway, as another Amazon reviewer pointed out, Cythera is really the only female character. She's already Croy's love interest, but Malden becomes attracted to her as well. Cythera promises she'll marry Croy, though, if he can free her mother from Hazoth's control. Croy is too injured to actively participate in the rescue, we are told, but he fights valiantly and even manages to slay the man (another holder of an ancient blade) who was his mentor. I'm a little hazy on the details because I was really sleepy when I was reading this part. Though I think that has to do more with my own physiology than it does with the pacing or action.
I mentioned earlier that Malden stole the Burgrave's crown twice; the second time, he was stealing it back from Hazoth, who paid him (through intermediaries) to steal it in the first place. And the stealing it back part occupies a good deal of the last 1/3 of the book, covered from various viewpoints. Honestly, this book works reasonably well as a standalone. Even the identity of Hazoth's secret co-conspirator is revealed, and it was a surprise to me. (I wasn't sure whether it would be a character we'd already met, or some surprise outsider. I won't tell, because I forget how to spell the guy's name, but I'll admit I didn't see it coming, and unpredictability is usually a good thing.) You do wonder what's going to happen with the love triangle, and possibly what's going to come of the acid-dripping ancient blade whose master Croy kills, but order is basically restored by the end, with the major questions answered. Although the standalone/series thing is not so much of an issue because all three books are out.
One thing which Chandler does pretty well -- with one exception, which I'll talk about later -- is the moral gray areas with the characters. No one is all good or all bad. Cutbill, who runs the thieves' guild, offers protective services to some nobles, and safety to thieves, who'd otherwise be executed if caught. Malden is self-made and successful, and does the right thing in the end, but he has no qualms about stealing, and he is interested in stealing his friend's woman. Cythera is trapped by Hazoth and kind of plays Croy and Malden off each other (maybe not consciously), but she also is deeply concerned about her mother. Croy is Dudley-Do-Right, to the point of recklessness in some cases.
The one exception is Hazoth. He does all sorts of terrible things, including having sex with demons to produce half-demon offspring. He wants to help take over the city, so he can engage in even more nefarious activities without worrying about getting caught (though he seems to have a pretty strong set of protections already in place). He keeps Cythera in check by keeping Cythera's mother prisoner, and tortures Cythera's mother to keep Cythera in line. He's just too one-dimensional and evil.
I've covered a bit about plot and characters, let's spend a little time on world-building and call it a day, I think. Ness is the setting for all the events in Den of Thieves. I do believe Chandler thought out pretty carefully what the city was like; there's a map of it in the front of the book, and he took some time to think about the history (without doing a brain dump a la Michael J. Sullivan) and incorporate a little of it into the story without beating the reader over the head with it. It's not particularly different from other fantasy cities, especially those from novels which also have thieves' guilds or organized crime or active "underworld" elements.
Magic appears to be "anything goes." Cythera's mother can turn herself into a tree, and do the whole tattoo-skin thing. The first Burgrave put his soul (or something) into his crown, and uses it to control his descendants. Appearances of physical objects (e.g. windows, floors, etc.) can be altered. Demons exist and can cross over into the world, and there are magic swords. Magical creatures exist. Non-physical barriers that can be lifted and restored with a single gesture (which can be easily switched out) can be erected around homes. Semi-corporeal ghosts exist. There are few limitations, except that Cythera doesn't yet know how to discharge her curse so she can touch people without killing them. I'd have preferred a more constrained, interrelated magical system, when what it seems like is Chandler threw a bunch of pieces of paper into a hat with different ideas for magic on them, and then picked 7 or 8 and constructed a story that included them.
When I start trying to pick out individual magical elements and get rid of them, it doesn't work, though. If not for the Burgrave's crown's imbued powers, stealing the crown would have no effect because they could just make a new one. The tattoo-skin thing has to be there, or else Cythera could just sleep with either Croy or Malden and that would be that. Kemper (the ghost, who is, by the way, afraid of death...) has to be able to do some sneaking around that a fully solid person couldn't do. Hazoth has to have barriers around his house or it wouldn't be difficult for Malden to sneak in. It kind of makes me think that Chandler came up with the basic idea for his story, and whenever he encountered a problem he couldn't solve, he created some new magical element to deal with it. Took the easy way out, and all. (Maybe I don't care for this because when I write, and I encounter an inconsistency, I change my manuscript to solve the problem in a practical way, without changing my magical system. Because I decided early on what the magic could and couldn't do, and stuck to it.)
I realize I haven't said too much about the writing style. I've been fixated on speaker attributions lately, and they're inconsistent here. Sometimes Chandler does pretty well, but then someone will utter a line and a verb which does not physically denote speaking is used. Usually it's something which is redundant because it's inferred from context, like "demanded" or "insisted."
Occasionally (and I apologize again if this is disjointed, as I've had to let the partially-written review sit for yet another day), a character uses overly-stilted or grandiose language, but for the most part, things are not bad. (A bit too much "aye" instead of "yes," also.) There are a few attempts at humor, which don't really do much for me. But mostly, the rest of the writing is decent. Not overly flowery. Some similes and metaphors, which are mostly appropriate (none of that "giant raspberry pie" junk that we saw in Jon Sprunk).
Anyway, I guess Den of Thieves isn't anything to write home about. But if you're really into the thief/assassin sorts of stories that seem to be all the rage these days, the Ancient Blades trilogy is a finished series in this genre.
Why this is important is that, goddamn it, I feel like I've read Den of Thieves about 200 times lately. There was Shadow's Son by Jon Sprunk. There was Theft of Swords by Michael J. Sullivan. There was The Night Angel Trilogy by Brent Weeks. And probably a few more that I haven't managed to purchase yet. Now I'm going to give Chandler the benefit of the doubt -- if he had, in fact, been working on these books for awhile before they got published, he might have actually thought he was being original. At the time he was writing, there wouldn't have been 200 other books like this. But when you have a thief or assassin, who is in a guild in a dark, dirty city, who is the friend of prostitutes with hearts of gold, blah, blah, blah...anyway, originality is not the first word that comes to mind these days. Even Malden's non-corporeal sidekick, Kemper, is a bit like Kit in Jon Sprunk's work. Not exactly, as Kemper does have more of a physical presence, but there are definite similarities.
I read a review of this book on Amazon that celebrates the fact that Chandler embraces dwarves and elves (well, I haven't seen any elves yet, though they are alluded to). This reviewer further says that incorporating these elements is a great throwback to the old days of fantasy, because people have been avoiding dwarves and elves in their writing lately. To which I would say, "what rock have you been hiding under?" Slag the dwarf is almost an identical character to Magnus from Michael J. Sullivan's work. (Elves aplenty exist in fantasy work, as well, but since Chandler hasn't included any in this volume, I won't talk about them here.) Chandler's dwarves like to make things -- they're very good at it -- and live in big excavated structures underground. You know, exactly like the dwarves in every other fantasy novel out there. Chandler's dwarves do curse a blue streak, which I found amusing (probably because I personally also have this tendency).
The next thing I want to say is that Den of Thieves could have used an editor. A real, honest-to-goodness editor to catch horrible grammar mistakes like "between you and I." (No! A pronoun which is the object of a preposition is in objective case, not nominative/subjective case.) And a copy editor to catch the myriad of typos. (I believe they must've run a spell-checker, at least.) Although I am reading Science Fiction Book Club editions of Chandler's books, and I have seen some horrendous typos from them in the past. Granted, that's usually the SFBC-produced omnibus editions that have the typos, and I'm reading Chandler's books as single volumes. But please, people, have a care.
I've already bemoaned the guy-in-a-hooded cloak cover art thing, so I won't say anything about that right now.
I found this book oddly difficult to get into. I mean, I read it in just a couple of days -- it wasn't a difficult read at all. But I found that I just didn't care all that much about the characters or what happened to them. While Malden is the son of a prostitute, as we are CONSTANTLY reminded, and Caim from Jon Sprunk is a noble, they're like the same guy. (Combine Royce and Hadrian from the Riyria books and you've got their triplet.) Malden doesn't quite get to Mary Sue territory, but he's close. The reason I say he doesn't quite get there is that he is frustrated by social pressures. His life is constrained at first -- he doesn't leave the brothel where he was raised until his mother dies, at which time he's too old to apprentice to an honest tradesman. If he leaves the city, he's liable to get pressed into service working the fields somewhere. So he's not free -- again, as we are constantly reminded -- and he's forced to invent his own ways to make money.
Where Malden approaches Mary Sue territory is that he's like, the best thief, and he kept the books for the brothel where he worked, and taught himself to read, and practiced running over the rooftops to get away from the city watch, and all this sort of thing. (I do like that he's never had to kill anyone in his line of work, and that he's not allowed to carry a real blade, so the fighting part gives him pause. That redeems him to a good degree.)
Malden's adventures are often implausible and remind me of playing the dungeon levels in the early Super Mario Brothers games. (You know, on the NES...and then you finish the level, and find out the princess is in another castle. I still have these, by the way. Never could get past level 8-1 in the original, and that's with the warps. But that's because I have no hand-eye coordination, and now I'm really off-topic.) Ducking under falling portcullises to get to the prize, and all of that. In particular, this is a problem when he steals the Burgrave's crown. Twice. (The Burgrave is an apparently hereditary ruler in the "free" city of Ness.) I suppose this creates some excitement, though the problem is that you never really question that Malden is going to succeed. He does run into plenty of obstacles, so it's not smooth sailing for him, exactly.
All right, so I had to stop writing this review in the middle and start back up again the next day. So I apologize for any disjointedness. I notice, looking over the previous text, that I haven't mentioned the other two main characters, Croy and Cythera.
Croy is a knight, and he's the super-good kind of knight who is an excellent swordsman and loyal to a fault. He has one of the ancient blades, which are swords that were forged to do battle with demons (argh, demons, I really wish people would stop using demons as generic evil beasties in fantasy novels...). These blades are passed down among the generations, and at the current time, aren't really needed as most of the demons in the world have been defeated. Croy has been banished from the city of Ness under threat of execution if he returns, but he keeps coming back (one time having to be rescued immediately prior to execution) because the object of his affection (Cythera) is held in thrall by the evil wizard Hazoth.
So I should probably introduce Cythera at this point; she is the daughter of a witch and her mother put some spell on her where any time she (Cythera) is the object of malevolent magic, it manifests itself as moving nature tattoos (plants, vines, and such) on her skin. She's mostly covered for the duration of the book. Hazoth holds Cythera's mother captive and tortures her (the mother) to keep Cythera in line; further, Hazoth has made it so whenever someone directs malevolent magic at him, Cythera gets more tattoos. Further, if Cythera is subjected to physical violence, the tattoo magic will discharge itself into the perpetrator. Any contact, really, other than a light kiss, causes the magic to discharge. (This precludes intercourse, by the way. So Cythera's relationship with Croy is pretty chaste.) Spoiler alert, but Hazoth is Cythera's father, though Cythera doesn't seem to have inherited any magic, despite being the daughter of a witch and wizard.
Anyway, as another Amazon reviewer pointed out, Cythera is really the only female character. She's already Croy's love interest, but Malden becomes attracted to her as well. Cythera promises she'll marry Croy, though, if he can free her mother from Hazoth's control. Croy is too injured to actively participate in the rescue, we are told, but he fights valiantly and even manages to slay the man (another holder of an ancient blade) who was his mentor. I'm a little hazy on the details because I was really sleepy when I was reading this part. Though I think that has to do more with my own physiology than it does with the pacing or action.
I mentioned earlier that Malden stole the Burgrave's crown twice; the second time, he was stealing it back from Hazoth, who paid him (through intermediaries) to steal it in the first place. And the stealing it back part occupies a good deal of the last 1/3 of the book, covered from various viewpoints. Honestly, this book works reasonably well as a standalone. Even the identity of Hazoth's secret co-conspirator is revealed, and it was a surprise to me. (I wasn't sure whether it would be a character we'd already met, or some surprise outsider. I won't tell, because I forget how to spell the guy's name, but I'll admit I didn't see it coming, and unpredictability is usually a good thing.) You do wonder what's going to happen with the love triangle, and possibly what's going to come of the acid-dripping ancient blade whose master Croy kills, but order is basically restored by the end, with the major questions answered. Although the standalone/series thing is not so much of an issue because all three books are out.
One thing which Chandler does pretty well -- with one exception, which I'll talk about later -- is the moral gray areas with the characters. No one is all good or all bad. Cutbill, who runs the thieves' guild, offers protective services to some nobles, and safety to thieves, who'd otherwise be executed if caught. Malden is self-made and successful, and does the right thing in the end, but he has no qualms about stealing, and he is interested in stealing his friend's woman. Cythera is trapped by Hazoth and kind of plays Croy and Malden off each other (maybe not consciously), but she also is deeply concerned about her mother. Croy is Dudley-Do-Right, to the point of recklessness in some cases.
The one exception is Hazoth. He does all sorts of terrible things, including having sex with demons to produce half-demon offspring. He wants to help take over the city, so he can engage in even more nefarious activities without worrying about getting caught (though he seems to have a pretty strong set of protections already in place). He keeps Cythera in check by keeping Cythera's mother prisoner, and tortures Cythera's mother to keep Cythera in line. He's just too one-dimensional and evil.
I've covered a bit about plot and characters, let's spend a little time on world-building and call it a day, I think. Ness is the setting for all the events in Den of Thieves. I do believe Chandler thought out pretty carefully what the city was like; there's a map of it in the front of the book, and he took some time to think about the history (without doing a brain dump a la Michael J. Sullivan) and incorporate a little of it into the story without beating the reader over the head with it. It's not particularly different from other fantasy cities, especially those from novels which also have thieves' guilds or organized crime or active "underworld" elements.
Magic appears to be "anything goes." Cythera's mother can turn herself into a tree, and do the whole tattoo-skin thing. The first Burgrave put his soul (or something) into his crown, and uses it to control his descendants. Appearances of physical objects (e.g. windows, floors, etc.) can be altered. Demons exist and can cross over into the world, and there are magic swords. Magical creatures exist. Non-physical barriers that can be lifted and restored with a single gesture (which can be easily switched out) can be erected around homes. Semi-corporeal ghosts exist. There are few limitations, except that Cythera doesn't yet know how to discharge her curse so she can touch people without killing them. I'd have preferred a more constrained, interrelated magical system, when what it seems like is Chandler threw a bunch of pieces of paper into a hat with different ideas for magic on them, and then picked 7 or 8 and constructed a story that included them.
When I start trying to pick out individual magical elements and get rid of them, it doesn't work, though. If not for the Burgrave's crown's imbued powers, stealing the crown would have no effect because they could just make a new one. The tattoo-skin thing has to be there, or else Cythera could just sleep with either Croy or Malden and that would be that. Kemper (the ghost, who is, by the way, afraid of death...) has to be able to do some sneaking around that a fully solid person couldn't do. Hazoth has to have barriers around his house or it wouldn't be difficult for Malden to sneak in. It kind of makes me think that Chandler came up with the basic idea for his story, and whenever he encountered a problem he couldn't solve, he created some new magical element to deal with it. Took the easy way out, and all. (Maybe I don't care for this because when I write, and I encounter an inconsistency, I change my manuscript to solve the problem in a practical way, without changing my magical system. Because I decided early on what the magic could and couldn't do, and stuck to it.)
I realize I haven't said too much about the writing style. I've been fixated on speaker attributions lately, and they're inconsistent here. Sometimes Chandler does pretty well, but then someone will utter a line and a verb which does not physically denote speaking is used. Usually it's something which is redundant because it's inferred from context, like "demanded" or "insisted."
Occasionally (and I apologize again if this is disjointed, as I've had to let the partially-written review sit for yet another day), a character uses overly-stilted or grandiose language, but for the most part, things are not bad. (A bit too much "aye" instead of "yes," also.) There are a few attempts at humor, which don't really do much for me. But mostly, the rest of the writing is decent. Not overly flowery. Some similes and metaphors, which are mostly appropriate (none of that "giant raspberry pie" junk that we saw in Jon Sprunk).
Anyway, I guess Den of Thieves isn't anything to write home about. But if you're really into the thief/assassin sorts of stories that seem to be all the rage these days, the Ancient Blades trilogy is a finished series in this genre.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Bad Mothers
I got back to thinking about my Bad Fathers post and wondered if I could do the same for mothers. I've had a hell of a time coming up with any. In a lot of books, the mothers are just absent (usually dead). Here are a few I thought of; if you can come up with any more, post a comment:
- Hekat from Karen Miller's Godspeaker Trilogy. She does a lot of stuff that's questionable or downright evil (sometimes comically so, like the amount of sacrifice). But when one of her sons falls in love with someone she deems inappropriate, Hekat just slaughters the woman.
- Leesha's mother from Peter V. Brett's The Warded Man and sequels. It's been a long time since I read any of those books, but what I remember about Leehsa's mother is that she either cheated on Leesha's father or it was strongly suggested that she did, and that she was pretty much a bitch in a lot of other ways. (I would love to illustrate this with specifics but I just don't remember.)
- Syrarys from The Red Wolf Conspiracy and sequels by Robert V.S. Redick. Now, I know she's not Thasha's real mother, but she's a spy and she manipulates Thasha's father and she definitely doesn't have Thasha's interests at heart.
- Cersei Lannister from A Song of Ice and Fire. Her first son is an absolute monster and none of us are too sad when he dies. She sleeps with anyone who crosses her path, if she thinks it will get her what she wants. She does get her walk of shame, at least, in A Dance with Dragons. (Oh yeah, and all of her kids were fathered by her own twin brother. Ew.) This may all be a case of her being a bad person, rather than a bad mother, though.
- Ravenna from Sara Douglass's DarkGlass Mountain Trilogy. You could argue that she thinks she's going to save everyone from evil, but she's generally a pretty awful person, and she even kills her own mother at one point. She also plans to kill Salome's baby, although she doesn't go through with it.
Monday, February 20, 2012
Bravos, Bandits, and Brigands, Oh My!
So if you are writing a fantasy novel, and you feel the need to show off one of your characters' fighting prowess by having him or her beat up on some unnamed assailants (or outsmart them), first of all, take the Mary Sue test, because your character probably is one.
Second, seriously, stay the hell away from unnamed bravos, bandits, and brigands. That means you, David Chandler, Michael J. Sullivan, L.E. Modesitt, Jr., and Elizabeth Moon. Actually, don't use the words "bravos," "bandits," or "brigands." If you absolutely MUST, be cognizant of how often you use those words. Consider checking out these web tools to see how often you use certain words and phrases. If you're stuck on something, change it up. Variety in language is important! Repeatedly using one word becomes humorous after awhile, though that was probably not your intent.
This is not to say that travelers never get accosted on the road. It stands to reason that they do. Have it happen once or twice, if you need it to, to further the story. But, think outside the box a little. Robin Hobb's Forged folk represent one option. (Well, don't go and use them now, because she's already done it.)
While we're at it, please, people, don't write any more books about thieves' and assassins' guilds, or reformed thieves and assassins who serve nobles and/or nobler causes now. I've seen enough of these in the last six months to last a lifetime.
Second, seriously, stay the hell away from unnamed bravos, bandits, and brigands. That means you, David Chandler, Michael J. Sullivan, L.E. Modesitt, Jr., and Elizabeth Moon. Actually, don't use the words "bravos," "bandits," or "brigands." If you absolutely MUST, be cognizant of how often you use those words. Consider checking out these web tools to see how often you use certain words and phrases. If you're stuck on something, change it up. Variety in language is important! Repeatedly using one word becomes humorous after awhile, though that was probably not your intent.
This is not to say that travelers never get accosted on the road. It stands to reason that they do. Have it happen once or twice, if you need it to, to further the story. But, think outside the box a little. Robin Hobb's Forged folk represent one option. (Well, don't go and use them now, because she's already done it.)
While we're at it, please, people, don't write any more books about thieves' and assassins' guilds, or reformed thieves and assassins who serve nobles and/or nobler causes now. I've seen enough of these in the last six months to last a lifetime.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Are Blogs Killing Good Writing?
Found this the other day in the LA Times.
Look, I harp all the time about bad writing on this blog. I make fun of Amazon reviewers, high school and college students, even published authors who can't write very well. I also frequently point out that this blog is not my own best writing. (I can write well -- as judged by others, not myself -- and hopefully I do, when it comes to my own manuscript.)
The Reuters blog post the linked-to article is a response to celebrates bad writing on the web, in a way. If you turn out enough of it, the author says, you'll get rewarded. Quantity is valued over quality. I've certainly gotten more attention for this blog as the number of posts has increased. Hopefully, at least some of the time, I put out something of quality, as well.
Because that's just it -- I do value quality writing and editing. (Well, it's difficult to tell when a book has been well-edited, other than not noticing errors, but that could be due to the writer's careful attention, as well -- but it's quite easy to tell when it's been poorly-edited. And poorly-edited work drives me absolutely batty. Incorrectly-used words, unchecked facts, inconsistent spellings of the same word or name within the same article, argh!)
I'm wondering if I should rethink my own views re: bad writing on the web. I've accepted it because, so far, the web has been something separate from print. But the lines are blurred, with e-books, with online scholarly journals (the American Chemical Society no longer puts out print editions), with people getting news from blogs instead of newspapers. More reading is moving (or has moved) online, and editing needs to be a part of that. (Since I can't afford an editor, maybe I'll try to start looking out for bad punctuation and run-on sentences as I write new posts, which are probably my own biggest problems in terms of web writing.)
Look, I harp all the time about bad writing on this blog. I make fun of Amazon reviewers, high school and college students, even published authors who can't write very well. I also frequently point out that this blog is not my own best writing. (I can write well -- as judged by others, not myself -- and hopefully I do, when it comes to my own manuscript.)
The Reuters blog post the linked-to article is a response to celebrates bad writing on the web, in a way. If you turn out enough of it, the author says, you'll get rewarded. Quantity is valued over quality. I've certainly gotten more attention for this blog as the number of posts has increased. Hopefully, at least some of the time, I put out something of quality, as well.
Because that's just it -- I do value quality writing and editing. (Well, it's difficult to tell when a book has been well-edited, other than not noticing errors, but that could be due to the writer's careful attention, as well -- but it's quite easy to tell when it's been poorly-edited. And poorly-edited work drives me absolutely batty. Incorrectly-used words, unchecked facts, inconsistent spellings of the same word or name within the same article, argh!)
I'm wondering if I should rethink my own views re: bad writing on the web. I've accepted it because, so far, the web has been something separate from print. But the lines are blurred, with e-books, with online scholarly journals (the American Chemical Society no longer puts out print editions), with people getting news from blogs instead of newspapers. More reading is moving (or has moved) online, and editing needs to be a part of that. (Since I can't afford an editor, maybe I'll try to start looking out for bad punctuation and run-on sentences as I write new posts, which are probably my own biggest problems in terms of web writing.)
Review - The Desert of Souls
The Desert of Souls by Howard Andrew Jones was a random bookstore purchase a week or two ago. I actually thought it was a reasonably good read.
It's set in the geographical area that will eventually become Iraq. While Jones admits in the afterword to altering the history a bit, he's also done a good bit of research and offers further reading for those interested in the time period. The protagonist, Captain Asim, is a city-dweller (Baghdad) and we also encounter Greeks (really mostly Byzantine Romans, Jones admits), Marsh Arabs, and Bedouins. I think, for once, I am actually relieved that an author didn't go to elaborate lengths to create fake races and peoples. Not that that can't be done well -- on occasion, it has been -- but the Middle East hasn't featured in a lot of fantasy. (Sure, I can list all sorts of fantasy novels with desert nomads who make their women wear veils and such, but those smack of no research being done. People seem to think the entire region is a desert, forgetting everything they learned about the Tigris and Euphrates in middle school social studies. But I digress.) The Middle Eastern fantasy may be becoming more popular; I've recently read a bit about Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed, which sounds interesting as well and which I will probably eventually check out. But I'm getting really off-topic here. The original point of this paragraph was to situate Desert of Souls in the wider fantasy genre.
I'm having a little trouble coming up with things to say about this book, honestly, and I'm not sure why. I thought the pacing was pretty good, and my interest was definitely hooked early on. I read about the last 200 pages in two hours last night -- didn't want to put it down, actually. (So it's not a difficult read, either.)
The dialogue is a little stiff and formal at times, let's give Jones the benefit of the doubt and assume he's pretending to translate from Arabic to English. Not that I've read much (well, any) Arabic in translation, so I don't know if it turns out like this. There are no attempts for the characters to be witty (which is nice, for a change -- too many novels I've read lately feature thieves and assassins who are far too good at the art of the snappy comeback).
From this paragraph on, assume major spoilers. The main viewpoint character, Asim, is actually a pretty serious guy. He is the captain of the household guard of Jaffar, a high-ranking nobleman, and he's sent to retrieve a couple of treasures that were stolen from Jaffar's house. This takes him down the Tigris on a boat, along with a scholar called Dabir, a poet called Hamil, and a Zoroastrian priest. Oh yeah, and Jaffar's niece, who has stowed away on the boat. We'll get to that part later. The Zoroastrian (called a Magian here) dies, as do (eventually) all of Asim's men, including his nephew Mahmoud, leaving only Asim, Dabir, and Sabirah (the niece). The thieves were after some magical door pulls (that's what was stolen from Jaffar's house) that, when properly attached to doors in the right location, allow access to a magical sort of world where the bad guys can access the tools to create havoc and bring down Baghdad and the caliph.
Dabir and Asim follow Firouz (the evil magician) into the magical world through the doors and get stuck there. In this place, it seems, people appear as they are inside, as opposed to how they seem with others. Asim looks pretty much the same in both places. Here is a guy with a consistent value system, who sees the world in terms of right and wrong, who is pious, who is loyal to his employer, and who is good with a sword. He's also decent at telling a tale, an ability which he repeatedly denies and/or downplays.
There's a scene early on where he, Jaffar, and Dabir go to a fortuneteller. Jaffar is told he'll fall for a woman above his station and be beheaded, Dabir is told he'll slay a monster, and Asim is told he'll write an account of some adventure he has yet to experience. For much of the novel, Jaffar is convinced the fortunes were switched and that Dabir is the one falling for a woman above his station -- Sabirah, whom he tutors. (Turns out, the feeling was there, and mutual, but of course that sort of romance would never have been allowed.) At any rate, when they all come back to Baghdad after the adventure, Jaffar is more convinced than ever that Dabir intends some impropriety with Sabirah, and Dabir is imprisoned and Sabirah hastily married off. (Sabirah makes it a condition of her marriage that no harm comes to Dabir, but Jaffar seems disinclined to honor this.) So here we have a problem for Asim -- Dabir is his comrade, and is blameless, having taken no inappropriate actions with respect to Sabirah, but he is condemned to die because of Jaffar's suspicions, nonetheless. And here is where Asim undergoes his transformation. He risks everything to save his friend, and they end up saving Baghdad from Firouz and company, instead. So it's mostly a happy ending, other than that Dabir and Sabirah don't end up together. (It would've been unrealistic for them to marry each other, at any rate, and any contrivance that put them together, other than them abandoning the quest -- which is a possibility that is floated at one point -- would have been unbelievable and would have detracted from the tale. So I think Jones made the right choice, there.) Asim also started the tale not caring much for Hamil, the poet, but grudgingly admits respect for the man as a traveling companion, if nothing else, by the end. We know he's capable of emotion, as well as rational judgment -- he mourns his lost men, especially his nephew, and we also know he's capable of making mistakes (I'm thinking here about the escape from the Marsh Arabs, if you've read the book). So, he's a complex character who has suffered tragedy and who has to take actions which are somewhat in conflict with his view of the world towards the end of the book. All-in-all, pretty well-done, I think.
We know less about the other characters, mostly because Asim is the one telling the story. Dabir has also suffered tragedy (his wife died in childbirth, sometime before the start of the story), is in love with a woman he can never have, and has a little bit of a past with Firouz that makes him at least seem shady. Sabirah has a relatively small part in the story; I don't think she could've been gotten rid of, because then Jaffar would have nothing to hold over Dabir, nothing to confirm his suspicions that the fortunes were switched, and because she becomes privy to important information at one point in the story. She's a source of tension on the boat and the subsequent journey. It's a little hokey that Dabir keeps saying he is so impressed by her mind -- since she is really the only female character in this book, she turns into a little bit of a stand-in for all women who are subject to the whims of their male relatives. For the rest of the characters, we don't even get this.
As the main villain, we know a little about Firouz -- he used to study at the same place Dabir studied, and he lost his wife and family in a military action. He blames the caliph; even though his family members weren't rebels and were therefore not targets -- they were more along the lines of collateral damage. Because of this blame, he wants to tear down the whole caliphate, and concocts a rather incredible scheme to do so. I won't get into all the details here, as they do unfold in the story in a way that makes sense, with a little information revealed at a time. I will say that Firouz's schemes are a little over-the-top (bringing down the whole caliphate? instead of just wanting to assassinate the current caliph) for what happened to him, but then I've never lost family in a war and I don't know how it would affect me.
Don't expect anything too deep with this book, as it is a sword and sorcery adventure (which it does quite well at). The descriptive passages are nice, with good use of figurative language. As is my constant complaint these days, the speaker attributions could use work, but mostly I tended not to notice. (Most of my problems here were the "-ly" word variety, or the use of words like "commanded" instead of said. If you order someone about and end with an exclamation point, it's redundant to "command" someone. That's implied. "Said" is sufficient.) I can't think of any major grammatical errors that bothered me, which is nice for a change, nor can I remember any words that were used too often, which is also nice. The prose stood back and did its job, which is what good prose should do -- tell the story without detracting from the story.
One of the magicians in the story uses reanimated animals to do his dirty work; there are stones in them that bring them back to a type of life. The birds, especially, make me think of the Sarantine Mosaic novels by Guy Gavriel Kay, where a similar device is used (though the details are somewhat different). The reanimated monkeys are a bit more like the dead squirrel in Warbreaker, which is perhaps less fortunate, but I suppose they served to put the heroes on notice that this sort of tactic was likely to be employed. Human thieves who escaped would also have worked, I think, for the stealing part. But then it would've been harder to set up for the lion, later. Other magic includes a djinn, who performs impressive tasks but only for the trade of a human soul. (Dabir steals the djinn's bottle and uses it against Firouz in the end. It works well as a plot device, because it was introduced appropriately earlier on.)
At this point, I don't remember much about the fight scenes. This means that they weren't long enough to bore me, which is good. As for whether they were well-done or not, it's harder to say. Asim does seem to be so intent on what he's doing when he's fighting, that he doesn't always realize what's happening around him, such as when his nephew is killed. Which is probably a reasonably accurate depiction of a fighter, actually. I haven't read much of the classic sword and sorcery that probably inspired him (Fritz Leiber and Robert E. Howard are names that keep popping up) so I can't speak as to influences from that direction. However, I did enjoy the book without that background. So if you know it, great, but if you don't, you'll still get plenty out of this book.
Mildly funny are the 3 full pages of blurbs, many of which are from anonymous bloggers, though the first page of these is stacked with reviews from actual authors. (I don't tend to write sound-bite style reviews in this blog, so I'll probably never get quoted on a book jacket. Though in principle, I wouldn't object to it.)
One more thing. We get hints that there is much more that will happen to Asim and Dabir, and we're told a bit of their history. But the book is definitely self-contained, and doesn't leave you hanging as to the fates of major characters in the end. So it does read like a standalone, if that's what you're looking for.
Anyway, overall I was pretty happy with The Desert of Souls, and am looking forward to any sequels. According to the last page of my edition, I don't have long to wait, as another volume is coming out in summer of this year.
It's set in the geographical area that will eventually become Iraq. While Jones admits in the afterword to altering the history a bit, he's also done a good bit of research and offers further reading for those interested in the time period. The protagonist, Captain Asim, is a city-dweller (Baghdad) and we also encounter Greeks (really mostly Byzantine Romans, Jones admits), Marsh Arabs, and Bedouins. I think, for once, I am actually relieved that an author didn't go to elaborate lengths to create fake races and peoples. Not that that can't be done well -- on occasion, it has been -- but the Middle East hasn't featured in a lot of fantasy. (Sure, I can list all sorts of fantasy novels with desert nomads who make their women wear veils and such, but those smack of no research being done. People seem to think the entire region is a desert, forgetting everything they learned about the Tigris and Euphrates in middle school social studies. But I digress.) The Middle Eastern fantasy may be becoming more popular; I've recently read a bit about Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed, which sounds interesting as well and which I will probably eventually check out. But I'm getting really off-topic here. The original point of this paragraph was to situate Desert of Souls in the wider fantasy genre.
I'm having a little trouble coming up with things to say about this book, honestly, and I'm not sure why. I thought the pacing was pretty good, and my interest was definitely hooked early on. I read about the last 200 pages in two hours last night -- didn't want to put it down, actually. (So it's not a difficult read, either.)
The dialogue is a little stiff and formal at times, let's give Jones the benefit of the doubt and assume he's pretending to translate from Arabic to English. Not that I've read much (well, any) Arabic in translation, so I don't know if it turns out like this. There are no attempts for the characters to be witty (which is nice, for a change -- too many novels I've read lately feature thieves and assassins who are far too good at the art of the snappy comeback).
From this paragraph on, assume major spoilers. The main viewpoint character, Asim, is actually a pretty serious guy. He is the captain of the household guard of Jaffar, a high-ranking nobleman, and he's sent to retrieve a couple of treasures that were stolen from Jaffar's house. This takes him down the Tigris on a boat, along with a scholar called Dabir, a poet called Hamil, and a Zoroastrian priest. Oh yeah, and Jaffar's niece, who has stowed away on the boat. We'll get to that part later. The Zoroastrian (called a Magian here) dies, as do (eventually) all of Asim's men, including his nephew Mahmoud, leaving only Asim, Dabir, and Sabirah (the niece). The thieves were after some magical door pulls (that's what was stolen from Jaffar's house) that, when properly attached to doors in the right location, allow access to a magical sort of world where the bad guys can access the tools to create havoc and bring down Baghdad and the caliph.
Dabir and Asim follow Firouz (the evil magician) into the magical world through the doors and get stuck there. In this place, it seems, people appear as they are inside, as opposed to how they seem with others. Asim looks pretty much the same in both places. Here is a guy with a consistent value system, who sees the world in terms of right and wrong, who is pious, who is loyal to his employer, and who is good with a sword. He's also decent at telling a tale, an ability which he repeatedly denies and/or downplays.
There's a scene early on where he, Jaffar, and Dabir go to a fortuneteller. Jaffar is told he'll fall for a woman above his station and be beheaded, Dabir is told he'll slay a monster, and Asim is told he'll write an account of some adventure he has yet to experience. For much of the novel, Jaffar is convinced the fortunes were switched and that Dabir is the one falling for a woman above his station -- Sabirah, whom he tutors. (Turns out, the feeling was there, and mutual, but of course that sort of romance would never have been allowed.) At any rate, when they all come back to Baghdad after the adventure, Jaffar is more convinced than ever that Dabir intends some impropriety with Sabirah, and Dabir is imprisoned and Sabirah hastily married off. (Sabirah makes it a condition of her marriage that no harm comes to Dabir, but Jaffar seems disinclined to honor this.) So here we have a problem for Asim -- Dabir is his comrade, and is blameless, having taken no inappropriate actions with respect to Sabirah, but he is condemned to die because of Jaffar's suspicions, nonetheless. And here is where Asim undergoes his transformation. He risks everything to save his friend, and they end up saving Baghdad from Firouz and company, instead. So it's mostly a happy ending, other than that Dabir and Sabirah don't end up together. (It would've been unrealistic for them to marry each other, at any rate, and any contrivance that put them together, other than them abandoning the quest -- which is a possibility that is floated at one point -- would have been unbelievable and would have detracted from the tale. So I think Jones made the right choice, there.) Asim also started the tale not caring much for Hamil, the poet, but grudgingly admits respect for the man as a traveling companion, if nothing else, by the end. We know he's capable of emotion, as well as rational judgment -- he mourns his lost men, especially his nephew, and we also know he's capable of making mistakes (I'm thinking here about the escape from the Marsh Arabs, if you've read the book). So, he's a complex character who has suffered tragedy and who has to take actions which are somewhat in conflict with his view of the world towards the end of the book. All-in-all, pretty well-done, I think.
We know less about the other characters, mostly because Asim is the one telling the story. Dabir has also suffered tragedy (his wife died in childbirth, sometime before the start of the story), is in love with a woman he can never have, and has a little bit of a past with Firouz that makes him at least seem shady. Sabirah has a relatively small part in the story; I don't think she could've been gotten rid of, because then Jaffar would have nothing to hold over Dabir, nothing to confirm his suspicions that the fortunes were switched, and because she becomes privy to important information at one point in the story. She's a source of tension on the boat and the subsequent journey. It's a little hokey that Dabir keeps saying he is so impressed by her mind -- since she is really the only female character in this book, she turns into a little bit of a stand-in for all women who are subject to the whims of their male relatives. For the rest of the characters, we don't even get this.
As the main villain, we know a little about Firouz -- he used to study at the same place Dabir studied, and he lost his wife and family in a military action. He blames the caliph; even though his family members weren't rebels and were therefore not targets -- they were more along the lines of collateral damage. Because of this blame, he wants to tear down the whole caliphate, and concocts a rather incredible scheme to do so. I won't get into all the details here, as they do unfold in the story in a way that makes sense, with a little information revealed at a time. I will say that Firouz's schemes are a little over-the-top (bringing down the whole caliphate? instead of just wanting to assassinate the current caliph) for what happened to him, but then I've never lost family in a war and I don't know how it would affect me.
Don't expect anything too deep with this book, as it is a sword and sorcery adventure (which it does quite well at). The descriptive passages are nice, with good use of figurative language. As is my constant complaint these days, the speaker attributions could use work, but mostly I tended not to notice. (Most of my problems here were the "-ly" word variety, or the use of words like "commanded" instead of said. If you order someone about and end with an exclamation point, it's redundant to "command" someone. That's implied. "Said" is sufficient.) I can't think of any major grammatical errors that bothered me, which is nice for a change, nor can I remember any words that were used too often, which is also nice. The prose stood back and did its job, which is what good prose should do -- tell the story without detracting from the story.
One of the magicians in the story uses reanimated animals to do his dirty work; there are stones in them that bring them back to a type of life. The birds, especially, make me think of the Sarantine Mosaic novels by Guy Gavriel Kay, where a similar device is used (though the details are somewhat different). The reanimated monkeys are a bit more like the dead squirrel in Warbreaker, which is perhaps less fortunate, but I suppose they served to put the heroes on notice that this sort of tactic was likely to be employed. Human thieves who escaped would also have worked, I think, for the stealing part. But then it would've been harder to set up for the lion, later. Other magic includes a djinn, who performs impressive tasks but only for the trade of a human soul. (Dabir steals the djinn's bottle and uses it against Firouz in the end. It works well as a plot device, because it was introduced appropriately earlier on.)
At this point, I don't remember much about the fight scenes. This means that they weren't long enough to bore me, which is good. As for whether they were well-done or not, it's harder to say. Asim does seem to be so intent on what he's doing when he's fighting, that he doesn't always realize what's happening around him, such as when his nephew is killed. Which is probably a reasonably accurate depiction of a fighter, actually. I haven't read much of the classic sword and sorcery that probably inspired him (Fritz Leiber and Robert E. Howard are names that keep popping up) so I can't speak as to influences from that direction. However, I did enjoy the book without that background. So if you know it, great, but if you don't, you'll still get plenty out of this book.
Mildly funny are the 3 full pages of blurbs, many of which are from anonymous bloggers, though the first page of these is stacked with reviews from actual authors. (I don't tend to write sound-bite style reviews in this blog, so I'll probably never get quoted on a book jacket. Though in principle, I wouldn't object to it.)
One more thing. We get hints that there is much more that will happen to Asim and Dabir, and we're told a bit of their history. But the book is definitely self-contained, and doesn't leave you hanging as to the fates of major characters in the end. So it does read like a standalone, if that's what you're looking for.
Anyway, overall I was pretty happy with The Desert of Souls, and am looking forward to any sequels. According to the last page of my edition, I don't have long to wait, as another volume is coming out in summer of this year.
Saturday, February 18, 2012
This Made Me So Sad
In the New York Times the other day, there was an article about New York state tests for graduation (Regents Exam). The focus was mostly on writing standards.
Click here to read it.
First of all, no wonder I've aced every standardized writing test I've ever taken. (Perfect scores on the SAT II and GRE writing sections.) Because if this sort of stuff is what cuts it for high school students in New York, then no wonder students in other countries are doing better than students in the US in just about every goddamn subject. Some of the sentences in the examples make me want to cry. (I have two nieces who will be going to high school in New York though not for another 13 or 14 years.)
It's not just New York, though. I have some rather unusual educational circumstances that involved me taking English I and II at a state university satellite campus in Missouri, after I graduated from Harvard. I look young, so I just kept my mouth shut and people assumed I was 18 instead of 24. (Okay side note, wow, was that really 10 years ago?) But there were kids in those classes who were graduates of an urban school system, and some of them actually thought "tough" was spelled "tuff," or worse, were unable to construct an argument. (We had to do peer review. I didn't expect much in the way of constructive criticism and I didn't get it. I also didn't need it. But I tried to do a good job helping my fellow students and sometimes I didn't even know where to begin.) It's not just Missouri either, though. I have seen writing from undergraduates at a major (selective) public university in Georgia, and it's abysmal as well.
Obviously, there are exceptions to every rule. Some high school students can write well; I suspect these are the ones who enjoy reading. There's nothing better than learning by example -- if your examples are good.
I go back and forth about whether I would teach high school or not. (I've got bachelor's degrees in three subjects although English is not one of those subjects.) I did, at the university in Missouri, receive some excellent instruction in scientific writing towards the end of my time there. I would like to pass that knowledge on to the next generation, I suppose. Though the pay may not be enough to make a dent in my Stafford Loan balances, so I'll probably be looking elsewhere for employment.
Click here to read it.
First of all, no wonder I've aced every standardized writing test I've ever taken. (Perfect scores on the SAT II and GRE writing sections.) Because if this sort of stuff is what cuts it for high school students in New York, then no wonder students in other countries are doing better than students in the US in just about every goddamn subject. Some of the sentences in the examples make me want to cry. (I have two nieces who will be going to high school in New York though not for another 13 or 14 years.)
It's not just New York, though. I have some rather unusual educational circumstances that involved me taking English I and II at a state university satellite campus in Missouri, after I graduated from Harvard. I look young, so I just kept my mouth shut and people assumed I was 18 instead of 24. (Okay side note, wow, was that really 10 years ago?) But there were kids in those classes who were graduates of an urban school system, and some of them actually thought "tough" was spelled "tuff," or worse, were unable to construct an argument. (We had to do peer review. I didn't expect much in the way of constructive criticism and I didn't get it. I also didn't need it. But I tried to do a good job helping my fellow students and sometimes I didn't even know where to begin.) It's not just Missouri either, though. I have seen writing from undergraduates at a major (selective) public university in Georgia, and it's abysmal as well.
Obviously, there are exceptions to every rule. Some high school students can write well; I suspect these are the ones who enjoy reading. There's nothing better than learning by example -- if your examples are good.
I go back and forth about whether I would teach high school or not. (I've got bachelor's degrees in three subjects although English is not one of those subjects.) I did, at the university in Missouri, receive some excellent instruction in scientific writing towards the end of my time there. I would like to pass that knowledge on to the next generation, I suppose. Though the pay may not be enough to make a dent in my Stafford Loan balances, so I'll probably be looking elsewhere for employment.
Writer's Relief
Found a website for Writer's Relief the other day.
They're not literary agents or publishers; they take care of the submissions to agents and publishers for writers. For a fee. (They also design websites but they list installing Wordpress as one of their services and buying domain names as another. I'm perhaps a little more computer-savvy than the next person, and I'm not saying my own personal website is perfect, but designing a website is not difficult and I got my domain and a year of hosting for under $100. Installed Wordpress myself. Designed the site myself using Dreamweaver. While they won't list prices for web design on their site, I'm guessing I did it myself for cheaper because all I had to pay for were hosting and domain registration fees.)
There are various posts/blogs/articles on the site offering advice for writers. I took a look and some are more useful than others. Listing The Lord of the Rings as an example of a fantasy is a little insulting on a page which purports to define genres so people know what genre they're writing in. Either this site isn't updated often, or these people don't work with many fantasy authors, or the fantasy authors they do work with don't know shit about their own genre. And if you don't read a lot of fantasy, you shouldn't write it. (They're a little fixated on fairy tales and myths when it seems to me antiheroes, assassins, and thieves are a little more where the genre seems to be going these days. Or maybe that's just biased by the books I've personally read recently.)
I applaud anyone who can make a buck doing this sort of thing, and they've been at it for a long time. They have lots of testimonials on the site (from authors I've never heard of, but I'm not familiar with every genre and I sure as hell don't read poetry, so I'll give them a break there). But technically it's free to submit your work to literary agents (and some publishers), and if you have time to write, you probably have time to do the submissions yourself. What Writer's Relief seems to like to do is tease just a little...you know, "we know the secrets, click here to read about them," and then not actually have very detailed information when you follow the links. They want you to pay them, so of course they don't reveal the information -- if they did, you wouldn't pay, and they'd be out of business.
Wanna go the cheap way? Try the 2012 Writer's Market. Though I've heard there are some problems with this year's edition, based on Amazon reviews, so be forewarned.
They're not literary agents or publishers; they take care of the submissions to agents and publishers for writers. For a fee. (They also design websites but they list installing Wordpress as one of their services and buying domain names as another. I'm perhaps a little more computer-savvy than the next person, and I'm not saying my own personal website is perfect, but designing a website is not difficult and I got my domain and a year of hosting for under $100. Installed Wordpress myself. Designed the site myself using Dreamweaver. While they won't list prices for web design on their site, I'm guessing I did it myself for cheaper because all I had to pay for were hosting and domain registration fees.)
There are various posts/blogs/articles on the site offering advice for writers. I took a look and some are more useful than others. Listing The Lord of the Rings as an example of a fantasy is a little insulting on a page which purports to define genres so people know what genre they're writing in. Either this site isn't updated often, or these people don't work with many fantasy authors, or the fantasy authors they do work with don't know shit about their own genre. And if you don't read a lot of fantasy, you shouldn't write it. (They're a little fixated on fairy tales and myths when it seems to me antiheroes, assassins, and thieves are a little more where the genre seems to be going these days. Or maybe that's just biased by the books I've personally read recently.)
I applaud anyone who can make a buck doing this sort of thing, and they've been at it for a long time. They have lots of testimonials on the site (from authors I've never heard of, but I'm not familiar with every genre and I sure as hell don't read poetry, so I'll give them a break there). But technically it's free to submit your work to literary agents (and some publishers), and if you have time to write, you probably have time to do the submissions yourself. What Writer's Relief seems to like to do is tease just a little...you know, "we know the secrets, click here to read about them," and then not actually have very detailed information when you follow the links. They want you to pay them, so of course they don't reveal the information -- if they did, you wouldn't pay, and they'd be out of business.
Wanna go the cheap way? Try the 2012 Writer's Market. Though I've heard there are some problems with this year's edition, based on Amazon reviews, so be forewarned.
Friday, February 17, 2012
That Versus Who
So I complained in my review of Unnatural Issue by Mercedes Lackey that I thought she used "that" when she meant "who."
Well, if you actually start looking things up, the situation is more complicated. My Bedford Handbook says to use "who" for people because "that" is impersonal. Grammar Girl says it's more complicated but recommends "who" for people and "that" for things, because if you do that, it's pretty much impossible to get it wrong. Grammar Girl also says people probably use the two interchangeably because they don't know the difference. The dictionary on my MacBook Pro says the two words are interchangeable for people. So who the hell knows?
Honestly, to me, it just sounds wrong to say "People that want their trash emptied should put their trash cans outside their offices." ("People who want their trash emptied should put their trash cans outside their offices" works for me.)
Usually when something sounds wrong to me, it is grammatically incorrect. I won't say this is true 100% of the time, but I'm well-educated, and I'm well-read, and my instincts are usually correct in this area. Which is why, even though I acknowledge in this case that there is some controversy, I cringe to admit it. (Please don't look to this blog for examples of impeccable sentence construction. It's a blog, for crying out loud.) I'm totally in the camp of prescriptive grammarians (not descriptive ones), no question about it.
Well, if you actually start looking things up, the situation is more complicated. My Bedford Handbook says to use "who" for people because "that" is impersonal. Grammar Girl says it's more complicated but recommends "who" for people and "that" for things, because if you do that, it's pretty much impossible to get it wrong. Grammar Girl also says people probably use the two interchangeably because they don't know the difference. The dictionary on my MacBook Pro says the two words are interchangeable for people. So who the hell knows?
Honestly, to me, it just sounds wrong to say "People that want their trash emptied should put their trash cans outside their offices." ("People who want their trash emptied should put their trash cans outside their offices" works for me.)
Usually when something sounds wrong to me, it is grammatically incorrect. I won't say this is true 100% of the time, but I'm well-educated, and I'm well-read, and my instincts are usually correct in this area. Which is why, even though I acknowledge in this case that there is some controversy, I cringe to admit it. (Please don't look to this blog for examples of impeccable sentence construction. It's a blog, for crying out loud.) I'm totally in the camp of prescriptive grammarians (not descriptive ones), no question about it.
Unnatural Issue - Reviewing the Reviewers
Unnatural Issue by Mercedes Lackey only has 23 reviews as of this post, and some of them are pretty terrible, so I figured it was time for another "reviewing the reviewers" post. Why do I write these posts? Well, there are a couple of reasons. (1) I like to make fun of people. (2) I feel like we, as readers and consumers, should expect more out of online reviews. Two sentences are simply not enough to actually evaluate whether or not a book should be purchased. "I liked it" and "it sucked" are equally worthless. (This is not my most inspired "reviewing the reviewers" post ever. I can't hit a home run every time.)
Anyway, here goes.
The 1-star reviews are too short although the first one actually lists some reasons that this book is lacking, and the second one suggests an alternative.
The anonymous 2-star reviewer (Amazon's most helpful negative review) is pretty good (probably I think so because it contains multiple paragraphs and objects to many elements of the story that I also had problems with). Not sure what "continuity" issues the second reviewer was talking about, though I agree, the book did read like a draft and not a finished product. KwikiTart (the third reviewer) must've been sitting there with a thesaurus, but manages to misspell the heroine's name. (Granted, "Susanne" is an obnoxious spelling, but if you've read the whole book, you should've noticed that it's not the more standard "Suzanne.")
The first 3-star reviewer is from my neck of the woods (Marietta, GA, is very near where I live). And I just can't believe this person thought the part about Susanne's service in the war was good. I'll tell you what the sections on Susanne-as-nurse were like. "I thought the doctors would do all the hard stuff. Now I learn the nurses have to. Here's a list of disgusting procedures I have to perform. I use Earth magic to keep these guys alive. It's so hard to find syringes and needles. I'm glad I have some rich friends to take me to dinner and buy me my own needle and syringe." Another reviewer thinks the necromancy could have been the best part. I didn't find the necromancy particularly interesting. OMG it's forbidden and evil. And I seriously just got done with another book (The Pattern Scars by Caitlin Sweet) with similar elements. Actually, Lackey is borrowing from one of her other series here: I'm thinking of the Shamblers from The Enduring Flame Series. These guys are raised up and come after the heroes, too. And reviewer Daisie says this: "Like all Mercedes Lackey books, it was well written and the story flowed well. The plot is well thought out and is consistent from beginning to end." Um, no. No, it was terribly written and the pacing was all wrong. The plot is not well thought out; in particular, the packet that one of the 2-star reviewers mentions that Susanne was supposed to burn, and then didn't burn, seems like Lackey forgot her intentions halfway through. (It's easy to do this in a draft; my own draft contained some similar problems, but the thing is, I revised and found and eliminated them!)
On to the 4-star reviews. "Rowan Reader" lists some "slight" flaws that are actually pretty serious, in my opinion. See my own review of this book for more on that. (Also, I just hate the word "niggle" and wish no one would use it. Ever.) Sheila L. Beaumont says the book is dark and grim at points on the battlefield but also calls it a "fun, light read." At least she mentions the need for editing. There are some reasonable reviews among the remainder of the 4-star ones, though the Klausner-bot gets some key details wrong. But then, that's easy to do when you review 97 books a day.
A number of the 5-star reviews are very short and deserve little attention here. One is long but the writer of it doesn't understand the concept of line breaks and it's therefore very difficult to read. However, it does one service which is to actually explain the continuity errors one of the earlier reviewers was complaining about (I noticed one of these when I read but not the other). Unfortunately, the long review also consists largely of plot summary. Reviewer M. Rankin thinks the book is about World War II. (It's not.) Reviewer Arthur W. Jordin is also from my neck of the woods, and apparently favors incredibly short paragraphs identifying characters and describing the plot. There's nary a word of actual evaluation buried in this list of characters and plot summary points. Reviewer Shelby B. Stevens only writes that she bought this for her daughter for Christmas and her daughter (who hasn't yet read it) was excited. That is not a review. Honestly, it should be removed by Amazon. But of course that won't happen.
Among the bad and/or stupid reviews, there are a few that were actually legitimate, literate, and well-written. I think the best is the anonymous 2-star review entitled "Mercedes Lackey is clearly not paying attention, phoned this one in."
Anyway, here goes.
The 1-star reviews are too short although the first one actually lists some reasons that this book is lacking, and the second one suggests an alternative.
The anonymous 2-star reviewer (Amazon's most helpful negative review) is pretty good (probably I think so because it contains multiple paragraphs and objects to many elements of the story that I also had problems with). Not sure what "continuity" issues the second reviewer was talking about, though I agree, the book did read like a draft and not a finished product. KwikiTart (the third reviewer) must've been sitting there with a thesaurus, but manages to misspell the heroine's name. (Granted, "Susanne" is an obnoxious spelling, but if you've read the whole book, you should've noticed that it's not the more standard "Suzanne.")
The first 3-star reviewer is from my neck of the woods (Marietta, GA, is very near where I live). And I just can't believe this person thought the part about Susanne's service in the war was good. I'll tell you what the sections on Susanne-as-nurse were like. "I thought the doctors would do all the hard stuff. Now I learn the nurses have to. Here's a list of disgusting procedures I have to perform. I use Earth magic to keep these guys alive. It's so hard to find syringes and needles. I'm glad I have some rich friends to take me to dinner and buy me my own needle and syringe." Another reviewer thinks the necromancy could have been the best part. I didn't find the necromancy particularly interesting. OMG it's forbidden and evil. And I seriously just got done with another book (The Pattern Scars by Caitlin Sweet) with similar elements. Actually, Lackey is borrowing from one of her other series here: I'm thinking of the Shamblers from The Enduring Flame Series. These guys are raised up and come after the heroes, too. And reviewer Daisie says this: "Like all Mercedes Lackey books, it was well written and the story flowed well. The plot is well thought out and is consistent from beginning to end." Um, no. No, it was terribly written and the pacing was all wrong. The plot is not well thought out; in particular, the packet that one of the 2-star reviewers mentions that Susanne was supposed to burn, and then didn't burn, seems like Lackey forgot her intentions halfway through. (It's easy to do this in a draft; my own draft contained some similar problems, but the thing is, I revised and found and eliminated them!)
On to the 4-star reviews. "Rowan Reader" lists some "slight" flaws that are actually pretty serious, in my opinion. See my own review of this book for more on that. (Also, I just hate the word "niggle" and wish no one would use it. Ever.) Sheila L. Beaumont says the book is dark and grim at points on the battlefield but also calls it a "fun, light read." At least she mentions the need for editing. There are some reasonable reviews among the remainder of the 4-star ones, though the Klausner-bot gets some key details wrong. But then, that's easy to do when you review 97 books a day.
A number of the 5-star reviews are very short and deserve little attention here. One is long but the writer of it doesn't understand the concept of line breaks and it's therefore very difficult to read. However, it does one service which is to actually explain the continuity errors one of the earlier reviewers was complaining about (I noticed one of these when I read but not the other). Unfortunately, the long review also consists largely of plot summary. Reviewer M. Rankin thinks the book is about World War II. (It's not.) Reviewer Arthur W. Jordin is also from my neck of the woods, and apparently favors incredibly short paragraphs identifying characters and describing the plot. There's nary a word of actual evaluation buried in this list of characters and plot summary points. Reviewer Shelby B. Stevens only writes that she bought this for her daughter for Christmas and her daughter (who hasn't yet read it) was excited. That is not a review. Honestly, it should be removed by Amazon. But of course that won't happen.
Among the bad and/or stupid reviews, there are a few that were actually legitimate, literate, and well-written. I think the best is the anonymous 2-star review entitled "Mercedes Lackey is clearly not paying attention, phoned this one in."
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Review - Unnatural Issue
I will admit that, in the past, Mercedes Lackey's Elemental Masters novels have been a guilty, girly pleasure for me. Especially The Serpent's Shadow and Phoenix and Ashes. Now, I will grant you that it has been a long time since I read (or re-read) either of those, and so I make no claims about the writing quality. Since I started writing my own manuscript, and have been involved in the (self) editing process firsthand, I have become much more critical. And unfortunately, Unnatural Issue is just not that good.
The other Elemental Masters novels -- notably the two mentioned -- have sympathetic characters and love stories that actually make sense in terms of the plot. But for Unnatural Issue, Lackey just seems to be phoning it in (as one of the Amazon reviewers said). It was actually difficult for me to read the first 25-30 % of the book, because the writing was that terrible. It had a rough draft quality to it, and if someone edited this book, it is NOT apparent. Speaker attributions are regularly constructed in a hackish manner. In this book, it's almost never: "'Help!' Susanne said." It's always: "'Help! screamed Susanne frantically." (If you're calling for help, it's assumed you're somewhat frantic and that your voice is raised. The mood and manner of your request for help should be apparent from the situation you find yourself in. It's insulting to the reader to tell us the same thing twice. It also wastes space on the page.)
Also problematic: continual use of "that" when "who" is meant. This bothers me enough to have a grammar pet peeve post about it in the near future.
Speaking of telling us the same thing twice, there's a space of a couple of pages where Susanne (our heroine, but we'll get to the characters in a moment) is concerned that her father is taking notice of her after two decades of ignoring her. She has a bad feeling about this. She thinks he's up to something evil. It's weird that he's paying attention to her, and he must be up to something really evil. She can feel it. She doesn't know what it is but it must be bad. And so on, for paragraph after paragraph. Four or five pages to make one point. (Take those last couple of sentences I wrote, and imagine extending them out past the 3 or 4 lines they take up. It gets downright BORING to read.) In general, there's a lot of telling, and not a lot of showing in this book. Example: we find out Susanne's father has become SOOOOO powerful because he was studying with Hun necromancers. Even though he's a major viewpoint character in the book, we never hear about this in his scenes. It's only a side comment near the end of the book.
Another flaw is the attempt to introduce dialect and local ways of speaking. With all the "tha" instead of "you," it can sometimes be downright impossible to read. Here, I'd honestly be satisfied with a mention of Susanne's Yorkshire accent. I don't want to have to read it. It's even worse when Charles and Peter are speaking to each other, I feel like they're two teenage boys who spend too much time on Memebase and like to pretend they look like this:
It's like an SNL sketch or something, the way they talk. I have a hard time taking these characters seriously. Especially when Peter, who is supposed to be investigating necromancy, appears in his aristocrat guise at Charles's house in the country, then leaves, only to return in disguise as a huntmaster or groundskeeper or some such, with the same servant, who is now posing as his half-brother. As if the servants are that stupid, that they wouldn't be able to tell these were exactly the same two guys.
I should probably introduce a bit of the story at this point. Richard is an Earth Master who's been called to London to deal with some magical nastiness; he arrives home to find his pregnant wife has gone into premature labor and died, though the baby (Susanne) was fine. He locks himself away on the second floor and never wants to see his daughter again. This continues for about twenty years, until he sees Susanne out the window one day. She's apparently the spitting image of her mother, and he gets the idea to bring her mother's spirit back into Susanne's body. At first, it's utterly unclear why he would want Susanne's mother back -- when he reminisces, he continually calls her simple and has to set her to tasks to improve herself because she's not ambitious enough. (Later, at least, this makes sense -- she adored him, for whatever reason, and he liked to be admired by her.)
Anyway, he starts paying attention to Susanne, and this makes her uncomfortable, and she eventually runs away, to a nearby farm where the Kettridges (Charles and his parents) live. She runs into Peter here (remember, he's been sent to investigate necromancy) and is outed because of her magical talents. She's sent to France, where World War I breaks out, she poses as a nurse, she's sent back to England. There's a confrontation, the building she's in is bombed by a zeppelin, her father dies, she escapes, and BOOM, it's the end. Just like that. The pacing is super-uneven in this book; we get all sorts of insight into the life of a dairy maid (what she poses as during the initial part of her stay at the Kettridges' home), and very little of the rest of her life, except for continual reminders that nurses on the Front never had enough hypodermic needles or syringes (gee, that makes me cringe to think of reusing needles and syringes...), as she flits about from place to place, from front line to rooming house to hotel and so on. Though I would imagine the front lines in WWI to have been hectic, dangerous, etc., Susanne has no trouble running into Charles again and again.
And there's this love quadrangle going on. Peter (who is higher in station even than Charles) falls for Susanne, but Susanne has fallen for Charles, who's above her station, but Charles has a fiancee named Rose, who is actually a socially appropriate match for him according to the standards of the time. In the end, Peter, as the younger of two brothers, thinks he can get away with being in a relationship with Susanne, and she seems to be giving him a chance. It's not really developed enough -- Rose comes out of nowhere near the end, and it doesn't totally make sense -- while class was enough to keep Susanne from Charles, it's not enough to keep Peter from Susanne (who is higher than Charles).
I don't actually find Susanne to be that great of a character, though. I don't really like her. She considers it her duty at the beginning of the book to care for the land around her family estate. It is difficult for her to leave home. But then she never looks back; spares exactly one sentence of thought for all the servants who raised her when she finds out her father killed them (and reanimated their corpses). And all the while that she's helping out with things, before her father takes notice of her, she grumbles that no one appreciates what she does for the land, or that she's some sort of gentry and is better than a servant, etc. She drops this by the end, and actually does some useful things, but our first impression is not that great, and unfortunately it stuck with me throughout the book. We're also continually reminded that Susanne is SO POWERFUL but she's hardly given a chance to prove herself. Most of the time, she runs away before there's a confrontation, or others fight off the revived corpses. Then the roof collapses and kills her father. Then we're not really sure what will happen to her after the end of the book, because the ending is so abrupt.
Her father is another caricature of an evil bad guy. He wants to put his dead wife's spirit in his daughter's body, then take her away to Italy and fire all the servants and marry his own daughter, and he kills all the servants and brings them back to life, and he employs all manner of evil elementals, studies with magicians from the opposing side in the war, he's a misogynist, etc. I can understand he was despondent when his wife died, and he wasn't there with her, but his descent into something despicable was abrupt and complete and is not justified by what happened to him, I think. Unless he was already fragile -- and to be fair, there is a hint of this -- and an asshole before his wife died, and this last thing just put him over the edge.
This one also feels like I've read it before, mostly in other Elemental Masters novels. Susanne's plight is a lot like Eleanor's from Phoenix and Ashes, in that she's living as a servant in her own home though she's a powerful mage (a master, even!). Now maybe this is because these books are ostensibly based on fairy tales, and a lot of fairy tales are quite similar in theme to one another.
Honestly, there's just not much recommending this book for me. Think I might write a "reviewing the reviewers" post on it soon. There are a lot of worthless 5-star reviews for this one. I suppose if you've read the others, you'll enjoy seeing Maya and Peter from The Serpent's Shadow again (and actually might be confused about who the hell they are, if you haven't read that book, though otherwise this volume stands alone). But if you're new to the series, get some of the earlier ones first, and leave Unnatural Issue alone.
The other Elemental Masters novels -- notably the two mentioned -- have sympathetic characters and love stories that actually make sense in terms of the plot. But for Unnatural Issue, Lackey just seems to be phoning it in (as one of the Amazon reviewers said). It was actually difficult for me to read the first 25-30 % of the book, because the writing was that terrible. It had a rough draft quality to it, and if someone edited this book, it is NOT apparent. Speaker attributions are regularly constructed in a hackish manner. In this book, it's almost never: "'Help!' Susanne said." It's always: "'Help! screamed Susanne frantically." (If you're calling for help, it's assumed you're somewhat frantic and that your voice is raised. The mood and manner of your request for help should be apparent from the situation you find yourself in. It's insulting to the reader to tell us the same thing twice. It also wastes space on the page.)
Also problematic: continual use of "that" when "who" is meant. This bothers me enough to have a grammar pet peeve post about it in the near future.
Speaking of telling us the same thing twice, there's a space of a couple of pages where Susanne (our heroine, but we'll get to the characters in a moment) is concerned that her father is taking notice of her after two decades of ignoring her. She has a bad feeling about this. She thinks he's up to something evil. It's weird that he's paying attention to her, and he must be up to something really evil. She can feel it. She doesn't know what it is but it must be bad. And so on, for paragraph after paragraph. Four or five pages to make one point. (Take those last couple of sentences I wrote, and imagine extending them out past the 3 or 4 lines they take up. It gets downright BORING to read.) In general, there's a lot of telling, and not a lot of showing in this book. Example: we find out Susanne's father has become SOOOOO powerful because he was studying with Hun necromancers. Even though he's a major viewpoint character in the book, we never hear about this in his scenes. It's only a side comment near the end of the book.
Another flaw is the attempt to introduce dialect and local ways of speaking. With all the "tha" instead of "you," it can sometimes be downright impossible to read. Here, I'd honestly be satisfied with a mention of Susanne's Yorkshire accent. I don't want to have to read it. It's even worse when Charles and Peter are speaking to each other, I feel like they're two teenage boys who spend too much time on Memebase and like to pretend they look like this:
It's like an SNL sketch or something, the way they talk. I have a hard time taking these characters seriously. Especially when Peter, who is supposed to be investigating necromancy, appears in his aristocrat guise at Charles's house in the country, then leaves, only to return in disguise as a huntmaster or groundskeeper or some such, with the same servant, who is now posing as his half-brother. As if the servants are that stupid, that they wouldn't be able to tell these were exactly the same two guys.
I should probably introduce a bit of the story at this point. Richard is an Earth Master who's been called to London to deal with some magical nastiness; he arrives home to find his pregnant wife has gone into premature labor and died, though the baby (Susanne) was fine. He locks himself away on the second floor and never wants to see his daughter again. This continues for about twenty years, until he sees Susanne out the window one day. She's apparently the spitting image of her mother, and he gets the idea to bring her mother's spirit back into Susanne's body. At first, it's utterly unclear why he would want Susanne's mother back -- when he reminisces, he continually calls her simple and has to set her to tasks to improve herself because she's not ambitious enough. (Later, at least, this makes sense -- she adored him, for whatever reason, and he liked to be admired by her.)
Anyway, he starts paying attention to Susanne, and this makes her uncomfortable, and she eventually runs away, to a nearby farm where the Kettridges (Charles and his parents) live. She runs into Peter here (remember, he's been sent to investigate necromancy) and is outed because of her magical talents. She's sent to France, where World War I breaks out, she poses as a nurse, she's sent back to England. There's a confrontation, the building she's in is bombed by a zeppelin, her father dies, she escapes, and BOOM, it's the end. Just like that. The pacing is super-uneven in this book; we get all sorts of insight into the life of a dairy maid (what she poses as during the initial part of her stay at the Kettridges' home), and very little of the rest of her life, except for continual reminders that nurses on the Front never had enough hypodermic needles or syringes (gee, that makes me cringe to think of reusing needles and syringes...), as she flits about from place to place, from front line to rooming house to hotel and so on. Though I would imagine the front lines in WWI to have been hectic, dangerous, etc., Susanne has no trouble running into Charles again and again.
And there's this love quadrangle going on. Peter (who is higher in station even than Charles) falls for Susanne, but Susanne has fallen for Charles, who's above her station, but Charles has a fiancee named Rose, who is actually a socially appropriate match for him according to the standards of the time. In the end, Peter, as the younger of two brothers, thinks he can get away with being in a relationship with Susanne, and she seems to be giving him a chance. It's not really developed enough -- Rose comes out of nowhere near the end, and it doesn't totally make sense -- while class was enough to keep Susanne from Charles, it's not enough to keep Peter from Susanne (who is higher than Charles).
I don't actually find Susanne to be that great of a character, though. I don't really like her. She considers it her duty at the beginning of the book to care for the land around her family estate. It is difficult for her to leave home. But then she never looks back; spares exactly one sentence of thought for all the servants who raised her when she finds out her father killed them (and reanimated their corpses). And all the while that she's helping out with things, before her father takes notice of her, she grumbles that no one appreciates what she does for the land, or that she's some sort of gentry and is better than a servant, etc. She drops this by the end, and actually does some useful things, but our first impression is not that great, and unfortunately it stuck with me throughout the book. We're also continually reminded that Susanne is SO POWERFUL but she's hardly given a chance to prove herself. Most of the time, she runs away before there's a confrontation, or others fight off the revived corpses. Then the roof collapses and kills her father. Then we're not really sure what will happen to her after the end of the book, because the ending is so abrupt.
Her father is another caricature of an evil bad guy. He wants to put his dead wife's spirit in his daughter's body, then take her away to Italy and fire all the servants and marry his own daughter, and he kills all the servants and brings them back to life, and he employs all manner of evil elementals, studies with magicians from the opposing side in the war, he's a misogynist, etc. I can understand he was despondent when his wife died, and he wasn't there with her, but his descent into something despicable was abrupt and complete and is not justified by what happened to him, I think. Unless he was already fragile -- and to be fair, there is a hint of this -- and an asshole before his wife died, and this last thing just put him over the edge.
This one also feels like I've read it before, mostly in other Elemental Masters novels. Susanne's plight is a lot like Eleanor's from Phoenix and Ashes, in that she's living as a servant in her own home though she's a powerful mage (a master, even!). Now maybe this is because these books are ostensibly based on fairy tales, and a lot of fairy tales are quite similar in theme to one another.
Honestly, there's just not much recommending this book for me. Think I might write a "reviewing the reviewers" post on it soon. There are a lot of worthless 5-star reviews for this one. I suppose if you've read the others, you'll enjoy seeing Maya and Peter from The Serpent's Shadow again (and actually might be confused about who the hell they are, if you haven't read that book, though otherwise this volume stands alone). But if you're new to the series, get some of the earlier ones first, and leave Unnatural Issue alone.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Ode to the Science Fiction Book Club
Sorry this is free verse, but I think making it rhyme would be difficult and I'd still be working on it this time next year. I'm not a poet.
You introduced me to Steven Erikson,
Steven Donaldson, Guy Gavriel Kay,
Glen Cook, Brandon Sanderson,
Carol Berg, Patrick Rothfuss,
Joe Abercrombie, and George R.R. Martin
And for that I love you, and I've
Been a member for close to ten years
I've got lots of nice matching hardcovers
On my shelves, though physically, they're
Smaller than the ones from the bookstore
But the copy of The Belgariad,
Volumes One through Three, you sent
Was missing sixty pages and you
Kept billing me for replacement copies
When it was your screw up in the first place
And when I ordered all the Shannara
Books you carried, I received an
Empty damaged box with no books inside
Blame it on the Postal Service if you must
But poor packaging was also to blame
And recently you sent me a random
Steampunk book instead of the epic
Fantasy I'd ordered. Luckily I discovered
Things get resolved much more quickly
If you call instead of e-mail
Like last week, when you sent me
Another empty box, instead of Heir of Novron
By Michael J. Sullivan, and when you sent
The replacement order, that box was also open
But at least the book was inside this time
And what the hell was with you offering
"The Best of the Best Cookbook Recipes"
As a featured selection a couple of years ago?
By the way, I have learned never to allow
You to auto-charge my credit card
So here's to another decade of
Discovering new authors, and book
Reviews on my blog, and omnibus
Editions full of typographical errors
Thanks, SFBC!
You introduced me to Steven Erikson,
Steven Donaldson, Guy Gavriel Kay,
Glen Cook, Brandon Sanderson,
Carol Berg, Patrick Rothfuss,
Joe Abercrombie, and George R.R. Martin
And for that I love you, and I've
Been a member for close to ten years
I've got lots of nice matching hardcovers
On my shelves, though physically, they're
Smaller than the ones from the bookstore
But the copy of The Belgariad,
Volumes One through Three, you sent
Was missing sixty pages and you
Kept billing me for replacement copies
When it was your screw up in the first place
And when I ordered all the Shannara
Books you carried, I received an
Empty damaged box with no books inside
Blame it on the Postal Service if you must
But poor packaging was also to blame
And recently you sent me a random
Steampunk book instead of the epic
Fantasy I'd ordered. Luckily I discovered
Things get resolved much more quickly
If you call instead of e-mail
Like last week, when you sent me
Another empty box, instead of Heir of Novron
By Michael J. Sullivan, and when you sent
The replacement order, that box was also open
But at least the book was inside this time
And what the hell was with you offering
"The Best of the Best Cookbook Recipes"
As a featured selection a couple of years ago?
By the way, I have learned never to allow
You to auto-charge my credit card
So here's to another decade of
Discovering new authors, and book
Reviews on my blog, and omnibus
Editions full of typographical errors
Thanks, SFBC!
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Review - The Bards of Bone Plain
I have been in a bit of a funk lately (life is getting to me, you know -- the prospect of graduating and having to find a job, since the $7 I won playing Powerball last night isn't exactly enough to retire on). Reading The Pattern Scars wasn't the antidote I was looking for (see my review for more on that). So when I scanned my bookshelves to choose what to read next, and I happened upon an unread Patricia McKillip, I seized the opportunity. (Saw The Bards of Bone Plain in mass market paperback at B&N on Friday for the first time, so I suppose this is at least a little timely.)
Anyway, if you are already a fan of McKillip, you will like Bards as well. I have previously read her Riddle-Master trilogy and Od Magic (Riddle-Master much more recently) and was hoping for more of the same, and Bards delivered in that respect. I suppose I should count myself lucky, as she has many more books out there, most of which seem to be standalones. I could stock up, and pick one up whenever I get through some other work I find particularly depressing.
All of the McKillip books I've read have centered around schools, and The Bards of Bone Plain is no exception. In this case, it's a school for bards, with younger students, and older students who are something like graduate students in that they've been through the courses already, for the most part, and now teach a bit and write papers which sound like dissertations or theses. The story is constructed in two parts that merge at the end, with one being the historical account of a young bard, Nairn, who ends up at the site of this very school being constructed. The other part centers around two students at the school (Phelan, the son of a wealthy and ill-tempered/ill-mannered archaeologist, and Zoe, a talented young bard-ette who is also a cook) and the Princess Beatrice, one of the younger children of the king and queen who would prefer to spend her time on digs with Phelan's father Jonah than on activities of which her mother approves. (Beatrice's father does share an interest in archaeology and encourages her activities.)
The world of this book was unique in that technology like motorcars and trams (steam-powered?) exist and yet the feel of the place is still out of classic fantasy. (You know, there are princesses and court bards and so forth.) I haven't seen anything quite like that before, though of course young musicians hanging out in taverns is nothing new (see A Song for Arbonne or The Name of the Wind if you happen to enjoy that, by the way).
It's a short book, as are McKillip's others (at least those that I've read) but you actually do come to care about the characters. The "modern day" ones are sympathetic, though the historical ones are more interesting and complex (and ultimately, tragic).
The language, especially in the narrative passages, is quite nice. Speaker attributions, again, not so much. Way too many "-ly" words and use of verbs other than "said" or "asked." (If someone asks about something two or three times, we don't need to be told "xxx" so-and-so persisted. The very act of asking a couple of times indicates persistence.) Other than that, though, the dialogue was quite nice, with some quick back and forth exchanges that actually sounded like they could be real conversations. This is something I haven't seen enough lately, and it was greatly appreciated.
All this praise is not to say the book is perfect. I didn't really get the point of the final confrontation. I mentioned the parallel stories; both of them climax with great multi-day competitions for someone to become the king's next court bard. It always boils down to a young person (Nairn, historically, or Zoe, in the contemporary part of the story) against a mysterious stranger, who was called Welkin in Nairn's day and Kelda in Zoe's/Phelan's. Everyone is enthralled by the mysterious stranger, except perhaps for a few of our heroes and heroines, who set out to discover his nature. Nairn and Welkin disappeared under mysterious circumstances, only to turn up as ****SPOILER ALERT**** Jonah and Kelda hundreds of years later.
The part I don't get about the final confrontation is that, here are Zoe and Phelan singing and playing their hearts out in the bardic competition, and here is Jonah, who doesn't trust Kelda at all (we've learned why, at this point -- he's Jonah's ancient nemesis), trying to save Phelan from his (Nairn/Jonah's) own fate, and all Kelda does is give Nairn back his musical ability, which he had lost, and then goes and turns into a standing stone. (Side note...Beatrice digs up an archway/door near the end of the book, and what the hell it is or why everyone is so excited about it is never adequately explained. She kind of gives up on it to go watch the bard competition.)
The reason I don't understand Kelda's actions is because he's the same as Welkin all those centuries ago. Nairn thought Welkin was evil, and probably untalented except he had a special harp with secret runic symbols carved into it that gave him his musical ability. It's never explained if Welkin was evil. Or why he was holding secret classes with a bunch of students from the bard school in the tunnels under the castle. Sure, it made him seem sinister, but he never actually seems to have done any harm except blow a door off its hinges with a word.
I surmise Welkin/Kelda was supposed to be some ancient spirit of Bone Plain (a mysterious location which may or may not be right where the bard school is) who was sent to test Nairn, but this is never really clear. It is said that Nairn was to face three challenges on Bone Plain and that he'd failed and had been doomed to live eternally without his musical talents. These challenges are named (a tower, and a cauldron, and something else which currently escapes me) but they are never adequately addressed. The tower is sort of explained, but the mention of the cauldron at the end seems like a cop-out.
There are so many hints at a history that was ancient even in Nairn's time -- old songs, runic writing, ruins, the moving standing stones, the trials of Bone Plain -- that I would have loved the book to have been twice as long to really get into the details. More length might have cleared up some of the issues I addressed in the previous few paragraphs, as well.
As one Amazon reviewer points out, Phelan's and Beatrice's romance kind of comes out of nowhere. He's known her a long time, but finds himself in bed with her one morning and suddenly becomes one of the most talented bards around because he's in love with her? It deserved a little more development, I think.
I am glad I don't have to give out stars here, because I'm not sure what I'd pick. There were some definite flaws in the overall narrative and story structure, but the writing was generally quite nice. The world was interesting, and instead of having a one-dimensional villain, the antagonistic relationships were complex and no one character was truly evil. A number of plot points were not adequately explained, in my mind. Did I get what I wanted out of this book, though? Definitely. I needed something light and easy to read and with a happy ending, and this book was nothing if not that.
Anyway, if you are already a fan of McKillip, you will like Bards as well. I have previously read her Riddle-Master trilogy and Od Magic (Riddle-Master much more recently) and was hoping for more of the same, and Bards delivered in that respect. I suppose I should count myself lucky, as she has many more books out there, most of which seem to be standalones. I could stock up, and pick one up whenever I get through some other work I find particularly depressing.
All of the McKillip books I've read have centered around schools, and The Bards of Bone Plain is no exception. In this case, it's a school for bards, with younger students, and older students who are something like graduate students in that they've been through the courses already, for the most part, and now teach a bit and write papers which sound like dissertations or theses. The story is constructed in two parts that merge at the end, with one being the historical account of a young bard, Nairn, who ends up at the site of this very school being constructed. The other part centers around two students at the school (Phelan, the son of a wealthy and ill-tempered/ill-mannered archaeologist, and Zoe, a talented young bard-ette who is also a cook) and the Princess Beatrice, one of the younger children of the king and queen who would prefer to spend her time on digs with Phelan's father Jonah than on activities of which her mother approves. (Beatrice's father does share an interest in archaeology and encourages her activities.)
The world of this book was unique in that technology like motorcars and trams (steam-powered?) exist and yet the feel of the place is still out of classic fantasy. (You know, there are princesses and court bards and so forth.) I haven't seen anything quite like that before, though of course young musicians hanging out in taverns is nothing new (see A Song for Arbonne or The Name of the Wind if you happen to enjoy that, by the way).
It's a short book, as are McKillip's others (at least those that I've read) but you actually do come to care about the characters. The "modern day" ones are sympathetic, though the historical ones are more interesting and complex (and ultimately, tragic).
The language, especially in the narrative passages, is quite nice. Speaker attributions, again, not so much. Way too many "-ly" words and use of verbs other than "said" or "asked." (If someone asks about something two or three times, we don't need to be told "xxx" so-and-so persisted. The very act of asking a couple of times indicates persistence.) Other than that, though, the dialogue was quite nice, with some quick back and forth exchanges that actually sounded like they could be real conversations. This is something I haven't seen enough lately, and it was greatly appreciated.
All this praise is not to say the book is perfect. I didn't really get the point of the final confrontation. I mentioned the parallel stories; both of them climax with great multi-day competitions for someone to become the king's next court bard. It always boils down to a young person (Nairn, historically, or Zoe, in the contemporary part of the story) against a mysterious stranger, who was called Welkin in Nairn's day and Kelda in Zoe's/Phelan's. Everyone is enthralled by the mysterious stranger, except perhaps for a few of our heroes and heroines, who set out to discover his nature. Nairn and Welkin disappeared under mysterious circumstances, only to turn up as ****SPOILER ALERT**** Jonah and Kelda hundreds of years later.
The part I don't get about the final confrontation is that, here are Zoe and Phelan singing and playing their hearts out in the bardic competition, and here is Jonah, who doesn't trust Kelda at all (we've learned why, at this point -- he's Jonah's ancient nemesis), trying to save Phelan from his (Nairn/Jonah's) own fate, and all Kelda does is give Nairn back his musical ability, which he had lost, and then goes and turns into a standing stone. (Side note...Beatrice digs up an archway/door near the end of the book, and what the hell it is or why everyone is so excited about it is never adequately explained. She kind of gives up on it to go watch the bard competition.)
The reason I don't understand Kelda's actions is because he's the same as Welkin all those centuries ago. Nairn thought Welkin was evil, and probably untalented except he had a special harp with secret runic symbols carved into it that gave him his musical ability. It's never explained if Welkin was evil. Or why he was holding secret classes with a bunch of students from the bard school in the tunnels under the castle. Sure, it made him seem sinister, but he never actually seems to have done any harm except blow a door off its hinges with a word.
I surmise Welkin/Kelda was supposed to be some ancient spirit of Bone Plain (a mysterious location which may or may not be right where the bard school is) who was sent to test Nairn, but this is never really clear. It is said that Nairn was to face three challenges on Bone Plain and that he'd failed and had been doomed to live eternally without his musical talents. These challenges are named (a tower, and a cauldron, and something else which currently escapes me) but they are never adequately addressed. The tower is sort of explained, but the mention of the cauldron at the end seems like a cop-out.
There are so many hints at a history that was ancient even in Nairn's time -- old songs, runic writing, ruins, the moving standing stones, the trials of Bone Plain -- that I would have loved the book to have been twice as long to really get into the details. More length might have cleared up some of the issues I addressed in the previous few paragraphs, as well.
As one Amazon reviewer points out, Phelan's and Beatrice's romance kind of comes out of nowhere. He's known her a long time, but finds himself in bed with her one morning and suddenly becomes one of the most talented bards around because he's in love with her? It deserved a little more development, I think.
I am glad I don't have to give out stars here, because I'm not sure what I'd pick. There were some definite flaws in the overall narrative and story structure, but the writing was generally quite nice. The world was interesting, and instead of having a one-dimensional villain, the antagonistic relationships were complex and no one character was truly evil. A number of plot points were not adequately explained, in my mind. Did I get what I wanted out of this book, though? Definitely. I needed something light and easy to read and with a happy ending, and this book was nothing if not that.
Monday, February 13, 2012
What's Driving E-Book Sales
I find this article from The Guardian interesting. It says that e-book sales are being driven by "downmarket" genre fiction -- sci-fi, romance, horror, etc. I guess it's the sort of thing people would've been embarrassed to read on mass transit or in airports in the past, because they'd've been seen with bodice ripper covers or slasher novels. (I say, bring it on. But then it seems most of the books I've ordered lately have men in black cloaks with hoods on the covers. Plus, I don't really give a crap what people think about me. I wear 10-year-old Airwalks with flames on the sides and t-shirts from LOLMart on most days -- at least until I get a real job, I suppose.)
It's hypocritical, I think, to have classics on the shelf and genre fiction on the e-reader. It's like you want to impress visitors to your home but you actually carry the "downmarket" stuff with you when you're out and about, and no one can see it because it's on an e-reader. (The majority of my books these days are fantasy novels, though I have some "intelligent" reading as well, mostly left over from my days as a Harvard undergrad, since I've never sold a textbook back. For what it's worth, my diploma is not framed and is currently in a drawer. Maybe one day I'll hang it up. And people can contemplate it next to the cat toys and fantasy novels and draw whatever conclusions they want.)
Interesting also, in the Guardian piece, to think about how there's no one industry-wide practice for collecting information on e-book sales. I suspect this will have to change, however.
It's hypocritical, I think, to have classics on the shelf and genre fiction on the e-reader. It's like you want to impress visitors to your home but you actually carry the "downmarket" stuff with you when you're out and about, and no one can see it because it's on an e-reader. (The majority of my books these days are fantasy novels, though I have some "intelligent" reading as well, mostly left over from my days as a Harvard undergrad, since I've never sold a textbook back. For what it's worth, my diploma is not framed and is currently in a drawer. Maybe one day I'll hang it up. And people can contemplate it next to the cat toys and fantasy novels and draw whatever conclusions they want.)
Interesting also, in the Guardian piece, to think about how there's no one industry-wide practice for collecting information on e-book sales. I suspect this will have to change, however.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Please tell me...
Hey, anyone who is actually reading this, and exploring this blog. Please tell me if you find any broken links. Post a comment on any page and let me know what the problem is. I just found a bad link on my "reviews" page (tab at the top of the page) by chance. I fixed it, and I hope there aren't any more out there. But really, I put this content out there because I want people to see it and if there are broken links, well, people can't see it.
I may not be able to do much about blogs, articles, etc. that I link to -- if those are gone, they're unlikely to be found again. But internal links (like my "reviews" or "services" or "lists" pages, or Wikipedia links, or meme pictures, or links to publishers' websites, well, I can and will fix those).
This blog is of a size now where it is unlikely I can go back and revisit old posts and spruce them up. Instead, I choose to keep soldiering on. But a lot of people find this blog through Google searches and hit old posts; my second post ever, Worst Fantasy Series, still gets a lot of hits. (And, by the way, I haven't changed my opinion on that particular topic.)
Also, seeking examples for an upcoming post. My Bad Fathers post was popular and I've been thinking of doing a Bad Mothers post. I'm having trouble coming up with many. Maybe I'll go stare at the bookshelves for awhile and something will come to me.
I may not be able to do much about blogs, articles, etc. that I link to -- if those are gone, they're unlikely to be found again. But internal links (like my "reviews" or "services" or "lists" pages, or Wikipedia links, or meme pictures, or links to publishers' websites, well, I can and will fix those).
This blog is of a size now where it is unlikely I can go back and revisit old posts and spruce them up. Instead, I choose to keep soldiering on. But a lot of people find this blog through Google searches and hit old posts; my second post ever, Worst Fantasy Series, still gets a lot of hits. (And, by the way, I haven't changed my opinion on that particular topic.)
Also, seeking examples for an upcoming post. My Bad Fathers post was popular and I've been thinking of doing a Bad Mothers post. I'm having trouble coming up with many. Maybe I'll go stare at the bookshelves for awhile and something will come to me.
Allusions
Found this in the New York Times a week or so ago:
Grand Allusion
I know, I know, not very timely of me. But my weeks are so full that I have to come up with like 10 blog posts on Sunday afternoons and hope they stay at least a little relevant throughout the course of the week.
Anyway, I was pleased to at least recognize quite a few of the allusions in the piece. I read Anna Karenina close to 20 years ago, so while I remember who Vronsky was, I don't remember the incident with the horse. I remember Scylla and Charybdis from The Odyssey and have always thought Natty Bumppo had one of the dumbest surnames in fiction (which is probably why they called him "Nathaniel" in the movie).
I wondered this week, when I saw the phrase "tilt at windmills" on at least two successive days in the New York Times, how many people got that reference (I never read Don Quixote but somehow I figured it out).
Actually, this post is giving me some ideas for my "reading outside of genre" project. And anyway, I'm sure I'd get more out of Tolstoy at 34 than I did at 14.
Grand Allusion
I know, I know, not very timely of me. But my weeks are so full that I have to come up with like 10 blog posts on Sunday afternoons and hope they stay at least a little relevant throughout the course of the week.
Anyway, I was pleased to at least recognize quite a few of the allusions in the piece. I read Anna Karenina close to 20 years ago, so while I remember who Vronsky was, I don't remember the incident with the horse. I remember Scylla and Charybdis from The Odyssey and have always thought Natty Bumppo had one of the dumbest surnames in fiction (which is probably why they called him "Nathaniel" in the movie).
I wondered this week, when I saw the phrase "tilt at windmills" on at least two successive days in the New York Times, how many people got that reference (I never read Don Quixote but somehow I figured it out).
Actually, this post is giving me some ideas for my "reading outside of genre" project. And anyway, I'm sure I'd get more out of Tolstoy at 34 than I did at 14.
Bestseller Lists
If you are interested in what makes a book a "bestseller" and how the different bestseller lists differ, you may want to check this out:
What Being a Bestselling Author Really Means from Fast Company
This term has changed and is changing in this world of e-books, self-publishing, etc. It's interesting to think about for someone like me, since I'm writing a novel right now. I do check out the New York Times lists for fiction regularly, but I'm noticing Amazon sales ranks more and more, as well.
Sorry for all the short posts lately, I'm finding myself not really in the mood to write long commentaries these days. (Going through a slump probably related to getting close to finishing my PhD and the very real need to find a job, coming up. I hate not knowing what I'll be doing in 6 or 8 months.) Though in the interest of keeping the blog alive, I am passing on articles of interest that I find as I surf the web. That is, until I finish another book, when I'll post another review.
Still looking for suggestions for my "out of genre" reading project for February. Offer your suggestions in the comments to any post.
What Being a Bestselling Author Really Means from Fast Company
This term has changed and is changing in this world of e-books, self-publishing, etc. It's interesting to think about for someone like me, since I'm writing a novel right now. I do check out the New York Times lists for fiction regularly, but I'm noticing Amazon sales ranks more and more, as well.
Sorry for all the short posts lately, I'm finding myself not really in the mood to write long commentaries these days. (Going through a slump probably related to getting close to finishing my PhD and the very real need to find a job, coming up. I hate not knowing what I'll be doing in 6 or 8 months.) Though in the interest of keeping the blog alive, I am passing on articles of interest that I find as I surf the web. That is, until I finish another book, when I'll post another review.
Still looking for suggestions for my "out of genre" reading project for February. Offer your suggestions in the comments to any post.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Fan Fiction, Revisited
Found this the other day. Mark Zuckerberg fan fiction. Really? Some people seriously have no lives. And it's just as bad as any other fan fiction, judging from the examples. Lots of erotica, including the gay variety. (Not that I have anything against gay romantic fiction or erotica, though I don't read either, it's just that this stuff is all over the place in fan fiction.)
I have written about fan fiction here in the past, though I can't seem to find the post now. (Needle in a haystack, I suppose, after 300+ posts.) I hate fan fiction. I don't see it as a valuable use of anyone's time. You're not being creative if you write it (well, the combination of Mark Zuckerberg fiction and the X-Men at the link above was a little different), you're ripping off characters created by someone else and putting yourself in there as a thinly-disguised Mary Sue, and often you can't even write well (or bother to use the spell-checker).
If you want to write, don't do fan fiction. Seriously. If you need help, take a class. Community colleges have them. There are online communities, as well. Writer's Digest has writing prompts. I'm all for people who love to write, writing, but I think you really limit yourself if you stick to fan fiction -- which you really can't publish, anyway.
I have written about fan fiction here in the past, though I can't seem to find the post now. (Needle in a haystack, I suppose, after 300+ posts.) I hate fan fiction. I don't see it as a valuable use of anyone's time. You're not being creative if you write it (well, the combination of Mark Zuckerberg fiction and the X-Men at the link above was a little different), you're ripping off characters created by someone else and putting yourself in there as a thinly-disguised Mary Sue, and often you can't even write well (or bother to use the spell-checker).
If you want to write, don't do fan fiction. Seriously. If you need help, take a class. Community colleges have them. There are online communities, as well. Writer's Digest has writing prompts. I'm all for people who love to write, writing, but I think you really limit yourself if you stick to fan fiction -- which you really can't publish, anyway.
Childish Behavior from Big Corporations
From Bloomberg Businessweek: Barnes & Noble says it won't stock Amazon titles
From the New York Times: Barnes & Noble Won't Sell Books from Amazon Publishing
You don't really even have to click to get the gist of these stories. The way I see it, the people really losing out are (1) the consumers, who now don't have a choice of where to purchase some titles -- and some of us really like physical bookstores and (2) new authors looking for print publishers -- who wants to pass up being sold at B&N? (Also, of course, books that are not available for both Nook and Kindle will have smaller audiences.)
From the New York Times: Barnes & Noble Won't Sell Books from Amazon Publishing
You don't really even have to click to get the gist of these stories. The way I see it, the people really losing out are (1) the consumers, who now don't have a choice of where to purchase some titles -- and some of us really like physical bookstores and (2) new authors looking for print publishers -- who wants to pass up being sold at B&N? (Also, of course, books that are not available for both Nook and Kindle will have smaller audiences.)
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