Constructive Criticism

Little experiment here.  Part of my "Operation Literary Critic" project.  I decided I'd start out by being nice to someone on FanFiction.net.  (I also decided I'd only comment on fan fiction for books I've actually read.)

Instead of "it's just getting interesting" or "I can't wait to see what happens next" or some crap like that, I thought I'd offer real advice.  If anyone responds, I'll discuss it here.

Defenders of fan fiction say they're in it for the community, for the chance to improve their own writing, for the transformative experience it offers, blah, blah, blah.  Well, let's put that to the test.  I've got a prediction about the sort of reaction my commentary is going to get, but I'll wait to share it until I get some replies.  I may have to fish for awhile before someone takes the bait.

Here's the first story I critiqued, based on Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy.  You can see which comments are mine from the user name.

B&N Disappointment, Part Two

I've mentioned this before, but I'm not happy with the direction Barnes and Noble is taking.  First, it was getting rid of books and expanding the toy section.

I went there Sunday night.  My boyfriend had a couple of gift cards to spend, though I'm the only one who actually bought anything.  But anyway, two things bothered me:

• 50 Shades galore: there were like hundreds of copies of these books all over the place (blech)
• No Among Others: I was interested in buying this after it won the Nebula Award, but I couldn't find a copy anywhere in the store (I ordered it on Amazon.com later that night)

Well, if I had to mention a third thing, it would be that the Nook section is encroaching on the rest of the store.  It's getting closer and closer to the door, and you can't avoid looking the Nook guy in the eye as you walk in.  It's almost like they have a recording saying "Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook Nook" when you walk in the door.  (I picture it in the voice of those Sesame Street aliens and that makes it a little better.)

If you don't remember the Sesame Street aliens, here you go:



All right, that's about as random and off-topic as I can get. Time to sign off.

Operation Literary Critic

I write reviews on this blog.  I complain about fan fiction.  I nitpick grammar and spelling and usage.  I talk about the dumbing down of America's students/writing instruction/standardized testing.  (I also occasionally update my readers on the progress of my manuscript.)

What it all boils down to, though, is that I expect a lot out of the writing I read.  (Originality, good characters, interesting plot, command of the written English language, etc.)  And since I like to criticize, it's only fair that I write my own novel and put my work out there for others to read and comment on.  (Granted, this blog is anonymous -- hey, I'm in the job market right now -- and the novel will be submitted to publishers under my real name.)

But back to the purpose of this post.  I wrote about Book Country earlier this year.  I decided to join; look for me there as Sneaky Burrito.  (Big surprise.)  What I hope to do is offer constructive criticism to help aspiring authors improve their work.  I'm not interested in tearing anyone down.  I admire the courage of people to post their fiction online where anyone can see it.  So I'll be nicer about what I say on Book Country than I am in my reviews on this blog.  (And anyway, Book Country work is work in progress.  People are looking for suggestions.  They haven't already been accepted by publishers.  Published work is in a whole different category.)

But, I still have to have an outlet for my snarkiness.  So I'm also joining FanFiction.net.  I have no intention of writing or posting any fan fiction.  I only joined so I can post reviews.

My intent is to write a blog post every week or so detailing my activities on these two sites.  We'll see how that goes.

Readability

One of the great things about screwing around on the internet for an entire afternoon (minus an hour and a half in the bathtub working on this month's out-of-genre reading project amidst rose-scented bubbles) is that I find some fun websites.  I turned up this readability index calculator and I had to share.

If you want to read about algorithms, you go right ahead.  There are links.  I'm not going to bother with that.

I plugged in the first two sections of my Ph.D. thesis.  Got this:

Flesch-Kincaid Grade level: 18.
Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease score: 2.

That means you have to have at least a master's degree, basically, to read it.  And a reading ease score of 2?  Wow.  They say legalese is less than 10, and comics are around 90.  (It depends on who's doing the reading.  My committee thought it was one of the best-written theses they've seen.  But they're all Ph.D.s/chemists/college professors.)

Then I plugged in the first 10 pages of my novel manuscript.  Got this:

Flesch-Kincaid Grade level: 6.
Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease score: 71.

Well, there are some words in the manuscript you probably shouldn't let a 6th grader read.  But that's good.  Harder to read than comics but much, much easier than my thesis.  What makes me happy about this is that I can tailor my writing to my audience, and I can write in a variety of styles for a variety of audiences.

I could do this all day.  I plugged in a random blog entry (my review of The Fire Rose by Mercedes Lackey).  Got this:

Flesch-Kincaid Grade level: 7.
Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease score: 64.

Interestingly, the novel is easier to read than this blog.  (It's also much more heavily edited.  This blog is pretty much stream of consciousness.)  Though I'm sure this varies by entry.

Okay, I'm going to stop before I start pasting fan fiction, articles from the New York Times, bad Amazon reviews, etc.

One Year Anniversary

Hard to believe, but it's been one year since I re-started this blog.  Nearly 500 posts later, it may not have turned out to be quite what I intended when I started, but the blog has definitely taken on a life of its own.  Here's a list of blog topics that have generated multiple posts:

• reviews of fantasy novels (these posts still get the most hits)
• discussions of tropes in fantasy novels
• discussions of books, e-books, and the general state of the publishing industry
• updates on my own writing efforts
• my pet grammar peeves
• student writing and how to evaluate it and improve it
• science in fantasy and how it is not always well-understood by authors
• plagiarism and fan fiction
• random links to stories about fantasy authors (including, but not limited to, obituaries)
• Amazon reviews and reviewers
• writing resources on the web
• George R.R. Martin and Game of Thrones (probably rates his own category)
• "best of" book lists (my own, and commentary on others)
• cover art
• reading outside the fantasy genre and what it has taught/is teaching me

So it's not strictly a fantasy blog, though the posts are overwhelmingly about fantasy literature.  I guess I try to situate fantasy, and my take on it, in the broader context of literature and writing.  Because fantasy is not *just* genre fiction, though it sometimes gets treated that way.

Anyway, here's to a successful year two!

Fan Fiction of Fan Fiction

When will it end?

"Fifty Shades" books now have fan fiction of their own

I went to fanfiction.net and read part of one.  And it made my brain hurt, the writing was so bad.  It's a good thing it's on my MacBook Pro's screen, as I was so tempted to take a red pen and start marking it. It would've been a futile exercise had I been correcting it on paper.  Not sure if the whole page would've been red at the end with ink or red with blood from me having stabbed my eyes out with my own pen.

There are a lot of misspellings (a pre-med student ought to know how to spell "Tylenol," for example, and you shouldn't spell one of the characters' names two different ways on the same web page) and some lines that just don't make sense:

"'What?' his eerie, evil eye eyes me suspiciously and I love alliterations... it's always good to be a little random, keeps me sharp and I wasn't about to fall into his trap."

I had a really hard time figuring out what the hell was going on in this sentence.  I understand alliteration but I kept looking for it in the dialogue, not the narrator's internal monologue.  I gather it was supposed to be "eerie, evil eye eyes" but alliteration isn't just repeating a letter, it's a sound.  You could argue that "eerie" and "evil" kind of sound the same, and "eye" and "eyes" obviously have the same vowel sound, but the group of four words isn't really alliteration because it uses two (or three) sounds rather than one.  Also ("eye eyes" is just stupid as a subject-verb pair).

Also, this character apparently thinks her own internal monologue is extremely clever -- so clever that she has to digress way the hell off topic to comment on what she perceives to be her own cleverness in case the reader missed it.  (Yeah, used the word "clever" too many times in that sentence.  But at least I recognize that I did.)

The reviews are a joke, as well.  Except for the last one (from BelleMorte08), which actually points out flaws in the story.

The moral of all this: don't try to critique fan fiction.  I felt smart this morning (I defended my PhD thesis on the day I wrote this post so now you have call me "Dr." instead of "Ms.") but trying to read this story just knocked about 50 points off my IQ.  (If I didn't worry about becoming completely dumb from reading the stuff, I could have a whole blog where I make fun of fan fiction.)

Review - Kings of Morning

So you know, I defended my PhD thesis this morning, and instead of doing anything of value this afternoon, I've screwed around on the internet all afternoon (there are enough Cheezburger sites to keep me busy for awhile).  Then I saw Kings of Morning on my table and thought I'd better write my review before I completely forget the book.  (Unfortunately, it may be too late for that.  I've been too busy thinking about my defense.  And my sick cat.  But I digress.)

So at the end of Corvus, Rictus's daughter was in love, his wife was dead, and Corvus was king of the Macht and wearing the Curse of God that had belonged to his father.  Kings of Morning, like the previous two volumes in the Macht trilogy, has basically no magic, just this armor, the making of which has been forgotten.  Maybe it's magic, maybe it's not (kinda like Valyrian steel, or maybe not, it's never really described but that's okay).

So there was some confusion after The Ten Thousand about whether or not the Kufr are human.  I was pretty sure after Corvus that they were, and the more I think about it, the more I am sure that they are.  If people have trouble telling what Corvus's heritage is, well, then, he doesn't actually have half a horse head and Paul Kearney was just good at exploring how alien the Macht and Kufr cultures were to each other.  (This also occurred with Torve's people in Russell Kirkpatrick's Broken Man trilogy, although I was never fooled into thinking Torve's people were anything but horribly mistreated humans.  So Kearney does this a little bit better.)

At the beginning of Kings of Morning, Rictus is back with the army.  Some years have passed and Corvus has his heart set on conquering the Asurian Empire.  Once again, there are some gritty battle scenes, something Kearney does quite well.  (And manages without mages setting fire to all the enemy troops.  Not that I'm knocking Steven Erikson, whose books I also like.  It's just kind of nice to see practical battles on occasion, as well.)

Honestly, there's not a lot that's new in this book, at least with regard to the Rictus/Corvus storyline.  Rictus becomes more of a voice of reason to Corvus than a battle commander, though he shows up on the front lines, as well.  (Most of his Dogsheads have been slaughtered by the end.)  The army marches, they are quite reasonable when a city surrenders without a fight (which happens often), but they destroy cities that refuse to yield.  By the end, Rictus is an old man who just wants to go back and see his grandchildren.  He doesn't have a falling out with Corvus, exactly, but is glad to part ways at the end.

There are a number of new characters in this book -- primarily Ashurnan's children (remember Ashurnan, the Great King from The Ten Thousand?).  There's Kouros, the oldest son and presumptive heir, even though he's a violent (at least when the victims are weak or he has a vendetta against them), self-important trope.  Here, I'd disagree with A. Whitehead's Amazon review.  There's nothing particularly original about this type of character.  We saw another guy just like him in Seven Princes (think Gammir/Fangodrel but without the magic).  His mother is also something of a stock character, the harem wife who schemes and manipulates to get what she wants -- her son in charge, with her pulling the strings (which we've seen in The Percheron Saga by Fiona McIntosh).

There's a slave, Kurun, who is also mistreated (by Kouros and his men -- they rape and castrate him for being in the wrong place at the wrong time -- actually also like a character in McIntosh's Percheron Saga, well, not the rape part).  I kind of didn't like Kurun and Kouros being introduced around the same time, I had trouble remembering which was which because of the similarity of the names, although context usually straightened it out for me.  (Kind of like how I named one of my cats after one of my brothers, but my boyfriend usually can figure out what the hell I'm talking about by context.  But I digress.)  I don't actually think Kurun is all that important; he is a vehicle for displaying Kouros's cruelty, but most of his other actions could be done by anyone else.  He does aid in an escape from Ashurnan's ziggurat, but a rewritten scene would've been all it took to eliminate him here, too.  I guess we're supposed to feel sorry for him, and sure, I do, but he doesn't serve much of a purpose.

There are also some twins who are the son and daughter of another of Ashurnan's wives.  The male twin is killed off by Kouros (seen as a competitor for the throne).  His name is Rakhsar and everyone keeps hinting that he's even crueler than Kouros, but we never see it.  His sister is Roshana and she survives the attack.  Corvus marries her to cement his claim to the throne of the Asurian Empire.  Most of the time she is ill or otherwise incapacitated; she does show mercy to Kurun.  But there's really not much to her, either.

So we have the old characters who haven't changed a bit (you could make an argument for Rictus changing at the end, I guess), and new characters who are trope-ish or otherwise uninteresting. I've made mention of grammatical errors in the previous two volumes; there was more of this here, but nothing so glaring that I marked the page to comment upon later.  Same sort of stuff as before, probably fewer errors than The Ten Thousand.  Maybe the editor got better.

I haven't said a lot about this book, but there's not a lot to say.  The plot is kind of like, "this happened, then this happened, then this happened."  The conflict among Ashurnan's children was probably more interesting than anything that happened with Corvus's army.  I guess I'm struggling with the necessity of this volume; you could probably stop reading at Corvus and not miss much.

This isn't a "reviewing the reviewers" post (wow, by the way, as of this writing, the Klausner-bot hasn't gotten to this book) because there are only three reviews posted.  Although, why not?  It'd add some bulk to this post and possibly address a few more issues.  The 5-star review by "Gnosticus" is worthless.  It contains the sentence: "For those who want a novel with a unique ending, this is it."  No, nothing unique about it.  Sorry.  Special boy raises an army, takes over the empire, marries the princess?  Old soldier wants to retire?  I've seen it dozens of times before.  I don't feel like A. Whitehead and I were reading the same book.  At the very least, our standards for evaluation are quite different.  I'd say he hasn't read much fantasy, but I do see detailed reviews posted under his name regularly on Amazon.  It seems like our reading lists overlap quite a bit.  And yet, thinking Kouros is original and well-characterized?  (I do agree with Whitehead's discussion of war, battle, the waste of life, and the aftermath.  This is Kearney's true strength.)  Probably the review I agree with most is the 3-star review by "Poisoned Blade."  Which is pretty much what I thought of the book.  (Click the cover below to go to the Amazon page and read the reviews for yourself.)

I wanted to like this book more, honestly.  I thought Kearney's earlier The Monarchies of God series was quite good.  And he is much better at writing military action than someone like Elizabeth Moon, who focuses on the wrong (read: boring) details.  Maybe it's because he was adapting historical events into a fictional setting (which is fine), but The Monarchies of God was more original and more engaging, as far as I'm concerned.  If you're into military fantasy, read the Macht trilogy.  Corvus -- the middle book -- was probably the best one.

This is Especially True of Fantasy Authors

(Except for me because I successfully defended my PhD in chemistry this week. Though I'm not yet a published fantasy author, either.)

Ack!

I was watching season one of Game of Thrones last night and I realized I need to make a major change to my manuscript.  Because a king getting gored by a boar in a hunting accident isn't terribly original.  (Nor is a set-up to make it look like an accident.)  I don't know how I managed to let that one get by me.  I feel like a dumbass.

Problem is, I still need the guy to be impaled on something.  I've got the "something" but not the set-up.  I'd like to avoid a hunting accident, but need a plausible reason for the impaling.

Also I need to insert a comment about the social structure early on, but there's a good place to do that.  (Otherwise it seems too much like present-day humans playing at acting medieval because the author didn't know any better.  In fact, that's not it at all, but I need to set that out at the beginning or there will be misconceptions.)

And to think I almost didn't do a 7th draft...

Here's a P.S. to the makers of the Game of Thrones television show.  Look, I know you only had a couple of locations for filming.  But it strikes me as poorly-planned that the forest of the North, where Robb and Bran and Theon encounter wildlings, looks exactly the same as the forest which must be somewhere near King's Landing where King Robert and Renly and the others are hunting (ferns, trees with straight trunks, and all).

Dr. Drew and "50 Shades"

I don't know why I keep posting about the Fifty Shades books when I have no intention of reading them.  (Sorry, but fan fiction with the names changed, especially Twilight fan fiction, is definitely not my thing.  I actually don't give a shit whether there's a lot of sex in them or not.)

But, I found this story online, where Dr. Drew criticizes the books for being violent and pathological.

I would like to hear more about the "horribly written" part.  I'd make fun of the books on my blog, but (1) they're not fantasy, (2) they started out as fan fiction, and (3) that would require me to actually purchase and read them, which I will not do.  So instead, I will content myself with news stories and at least be glad that people are actually reading and talking about books.

Self-Publishing Success, Revisited

Not sure how I should feel about this as I am about to start submitting my novel to publishers and I know it's going to end up in a pile like the one in the picture at the following link:

The Most Successful Self-Published Sci-Fi and Fantasy Authors

The only two I could guess in advance were Michael J. Sullivan (I've read all of his novels, though only after the paper copies came out) and Amanda Hocking (her work doesn't sound like my kind of thing). But then, I don't read e-books, so I wouldn't know about most of these.

Some of the comments are definitely worth reading, though long.  One self-published author explains the process he went through.  Not having entered the fray just yet, I'll lit his words speak for themselves (click the link above to see them, duh).

Nebula Award Winner

Congratulations to Jo Walton for winning the Nebula Award for Among Others.

I have not read this book.  But after reading the description on Amazon.com, I very well might.  (Click the link above to go to the Amazon page.)

Not much else to this entry, just figured since I did a preview post last week or so, you all might want a follow-up.  (Actually, looks like I did two previews, if you search "nebula" in the Google search box on my sidebar.  It's easy to forget what I've posted about in the past, when I'm doing like 10 posts a week.  Give me a break, I'm under a lot of stress lately.)

Obscenity in Teen Books

Apparently researchers at Brigham Young University have done a study indicating that YA fiction has a lot more foul language than video games.  And that characters who drop f-bombs and the like, are portrayed as more popular, better-looking, wealthier, etc.

Okay, first of all, art does not imitate life.  I drop f-bombs daily (usually while driving) and I'm neither popular nor wealthy.  (Wouldn't mind being wealthy.  Don't give a shit about being popular.  If I bothered to change out of pajamas and brush my hair, the looks would at least be debatable.)

Second of all, the source is suspect.  I'm not at all surprised that someone at BYU set out to find obscenity in books and found it.

Lastly, to the author of the piece I link to, please learn a phrase other than "rife with" that means the same thing.  Here is a list of synonyms for "rife" from my Dictionary app: widespread, general, common, universal, extensive, ubiquitous, omnipresent, endemic, inescapable, insidious, prevalent, overflowing, bursting, alive, teeming, abounding.  Not every one of them is appropriate, and sentences might have to be reworded, but you get the point.  You use the phrase "rife with" twice in the first three sentences.  Also in the teaser line beneath the title.

Commentary That Takes Fantasy Seriously

I bookmarked this piece from the LA Times the other day:

George R.R. Martin Fights the Genre Wars


It's an excerpt from a book called Beyond the Wall: Exploring George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, From A Game of Thrones to A Dance with Dragons edited by James Lowder.  The particular piece published in the LA Times is by Ned Vizzini.

Most pieces like this that are published on the web are, quite frankly, not very good.  They're short, or full of fluff, or don't delve very deep into the history of the issue at hand.  But I actually think Vizzini does a nice job here.  He's either done his research, or was a big fan to begin with, or possibly both, and it shows.

One thing that I don't think is so unique to Martin is the use of nobles as protagonists.  Maybe commoners (Ged, etc.) were all the rage leading up to 1983, when John H. Timmerman first published Other Worlds: The Fantasy Genre.  (Well, though, that's not strictly true.  The Amber books by Roger Zelazny -- at least the first five -- predate Timmerman's book, and dominated by feuding nobles.)  But most of the fantasy I've read is from the last 15-20 years, and there are lots of nobles.  In fact, the noble-in-disguise/humble-boy-who-becomes-king narrative is pretty popular.  In the Wheel of Time, Perrin marries someone who's close in line to the throne of a country, Mat marries an empress, Elayne is a princess who becomes a queen, Rand takes over lots of places, Egwene takes control of the Aes Sedai, Nynaeve marries a man who should've been king, etc.  In the Sword of Truth, Kahlan is in control of the Midlands, and Richard is the heir to D'Hara, despite his seemingly-humble beginnings.

Now, Martin takes this a bit further; his characters are scheming and sometimes not very likeable.  And he kills them off regularly.  That's new and different and a bit shocking.  (Well, not so new...I gather A Game of Thrones was published in 1996 -- the year I graduated high school.  To put that in some perspective, since 1996 I have completed three bachelor's degrees and will be finishing up my PhD very soon.  But the point of this piece wasn't to decry Martin's slow writing pace.  I've done that enough elsewhere.)

I also like the discussion of "The Hero" (Joseph Campbell's legacy).  I think this needs to be subverted, it shows up all over the place and it's no longer interesting.  So I applaud Vizzini for that discussion.  (If you're interested in learning more about this concept, but don't feel like reading Campbell's books, try Joseph Campbell on Power of Myth With Bill Moyers.  Enjoy the cheesy graphics and Bill Moyers's 1980s TV preacher look.)

At any rate, the piece is not all about George R.R. Martin, but is an in-depth discussion of why fantasy gets relegated to the genre fiction shelves.  Check it out.

Review - Corvus

Corvus is the second book in Paul Kearney's Macht trilogy (The Ten Thousand being the first).  It's also one of those rare cases where the sequel is better than the first volume, and Corvus definitely does not suffer from that all-too-common "second book in a trilogy" issue.  It's not just a placeholder volume.

This is straight-up military fiction.  There's little-to-no magic involved, except for the armor possessed by some among the Macht known as the Curse of God, which is black, which fits itself to the wearer, and which seems to be better than other armor at protecting one from injury.  If you happen to like non-fantasy fantasy, then this book may well be for you.  If you're expecting dragons or elves or some such, look elsewhere.

There are some changes from the first book; gone are all the references to nut-brown skin (what a relief).  Also, while it was not entirely clear that the Kufr were human in the previous volume, now it is clear that they are -- Corvus, the title character, is half-Macht and half-Kufr.  (Rictus is back, and he's a little dense; it was obvious to me from the beginning who Corvus's parents were, but Corvus has to TELL Rictus, who is then stunned, even though I think he was a little drunk at the time, if I remember correctly.)

Fewer typos/grammatical errors this time around, although a couple still appeared.  (For example, when Karnos wakes up on the battlefield after having been wounded, he is described as being "more thirsty" than he ever had been in his life.  Once again, let me remind you all -- it's not a choice to use "more thirsty" versus "thirstier."  You can't pick one for emphasis.  One is correct, and one is not.  It's that simple.  In this case, "thirstier" is actually correct.  Suzanne Collins also has this problem.)

I liked some things about the storyline involving Rictus's wife and daughters, and disliked others.  I've already divulged some spoilers, so here are some more.  (Seriously, don't read this blog if you don't want to see spoilers.  They're everywhere.)

Phaestus is angry that Rictus joined with Corvus instead of standing with the rest of the unconquered Macht.  He gets ostracized from his city and he and his son plot revenge by kidnapping Rictus's wife Aise and his two daughters.  What I like about this storyline is that despite all the co-conspirators' best efforts, Aise and the girls never actually get used as any kind of bait.  We're led along, thinking they will be, and then since everyone thinks Rictus died during the first attempt to take Machran, the situation changes.  Rictus is free to plot and strategize with Corvus to take the city without the fate of his family hanging over his head.  When he does find out what happened to them, though, he fights like a man possessed.  But he and his men make pretty short work of the bad guys at that point.  I'm just glad Kearney wrote it this way, because I kept thinking that if Rictus had known what was going on, any attempt to solve the problem at that point would've been pretty weak.

Now for the thing I didn't like.  Some of Phaestus's fellow kidnappers are unsavory characters, to say the least.  Phaestus gets sick and these guys decide to rape Aise.  And they do it, brutally.  When she's finally free, at the end, she commits suicide.  In a way, it's tempting to compare Aise to Tiryn in The Ten Thousand.  Tiryn is also brutalized, and later loses Jason in a stupid barfight, but finds a life after the fact.  A decent one, judging by the values Corvus holds (he's egotistical but has morals).  Aise decides to take her own life after being brutalized and thinking Rictus is dead.  I mean, Tiryn had to survive to give birth to her half-Macht son.  Aise was less important to the story, as Rictus is always going off to war.  But in general, I hate it that most rape victims in fantasy novels either recover in no time, as if it never happened (Josey in Jon Sprunk's work, Salome in The Twisted Citadel, Paks in The Deed of Paksenarrion) or die (that girl whose name I forget -- Orrade's sister -- in The King's Bastard).

The main characters were complex and not complete badasses.  Corvus would've come close, but he nearly got everyone caught with his little foray into the enemy camp, and his first attempt to storm Machran didn't work.  He's also egotistical, as I think I mentioned before.  But, you find yourself rooting for him because every now and then, his good side shows through.  He fights to save a woman who is being raped, he keeps a tight rein on his troops so they don't destroy the lands they pass through, and he can bring diverse people together.

Rictus's legend has grown; he wants to lead a simple life but keeps being called back to war.  His relationship with his wife is strained, or so it seems.  He doesn't grow much in this book, but we experienced his true growth as a character in The Ten Thousand.

Those are the main good guys; there are a lot of supporting characters who don't get fully fleshed out.  Now for the villains (although, again, they're not supervillains -- they seem like real people).  Karnos is an interesting study.  He owns a lot of slaves, and has sex with a lot of them, but we find later that he has never forgotten his humble beginnings and buys them out of some need to protect them from the evils of the city.  He is a great speaker who inspires many, but he's also a thief (he steals a Curse of God from a dead man after promising to take the armor to the dead man's son).  He isn't a badass at all; he's fat and out of shape and is just another guy in the phalanx.  He doesn't lead soldiers.  He does seem to care for one woman in particular, and feels terrible guilt over what happened to Aise, for which he feels the blame (since he might have suggested that course of action to Phaestus).

Phaestus just wants to be able to go back to his city.  When he's healthy, all is well, but when he falls ill, things get out of his control.  He intends for Aise and Rictus's daughters to be treated well, but his companions attack Aise and he allows it.  He has raised an honorable son, however -- Philemos protects Rian and Ona (Rictus's daughters) from suffering the same fate as their mothers, and has a few other good moments, as well.

There are plenty of battle scenes, and Kearney seems to take great joy in writing them full of gory detail.  You get both the up close, personal view (e.g. Rictus stabbing at people with his spear) and also the views of the commanders, which lines break, etc.  Like I said earlier, if you like military fantasy, you'll want to read this book.  Slightly improbable is Rictus's jump off the walls of Machran onto a pile of bodies and subsequent trip back to Corvus's camp with Ardashir.  What are the odds that not one, but TWO, of Corvus's most important commanders are left for dead on the battlefield and find one another in the aftermath?  (An even worse coincidence is when Aise sees two men stumbling drunkenly after the battle back to Corvus's camp.  I'm assuming they were supposed to be Ardashir and Rictus...)

It's cold and wintry during much of the march, and while harsh conditions are alluded to, we don't hear too much about frostbite or communicable diseases.  I mean, too much of that and you get bogged down in it (like all the winter survival stuff in J.V. Jones's Sword of Shadows series).  But a little more might've enhanced the story.  Still, that's a minor concern.

I'm finding I have less to say about this book than usual.  It's hard to pick apart, which is good, because I've become quite adept at trashing novels for relatively minor infractions.  It depends on my mood, I guess.  I'm kind of sad and depressed today, not angry and confrontational.  (Sick cat, money troubles, anxiety because my PhD defense is this week.)

Anyway, I guess I'll call it quits for this review pretty soon.  I liked this book pretty well; you might not really need to read The Ten Thousand to understand it, though without the first book, Rictus's character is kind of flat.  Lots of gritty military details and almost no magic.  Villains and heroes who are complex, not all good or all bad, not invincible.  So if that's your thing, or if you read pretty broadly (like I do), you'll probably like Corvus.

Don't Quit Your Day Job

Saw this on Forbes.com today:

Only the Rich Should Quit Their Job to Write a Novel

First of all, I've got to poke fun at the title of this article.  Do all the rich, together, have one collective job?

Anyway, the piece isn't at all what you might expect it to be, based on the title.  I was thinking it would be a discussion of the ins and outs of publishing, getting agents, etc., including a discussion of how much money one might expect to make.  Not there.  If you're interested in that sort of thing, try How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy by Orson Scott Card.

What the piece is, instead, is a profile of a young woman from a super-privileged background who'd been working as a bankruptcy attorney, got a little feedback from author friends, and landed an agent and a book deal in short order.  In other words, the kind of luck none of the rest of us have.  (I do have ONE thing in common with her, and that's that I'm also a Harvard grad.  But I kept in touch with no one from college and I just don't have the same kind of resources as the woman profiled in this piece.  I will not be quitting my day job anytime soon.  Well, I'd have to find one first anyway.  I have exactly three graduate student stipend checks coming, and some Stafford loans, and then I have no idea where my next income is coming from.)

I'm not sure what the title is getting at, honestly.  Is no one who's not rich capable of writing a good novel?  Can no one else make it?  It's a sweeping generalization.  (And honestly, I don't know where I fall.  I have the background and education that make me identify with, if not the rich, the upper middle class, but my financial situation classifies me as poor.  So if there's any lesson here, it's that a great education may get you nowhere.  Maybe I'm just a little bitter and I should post this now instead of wallowing in my misery.)

E-Books for College Students

Well, the traffic on this blog has gone to crap lately.  Probably because I'm drifting further and further afield of the stated topic (fantasy).  Cut me some slack, I defend my PhD this week.  I'm now officially underwater on my mortgage thanks to declining property values.  One of my cats has been sick to the tune of $6500 in vet bills.  And I still don't have a job lined up, despite my best efforts.  So I'm under a lot of stress at the moment.

One of the topics I've written about a lot on this blog, which should at least be of interest for people who are into books, if not fantasy in particular, is e-books.  You all no doubt know that I'm not a fan.  But I know people who love their Kindles, like an Israeli friend of mine who takes hers on the long flights back to visit her family.

So when I saw this on Forbes.com, I was interested:

Should College Students Be Forced to Buy E-Books?

My response is no.  Certainly, they should be allowed to buy e-books if they want to.  I've got no problem with that.  But e-books have no resale value.  You can't resell them at all, in fact.  Because why would the publishers want to allow that, when they can sell a new copy to everyone who comes along?  You can't buy used copies (which really doesn't make sense with an e-book anyway as there are no pages to get dogeared or passages to highlight), and according to the piece linked to (which is NOT neutral, since it's written by an executive of a textbook publisher), currently e-book prices can't compete with those of used textbooks.

I really don't like the model by which students are auto-billed for e-textbooks.  While it may decrease prices, this removes the choice of vendor.  Right now, if I wanted a biochemistry textbook, I could get it at my school bookstore.  I could get it at Amazon.com or BN.com.  I could buy it direct from the publisher.  I could get it used from another student.  Or from any number of textbook websites out there.  It means there is no longer any price competition; it effectively creates a monopoly.  Also, there is an accessibility issue.  Some students don't have e-readers and can't afford them.  Some students don't have their own computers.  (It's a smaller and smaller fraction, but it still happens.)  So how can you study if you can't get to the textbook because you don't have a device to read it on?

Novelty in Fantasy

No posts stored up, so this one is off the cuff.  Saw this recently:

Fantasy, Realism, and the Quest for Novelty from Forbes.com

It's sort of a mix of discussion about books and video games.  All the comments (well, the ones I read) are about video games that I've never played.  (For the record, I do like video games but I just don't have the time.)  Wish there'd been more discussion about books.  Suppose I could try to write something myself.  (Though that would, like, take effort.  Maybe after my PhD defense?  If I remember to do it...)

I do see a couple of good points.  I like The First Law example because yeah, you totally wouldn't appreciate what Joe Abercrombie did with those books if you weren't familiar with the genre in the first place.  (I think the Land Fit for Heroes series does this, as well.)

All the same, I think there are some authors who are attempting to move beyond tropes.  Not that their work is completely free of tropes, but Nnedi Okorafor, N.K. Jemisin, Howard Andrew Jones, Catherynne M. Valente, and others, are either translating narratives into non-pseudo-European settings or coming up with original ideas and imagery.  China Mieville is playing with the boundaries of genre, as well.

The author of this piece (Erik Kain) links to another one where he lists video game tropes he'd like to see done away with.  I only bring it up because I have an answer to one of them.  I had to go back to my elementary school years, but where Kain complains about torches always being lit in RPGs?  One game I remember fondly was Shadowgate for the NES.  And you had to take the torches off the walls and carry them with you and light them with other torches.  When they burned down, you were in trouble.  If they went out, you died.  But yeah, that's literally the only time I've ever seen characters have to light torches in a video game, and that one came out in 1989.

Wonder what this blog would be like if I tried to write serious essays all the time?  It'd be an even bigger time drain than it already is, that's for sure.

Blatant Cheating

Well, I figure this will be a popular post because people really like the EssayTyper and illegal book downloading posts.  Here is another way to cheat:

BestEssay.com

They even do press releases about themselves to get more attention.

Why do I call it cheating?  Because you're not doing your own fucking work, that's why.  If you've made it to college and don't know how to write a paper, your high school teachers did you a real disservice.  But most colleges have writing centers that are perfectly willing to help you with this sort of thing, and college librarians are usually excellent (and underutilized).  And if you're struggling that much, well, talk to your teacher/instructor/professor.  It's the person's job to help you.

Also, I really don't trust websites like this.  They might produce decent work for a general education English or history class.  The kind of thing that everyone has to take.  And there are probably a lot of out-of-work English and history and philosophy majors willing to write essays for other people for money.  But getting people to write your dissertation?  Your college admissions essay?  To do your math homework for you?

All I have to say is that if you rely on services like this, (1) you must have a lot of money and (2) when you get out into the real world and you didn't even do your own coursework, someone is going to find you out and you'll be out of a job.  And you'll deserve it.

Another Kid Writer

Look, it'll probably make me sound like a complete ass, but I'm going to discuss a specific teenaged author today.

Hermosa Beach teen author unveils fantasy world

Here's a quote from the girl (who's 13): “I enjoy writing because you can form characters, places, and truly take control of a story you can call your own,” she said. “Sometimes the characters take control and have the ability to mold the story, and you can become attached to them as you write.”

So why do I even bring this up?  I mean, that doesn't sound so bad, right?  Kind of an intelligent statement from a 13-year-old.

Well, what's the name of her book?  Fionavar.  Not a place she created at all, unless she did it when she was younger than two years of age and Guy Gavriel Kay stole it from her (The Summer Tree (The Fionavar Tapestry, Book 1), copyright 2001).  Which seems exceedingly unlikely.  This may be another point in favor of big publishing houses, with editors who are familiar with the fantasy genre, since highly-derivative (or work that is plagiarized) is more likely to get recognized.  I'm not going to say this is universal; I did read The Unremembered, after all.  But these self-published kids whose parents are indulging them really aren't getting any benefit from the process other than an ego boost that may not last into adulthood when real rejection sets in.  (I've already written about this, though, so I'll stop here.)

You know, sometimes fantasy-type names and place names get recycled.  It happens.  Sometimes as a tribute to the originator.  But not usually so blatantly as to be part of the title of a book.

It's a problem in general with teenaged authors.  Christopher Paolini's work is similarly plagued with "borrowing" (to put it as nicely as possible).

Sure, lots of kids get their starts writing something akin to fan fiction.  And I'm less critical of this when a 10-year-old does it than when a 35-year-old does it.  I have a cousin who, when much younger, wrote entire scripts for G.I. Joe cartoons and stories featuring King Arthur.  My mother praised his efforts but tactfully encouraged him to consider using original characters, and he took her advice to heart.  (Also my aunt and uncle didn't pay to self-publish his books.)  And he'll be a better writer, if that's what he wants to do, because of it.  And this kind of stuff certainly doesn't deserve to be published.

NYT Commentary on The Hunger Games

More reblogging.  Gotta stockpile some posts, and I happen to have time right now.  Kind of in a brain drain mode because I defend my PhD thesis next week.  So not doing too much original thinking.  On to today's reblog (from The New York Times):

Staging the Self: The Hunger Games by Stanley Fish

The piece starts out all right.  The pacing of these books is quite good.  You want to keep reading past the end of a chapter.  But then this essay really diverges for me.  To the point where it sounds like a paper I might have turned out during college.

I know that what I do on this blog isn't professional literary criticism.  I'm not trained in that discipline, I wasn't an English major, etc.  Sometimes my reviews are rambling and unstructured.  I'll admit that.  Freely.  But I have a hard time reading essays like the one I link to.

There are several foci for this blog.  One is to chronicle my attempts to write a fantasy novel.  One is to provide commentary on the genre in general, as well as on books, booksellers, and the publishing industry.  One is to share interesting essays, articles, and blog posts I found online that might be of interest to my readers.  And one is to write reviews.  While most of my reviews do contain spoilers, I like to think that my efforts in this area might help people decide whether or not to read the books I write about.

That's not the point of the essay which inspired this blog post.  I'm not entirely sure what the point of that essay is.  I can tell the author of that piece did read the books, probably all three of them.  I looked up his bio and it says he's a professor of humanities and law.  Well, there's your problem.  Professor of humanities.  I've had a few humanities courses in my day, and some of the work I turned out in those was absolute bullshit, but I got good grades for it.  Because I'm good at making stuff up and getting it to sound nice (I'm thinking in particular of a first-year essay about Foe by J.M. Coetzee and a sophomore year essay about Othello).  But I can't help but feel like that style of writing is "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."  (A couple of lines from Macbeth that inspired the title of a William Faulkner novel.)  There's just no actual content.  All it means is that the author likes to construct sentences and read his or her own writing.

Maybe I'm being hard on literary criticism.  It's not as if I haven't ever read a good book review.  Maybe my mind just isn't wired for appreciation of this type of content.  Perhaps that's why I've stuck to the hard sciences as I've pursued my graduate education.  At any rate, I've gone off on a tangent here and I doubt I can recover.

Scam

I wrote a little bit about bookreview.com earlier this week.  Here is a (kinda old, but still valid) blog post I found about the site:

Scam of the Month from A Writer's Life

So the blog post that I link to is 8 years old, and the site in question hasn't changed much.  If at all.  The text is nearly identical.  I wonder how it's working for them?

Read the comments, too.  Someone who works for bookreview.com replies rather angrily.

And, while Harriet Klausner wasn't on my radar in 2004 (though I was, at that point, reading fantasy...I won't bore you with the personal details of my life that confirm the timeline for me), it's nice to know someone was on to her then.  Although it doesn't seem to have made much of a difference in terms of anyone actually policing the crap she puts out.

If the bookreview.com people were serious, they'd ban Klausner from the site and delete all her "reviews."  (Though then they wouldn't have a lot of content left.)

Nebula Awards Guide

No, I didn't write the guide myself.  But if you are interested in sci-fi/fantasy awards, here is an analysis of this year's Nebula Awards nominees from The Millions.

I like the post because it's not just a list, there are actually long paragraphs next to each nominated book.  Like the author of the piece (Chris Barsanti) actually read them all, or consulted with someone who did.

I haven't read any of these books yet, though I do have N.K. Jemisin's The Kingdom of Gods just waiting to be read.  Maybe that will be next, as I'm slogging through Paul Kearney's Macht Trilogy right now.  (It's getting better, by the way.  But I'll have had my fill of military fantasy for awhile and I'll be looking for something a little different.)  And I'll pick up God's War because I managed to buy the sequel already (way to go, Night Shade Books...please try labeling books more clearly as to which volume in a series they are...same to you, Solaris).

I'm almost always a couple of weeks (months, years?) behind in my reading.  I buy books faster than I can consume them.  I've got a couple on order right now, and a stack of 20 or so I haven't even cracked the covers on, yet.  I think that's another reason for me not to get an e-reader, I think I'd lose track of what I'd bought.  With books on the shelf, I can SEE what I've read and what I haven't.

Sorry if this post is all over the place.  I'm having trouble coming up with a good stockpile of posts so I'm writing them as I go.  I have no idea what's coming up except I'll finish Corvus in a couple of days and post a review.  Suggestions for posts/topics are always welcome.

Pace of Writing

Some fantasy authors are prolific.  L.E. Modesitt, Jr., has an impressive number of titles under his belt.  Mercedes Lackey does, also.  In the world of mainstream fiction, James Patterson apparently writes very quickly.  Of course, he has a lot of co-authors with whom to split the work.  (So does Lackey.)

Here are a couple of recent articles I found about the pace at which authors should turn out books.

Writer's Cramp: In the E-Reader Era, A Book a Year is Slacking (New York Times)
In the E-Reader Era, A Book a Year is Plenty (Forbes)
I'm Writing as Fast as I Can (New York Times letter to the editor)

I think I'm in the camp of the second two pieces I linked to.  Quality is important to me -- in what I write as well as in what I read.  I'm currently on the seventh draft of my manuscript.  I think this will be the last draft (gotta stop sometime), but I've been working on it a little over a year.  About half the time was taken up with writing the first draft; I've been editing since October.  One book a year seems about right, at least for me, working part time only.  (Half an hour a day on weekdays, an hour on weekends and/or holidays.)

Also, yeah, don't give in to demands to produce crap just because the readers want more.  (On the other hand, don't be like George R.R. Martin and wait years between volumes in the same series.)

If I ever became one of those lucky individuals who gets to write full-time, I might turn out more than one book a year.  Rather than cramming all my work on one book into a three-month period or something, I'd probably have a couple of different projects in different stages (writing, planning, editing) all going on at the same time.  But this rate wouldn't be due to pressure from fans or publishers; rather, I'd honestly feel a bit guilty only working for 30 minutes a day.  I'd give it a couple of hours, at least!

Mockingjays

I found this in the New York Times over the weekend:

D.I.Y. Biology, on the Wings of the Mockingjay

Couple of comments:

1. DIY biology is a little bit alarming, to me.  (Remember, I'm less than two weeks away from defending a PhD thesis in biochemistry.  So I have some perspective on this.)  I don't want untrained enthusiasts messing around with E. coli and viruses.  Though, without the backing of grant money, and even with a number of people pooling resources, I don't think people are going to get very far.  If you really want to do biology, go to grad school.  In the sciences, you are supported via research and teaching assistantships.  You can also get Stafford Loans.  And then you have the credentials and resources and education and actual lab skills to really make progress.
2. I still maintain that the science of The Hunger Games is just terrible.  Click here or here to see my own indictments of the whole concept of jabberjays and mockingjays.
3. Check out the comments on the New York Times piece.  Taylor Dwight and Kevin from Iowa are right on the money.  (There may be some others that are also good; the comments section keeps expanding.)

Review - The Ten Thousand

I finished The Ten Thousand by Paul Kearney while waiting -- I kid you not -- three and a half hours at the emergency vet for something they couldn't even fix (clogged feeding tube in one of my cats; don't worry abut the cat, we've got an appointment with the regular vet tomorrow and she's fixed this problem before).

Anyhow, I was looking forward to Kearney's Macht trilogy as I had previously enjoyed his Monarchies of God series (Hawkwood and the Kings and Century of the Soldier).  Unfortunately, I didn't get what I expected out of The Ten Thousand.

First off, the book was riddled with grammatical mistakes:

• This sort of thing kept popping up: "the soldiers raised their spear."  No.  Unless the soldiers collectively have on spear.  It should be "the soldiers raised their spears."  This happened all the time.
• I saw at least one "taller than him" in there, though the book was inconsistent on this front.  It was right at least once, as well.
• "You keep your mouth shut and less flies get in it."  Nope, should be fewer.

The whole book was full of stuff like this.  I guess there wasn't an editor, or something.  There were plenty of -ly adverbs attached to speaker attributions and some physical impossibilities (or near-impossibilities, like growling a sentence).  It was bad enough that it detracted from my enjoyment of the story.

There wasn't much in the way of magic.  There was this armor called the "Curse of God" which was so black it reflected no light.  No one knew how it was made, and it was coveted and passed down upon soldiers' deaths.  Fine.  But that was about it, in terms of magic.  There may or may not have been non-human sentient creatures, it is hard to say.  I am sure the Macht were human, the Kufr at first sounded like humans with horses' heads, though they sounded more and more human as time went on.  (Not to mention apparently they can cross breed with the Macht.)  The Juthan also sounded largely human.  I actually had a really hard time parsing whether the other races were human or not.  It could be that their cultures and skin colors are just so different that they didn't think each other to be of the same species, when in fact they were.

Anyway, back to the Curse of God.  I guess this was good armor, but why does there always have to be something blacker than black?  Gene Wolfe seems to have started it, with Mark Charan Newton picking it up as tribute, and C.S. Friedman's Magisters also had a special shade of black for their robes.

While we're on the topic of colors, what's with all the nut-brown skin.  When I think of nut-brown skin, I think of the tan mom.  I mean, if you consider the color of actual nuts.  But then, Rictus is continually referred to as straw-headed.  Which to me, suggests blond.  Well, there's only about one group of people in the world who that description might fit, and those are the light-haired people from the Solomon Islands.  Who are so unusual that I'd never heard of them until last week.  There just aren't a lot of naturally blond, dark-skinned people out there.  And if Kearney meant something different, well, he should've been more careful about his descriptions.

There were a couple of story elements that also left me disappointed.  First, Rictus's rise to power seems a little improbable.  Granted, most of the other Macht officers had been killed off, and he'd shown some initiative.  Second, I don't know how the Macht army was so good when a lot of the soldiers would've been like Gasca, fresh off the farm, so to speak, and never having wielded spear or shield before.

This morning, I read the part where the upstart prince who has hired the Macht mercenaries to take  over his brother's kingdom is killed.  And a dozen or so of the best Macht officers go into the Great King's tent to discuss terms by which they may be allowed to return home.  And this is just what I kept thinking (image courtesy of Know Your Meme):



And guess what?  It was a trap.  All but three of the Macht officers are killed in the ensuing ambush.  I can't believe they'd be so stupid as to fall for it.

Another thing that bothered me a little was that Kearney didn't seem to be keeping track of the actual number of Macht soldiers very well.  The name of the book is The Ten Thousand.  But during the first part, the leaders of the army are complaining that they aren't at full strength.  After several brutal battles, they're still referred to as ten thousand.  Then later it says they started as fourteen thousand.  Well, I suppose that could include cooks and grooms and other camp followers (though no women were allowed).

Oh yeah, and the mercenaries all have matching red cloaks.  But...they have to provide their own weapons and armor.  Seems to me like it would be better for the army to provide weapons and armor, and say "screw the cloaks."  Seems like a strange ordering of priorities.  Oh well.

One other criticism, and then I'll get on to what I liked.  The plot of this book just reminded me a lot of the Monarchies of God.  Rictus mirrors Corfe a lot; Corfe got away from a sacked city at the beginning of those books and Rictus does at the beginning of this book.  Corfe rises to quite high places, and it appears that Rictus will in the subsequent volumes, as well.  There's a perilous sea voyage (shorter here than in the Monarchies books).  At the end of the sea voyage, our heroes encounter strange people who are at once seemingly human and not human.  And so on.

Rictus is a decent character, I suppose.  At times he's a little bit of a goody two-shoes.  You know, not wanting to rape and pillage, performing last rites for his father and the servants and even the dog, despite the advanced state of decomposition of the bodies, expressing loyalty to the commanders who gave him a chance, etc.  But he remains friends with Gasca until his (Gasca's) death, he loses control of his troops and they pillage a city, and he is driven by anger and a desire for revenge against Aristos (who took off with much-needed supplies after Rictus was elevated in the command structure).  Also, at least he doesn't become king or emperor or some such, but remains a military man.  Early in the book, he finds some enemy soldiers who have taken off the daughter of one of his neighbors.  He's wounded, though, and he realizes he can't fight them off, so he stays hiding.  I'm glad he has a realistic opinion of his abilities at that moment, and that he's not some magic ninja who can take out a whole troop of bad guys.

I don't really feel like we get into the other characters' heads a lot.  We experience some of Jason's feelings (he's another Macht commander who makes it out of the ambush), some of Gasca's (a common Macht soldier), some of Tiryn's (a female Kufr who hooks up with Jason), some of Vorus's (a Macht who serves the Great King and must fight his own people), some of the other Macht commanders.  But we see the most of Rictus.  And actually, we can sympathize with almost all of these people.

One thing Kearney does well is that he shows that the "good guys" are not always good.  They pillage a city, they fight amongst themselves, etc.  He holds Rictus above this a little bit, because Rictus takes responsibility even as everyone knows he was trying to hold his troops back.  But I think we really do see two sides to the story.  The villains are not so evil as to be caricatures (I've read too many books like that lately).  So I like that a lot.

I am going to say the military action and descriptions of battle are also done well.  I did find myself skipping through long battle scenes, because this is just not my cup of tea.  But what I did read, made sense, and I could tell Kearney really thought about the battles.  Of course, I've also heard that this book pretty heavily draws from Xenophon's Anabasis; while I'm not familiar with that work, the Wikipedia summary fits pretty well with a plot summary of Kearney's book.

I'll also say that I think the world-building is pretty good.  The Macht, as a group, really do have a defining set of characteristics which are mostly consistent, and which are referred to often enough to make the point Kearney wants to make, without beating it over our heads.  (For example, how they cook food, or their battle hymn, the "Paean," or the way they choose officers and their command structure.)  I like the relationship between Vorus and the Juthan who saved his life, and how the Juthan desertion turns the tide of the battle.  I think this was done well, and I actually might have liked to have seen a little more.  (I don't think there was enough introduction of the Qaf, meanwhile.)  You don't see as much of the Kufr society, though.

The other thing I find interesting is that the so-called "good guys" don't win.  The army splits from internal tensions after their patron and many officers are killed, then the soldiers take their pay and basically desert.  The Macht never make it home.  This type of ending is refreshing in fantasy.

Who should read this book?  Well, people who are interested in history and who want to compare the actual march from the Anabasis to this book would probably enjoy it.  If you like military fantasy, that aspect is done pretty well in this book; you get a decent level of detail without getting bored.  If you're big on grammar, this book -- especially the early part -- may give you a little bit of a headache.

I hope I don't come off as having trashed this book too much; I wanted to like it more than I ended up liking it.  We'll see what the next two installments bring us.

Robo-Writers

Found this on CNN.com the other day:

Could a computer write this story?

I think the world of fantasy novels is safe for now, though I can see how this might apply to factual data.  The discussion of high school football game write-ups sounds suspiciously like Kirkus Reviews of books.  Or some crap that Harriet Klausner posted on Amazon.com.  You know, plot summary that sounds like it came off the book jacket and a listing of previous volumes in a series and then almost always a favorable final line.  (Harriet has almost never given fewer than four stars.)

Speaking of useless reviews, found this site the other day:

bookreview.com

The search feature is not very good (searching for "fantasy" will turn up all sorts of other things that are not fantasy).  Also all the fantasy reviews I did manage to find were the same Harriet Klausner nonsense that turns up everywhere else.

The site charges $125 for an express review service.  No way I'd pay that!

Losing Faith in Humanity

People are not interested in being honest or in conducting themselves with integrity.  Two of my most popular posts in the last couple of months have been about Essay Typer and the closing down of library.nu (which I assume people are searching looking for a new source of illegal downloads).

Nope, instead students can't even bother to copy and paste from Wikipedia anymore, they want to use Essay Typer to do it for them.  And yeah, I know textbooks are expensive.  Buy used ones on Amazon or something.  Get them from a student who took the class last semester.  Hell, use the ones on reserve at the library.  But don't download stuff illegally.

And here, I applied to a faculty position.  (Haven't heard back yet.)  Maybe I'm wasting my time.

Okay, off the soap box.  And back to writing about fantasy.  I promise.

Fidelity to the Story

I gather Game of Thrones (the HBO series) has drifted away from some of the plotlines of A Song of Ice and Fire (the book series).  You can read a brief analysis of one episode here.

For what it's worth, there may be spoilers here or in anything I link to in this post.  I've read the books but only seen about three episodes of season one.

You know, I realize they were going to have to do this at some point.  And I guess the Reeds *could* be written out.  They pretty much stay involved in Bran's plotline, and only Bran's plotline.  They don't cross over (the way someone like, say, Brienne does).

And, well, a lot of Dany's story is kind of boring.  So I'm not necessarily opposed to adding events to it.  As long as they're one-off events that don't have anything to do with the larger plot.  I guess.

But you run a risk, when you start changing the story.  What if you get to the end and it doesn't make any sense?  What if the author has taken characters off in an incompatible direction, and you can't reconcile the two?  (Rickon basically hasn't shown up since he left with Osha.  But what if Osha and Rickon turn up again?  I mean, now, he's the only son of Ned Stark still alive who's not a tree or in a wolf's body or something.)

Well, we'll see where this goes.  I'll be about a year behind because I don't have HBO and I have to wait for iTunes or DVDs.

Fantasy Armies

Several years ago, when I first got the idea to write a fantasy novel, I came across this post on Writing-World.com:

The Numberless Hordes: Keeping Your Fantasy Armies a Little Less Fantastic

I think this should be required reading for any fantasy author.  Or at least, any author who is considering any sort of military action as a part of his or her story.  Not just new authors, but established ones as well.

A particularly prominent example of fantasy armies done wrong is the The Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind.  I'm referring to the conflict with Jagang's forces, where millions upon millions of soldiers march.  They just keep coming.  In the interest of not singling any one author out, the DarkGlass Mountain books by Sara Douglass have similarly unbelievably-sized armies.

Even without having read the linked-to piece, armies of millions seem unrealistic.  Let's assume all sorts of disease and accidental death and so forth, in a pre-modern society.  These sorts of civilizations just don't get that big.  You can look up the sizes of cities at different times in their histories.  They weren't always as big as they are today.  Even the U.S. military has a maximum of about 2.3 million active duty and reserve forces, combined.  And that's for an entire country with a population of a little over 300 million people.

Granted, warfare is different today than it was even 500 years ago.  Drone strikes and machine guns and so forth.  And yeah, that means a different percentage of the population will be required for military action.  But I maintain that armies of millions make no sense.  Don't use them.

Review - The Scar

The Scar by Sergey and Marina Dyachenko is the first translated fantasy novel I've ever read.  From poking around on the web, I've learned that it is actually the second book in a series, but that's not necessarily obvious from reading it.  So the first praise I'll offer is that it does a pretty good job of standing on its own.  You can tell there are some bigger issues and personalities in the world the Dyachenkos have created (e.g. who is the Wanderer, mage training, who is Lash, etc.).  And maybe if the first volume had been made available in English, it would change my perspective on the story arc.  But I found this to be an enjoyable read, overall.

For what it's worth, this post is riddled with spoilers and plot summary.  So read at your own risk.

And, even though it's a second volume, it doesn't suffer from second volume syndrome.  There's a beginning, middle, and end.  A clear, concise narrative.  It's a character-driven piece, really (more on that later).

I'm not going to spend a long time nitpicking the language.  I don't know what sort of writing advice gets offered to Russians and/or Ukrainians (the Dyachenkos live in Kiev).  The translator, no doubt, conveyed the literal meanings pretty well, but it's not very artful and the language doesn't flow all the time.  (It's not like reading a translation of Tolstoy of Dostoyevsky, is what I mean, but then academics devote good portions of their lives to classic works.)  There's a lot of passive voice, for example.  However, it's still generally readable.

The setting is pretty typical: big cities with nobles who are members of the local militia and who ride roughshod over the serving maids in taverns, visiting students, and other commoners.  Oh yeah, and it's fine to fight duels (to the death).  These cities seem to have an overabundance of establishments dedicated to drinking and carousing.  There's also travel by coach between cities, which can be dangerous, and there's a university.  You might think this is setting up the book to be standard fantasy fare, but the Dyachenkos come up with some interesting twists on fantasy tropes that make it worth continuing.

First of all, the main character has a rather unromantic name (Egert Soll).  Well, maybe it's a dashing name in Russian, but it's kind of nerdy in English.  Even so, he starts out the book as an unsympathetic character.  When he's drunk, he wants to throw knives at a tavern serving girl (William Tell style though without apples or arrows, if that makes any sense...that is, he doesn't want to kill her, just show off his prowess).  He apparently dresses up in drag and seduces a merchant's wife.  (Actually, I'm a little confused about that part.  If this guy is so dashing, how is it that it's even possible for him to pass as a woman?  Maybe something got lost in translation.  Literally.  But let's move on.)  He's awesome with a sword, too.

He has a sidekick, Karver Ott, who idolizes him at first; the guy's always in his shadow, and he gets a little resentful, which becomes important later.  Sorry for all the plot summary, by the way.  I'm really just setting up the transformation in Egert's character that makes him much more sympathetic by the end of the novel.

Anyway, one day, two students from the university in a distant town come; they're hoping to use the library for some research.  Egert is smitten with the woman (Toria) and takes it upon himself to try to introduce her to the town.  She rebuffs his advances and the whole thing ends with a duel where Egert kills the male student, who happens to be her fiancé.  The dead student (his name is Dinar) never stood a chance in the duel, and a mysterious old man watches everything and challenges Egert to a duel early the next morning.

Well, it was a challenge, so Egert accepts, but he doesn't understand why, as the man looks weak.  But Egert gets his ass kicked, and instead of killing him, the man puts a scar on his cheek.  Associated with the scar are a couple of new personality features that just don't mesh with the Egert we've come to know.  First, Egert is now paralyzed by fear in just about every situation.  Second, he can sometimes feel the pain of others.  (This second one turns itself on and off.)  So Egert is afraid during some military maneuvers and he fakes a seizure to get out of walking across a narrow beam.  He plays up the illness for awhile.  Later he feels up to visiting one of his mistresses, and can't do the deed for fear of getting caught by the woman's husband.

A series of shameful events follow, and Egert leaves town.  On the way to another town, his coach is robbed.  There's a hidden space under the seat and Egert actually pulls a female passenger out of there so he can hide himself.  The inevitable happens with the female passenger, and the highwaymen realize Egert is too much of a wuss to do anything about it.  They don't even restrain him.

So for now, I'll stop the plot summary and get to some actual analysis.  Egert has gone from a super badass to a quivering child.  The rest of the book is the story of his struggle to regain his confidence and redeem himself.  When he makes it to the new town (I forget the name of the place), there are two opposing factions, essentially.  Luayan is Toria's father (remember the female student from earlier?) who is the Dean of the university and also something of a mage, though his arcane studies ended with the loss of his mentor and his decision not to take another.  Then there's the Tower of Lash, Lash being a spirit (possibly once a person, this is a little unclear) around whom a religious order has sprung up.  There are constantly screams coming from the tower, and the acolytes tend to be viewed with suspicion around town (they wear gray robes -- usually -- so they're easy to spot).  Lash's devotees seem to have an abiding interest in what Luayan and Toria are doing, and they try to get Egert to spy.

So, at some point I think I said I would talk about the Dyachenkos turning tropes around.  Here are a couple that I liked:

1. Egert becomes an auditor at the university at Luayan's invitation; he's not even a real student and he's certainly not the top of his class (he didn't do a whole lot of reading in his hometown).  I like Patrick Rothfuss and all, but in the school setting, Kvothe is a little too awesome for his own good sometimes.  Egert is not like that at all.  It's refreshing.
2. Egert's family doesn't disown him, even though they're upset that he left.  His father occasionally sends him money and even comes to visit, once, to beg him to visit his ill (dying?) mother.
3. The Wanderer (the old man who kicked Egert's ass in a duel) gives Egert a set of conditions he must meet in order to break the curse that's making him so fearful.  (In a situation which is particularly dangerous, he'll be asked five questions.  He must answer "yes" each time.)  But it's not so easy.  First off, Egert is attacked in the street by Karver Ott (remember his sidekick?) who has been sent to retrieve him since he deserted his military duties.  Ott asks him five questions, he answers "yes," and nothing happens.  Later, when Toria is on trial for sorcery (more on that in a minute), Egert is called by the Order of Lash to testify as a witness.  He has no trouble answering "yes" to the first four questions, but saying "yes" to the last one would condemn Toria.  So he refuses.  And that breaks the curse.  (And then there's a rather improbable brawl in the courtroom.)  So what I like is that Egert actually doesn't follow the Wanderer's directions to the letter, he has to take a stand, and then the curse is broken.

 It's a little bit of a slow buildup, but the main conflict occurs when the Order of Lash releases plague organisms into town by opening up an old grave mound.  (Not so unrealistic, I suppose.  Bacterial spores can live for a long time.)  They went around telling their own members Lash would protect them, but the plague didn't discriminate.  And the only thing that can stop the plague is a magician; this seems to cause the magician to die, but he saves the city.  Only, no one knew what happened except the people from the Order of Lash, and then Egert, Toria, and Luayan (who actually is the one who saved the city).  So the Lash-ites accuse Toria and Luayan of being the ones to release the plague, and then set up a kangaroo court.  People believe them, even smash in the windows of the university.  Toria isn't vindicated by Egert's refusal to meet the Wanderer's final condition; instead, Egert kicks the Lash-ites asses.  Then, Egert is lauded as a hero.

So Egert's back to his normal self by the end.  But not quite.  He's a changed man, and changed for the better.  He's made real friends instead of just hangers-on, he's lost friends to the plague, he managed to gain some courage by his own, he learned to love and not just react with lust, and he knows what it's like to be afraid and to experience the pain of others.  He's still an excellent fighter, but he's not so cocky anymore.

I think I said I would talk more about Karver Ott, so here goes.  He has a big part early in the book, then is gone when Egert travels, then catches up with Egert.  And he's basically become what Egert was, before.  The sidekick has become the main attraction, with Egert out of the picture.  So I think it's a nice touch that Egert can see what he must have been like, beforehand.  (Then Ott dies of the plague.)

This is mostly Egert's story.  Different sections (chapters are loooooooong) are headed with different characters' names, but it always seems to come back to Egert.  A few other characters get to be POV characters for short periods of time.  It's easy to keep these things straight.

One thing I haven't mentioned yet is the budding romance between Toria and Egert.  It goes from utter indifference on Toria's part (in Egert's hometown), to hatred (this is the man who killed her fiancé), to tolerance, to love.  This is done reasonably well, with a number of incidents leading up to it -- it's a short book, but it feels like a longer one (in a good way).  I think it could've been better if we'd been in Toria's head more, though I guess we got a little of that.  (She thinks about how Dinar never really made physical contact with her, and that he'd have been more of a friend than a lover.  Egert is the opposite.)  Toria isn't as well-developed as Egert, but she's not the focus of the book, either.  As a supporting character, she's not bad.

I feel like I've written an incredibly long plot summary.  There's more to this book than that.  I think it's difficult for me to review books I like.  I know the old saying goes "if you're not going to say something nice, don't say anything at all."  I also know that I love to rip apart bad writing.  It's harder, then, to write a review of a book like The Scar, which I actually enjoyed and which I read quickly and which takes some common tropes and turns them around in interesting ways.  (For what it's worth, I also like the idea of learning more about the world of this book, more about Lash and the Wanderer, etc.)

In the end, I think this book is an interesting and entertaining character-driven fantasy and I look forward to other volumes' translations in the near future!  (Hint, hint.)

Old Advice

So I've been reading about submitting manuscripts.  And I've come to the conclusion that no one has updated their advice on this in a decade.  Case in point: the repeated admonition NOT TO SEND YOUR ONLY COPY.

Is there any such thing as an only copy these days?  I mean, yeah, I wrote my first draft longhand in spiral notebooks.  But I typed it afterwards.  I have a Microsoft Word file that contains my manuscript (and I've saved all the previous versions, just because I'm interested in how things changed over time).  I can print new copies any time I choose.

The only way you'd have an only copy is if you wrote the damned thing on a typewriter.  Or didn't believe in backing up data files.  (I guess that's how Glen Cook lost the manuscript for one of his Dread Empire books in the late 1980s -- well, it was stolen, anyway.)

Also, really, Courier?  I haven't seen a book printed in Courier in forever.  And bond paper?  I actually saw one person writing advice on submitting manuscripts listing these types of printouts in order of preference:

• laser
• inkjet
• dot matrix

Seriously, dot matrix?  Are you going to send it to a publisher using the Pony Express, too?  I can understand choosing between laser and inkjet.  But the last time I used a dot matrix printer was sometime in the early 1990s.