So, I feel like I’m becoming a bit of a Sanderson expert. I’ve read all of his published work except for his thesis and that new media tie-in piece he did, and I am acquainted with him from conventions, and I correspond with his assistant Peter from time to time. So, I sometimes feel a little biased when I review one of Brandon’s books. Well, biased isn’t the right word. See, I love Sanderson’s writing, and Alloy of Law has been no exception, but I’m not going to give anything he writes a five-star pass. In fact, I might be more tending to be harsher in my criticism, or at least more specific, as I am conscious of my propensity to want to give him a five-star pass, thus I raise the bar. Is it fair, no. Is it me and still an honest review, yeah. Anyway, spoiler-free! So, on with the show!
Alloy of Law is a sort-of sequel to the Mistborn trilogy, only it takes place 300 years later and with entirely new characters and a new take on the magic system. Now, our main character, Wax, is not a mistborn himself as Vin was, but instead is a “Twinborn”, a man who can use 1 of the 16 metals for Allomancy and 1 of the 16 metals for Furuchemy. In his case, he can push metal with his Allomancy and store weight with his Furuchemy. I won’t go into that more, because the book actually does it ad nauseum. More on that in a bit. Anyway, Wax is a law keeper from the world’s version of the Wild West that has returned to civilization to take his place as a house lord, but is quickly drawn into the investigation of a mysterious set of crimes.

So, as always, the good stuff first. The writing is strong and enjoyable, much as I’ve come to expect from Sanderson. The story, much like the prior Mistborn novels, is very character driven, with strong personalities and plenty of banter that hides info dumps and “slow parts”. This book is also meant as an entry point to the Mistborn world, and I even tested that by having a friend of mine read it that had not read Mistborn and then discussed the book with him. In this highly unscientific method, Sanderson succeeded. He doesn’t give any spoilers for the prior books while still leaving plenty of hints and clues for those of us that have read them. If you don’t get the hints and clues, you still enjoy the book. If you do, you get a chuckle or a “oh…” type moment.

On to what I didn’t like so much. One: I can tell this was (I think) a bit rushed in the production due to Wheel of Time. This kind of doesn’t make sense, seeing as Sanderson completed this nearly a half year before it hit the bookshelves, at least that is when the advanced copies were starting to appear, but from what I have followed of Brandon, Alloy was really just a spin-off exercise on writing he was doing to stretch his mind that ended up becoming book length. Because of that, it has some weaknesses.

The first is that I think Brandon goes a little overboard on re-explaining the magic. Yes, I have three much longer books under my belt explaining this magic system to me, and this book is supposed to cater to new readers as much as returning, but when there are asides in the last fight repeating, and I do mean fully repeating, how the two halves of Wax’s magic work and interact, it seems a little overboard. Also, the last fight’s choreography was a bit trite, even if the major points were pretty awesome. The stuff that connected them was, well, not hard or boring to read, but after a while I started saying “I get it, Wax can shoot the wings off a fly at 100 yards.”

My final complaint is that the ending was… well, lacking. Several times in the novel, they go on and on about the “reason behind the crimes.” They set up a master-mind king-pin type character that Wax has to face off against. Okay, that is well and good. Wax never faces off against him. Again, not all bad. The ending is very much saying “There will be a sequel”. But what makes all this annoying to me is that, in all of the marketing and blogging about this book, it was marketed as a “Stand Alone”. That means the main drive of the plot, if not every single thread, is wrapped up in a tight bow by the end. That this book is probably half the length of a normal Sanderson novel really makes me feel like I got half a book, not the whole one, especially with all of the major plot threads.

So, spoiler-free short? This is a great book, but Sanderson leaves us hanging a little bit with it. I know recent marketing schemes have called it “A Mistborn Adventures Book”, so hopefully there will be sequels.

I recently read the Alcatraz Smedry books by Brandon Sanderson, and I’ll go ahead and say yes, they are good. You should find them and read them. But this isn’t a review. Instead, I’m keying in on something that was brought up in the second book, “Alcatraz vs. The Scrivener’s Bones.” In that book, Alcatraz meets his uncle Kaz, who is a “little person,” or as Alcatraz oafishly states upon first seeing him. “You’re a midget!” There is then not only a “learn to be nice” lesson that gets brought about, but a little later, a discussion akin to this follows:

Kaz: “Describe the people in our party.”
Al: describes everyone by job, but then starts with Kaz’s height on his description.
Kaz: Why do you have to mention I’m short!

Now, this is a good moral. You shouldn’t just latch onto an abnormality someone has and define them by it. Short people are still people, right? But, despite my egalitarian leanings, this kind of bugs me, especially when presented in Speculative Fiction. Please read why before saying I’m trying to justify being a bigot of some sort.

See, I agree with the point, but there is a flaw in it. To take the “mundane” example used in Alcatraz, why do you say “he’s short” but not “she’s average height” in the description? Because it is something that marks you different from those around you! Just like in a group of 10 people where nine are men, you will refer to the woman as female, but not necessarily comment that the others are male. There is nothing wrong with being a woman, but it still makes her stick out. In the case of Kaz, being short makes him stick out. There is a certain average height, and then a bell curve around the average that is still “normal.” (This is getting into statistics and standard deviations). Once past that standard deviation, then it is no longer tacitly implied that the descriptor is “normal.”

I am prone to think of the game Guess Who I used to play as a kid. The best way to play was to be able to ask the questions that most evenly bisected who was left still flipped up on your board, but if you were gutsy, you could ask something that was more of a 10/90 split and possible drop 90% of your tiles. Of course, that only works 10% of the time.

So, yes, being short is something that will be remarked on. I’m sorry. Yes, the lesson is good to see past the shortness, but I think there shouldn’t be so much of a “don’t even see the shortness” tone to it. On the same token, it’s a middle grade book, so I’m not going to complain too much. You have to be heavy handed a bit with that level to get something to really stick.

But now my rant is going to move away from short people and to Spec Fic. In fact, let us consider my own character, Markus McGrigor. He is the only cyborg in a city that hates cyborgs. He wants to be treated like he’s normal. But his he really? He can jump, run, and fight better than anyone because of his new parts. And not just like Hulk Hogan is better than me. No, he is a leap beyond anything humanity could hope to attain naturally. Yes, he is still a sentient person, and needs to be treated like a person in an ideal world, but there is a bit of a Spider-man/Peter Parker thing going on here. He has great power, and he should have great responsibility. But besides Uncle Ben being there to haunt you with those words, what really would keep a super-human on the straight and narrow? How can we even begin to address a moral absolute in such a situation, especially since we as a world have never faced it? And when books try and say “no, super-humans and regular humans should just keep using the same old laws, and treat each other ‘normally’ and not judge or define a person by their super-power”, well, it makes a nice allegory for racism. But it really fails in my read on it. Racism is a bigotry based on a perceived but objectively false correlation between worth and a physical characteristic. The McCarthy wanna-be in X-Men wanting mutants to register, well, he has a real point. What stops a person who can control minds from not just being an amoral son of a bitch? Human nature is typically to abuse power, so why should we not fear those who are naturally more powerful than us?

You probably will notice this theme is already appearing in Tijervyn, and yes I will explore it more. As for an answer, I don’t know yet. That is one of the reason I am writing speculative fiction, and in particular Tijervyn. How could we deal with it? I am using the characters to try and find out. I hope on some level now, if you hadn’t been thinking about this, maybe now you will, at least in the back of your mind, as you read the story. Maybe you won’t find the same answer I will, but that is okay. I’m happy enough if you are reading and thinking.

Penultimate, they call this chapter. I’ve always found that a funny word. It makes me think of a super hero that has a sidekick called PencilOrdinary. Just saying.

So, although I write steampunk, more or less, one might notice there is sort of a bit of magic in this world. Yes, no one calls it magic, but the Secret of Silver and Copper are both fairly magic-like things. I mean, come on, the Secret of Silver? Having a silver spike rammed into your brain, and boom, perfect cyborg tech? Yeah. But that is why I love steampunk. The line between science and magic is fuzzy and you can play with it, just like you can play with the gritty nature of Sci-Fi while also having a bit of the clean nature of Fantasy. But, there is always that problem of originality, even in the “fresh new world” of Steampunk. And I blame Brandon Sanderson.

Now, I know I talk about Brandon a lot on this blog, but pardon, as he is one of the few (read “the only”) NYTBS authors that not only do I know, but that knows me too. So I’m a bit biased on using my examples from him. ANYWAY.

Brandon is known for being very imaginative with his magic systems. I, on the other hand, am not thus known. I don’t really know if I’m known for anything aside from occasionally Rickrolling people. But, yeah, but I do try to be creative.

Now, when I wrote my first manuscript in the world of Tijervyn (which a few of you have seen, not many) I had not even heard of Brandon Sanderson. Seriously, I had not. But I got this idea for steampunk cyborgs, and decided they should have a spike of silver in their head. So I wrote a 120k novel, shopped it around a bit with no luck, but idled away the months of waiting by finally reading a book or two from the man that would finish The Wheel of Time. And, oh, look at that. He has this monsters that have spikes in their eyes and are all mean. Fun!

Then, maybe a year or so later, I read the rest of Mistborn. I find out that the spikes give the monsters super powers. That getting stabbed is by a spike of a certain metal is a magic system, including having it rammed into your brain. Oh great.

Now, I shouldn’t be concerned by this. I mean, I came up with my idea before I ever read Sanderson. It was not one of contamination. Except now I have seen that there, and I’m worried I might start to veer towards it like a drunk driver veers towards anything he can see. I don’t mean to. I might even think I’m pushing away. But, nope, I just ran over a telephone pole.

I have a similar problem with another manuscript I’ve written. To read it, you might think “Oh, I know Richard is a browncoat, and there are obvious Firefly parallels here.” Except, I wrote the story before I knew who Joss Whedon even was, at least consciously. I’d seen Serenity a long time ago but had no clue there was a show and the movie had not stuck in my mind. After I wrote that, some of my readers pushed me to watch Firefly. And I swore. I loved it, but I swore. When I pitched to an editor that the story was life Firefly in mood and feeling, he cringed. That didn’t help either.

So how do I make my magic without being derivative? Honestly, I just try to not care. The more I think about “oh no, that is too much like XYZ system” the more I am going to end up patchworking a bunch of different systems instead of making something that is organic and fits together. I’m not Brandon; I don’t see the KFC sign and think “11 herbs and spices? MAGIC SYSTEM!” (it’s a joke comic that was made. Have fun googling, I tried and failed, but Brandon linked to it somewhere.)

Aside aside, I would rather accidently have a magic system that is similar but different in some ways and works for my story than one I tried desperately to make unique and special. But that is just me. The same goes for my character dynamics, plots, etc etc. Adding my flavor, my voice, my special je ne sais quoi is what is important to me. And that is how I make the magic.

Small admin note: I’ll be toastmastering JordanCon this weekend, and I’ll also be running the Tor.com Wheel of Time community on twitter and facebook during it, as the normal wonderful lady that does is the convention chair and will be even more busy than me. Anyway.

So, I promised a review of Peter Orullian’s The Unremembered today. I’m a filthy liar who lies. I wish I could say this was because I have been busier than nothing else with JordanCon prep on top of the Tijervyn stuff, but that’d be only half the true. The part is that I read to page 42 and had to put it down, so I am not going to review it. I will still talk about it, though.

See, there is a vital difference to me here. I reviewed Rothfuss. I said what he did well and what he didn’t do so well based on the whole of story. I cannot do that with Orullian. I have no clue how his plot fares. I have no clue how his characters grow. I have 42 pages.

So, let me talk about those 42 pages. Orullian’s writing style is extremely descriptive. I mean, he makes Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson look like they are writing “See John Run” books. This is not a good thing, in my opinion. Jordan and Sanderson (and Rothfuss, really) are very descriptive writers, but they use “common language” and a pacing to their description that often hides it amongst beautiful dialog and action. Orullian has paragraphs that are (rough estimate) 80% description. End on end on end.

Add to this that he is using a language that is going to be honestly prohibitive to many readers because you need a vocabulary beyond reckoning. I mean, he was pulling words out I have a hard time defining on the head, even if I have a vague sense of their use. I’d imagine a less loquacious reader would have a hard time when they don’t recognize half of the words, despite their being English.

I must give a special consideration to a word used in the prolog that almost made me close the book at five pages. That word is susurration. I despise this word with the white-hot passion of a thousand burning suns because it is basically a word that exists solely (in my opinion) to show off a person’s vocabulary. “a soft muttering” is not that hard to say, and flows across the eyes so much easier. Susurration is only one of many “purple words” Orullian was fond of using.

Now, some people like that. I have read some reviews that actually laud his word choice, so if you enjoy a person who uses the English tongue like a gourmand, be my guest. Personally, I hate gourmet food. Give me wonderfully flavorful food that is made with interesting combinations of common ingredients. End that analogy.

If it was just the fancy word choice, I could have powered through it for the sake of review. But it was compounded by what I felt was bad word choice at times. In the prologue, he uses about every single synonym for “temple” that he can so that he doesn’t have to say the word temple all that often. In doing so, he used some very specific and nearly antonymic words. A tabernacle is a very specific type of temple, and not to be confused with any other. I’m just saying. And no, I’m not Jewish, but if you are going to use a specific word, I’m going to hold you to the meaning.

Number three on my list of why I stopped at that most magically numbered of pages? The cardinal rule of narrative writing is show, don’t tell. Thus, the info dump that is the first two chapters (those that I read) made my eyes bleed. The boy, Tahn, is out in the woods and his mind wonders in thought. Okay, one or two hints at what might be important, I can handle that. Finding out about his special, magic words, the monsters in the Borne, his sister’s rape and pregnancy, his lack of a memory prior to ten, his special hammer-shaped scar/birthmark on his hand—that it goes out of the way to tell you nobody comments on—and the presence and death of his father a couple years ago, all in the span of three, maybe four pages? No. Especially when all of that is broken with maybe two short paragraphs of action. It gets worse when they meet the Gandalf character, who appears out of nowhere, is all crazy intimidating, then info-dumps the entire world history-for-idiots (complete with “Age Of”s and “League Of”s that change their names and about seven made up words) for an entire chapter, namely chapter two? Double No.

And the final nail in the 42^nd page coffin: characterization. This includes dialog. The characters are gullible and simple minded. Way too gullible and simple minded. Adults and near-adults alike just take anything that is said for fact. They just reveal secrets and share information without pause. Tahn runs into town, starts telling whoever will listen there is a monster in the woods that is straight from fairytales, and everyone believes him like it happens every day. Never mind that it goes out of the way to say it never does. The interaction between the characters (that I saw) was stiff and painful, and reminded me nothing less than an attempt to write like David Eddings that fell short.

So… that is my discussion on The Unremembered. I feel like a heel for doing that. Why? For a couple reasons. One: everyone else seems to be loving this book. Read the other reviews, see what they say, and look at the book yourself. I am notoriously picky about what I read, which is why I don’t try and professionally review books, because Sturgeon’s Law would destroy me. The second reason is because Peter Orullian himself is an awesome guy. I love his interviews, and what little I’ve interacted with him tells me that he is a cool, down to earth guy. Neither of these things correlate at all with raw writing ability, but it still annoys me that I’m kind of panning his book without having even read the entire thing. So, Peter, if you read this, I’m sorry. It’s not you. It’s me. I couldn’t read Kevin J Anderson or Steven Erikson either.

So, next week I’m going to put up a review of Peter Orullian’s “The Unremembered”. That is why this week gets to be what was going to be next week’s news-ish post thinger. See, this time next week, I’m going to be waking up in Atlanta and preparing for JordanCon Three: ConSaken. If you are in the area and are a Brandon Sanderson, Robert Jordan, David B, Coe, Jana Oliver, or Eugie Foster fan, come check it out! Yes, the majority of the convention is Wheel of Time stuff, but all of the above authors (obviously sans Robert Jordan) will be there. Oh, and I’m the Toastmaster.

I won’t ruin too much (read any), but I have the great honor of Toastmastering the third ever JordanCon, and I think I’ve hobbled together a mighty good Opening Ceremony. In addition to an hour of humiliating myself in front of the entire convention, I am also slated to run a Pen-and-paper Wheel of Time Role Play session, and I’ll be the moderator for the major “Team Jordan talks about A Memory of Light” panel Saturday, and I’ll be the emcee for the Costume Contest. And I wouldn’t be surprised if I get roped into a few other things as well, but that’s what I’m all about.

Back to more on the convention: aside from my wonderful self and the above mentioned authors, also in attendance will be Harriet McDougal, Robert Jordan’s widow and editor, Alan Romanczuk and Maria Simons, Jordan’s assistants, and numerous other people involved at all levels of the Wheel of Time production. Oh, and several hundred Wheel of Time fans! It is too late to preregister now, but you can still do on-site registration. You just don’t get as cool of a badge. But you still get to see me! Right? Anyone?

So yeah, shameless plug aside, this has been a huge undertaking for me. I was approached to be the Toastmaster only a couple of months after the last JordanCon, so I’ve known this was coming, but the way things work out, it has only been this last month and a half that I’ve been working on the opening ceremony. Add onto that a few pieces I wrote under deadline for Tor.com, the weekly commitment of Tijervyn, my day job, and a couple of curve balls in my personal life, this has been a very tense month for me. My back feels like a slab of granite, despite having seen a massage therapist a few times. I won’t even get into what a wreck my sleep habits have turned into.

So, I have to say that while I am glad I have survived all this, I hope to never foolishly commit to this many things again. I kept telling myself “oh, it is only a couple of hours of writing here, a couple there. And I have months, I’ll be fine.” Yeah, not so much. I guess I over-estimated how quickly I could write, and how often I’d be able.

It was a valuable lesson, though. I have grown and learned some, I think, especially in the form of learning to be the craftsman as a writer, not just the artist. I don’t think the Tijervyn’s have really suffered, per se, although I admit I have been a bit lax on going back and editing out small noises, etc, on the audios. But even when inspiration would not come, I was able to just get the ball moving using my outlines and bring out something I was happy with. That is a very useful skill as a writer. Now if I could only figure out the Businessman side of writing…

Anyway, next week, The Unremembered and another chapter. Tijervyn will take no break just because I’m off having a good time. See ya then, hopefully at the convention, but if not, still here.

So, Patrick Rothfuss has released another amazing book. It is his second. I have not read it yet, as I’m a broke, starving author type and can’t afford the book off hand, but I am re-reading my mass-market edition of his first novel. And while my more-critical-than-first-reading eye is catching things that kind of bug me here and there, I cannot argue: the man deserves his blinding success. Not to mention, in person, he is a humble, funny, very approachable person. Seriously. And it kind of annoys me. Why in a bit.

Brandon Sanderson is another author like Rothfuss. I’ll admit his first book, Elantris, wasn’t quite as mind blowing as The Name of the Winds, his career sky rocketed quickly. Mistborn was amazing, as was Warbreaker, and his selection as the finisher of Wheel of Time is without doubt a major break both for his career and his access to one of the best editors of High Fantasy alive.

But, I am a man, and I must admit, some small bit of is jealous of these men. That I can accept and stamp out as the petty nature of man, and I can still admire them. But now there is another problem. Intimidation. See, all writers are a little arrogant. We kind of think we are hot shit. And well have dreams of getting the NYTBS #1 slot with our every book. But, I shall steal a line from Neal Stephenson, another author that awe inspires me, here.

“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Columbian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

Hiro used to feel that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this is liberating. He no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken.”

See, in this case, I am Hiro, and people like Rothfuss and Sanderson are Raven. Go ahead and fill in the rest of the needed conversions yourself. I do think I’m a good writer, but I read current Sanderson, or any Rothfuss, and I weep for my poor, sad fate. These men are my betters. I feel strange saying that. Perhaps there is still some small part of me that thinks if I can get an editor and agent, if I can just sit down and write something completely from the heart.

Except I do write from my heart, so I can’t really depend on that. Yeah, I put a lot of head-planning in my writing, but I write from my characters, they are in my heart. I just filter it from the brain. Several of my short stories weren’t even all that brain-filtered (the best, in my opinion). I look at them and still lament.

Now, I am probably being harsh on myself. After all, Rothfuss and Sanderson both have agents and editors. I am not comparing my unedited manuscript to their unedited manuscripts. I am comparing my first drafts to their final, and Sanderson has told me before that even now, his pages still bleed during editorial.

What’s the whole point of this ramble? Simply put: don’t despair, my fellow writers. I can keep writing despite my feelings that there is already no room for me at the top. Who knows, maybe I’ll get there one day regardless. The path of the writer is not one that is sudden or instant. Rothfuss spent ten years righting Wind, and Sanderson spent 8 years unpublished after he fully committed himself to writing, if memory serves. Kevin J Anderson had hundred, if not close to a thousand, reject letters, and if you are here, reading my work and enjoying it, remember: I am not formally published yet either. Just stay true to the path, and you will get there.

Now, to shatter that lovely ending point, I just want to comment on the end of this chapter. Sword fight! I love sword fights, and I tend to think they are one of my stronger points. If you can’t tell, I am actually a classically trained fencer, and while there is some technical jargon (such as the fact I use the terms piste and riposte) I tried to keep it simple enough. I hope you enjoy it.

So, on the more spoilery side of things, this Chapter is the start of what actually make me keep typing “episode” when I want to write chapter. I’m approaching this serial with a much different mindset than I would a normal novel. See, I’m an architect, as G.R.R. Martin and Brandon Sanderson would call it, when I write. I like to have everything as a known factor before I write a single sentence of my narrative. During this outline and plan stage, I get to know who my characters are and what the setting is, and any changes that need to be made are. So, after a fashion, I’m a gardener too, I just like to cultivate my horticulture, to overdraw the metaphor.

Tijervyn is different. I know vaguely where this is going, but I’m inspired by some of the great television shows I’ve watched for the plotting, at least as it is revealed in the producer commentaries. Example: Firefly. Joss didn’t really know exactly where he was going. He was discovering that universe as much as we were, just ahead of us. But he did know some of the major plot points and foreshadowed them often. But if a knew plot point came along, he’d foreshadow it when he thought of it and get to it eventually.

Tijervyn is going to be like that. I’ve already made some major plot changes in the nearly six chapters I’ve written, and there was even a tweak two made in this one the night before it went up. So welcome to my roller coaster. I’m having a fun time, and I’ll get more into my “TV mentality” on Chapter 4 (that, I at least, know).

As an aside, if anyone is listening to the podcast or reading the ePub/Mobi’s, let me know how they show up/sound. We can never really be a good judge of our own recorded voices, and I alas do not own any real eReaders, so I can only check the eBook stuff on my phone or a crappy desktop reader. If there is something off in the formatting or something, let me know and I’ll fix it, even retroactively and all that.

As a second aside, I love that I am working ahead, because this has been a bit of a personal week from down below, what with the snowpocalypse and other things. But, as Queen said, “The Show Must Go On!”

So, the first thing that no-one else seemed to be annoyed by was the major 15 year old question: Who Killed Asmodean? The way it was answered? In the glossary as a sneaky after-thought. There is a kind of maybe hint to it in the text, but the way it is worded could actually be taken to be talking about Rahvin, not Asmodean. So yeah, I can of feel, iunno, jipped? The question that has been RAFO’d non-stop for so long, and it isn’t even hidden in the narrative. Heck, one of the reviewers kind of missed it, I think (although, I think it was because she was using her beta-reader copy that probably didn’t include the glossary).

The next was that I was annoyed with the Perrin and Elayne prominence in the book and the way Mat was kind of off to one side. Mat’s plotline basically went down easy street until the three-chapter raid on the Tower at the very end, and Perrin and Elayne kept having new things pop up. I mean, seriously, when they started talking politics in Cairhien, I almost blew a gasket. It was really acting like there was going to be another succession war. I knew that there was no way they could fit that in the book, but still. Oh, and Elayne continued to be a head-strong dress-concerned nuisance. Yes, I am an Elayne hater, and this book did not alleviate that.

As to the Perrin plot, while I am happy he has stopped being Mr. Emo Pants, I still feel there was just way too bloody much going on in this. Especially since he didn’t get to kill his “enemy” this book. And the continued “blah blah” of near misses that continued for so long with the whitecloaks, gah!

Oh, and Gawyn. He continued to be Gawyn. I love how he was called out on his stupidity by Elayne, but he continued to act more like a spoiled, jealous teenager than I really would have preferred. I am also still wondering how, now that he and Egwene have gotten through their spat, the vision of him either killing her or becoming bonded to her was supposed to be such a near miss?

One other thing: anti-climactic stuff. No offense to Robert Jordan or Brandon Sanderson, but I think the wait and the drawn out middle of the books, but some of the plot issues were, well, resolved in kind of “really, that’s it?” kind of ways. As I said, Mat had an easy-street until the Tower, including his attack on the Gholam. He set it up, and it was taken out of the picture in a way that actually didn’t make entirely that much sense to me if I thought about it too long. The at first build up to the Cairhien stuff and the sudden “haha, just kidding, this was actually kind of easy” was one too. I also had a bit of a teeth-gritting at the “wow, you are a genius” back-patting that was going on here and there. I hate to say it, but real political genius is actually kind of boring to read about, and the stuff that is kind of interesting to read about is actually kind of “duh”. So the “wow, you took this perfect situation and made the ‘no dip’ solution” is not genius.

That being said… I loved the book. Can you tell? Ok, fine, I was a little negative, but that is mainly because I loved it, and I hate to “review” something I loved because I feel like I’d just be gushing like a fan. Which means I look at it more critically and find things to grouse about. But, the good: Mat’s scenes were very Mat, much better read than his scenes in The Gathering Storm, (which I still liked, but some didn’t). The moments of awesome were indeed awesome, and the aside from a couple of times that I just didn’t want to read an Elayne chapter when they happened, the book had a good pace. There is also a scene in there that seriously choked me up and brought a tear to my eye, mainly because of the paternal instinct in me. I actually enjoyed the “jesus-ification” of Rand because it wasn’t all that over-done I think. It actually made sense, for what happened to him at the end of the last book, mainly his getting sane understanding instantly of 400+ years of life during the Age of Legends.

So yeah, the book is awesome, above grousing included, and I eagerly await the final book (hopefully one year from now).

So, at the Raleigh signing, I asked Brandon about the editing on Elantris, his first novel. What he had to say was actually somewhat cheering, as apparently not only did his pages bleed (which they still do, even on The Way of Kings, just not as much as back then), but his editor actually worked with him on major changes, like removing a character. The reason this makes me feel better is because I have had the impression for so long that the first novel you send in needs to be only a mild line edit from published, especially with how the editors talk at panels. I guess it is good to hear that editors, um, edit? Yeah.

The other thing Brandon had to say was heartening too, which was to not worry as much about there being occasional typos or bad word choice in the story. The first few pages are pretty important, but the editors should be expecting some errors naturally in the story. In the end, it is an overall quality of writing and a good story they are seeking out. Granted, this doesn’t mean to slack, but it also means to not sweat bullets when you see one you missed a month after sending something in. Unless it is on the first page and you are slush submitting. Then you are probably boned. But otherwise, cheer up! Right? Of course right.

In other news, I noticed Terry Goodkind has signed a three-book deal with Tor for more Sword of Truth type novels. That breaks my heart. I’ll explain why in another post.

Oh, also, my latest Firefly rewatch is up too: “Our Mrs. Reynolds”