This is the last page of “The Story of Cook”. I hope you have enjoyed this short interlude. Next, a small pimpage of my social media. If you are a twitter or facebook follower of mine (links to the left), then you will soon get a special treat in your feeds by way of the cover art and title of The Tijervyn Chronicles Volume 2! Weee! Anyway, onto actual blog posty stuff.

So, part of the “for sale” eBook I’m putting together for Revenant is that I wrote a special short story/23^rd chapter that will be in the “for purchase” version of the book only. Well, I’ll probably post it as a $0.99 download on its own too, but regardless! I wrote this chapter.

And, in this chapter, I suddenly started to realize I was using some symbolism and phrases I’d used in other short stories, in particular dealing with cheating destiny and forging your own fate. And I had the sudden worry: am I becoming a theme writer?

Now, writing by themes is not a bad thing. Every writer, in my experience at least, has some over-arching themes across their work. G.R.R. Martin is a cynic that looks at the human condition through the lens of crap-pot worlds, usually dealing with winter. Robert Jordan played with moral ambiguity in a fantasy world where “right and wrong” should be easy, but still weren’t. Some authors love coming of age stories. Some love overcoming-the-odds stories. I, I’ve noticed, am starting to really focus in on personal agency. For the layman, that is a fancy academic term for free will.

What interests me most about this is that I never really thought I had any particular strong opinions or curiosities about free will. Yes, I enjoy time travel stories and “free will” type stories, but I enjoy a lot of things.

If I had to have guessed what “major” theme I was going to end up with (and in truth probably have besides), it would be an examination of ways to deal with “different sentiences”. That is to say, a rational, self-aware being that isn’t human, or is in some way objectively different from human through tampering, mutation, etc, and how it interacts with humans and how we interact with it. In obvious example: cyborgs who are stronger, faster, and can still feel with their new parts. As I said in an earlier post, this question fascinates me. But I digress.

So, I’ve started to fixate on free will and personal agency. What should I do about it? (If that isn’t the most meta of questions!) As I said, being a theme writer isn’t bad, but there is one thing that worries me about themes, and that is getting stuck in a rut. What I am scared of doing is being that author who always writes about one thing. Just like I don’t want to be pigeonholed as just a steampunk writer (I have urban fantasies and hard sci-fis I want to tell too), I don’t want to be “that free will author” either. So, I’ll keep what I have, because I think it is some good stuff, but we’ll see where Tijervyn 2 takes us. There will probably still be my “different sentiences” and some “free will/personal agency” stuff in there, but I have plans to play with other ideas too. After all, as I once explained to someone, Spec Fic isn’t about dragons and spaceships. It is about being able to ask the question “what if” and explore how people react to it.

Oh, and Page Three of Legends is up.

So, I finished ADWD Wednesday in the doldrums of the day. I had a conversation earlier with a friend who had finished it before me that had gotten my hopes up for the end to somewhat justify the silliness that was A Feast For Crows, but sadly they misremembered where my “current spot” was and were actually trying to trump up something I’d already read that didn’t really deliver, in my mind. So I was left with the feeling of “Damn it, Martin did it to me again!” (Swearing needed, this is a review of an A Song and Ice and Fire book.)

So, what was good about the book, because I always like to start on good notes. We get the viewpoints we were missing in Feast. Tyrion, Jon, Dany. About halfway through the book (right on page 500, as it happens, in the hard back), we catch up time-line wise and start getting snippets of the plots from Feast, but in ways that aren’t completely annoying. Cersei’s chapters didn’t actually seem to drag on forever, and there were blessed few of them besides. No Samwell, which kind of disappoints me because at the end of Feast I was suddenly interested in him.

Other annoyances: The Iron Islands stuff, while not as annoying to me as in Feast, was just kind of . . . well . . . there. I get what Martin was doing, but he left it hanging big time for the next book. And what Dornish chapters there are were again not as annoying to me as in Feast, but they still felt like they were just “there”, despite the critical role they end up playing by the end of the book.

But, moreover, Martin seemed dedicated by the end of ADWD to make up for the lack of gritty storytelling in Feast. And this is where I am going to get into my rant.

Aside time. Tolkien was not the best of writers, even in his day. I’ve read some genre contemporaries of Tolkien, and they actually had a better prose, narrative style, and sense of plot and character. So to say someone is a better writer than Tolkien is like saying Swiss Chocolate is better than a Hershey bar.

What Tolkien had was an idea that launched a new style of writing. No, not fantasy, despite some people calling Tolkien the Father of Fantasy. They are missing a word. There was fantasy as a genre before Tolkien. Ever hear of Conan the Barbarian? The character predates Tolkien’s Hobbit by five years, and there were plenty of other pulp writers messing around even before that.

No, Tolkien is better labeled the “Father of High Fantasy,” a subgenre that is bickered about as far as an exact definition, but is typically nutshelled down to the following:

1) The central struggle of the book is one of world proportion. The very way the people of the world live will be changed depending on the outcome of the conflict.
2) There is an objective good and evil. The protagonists are at their core heroic and the protagonists are sinister. There may or may not be actual manifest deities, but there is a clear cut good and evil.

Simple, eh? Well, Martin meets the first, sort of. Yes, all the “Game of Thrones” stuff is going on and is more of a petty squabble between lords with no clear and obvious best choice (at least now that he has been killed off in Book 3), but the White Walkers from beyond the Wall seem pretty well the true villains, even if the vast majority of the world doesn’t know it yet.

Oh, but number two. Westeros is not a world where there is a clear right and wrong. Heroes have murder, rape, and incest in their past, and the only “good” people are actually naïve to the workings of the world and die for it. What we are left with is a snow-slush gray cast where we have a hard time truly rooting for a character. I’ll be honest, aside from Dany, Jon and Tyrion, I don’t really care about the fates of any of the surviving characters, and even those three have been through some morally questionable space.

And that grit that Martin writes with is what makes him almost the antithesis of Tolkien. Perhaps I can grant you that both Tolkien and Martin are trail-blazing and foraging their way into a new idea of writing fantasy, but I feel that I have to quote Robert Jordan here.

The reason for the popularity of fantasy, and the reason science fiction is fading in comparison, is quite simple, really. Increasingly in books and films, including science fiction but also in everything from mysteries to so-called “main stream literary” novels, the lines between right and wrong have become blurred. Good and evil are more and more portrayed as two sides of the same coin. This is called realism. People by and large want to believe that there is a clear cut right and wrong, though, and that good and evil depend on more than how you look in the mirror or whether you’re squinting when you do. In fantasy, you can talk about good and evil, right and wrong, with a straight face and no need to elbow anybody in the ribs to let them know you’re just kidding, you don’t really believe in this childish, simplistic baloney. That seems to be less and less so in other genres.

Now, call me a Jordan Fanboy, but honestly, Jordan is much more of a direct descendant/heir to Tolkien. He, at least, writes High Fantasy with the Good-and-Evil commentary. More-over, it allows the escapism. Because, you know what, that is a lot of what fantasy is. It is an escape from the morally gray world we actually live in and struggle in. Martin does not allow us that escape. Idealists are killed in Westeros, and only the self-serving and corrupt survive. It is gritty, and it is well written, and it even serves to the appetite of the main stream, contrary to Jordan’s expectations, but it is not High Fantasy. Much as Goodkind is the high fantasy author who claimed to not write fantasy, Martin is the author who seems to write high fantasy but doesn’t. Note: I don’t know what Martin’s own opinions of his writing are off hand, but he is getting pigeonholed into High Fantasy.

That being said: I still do enjoy Martin’s books. ADWD is very well written, and while it has a few of the gritty Martin “gotcha’s” in it, I will still recommend his series to my friends to read, and I will buy further books. But, seriously, if you have to compare Martin to someone, Dickens. The NYT got that right at least, after the horrible Tolkien analogy. They are both bitter and bleak examinations about the cruelty of the world and the human condition. Yes, one has dragons and the other doesn’t, but it really doesn’t change the gut feeling. Just saying.

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!”

Now, tell me, is there any way that even the most inobservant of people who are at least looking at you would miss the sheer forced nature and utter facetiousness of that smile? Is there any way that there is anyone that doesn’t know that you aren’t smiling on the inside? Well, maybe if you are a clown and a kid is looking at you. After all, we all know clowns don’t smile on the inside, but only after we become adults.

So, why do I bring this up? Well, I have started to wonder at how this has become an accepted writing tool. There are typically two types of people that typically have smiled that don’t touch their eyes. One is catty people, the other is complete manipulators.

The catty people I don’t mind. After all, these are people who are trying to pretend but fail miserably at it. They wear their emotions on their sleeves and stab backs before said backs are even turned. For them to have that funny looking smile you just saw in the mirror, no problem from me at all.

But manipulators, really? Not only is this person’s fake smile supposed to be a sign of their ingenious and masterful ability to hide their true motives, the observation of said smile is supposed to speak to the ability of the observer to see past the manipulator’s game. Gah!

A real manipulator would know how to actually squint a little when they smile to make said smile look genuine. A real manipulator would force a smile in a time where said smile would be suspicious, even if it does touch the eyes. I guess it just gets back to my usual gripe that manipulators are always “evil” and must have their disguises casually ripped off by the morally upright and usually “stupid” hero. I won’t even get into my normal diatribe on the anti-intellectualism that is prevalent in novels, nor the irony that the writers of said novels are usually very intelligent people.

And, I think this is one reason I enjoyed A Game of Thrones better this time through reading it. The heroes, the Starks, actually really annoyed me for the most part, while the villains, the Lannisters, had me rooting for them. Why? Because the Lannisters were practical. There was a line in there, near the end, that I loved. One of the Starks, the older daughter who thinks life is a fairytale, realized that it isn’t, and thinks to herself “In real life, the monsters win.”  Well, maybe monsters is a little harsh of a word, but yes, the people who are willing to play the game win. What is wrong with that, honestly?

Caveat: The Fife in no way endorses complete and total Machiavellian means. He says this with a smile that touches his eyes. Honest.