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, I spent a bit trying to decide what to do with today’s blog. First I was all super hopeful about how fast I could read a book and thought I could review A Dance with Dragons. Yeah, not so much. Then I was thinking maybe I could catch a midnight showing of Harry Potter and review that. Then I remembered that meant I’d be getting back at 3am or so, exhausted, and needing to write a coherent review. Yeah, not so much. That can be next Friday’s blog, and A Dance with Dragons the Friday after that. Today, let’s talk about something short and sweet: Conan.

See, as those who follow my twitter or facebook know, I found an old copy of Conan the Unconquered by Robert Jordan at my local used bookstore. I snatched that up double-quick, and honestly, that might be one of the best dollars I’ve ever spent.

Now, I’m not the biggest of Conan fanboys, although I do know enough to know that for as fun as those two movies are, they fell a bit short of the full Conan feel, and the new movie is a little disappointing casting wise. I know my way around Hyborea well enough to know some of the countries, etc, but I’ve read very little of the original R.E.Howard work, and until recently had not read any of the post-Howard novels.

I say all this, but, really, the truth is that Conan the Unconquered was 280ish pages of awesome that you did not need to know a lick of Conan to be able to enjoy. It is pretty well a non-stop, seat-of-your-pants adventure that is on the surface the worst type of male-oriented fantasy, including all the lusty wenches, but it does it in a way as to not feel like a trashy novel. The fact that none of the sex is on screen might help with that, but it is also a lot of thanks to the writing style, which is both amazingly descriptive without being over the top that some might accuse Jordan of in his later novels.

But what really amazes me with all of this is how easy it was to read. I guess I never have really read a pulp adventure, and even then, I never expected myself to enjoy one so much, despite having writing something somewhat like a pulp adventure for one of my manuscripts (which as it turns out is the novel I have on submission to an editor right now). I also have to wonder if this is part of a general movement in fantasy away from pulp.

If it is, I think it is a mistake. Fantasy novels do seem to have a tendency to always want to be parts of series, even when they are supposed stand-alone novels. Part of this is the publishers, who are always wanting to option sequels in case the book takes off so they can cash in on the “more of the same”, but part of it is the writers too. Writers want to continue to be Tolkien, or Jordan, or Martin, and tell these massive, multivolume stories that pretend to be more than one book. But, as a friend of mine pointed out once, it really shouldn’t count as a separate book if you have the read the prequel to understand at all what is going on or the sequel to know how it ends.

Conan was exactly the opposite of that series concept. Yes, there tons of Conan novels, but it doesn’t matter what order you read them in. They are all meant to be the starting place, or middle, or end of your Conan experience, and each one is a complete, self-contained story. Conan kills the evil wizard, saves the day, and gets the girl at the end of each book. Even if there was some larger under-plot about the bad guy, it doesn’t need to be left wide open for the next book, nor does the action of the prior book need to even be necessary to the next book. “He had dealt with them before” is all the back-story Conan ever needed.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my Tolkien-esk epics too, but I just wish there was more pulp out there. What do you all think? Does Fantasy need to learn to get past always wanting to write in trilogy-or-more formats and bring back the single-novel pulp? I know I’d like to see it. What about you?

So, last weekend I was at JordanCon as the toastmaster. While my opening ceremonies (watchable here) were well in the tradition of past years, that is to say, completely zany and awesome, I did leave a bit at the end for a serious speech (which is the better part of part 4 in the youtubes). For those who prefer to read than watch, here is the speech as I wrote it. I seem to recall that I didn’t miss or change anything, so, here it is. The general topic (as is easy to figure out) is what Robert Jordan means to me as a writer.

What I’d like to talk about now is what Robert Jordan and his work has meant to me as not a fan, but as a writer. See, I’ve always wanted to be a writer. My honest to Light earliest memories are of having watched the movie Dragonslayer and thinking “I can do better than that,” and then proceeding to steal my mom’s old typewriter and pluck out a chapter book. Sadly, it never got past the first chapter.

But even then, for as much as I wanted to write stories, I never really seemed to have the full motivation to actually do it. I read C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, David Eddings and Piers Anthony, Margret Wiess and Tracy Hickman. But all of that always just scratched an itch for fantasy. It didn’t push me over the edge. Then, one day in ’98, a friend hands me The Eye of the World. Now, my deep dark admission here is that I only got to Four Kings before I put the book down because of various other distractions, and I didn’t pick it back up again until ’03 and realized what I’d been missing.

Dark secret aside, something stuck with me from what I read back in ’98, and that was the prologue, Dragonmount. Those pages have been emblazoned on my mind, and even though I wasn’t completely aware of it, they were molding me. See, I’ve read numerous books with prologues, and nearly every single one of them did it poorly. And those that didn’t still didn’t really need them. But Dragonmount set the stage perfectly for the Wheel. I’ll openly admit that it was shortly after reading Eye of the World that I started putting pen to paper with any commitment. In fact, I wrote several wonderful and complete knockoffs of Dragonmount to prologue my own stories, and I am thankful that they have all been lost in hard drive crashes and cross-country moves. And, despite my, um, “homage” in my writing, I don’t think it was until recently that I was able to really see how Robert Jordan had started the ball rolling for me. And now, much like any writer who grew up reading Jordan, I desperately would love to tell my own grand epic and am doing what I can to perfect my words until I’m ready.

But, what is it about Jordan? He is hardly the first person to write a massively long series or even an epic fantasy. Why did Tolkien or Lewis not spark me the same way? I’ve thought long and hard, and the seed of this answer came after JordanCon I. Somewhere at that convention, among meeting Team Jordan and the other fans, I realized a unique truth.

Robert Jordan’s true legacy is not just ink on paper. Nor is it even a well thought-out and realized world and story. It is something more than that, something that is living and breathing. It is a seed that grows in our minds and makes us really think. In the Wheel of Time, we find mirrors for our own society and the hard questions we must ask. Rand may be fighting the ultimate war of Good and Evil, but there are a thousand ways that Jordan has challenged us to think about our own, internal struggles.

And that literary strength is what grew in me starting with Dragonmount. There is a scope and power imbued in those words that let you know this is not just any other book. Even in Lews Therin’s madness, we can see ourselves. We can feel his loss and his failure. And that is what Robert Jordan means to me. It isn’t the gorgeous description, or the vastness of the world, or the diversity of the characters. It is that he makes me feel what they feel in a way that no other fantasy ever has.

And he did it with careful thought, and a desire to ask questions without giving answers to them. If he had his own answers, he did not presume to tell us, because, I think, he knew that any answer out there was greater than one person. He wanted us all to experience it for ourselves, because, after all, one of the cardinal rules of writing is to show, not tell. And that idea, that power that Jordan has written with is what drives those of us who have been inspired by his work. We want to tell our epics, but what’s more, if we can examine and realize it, is that we want to ask questions that will make people think. We want to tell stories that will make people discuss. We want to make worlds where we can find our own answers and then share those worlds so that others might find their answers as well.

And so now, let us ask our questions, discuss our thoughts, and try as we might to find our answers. We are on the brink, not of seeing the end of a series, but of being posed a final query. When we thought all might have been lost, a storm gathered and the towers of midnight themselves stood before us. Soon, the pattern willing, we will have our conclusion. So, join me, here, as we all march on to Tarmon Gaidon with naught but a Memory of Light to guide us.

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, 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).

See, The Long Price Quartet (as the series this book starts is called) exists in a world where some people communicate using both words and accompanying poses. Alright, interesting concept, especially when dealing with such people and others who are not as adept at the poses so miss nuances, if not complete understanding. But, here is the hitch: presentation. I cannot think of any way to actually do these “languages of fans” to an excessive degree without making them trite and slightly annoying.

See, all the descriptive texts for the conversations—those little beats between the actual dialogue—were eaten by the poses. He says something, then takes a pose that is kind of “duh”, like he asks a question and takes a pose of query. There might be a little more detail than just “of query”, but like “a pose of query that implied a formal frankness”, but all of this was usually present in the dialogue. In the events where there was only a pose and no dialogue, it felt like poor attempt at making the characters more eloquent than the writer felt himself capable of.

Another instance of this in writing, one where I am actually pulling the title of the post from, and that is the Wheel of Time. One of the nations in that book series has an entire language of fans (which I want to think is drawn from a real nation somewhere that did the same thing), where you could non-verbally communicate. In The Wheel of Time, Faile, the character that uses the language, only does so on rare instance due to the fact that almost no one else in the series knows it, and the one person who does know some is her husband, who she has been teaching it to. There, it makes sense as a means of subterfuge. But if it was all over the place, well, I’d probably be annoyed by it too.

The related problem, of course, is how to relate massive use of such a thing, especially when it is required to understand the dialogue, on a movie screen. Yeah, baseball movies have the call-sign things between coaches and players, but all you need to know there is that communication happened, not what it was. Imagine, though, having to work in some explanation for poses or fan-motions so that the audience could have a chance at knowing what is being said, and then having to expect them to remember more than one or two meanings. Gah!

So yeah, Language of Fans is right there on my “cool yet bad idea” list. Can anyone think of a counter-example? I’m hard pressed.

About a year ago, I had the honor of getting to meet Tom Doherty, the publisher and top dog of Tor books. In the course of the conversation, I asked him if he had any insight or idea of where the genres were headed, and he replied with an odd answer. He said that books like Twilight by Stephanie Meyers are good. Not per se good on their own, but good because they are brining a different audience into genre. It really made me realize that this man could see the silver lining to any genre cloud, and not just one with dollar signs. Although dollar signs might be involved, and I don’t fault him for that. He is a businessman too, after all. (yes, this is quite a setup).

Which is why I don’t fault him in this article. (It’s only a few paragraphs, read it, I’ll wait.)  For those who don’t even want to read that much off my site (and who would), his quote of “We are excited to publish Terry Goodkind again. Millions of people delight in the novels of Richard and Kahlan and eagerly await the continuation of their story.”

Yes, that is right, Terry Goodkind, the man who believes he has the power to channel Ayn Rand; the man who doesn’t write fantasy novels, but instead philosophical discussions with fantastical settings; the man whom, whether or did it intentionally or not, ripped of Robert Jordan’s setting and trope-mixture four years later, is getting to write three more books for Tor.

Now, I originally liked The Sword of Truth. Even to this day I think the first five or so novels aren’t bad (although number two had a bit much in the ol’ melodrama.) OK, they all have a good amount of melodrama, but I was a teenager when I read them, so sue me. I ate that stuff up. I had tried The Eye of the World, but it didn’t stick the first time, so I had to settle for Goodkind. I will admit, I somewhat regret that, but it’s past, so whatever.

Anyway, it was around book five that he started to get into the political commentary hard and heavy. Saving grace for book five was I really liked the pseudo-villain, Dolton Campbell, for being a sneaky prick who was burnt by his actions and didn’t whine about it, but instead got even.  But after that, the entire story became an Objectivist parable. The writing style also went downhill because at this point, it is Terry F-ing Goodkind, you don’t need to line-edit him!

So yeah, the series jumped the shark, I said F-it after Naked Empire, and finally got my hands on The Wheel of Time and have been happy since. Now if I could only make myself read G.R.R. Martin, but that is another rant.

But now, Goodkind is coming back. Humorously, I hear that he had signed a three book deal at Putnam, and the first one bombed like hell. (pause) OK, I just went and looked up the summary of The Law of Nines on Amazon. I see why. Callbacks to The Sword of Truth in an urban-fantasy (not that he’d call it that, I’m sure). No word, as far as I know, of what happened to his other two promised books with Putnam. I wonder if they just dissolved it after the bomb. Good money after bad and all that.

But, long and the short is, Goodkind is back at Tor, and a small part of me died a little.

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”