Marie Brennan's Blog, page 188
March 4, 2013
Ides of March Book Giveaway
It's better than a dagger in the back . . . .
I'll have the usual book tour update for you all tomorrow, but I wanted to put this one out on its own: the Ides of March Book Giveaway, in which I join forces with sixteen other authors to reward the winners with a whole stack of books. To quote the official description:
Do you love books that take you somewhere you've never been before? Books with a unique sense of history or a fantastical premise, dark thrills or the sparkle of your favorite fairy tale--or perhaps all of these rolled up in one? Seventeen of your favorite, award-winning and best-selling authors have teamed up to offer this giveaway:
THE LANTERN by Deborah Lawrenson - NY Times bestseller modern gothic novel of love, secrets, and murder—set against the lush backdrop of Provence
THE FIREBIRD (ARC) by Susanna Kearsley - A twin-stranded story that blends modern romance with 18th-century Jacobite intrigue, traveling from Scotland to Russia
THE TWELFTH ENCHANTMENT by David Liss - In Regency England, at the dawn of the industrial era, magic and technology clash and the fate of the nation rests in the hands of a penniless young woman
COLD MAGIC by Kate Elliott - An epic adventure fantasy with a decidedly steampunk edge where magic - and the power of the Cold Mages - hold sway
THE MAPMAKER'S WAR by Ronlyn Domingue - Set in an ancient time in a faraway land, The Mapmaker’s War accounts the life of an exiled mapmaker who must come to terms with the home and children she was forced to leave behind.
DRACULA IN LOVE by Karen Essex - "If you read only one more vampire novel, let it be this one!" -C.W. Gortner, author of The Last Queen & The Confessions of Catherine de Medici
RED, WHITE AND BLOOD by Chris Farnsworth - High-octane supernatural thriller, a sequel to The President's Vampire
THE HOUSE OF VELVET AND GLASS by Katherine Howe - The House of Velvet and Glass weaves together meticulous period detail, intoxicating romance, and a final shocking twist in a breathtaking novel that will thrill readers
THE FAIREST OF THEM ALL (ARC) by Carolyn Turgeon - An inventive, magical fairy-tale mash-up about Rapunzel growing up to be Snow White's stepmother
THE BOOK OF LOST FRAGRANCES by M.J. Rose - A sweeping and suspenseful tale of secrets, intrigue, and lovers separated by time, all connected through the mystical qualities of a perfume created in the days of Cleopatra--and lost for 2,000 years
THIEFTAKER by DB Jackson - Combining elements of traditional fantasy, urban fantasy, mystery and historical fiction, Thieftaker will appeal to readers who enjoy intelligent fantasy and history with an attitude
GLAMOUR IN GLASS by Mary Robinette Kowal - Follows the lives of the main characters from Shades of Milk and Honey, a loving tribute to the works of Jane Austen in a world where magic is an everyday occurrence
DEVIL'S GATE by FJ Lennon - Exhilarating urban fantasy, with first class writing and characters that are unforgettable beyond the last page
THE MISSING MANUSCRIPT OF JANE AUSTEN by Syrie James - "A novel within a novel honoring what we love most about Austen: her engaging stories, rapier wit, and swoon worthy romance. Pitch perfect, brilliantly crafted." —Austenprose
THE CROOKED BRANCH by Jeanine Cummins - “Wonderfully written, with strong, compelling characters, it is a deeply satisfying combination of sweeping historical saga and modern family drama, a gentle reminder of the ever-reaching influence of family”--Booklist
A NATURAL HISTORY OF DRAGONS by Marie Brennan - The story of Isabella, Lady Trent, the world's preeminent dragon naturalist, and her thrilling expedition to Vystrana, where she made the first of many historic discoveries that would change the world forever
THE RECKONING by Alma Katsu - In the tradition of early Anne Rice, a gorgeously written sequel to The Taker that takes readers on a harrowing, passion-fueled chase that transcends the boundaries of time
We're giving away one set of books per 500 entries, so how many winners there will be depends on the number of entrants! To enter, fill in the form below -- you have until March 15th. Please note that this contest is open to residents of the US, Canada and the UK only and by entering, you agree to be added to the authors' mailing lists (don't worry; you can always unsubscribe from any mailing list at any time).
a Rafflecopter giveaway
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/578053.html. Comment here or there.
I'll have the usual book tour update for you all tomorrow, but I wanted to put this one out on its own: the Ides of March Book Giveaway, in which I join forces with sixteen other authors to reward the winners with a whole stack of books. To quote the official description:
Do you love books that take you somewhere you've never been before? Books with a unique sense of history or a fantastical premise, dark thrills or the sparkle of your favorite fairy tale--or perhaps all of these rolled up in one? Seventeen of your favorite, award-winning and best-selling authors have teamed up to offer this giveaway:
THE LANTERN by Deborah Lawrenson - NY Times bestseller modern gothic novel of love, secrets, and murder—set against the lush backdrop of Provence
THE FIREBIRD (ARC) by Susanna Kearsley - A twin-stranded story that blends modern romance with 18th-century Jacobite intrigue, traveling from Scotland to Russia
THE TWELFTH ENCHANTMENT by David Liss - In Regency England, at the dawn of the industrial era, magic and technology clash and the fate of the nation rests in the hands of a penniless young woman
COLD MAGIC by Kate Elliott - An epic adventure fantasy with a decidedly steampunk edge where magic - and the power of the Cold Mages - hold sway
THE MAPMAKER'S WAR by Ronlyn Domingue - Set in an ancient time in a faraway land, The Mapmaker’s War accounts the life of an exiled mapmaker who must come to terms with the home and children she was forced to leave behind.
DRACULA IN LOVE by Karen Essex - "If you read only one more vampire novel, let it be this one!" -C.W. Gortner, author of The Last Queen & The Confessions of Catherine de Medici
RED, WHITE AND BLOOD by Chris Farnsworth - High-octane supernatural thriller, a sequel to The President's Vampire
THE HOUSE OF VELVET AND GLASS by Katherine Howe - The House of Velvet and Glass weaves together meticulous period detail, intoxicating romance, and a final shocking twist in a breathtaking novel that will thrill readers
THE FAIREST OF THEM ALL (ARC) by Carolyn Turgeon - An inventive, magical fairy-tale mash-up about Rapunzel growing up to be Snow White's stepmother
THE BOOK OF LOST FRAGRANCES by M.J. Rose - A sweeping and suspenseful tale of secrets, intrigue, and lovers separated by time, all connected through the mystical qualities of a perfume created in the days of Cleopatra--and lost for 2,000 years
THIEFTAKER by DB Jackson - Combining elements of traditional fantasy, urban fantasy, mystery and historical fiction, Thieftaker will appeal to readers who enjoy intelligent fantasy and history with an attitude
GLAMOUR IN GLASS by Mary Robinette Kowal - Follows the lives of the main characters from Shades of Milk and Honey, a loving tribute to the works of Jane Austen in a world where magic is an everyday occurrence
DEVIL'S GATE by FJ Lennon - Exhilarating urban fantasy, with first class writing and characters that are unforgettable beyond the last page
THE MISSING MANUSCRIPT OF JANE AUSTEN by Syrie James - "A novel within a novel honoring what we love most about Austen: her engaging stories, rapier wit, and swoon worthy romance. Pitch perfect, brilliantly crafted." —Austenprose
THE CROOKED BRANCH by Jeanine Cummins - “Wonderfully written, with strong, compelling characters, it is a deeply satisfying combination of sweeping historical saga and modern family drama, a gentle reminder of the ever-reaching influence of family”--Booklist
A NATURAL HISTORY OF DRAGONS by Marie Brennan - The story of Isabella, Lady Trent, the world's preeminent dragon naturalist, and her thrilling expedition to Vystrana, where she made the first of many historic discoveries that would change the world forever
THE RECKONING by Alma Katsu - In the tradition of early Anne Rice, a gorgeously written sequel to The Taker that takes readers on a harrowing, passion-fueled chase that transcends the boundaries of time
We're giving away one set of books per 500 entries, so how many winners there will be depends on the number of entrants! To enter, fill in the form below -- you have until March 15th. Please note that this contest is open to residents of the US, Canada and the UK only and by entering, you agree to be added to the authors' mailing lists (don't worry; you can always unsubscribe from any mailing list at any time).
a Rafflecopter giveaway
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/578053.html. Comment here or there.
February 26, 2013
How to write a long fantasy series
It took three years and two months rather than the two years I initially planned, but I have, at very long last, finished the Wheel of Time re-read and analysis. And as I promised quite some time ago, we’ll end with what I’ve learned.
This post, unlike the others, is not WoT-specific. I’ll be referencing the series, because it’s the primary source of my thoughts on this topic, but the point here is to talk about the specific challenges of writing a long epic fantasy series -- here defining “long” as “more than a trilogy, and telling one ongoing story.” (So something like Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar books wouldn’t count, since they’re a conglomeration of multiple trilogies.) My points probably also apply to non-fantasy series, but other genres are much less likely to attempt multi-volume epics on this scale, so I’m mostly speaking to my fellow fantasists.
I do not pretend this is in any way, shape, or form a recipe for commercial success with an epic fantasy series. After all, most of this is a checklist of errors I feel Jordan made, and you could paper the walls of Tor’s offices in fifty-dollar bills with the cash he made for them. Nor am I claiming artistic failure awaits if you fail to heed this advice; you might squeak through on luck, or just really good storytelling instinct. But I do feel that bearing these points in mind can help the would-be writer of an epic series avoid falling off some of the more common and perilous cliffs.
With all of that intro material out of the way, let’s get to it.
On the basis of my re-read, and comparing to other series that attempt similar tasks, I have come to believe there is a single, fundamental principle, underlying all the other points I’ll make throughout this post, which governs the author’s ability to keep the narrative from spinning wildly out of control, to the detriment of their story.
It’s simple:
PICK A STRUCTURE, AND STICK TO IT.
Most of us, when we set out to write a novel, have at least a vague sense of how long it’s going to be. We can be off in that estimate -- In Ashes Lie ran about thirty thousand words longer than I originally intended -- but generally speaking, you know that you’re aiming for 60K or 100K or 200K, and you use that to guide a thousand decisions you make along the way. Should you introduce new subplots, or is it time to start tying things up? Does your protagonist’s next action need some complications along the way, or would it be better to just handle it offscreen and move on to more important things? Can you bring in a new character for this strand, or should you find a way to take care of things with the characters you already have? These are questions of pacing, and we’ll come back to that a bunch of times along the way. But you can’t gauge your pace when you don’t know how long the race will be: at best, you’ll end up going through the whole thing with a steady, slogging, workhorse pace that (to switch metaphors) loses all sense of dynamics.
Pick a structure, and stick to it.
By “a structure” I mostly mean “a set number of books,” though I allow that there might be other ways to conceive of it. J.K. Rowling knew the Harry Potter series would be seven books, and each book would span one academic year at Hogwarts (plus or minus a little time before or after). The actual size of those books varied wildly, and you can certainly make the argument that she would have benefited from tighter editing as the word-count ballooned. But does anybody think that situation would have been improved by her saying, “There’s an awful lot of stuff to deal with in book five; I think I should split it in two”? I doubt it. (The decision to split the final film was likely drive as much by financial aspirations as artistic, if not more so. And oy vey is that the case with the two Breaking Dawn movies. But by then the material was set; the end was in sight.)
I haven’t read Steven Erickson’s Malazan books, but I’m told he set out to write a ten-book series, and that’s what he delivered. And you know what? Based on what I’ve heard from readers, some of them thought it was great, some of them thought it was flawed, but none of them thought it was the trainwreck of apocalyptically bad pacing the Wheel of Time turned into. Whether or not you liked where the story was going, it was indubitably going somewhere, and at a reasonable clip.
A Song of Ice and Fire, by contrast, was supposed to be a trilogy. Then a quartet. Then a sextet. Then A Dance With Dragons got too long, so Martin split it and now the series is a septet. In a recent interview, he said it might run to eight books instead. Step by step, I can see him walking into the same swamp Jordan got lost in.
Tom Smith discusses this in his essai Zeno’s Mountains, wherein he cites David Eddings saying that a man who’s never walked a mile has no real sense of how far a mile is. Most of us learn how much Stuff goes into a novel by writing one; we learn how much Stuff goes into a trilogy by doing the same. How many of us ever write more than one seven- or nine- or ten-book series, though? Jordan never got a chance to learn from his first attempt and do better the second time. Martin likely won’t, either.
Smith says, “I do not know of any general solution to this problem; perhaps no general solution is possible.” I say there is a solution, and its name is Discipline.
As answers go, it isn’t perfect; keeping your series confined within its intended boundaries may result in a less satisfying arc for various plots than you would get if you let them stretch out to their fullest. But letting them stretch may very well be detrimental to other aspects of the story. Keep one eye always on the larger picture, and know what must be accomplished by the end of the current book for you to remain on schedule.
Doing so may require some ruthless editing. And it’s entirely possible that such editing won’t be in your best commercial interests: it costs time and effort, laid against the odds that allowing the story to sprawl will translate into more money for you and your publisher alike. From the standpoint of craft, though, rather than the bottom line:
Pick a structure, and stick to it.
Continuing onward from there, I have learned several other salutary lessons, most (if not all) of them standing on that structural foundation.
1. Control your points of view.
A friend of mine, in discussion regarding an epic fantasy series she’d like to write, proposed that this should be the number-one item on my list. I put it at number two because I believe structure is one of the major yardsticks by which the decision to add a new pov character should be measured.
I could point to any number of cautionary examples from the Wheel of Time (goddamed Vilnar Barada comes to mind, or Alteima), but I think it’s best to look at the moment where I first noticed Jordan going wrong. That would be the pov scene for Jaichim Carridin in The Shadow Rising, the fourth book of the series -- the one where the branching nature of the story is at its strongest, right before passing from being a feature into being a nigh-fatal bug.
For those who aren’t familiar with the Wheel of Time, Carridin is a minor villain character who gets four pov scenes in the entire series. In this particular scene, we discover that he’s scheming with Liandrin (another minor villain; she gets four pov appearances, too) on behalf of one of the factions he serves, and with the King of Tarabon on behalf of a different faction. Which sounds good, except that the key word in that sentence is “discover” rather than “scheme” -- relatively little action takes place. Most of Carridin’s 3,194 words are spent on him thinking about stuff: the current political situation in the city, the current political situation outside the city, the way his evil overlords have been slaughtering his family one member at a time to motivate him, etc.
Some of the information that appears in this scene also reaches us via different channels in the story. Other parts aren’t terribly relevant, because they don’t come to anything in the long run. Jordan could easily have cut this scene, and we would have lost very little of substance; the few salient details could have been brought in elsewhere, by other means.
But let’s pretend for a moment that the information here is actually vital. Does that justify spending time in the head of this minor villain?
No. Because here’s the thing: switching to Carridin is lazy. It’s the easiest way to tell us what the bad guys are doing -- and I do mean “tell,” given that most of the scene is Carridin thinking rather than acting. Had Jordan restricted himself to a smaller set of pov characters, he would have been forced to arrange things so that his protagonists found out what Carridin was doing. In other words, they would have had to protag more. And that would have been a better story.
Every time you go to add a new point of view character, ask yourself whether it’s necessary, and then ask yourself again. Do we need to get this information directly, or see these events happen first-hand? Can you arrange for your existing protagonists to be there, or to find out about it by other means? Are you sure?
Given what I said above about sticking to your structure, there may indeed be times where it’s more word-efficient to jump to a new pov, rather than constructing a path by which your existing viewpoints can pick up the necessary threads. But be careful, because taking the lazy way out appears to be a slippery slope for authors. This page lists no less than sixty characters who get only a single pov scene each during the entirety of the Wheel of Time. Nineteen more get two apiece. Eleven get three, seven get four, and then the numbers start ticking upward faster, until our six primary characters have between fifty-seven and two hundred -- just to give you an idea of scale.
If I am counting correctly, this series has ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-NINE POINT OF VIEW CHARACTERS.
That is absurd.
Martin is starting to have a similar problem, albeit on a smaller scale. He has thirty-one viewpoint characters so far, according to this page. Fifteen of those -- nearly half! -- have been introduced or received pov in the last two books, and most of them have only one or two chapters apiece per book, well below the usual average for this series. One character in A Feast for Crows died at the end of his sole chapter, whereupon pov transferred to one of the people he’d been traveling with. Why not give that person viewpoint to begin with? Why not spend the pages developing that character, instead of the one who won’t be with us for long?
John Scalzi once pointed out the inexorable consequence of multiple points of view on pacing, which authors of long epics would do well to bear in mind. If you have a 120K book and one pov character, that’s a hundred and twenty thousand words forwarding that character’s story. If you split it evenly between two characters, they get 60K apiece. Four characters, and now each of them has only 30K in which to move forward. Pretty soon, it feels like not very much is happening with any one of them.
Of course, you can mitigate this to some extent by having those characters interact, so that A’s story is progressing even while we’re in B’s head. But that brings us to our next point . . . .
2. Control your subplots.
Once you have multiple pov characters, it’s easy to let them wander off from one another and start doing different things. This isn’t inherently bad; if you want to write a long epic fantasy series, you’re going to need a high degree of complexity. But if you lose sight of your structure, you’re liable to also lose sight of how many subplots is too many, and which ones are taking too long to resolve.
There are two ways to fall off this particular cliff. One is that you know X is going on in Y part of the world, but you’re afraid it won’t seem reasonable if you spring it on your reader at the point where X begins to affect the rest of the plot. (Or you just think it’s too shiny not to show, or whatever.) So you decide you need to show X happening -- and probably add a point of view to facilitate that. The other path starts with the point of view: having given a character pov rights, you feel consciously or subconsciously obligated to justify that decision. On a small scale, this leads to pointless crap like Vilnar Barada thinking about the girl he wants to marry; on a large scale, it leads to things like the Shaido Plot From Hell, which I am convinced was Jordan creating makework so that Perrin would have something to do, and also justifying Faile as an ongoing pov character.
It may annoy readers (especially when you do it badly), but I’ve come around to the philosophy that you shouldn’t be afraid to give one or more of your characters a sabbatical from the story. The example of Jordan doing this right is Perrin’s absence from The Fires of Heaven: Perrin had just won a great victory and settled into some necessary but unexciting work of consolidation, so it was a dandy time to step away and focus on other characters. The story would not have been improved by inventing a subplot to fill that gap. The example of Jordan doing it wrong is Mat’s absence from The Path of Daggers: Mat had just been trapped under a collapsing wall during the invasion of a city. It turns out nothing interesting had been going on with him during his book-long absence . . . but given where the story had left off with him, readers expected a great deal more, and didn’t get it. If you’re going to step away, choose the point at which something has wrapped up, not begun.
Making up subplots to keep a character busy is a cascading problem. The proliferating points of view created and/or abetted new plot complexity, which meant the central ropes of the narrative got stretched out farther than they were meant to go. You can’t shelve your main character for three books, though, so Rand -- ostensibly the driving force of the whole shebang -- didn’t have a lot to do for a while other than run around micro-managing the politics of several nations, creating a lot of material that didn’t really add all that much to the story. It did add words, though, which meant Jordan had to find something for Perrin to do while Rand was occupied, so Faile got kidnapped by the Shaido, and then next thing you know, you’ve created a monstrosity of a plotline that 80% of your readers will hate with the fire of a thousand suns, and oh by the way now you need to keep all those secondary characters busy, too, the ones who started this problem in the first place. It’s the principle of the Lowest Common Multiple, played out in narrative form: if one character is cycling at 13 rpm and another is at 20, you have to keep rolling until you hit 260 to get them both wrapping up at the same time. And that way lies the ever-expanding tale.
If you stick to your structure, you at least have a metric by which to gauge whether a subplot is worth the time it will take to cover it. Of course, most of us can’t really eyeball an idea and say “why yes, that’s fifteen thousand words’ worth of subplot” -- would that we could! But this gets back to the “ruthless editing” I mentioned before. If it starts stretching out too far, find a way to accomplish the necessary elements more efficiently. If you can’t do that, cut the subplot. Yes, it may be shiny, but is it worth throwing off the balance of everything else in the story?
3. Centralize.
This is closely-enough related to the previous point that I almost folded it in there, but I think it deserves to be pulled out and looked at on its own.
A long series is going to have a certain amount of sprawl, which is both necessary and desirable. But keep an eye on how long it’s been since your major characters interacted with one another. In the Wheel of Time, the fourth book was the first one where the main protagonists didn’t all come together for the finale; not coincidentally, it’s also the last one where the story’s sprawl felt truly effective. Something like eight or nine books passed without Rand and Perrin seeing one another, or Perrin and Mat. There was a point in the story where Rand, Mat, Perrin, Egwene, and Elayne were all in different places doing different things, and had been for some time; that’s five major plots rolling without reference to one another, in addition to the countless minor plots. We may also consider that Martin’s story and pacing have begun to fall apart as he lets his characters separate further and further: when’s the last time you had any two of Arya, Jon, Bran, Sansa, Catelyn, and Tyrion in the same place at the same time? (Not to mention Daenerys, off on the other side of the planet this entire time, or the host of other pov characters Martin has begun to introduce.)
Remember Scalzi’s point above: the more you fragment the perspective, the less forward movement each one gets per book. Remember my corollary: you can mitigate that by having the viewpoints overlap. Apart from the simple mathematics of pacing, this helps deal with the subplot issue, because you can keep important characters in the narrative by having A work with B on whatever it is B’s doing. (Or oppose it, or interfere with it, or whatever.) And it will assist in maintaining your structure, because if Aragorn’s got to be at the Black Gates when Frodo arrives at Mount Doom, then you’ve got to get that Pelennor thing done on schedule, which means not letting the Paths of the Dead episode overstay its welcome.
(Note that I am NOT holding up Tolkien as a model for how to construct the kind of narrative I’m talking about here. His approach was to ignore half his story for half a book, which isn’t a tactic that will serve any modern author very well. But Lord of the Rings is familiar enough to serve as a useful example.)
So yes. By all means let your characters wander off and do their own thing . . . but not for too long. Bring them back together periodically, and look for ways to get multiple stones to work together on killing that bird.
4. The further you go, the less you have to show your math.
This is less tied into the structural base than the rest of my points; it’s more a simple matter of word bloat.
Early on in your story, it’s useful to show how your characters pull off their small accomplishments. It demonstrates their competence to us, if it’s something they’re supposed to be good at, or conversely shows them developing new skills, if they’ve been thrust into situations outside their usual depth. Or it establishes the realism of the world, or gives the reader information about a topic they may not know very well. All of that is perfectly fine.
But when you’re ten books into your series, you really don’t need to show the camp logistics of the army your hero has been in command of for the last four books. You don’t need to walk through every step of how the heroine, having attained her throne, arranges a meeting with some fellow sovereigns. You’ve already established that these are tasks well within their skill-set. We will not bat an eyelash if you go straight to the meeting, or have the army keep trucking along in good order. If you introduce some element that makes those tasks hard again, then by all means show how the new challenge is overcome -- but even then, you’re allowed to only focus on the challenging part, and let the routine stuff go.
Because in theory, the further you go into your series, the more exciting the story should be. Tensions mount! We’re building toward the climax! Now is not the time to stop and do the simple math all over again. Think of it like a geometry proof: once you’ve proved the basic theorems, you’re allowed to just cite them and move on, rather than having to go through every step every time.
One of the corollaries to this is more debatable. Re-reading the Wheel of Time, I was struck by how many times the story explains Min’s visions; it felt unnecessarily repetitive to me. Arguably, however, that sort of repetition is necessary, because some readers may not have read the previous book in a long time, and may have forgotten who Min is and what she can do. (Or they may have picked up the third book without having read the first two, though I tend to be of the opinion that people who do that deserve what they get. I note that many series, including both the Wheel of Time and Harry Potter, eventually give up on holding people’s hands -- it just takes a while.) This is more a matter of exposition than showing the narrative math, and I’ll allow that some amount of reinventing the wheel may be required. But keep an eye on it anyway, and try to keep it to a minimum.
There are many other things I could say about the flaws in the Wheel of Time, or in other long series. But these are the main points, the ones I think are universally applicable, rather than specific to a particular narrative -- along with, of course, the basic lessons of good writing, like not using twenty words where five will do. A story’s quality depends heavily on its shape, on the timing of various twists and revelations, the pacing of its arcs and the rate at which the characters grow; and good shape rarely happens by accident, especially on a large scale. Ergo, I firmly believe that you need some fixed points by which to navigate during your journey. Know how many books you’re going to write, hammer in a couple of pegs to say that certain events will happen at certain points, and then hold to your course. If you stray from the path, you may never find your way out of the woods.
Rumor has it, of course, that Jordan was asked to stretch the series out, because it was making so much money. I have no idea if that’s true. But as I said at the start, my concern here is not the commercial success of a series; I’m addressing the story itself.
I’m speaking, mind you, as someone who has yet to write a series longer than four books (and those structured almost entirely as stand-alones). This is all based on my observations of other people’s efforts, not my own experience. But as I said to Tom Smith in the comments to “Zeno’s Mountains,” there’s not enough time in life to screw it up yourself for a dozen books, and then to do better afterward. If you want to write a long series and not have it collapse in the middle like a badly-made souffle, you have to learn from other people’s mistakes.
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/577881.html. Comment here or there.
This post, unlike the others, is not WoT-specific. I’ll be referencing the series, because it’s the primary source of my thoughts on this topic, but the point here is to talk about the specific challenges of writing a long epic fantasy series -- here defining “long” as “more than a trilogy, and telling one ongoing story.” (So something like Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar books wouldn’t count, since they’re a conglomeration of multiple trilogies.) My points probably also apply to non-fantasy series, but other genres are much less likely to attempt multi-volume epics on this scale, so I’m mostly speaking to my fellow fantasists.
I do not pretend this is in any way, shape, or form a recipe for commercial success with an epic fantasy series. After all, most of this is a checklist of errors I feel Jordan made, and you could paper the walls of Tor’s offices in fifty-dollar bills with the cash he made for them. Nor am I claiming artistic failure awaits if you fail to heed this advice; you might squeak through on luck, or just really good storytelling instinct. But I do feel that bearing these points in mind can help the would-be writer of an epic series avoid falling off some of the more common and perilous cliffs.
With all of that intro material out of the way, let’s get to it.
On the basis of my re-read, and comparing to other series that attempt similar tasks, I have come to believe there is a single, fundamental principle, underlying all the other points I’ll make throughout this post, which governs the author’s ability to keep the narrative from spinning wildly out of control, to the detriment of their story.
It’s simple:
PICK A STRUCTURE, AND STICK TO IT.
Most of us, when we set out to write a novel, have at least a vague sense of how long it’s going to be. We can be off in that estimate -- In Ashes Lie ran about thirty thousand words longer than I originally intended -- but generally speaking, you know that you’re aiming for 60K or 100K or 200K, and you use that to guide a thousand decisions you make along the way. Should you introduce new subplots, or is it time to start tying things up? Does your protagonist’s next action need some complications along the way, or would it be better to just handle it offscreen and move on to more important things? Can you bring in a new character for this strand, or should you find a way to take care of things with the characters you already have? These are questions of pacing, and we’ll come back to that a bunch of times along the way. But you can’t gauge your pace when you don’t know how long the race will be: at best, you’ll end up going through the whole thing with a steady, slogging, workhorse pace that (to switch metaphors) loses all sense of dynamics.
Pick a structure, and stick to it.
By “a structure” I mostly mean “a set number of books,” though I allow that there might be other ways to conceive of it. J.K. Rowling knew the Harry Potter series would be seven books, and each book would span one academic year at Hogwarts (plus or minus a little time before or after). The actual size of those books varied wildly, and you can certainly make the argument that she would have benefited from tighter editing as the word-count ballooned. But does anybody think that situation would have been improved by her saying, “There’s an awful lot of stuff to deal with in book five; I think I should split it in two”? I doubt it. (The decision to split the final film was likely drive as much by financial aspirations as artistic, if not more so. And oy vey is that the case with the two Breaking Dawn movies. But by then the material was set; the end was in sight.)
I haven’t read Steven Erickson’s Malazan books, but I’m told he set out to write a ten-book series, and that’s what he delivered. And you know what? Based on what I’ve heard from readers, some of them thought it was great, some of them thought it was flawed, but none of them thought it was the trainwreck of apocalyptically bad pacing the Wheel of Time turned into. Whether or not you liked where the story was going, it was indubitably going somewhere, and at a reasonable clip.
A Song of Ice and Fire, by contrast, was supposed to be a trilogy. Then a quartet. Then a sextet. Then A Dance With Dragons got too long, so Martin split it and now the series is a septet. In a recent interview, he said it might run to eight books instead. Step by step, I can see him walking into the same swamp Jordan got lost in.
Tom Smith discusses this in his essai Zeno’s Mountains, wherein he cites David Eddings saying that a man who’s never walked a mile has no real sense of how far a mile is. Most of us learn how much Stuff goes into a novel by writing one; we learn how much Stuff goes into a trilogy by doing the same. How many of us ever write more than one seven- or nine- or ten-book series, though? Jordan never got a chance to learn from his first attempt and do better the second time. Martin likely won’t, either.
Smith says, “I do not know of any general solution to this problem; perhaps no general solution is possible.” I say there is a solution, and its name is Discipline.
As answers go, it isn’t perfect; keeping your series confined within its intended boundaries may result in a less satisfying arc for various plots than you would get if you let them stretch out to their fullest. But letting them stretch may very well be detrimental to other aspects of the story. Keep one eye always on the larger picture, and know what must be accomplished by the end of the current book for you to remain on schedule.
Doing so may require some ruthless editing. And it’s entirely possible that such editing won’t be in your best commercial interests: it costs time and effort, laid against the odds that allowing the story to sprawl will translate into more money for you and your publisher alike. From the standpoint of craft, though, rather than the bottom line:
Pick a structure, and stick to it.
Continuing onward from there, I have learned several other salutary lessons, most (if not all) of them standing on that structural foundation.
1. Control your points of view.
A friend of mine, in discussion regarding an epic fantasy series she’d like to write, proposed that this should be the number-one item on my list. I put it at number two because I believe structure is one of the major yardsticks by which the decision to add a new pov character should be measured.
I could point to any number of cautionary examples from the Wheel of Time (goddamed Vilnar Barada comes to mind, or Alteima), but I think it’s best to look at the moment where I first noticed Jordan going wrong. That would be the pov scene for Jaichim Carridin in The Shadow Rising, the fourth book of the series -- the one where the branching nature of the story is at its strongest, right before passing from being a feature into being a nigh-fatal bug.
For those who aren’t familiar with the Wheel of Time, Carridin is a minor villain character who gets four pov scenes in the entire series. In this particular scene, we discover that he’s scheming with Liandrin (another minor villain; she gets four pov appearances, too) on behalf of one of the factions he serves, and with the King of Tarabon on behalf of a different faction. Which sounds good, except that the key word in that sentence is “discover” rather than “scheme” -- relatively little action takes place. Most of Carridin’s 3,194 words are spent on him thinking about stuff: the current political situation in the city, the current political situation outside the city, the way his evil overlords have been slaughtering his family one member at a time to motivate him, etc.
Some of the information that appears in this scene also reaches us via different channels in the story. Other parts aren’t terribly relevant, because they don’t come to anything in the long run. Jordan could easily have cut this scene, and we would have lost very little of substance; the few salient details could have been brought in elsewhere, by other means.
But let’s pretend for a moment that the information here is actually vital. Does that justify spending time in the head of this minor villain?
No. Because here’s the thing: switching to Carridin is lazy. It’s the easiest way to tell us what the bad guys are doing -- and I do mean “tell,” given that most of the scene is Carridin thinking rather than acting. Had Jordan restricted himself to a smaller set of pov characters, he would have been forced to arrange things so that his protagonists found out what Carridin was doing. In other words, they would have had to protag more. And that would have been a better story.
Every time you go to add a new point of view character, ask yourself whether it’s necessary, and then ask yourself again. Do we need to get this information directly, or see these events happen first-hand? Can you arrange for your existing protagonists to be there, or to find out about it by other means? Are you sure?
Given what I said above about sticking to your structure, there may indeed be times where it’s more word-efficient to jump to a new pov, rather than constructing a path by which your existing viewpoints can pick up the necessary threads. But be careful, because taking the lazy way out appears to be a slippery slope for authors. This page lists no less than sixty characters who get only a single pov scene each during the entirety of the Wheel of Time. Nineteen more get two apiece. Eleven get three, seven get four, and then the numbers start ticking upward faster, until our six primary characters have between fifty-seven and two hundred -- just to give you an idea of scale.
If I am counting correctly, this series has ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-NINE POINT OF VIEW CHARACTERS.
That is absurd.
Martin is starting to have a similar problem, albeit on a smaller scale. He has thirty-one viewpoint characters so far, according to this page. Fifteen of those -- nearly half! -- have been introduced or received pov in the last two books, and most of them have only one or two chapters apiece per book, well below the usual average for this series. One character in A Feast for Crows died at the end of his sole chapter, whereupon pov transferred to one of the people he’d been traveling with. Why not give that person viewpoint to begin with? Why not spend the pages developing that character, instead of the one who won’t be with us for long?
John Scalzi once pointed out the inexorable consequence of multiple points of view on pacing, which authors of long epics would do well to bear in mind. If you have a 120K book and one pov character, that’s a hundred and twenty thousand words forwarding that character’s story. If you split it evenly between two characters, they get 60K apiece. Four characters, and now each of them has only 30K in which to move forward. Pretty soon, it feels like not very much is happening with any one of them.
Of course, you can mitigate this to some extent by having those characters interact, so that A’s story is progressing even while we’re in B’s head. But that brings us to our next point . . . .
2. Control your subplots.
Once you have multiple pov characters, it’s easy to let them wander off from one another and start doing different things. This isn’t inherently bad; if you want to write a long epic fantasy series, you’re going to need a high degree of complexity. But if you lose sight of your structure, you’re liable to also lose sight of how many subplots is too many, and which ones are taking too long to resolve.
There are two ways to fall off this particular cliff. One is that you know X is going on in Y part of the world, but you’re afraid it won’t seem reasonable if you spring it on your reader at the point where X begins to affect the rest of the plot. (Or you just think it’s too shiny not to show, or whatever.) So you decide you need to show X happening -- and probably add a point of view to facilitate that. The other path starts with the point of view: having given a character pov rights, you feel consciously or subconsciously obligated to justify that decision. On a small scale, this leads to pointless crap like Vilnar Barada thinking about the girl he wants to marry; on a large scale, it leads to things like the Shaido Plot From Hell, which I am convinced was Jordan creating makework so that Perrin would have something to do, and also justifying Faile as an ongoing pov character.
It may annoy readers (especially when you do it badly), but I’ve come around to the philosophy that you shouldn’t be afraid to give one or more of your characters a sabbatical from the story. The example of Jordan doing this right is Perrin’s absence from The Fires of Heaven: Perrin had just won a great victory and settled into some necessary but unexciting work of consolidation, so it was a dandy time to step away and focus on other characters. The story would not have been improved by inventing a subplot to fill that gap. The example of Jordan doing it wrong is Mat’s absence from The Path of Daggers: Mat had just been trapped under a collapsing wall during the invasion of a city. It turns out nothing interesting had been going on with him during his book-long absence . . . but given where the story had left off with him, readers expected a great deal more, and didn’t get it. If you’re going to step away, choose the point at which something has wrapped up, not begun.
Making up subplots to keep a character busy is a cascading problem. The proliferating points of view created and/or abetted new plot complexity, which meant the central ropes of the narrative got stretched out farther than they were meant to go. You can’t shelve your main character for three books, though, so Rand -- ostensibly the driving force of the whole shebang -- didn’t have a lot to do for a while other than run around micro-managing the politics of several nations, creating a lot of material that didn’t really add all that much to the story. It did add words, though, which meant Jordan had to find something for Perrin to do while Rand was occupied, so Faile got kidnapped by the Shaido, and then next thing you know, you’ve created a monstrosity of a plotline that 80% of your readers will hate with the fire of a thousand suns, and oh by the way now you need to keep all those secondary characters busy, too, the ones who started this problem in the first place. It’s the principle of the Lowest Common Multiple, played out in narrative form: if one character is cycling at 13 rpm and another is at 20, you have to keep rolling until you hit 260 to get them both wrapping up at the same time. And that way lies the ever-expanding tale.
If you stick to your structure, you at least have a metric by which to gauge whether a subplot is worth the time it will take to cover it. Of course, most of us can’t really eyeball an idea and say “why yes, that’s fifteen thousand words’ worth of subplot” -- would that we could! But this gets back to the “ruthless editing” I mentioned before. If it starts stretching out too far, find a way to accomplish the necessary elements more efficiently. If you can’t do that, cut the subplot. Yes, it may be shiny, but is it worth throwing off the balance of everything else in the story?
3. Centralize.
This is closely-enough related to the previous point that I almost folded it in there, but I think it deserves to be pulled out and looked at on its own.
A long series is going to have a certain amount of sprawl, which is both necessary and desirable. But keep an eye on how long it’s been since your major characters interacted with one another. In the Wheel of Time, the fourth book was the first one where the main protagonists didn’t all come together for the finale; not coincidentally, it’s also the last one where the story’s sprawl felt truly effective. Something like eight or nine books passed without Rand and Perrin seeing one another, or Perrin and Mat. There was a point in the story where Rand, Mat, Perrin, Egwene, and Elayne were all in different places doing different things, and had been for some time; that’s five major plots rolling without reference to one another, in addition to the countless minor plots. We may also consider that Martin’s story and pacing have begun to fall apart as he lets his characters separate further and further: when’s the last time you had any two of Arya, Jon, Bran, Sansa, Catelyn, and Tyrion in the same place at the same time? (Not to mention Daenerys, off on the other side of the planet this entire time, or the host of other pov characters Martin has begun to introduce.)
Remember Scalzi’s point above: the more you fragment the perspective, the less forward movement each one gets per book. Remember my corollary: you can mitigate that by having the viewpoints overlap. Apart from the simple mathematics of pacing, this helps deal with the subplot issue, because you can keep important characters in the narrative by having A work with B on whatever it is B’s doing. (Or oppose it, or interfere with it, or whatever.) And it will assist in maintaining your structure, because if Aragorn’s got to be at the Black Gates when Frodo arrives at Mount Doom, then you’ve got to get that Pelennor thing done on schedule, which means not letting the Paths of the Dead episode overstay its welcome.
(Note that I am NOT holding up Tolkien as a model for how to construct the kind of narrative I’m talking about here. His approach was to ignore half his story for half a book, which isn’t a tactic that will serve any modern author very well. But Lord of the Rings is familiar enough to serve as a useful example.)
So yes. By all means let your characters wander off and do their own thing . . . but not for too long. Bring them back together periodically, and look for ways to get multiple stones to work together on killing that bird.
4. The further you go, the less you have to show your math.
This is less tied into the structural base than the rest of my points; it’s more a simple matter of word bloat.
Early on in your story, it’s useful to show how your characters pull off their small accomplishments. It demonstrates their competence to us, if it’s something they’re supposed to be good at, or conversely shows them developing new skills, if they’ve been thrust into situations outside their usual depth. Or it establishes the realism of the world, or gives the reader information about a topic they may not know very well. All of that is perfectly fine.
But when you’re ten books into your series, you really don’t need to show the camp logistics of the army your hero has been in command of for the last four books. You don’t need to walk through every step of how the heroine, having attained her throne, arranges a meeting with some fellow sovereigns. You’ve already established that these are tasks well within their skill-set. We will not bat an eyelash if you go straight to the meeting, or have the army keep trucking along in good order. If you introduce some element that makes those tasks hard again, then by all means show how the new challenge is overcome -- but even then, you’re allowed to only focus on the challenging part, and let the routine stuff go.
Because in theory, the further you go into your series, the more exciting the story should be. Tensions mount! We’re building toward the climax! Now is not the time to stop and do the simple math all over again. Think of it like a geometry proof: once you’ve proved the basic theorems, you’re allowed to just cite them and move on, rather than having to go through every step every time.
One of the corollaries to this is more debatable. Re-reading the Wheel of Time, I was struck by how many times the story explains Min’s visions; it felt unnecessarily repetitive to me. Arguably, however, that sort of repetition is necessary, because some readers may not have read the previous book in a long time, and may have forgotten who Min is and what she can do. (Or they may have picked up the third book without having read the first two, though I tend to be of the opinion that people who do that deserve what they get. I note that many series, including both the Wheel of Time and Harry Potter, eventually give up on holding people’s hands -- it just takes a while.) This is more a matter of exposition than showing the narrative math, and I’ll allow that some amount of reinventing the wheel may be required. But keep an eye on it anyway, and try to keep it to a minimum.
There are many other things I could say about the flaws in the Wheel of Time, or in other long series. But these are the main points, the ones I think are universally applicable, rather than specific to a particular narrative -- along with, of course, the basic lessons of good writing, like not using twenty words where five will do. A story’s quality depends heavily on its shape, on the timing of various twists and revelations, the pacing of its arcs and the rate at which the characters grow; and good shape rarely happens by accident, especially on a large scale. Ergo, I firmly believe that you need some fixed points by which to navigate during your journey. Know how many books you’re going to write, hammer in a couple of pegs to say that certain events will happen at certain points, and then hold to your course. If you stray from the path, you may never find your way out of the woods.
Rumor has it, of course, that Jordan was asked to stretch the series out, because it was making so much money. I have no idea if that’s true. But as I said at the start, my concern here is not the commercial success of a series; I’m addressing the story itself.
I’m speaking, mind you, as someone who has yet to write a series longer than four books (and those structured almost entirely as stand-alones). This is all based on my observations of other people’s efforts, not my own experience. But as I said to Tom Smith in the comments to “Zeno’s Mountains,” there’s not enough time in life to screw it up yourself for a dozen books, and then to do better afterward. If you want to write a long series and not have it collapse in the middle like a badly-made souffle, you have to learn from other people’s mistakes.
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/577881.html. Comment here or there.
February 25, 2013
time for more dragons!
But first, a reminder: only a few days left to get a letter from Lady Trent. (If you've already written to her, the reply will be on its way shortly -- I delayed a little bit in order to get something cool to include with the note.)
***
New interview at The Adventures of Cecelia Bedelia, another interview at Short and Sweet Book Reviews, and a guest post at Head Stuck in a Book. There were supposed to be a couple of others, too, but the scheduling of those appears to have gone astray.
***
I do, however, have my usual biweekly post up at BVC: "It happened to my cousin's best friend's roommate," wherein I discuss legends. Comment over there!
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/577576.html. Comment here or there.
***
New interview at The Adventures of Cecelia Bedelia, another interview at Short and Sweet Book Reviews, and a guest post at Head Stuck in a Book. There were supposed to be a couple of others, too, but the scheduling of those appears to have gone astray.
***
I do, however, have my usual biweekly post up at BVC: "It happened to my cousin's best friend's roommate," wherein I discuss legends. Comment over there!
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/577576.html. Comment here or there.
February 23, 2013
recent media
You get rambly thoughts. Yay!
Revenge: A bit muddled here and there, but still interesting, especially because of the extent to which (at least at the beginning) it's framed as this faceoff between two women, both powerful in their own way. Because of the aforementioned muddling, it doesn't quite stay that way, but it was still nifty while it lasted. And I kind of love the relationship between Emily and Nolan -- all the more so because the show is unafraid to make Nolan a physical wimp. When somebody holds him at knifepoint, he gets scared. And then he turns around and calls Emily on her errors, and she generally admits he's right.
![[profile]](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1380840198i/3130798.png)
kniedzw
called it a "soap opera" at one point, which got me thinking about the extent to which a soap opera can be defined as a drama that caters to a female audience. There are other aspects, too -- the daytime slot being a shallow one; the constant plot churn being a more substantial one -- but "soap opera" has a connotation of "ridiculous," and really, I don't think Revenge (at least in its first season) is any more ridiculous than various evening dramas that cater to a male audience. So there's that.
Lost Girl: The werewolf guy is hot, but the tone of the show really doesn't do it for me, and I can't help but roll my eyes at the extent to which the protagonist's nature seems like an excuse to have her make out with people every episode. Not my cup of tea, I think.
The Vampire Diaries: Also not my cup of tea, but I watched the first two episodes out of curiosity (yay Netflix streaming!), and have to applaud the way Stefan goes against the stereotypical grain of the YA paranormal boyfriend. Which is to say, he's not an asshole. In fact, he is an anti-asshole in some ways I can't help but read as a deliberate response to Edward in Twilight, whether that's the case or not. I still don't find him that interesting, but at least I don't want to deck him.
Coriolanus: And now for something that isn't TV. Not one of Shakespeare's better-known tragedies, but after watching this adaptation, I have no idea why. It's been too long since I read the play (my sophomore year of college, I think) for me to recognize whether it's a matter of how they edited the script, or just the bloody fantastic performances from Ralph Fiennes and Gerard Butler and Brian Cox and James Nesbitt and oh my god Vanessa Redgrave, but it fits all but seamlessly into a run-down, militarized present day, with weary politicians and some conspirators who are, when I think about it, weirdly honest. I think I may have to buy a copy of the movie and add it to my library of Good Shakespeare Adaptations.
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/577305.html. Comment here or there.
Revenge: A bit muddled here and there, but still interesting, especially because of the extent to which (at least at the beginning) it's framed as this faceoff between two women, both powerful in their own way. Because of the aforementioned muddling, it doesn't quite stay that way, but it was still nifty while it lasted. And I kind of love the relationship between Emily and Nolan -- all the more so because the show is unafraid to make Nolan a physical wimp. When somebody holds him at knifepoint, he gets scared. And then he turns around and calls Emily on her errors, and she generally admits he's right.
kniedzw
called it a "soap opera" at one point, which got me thinking about the extent to which a soap opera can be defined as a drama that caters to a female audience. There are other aspects, too -- the daytime slot being a shallow one; the constant plot churn being a more substantial one -- but "soap opera" has a connotation of "ridiculous," and really, I don't think Revenge (at least in its first season) is any more ridiculous than various evening dramas that cater to a male audience. So there's that.Lost Girl: The werewolf guy is hot, but the tone of the show really doesn't do it for me, and I can't help but roll my eyes at the extent to which the protagonist's nature seems like an excuse to have her make out with people every episode. Not my cup of tea, I think.
The Vampire Diaries: Also not my cup of tea, but I watched the first two episodes out of curiosity (yay Netflix streaming!), and have to applaud the way Stefan goes against the stereotypical grain of the YA paranormal boyfriend. Which is to say, he's not an asshole. In fact, he is an anti-asshole in some ways I can't help but read as a deliberate response to Edward in Twilight, whether that's the case or not. I still don't find him that interesting, but at least I don't want to deck him.
Coriolanus: And now for something that isn't TV. Not one of Shakespeare's better-known tragedies, but after watching this adaptation, I have no idea why. It's been too long since I read the play (my sophomore year of college, I think) for me to recognize whether it's a matter of how they edited the script, or just the bloody fantastic performances from Ralph Fiennes and Gerard Butler and Brian Cox and James Nesbitt and oh my god Vanessa Redgrave, but it fits all but seamlessly into a run-down, militarized present day, with weary politicians and some conspirators who are, when I think about it, weirdly honest. I think I may have to buy a copy of the movie and add it to my library of Good Shakespeare Adaptations.
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/577305.html. Comment here or there.
February 21, 2013
last few days for Con or Bust
Just as a reminder, the "Con or Bust" auctions close this Sunday. Bidding on the double-signed copy of A Natural History of Dragons (autographed by both me and Todd Lockwood, with a bonus sketch from him) is up to $48, while
A Star Shall Fall
is at $15 and
With Fate Conspire
is at $20. Proceeds go to a good cause, and the books don't suck either, if I do say so myself. ;-)
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/577160.html. Comment here or there.
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/577160.html. Comment here or there.
(Re)Visiting the Wheel of Time: A Memory of Light (analysis)
[This is part of a series analyzing Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time novels. Previous installments can be found under the tag. Comments on old posts are welcome.]
I pretty much covered my reactions to this book with the two liveblog posts. So now it's time to set aside the straight-up "Oh my god I can't believe this series is finally done I've been waiting for this for more than half my life"> stream of consciousness, and talk about this in a more sensible fashion.
Let's start with the character deaths.
On the one hand, they aren't surprising at all. It's the end of the series; this is traditionally the time when authors start killing people wholesale. On the other hand, Jordan has such a long-standing track record of not killing anybody signifcant -- not even the bad guys, half the time -- that it still comes as a shock.
Alanna's death puts her entire plotline into perspective: she bonded Rand so that Jordan could avoid having to kill off one of Rand's lovers. Part of me isn't wild about that, but at least it means none of them get stuck on the sidelines during the Last Battle, so I guess that's good? Rhuarc makes me sad less for his death, more for him getting mind-wiped by Graendal before he went, and then for Aviendha being the one to kill him. Davram Bashere and everybody below him on the Character Prominence Scale, eh, whatever.
Siuan and Gareth Bryne are interesting to me mostly because of how their deaths reflect on prophecy. Min's viewing are mostly inevitable: she sees that somebody will die, and they die. On the few occasions when she has an if/then viewing, it's easy for that to be a safety net for the characters, a way for them to avoid things going utterly wrong. So it was interesting for this one to fall through -- for them to have warning and still to die.
Gawyn . . . gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. His death was as disappointing as the last couple months of his life. It really annoys me that, after being such a tool during the previous books, he dies so pointlessly -- basically doing more damage to his own side (via the bond to Egwene) than to the bad guys. I could have forgiven it as a slightly annoying cliche had he taken out Demandred, but of course he didn't. So he just ran around being secretive and failing to work with his own allies, and then he died, and what did it accompish?
It made Egwene go postal, is all. She at least got to go out like a bad-ass, nuking all the Sharan channelers and so on, but I do wish the whole "Flame of Tar Valon" thing had felt a bit less like it got pulled out of Jordan's ear. (I presume that was Jordan's idea; things like that are too major to be Sanderson's invention.) It's a perfectly fine idea; it just needs to have been foreshadowed more than it was.
And then there's Rand's "death." I admit I'm still not entirely clear on how exactly he swapped with Moridin. I don't mind the fact of it (though I do feel like Alivia's role ended up being really disappointing); I think it's kind of nice that Rand actually gets to enjoy the fruits of his labor, rather than going down in flames. I'd like the mechanism of it to have been clearer, though.
On the bad-guy side, Demandred ends up seeming like the biggest badass the Forsaken have ever seen, Graendal is diabolically evil, and Moghedien ends the way she began, as a coward. I almost feel sorry for Moridin, and that's an interesting trick: rather than him being larger-than-life evil, he became painfully human, so despairing and depressed that he'd rather see reality come to an end entirely than face the prospect of continuing in this life or the next. And then there's Lanfear -- who is, for the first time in the series, actually impressive to me. The believability that she might do a face-turn as a way of escaping the Dark One (making her the flip side of Moridin's situation), and then the last second heel-turn, or rather the last-second revelation of her true colors, that bring her closer to success than any other villain in this story. And, despite everything, I actually like Perrin killing her. There's been so much angst in this series about it's so much more horrible to kill a woman than a man (which is not a principle I agree with), that I find it a relief to see Perrin say, she's a threat, she has to go.
Two other villains, however, fall kind of flat. First, although Luc/Isam/Slayer made a more substantial threat of himself this time around, he still feels pointless to me. Why did he have to be related to Rand and to Lan? There was no reason for that, no payoff for those connections. That's something that got laid into the narrative back in The Shadow Rising -- ten books ago! -- and yet in the end, it could have just been Slayer, a perversion of the wolf dream, with no connection to any of the other characters. (In the end, really, that's all he was.) Second, although I did like Mat's immunity to Padan Fain/Ordeith/Mordeth/Shaisam, I had really been convinced he was going to pay more of a Gollum role in the end. I guess Jordan saw him as more of Mat's antagonist (thanks to the connection via Shadar Logoth) than Perrin's or Rand's; it's just a bit of a surprise to me.
Speaking of Shayol Ghul: credit where credit is due. The idea of time dilation around the Bore is an excellent one. Not only does it make sense on a sort of quasi-scientific level (the Bore sort of being like a black hole), but it allows Jordan to get the best of both worlds with the Last Battle. Rand's fight with the Dark One shouldn't go on for months; that would really undercut its impact. The army side of things, however, shouldn't be knocked off in a few days flat -- that would really undercut its impact. By creating that gradient, we get a truly apocalyptic was in the Borderlands and further south, a last-stand kind of battle in Thakan'dar, and a timeless moment of faceoff between Rand and the Dark One, plus the plot compications that come from characters jumping between the different fronts.
My personal feeling is that the war stretches on a little too long -- or rather, that we get too much of it. I'm impressed by the scale of it, the very real sense that humanity is throwing every last resource it has into the fight, and is frequently teetering on the verge of catastrophe (or falling straight over it); that part is pretty cool. I just wish there had been a little more flexibility on that side, more room for the main characters to vary their actions. Once the war starts, virtually everybody other than Rand, Nynaeve, and Moiraine is busy fighting, with only small breathers like Min getting roped into being Tuon's Truthspeaker. Individually, the elements of the war are cool. In the aggregate . . . after a whlie, I started going numb.
Which is one of the reasons I am so, so glad that Rand's showdown with the Dark One isn't a straightforward battle. The dueling Patterns thing is far more interesting. Getting rid of the Dark One doesn't work: of course not, because people need free will, or else you're just doing the Light-side equivalent of Turning them. A lot of readers, myself included, figured the prison needed to be not just patched but remade, so while the mechanism of it isn't something I foresaw (using Callandor and Moridin and the True Power and so on), the outcome is. I did wonder, though, whether it would go further than that. Would it be possible to break out of the circular cosmology of the Wheel of Time? Could anything be truly changed, or would it all go back to the status quo? I doubted the series would end with a true disruption; it was more likely that we would go back to an intact prison. It would have been interesting, though, if the Dark One inside it had not been the one there before. We had Moridin; we had Slayer; we had Padan Fain. Varieties of evil, born out of different impulses in the world. What if you combined them somehow? Rand already played the role of the Creator in remaking the prison; what if someone else played the role of the Dark One in being imprisoned?
What we got was pretty satisfying. But that . . . done right, it might have been breathtaking.
And that's sort of how I feel about the book as a whole. I don't know if breathtaking was even possible at this point; there had been so many flaws along the way, so many places where things could have been set up better or taken care of earlier instead of dropped. There are flaws here, too, that can't entirely be blamed on preceding weaknesses. Nynaeve's use of herbs was appropriate, but I'm disappointed that she and Moiraine were basically just a pair of batteries in the end, and that Moiraine's significance at Merrilor amounted to "she's the only one Rand will listen to when she says he's making a mistake."
Still and all. For something as messy and sprawling and drawn-out as this series was, for a story delivered so piecemeal, with so many delays and unnecessary diversions and with another author subbed in for the conclusion . . . it could have been a flaming disaster. It could have been "well, at least that's over with at last." And for some people, maybe that's what it was. But for me, it was satisfying. Flaws and all, I'm glad I read it, and not just for the simple closure.
There will, of course, be one more post. I set out to do this not just to document my trip down the nostalgia lane of my high school fandom, not just to get the ending of the story, but to learn something about writing a long epic fantasy series. This project has taught me a great deal on that front, and you'll get the results soon.
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/576976.html. Comment here or there.
I pretty much covered my reactions to this book with the two liveblog posts. So now it's time to set aside the straight-up "Oh my god I can't believe this series is finally done I've been waiting for this for more than half my life"> stream of consciousness, and talk about this in a more sensible fashion.
Let's start with the character deaths.
On the one hand, they aren't surprising at all. It's the end of the series; this is traditionally the time when authors start killing people wholesale. On the other hand, Jordan has such a long-standing track record of not killing anybody signifcant -- not even the bad guys, half the time -- that it still comes as a shock.
Alanna's death puts her entire plotline into perspective: she bonded Rand so that Jordan could avoid having to kill off one of Rand's lovers. Part of me isn't wild about that, but at least it means none of them get stuck on the sidelines during the Last Battle, so I guess that's good? Rhuarc makes me sad less for his death, more for him getting mind-wiped by Graendal before he went, and then for Aviendha being the one to kill him. Davram Bashere and everybody below him on the Character Prominence Scale, eh, whatever.
Siuan and Gareth Bryne are interesting to me mostly because of how their deaths reflect on prophecy. Min's viewing are mostly inevitable: she sees that somebody will die, and they die. On the few occasions when she has an if/then viewing, it's easy for that to be a safety net for the characters, a way for them to avoid things going utterly wrong. So it was interesting for this one to fall through -- for them to have warning and still to die.
Gawyn . . . gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. His death was as disappointing as the last couple months of his life. It really annoys me that, after being such a tool during the previous books, he dies so pointlessly -- basically doing more damage to his own side (via the bond to Egwene) than to the bad guys. I could have forgiven it as a slightly annoying cliche had he taken out Demandred, but of course he didn't. So he just ran around being secretive and failing to work with his own allies, and then he died, and what did it accompish?
It made Egwene go postal, is all. She at least got to go out like a bad-ass, nuking all the Sharan channelers and so on, but I do wish the whole "Flame of Tar Valon" thing had felt a bit less like it got pulled out of Jordan's ear. (I presume that was Jordan's idea; things like that are too major to be Sanderson's invention.) It's a perfectly fine idea; it just needs to have been foreshadowed more than it was.
And then there's Rand's "death." I admit I'm still not entirely clear on how exactly he swapped with Moridin. I don't mind the fact of it (though I do feel like Alivia's role ended up being really disappointing); I think it's kind of nice that Rand actually gets to enjoy the fruits of his labor, rather than going down in flames. I'd like the mechanism of it to have been clearer, though.
On the bad-guy side, Demandred ends up seeming like the biggest badass the Forsaken have ever seen, Graendal is diabolically evil, and Moghedien ends the way she began, as a coward. I almost feel sorry for Moridin, and that's an interesting trick: rather than him being larger-than-life evil, he became painfully human, so despairing and depressed that he'd rather see reality come to an end entirely than face the prospect of continuing in this life or the next. And then there's Lanfear -- who is, for the first time in the series, actually impressive to me. The believability that she might do a face-turn as a way of escaping the Dark One (making her the flip side of Moridin's situation), and then the last second heel-turn, or rather the last-second revelation of her true colors, that bring her closer to success than any other villain in this story. And, despite everything, I actually like Perrin killing her. There's been so much angst in this series about it's so much more horrible to kill a woman than a man (which is not a principle I agree with), that I find it a relief to see Perrin say, she's a threat, she has to go.
Two other villains, however, fall kind of flat. First, although Luc/Isam/Slayer made a more substantial threat of himself this time around, he still feels pointless to me. Why did he have to be related to Rand and to Lan? There was no reason for that, no payoff for those connections. That's something that got laid into the narrative back in The Shadow Rising -- ten books ago! -- and yet in the end, it could have just been Slayer, a perversion of the wolf dream, with no connection to any of the other characters. (In the end, really, that's all he was.) Second, although I did like Mat's immunity to Padan Fain/Ordeith/Mordeth/Shaisam, I had really been convinced he was going to pay more of a Gollum role in the end. I guess Jordan saw him as more of Mat's antagonist (thanks to the connection via Shadar Logoth) than Perrin's or Rand's; it's just a bit of a surprise to me.
Speaking of Shayol Ghul: credit where credit is due. The idea of time dilation around the Bore is an excellent one. Not only does it make sense on a sort of quasi-scientific level (the Bore sort of being like a black hole), but it allows Jordan to get the best of both worlds with the Last Battle. Rand's fight with the Dark One shouldn't go on for months; that would really undercut its impact. The army side of things, however, shouldn't be knocked off in a few days flat -- that would really undercut its impact. By creating that gradient, we get a truly apocalyptic was in the Borderlands and further south, a last-stand kind of battle in Thakan'dar, and a timeless moment of faceoff between Rand and the Dark One, plus the plot compications that come from characters jumping between the different fronts.
My personal feeling is that the war stretches on a little too long -- or rather, that we get too much of it. I'm impressed by the scale of it, the very real sense that humanity is throwing every last resource it has into the fight, and is frequently teetering on the verge of catastrophe (or falling straight over it); that part is pretty cool. I just wish there had been a little more flexibility on that side, more room for the main characters to vary their actions. Once the war starts, virtually everybody other than Rand, Nynaeve, and Moiraine is busy fighting, with only small breathers like Min getting roped into being Tuon's Truthspeaker. Individually, the elements of the war are cool. In the aggregate . . . after a whlie, I started going numb.
Which is one of the reasons I am so, so glad that Rand's showdown with the Dark One isn't a straightforward battle. The dueling Patterns thing is far more interesting. Getting rid of the Dark One doesn't work: of course not, because people need free will, or else you're just doing the Light-side equivalent of Turning them. A lot of readers, myself included, figured the prison needed to be not just patched but remade, so while the mechanism of it isn't something I foresaw (using Callandor and Moridin and the True Power and so on), the outcome is. I did wonder, though, whether it would go further than that. Would it be possible to break out of the circular cosmology of the Wheel of Time? Could anything be truly changed, or would it all go back to the status quo? I doubted the series would end with a true disruption; it was more likely that we would go back to an intact prison. It would have been interesting, though, if the Dark One inside it had not been the one there before. We had Moridin; we had Slayer; we had Padan Fain. Varieties of evil, born out of different impulses in the world. What if you combined them somehow? Rand already played the role of the Creator in remaking the prison; what if someone else played the role of the Dark One in being imprisoned?
What we got was pretty satisfying. But that . . . done right, it might have been breathtaking.
And that's sort of how I feel about the book as a whole. I don't know if breathtaking was even possible at this point; there had been so many flaws along the way, so many places where things could have been set up better or taken care of earlier instead of dropped. There are flaws here, too, that can't entirely be blamed on preceding weaknesses. Nynaeve's use of herbs was appropriate, but I'm disappointed that she and Moiraine were basically just a pair of batteries in the end, and that Moiraine's significance at Merrilor amounted to "she's the only one Rand will listen to when she says he's making a mistake."
Still and all. For something as messy and sprawling and drawn-out as this series was, for a story delivered so piecemeal, with so many delays and unnecessary diversions and with another author subbed in for the conclusion . . . it could have been a flaming disaster. It could have been "well, at least that's over with at last." And for some people, maybe that's what it was. But for me, it was satisfying. Flaws and all, I'm glad I read it, and not just for the simple closure.
There will, of course, be one more post. I set out to do this not just to document my trip down the nostalgia lane of my high school fandom, not just to get the ending of the story, but to learn something about writing a long epic fantasy series. This project has taught me a great deal on that front, and you'll get the results soon.
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/576976.html. Comment here or there.
February 19, 2013
Dragons had a nice long weekend; how about you?
Two new giveaways popped up over the weekend: one at Short and Sweet, and one at WORD for Teens.
New interview over at Literary Escapism, where I'm asked about writing historical fantasy vs. secondary-world fantasy, and writing British-style stuff when I myself am American.
I also have a post up at Sci-Fi Songs wherein I talk about the soundtrack of the book. (Don't tell anybody, but I always wish somebody would ask me about the soundtrack. I put so much work into it, and then I'm usually the only person who ever hears it -- my music choices are too obscure for me to be able to put it together in a way that can be shared online.)
And, unrelated to dragons, it's time for my usual post at SF Novelists. This time it's An Open Letter to the Creators of Sexist Fantasy and Comic Book Art. (Comment over there; no login required.)
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/576737.html. Comment here or there.
New interview over at Literary Escapism, where I'm asked about writing historical fantasy vs. secondary-world fantasy, and writing British-style stuff when I myself am American.
I also have a post up at Sci-Fi Songs wherein I talk about the soundtrack of the book. (Don't tell anybody, but I always wish somebody would ask me about the soundtrack. I put so much work into it, and then I'm usually the only person who ever hears it -- my music choices are too obscure for me to be able to put it together in a way that can be shared online.)
And, unrelated to dragons, it's time for my usual post at SF Novelists. This time it's An Open Letter to the Creators of Sexist Fantasy and Comic Book Art. (Comment over there; no login required.)
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/576737.html. Comment here or there.
February 18, 2013
Writing Fight Scenes: Sentence Structure
[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]
Step up one level from the nouns and verbs you're going to be using over and over and overandoverandover again in your fight scenes, and it's time to consider how you're going to string them together into sentences.
There are two main schools of thought on this, and I'm going to give you the one I disagree with first.
The first school of thought says your fight scene should have a lot of short sentences, which will read quickly and help create the sense of excitement you want in your scene.
I understand where this is coming from. It's the same principle that argues in favor of short scenes and short chapters, if the story you're writing is supposed to be fast-paced and thrilling. On the scene and chapter levels, I think there's some truth to that; the frequent breaks allow you to build in frequent cliffhangers, which will propel your reader onward through the story. On the sentence level, however, I believe this advice is dead wrong.
Punctuation, at least in the western world, developed out of the marks Greek orators put into their texts to tell themselves where to pause. Commas indicate a brief pause; periods -- also called "full stops" -- indicate a longer one. When you write in short sentences, you're stopping your reader dead every line or so. How well does this flow?
That kind of prose makes me feel like I'm being jerked forward and back, forward and back. (Also, it makes me feel like a third grader: See Penthesilea. See Penthesilea stab. Stab, Penthesilea, stab!)
True, I exaggerated the shortness of the sentences; few writers are going to be that terse in their phrasing. But don't worry -- I'll exaggerate just as much in a moment, when I illustrate the second school of thought.
This one says that, since the action of a fight often flows rapidly, it's better to write long, flowing sentences. If periods are full stops, then use fewer of them, and more commas or semicolons. Maybe even let your sentences become borderline ungrammatical. Example:
That's overkill, of course. But of the two extremes, I prefer the latter, which does a better job of conveying the headlong rush of a fight.
Naturally, the fight won't always be a headlong rush. When the characters are taking their time, sizing one another up, venturing a test strike here and there, that's a good time for shorter sentences. When the fight gets faster or more chaotic, though, the prose should reflect that.
This scales up to paragraphs, too. Put in breaks where there is a break in the struggle, or where something shifts in the flow of the fight. Injury, a change in tactics, one character learning something, the direction of motion altering. When the action cascades, though, keep it all in the same paragraph, to avoid the brief interruption of that line break and indentation.
Speaking of cascading . . . that will be the next post, when we talk about which parts of the fight should get the most attention.
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/576377.html. Comment here or there.
Step up one level from the nouns and verbs you're going to be using over and over and overandoverandover again in your fight scenes, and it's time to consider how you're going to string them together into sentences.
There are two main schools of thought on this, and I'm going to give you the one I disagree with first.
The first school of thought says your fight scene should have a lot of short sentences, which will read quickly and help create the sense of excitement you want in your scene.
I understand where this is coming from. It's the same principle that argues in favor of short scenes and short chapters, if the story you're writing is supposed to be fast-paced and thrilling. On the scene and chapter levels, I think there's some truth to that; the frequent breaks allow you to build in frequent cliffhangers, which will propel your reader onward through the story. On the sentence level, however, I believe this advice is dead wrong.
Punctuation, at least in the western world, developed out of the marks Greek orators put into their texts to tell themselves where to pause. Commas indicate a brief pause; periods -- also called "full stops" -- indicate a longer one. When you write in short sentences, you're stopping your reader dead every line or so. How well does this flow?
Penthesilea charged at her enemy. She raised her sword. She chopped down at his head. He dodged. His sword cut along her side. She cried out in pain. Then she shoved him back with her shield. He stumbled and she ran him through.
That kind of prose makes me feel like I'm being jerked forward and back, forward and back. (Also, it makes me feel like a third grader: See Penthesilea. See Penthesilea stab. Stab, Penthesilea, stab!)
True, I exaggerated the shortness of the sentences; few writers are going to be that terse in their phrasing. But don't worry -- I'll exaggerate just as much in a moment, when I illustrate the second school of thought.
This one says that, since the action of a fight often flows rapidly, it's better to write long, flowing sentences. If periods are full stops, then use fewer of them, and more commas or semicolons. Maybe even let your sentences become borderline ungrammatical. Example:
Penthisilea charged at her enemy, sword raised, then chopped down at his head, but he dodged and his sword cut along her side, making her cry out in pain; she shoved him back with her shield, and then he stumbled and she ran him through.
That's overkill, of course. But of the two extremes, I prefer the latter, which does a better job of conveying the headlong rush of a fight.
Naturally, the fight won't always be a headlong rush. When the characters are taking their time, sizing one another up, venturing a test strike here and there, that's a good time for shorter sentences. When the fight gets faster or more chaotic, though, the prose should reflect that.
This scales up to paragraphs, too. Put in breaks where there is a break in the struggle, or where something shifts in the flow of the fight. Injury, a change in tactics, one character learning something, the direction of motion altering. When the action cascades, though, keep it all in the same paragraph, to avoid the brief interruption of that line break and indentation.
Speaking of cascading . . . that will be the next post, when we talk about which parts of the fight should get the most attention.
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/576377.html. Comment here or there.
February 17, 2013
books for the book god
Below the fold, the latest offerings from Book View Cafe: novels from Judith Tarr and Patricia Rice, plus a romance sampler edited by Pati Nagle.
His Majesty's Elephant, by Judith Tarr
The Passionate Cafe II, ed. Pati Nagle
Trouble with Air and Magic, by Patricia Rice
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/576212.html. Comment here or there.
His Majesty's Elephant, by Judith Tarr
Once upon a time, the Caliph of Baghdad sends the Emperor Charlemagne a wonderful gift: an elephant named Abul Abbas. That gift brings great magic into the royal court, and a great betrayal. With the help of a stableboy who is more than he seems, and the Elephant himself, the Emperor’s daughter Rowan must learn to master that magic and save her father’s life.
The Passionate Cafe II, ed. Pati Nagle
‘Tis the season of romance . . .
Book View Café’s masters of romance offer a new selection of delectable tidbits to tantalize your taste for passion. Lovingly gathered into one convenient ebook, this array of samples from current romance and romantic novels by award-winning and bestselling writers is like a box of bon-bons. A sweet Regency delight, something dark and rich, a touch of the fantastic -- which will you taste first?
Since the release of volume one of The Passionate Café in 2010, BVC’s ranks of romance authors have grown. Ever-popular veterans Patricia Rice, Madeleine Robins, and Jennifer Stevenson are joined by the new faces of Sherwood Smith, Patricia Burroughs, Kelly McClymer, Deborah J. Ross, and Julianne Lee.
Trouble with Air and Magic, by Patricia Rice
Dorothea Franklin’s life is sliding toward disaster just as surely as her house is crumbling into the Pacific. Her unusual talent for feng shui can’t bring harmony to her invalid father or prevent her brother from dying in an experimental helicopter crash. Or has he?
She turns to computer genius Conan Oswin, whose brother also reportedly died that day. When Dorothea informs Conan that she didn’t feel the vibrations of her brother’s death, he wants to dismiss her illogic… but his instinct for trouble is already on full alert. His attraction to her is almost as distracting as her nonsense about chi and harmony — nonsense that plants doubts about the deadly crash. If only she would quit twisting his head with temptation, he might be able to save their brothers and her life.
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/576212.html. Comment here or there.
February 15, 2013
Talk to me about tablets, part 2
I made that post the other day in a hurry, hence not going into detail about what I'm looking for and how I'm using my laptop right now. But in a way, that made it more interesting; I got a broad array of answers. Thank you all!
So now comes the detail, and if you have other advice to offer, please do.
First of all, I have a desktop computer, which is where I do 95% of my writing work -- maybe more. Also a lot of e-mail, websurfing, listening to music, and most of my game-playing. That's still working fine.
My laptop mostly gets used in front of the TV, where I deal with e-mail and surf the web while watching TV. Sometimes I write blog posts. It also gets taken along when I travel, and that's where its deficiency really starts to show: it's too large, too heavy, too inconvenient. It takes too long to wake up and reacquire a wireless signal, which is partly a function of its slow degeneration from age -- but not entirely.
Ergo, I want something that is smaller, lighter, and more responsive, as well as something that can function as a better ebook reader than the tiny screen of my phone. Netbooks are generally too small; I don't have large hands, but it's still a bad ergonomic idea for me to try and type a lot on such a small keyboard. I think I'd be better off with a Bluetooth keyboard for a tablet, which will be about the size of the one on my current laptop. An ultrabook is a possibility . . . but I'm not sure I really need something on that scale, for the use I make of it.
On the other hand, I'm not a fan of the restricted environment of an app market, whether Android or iOS, which is a point against tablets. (The Surface would be a compromise on that front, but it has other things against it -- price for one, and apparently it's a nightmare to repair.)
Anyway, I'm likely to go test-drive some prospects soon, as this laptop is having an increasing amount of trouble finding our wireless network and maintaining a connection to it. Without that, it's nothing more than a very hot brick. So if you have advice to offer, get it in fast, 'cause time is running out!
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/575793.html. Comment here or there.
So now comes the detail, and if you have other advice to offer, please do.
First of all, I have a desktop computer, which is where I do 95% of my writing work -- maybe more. Also a lot of e-mail, websurfing, listening to music, and most of my game-playing. That's still working fine.
My laptop mostly gets used in front of the TV, where I deal with e-mail and surf the web while watching TV. Sometimes I write blog posts. It also gets taken along when I travel, and that's where its deficiency really starts to show: it's too large, too heavy, too inconvenient. It takes too long to wake up and reacquire a wireless signal, which is partly a function of its slow degeneration from age -- but not entirely.
Ergo, I want something that is smaller, lighter, and more responsive, as well as something that can function as a better ebook reader than the tiny screen of my phone. Netbooks are generally too small; I don't have large hands, but it's still a bad ergonomic idea for me to try and type a lot on such a small keyboard. I think I'd be better off with a Bluetooth keyboard for a tablet, which will be about the size of the one on my current laptop. An ultrabook is a possibility . . . but I'm not sure I really need something on that scale, for the use I make of it.
On the other hand, I'm not a fan of the restricted environment of an app market, whether Android or iOS, which is a point against tablets. (The Surface would be a compromise on that front, but it has other things against it -- price for one, and apparently it's a nightmare to repair.)
Anyway, I'm likely to go test-drive some prospects soon, as this laptop is having an increasing amount of trouble finding our wireless network and maintaining a connection to it. Without that, it's nothing more than a very hot brick. So if you have advice to offer, get it in fast, 'cause time is running out!
This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/575793.html. Comment here or there.
