Marie Brennan's Blog, page 215

Yuuuuuuuuuletide

And we are done with anonymity; the authors have been revealed! I can now talk about what I did for the last month, after finishing novel revisions. :-D

findabair , did you peek or something?! ;-) Because you managed to throw a dart at a board 2598 fics big, and hit my assignment. That's right, I matched with ladyanneboleyn on Cirque du Soleil's show Alegría, and as a result, wrote "If You Have No Light." It's possibly one of the weirder things I've ever produced; while I adore Cirque, Alegría isn't the one I'm the most familiar with, and so I had to force my brain to do a lot of high-speed composting of all the beautiful-but-strange things floating around the margins of that show. I really do like some of the touches I managed to put into that one, though, and I kind of hope Cirque gets requested again in the future. There really is so much hinted-at story in what they do, that deserved to be teased out more.

Next I wrote a treat, and here I'm cackling about who didn't guess. Not one but two friends pinged me to say "YOU MUST READ THIS STORY IT'S AWESOME" . . . and linked me to my own fic! <chortle> The tale in question is "The Rest," which arose out of reading a few prompts for The Sandbaggers, and then one for Casino Royale, which reminded me that SIS = MI6, and a crossover promptly fell out of my head. It probably loses something if you don't know the first source (or the second, though that's a much smaller percentage of the population -- hi, maratai !), but I hope I managed to interest a few more people in that brilliant, brilliant show.

Then, ladies and gents, I had Angst. I even posted to the Yuletide community about it. I had this idea, see, but it was entirely possible somebody else had the same idea, and if that somebody else was the assigned writer I was going to feel like I'd copied their prom dress . . . and then five minutes after I posted that, the request came up for a pinch hit, and I just about sprained something grabbing it. :-D

Normally, of course, I'd say that two writers can produce very different results from the same idea. In this case, however, there was a lot less wiggle room than usual, because the idea in question was "The Tough Guide to Yuletide." WOOOO, I managed to write one of this year's hits! I sort of thought that might be the case, since Yuletide meta is one of the things people tend to like, but I did not anticipate the scale of my success. Prior to this, my most widely-read story was "Desert Rain," my Elfquest pinch hit from last year. That got 223 hits over the course of the subsequent year. "The Tough Guide to Yuletide"? Had nearly 1400 before the author reveal. Holy cats, y'all.

The other funny thing here is that I had a panic attack of second-guessing: what if my recipient wasn't all that interested in Yuletide meta? Just to cover my bases, I ran off and wrote a treat fic for the same person, also based on The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: "A Special Limited-Time Offer," wherein I (lovingly . . . for the most part) mock the current wave of "gritty" epic fantasy. So yeah, two of this year's three Tough Guide fics are my work, and both got a lot of love.

I also got a lot of love for -- let's see if LJ herniates on this text -- "待龙纹身的女孩 (Dài lóng wénshēn de nǚhái) ," a Mulan fic based on the "Twisted Disney Princesses" fan-art series. (If you can't read that, it's characters followed by "Dai long wenshen de nuhai" with a lot of diacritical marks, which is, according to the hippo who helped me, the official Mandarin translation for "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.") The fact that I'm playing a Togashi monk in a Legend of the Five Rings game had nothing to do with my interest in that one, nosirree . . . Obvious title is obvious, but I figured I could be a little more creative, and avoid the odds of duplication with somebody else's fic, if I took it out of English.

And finally, one final treat squeezed out at the last minute, because I'd seen the request weeks before and loved the concept enough that dammit, I wasn't going to let the chance slip by. "A Devilish Exercise" was inspired by a prompt for a Hamlet crossover with Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (and ended up waaaaay darker than the other fic written from the same thing). The bad part? I, er, mentioned in my notes on the fic that I had to stop the story where I did in order to prevent it from turning into a giant Hamlet AU . . . and then every comment I got urged me to go ahead and write the giant Hamlet AU.

The first chapter of that has just gone up.

I had a lot of success this Yuletide; not only did three of my fics get more hits in the last week than my most popular fic before did in a year, but I was lucky enough to see almost all of them recced on the Yuletide member community, several of them more than once. Some of that, I think, is more a matter of fandom than anything else; a lot more people are familiar with, say, Mulan -- or Yuletide meta/the works of Diana Wynne Jones -- than with the Gabriel Knight computer games. Still, pretty satisfying. :-)

Almost forgot the Aurors deadline . . . .

Heh. Just realized today that in all the madness of writing six fics for Yuletide, I almost forgot about the challenge starlady38 and I are running. The page for that is here, if you missed it before but like the idea, and you don't have to have participated in the prompt-generation phrase to write fics for any of the prompts there now. (You do, however, need an AO3 account; e-mail me if you want an invitation, which lets you bypass the queue.)

(Also, while I'm still on fanfic-related matters, I should mention that I won't be replying to any guesses as to what I wrote for Yuletide until after the reveal. But I may offer some kind of prize if there are any correct guesses.)

Happy New Year, all! I'll see you in 2012.

The DWJ Project: The Crown of Dalemark

Conclusion of the Dalemark Quartet. Here we jump all around the Dalemark timeline, dwelling mostly in the "present day" of Moril and Mitt, but spending part of the narrative about two hundred years later, and drawing in components from the more distant past of The Spellcoats.

As a series conclusion goes, it's . . . odd. For one thing, as I mentioned in the post on The Spellcoats , this book came out fourteen years after its predecessor. That's quite a long time to wait for a finale, and I'm not sure why the pause happened -- especially given the way things were left hanging in some of the previous books. Cart and Cwidder ends on a mostly-resolved note (sorry, pun not intended); there's clearly room for more to be told, but if that was the last of it, we'd be okay. Drowned Ammet more obviously leaves things hanging, with Mitt making promises for the future that don't get addressed in his book. The Spellcoats is the most open-ended of the lot, but I'll leave the statement at that, to avoid spoilers.

This isn't your usual sort of last book; the stories it draws together are quite widely scattered. Even Moril and Mitt, who at least exist in the same century, hail from opposite ends of Dalemark, and have never met each other before this story begins. We also get a new character in the form of Maewen, a girl from the future of Dalemark, and quite a bit of the history being addressed is hers -- but although she's a central character, the book doesn't belong wholly to her. It's as much Mitt's book, or possibly more. This leads to some weird structural elements. To say more about those, though, I'll have to get into spoilers.

I find it odd that the book begins with Mitt, and stays with him for such a long time before introducing Maewen at all. Given that she's the new component, and plays such a major pov role in the story, sixty pages in feels awfully late for her to show up. (That's a full seventh of the book.) Then Maewen gets a lot of focus -- enough that I think of her as the protagonist, even though the story didn't start with her -- but Mitt's the one who confronts and destroys Kankredin, and we aren't even in his pov when it happens. Maewen's sort of an observer to his coronation and that last fight. Her final protaggy contribution is to return the cwidder to Wend. It feels off-kilter to me.

It's also odd because the conflict mostly doesn't have to do with what we saw in the first two books. The Countess uses the events of DA as leverage on Mitt, and a Southern army shows up at the end, but Mitt doesn't go back to the Holy Isles (except in an offscreen fashion, when they talk about what Amil did as king), which I was expecting to see happen. The aftermath of The Spellcoats isn't quite what I expected, either. It isn't exactly a surprise to find out that Tanaqui and some of her siblings are Undying, but the business with their battle and Kankredin feels sort of like a side note, if that makes any sense.

Which isn't to say I don't like the book. Mitt's conflict is a good one, with him caught up in politics and questioning his own morality. I liked seeing Tanaqui and Duck again, grown up but still identifiably themselves. Navis, as someone promised in a previous comment thread, grows a great deal as a character (I quite like him now, actually). The disappearance of Noreth is disturbing, even if I wish Maewen didn't forget about it so thoroughly for a good portion of the book. I was sad about Hildy, though; while she wasn't quite a good person in DA, she did grow, and it's a pity to watch her backslide here, even if it's realistic. (Biffa, however, is awesome, and needs her own fandom.)

I think my favorite part is the meeting with Hern in the past-realm of Kernsburgh, and the way he winnows through them -- or rather, gets them to winnow themselves -- to figure out who should be King. Maewen noting that he doesn't look like his portrait, and then thinking about how the Undying can be bound, was another nice touch. There's lots of good numinousness here (which is something I'm obviously fond of); it's just that the arrangement of it is a little peculiar.
Aaaaand that's it for Dalemark, and for this month of the project. Presuming I manage to stick to my schedule, only three more months and less than a dozen books to go!

. . . yeah, it still sounds like a lot, when I put it that way. Still, weighed against what I've gotten through already, I really am nearly done.

The DWJ Project: The Spellcoats

Third book in the Dalemark Quartet, which steps way back in history for the founding of the kingdom, when an invading army and an evil mage threaten the land.

A lot of people have cited this as their favorite book of the series, and I can see why. Tanaqui and her siblings are a great DWJ family; they don't all get along, but they're deeply loyal to one another, and all contribute in their individual ways. And the worldbuilding for this novel is especially rich: the Undying, the weaving of the rugcoats, the mages binding their spirits with their gowns, and all the rest of it. The setting we see is very plausibly an earlier society than the Dalemark of the "present-day" books (the ones with Moril and Mitt), and yet some of the things that happen along the way aren't the obvious -- because Jones is good at making things more complex than you expect at first glance.

Getting into the details: I'm thinking specifically of the invading "Heathens," and how Kars Adon, whom you expect to be a real enemy, isn't really. Nor is the unnamed King; he interferes with Tanaqui and her family, yes, but as they say at one point near the end, he's just the wrong guy for the times he lives in. Kankredin is flat-out evil -- and I do wish we got more backstory there, about who he is and where he came from; the bits we get only whet my appetite for more -- but he's also clearly inhuman; he may have once been human, but the process the mages go through, dying and binding their spirits back into their flesh, leaves them something other than people. (I try to take each book on its own terms here, but as it happens I've finished The Crown of Dalemark before writing this post, and the way Kankredin is treated there, as more an abstract force than a person, is very interesting.)

The Undying also interest me. I commented in the post on Drowned Ammet about the lack of religion in present-day Dalemark; the situation here is very different. Each family having their own Undying makes me think of the Lares and Penates in ancient Rome; the region in general has a very early-state feel, with an ostensible King, but very little in the way of centralization or state-sponsored faith. Then we hit the underlayer: the way the One was bound by Cenblith, the Lady as the River and also Tanaqui's mother, Tanamil's avoidant behavior on the topic of his own binding. The river as the River of Souls, and the way Kankredin rolls up it from the ocean, is numinous on a fundamental level that only a few of Jones' books achieve. (The Homeward Bounders comes to mind as one comparable example.)

And then there's the weaving, which is just cool, even if I can't figure out how the hell it's possible to cram the entirety of this novel into two coats, no matter how large. I've done some weaving myself; it isn't of the kind Tanaqui practices, but it gives me enough sense of the process that I scratch my head a bit over the practicalities. Still, I love the mythic resonance it has, and the way weaving = stories = spells.

(Actually, this seems a good time to ask -- has anybody out there seen a master's thesis (I think) posted online, about language and storytelling as magic in DWJ's novels? I started reading it years ago, then lost the file, and would like to take another look at it.)

I do like the epilogue, with its fictional-academic analysis of the story told in Tanaqui's spellcoats. Having said that: holy lack of resolution, Batman! The ending is all but a cliffhanger, leaving unanswered the question of how exactly that battle ends (though we can guess, because we've read the present-day books, that Kankredin doesn't win). And given that readers had to wait fourteen years for the finale . . . I think that may be why I always found the Dalemark books weird; I think I picked them up before The Crown of Dalemark came out, and then read that one separately later on. I'm curious as to why the delay happened. There are long gaps in other series of hers, but never with these kinds of dangling threads, waiting to be picked up and tied together at last.
Well, I've got <checks watch> about twenty-six hours to make that last post, to finish out this series before the end of the year. Expect that later tonight!

Locus Podcast on, um, everything?

I thought I had linked to this here before, but if so, I can't find it.

During World Fantasy, Karen Burnham of Locus sat me and Kari Sperring ( la_marquise_de_ ) down in front of a microphone to talk about a topic of our choosing. We chose Kari's "history is not a theme park" rant, and went from there, to, uh, everywhere. Subjects touched on included: The Three Musketeers, Aztecs and cultural relativism, Biblical archaeology, hemming clothing, stew, Mongolian steppe ponies, Minoan murals, authenticity in history, hippie elves, late medieval English blacksmithing guild laws, the Great London Plague of 1665, trousers and pigs, Biblical archaeology, kicking postmodernism in the head, seventeenth-century Parisian mud, telepathic wombats, and "the answer to almost everything is turnips."

All these things and more await you on the Locus website. You can listen to the file there or download it for later hearing. We ramble on for about an hour and twelve minutes; Karen said afterward that normally she waits for a lull in the conversation, then steps in to say "well, that about wraps things up." With us, she had to go in with a crowbar, or we would have kept rolling for another hour. We enjoyed it a lot -- well, certainly I did -- and I hope you do, too.

Yuletide guessing game

I don't know how many of you reading this participated in Yuletide (or at least have been reading through some percentage of the collection), but I might as well toss out some bait for interested parties to try and guess what I wrote.

Nota bene: do NOT go look at my page on the AO3 to see what I've written in the past. There's a bug that causes the fandoms my stories are in to be displayed, even for the stories that are still anonymous. It pretty much gives the game away.

This year I went a bit overboard and produced six stories. (This is a bit of a problem; last year I wrote four, which means next year my OCD brain is going to want me to write eight. At least.) One was my assignment, one was a pinch-hit, and four were treats. Several of those were supposed to be stocking stuffers (meaning less than a thousand words), but they all ended up higher: four were in the 1000-2000 word range, one was 2000-3000, and one was 3000-4000.

I wrote for three stage productions of one stripe or another, two movies, one TV show, one book, and one piece of art. If those numbers don't seem to add up to six, that's because three of the fics are crossovers, and I wrote in one fandom twice. Only one is a fandom I'd written in prior to this Yuletide.

Any guesses?

(And yes, we intend for regular posting here to resume before long.)

What I Got for Yuletide (a bit belated)

I've been extremely uncommunicative lately -- and my apologies if I owe you an e-mail, which is quite a lot of you -- but I'm breaking radio silence just before I go home to link you all to the story I got for Yuletide, which is absolutely beautiful.

"The Cautery Wind" combines two of my Elfquest-related suggestions: for my assigned writer to make up their own tribe in the World of Two Moons, and to give backstory for one of the original four tribes from canon (in this case, the Sun Folk). It's darker than more Elfquest, but in an appropriate way; it picks up on the threads of darkness that are already in the series, and looks at them head-on. The frame is Savah telling a story that Skywise and Timmain need to hear, and it contains more lovely notes than I can list about what it means for the Mother of Memory to want to forget something, what it means for Skywise to have changed the way he did in Kings of the Broken Wheel, what the relationship between Skywise and Timmain is about, and what the differences (and similarities) are between elves and humans. To name just a few of the things I loved about it.

The story probably won't mean a lot to people who haven't read the series, but if you know Elfquest, go read this story. It's a wonderful fan-made addendum to the canon.

progress, for realz

Got a draft of my Yuletide story last night. It's off to be read by fresher eyes than mine, and then I'll revise it, and get the whole shebang posted not quite as far in advance of the deadline as I'd initially hoped. :-)

On the basis of what I wrote last year, I find myself feeling bad that this story is so short, and will certainly be shorter than at least one of the treats I'm thinking of writing. I sort of feel like it, being my assignment, should be the longest thing I produce for Yuletide. Which is silly, of course: any given idea has a natural length (or range thereof), and bigger has no correlation with better. But still.

I'm really happy with my title, though. It came to me about halfway through the process, with no effort at all; the ones that do that are usually my favorites. Titles I have to sweat for rarely end up feeling more than adequate to me. (With Fate Conspire is something of a special case, given the process behind that one. It was more work than any other title I've ever put on a piece of writing, but I was very pleased with it in the end.)

The DWJ Project: Drowned Ammet

If I didn't have Christmas carols stuck in my head, I would have been singing Les Mis to myself for half this book. :-)

The Dalemark Quartet continues, with a book that takes on more directly the issue of oppression in the South Dales. Mitt's family is driven from their farm to the city of Holand by oppressive rents, and his father gets involved with a revolutionary society called the Free Holanders, which in turn ends up recruiting Mitt and his mother Milda, too. But when the Free Holanders decide to finally do something other than sit around and talk, things start to go very wrong very quickly.

That's half the story; the other half belongs to Hildy and Ynen, the grandchildren of the Earl of Holand. (70% of the names in this book begin with H. Hildrida and Hadd and Harl and Harchad and Holand and Hobin and hell if I can remember the rest.) As much as it sucks to be a commoner outside the palace, it isn't all sunshine and roses being a noble inside it, either; you never wonder where your next meal is coming from, but you do get sold off into political marriages and watch as your grandfather hangs Northerners whose only real crime was to be driven into harbor by a storm.

This book is stronger on both of the fronts that I felt were lacking in Cart and Cwidder; the plot has a lot more momentum, and the emotions are much more strongly laid out. Sure, I wanted to kick the Free Holanders in the teeth for being so blind they couldn't stage a revolution with both hands and a map -- and sometimes I wanted to kick Hobin, too, for failing to more effectively point out why joining them was a bad idea -- but it's entirely realistic stupidity, which means it frustrates me, but doesn't make for a bad story.

Other things I liked, before we LJ-cut for spoilers: Poor Old Ammet and Libby Beer. Which is to say, the tradition of making those two figures and throwing them in the harbor is fabulous. Like the word "cwidder," it feels very plausibly real, and ends up (as the title suggests) being very relevant to the story. I also liked the largely Ruritanian feel of the story; what with the revolutionaries and all, I half-believe that if you set sail across that ocean, you'll wash up in Westmark. :-)

The rest goes behind the cut.

I've said before, in other places, that I like it when the good guys find themselves at odds with one another, and have to overcome that in order to work together. It only pleases me, though, if their reasons for being at odds are valid. If it's all a Big Misunderstanding -- Spider-man movies, I am looking at you -- then I just want to slap everyone. So it pleased me a great deal when Mitt's storyline collided with Hildy and Ynen's, and they didn't all get along together, for reasons I could totally support on both sides. Yes, Mitt's life has sucked, and Hildy and Ynen have all kinds of privileges they've never really looked at before. Having said that, he's an ass to them on multiple occasions, and (as Ynen figures out) hasn't ever really thought through his revolutionary bullshit to see where it doesn't make sense. What's extra-awesome -- given that this is a series, and I know we'll be seeing them again -- is that they end the book still not quite liking each other. Mitt grumping that deciding he'll come back as a friend means he'll actually have to, y'know, act like a friend, and Hildy thinking that it's hard to trust Mitt when he's being such a jerk, serve as ballast to the deus ex aspects of the ending, keeping it all from feeling like it's been wrapped up in a tidy bow.

Speaking of deus ex, it occurs to me that one of the odd things about Dalemark is the near-total absence -- so far, anyway -- of anything like religion. Al tells them the people of the Holy Isles identify Old Ammet and Libby Beer as gods, which seems silly to the Holanders; do they have no religion themselves then? There isn't any sign of it that I can recall, here or in Cart and Cwidder. Which then has me wondering whether my off-the-cuff sense is accurate, that Ruritanian fantasy tends to be lacking in religion as a general thing. I'd love thoughts on that from people who are better-versed in the subgenre than I am. If I'm right, then my instinct is that it's because in fantasy, we assume gods are real, and that sort of de-Ruritanianizes the setting. But I don't know.

And speaking in turn of Al . . . it's been long enough since I read this book, and Jones had sold me well enough on "every other guy in Holand is named Alhammitt," that would you believe I actually didn't realize that was Mitt's father? And a right dick he is, too. Dalemark appears to be the Land of Parental Failure: Clennan and Lenina, Al and Milda, Navis sitting around and marinating in his own apathy. Not that good parents are common in Jones' books to begin with (or for that matter, in children's/YA lit in general), but for some reason I'm particularly struck by the ones we see here. They aren't abusive (mostly -- Al is, by the end), but in some ways I think that's why they bug me so much. There seems to be no reason why they couldn't be better parents. I want to shout at Milda to stop being such an idiot, and to tell Navis that ignoring problems, such as his own daughter, is not going to make those problems go away.

(Milda, btw, is a good example of why I try to keep an author's body of work in mind when I judge a single case. Her brand of idiocy, and the low opinion Mitt forms of women as a result, would bug me a lot more if I didn't know Jones had written plenty of other fabulous female characters, not all of them children. As it stands, I'm able to read Milda as being herself -- a stupid woman, and perfectly realistic as such -- rather than as an example of her gender.)
I think that's most of my thoughts. Drowned Ammet is nearly half again as long as Cart and Cwidder, but I read it more rapidly, because I found it more compelling. I'm looking forward to The Spellcoats, which I ever-so-vaguely recall might have been my favorite, back in the day.

The DWJ Project: Cart and Cwidder

This is the first book of the Dalemark Quartet, which I know I read many years ago, but out of order and sufficiently spaced out that I don't think I realized at the time the books made up a set.

In part, this is because -- although I've afterwards thought of them as a Proper Series -- these books are no more closely linked than, say, Howl's Moving Castle and Castle in the Air. They take place in the same setting, and maybe once I get further on (I'm in the process of re-reading Drowned Ammet right now) there will be more immediate linkages, but so far there's no sense in which any of these books is a direct sequel to one before. (The exception may come in The Crown of Dalemark, which I want to say builds on all three of its predecessors. Then again, I haven't read the thing in probably twenty years, so my instinct is not what you'd call reliable.)

The other reason I didn't notice, the first (and I think only) time I read these books, that they belonged together, was because . . . they never really made an impression on me. I know some people love the Dalemark series; there are a number of Yuletide requests for it this year. Glancing at them, though, they all seem to be for later books: I didn't see a single one for Cart and Cwidder, though I might have overlooked it. I think it's entirely possible I'll like the later ones better -- Drowned Ammet is already off to a better start -- but yeah, this one didn't do a lot for me. It's one of the earlier books, published in 1975, and it feels like it never quite hit its stride.

Before I get to unpacking that, though, a plot summary. The title refers to the fact that the protagonist, Moril, belongs to a family of traveling singers; they travel in a cart, and he and his father both play the cwidder, which is (as near as I can tell) a made-up stringed instrument, or maybe just a made-up name for a stringed instrument. ("Cwidder" is a reasonably plausible morph of "guitar," to my eye, though the image on my book cover looks more like a lute.) They're traveling in the South Dales, which suffer under a repressive set of earls, and trying to make their way to the North Dales, where Moril and the other children were born, and people can live free.

Now we can move on to the spoilers.

It takes about a quarter of the book for the plot to get started. Yes, Kialan is part of the plot, but not much is done with him early on; he just rides along with the family and annoys Moril and Brid. I don't feel like things really get moving until Clennan dies, fifty pages in. And even then, there isn't a clear direction to the plot, other than "get to the North." Compared with the other two books DWJ published in the same year -- Eight Days of Luke and Dogsbody -- it feels aimless. I had to look at the cover copy to see where it was going: "[Moril] must learn to harness [the cwidder's] strange power in time to prevent a destructive civil war." Oh, okay.

There are also three distinct points in the plot where I felt bothered by the characters' reactions to things, or more precisely, their lack of reaction. To some extent, I think this is the operation of a tendency I've commented on before; Jones frequently puts awful things into the story, in such a fashion that you can see as much or as little of the awfulness as you're prepared for. Taking the three incidents in sequence, I feel they fall more into that camp as they go along. But for whatever reason, it never quite works for me here the way it does elsewhere -- not the way it does in, say, Charmed Life, which came out two years later.

Which incidents do I mean? The first is Clennan's death, and the aftermath thereof. Nobody seems as upset by it as I feel they should be. Lenina . . . I had the Dread Pirate Roberts in my head, saying, "Tell me truly: when you found out he was gone, did you get engaged to your prince that same hour, or did you wait a whole week out of respect for the dead?" I know she hated that life, hated going barefoot and sleeping in tents and never knowing if they'd have enough money to eat next week; I know she stayed with Clennan only out of a sense of duty. (And depending on how you want to interpret the one time Clennan made Osfameron's cwidder work, she was magically coerced into it to begin with.) But marrying Ganner that same night? "The funeral-baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables," indeed. It's stunningly cold-hearted of her, and the only reason it doesn't hurt her children even more than we're told it does is because none of them seem quite as broken up by the loss of Clennan as I'd expect. Even if nobody quite liked him -- and I could see why they wouldn't -- the guy was the center of their entire world; I wanted to feel more impact from that loss.

Ditto Dagner, when Brid and Moril and Kialan drive off without him. Obviously there was nothing else they could do; I don't object to the action. But I wanted it to seem like a harder choice for them. I mean, a week ago Moril had a father and a mother and two siblings; now he's down to one sister and a strange kid he doesn't like very much. Also, his father turns out to have been a spy, and if he can't get to the North he'll probably be killed. I wanted him to freak out more, man!

The closest he comes is in the third incident, namely, when he drops a freaking mountain on the heads of his enemies. This one, more than the others, feels like Jones allowing me to think through the horror of what he did; I'm reminded of the mermaids in The Lives of Christopher Chant. But -- ye gods. Moril obliterated hundreds, maybe thousands, of men. I can't think of a single protagonist in Jones' books with that kind of body count. Hell, I'm having trouble thinking of a villain who can match it. Mr. Chesney? The mages of Arth? Them? But those are all less direct. I guess the closest is the conspirators in Deep Secret, who blew up the Emperor and everybody else in the palace.

Moril's distant reaction to that event at least feels kind of like shell-shock, rather than non-reaction. And I do like the way he did it, not for a great cause, but for Olob (who kind of got Newbery'd there). I also like his feeling that he's not ready for the power Clennan bequeathed to him. But still: I either wanted more reaction, or less of a slaughter.

None of this is to say I hated the book; I didn't. There were touches I enjoyed a fair bit, like how Osfameron's cwidder works, and the stories about him and the Adon. Much of the setting felt a bit flat, but those really stood out, implying greater depth that I'm looking forward to seeing in the later books. Drowned Ammet already feels richer, and I'm not very far in, so that's an encouraging sign.
. . . I can tell I'm starting to tire out on this project; it's been eight months and thirty-one books, and I still have a little way to go. But I'm near enough to the end that I want to finish by the anniversary of her death. I'll do the rest of Dalemark this month, and then there will be only ten more books left (eight novels and the remainder of two short story collections). And I've saved a few of my second-tier favorites for nearly last. :-)