Ari Bach's Blog, page 77
October 24, 2016
facts-i-just-made-up:
Valhalla by Ari Bach. The Mirror of...
Valhalla by Ari Bach. The Mirror of Erised knows you want to read it, even if you don’t.
Otreb mut ube cafru oyt on wohsi.
October 22, 2016
harmonyinkpress:
themysteryoftheunknownuniverse:
me when a...
themysteryoftheunknownuniverse:
me when a book gets a movie adaptation
Keep dreaming
I promise, some dreams will come true. Some day…
what makes a good description? preferably a better writer
We’re all guilty of describing a character with blue eyes as various types of weather and lakes or cloudy days, green eyes as emeralds, etc. And of course, the color of their hair is next. What is it? Flaming red, or a golden blond to rival the dawn? Or perhaps raven, or ebony, or some other word to rival the darkest shade of night. You might, perhaps, be even guilty of trying to describe skin color by various types of foods and coffee combinations.
There’s a reason these things are not only cliche but made fun of in writing communities. None of these things actually describe the character, do they? they don’t tell me anything about the character. Perhaps another character with jasper eyes and flaming hair and soy latte skin comes walking down the street– what separates them? What makes them different people? Colors are not infinite to us, and soon enough the permutations and combinations run out.
The colors a character is made up of– their hair, their eyes, even their skin, tell me little to nothing about them, especially if they’re in a fantasy world. Do blue eyes decide how kind he is? Does red hair dictate how in control of her life she is on first glance? Skin color might add a note or two about possible experiences with racism, but besides that what does it actually say about their personality?
So I’m going to challenge you here, dear writer: forego talking so much about the colors, unless they’re actually important to the plot (please don’t go out of your way to make them so). Do not describe any feature or article with a color. Now, that’s not to say you ought to try and reinvent red like that popular post you’ve seen going around. Do not compare their hair. Besides knowing they have dark or light hair, what more do I really need to know? Perhaps if they’ve combed it or not, if they cut it them self, if they’ve tried to dye it or perhaps they hide it because they’re ashamed. I don’t care what color the nail polish the character is wearing, is it perfectly newly manicured despite being a week old? Or is it cracked and chipping, even layered messily over old coats? Does the color of their eyes really tell me more about this person than perfect or smeared makeup, or lines, or red veins in them?
What do you think? Are colors as character descriptions over used?
This is fine for a general note on over-description of useless characteristics but it’s by no means universal.
First, as a matter of representation, skin color can be important to establish. Sometimes it is important to the plot that someone be a specific race and then it’s absolutely correct to mention. Even if it’s not important to the plot, it’s kind of hard to include racial diversity without in some way establishing race and the simplest, most honest way it often via skin tone. I’ve used “Ebony” before because when I asked a couple African-American friends, they both said that was the most flattering word to be sure people got that the guy was black, as ‘dark skin’ can mean a tan white person and so on.
Then artistically, color coding can be an amazing poetic tool. Some hair colors have literary and mythological connotations galore, as do eye colors and all kinds of things. That’s not even approaching clothes, which in the Hitchcockian sense can and often should be color coded to symbolic means. “Sir Gawain and the Knight of Indeterminate Hue” just doesn’t work.
And finally, if you’re the author and you have a vision of a character, why shouldn’t you say what color their hair or nails are? Every author has every right to describe what their characters look like and colors are a critical component of visual description.
Overdoing it is pretty silly, and limiting to it exclusively is indeed bad writing. But I’ve honestly never read any published book that overdoes it. The above post would seem to suggest that mentioning how my main character is blonde with purple eyes is going too far. I disagree. Both are important because of changes that happen in the final book. And even if they weren’t, it’s not a great sin to mention them.
If I were to give any criticism, it would be to just avoid overly flowery color-descriptive prose when it’s not necessary. “He had black hair” isn’t a crime. “His hair was the deepest black like the jet stone from within a Canadian coal mine just south of the arctic circle which absorbed more photons of the visible spectrum than all others,” might be pushing it.
October 18, 2016
intangiblepetrifications:
John Albert Bauer (Swedish, b. 1882 -...
John Albert Bauer (Swedish, b. 1882 - 1918)
Týr and Fenrir
(AKA Violet and Wulfgar)
October 17, 2016
facts-i-just-made-up:
facts-i-just-made-up:
Valhalla by Ari...
Valhalla by Ari Bach: All Comic Sans Edition coming soon!
Never underestimate the things a starving author will do for sales.
October 9, 2016
was Sasha's army and their goal based off of The White Man's Burden?
Not quite specifically Kipling’s poem if that’s what you mean, but the concept of imperialism, both from racist and religious perspectives.
It’s sort of a mishmash of imperial cliches and concepts. Many of Sasha’s statements are paraphrased from old rulers and writers, from Richard F. Burton to Carl von Clausewitz, and even to some racist newsletters a relative of mine found. Sasha’s sentiment is very much alive today. The research to write him was incredibly disturbing.
October 5, 2016
an-american-brit-on-tumbler:
the-walrus-squad:
an-american-brit...
Valhalla by Ari Bach: Militarizing the human brain since 2010.
This however, is not your brain on ragnorok, and most definitely not your brain on gudsriki. No, those brains are shattered into more pieces than @the-walrus-squad’s sense of love for his characters. (just teasing of course, i thought the ending was rather fulfilling and had a strong sense of closure, but still, fuck you for ruining V team just to fit a pun into book 3)
(SPOILERS)
Some plot specifics were inspired by a pun but I assure you, V Team’s downfall was planned from the very first draft in the 1990s.
1. Thank you for clarifying that makes me feel much better. 2. Still salty but what can you do eh? 3. Wow you respond quick. Thank you for your wonderful book series. 4. Still salty. Why veikko? He was the character i resonated with on a spiritual level man. Have alf do it he was gonna die anyways, or balder. Or cato. You could still burn him if cato did it. Than you give veikko the satisfying death he deserves man. 5. When your done with your next book (the medieval one the name escapes me) i request a book about the adventures of pytten working their (almost wrote his) way up to admiral with the big twist being veikko escaped and pytten has to kill him to honor his former admiral. Have a splendid night.
1- No problem :)
2- Better to inspire anger than nothing at all, I suppose.
3- Thanks! I’m fast when I’m on, but often miss stuff completely when I’m away for a while. If anyone reading this has ever tagged me and I’ve not responded, that’s why. I do reply to everything directed toward me requesting a response, if I see it. Direct ask messages generally get seen though.
4- Veikko is based on Loki in Norse myth, so he had to fulfill Loki’s betrayal. He was set up from the beginning to do what he does in the books, lots of foreshadowing. But villains in reality are rarely pure evil. The most horrifying ones are those who you feel for, even see yourself in. As the main villain of the series, even over Mishka and Wulfgar, I wanted him to be someone truly memorable and iconic. Rather than go the Darth Vader route, I wanted him to be a friend from the beginning. And honestly, there’s a lot of me in him. I guess my main villain had to be what I fear in myself. His manner of death at the end is also something planned from draft one, that ending for a bad guy cyborg was one of the very first ideas for the project.
5- If I do a chronological sequel to Valhalla it will be about Pytten, but first I’d do V Team’s adventures between Valhalla and Ragnarök. There’s a year of great material of the team in their prime. I almost delayed Ragnarök to do all those stories first, but 20 years to the end seemed like a long time.
an-american-brit-on-tumbler:
facts-i-just-made-up:
Valhalla by...
Valhalla by Ari Bach: Militarizing the human brain since 2010.
This however, is not your brain on ragnorok, and most definitely not your brain on gudsriki. No, those brains are shattered into more pieces than @the-walrus-squad’s sense of love for his characters. (just teasing of course, i thought the ending was rather fulfilling and had a strong sense of closure, but still, fuck you for ruining V team just to fit a pun into book 3)
(SPOILERS)
Some plot specifics were inspired by a pun but I assure you, V Team’s downfall was planned from the very first draft in the 1990s.
October 2, 2016
I really wish as a published author that I could claim this was...
I really wish as a published author that I could claim this was staged.
October 1, 2016
the-millennial-king:
An upcoming novella by Ari Bach, author of...
An upcoming novella by Ari Bach, author of the Valhalla Trilogy.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. It is the year 1000 A.D. and the elder generation is horribly disappointed by the Millennials. Berating them for everything from walking around staring into their seeing stones to their difficulties finding new dragons to slay, the old regime is about to learn that the children coming of age in the new millennium are destined for greater things than the old folks ever imagined.
New Blog. New Book. New Universe.
Coming soon…
