Archive for April, 2011
Oaths — Excerpt 1
A few weeks ago I posted the beginning of a thing — this post a continuation of a thing, tentatively titled Oaths. The title will change if I ever publish this because Oaths just doesn’t roll off the tongue very well, but it’s apt for now. I’ve decided to post excerpts of what I already have written, in the hopes of soliciting some feedback. I’ve already done some heavy edits on what I’ll be posting, but it’s far from a finished product. I, personally, benefit greatly from people giving me their thoughts on what I’m working on, even if they ultimately tell me that it’s shit. Knowing the specifics of why someone thinks it’s shit is a big help. “Why didn’t this work for them? Is it something I should fix, or is it just not clicking with this particular person?”
I think it also might be fun to provide a little information on my mindset when I was writing a particular piece. Maybe useful to all of you, definitely useful to me — I can look back down the road and see where I was coming from. So here is that for this part!
Forethoughts
This excerpt comes immediately after what I posted here previously. What I posted before is what I now consider the prologue. Originally the story kicked off right from there and we saw a child’s journey away from home to find her place amongst strangers in a place she’s never seen before, a place so massively different from her home that she needs to relearn how to live, essentially. Ultimately I ended up not being happy with that. That’s not the sort of person I am, writer or reader. One of my criticisms of The Farseer Trilogy was that the first half of the first book was completely dedicated to setting up the world Fitz lives in, and that wasn’t terribly exciting. Informative, yes. Exciting, no. I realized that I was repeating exactly what I didn’t like about those massive fantasy tomes: too much exposition for too long.
I scrapped all of that, kept the initial scene as a prologue, and restarted the story with the child already a young adult, living in this new world and accustomed to its ways. Essentially: she’s the same brave little girl, but she’s grown up, been through boot, and been exposed to What Lurks Below(tm).
Enjoy!
Hey Alex, whatcha readin’?
I picked up a Kindle quite awhile ago and I realized I’ve never really mentioned what I’ve been reading on it. Considering this blog exists, it seems like something I should do, no? I’m not going to review any of these titles, just yap about them very briefly.
The Dresden Files
I eased myself back into hobby reading by picking up a fun, simple series — Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files. It’s a series about a private investigator. Also, he’s a wizard. Wikipedia’s synopsis:
The Dresden Files is a series of fantasy/mystery novels written by Jim Butcher. He provides a first person narrative of each story from the point of view of the main character, private investigator and wizard Harry Dresden, as he recounts investigations into supernatural disturbances in modern-day Chicago. Butcher’s original proposed title for the first novel was “Semiautomagic”, which sums up the series’ balance of fantasy and hard-boiled detective fiction.
The series is an easy read and absolutely a cheesy romp — there’s plenty of gratuitous violence and sexual tension with a ludicrously powerful main character, but I’m cool with it. It’s fun and forgetting how to appreciate simple fun is one of the worst things you can do to yourself.
The Farseer Trilogy
Robin Hobb’s Farseer Trilogy is a great fantasy series that starts off very slowly. It’s a rich setting and the trilogy as a whole was made better by it, but the first half of the first novel is all scene-setting. You’re given the background of the kingdom involved and are given an overview of the main character’s growing years, from being a small bastard child left in the care of his father’s right hand man, up to him being a teenage apprentice to the royal assassin. I have rather severe untreated ADD. My attention span and ability to focus is complete shit and it’s something I struggle with quite a bit. Muscling through the first half of the first novel was hard. Not only is my attention span shit, but there was also nothing reaching out and grabbing me and forcing me to focus — if books had a voice, the first half of Assassin’s Apprentice would have sounded entirely monotone to me. It gets better.
Once the series got going, there was no stopping the events in motion. I loved the series — and I hated the main character. You want to cheer for him, but he’s constantly fucking everything up for himself and everybody he comes in contact with. You hate him, but you still want him to win. It was an interesting feeling.
The Tawny Man Trilogy is a followup to The Farseer Trilogy, taking place fifteen(ish) years later. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s on my list.
Codex Alera
After wrapping up the most recent addition to The Dresden Files, I was curious how Jim Butcher handled a pure fantasy setting. Codex Alera is his attempt at that — I’m currently reading the first novel in the series, Furies of Calderon. It’s … okay. It is far too early to say whether I like it or not, but it hasn’t grabbed me. It’s simply not interesting. I’m going to give Butcher the benefit of the doubt though, because I do love Dresden and early Dresden wasn’t the greatest material, either. Based purely on faith to the author, I’ll probably give it until book two to grab my attention.
Have any of you read this series? Does it get better?
What next?
After Codex Alera, I’ll either move onto The Tawny Man Trilogy or go back to the Vlad Taltos series. A good friend of mine recommended them to me a few years back and I very much enjoyed them, but for some reason I stopped reading right in the middle of Dzur and never picked the series up again. Considering the recent release of Tiassa, it seems like a good time to get back into them. Though I hear that reading Phoenix Guards before Tiassa is highly recommended — I haven’t touched those yet either. So perhaps Dzur, Jhegaala, Iorich, Phoenix Guards, then Tiassa? We’ll see.