I have mixed feelings about A Song of Ice and Fire (the overall series). My biggest problem is that I can make a pretty sizable list of things I don’t like: about the writing, about the characters (specifically how death is handled), about the sexism and sex and overall yuck factor, and…well you get the idea. On the other hand, I’m still reading it. None of these factors were enough to not bother with the current book, nor have they been enough to make me put the current book down. The story is still interesting enough, I guess. But see that’s just it. I can’t put my finger on why I haven’t had the urge to quit reading, and I can’t figure out why such a vague “like” factor should overrule that whole list of “don’t likes”.

If I had to rank in terms of overall enjoyment in the genre of epic fantasy, this is how my list would go: Mistborn, Wheel of Time, Name of the Wind, Dragonlance, Sword of Truth, Assassins/Liveships/Tawny Man, Deathgate Cycle, Belgariad/Mallorean, Song of Ice and Fire, Winds of the Forelands.

(That’s not counting any YA series, ’cause I feel like that’s a different beast. It’s also not counting The Way of Kings, because there’s only the one book so far. I have a suspicion it will shoot to the top pretty fast).

(Also, that list is not representative of how I feel about the writing of said series…for instance I think Sword of Truth is too heavy-handed and the Belgariad and Mallorean repetitive….but just how eager I was to finish the books and how much I enjoyed reading them. Honestly, Name of the Wind and Wheel of Time could trade places, but…WoT has seniority

So see, Ice and Fire is down there. It’s good enough to keep me into it, but barely. (Winds of the Forelands I had to force myself to finish. Because geez, warwarwar almost everyone dies. Meh.) I’m not going to be too upset if the final book never materializes (like this one almost didn’t…as a reader, I’m all “THAT’S ANNOYING!!1″, but as a writer, I can totally understand that slogging inch by inch through a manuscript and then glancing up going “Where the HELL has the year gone??”)

Interestingly, the things I don’t like about Ice and Fire: some have gotten better in A Dance With Dragons. The rash of people dying in stupid pointless ways has slowed to a trickle. There haven’t been nearly as many deaths all around, which is nice. It’s starting to look like at least some of the bad characters might possibly have a shot of seeing some comeuppance, you know, eventually. Hope? Not quite, but more like a lessening of utter despair.

Other things have gotten a lot worse. First of all, I absolutely cannot abide how this author treats women in this series. It’s like, yeah I know this is supposed to be a gritty, harsh world and all…but after a point, I begin to wonder how much of the blatant disgusting misogyny was put there on purpose, and how much is due to the unconscious worldview of the author. Women in A Song of Ice and Fire seem to exist for exactly one purpose: to be fucked by men. There are only two types of women in Martin’s epic: whores and not-yet-whores. A woman’s consent is irrelevant to the question of whether a man will stick his member in her…it only answers the question of whether or not it might be considered “rape” afterward. And nobody really cares whether it was rape or not. Women have no sexual agency whatsoever; it is the men who decide where, when, and how often a women will spread her legs. After all, that’s what women are FOR.

Even the women think this way in this world, which I find both abhorrent and utterly baffling. There was one scene where a female protagonist was assaulted by a male character intent on raping her. She fights him, he overpowers her…and then they have wild passionate sex which she absolutely enjoys. Only later do we find out she’s had this man as a lover for some time and is very attracted to him, wanted him, etc. I just…no. That is not how women think. There was nothing playful or coy about her telling him to bugger off (she drew a knife on him!). There is absolutely no reason to write a scene where a woman WANTS to be raped, even if she knows and has had sex with the guy before. It was disgusting. It confused me so bad that I had to flip forward and back several times to make sure I hadn’t MISSED some vital piece of information that would make that scene make any kind of sense. It threw me out of the story.

Also, I don’t remember nearly so many references to genitals that start with “c” in the other books. (Maybe my brain just sort of mentally tuned them out before). Have I mentioned that I hate, hate, hate those particular words? And sex with body parts. And fluids. And screaming. I just…ew. I know, I know, joyless world, crass characters, yadda yadda yadda…I don’t like it. Especially since I don’t know how much of it the author is deliberately channeling to create a certain mood or mindset…and how much of it is really how he sees things. Usually, when you write a book in which you must include morally offensive ideas…you present it well and realistically, yes, but at some point I feel like you’ve got to make it clear to your readers that the behavior in question is not okay. I haven’t gotten that vibe yet. The vibe I get is: it doesn’t matter whether something’s right or wrong…it’s how the world is, so deal with it. And maybe that’s the whole point.

Some point.

That actually takes me into…the yuck factor. I can deal with blood. You read fantasy, you’re going to see a lot of blood doing all sorts of things you’d just as soon not see: spraying, splattering, oozing, leaking, splashing, you get the idea. I can deal with body parts in written fantasy (movies…eh, not so much. Not a lot of it). Brains and entrails are common.

I cannot deal with human waste. And I’m really not exaggerating when I say that A Dance with Dragons is full of shit. Human shit, horse shit, pig shit, sick shit. There are many times where characters are described going to the bathroom (which I feel is generally unnecessary unless they get bit by a snake or something, you know, significant happens), in rather more detail than I felt necessary. I assume male characters take a piss from time to time. I might even assume they wake up with erections sometimes and you know, deal with that. You don’t have to tell me about it. Seriously. You don’t have to tell me about it. You’re going to make me think you’re obsessed with body parts or something. And honestly, the way you treat women in the story…

Ah but well. You’re probably by now wondering why I mentioned chamber pots.

Most traditional epic fantasy is based in a somewhat Medieval-ish setting with some magic or something thrown in. That means Medieval technology, which means you get around by some variety of horse (no self-powered vehicles), communicate by some variety of bird (no communication technology), defend yourself with swords, bows, and armor, or magic (no guns), pay taxes to a king or lord (no democracies), warm and light your house with fire (no electricity), eat from wooden, metal, ceramic, or glass flatware (no plastic), sew your own clothes and build your own furniture (no assembly-line produced goods), heal your wounds with raw herbs or magic (no advanced medicine), bathe by hauling buckets up to your room (no indoor plumbing), and sleep at the end of the day on a hay or feather mattress (no polyester or such).

And you do your business in a chamber pot in your room.

Now let’s be honest. The Medieval Age is not one in which most modern people would want to live, not if they’ve actually studied what it was like for a common shmuck back then. Life was harsh, unfair, hard, brutally short, and you stank through most of it.  So…why this institutionalized nostalgia as presented in fantasy literature? Well, to be fair, the Medieval period did produce some really kick-ass swords. And cathedrals. And there were knights, of course, which have a legacy that’s almost fantasy-ish in of itself. But I think the biggest reason is because of the magic. It is theorized that, if people had regular access to some source of supernatural power, humanity would have no particular reason to advance beyond the technological level of the late Medieval period. Magic would fill in the gap of technology, would provide all the advantages and conveniences that were, in real history, provided by science and technology.

My question is: if magic is supposed to fill in those gaps, why is there no indoor plumbing? Why does the widespread use of chamber pots persist in fantasy fiction??

It’s not like they can’t build pipes. Heck, you don’t even need magic for it…weren’t there some really ancient cities that had plumbing? This strange reliance on chamber pots and buckets of water just really doesn’t make sense. Why preserve THAT particular bit of Medieval reality, when so much of the rest is discarded? (Hot spring baths? How many people had access to those?) Peeing in one’s room is gross. It stinks. It attracts disease. You have to clean the pot. Did I mention it stinks?

If you’re lucky, an author might mention a random chamber pot once. Most don’t talk about the character’s bathroom arrangements at all, which is nice…although if you’re filling bathtubs with buckets, you’re probably peeing in pots. If that author is George R. R. Martin, you’ll get to read in rather graphic detail exactly how pervasive chamber pots are, and how often they are used, and even what happens when a character uses his bed or something else besides a chamber pot….yeah. Most authors leave the chamber pots offstage.

But they’re there, more often than not.

Why?

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What it did well:

The series made me care about every single character. I really couldn’t pick a favorite. Now I know that sounds like a “duh”, but honestly? That’s rare. That’s really, really rare. Anytime you have an epic with a huge cast of characters, there’s almost always going to be characters whose chapters you look forward to reading, and other characters whose stories you don’t care so much about, except that you’ve got to slog through them to get to your favorite POV again. It’s hard enough to create one character that everybody likes. Creating a whole cast of characters that everyone likes? In the Sword of Truth, I only really cared about Richard, Kahlan, and oddly, Nathan Rahl…reading about anyone else was work. In the Way of Kings, I liked Kaladin so much that it would take me a good two or three pages to get “into” anyone else’s story. Even the Wheel of Time couldn’t pull it off, though WoT manages to periodically bring various storylines to the forefront of my interest. I used to slog through Mat’s chapters because he just wasn’t as interesting to me. Now, with the introduction of Tuon, his is among my favorite storylines, and I find myself slogging through Elayne’s and the Forsaken’s chapters. Heck, there was a point around Book 8 where I was slogging through Rand’s storyline to get elsewhere.

In Winds of the Forelands, however, what would happen was I’d reach the beginning of a chapter with a new POV, figure out whose it was, and think something like, “Oh, yeah, them. I’d almost forgotten. There were having such and such problems, and this was going on…” and I was quite happy to keep reading. Those books were probably among the most balanced I’ve read, as far as juggling POVs and keeping interest up. The villains were as interesting and complex as the protagonists (a must for me, if I’m reading), and at various times I found myself honestly conflicted in who I was rooting for. This is something I really want to emulate in my Tindaari series…as every storyline is essential and I don’t want readers glazing over some to get to others.

The downside of this, however, is that while I cared about every character, there wasn’t one who really stood out to me. As I said, I couldn’t pick a favorite. Nobody really got to me, you know? The closest was Cadel the assassin, oddly enough, and he was killed off at the end of the third book. I really don’t think I was supposed to like him as much as I did…and it created in me an odd resentment towards one of the protagonists, Tavis. I’m supposed to be rooting for Tavis, and I did, but there was always this part of me going, “I wish I could like you more, but you killed Cadel. Yeah, I know he assassinated your fiance and framed you for it, and you’re going to be screwed until you get that sorted…but Cadel was awesome! I miss Cadel.”

Another aspect that bothered me about the series is that although the main storyline was tied off at the end, there were a whole slew of smaller subplots that I felt didn’t get finished. You sort of get the impression that all the smaller stuff will work itself out, but since I’d come to care about all these smaller situations, I didn’t like not knowing for sure. It felt like the smaller plotlines existed solely to propel one particular character, or a few characters, towards the final big battle at the end…and if we knew the fate of those characters, it would be enough. And I mean, I guess that is enough, ’cause there’s only so much wrapping up one can do before it gets boring. It just didn’t…feel like enough. Not for me.

But really, I can nitpick anything. Winds of the Forelands was a surprisingly good series, and I’d recommend it to anyone who likes the genre and is tired of WoT and LoTR knockoffs.

I realized that my vague dissatisfaction with the series has less to do with the quality of the books themselves, but in the fact that it was a war story. Most epic fantasy is about war. Most epic fantasy concerns itself with nations and kingdoms and armies and warriors and borders and conquest and preventing conquest. Lord of the Rings. The Wheel of Time. Dragonlance. The Belgariad. Even Harry Potter has got one set of sorcerers trying to conquer and destroy the other set. The Sword of Truth and The Way of Kings have enough else going on that it pulls the spotlight off the battles, but still, there are battles. There’s always a war going on, or a war about to start. I noticed it in Winds of the Forelands, I think, because the entire story hinges on one particular war, and concerns all the smaller wars that lead into the big one. It’s not just a story taking place during a war…it’s a story about a war.

I don’t like war. Fighting battles, moving troops, swords and arrows and armor, thinking about how many men it will take to defeat a particular army…none of that crud interests me. I hate watching spear-carriers in stories get killed off in huge swathes in order to “up the stakes” for the good guys. It may be necessary but I don’t like it. It’s not what draws me to epic fantasy and I’ll be honest, it’s my least favorite part of it.

And this got me thinking, why is epic fantasy always about war? Well, for one thing, it’s big. It involves all kinds of people from various places. It forces people to move around a lot. It forces people to ally with enemies, and estrange themselves from allies. It’s exciting. It permanently changes the geographical and political landscape. No one walks away unscathed. Very few things are as epic as a war. It’s conflict writ large.

I never pictured Tindaari as a war story. I had vague plans of a war between the new priesthood and the magic users, but it was never anything definite because it wasn’t a part of the story I enjoyed planning. I was putting a war into the story because…well, that’s what you do in epic fantasy. You need all-encompassing, world-changing, epic battles between really awesome magic users and warriors with really awesome swords. So I’ve put myself in a position of writing a story in a genre that requires me to include something I don’t really want to write about.

That won’t do.

So I started brainstorming. After all, I don’t have to write about war. I don’t care if it’s the easiest way to make an epic…I don’t have to do it that way. I just need to think of something else, something equally as epic…but something that interests me. What sort of event brings people together on as massive a scale as a war, but isn’t a war?

Natural disaster comes to mind pretty quick. But really, that’s just replacing people against people with people against nature. Plague, famine, the sudden appearance of superpowers or curses among the population…which usually leads to some sort of armed conflict between supes and non-supes.

The only other kind of epic fantasy I can think of are what I’ll call coming-of-age stories. They concentrate on one single person’s life…though that person is usually some kind of hero or king, or is well caught up in the doings of heroes and kings. Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicles is such a story, as is Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, as is Robin Hobb’s Assassins trilogy. (The Belgariad is a sort of hybrid, but honestly I think it’s the tongue-in-cheek humor that really carries that series for me.) Instead of creating an epic feel by spreading the focus wide, among a huge cast of characters…one narrows the focus down to a single individual, but takes that life in such detail that it becomes epic.

I just started The Wise Man’s Fear, second book in Rothfuss’ series…and I’ve been trying to put my finger on why I’m enjoying the reading so much more than Winds of the Forelands. I think it’s simply because I happen to like life-epics better than war-epics. For one things, life-epics tend to unfold at a slower, more relaxed pace than war-epics. I can get comfortable with the character and the world before the really big stuff starts to happen, and I’m not as tempted to read ahead to ease tension. Tindaari is very well set up to be a life-epic…it is, after all, the story of Ravana and Linus growing up, growing into their powers and into the world.

This is, perhaps, where Tindaari could really be something unique in the epic fantasy genre, because it’s really the story of several characters coming of age and meeting each other. You get to know all of them from childhood, or at least young-adulthood. It would be a life-epic in structure, but still keep the multi-character focus and breadth of a war-epic. I think taking the time to follow these characters as they grow up will help alleviate that “really like some characters, bored with others” problem that crops up in epics.

And best of all, if armed conflict does happen within the story (and it probably will), at least I can feel like I don’t have to focus on that aspect of it.

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I’ve begun re-reading my First Draft in 30 Days book, and thinking about how I’m going to approach re-writing the second installment in Shades. At the conference, I want to at least be able to say that I’m “working on” the second book. Hopefully if I start the re-write with a system, it will go faster than this first book has.

In other news, I finally got my hands on copies of the first two books in a series I was curious about: Chaos Walking by Patrick Ness. I’ve finished the first book and started on the second. I picked them up solely because their titles were so compelling. The Knife of Never Letting Go and The Ask and the Answer. I mean, come on…titles like that beg to be read. The voice of the story actually irritated me at first; the protagonist speaks in a very Huck Finn sort of way, ain’t and yer and phonetic spellings of words. It wasn’t what I was expecting, but you get used to it. Premise of the story is interesting…not unique, but approached in a unique way. But man, those titles. That’s why a book title has to be compelling.

Also picked up a book called Shade by Jeri Smith Ready. Anything with a title or premise that seems remotely similar to my Shades, I make a point to read. Just to make sure my story is sufficiently different. Shade is a pretty run-of-the-mill paranormal romance, not the best thing I’ve read but far from the worst. I enjoyed it, but there was one aspect that annoyed the hell out of me. It’s a sin that certain anime shows tend to pull, also, and maybe it’s just a particular irritant of mine. But: don’t introduce a mystery you aren’t going to explain. Don’t hint at certain aspects of worldbuilding, and then never come back to them. Rah Xephon did this, Evangelion did this. Arg. When you haven’t explained what exactly the Mu are, or where the Angels come from and why they are attacking, I don’t feel like the story is over. I am left feeling extremely unsatisfied. Maybe that’s a personal problem, but there it is.

Shade was bad about that. Basic premise: one solstice, something called the Shift occurred, and all children born afterwards possess the ability to see ghosts. The story takes place sixteen years later, and is about a girl who was the first one born after the Shift. There’s a possibility that her birth caused the Shift, but like most of the mysteries in the book, this was not explained. There was a whole subplot about her trying to figure out why her mother was in Ireland a year before the Shift, and who her father was, and if that was all connected to the Shift. One of the other characters, Zach, was the last one born before the Shift, and has this ability to scare away ghosts. All these things are introduced, but never explored. Never explained. I got to the end of the story, which ends in kind of an odd place, and thought to myself, “That’s it? Is that it?”

If this is the first book in a series, I would be willing to forgive everything I just complained about. However, there’s no indication anywhere in the book or on the cover that this is a series, or if there will be a sequel. I finished the book without being convinced that the story was over. It just kind of stopped. Only one plot threat was resolved. Everything else still hangs wide open. That sort of thing frustrates the hell out of me as a reader. Maybe that’s why there are so few anime shows I feel like I really “get”.

Anyway, I have Towers of Midnight, The Clockwork Angel, Linger, Last Sacrifice, and a few other titles still in my library queue. I do hope they don’t all come in at once (because, OMG, ToM is like 300,000 words or something). I checked out Wicked, and may attempt Pride and Prejudice and Zombies…that whole emerging genre of hijacking and twisting classics as they enter public domain is fascinating.

I also have Orson Scott Card’s Characters and Viewpoint sitting on my floor, since I liked his other writing book on sci-fi and fantasy so much. However, lately I’ve been reading some blogs online and realizing that a lot of people have a pretty negative opinion of the man and his writing. It puts me in a bit of an odd place, because on one hand, I don’t know anything about Card’s personal beliefs, and I haven’t read many of his books. It’s kind of scary to discover that I’ve been absorbing writing advice from a person who many people believe writes badly. However, How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy is undoubtedly one of the most useful books on writing that I own, despite being about twenty years out of date. I can’t deny that book’s value to me just because other people don’t like the man. Eh, it’s a weird mental situation. I’m willing to extend the benefit of the doubt, at least to his writing books.

In other writing news, I discovered a great, gaping plot hole in my Grimms premise. But that’s a subject for a separate post. Mostly I’ve just been struggling with getting Hands Like Secrets line edited, and ready to submit by January. I think I’ll get there.

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So what does that make us writers?

Anyway, I just finished The Maze Runner by James Dashner. It was good, but not the sort of book I’d write. Although I could take a page or two from him on how to pace a YA story, and how to sustain a mystery throughout a book in a way that’s intriguing, but not irritating. My only complaint was that sometimes the kids’ relationships in that book didn’t quite ring true. Honestly, they weren’t mean enough, petty enough, cruel enough. There wasn’t enough Lord of the Flies for me to quite believe it. But maybe that says more about me than it does about the author.

On the recommendation of several different people, I have started The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. I’m enjoying it so far, but I don’t think it’s going to quite match the sheer scope and power of The Way of Kings. However, one quality that I appreciate is that fact that it’s not as fast-paced as most epic fantasy, and far less fast-paced than the typical YA fare I devour.

It puts me more in mind of Robin Hobb’s Assassins trilogy, in that the main character is telling the story of his life, and is in no particular hurry to get to the “good” parts. The character’s voice is equally if not more intriguing than the events taking place. It’s not that there’s nothing interesting going on, but it’s a book than I can read a few pages and then put down again without…pain? Can’t do that with The Wheel of Time. Can’t do that with The Way of Kings. I don’t think this is a book I could just sit there and read for hours and hours at a time…it doesn’t spur you on and on and on. He eases you into the character at a nice leisurely pace. Yet it’s interesting enough that I want to get back to it.

I think that’s the sort of pace I want my Tindaari epic to have. Because while it’s an epic, it’s a character epic. I’m following five or six people throughout a large chunk of their lives…several decades. Stories like that just can’t run at a breakneck pace. Tindaari is also less about War (like most epic fantasy), and more about the interaction of Religion, Intrigue, and History. Yes, there is war, but the story is much more about all the threads that led up to the war…the war itself is rather short, and right at the end. More like an almost-war. I will reserve final judgment until I actually finish The Name of the Wind, but so far I think it’s one I will definitely try to emulate in pacing.

My chief complaint about the book so far is that even though it takes place on a completely different world, the author keeps using specific fantasy tropes from our own world. (And I’m not talking about demons…that’s become a fairly generic class of creature.) For example: The Fae. I can accept that another world might have fairies, but I would expect those fairies to be somehow; in language, behavior, lore, whatever; connected to that world. Rothfuss is not doing that with the Fae in The Name of the Wind. He’s using OUR fairies, OUR faery lore, OUR conventions to characterize them. (Allergic to iron, sometimes called the folk, same organizations: Twilight Court and such, graceful, ethereal, elusive, mischievous, cloven feet, etc.) And every time he does it, it throws me out of his fantasy world…because I associate those kind of faeries with OUR world. They’re too specific, and thus they don’t mesh with the rest of the world he’s created.

I think maybe he’s trying to follow the rule of not calling a rabbit a shmeerp, just because it exists in an exotic world. He wanted Fae in his story, and so he simply called them Fae (instead of making up some word for essentially the same beings). The problem, however, is that the history and existence of the Fae are all tied up in the history of Britain, Germany, Scandinavia, Russia, and other real countries.

Same thing with using words like Aleph or Ruach. Those are actual Hebrew concepts…with Hebrew connotations, weight, and subtleties that just don’t make sense and would probably never develop in a world where Hebrew culture never existed. It’s like the author has taken these ideas without bothering to really integrate them into the fabric of this other world he’s created. Aleph and Ruach don’t naturally arise from the history, lore, and mood of the his world. He hasn’t provided any reason for Fae, or words like Aleph and Ruach, to exist as they do in THAT world. It begins to feel like a cheap substitute for worldbuilding.

Which is odd, because other elements of that world are completely unique…like the Chandrian…and those play right out of the history and fabric of the world. Those belong, in a way that the Fae do not. It’s not like the author didn’t do his worldbuilding. The history of this world is actually quite interesting, and seems very well-thought out. I think maybe he though he could use the Fae like he used demons…in a generic sense. But to me, the Fae are too specific, and too tied into this world to transfer. It’d be like, instead of angels and demons, using Lucifer and Christian saints in a completely fantasy setting where Christianity never existed. You can’t do that. They don’t belong there.

That turned into a bit of a rant. Let me be clear that otherwise I’m really enjoying this book, and would recommend it.

Also on the reading list:

Finally finished White Cat by Holly Black. Not bad. Will be reading The Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Claire as soon as I get my copy from the library. Also thinking of reading the Coldfire trilogy by C. S. Friedman. I’ve read two other of her books and quite like her writing style. Going to see if I can find the Uplift trilogy by David Brin as well, on the recommendation of the guys on Writing Excuses.

And um, I’m going to be writing in there somewhere, too. I hope. Like I said, good books are dangerous.

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However, Guardians is worth seeing for about the same reason Avatar was worth seeing: it’s really, really pretty. The characters and story were all basic formula, but it actually wasn’t as bad or cheesy as you might expect. I think it worked simply because all the characters were owls, and that alone was novel enough to offset the cliche-ness. Having said that, it was very predictable. There were absolutely no surprises in that movie. All of the characters did exactly what I guessed they’d do, and I basically knew the part they were going to play before they played it. “Ah, there’s the love interest…there’s the traitor…there’s the gruff old mentor…etc.”

On the way home last night I was thinking about this seeming reluctance of movie-makers to allow non-formula stories in their films. Is it because movies are so much more expensive to produce than books, and therefore cannot afford to fail as badly? I mean, there’s a reason certain stories are “formula”…they work! But I’m kind of tired of walking away from every single movie feeling like I’m just seeing the same thing over and over again. Come on. Somebody do something different. Somebody take a risk and try something new!

And then, when they make books into movies, there’s this annoying tendency to make those follow formula too, even if the actual book did not. The Lightning Thief was actually a good book, and the rest of the series is good as well. I think it would have translated well to film as it was. But of course, with a series, they’re never sure if they’re going to be able to keep making more movies, and so they make sure the first movie can stand on its own. With The Lightning Thief, that meant cutting out any references to Kronos and the overarching plot of the series. But in doing that, they had to make Luke into a cookie-cutter villain. Remember my whole “they broke his GMC” post? Yeah, well, it doesn’t break in the book. And what’s worse, if they do make more Percy Jackson movies, they’re going to have to go and dump the Kronos plot back in, and it isn’t going to make as much sense as it would if it’d been set up naturally from the get-go.

Ah, well.

On a slightly depressing note, I have deleted 25 spam accounts from the database in just the last week. That’s probably about average. I wish they’d just make spamming illegal.

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It’s both similar to and very different from The Wheel of Time. For one thing, it’s still not entirely clear (to me, at least) where the overarching story is going. In TWoT, that was set up pretty concretely at the conclusion of Book 1: The Dragon Reborn is going to fight the Dark One in the Last Battle. Rand is the Dragon Reborn (that was pretty obvious at the end of Book 1, even though it wasn’t officially revealed until later). That is the quest; all else leads up to that.

In TWoK, things are not quite so clear. We know the Last Desolation is coming, but we don’t know exactly what that is. We know the Voidbringers are going to return, but we don’t know exactly what those are, either. We don’t know if the Knights Radiant will get rebuilt, because we don’t know why they disbanded in the first place. I’m not even entirely sure which side of things the Heralds are on.

I actually kind of like shrouding the central quest in mystery. Not that TWoT doesn’t have revelations and stuff you don’t know and have to guess, but the central quest itself is clear. I have a suspicion that my Tindaari epic (the one that’s been sitting on my computer for years, and will continue to sit there until I’m ready to write it) will need a mystery-shrouded central quest…which means that, like The Way of Kings, I will need to have some incredibly strong characters from the start.

On a somewhat related note, TWoK concentrates a whole lot more on the main characters’ lives, rather than the main characters on a quest. What they are doing is not unrelated to the central thread, of course, but they are not yet directly moving towards it. It’s a departure from the Tolkienesque plotline that seems to dominate most epic fantasy, and I like that.

Also, I swear I’ve never experienced three separate “holy shit” revelations within the space of fifty pages. The last section of the book was awesome.

If you are at all a fan of The Wheel of Time or epic fantasy in general, and you haven’t read The Way of Kings by Brandan Sanderson, then you need to.

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Right now I’m working on Inkheart, another book that I’ve seen the movie of. Pretty good so far.

I have a ridiculous weakness for M&Ms. In case the blog itself doesn’t give that away.

You might notice that I’ve tweaked the sidebar a little bit. That picture (and yes, that is me) is one the hubby took while we were in North Carolina. It was a nice foggy day, which made for some very neat photo opportunities. I also finally figured out how to eliminate the search thingy at the top. I never liked it there. I’ll probably put it somewhere else in the sidebar, so the blog is still easily searchable.

I’ve been thinking about the logistics of the coup Raphel is planning for the city of Aschera. I’d only given it so much thought the first time around, and I’m realizing that I really need to know how it’s going to work. I need to know how the government functions. I need to know how Cowls occupy the cities they conquer. I need to know what they do with the cowan citizenry of conqured places. I need to decide what they will do with the majahel students at the school who don’t escape. I need to decide how many cabals it would take to occupy a large city like Aschera, and how Raphel is going to contact these cabals. I need to figure out all the complications that will arise when Raphel basically bails on his cabal right after they’ve captured the city.

Aschamon’s professors are also the governing body of Aschera. The High Priestess is the High Priestess of that entire region; her role as headmistress of the school is really more of a side job for her. As commander-in-chief of the forces from the Aschera region, she is occasionally called out into the field, and thus absent from the school for days at a time. Donnevan, the Angelic Studies professor, acts as head of the school in her stead. A group of nine or ten professors make the larger decisions for the city as a whole, and each has a number of guild heads and craftmasters that report to them.

Students pay a tuition to attend Aschamon, but those who can’t afford it are generally taken on scholarship anyway. (This only applies to local students…student from outside cities like Chisge pay tuition, and it tends to be a little higher). The city tithes to the school, and provides for scholarship students and generally what tuition doesn’t cover. Aschamon students are encouraged to work in the city, offering services only majahel can provide. The more a business or trade donates to the school, the cheaper majahel services become for them. In the last couple of decades, Aschamon also began demanding a tax on top of the tithe, to better fund the war. After the capture of Iadnah, the last really big Cowl stronghold, the war turned in the Mantles’ favor. Thus they stepped up their efforts, hoping to finish it in a few short years. However, the tax began to really hurt some Aschera businesses, which led to closures and the price of certain items rising. Fewer families could afford to pay for their young majahel to attend Aschamon, but since the war was “almost over”, Aschamon felt they really couldn’t turn any aspiring student away. Thus, Aschamon began to have a surplus of scholarship students, which then put more pressure on the city to provide for the school’s needs…and thus more business and families began to hurt, financially. It’s a vicious cycle that Aschamon’s professors are aware of, but choose to ignore…because they are still hoping that if the Mantles can just push a little longer, the Cowls will be defeated once and for all.

I need to decide how many people live in Aschera. Luckily I had already sat down at some point and worked out all the logistics of Cowl raider culture. A typical cabal of raiders has anywhere from 15-40 members, average being 20 or so. Raphel’s cabal has 17-18, but these are very, very good, because Raphel has the reputation to be selective in who he allows to join. I’m deciding that Geris’ cabal has closer to 40, but he tends to attract the scum of Cowl society and as such, his crew is more of a rabble or mob than an trim fighting unit.

When Cowl cabals join together to accomplish a bigger mission, the operation is called a raid. Yes, I totally stole that from Warcraft. The term works. The ras from each cabal get together and decide who is going to lead the raid, by duel if necessary. The other ras in the raid function like suras to the ras in charge of the whole operation, but maintain control of their own cabals.

I think there needs to be two, possibly three more cabals involved to effectively occupy Aschera. When both Raphel and Mora disappear through Saeli’s portal, Raphel’s cabal is probably going to be taken over by a fellow named Jaime. (If the ras of a cabal dies/abdicates/is captured/etc., command of the cabal goes to the suras. In the unlikely event that both the ras and suras are killed/abducted/whatever at the same time, command goes to whomever is strong enough to take charge.) The fifteen of them will probably be nominally in charge of the whole occupation effort…until Raphel returns, that is. Thus, Jaime will be ras of the Aschera raid.

We’ll have Geris’ cabal still there, under the command of Egan, their suras. However, Egan is going to be killed by the student resistance, and I think after that the whole cabal is going to fall apart. Some of them might migrate to the other cabals, but on the whole, they’ll probably just take what they can and slink out of the city in the night.

We’ll have Teja’s cabal. I didn’t introduce her until the third book in the first draft, and I may still save her for then. Teja has a relatively large cabal, let’s say 30 or so, and she’s reasonably competent. After Egan is killed and the remnant of Raphel’s cabal abandons Aschera when Raphel returns, Teja will claim leadership of the occupation and become ras of the Aschera raid.

So we need at least one additional cabal, possibly two. Maybe two smaller ones of about 15-20. These are probably going to be Cowls that Raphel or possibly Mora knows, and trusts. I haven’t decided which of them knew Teja.

Now, the occupation itself. As a rule, majahel don’t kill cowans if they don’t have to. It’s kind of like the soldier/civilian dynamic…you don’t kill civilians if you can help it, and you certainly don’t target them. Killing cowans is bad form. Using cowans as cover is cowardly. Etc. Thus, the Aschera raid isn’t going to kill everyone in the city. Also, Prof Micah and Prof Lo do manage to get a sizable chunk of Aschera’s citizenry away from the city before the other cabals get there, so probably large parts of the city are going to be empty.

The students are somewhat of a gray area. On one hand, they are all majahel. On the other hand, a lot of them are not trained enough to really be a threat. The senior red cords and the Anjahel students are obvious threats. Probably any student sixteen or older will be treated as a threat, though the Cowls might decide to imprison them instead of executing them. The younger Mantle students would be treated like cowans. The gray students may be given the opportunity to take the Cowl.

Aschera’s going to get looted and torched pretty bad. Cowls are more accepting of looting than Mantles. (Not that Mantles don’t loot. They do. They just pretend they don’t, or they call it something else.) Aside from Geris’ mob, many of whom are thieves anyway…every Cowl that enters the city is going to take stuff. Plus, taking Aschera is the ultimate payback for Iadnah, and I’m sure the raid is going to destroy everything they don’t need, simply for revenge.

Aschamon is going to become the staging ground for the raid, and as such, the dormitories are probably going to be where they all sleep.

This is what Saeli is going to come back to. Not to mention a very pissed roommate who blames her for it all.

Alas, it is late, so I must give off my brainstorming for the night.

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Which is, by the way, not a bad movie, and I quite enjoyed it. It wasn’t on par with Pirates, and I decided that a lot of that was because it didn’t have a Jack Sparrow to carry it. The actors in Prince of Persia weren’t bad, but they weren’t great either…imagine Pirates without Jack Sparrow or Elizabeth Swan. I honestly don’t know why a lot of the critics were saying that the plot of Prince of Persia didn’t make sense, because I didn’t have any trouble following what was going on. No, it’s not realistic…you’ve got a dagger that can turn back time, for pity’s sake. The whole premise is unbelievable, but at least it’s internally consistent and the story works. I’ll admit that I spent a great deal of the movie admiring Dastan’s arms. And thinking that his particular brand of crazy “I’ll handle the impossible gate” bravado is a lot like Raphel’s.

The movie worked. Most movies do, or at least pieces of them do. Even movies like Avatar, with one dimensional characters and a cliched, recycled plot…they work. I’ve concocted a theory that movies contain certain moments, moments where you forget those are actors and you’re in a movie theater, moments that really get you in the heart…and it’s these payoffs that make the movie worth watching. When you watch the movie again, these are the moments that you find yourself looking forward to.

Several weeks ago, we went to see Clash of the Titans, and I was struck by something. That movie does not have any such payoff moments. I walked out of the theater feeling vaguely unsatisfied. Something was missing from that movie, and I could not put my finger on it. It wasn’t so different from other films of its genre, after all, and it wasn’t bad, so what was wrong? And I realized that there was never a moment in Clash of the Titans where my breath caught, where I was really touched. There wasn’t a single moment I really remembered. I cannot think of a single scene I’d like to see again.

And so I’ve been thinking through all the movies I’ve seen over the years, trying to identify those payoff moments and come up with some principles they have in common.

I also wondered how this theory would apply to novels and the written word. Books have payoff, too, but it’s done very differently than it is onscreen. I would be willing to bet that this is why we get so many book-turned-movies that are so very bad. They try to translate the book’s payoffs directly onto the screen and it doesn’t work.

So far I’ve come up with two components that must be there in a cinematic payoff: character and scale.

Character: This is fundamental. However, I would say it’s not necessarily limited to people. A ship can be a character, or a tree, or a city…depends on the movie. But the payoff moment has to arise from a character acting absolutely in character, and the audience has to care about that character. Alice had her moment while fighting the Jabberwock and reciting her six impossible things, ending with “I can slay the jabberwock”. Lucy had her moment in Prince Caspian when she walked out onto the bridge alone and pulled her dagger. Zuko had his moment when he redirected the lighting his father shot at him. Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy (in the most recent incarnation of the film) had their moment when Mr. Darcy walks out of the fog the morning after Elizabeth defies his aunt.

One way such character moments fall flat is when a character does something simply because it looks cool onscreen, not necessarily because it arises from within the character. Such moments ARE cool, and they serve a purpose, but that aren’t the kind of payoff moments I’m talking about. For example, Legolas’ sequence in Return of the King when he single-handedly slays an oliphant and its drivers is very, very cool. It’s something Legolas would do, but I think he did it because the writers knew it would be an awesome sequence, not because Legolas himself wanted to do it. And thus, yes, it’s memorable, but it’s not payoff.

Gandalf, with his white robes, staff, and horse, leading Eomer and his men down the mountainside during the battle of Helm’s Deep…now that was a moment.

Which leads to the other component: Scale.

A payoff moment has to be big. The bigness can be physical (something large is destroyed) or thematic (good vs. evil). I believe that the destruction of Hometree in Avatar succeeded as a moment by virtue of sheer scale, both in the physical and the thematic. You can’t watch something that big fall down without feeling something. Battles are often payoff moments because they are, by nature, big. When the Narnians swoop down on the White Witch’s forces, that’s payoff. The Lord of the Rings movies are full of battle moments. But big thematic moments can be small and insignificant on a physical scale: like Carl flipping through his wife’s adventure book in Up, or the naming of Kirk in the newest incarnation of Star Trek, where the theme is bigger than the event itself.

I think having several weighty elements of the story come together at once contributes to scale, and to these payoff moments. You can’t have a big payoff moment if it doesn’t mean anything to the story. Mr. Darcy walking out of the fog might not seem big until one considers that the entire story has been leading up to that moment. When Caspian doesn’t kill Miraz, that’s a relatively small thing in the overall series of events, but it’s huge for him personally, and it wraps up the Caspian/Miraz subplot. When Katara and Sokka fly a wounded Aang out of the Earth Kingdom at the end of the second season, Katara’s “The Earth Kingdom has fallen” moment carries the weight of the entire second season.

Music can definitely contribute to scale in cinema, because music is by definition expansive. Can you imagine Death Vader without the Imperial March playing in the background? Gandalf’s death in the Fellowship of the Ring, if I recall, was almost completely silent except for the soundtrack…the music pulls that single moment out of the flight scene that follows and makes it bigger than it might be on its own. Michael Scofield’s bleeding nose at the end of Prison Break is made bigger and more poignant by the soundtrack.

So, character and scale, and those go for both books and movies. I’m sure there are others. What I may do is pick three or four book turned movie examples, analyze their payoff moments, and pull out how it’s done in each medium.

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So a month or two ago, there was this author that had been recommended to me, and I kept telling myself I should check her out. Then, at the Cassandra Claire and Holly Black event in Vero, that same author was recommended yet again, by those two no less. I said to myself, “I really do need to look into that.”

Then, of course, I completely forgot the author’s name. I knew she had two books, and that the second one was called Fire. Let me tell you, there are a whole stinking lot of books on the market with “fire” in the title…which makes searching in the library almost impossible. Especially without an author. So…I gave up, in the hopes of eventually running across the name again and remembering it.

In a completely unrelated series of events, I ended up checking out a book called Graceling from the library. (Are you laughing yet?) It was one of those few books I pick up, not because I know anything about them, but because the back cover sounds interesting. Most of those are disappointments. This one was not.

It was imaginative, and exciting, and unpretentious. I would have built up the world a little more, if I’d been writing it, but the story didn’t suffer for lack of detail. Reading the inside flap, I was surprised to discover that the author lives in Jacksonville, FL. Yay, fellow Floridian! I enjoyed Graceling enough that I went online to see if the author had a blog or something. I started on Amazon, where I was excited to discover that there is apparently another book in the series.

Can you guess what that second book is called? Yep.

Fire.

Proving that yes, apparently I really should have checked Kristin Cashore out when I still remembered her name, because her first book was interesting enough for me to pick up AT RANDOM. Craziness.

In other news, I’m about halfway through the Sookie Stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris. Those are the books that apparently inspired the TrueBlood series on TV, which I know nothing about. But I’ve discovered that if a book spawns a movie or TV series, the book is at least worth checking out. (With the possible exception of Vampire Diaries. I tried to read those and it was like reading Twilight all over again. It was just…meh.) Anyway, I’m quite enjoying the Sookie books. They have a nice balance of mystery, sensuality, solid worldbuilding, and fun, and I really like the protagonist. She’s one of those perky southern women who don’t have a lot of “book larning”, but has a good head on her shoulders nonetheless.

I really need to update my to-read list, as I’ve finished a lot of what’s on it, and have added some stuff. I’ll probably do that in a different post.

The Shades rewrite is going very well. First person works a lot better than third ever did, I’m discovering. Much easier to introspect. But really, I think the best thing I did was starting at the fight scene. It just makes everyone’s motivations and conflicts so much clearer, and make so much more sense. Saeli, instead of starting things off with a dubious and rather stupid plan to meet with a Cowl, is immediately thrown into a conflict with one through no deliberate fault of her own. Yes, she ends up in a mess because of her decisions, but one could argue that there was little else she could do in those circumstances.

No, she didn’t have to sneak into the Temple to get a better look at a Cowl. But her doubts drove her there. No, she didn’t have to jump out to defend the High Priestess against Raphel, but her good heart wouldn’t let her do otherwise. It’s actually the only thing she does all night that a real White Mantle would also do.

She didn’t have to get into a conversation with Raphel, but her own doubts and curiosities, and Raphel’s strange manner, made it inevitable. This is where Saeli’s sense of what’s right departs from White Mantle philosophy. A Mantle would attack, and never give the enemy a chance to speak…no matter the circumstance, no matter how different or fascinating the enemy was. If Raphel had attacked her the second she appeared, that’s probably the course she would have taken, because it’s what she’s been taught. But Raphel tried to talk her away first, and that was enough to shock her out of reacting. Saeli’s own doubts compel her to try and find out why this Cowl is different.

She certainly didn’t have to take Raphel up on his compromise, and let him go when he asked…but it was the only thing she could do to save herself and the High Priestess’ life, given what she knows. (If she had known how much Raphel would risk to keep a gray her age alive, she might have been in a better position to bargain…but as far as she knows, Raphel’s going to kill her unless she does what he asks). She chooses saving lives over the morals she’s been taught, and that is significant. She’s willing to take circumstance into account. She follows her own inner sense of what’s right. This is what makes her so vulnerable to Raphel, but it’s also what will ultimately allow her to break free from him.

Raphel, instead of for-some-mysterious-reason deciding to meet an unknown student just because she asks, is thrown into a conflict with Saeli because of where he was and what he was trying to do. He spares her initially because he’s just killed Denys and is not happy about it, and he really doesn’t want to do it again. And before you start thinking that Raphel isn’t really such a bad guy after all, as Saeli does, know that Raphel objects to killing bystanders not out of the goodness of his heart, but as a matter of pride. He’s an assassin, and normally he’s good enough to get in and out of a place without having killed anyone other than his target. He’s more annoyed with himself at this point, because having to kill a student is embarrassing. Killing two would be unbearable, not to his conscience, but to his pride.

When she follows him up to the tower, he admires her for her tenacity. Mind you, he’s still going to kill her…perhaps even more so at this point, as it’s obvious she’s not going to leave him alone. But he’s curious enough about this Mantle who is acting so un-Mantle-like that he’s willing to hold back for a few minutes and see what she does. It’s when he figures out that she’s gray that the stakes change for him.

He realizes that he has a golden opportunity in Saeli to realize a plan that he’s been concocting for years. But, of course, now he can’t kill her. Hell, he can’t even hurt her in any significant way, as that would destroy any future trust she might have in him. But if he kills the HP, he knows he’ll have to fight Saeli, and thus probably hurt or kill her. However, if he doesn’t kill the HP, he’s going to face hell from his cabal, who are counting on him to take down the Mantle leader. And if he doesn’t choose quickly, he’s liable to get caught anyway. Saeli’s presence in this scene actually puts Raphel in a very difficult position, although of course, Saeli won’t know any of this.

He chooses Saeli, because even a faint hope of taking down the gods is worth the risk for him.

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Both of them read selections from their new books (Cassandra’s isn’t out yet, Black’s is), and then they did a Q&A. Some of the questions were more interesting than others…heh heh. Kind of makes me think about how they must have to answer the same questions over and over again, and that if my books gain enough of a following that I get to do a tour, how I’d have to do the same thing. Although, having people that interested in what I write would be awesome, in the long run.

I took my stele along, of course, being the ridiculous fan girl that I am. While I was there, I decided to give it to Cassandra Claire, since hey, she invented them, right? She said no one had ever given her one before, so that was kind of neat. I gave her a business card, too.

Let’s see, what else. I ran into a gal I had met at the writer’s conference, and we got to catch up. She’s a fellow fan of Susan Hubbard, and we seem to like the same sorts of books and movies. I had a lot of fun with her at the conference, so it was good to see her again.

But I think the crowning moment of the night was the earth-shattering burp that emanated from the balcony about halfway through the Q&A. Seriously, even the two authors paused long enough to acknowledge it.

Yeah, that was Eli.

Now, I don’t know what’s worse: the fact that my four-year-old son managed to belch loud enough for the entire building to hear…or the fact that I recognized his burp. I remember turning to M and saying “That sounded an awful lot like my son…”

Yeah…the hubby confirmed it later.

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