One of the things about Name of the Wind that kept me on the edge of my seat and constantly unsettled (in a good way), is the way he constantly changes the fortunes of his picaresque hero on a dime. One minute Kvothe is doing something so brilliantly, he succeeds at something so skillfully, that I would be shaking my head incredulously if not for being thrilled by the process of success. A success that almost invariable makes me think in some small voice, “Oh, that’s a bit too convenient. He can’t lose, now!” And then, before the thought is fully formed–wham! Kvothe is blindsided by a problem, an issue, a challenge, a loss that is actually worse than the previous success was wonderful, in such a way as to make me gasp and wonder, instead, “Yikes! How the heck is he going to recover from that? That’s really going to cost him.” And then, what follows, is an entirely believable and well-earned overcoming of misfortune.

The one problem I had with Name of the Wind was that the ending felt anti-climactic. But, when you consider, it’s really meant to simply be a first act, it works okay–especially since I was able to carry right on into the next book.

The problem(s) I had with Wise Man’s Fear is that it felt too much like his escapades were unearned, and Marty Stu-ish. Such as the afore-mentioned time in fey with a “lust goddess.”

"When Larry Met Mary"

(Oh, that’s funny. Re-reading that comic’s title, I just realized realized the very connection to the complaint I just made above! Duh! [Larry Stu is another name for Marty Stu, which are both variants of Marry Sue. See trope link.])

And then his excursion into the realm of, yeah, what’s essentially the equivalent of a ninja-factory, and all the fantasy sexinating he does there. (Another tangent: His time there reminded me way too much of the hero Anjin-san’s sexedumacation of the free and lusty way of feudal Japan in James Clavell’s Shogun.) It just didn’t have the same realism of the first book.

But then, what we’re reading in these two books, is the bildungsroman of a man who would become a legend, a subject of fantastic tales. He has to develop as a young man from urchin to world-wise proto-myth. He has to have the adventures and experience to create the mythic figure. And, I said before he doesn’t seem to earn the rather too-good-to-be-true romps, and as I think of it, he does… but doesn’t. *sigh*

Before he enters fey (like, literally stumbles into it from out of nowhere),  he has an experience during a fight that is rather horrific. It’s horrific for him, and it’s wonderfully and properly horrific for the reader. On the surface it’s an event that should be worthy of a positive turn for him. A piece of Kvothe’s “soul,” if not his sanity, should have been harmed in that event. But, then, really, it’s not. Rothfuss creates this event, this scene, that should have been extremely formative to Kvothe’s psyche, but it’s dropped almost as soon as it’s over. He does have a very negative event in fey with an enchanted tree (not as silly as it sounds–it’s described quite wonderfully!) that does in fact harm him and he carries the pain through the rest of the book. But, in my opinion, the tree event is a far lesser terror than what happens in the battle, and the lasting reactions and terribly flipped.

…unless, it’s intentional. Unless the the reason why Kvothe is able to shrug off the one and let the other emotionally haunt him, is very telling of the kind of man he becomes. If so, well, it needs to be more apparent in book three.

And, speaking of the man he becomes, this is the last thing that bothers me: The books are the story of Kvothe’s early life wrapped around a frame narrative of the man that he became telling his story. But the man in the “present” is constantly shifting, as if Rothfuss isn’t very solid on who Kvothe is these years later. One minute he feels like he’s in his 50s and has done and seen many great things before essentially retiring, and the next minute, he’s only a couple years older than the character he’s telling the story of. It’s very shaky.

Okay, the criticism aside, Wise Man’s Fear, not as good as Name of the Wind, is still one of the best fantasy books I’ve read. The emotion feels so authentic, the drama is compelling, the dialog is extremely believable, the writing is endlessly skillful yet completely painless to read. The wait for book three has been two days long for me and is already interminable!

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This is pretty darn cool!

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First, a quick update on my books. I’m still waiting for Singularity Deferred to get accepted into the premium catalog, which will put the book into Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and iTunes. Until then, I’m not really advertising in any significant way its existence on Smashwords and Amazon. Once I can officially say, “Available everywhere ebooks are sold,” I’m spamming the world! (Okay, not really. I kinda like not being hated. But I’ll be letting people know, easy like.)

However, without any advertising at all, it’s selling pretty well already, somehow! Eighteen copies in two weeks. Yeah, that doesn’t sound like much, but when you consider no marketing, and most self-published people on Smashwords sell 0, that’s not bad! My ultimate goal is to be able to sell enough on this book and my short story collection, to be able to make a car payment a month. With the next book, up that to rent each month. I think it’s do-able.

Brust & artists

So, Steven Brust is one of my all-time favorite writers, let alone fantasy writers. I’ll explain in a later post how I first got introduced to his work, the Dragaera series, and how he took the time to reply to an email way back in ’96, and his opening the door for my exploring Marxian criticism. My novel I just spoke of, Singularity Deferred–while I don’t directly imitate his style, the voice of his hero, Vlad Taltos, who is usually the 1st-person narrator of the Dragaera books, it was a very heavy influence.

Anyway, so, he posted on his blog several days ago a recent health scare he suffered. A potentially very serious health scare! After Maurice Sendak’s recent passing, my thoughts have turned to the mortality of the people who inspire you, and I’m both depressed and, ironically, gladdened that they had the chance to affect my life. I do hope Brust continues to have a long and healthy life. …and not just because he must finish his Vlad books! *evil grin* But seriously: his flair, his hat and mustache, his music and Renaissance Fair panache, would be sorely missed — even by those of us who have never met him.

On a related note, this part of his post disturbs me greatly:

I’m told I could use an operation to insert something into my chest that will shock my heart if it goes into, uh, I don’t remember.  Ventrical a-fib, maybe?  But it’s supposed to keep me alive.  I can no more afford the operation than I can pay the hospital bills I just incurred, BUT….

I met with a social worker, who seems confident she can get me heath care–enough to help with those bills[...]

The U.S. is the only modern nation in which people go without lifesaving healthcare because they can’t afford it. Now, I try not to get political on this blog (that’s what Facebook is for), except when critiquing a work, but this very directly affects artists, like us writers. If you live in the U.S., it’s almost impossible to be an artist unless you’re single, young and healthy, and can risk living without health insurance. (Technically, no one can risk being without health insurance, considering everything from a car wreak to cancer can happen to you no matter what your age.)

The only reason I can’t devote myself full-time to my writing, the reason it’s taken me years to write anything significant, and I can’t put more writing out in a timely manner, much less make my publishing imprint viable, is because I’m forced to treat all that as a hobby in my spare time as I have to work full-time for the health insurance to cover my family. Don’t get me wrong, I like my full-time day job OK–it could be worse. But I’m trapped and chained to a job that’s my second choice, unable to do what I love, because of our country’s for-profit insurance-based “healthcare” system.

I’ve seen blog after blog, post after post, article after article, of people in Canada and Europe, who are able to spend those crucial early years honing their craft by throwing themselves completely into it, unafraid of how they’re going to be able to afford a broken leg or a bout of pneumonia, knowing there’s no such thing as going bankrupt for having the audacity to want to be healthy and well.

Okay, again, sorry for the rant; I promise it’s a rare occasion. The subject just really, really bothers me. People whose occupation is to write our culture’s novels, paint our art, compose our music, shouldn’t be forced to choose among not doing those things, becoming financially ruined paying the bills for staying alive despite producing a career full of works, or choosing to not have medically necessary treatments. Nobody should be forced to die because they can’t afford life-saving treatment.

Xeni Jardin of, among other things, BoingBoing.net, has been posting healthcare relevant articles lately as she’s been dealing with her own cancer. One recent article has a collection of stories by people in the U.S. who have had family members who have died from disease because they couldn’t afford the treatments and chose not to tell their family about it until too late, so as to spare them the financial ruin and destitution of medical costs.

And, unlike every other modern nation, we’ve set ours up so that our artists and creators are unfairly more often than not the victims of this for-profit health care insurance system. It’s very depressing.

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• Brust on Capital

Okay, so the Kickstarter project to get the novel Singularity Deferred didn’t go over so well. That’s fine; it was something of a long-shot. So, we move on to Plan B: While I won’t be able to crowdsource the funding from contributors (who would have received the book as well as incentives), I’ll simply put out a first edition e-book to raise the funds. This will allow me to possibly succeed in two ways:

1. If the sales of the e-book go really well, then that’s all I’ll need to rely on and the funds from that will go to the professional graphic design and artwork, layout, marketing materials, and print run. But, if after a while the income isn’t as great as it might be but the feedback is positive, then…

2. I can use that feedback and garnered book reviews posted where it’s purchased (Smashwords, BN.com, and Amazon*) to help give a second Kickstarter attempt more promise. And, whatever funds gained from the e-book sales, would help mitigate what I would need to generate from Kickstarter contributors to complete the print project.

So, if you want an exciting scifi adventure to read, spend a mere fraction of what you would in a Nook or Kindle store e-book and purchase and download Singularity Deferred! Then, when you discover how much you’re enjoying it, go back and post a review, if you would. It’d certainly be appreciated!

And while you’re there, buy an additional copy or two to give as gifts! Everyone wins!

(*At this moment, the review processes to add the novel to BN.com is still going on. But if you have a Nook or even a Kobo or iPhone/iPad, copying the EPUB you buy from Smashwords should be a breeze!)

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• “The Return of the Novella, the Original #Longread”
• Quick Kickstarter update
• The start is being kicked!
• It is finished! …again!
• Farm-grown Spam

The Atlantic has a really interesting article entitled, “The Return of the Novella, the Original #Longread.” The author discusses how the novella, once the literary standard, is now the red-headed stepchild of the publishing industry. I like this section from Stephen King’s discussion on the topic in Different Seasons:

“I couldn’t publish these tales because they were too long to be short and too short to be really long,” he lamented. King illustrates his point with a geographical metaphor: The short story and novel are like two respected nations sharing a vast, ill-defined, and sordid border region. “At some point, the writer wakes up with alarm and realizes that he’s come or is coming to a really terrible place,” King intones, “an anarchy-ridden literary banana republic called the ‘novella.’” It’s a dark place for a writer to be, and most feel they must keep going, or else turn back.

Then, the article begins to discuss the Melville House Publishing project to publish, in physical print form, classic novellas. Cool idea!

But it took a frustratingly long time for the writer to even touch on the subject of e-books and online publishing. Finally, near the end, he deigns to spend a couple of paragraphs on the topic:

And, increasingly, the prohibition against short books seems to make no economic sense. Thanks to e-readers and digital editions, we’re seeing a renaissance in the mid-length non-fiction. The journalistic equivalent of the novella is thriving—whether it’s through Kindle Singles or Byliner one-offs like Jon Krakauer’s blockbuster expose, “Three Cups of Deceit.” These novella-length#longreads have proven to be profitable for authors and publishers as well as pleasurable to readers. Why shouldn’t the increased formal latitude extended to journalists be granted to fiction writers, too?

That’s all he says on the subject. In an article (a good and informative one, don’t get me wrong) that defends the novella and discusses its potential come-back, he only gives a passing mention to the single most important lifeline to the novella: e-publishing. And, especially, the self-published novella. That’s not to say the established and contracted author wouldn’t want to put out their novellas in convenient packages–even this article mentions how contemporary writers would like to have that option. But publishes have priced themselves into trouble with their hyper-inflated e-book prices. When you’re making customers pay $15 for a digital copy of a book, when the dead tree version is only a buck or two more, how can you justify charging less for 2/3 the size work? I mean, $15 for a product with no physical existence, no material cost, virtually no overhead, regardless of if it’s a 100,000 word work, a 40,000 word work, or a bazillion-word work, they’re in a bind justifying charging their likely $12 price for something that the consumer will more readily pause and wonder why they’re paying that much for the equivalent of a 60-page book.

The self-publisher is in a perfect position to take advantage of the big publisher’s foolishness. As many novel writers are charging $3 to $5 for a novel, they can easily charge a very reasonable $1 to $3 for what the article writer defined: “a narrative of middle length with nothing wrong with it, an ideal iteration of its own terms, that can devoured within a single day of reading.”

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• No Kickstarter, but Singularity ebook is a go!

sorry

I’m afraid I’m going to have to renege on that earlier promise to go through a rough draft process using the book First Draft in 30 Days. That is, I’m probably going to continue using the book, but I’m afraid if I try to analyze and review and blog about each step, I’ll be doing more words of that than my actual story! And right now, I can’t afford that. Let me explain:

I was laid off of my day-job last week. Sort of. That is, my job goes away by the end of June, and technically I’m without a main income (and insurance) at that time. But, I can apply at my work for one of the new jobs that are replacing it. I’m hopeful, and I have a good chance–but nothing is certain and I have to just assume that I’m going to be unemployed in 2 months. And even if I’m not, this event is showing me that I have to kick my writing and publishing efforts into full gear if it is to become a viable second income any time in the near future.

What this means is that, while have one collection of short stories out there, and soon an e-book novel (the Kickstarter is apparently not going to meet its goal, which means no print version in the foreseeable future), I need to really start pumping out the books! And then, get the publishing imprint going once I have the product and experience out there to back it up.

So, from here on out, I need to pump out the words hardcore on my next manuscript, and not take the time for long blog posts. Sorry. In any case, I’m still too inexperienced of a writer to be showing off my early research and sketch-notes! Perhaps, once this next novel is completed, I can take the creation materials and do a retrospective on how the book worked. We’ll see.

Anyway, since the topic of work and jobs has been broached, I want to share something I found on BoingBoing this evening: a leaked copy of highly successful video game company’s employee manual. Reading that PDF and seeing how well they’ve incorporated a ROWE/anarcho-collective work environment–makes me very jealous! Although, once I can transfer my writing/publishing into my main job, I’ll have my own results-only work environment, and maybe I’ll make up a similarly creative and rewarding employee manual for myself.

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• Podcast 008: Singularity Deferred, chapter 6
• Quick Kickstarter update
• The start is being kicked!
• Podcast 007: Singularity Deferred, chapter 5
• Podcast 006: Singularity Deferred, chapter 4

At the time of this podcast release, a Kickstarter should be running to help fund the publishing and distribution of the novel. (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1696794878/singularity-deferred-a-novel)

The complete audiobook will be published for free on Podiobooks, probably coinciding with the end of the Kickstarter and the beginning of the hardcopy publishing.

For more information on this novel, now and in the future, including a text/ebook sample, see the page: http://www.tragic-sans.com/singularity

Thanks for checking it out — hope you enjoy!

(Theme music:

“Cybernetic -Feat Zefora” (Stizreth) / CC BY 3.0

Intro music: “Oxygen Garden” by Chris Zabriskie
CC: Share, Non-Commercial, Attribute
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
http://www.archive.org/details/Divider-10058)
Podcast feed: http://www.tragic-sans.com/feed/podcast

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• Podcast 007: Singularity Deferred, chapter 5
• Podcast 006: Singularity Deferred, chapter 4
• Podcast 005: Singularity Deferred, chapter 3
• Podcast 004: Singularity Deferred, chapter 2
• Podcast 003: Singularity Deferred, chapter 1

However, I have one last hope: a favorite author of mine, John Scalzi, is actually allowing people to promote their Kickstarter in a special thread every Wednesday! I’ve set up an alarm to remind myself to post there promptly the next two weeks before the Kickstarter ends.

Some significant changes coming in my day job very shortly. We’ll see how that affects my writin’ n’ publishin’ work shortly.

And finally, in update news, my cold’s just about subdued enough to be a non-issue. I plan on recording chapter 6 tomorrow evening. Then, look for the official beginning of the novel draft exercise I mentioned last week.

Caio!

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• The start is being kicked!
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Thanks for your patience!

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So, I finally finished Patrick Rothfuss‘ The Name of the Wind a couple of nights ago. I started it…early last year, but only got about 20 pages in when I got distracted by something shiny. Then, a few weeks ago, I went on a Hunger Games jag and read that trilogy in about 4 days. As I mentioned in my post, “Hunger Games review and reaction,” that series had affected me so deeply, so fundamentally, that trying to read anything afterward was like tasting ash. I picked up and put down several books I had been in the middle of, and nothing appealed to me. Then I picked The Name of the Wind back up, and bam! I was on another jag, reading that every moment I could. (Thank you Nook and Android Nook app!)

Absolutely brilliant writing! Patrick’s way with words and structure, of painting scenes and clever dialog… captivating! And, it’s (technically) his first novel to boot! (“Technically,” because, as I recall from podcast interviews with him, he’d written and rewritten it enough times to make it, like, his 6th book.) But what really floors me, is, also according to him in interviews, he’d never really learned English grammar. He was always just good at picking up and sussing how words must fit together.

I can understand that! I relate. Despite my reading and writing at a very early age, despite my obsessive love of reading growing up, of my love of writing stories… I sucked in English classes. I graduated high school without any clear learnin’ of a participle from a preposition, a phrase from a clause to a run-on from a comma splice. Nominative and dative? Weren’t those Roman senators or something? It wasn’t until I took German classes in college when I finally had to learn English grammar. How could I get good enough grades in HS English to have been in AP English?! Because, like Patrick, I just groked grammar without knowing the jargon. Although, unlike Patrick, I’ve had to learn it all in order to get an English Master’s with the hope of teaching college English. Ironically, I’m not teaching yet Patrick is! Amusing.

Anyway, I digress. The Name of The Wind was like a dark, adult, punk Harry Potter. Orphaned boy, “wizarding” school, quest to find out and beat what killed his parents who loved him very much… all that. But that’s where the similarity ends. (And while I did say “adult,” it’s not that kind of adult novel. There’s some violence, some anti-social behavior, some implied sexuality–but all pretty tame. It’s simply that, while a young adult can (and should) read this novel, it’s meant for the adult reader.)

I did have a few qualms, though. I noticed a few instances of continuity errors. Sadly, I can’t bring any specific examples to mind, but they were things that made me have to go back and find where X was referred to earlier and confirm that there was a problem in its later reference. Oh well, nothing serious. But ti did make me feel a lot more positive about my own novel.

So, I just started on the sequel, The Wise Man’s Fear. I understand it’s a little more dark. It’s certainly at least as good so far.

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