Timewaster's Guide Archive

2006 it's in Los Angeles!

...register by September 12, 2004 and it's only $125

*wondering if I can consider making plans like that that far ahead*

In Elantris you give us the flawed and very interesting Hrathen, and he's one of the 3 main characters. Didn't Ben say he was his favorite character? And he's one one who lists that as his favorite book.

I don't know. I sort of see what you're getting at. But many of my favorite books have flawed main characters. For example, those Robin Hobb books. The main character in the Farseer books has lots of issues. And then in the 2nd trilogy there's one particular character who starts out an immature TWERP and really grows and shines by the end of the 3 books, becoming one of my favorite characters much to my surprise.

I still liked Mistborn Mk. 1. But what may be a problem there is that while the main character was a guy we were supposed to hate, there wasn't a foil there for him that we were supposed to like. Not really. There were some other characters in there like the girl, but she wasn't prominent enough for us to be cheering her on.

I don't think every book needs main characters with severe internal problems. But they've all got to have SOME kind of problem, of course. In Elantris we've got one main character with major internal problems and two with external ones. Dragonsteel...I dunno, Jerrick's problem finally turned out to be pretty important. With White Sand, yeah, that was pretty much all external. But the whole honesty thing in Aether I thought was important.

With Way Of Kings...we've got a couple sympathetic characters from the start. The kid and the girl. Whose names have completely slipped my mind. Even though their problems become very important by the end of the book, they're people we can root for early on. For me the problems with the book aren't with the characters but with the pacing toward the middle and with the way the end didn't (for me) pull off the emotional turning points you intended.

I like books that get me emotionally involved. Bujold's Curse of Chalion is one of those. The emotional conflict at the end of the first half of the book is the most intense I can remember reading about, and I've not seen it done better anywhere else. That character...starts out with some problems. He's a burned-out soldier at the beginning. But those aren't really problems that gain sympathy from the reader. The external problems he has to face starting soon after the beginning draw the reader in. And what really does the emotional whammy in the middle are not the internal problems he starts out with at all. Instead it's when he turns his emotions outward, directs them completely and unselfishly on behalf of someone else.

So what am I saying here...if you have someone who's unlikable from the start, you need that person offset by someone who is likable. And if everyone has problems to work through, they shouldn't be so overwhelming at first that there's not enough for you to like. There should be SOMEONE in there from the beginning who you can at least partially relate to OR root for. If not, there's a danger of readers not caring about these strangers' personal problems and giving up before something else in the book (such as the overall world-threatening plot) hooks them.

Yeah. I'm doing copyediting.

Am I the only one? Maybe I'm self-absorbed or something. When I'm at church and talk to someone I don't know, and they say "what do you do" and I say "I copyedit Japanese comic books" and they just give me this blank stare and say they do something like social work and aren't into reading books, I just lose all interest in getting to know them better.

I've known people who are fascinated by other people with very different interests and backgrounds. Me, I don't find myself caring at all. Is that wrong?

Is having a bunch of friends who have no interests in common with you preferred over having no friends?

I got it as soon as I could here. Which, unfortunately, involved getting a DSL modem from one company, which after a week of trying to get it to work told me that the phone company told them I was too far away. And when I asked the phone company myself, they were willing to offer me only 384/128. Come on! I'm only 4.5 km from the CO, the same as I was in Japan, and there I got actual DSL speeds of 800/800.

I eventually got Adelphia Cable even though it had so many bad reviews. And beyond some packet loss problems the first weekend, it's been smooth sailing ever since. And the wireless router I bought in Japan and brought back works just great, better than the linksys or netgear ones I bought in the US previously (both of those disconnected if I tried to send files on irc, and yes, I had all the ports configured correctly).

Adelphia gives me actual speeds of 2400/256. (Man, that 800 upload in Japan was NICE.)

Congrats!

64 pages in a day...is that manuscript pages? That would be 16,000 words. Or Times New Roman pages? 21,200 words. That's pretty impressive.

I liked Mistborn. And Final Empire is the one modern Brandon novel I didn't read all of (never got the second half). It sounds like you're happy with the way this turned out, so that has to be good news.

Humm. I don't think I've ever had a book ruined for me. There are a couple books I read in classes that I didn't like (Wuthering Heights, A Thousand Acres), but I think I wouldn't have liked those anyway. And other books I've read in classes I have enjoyed.

But still I don't like literary criticism. The classes that turned me off on literary criticism failed to turn me off on books.

Aren't you supposed to be finishing up your revisions here pretty soon? this sounds like a major undertaking!

You might print the whole thing out in really really small type (as small as you can get and still see)--but leaving good margin space--and spread them out on a large floor (church gymnasium?) and go through with different colors of markers and mark up the margins where you should change stuff...

meh, I don't really know what I'm talking about. I don't think I've ever actually done anything like that before, but it seems vaguely familiar.

You might try making an index. Isaac Asimov always wrote his own indices (for his nonfiction books)-- he'd go through the manuscript and a bunch of 3x5 cards, laying the cards out on whatever surfaces, and mark down on the cards whenever something in the manuscript came up and what page. You could divide by topics or characters or plot clues or whatnot. Maybe this would help see where you have extra material that you could take out (though I can't imagine...).

When I went through Dragonsteel to try to compress the first 6 chapters to 3 (or whatever it was), I looked for the important things that happened to see if there was a way to get to them earlier. I looked for characters whose roles could be taken by other characters. I looked for scenes that could be combined. I looked for things that wouldn't matter later in the book. And I did this all with a printed copy. Definitely want pen to be able to circle stuff and cross stuff out, and paper to flip through rapidly.

Anyway, hope this helps in any way.