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Messages - dreamking47

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16
Brandon Sanderson / Re: Warbreaker: Free Ebook
« on: April 26, 2007, 02:21:36 PM »
That's a really good point, Qarlin, about Lightsong and Susebron that I hadn't thought of.  If Lightsong's miracle was something like "heal him," then would not just his tongue but also his need for Breath be "healed," and his inability to use just a portion of his Breath be eased?  (If indeed he is a Returned; not being one would also solve the problem.)

I always figured that the one-use-of-Breath thing was a property of being Returned, not a question of limited amount of Breath.  That is, a Returned God could not just go out and purchase an extra 100 Breaths, and then use them to Awaken and Command.  But I have no evidence for this other than the fact that it never happened.

Not sure yet what I think about Lightsong...if he is the main "good" character to die then it might be best if he dies on-stage, since the "bad" Denth did and all the other "good" characters have died off-stage (Peprin) or without any detail (Tridees).  But we need to read the next two chapters to see what happens and how the pacing goes.

firstRainbowRose, we know that the Manywar started after one of the Five Scholars discovered a way to make Lifeless with only a single Breath, thus causing a military power imbalance in favor of Hallendren.  We know from just a few chapters ago that it was Denth's sister who made this discovery (thus she was one of the Five Scholars).  We know Vasher was a compatriot of Denth's sister also engaged in research into Breath (thus likely also one of the Five Scholars), and that he killed her around the time of the Manywar to stop her from arming the Lifeless with other sentient blades like Nightblood.  We know that possessing a large amount of Breath wards off the effects of aging.  So Vasher's age isn't meant to be a surprise at this point, I don't think.

The new bit of information in this chapter was that Vasher "ruled and started wars" -- makes me wonder if he was one of the people we've heard about already in connection with the Manywar...

MattD

17
Brandon Sanderson / Re: PC or Mac?
« on: April 26, 2007, 02:07:41 AM »
Threads like this are why people buy Macs!  ;)

Seriously, beyond the obvious questions -- what kinds of work will you be using it for, how many existing files do you have to worry about converting, what will the people you want to exchange data with be using, and advantages and disadvantages of having both a PC and a Mac in the house -- the main deciding factor between Macs and PCs has always been choice.  Macs present a minimum of choices in an effort to make things simpler and charge a premium price for that simplicity.  PCs give you a much greater range of choices but require you to make those choices.  With a PC laptop you can choose between a keyboard with big keys vs. little keys, mushy keys vs. clicky keys, a mousepad vs. a trackpoint, various levels of size, weight, computing power and battery life, etc.  They thus appeal more to people who can pinpoint what they want and are willing to shop around for the optimal configuration.

MattD

18
Writing Group / Re: Writing Attachment and Seperation
« on: April 26, 2007, 01:52:03 AM »
A few years ago, I spent a glorious three-day weekend at the beginning of summer hiking around in the forest up north.  My last day there, some faint noises and an unexpected flash of color from off the side of the trail led me to a tiny fledgling, newborn and nearly blind.  It had apparently fallen from its nest, and was now dragging an injured wing.

A nature-lover since the school camping trips of my youth, I recognized the bird as a very rare -- indeed, endangered -- species.  I had seen the species in books on occasion, but in person only a few times at a distance.  As a fledgling it was unremarkable, brownish gray feathers with a few streaks of bright color that had attracted my notice.  I knew though what it could grow into, and I was seized then with a desire that it should grow, that this injured fledgling, rare and precious yet alone and forgotten, should have the chance at becoming full-grown.  I gently scooped up the fledgling in a nest of pine needles and returned to my car, holding it close against my chest.

My first step was directory assistance.  Placing a few calls with my mobile phone, however, I learned that none of the nearby animal shelters or hospitals would take this fledgling.  If it were an adult bird, fully-grown, maybe; if it were some other species, more popular, certainly; but an injured fledgling, however rare...I sensed they just didn't want the risk of it dying on their watch.  Well, "if you want something done right..." and all that.  I picked up a cage, some seeds and a water bottle on the way home, and welcomed the bird into my life.

Or at least, I tried to.  It was tough going at first, for both of us.  I did happen to know a specialist who was able to give me advice in stabilizing the injured wing with a gauze wrapping, but I worried constantly for the first week that I was causing the fledgling greater injury.  It proved a worrisomely finicky yet voracious eater, too: it soon had me digging in the dirt of my backyard morning and night for all manner of long worms and odd comma-shaped grubs.  In-between I had a job I loved that kept me busy, but a random word or comment could distract me with thoughts of the bird at any time.  The odd hours I kept during the summer seemed to influence it, as it often remained silent all day only to jerk me upright with its calls for attention just as I was beginning to drift off to sleep late at night.  Some few visitors to my house it welcomed with affection -- the quieter, more considerate sorts -- but most it treated with a cool disdain.  I actually had to remind myself not to treat those friends with any disdain of my own, just because they didn't understand my obsession.

Because oh, as it grew under my care, it became a stunning sight.  No longer a fledgling, it had burned through a progressively larger series of cages over the months as summer turned to fall.  When its new growth of feathers came in, and the browns and grays were replaced by a brilliantly vibrant pattern of red, white, orange and blue, it was like a living flame.  The gauze wrap was long since removed and while it might always favor one wing over the other ever so slightly, it seemed quite capable of flight when I let it out of its cage to exercise (invariably a messy proposition).  It was enormously satisfying to see it grow, but it also became clear (I thought) that it had no further need for me.

It was then that I placed another call, this time to the forest warden.  I explained that I had a bird to release back into the forest, and asked what that entailed.  The warden had a number of suggestions, training to ensure my houseguest was able to survive on its own once in the wild: I realized my self-appointed task was not yet complete.  That bittersweet work took the balance of the winter, knowing that our ways would soon be parting but understanding that I was doing my best to prepare it for the world outside my door.

And so it was that the following spring I returned to the forest.  And so it was that I released the bird that I had spent so much of my time nurturing.  It was my gift back to the forest that had given me such pleasure all my life; my gift back to fellow nature-lovers.  Most people will never see it, many will not recognize it for what it is.  But every now and then, I get a post card, or an e-mail, from someone who saw it during their own journey in the forest: "we recognized it because it favored one wing over the other" they say with a wink; "we saw it foraging for odd comma-shaped grubs"; or "we recognized it because we heard its call just as we were falling asleep in our camping bags."  The best note I ever got, though, was from someone who said they saw it nesting.  I had done my part to ensure that the species, so very rare, had a chance to live on.

MattD

19
Brandon Sanderson / Re: Warbreaker: Free Ebook
« on: April 25, 2007, 10:36:31 PM »
Good stuff -- I like the filling in of Lightsong's origin.

Also I like that you're making us wait to find out what happened to Vivenna; it keeps the tension up even as the conflicts in this chapter get worked out.

Other comments:

- What you bring up in the second paragraph is something that has bugged me -- I mentioned before how Pahn Kahl seemed to be treated in the text as a separate kingdom, rather than a conquered province, and the issue of Bluefingers' role is a more personal instance of that.  The very fact that he was able to secure such an important position in the Court of Gods seems to undermine the idea of Pahn Kahl people being treated as "second class."  That doesn't mean Bluefingers has no motive for his actions, but it seems to me that either 1) the "second class" treatment should be played up a bit more (Vivenna meeting more Pahn Kahl people in the slums; Bluefingers' position being some sort of traditional, compulsary role of servitude; etc.) or 2) the motive should shift to something like revenge for the original encroachment on the Pahn Kahl homelands pure and simple.

- The word "pagan" (p.10) seemed odd to me coming from Bluefingers -- it's a very vague word with many meanings, but to me, it has the etymological connotations of an older religion still practiced among the country folk, but not in the metropolitan centers of religious thought.  When Bluefingers says it, though, I'm not sure what he means: the polytheistic Hallendren religion, or just something generically different and bloody?

- Also on page 10, regarding Siri's comments: do they have stories is this world of princesses being sacrificed on altars?

- Page 12: so a Returned can Awaken and Command things?  Or is this a special property of the God King?  I had thought that a Returned could only use his/her Breath once, and only all at once.

I notice these comments all come from the Siri parts of the chapter so apologies if they are some of the things you're already planning to tweak.

MattD

20
Brandon Sanderson / Re: Warbreaker: Free Ebook
« on: April 19, 2007, 05:06:20 AM »
Clearly Denth wanted Vivenna alive or he would have just killed her initially rather than stabbing her in the shoulder.

Anyway, I liked the chapter, minus a few niggles.  I've enjoyed how you've broken the POV pattern from the earlier chapters and are just going with the flow now, it makes the story feel more immediate and urgent.  Also I like how even with all the action there are still some mysterious bits added.  Vasher's thought about his fight with Denth -- "I just about had him!" -- was interesting, I wonder what trick he intended to play (the same one he used to defeat Arsteel?).  And Denth's comment -- "I've always found it funny that we bleed, just like regular men" -- did he just mean people with lots of Breath who have lived a long time, or something else?

Niggles:

- I still wince whenever Vivenna talks about her week being poor.  Partly because -- admittedly, somewhat illogically -- the idea that Vivenna feels like she could come to understand what it means to be poor and homeless in just a week feels to me like a slap in the face towards those who have been poor and homeless for much longer, or on a recurring basis, who have tried to work their way out and were rejected and forgotten.  It just doesn't feel earned, true (granted it doesn't need to be earned or true for the story to work, but it does undermine Miss "That’s why I’m the princess"'s character).  Also, in this case, partly because I find the moral recap unnecessary: "Yet, her recent past gave her the strength to push down her fear," etc.  I should, and I do, already understand this, without needing to be told it, just from watching her over the past few chapters.

- From page 2:
Quote
Denth reacted immediately, cutting the rope out of the air with his dagger.   The pieces of it twisted and wiggled

That's a sharp knife!

- From page 3:
Quote
"They're going to send Lifeless marching on your homeland," he said.

How does Vasher know this?  Did Denth tell him, just as Bluefingers told Siri?  Didn't these people read Villainy for Dummies?

- I don't know exactly how high up this third story window is, or what the acceleration due to gravity on this world is, but Vasher sure has a lot of time to do stuff while falling.

Random questions of the moment: whatever happened to Jewels and Clod; and given Jewels's impassioned defense of the Hallendren Gods, did she know what the true plan was?

MattD

21
Brandon Sanderson / Re: fiction, philosophy, and rhetoric
« on: April 13, 2007, 08:30:29 PM »
Omelas is an intriguing example to bring up, because it's one of the more complex "message" stories in all of sci-fi, and stubbornly resists any clear conclusion. Is the society good or bad? Were the ones who walked away rebellious or weak?It's open to a lot of different interpretations, instead of simply beating you over the head with an overt moral, which is what makes it so good.

Also, there are not just the explicit moral questions, but there is the issue of psychology which appears in a lot of Le Guin's work: the idea that people, when they reach puberty, agree to lock up their inner child, keep it malnourished in the dark, so that they can be part of what society defines as civilized, adult culture.  And then you look at what that culture is, and wonder about the connection between psychological and moral development.  I agree, it's good stuff!

I would agree that good fiction should present an opposing point of view. However, I've found that most fiction tends to only superficially address opposing viewpoints, which would not be permitted in philosophical inquiry. I really can't think of any works of fiction that really explore multiple view-point all with equal depth.

Most individual works of philosophy are written to make a point, too.  I don't remember Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx et al ever granting equal validity to the viewpoints they opposed.  One of the problems with the original quote is that it pits an individual book against all of "philosophical inquiry."  Philosophical inquiry (as a whole) would be more properly compared to literature (as a whole).

MattD

22
Books / Re: Convention Fiction
« on: April 13, 2007, 04:38:10 PM »
There's a convention in one of the earlier Sandman comics, found in the Doll's House collection.  That same setting is repeated in one of the prose short stories in the Sandman: Book of Dreams anthology.

MattD

23
Brandon Sanderson / Re: Warbreaker: Free Ebook
« on: April 12, 2007, 04:11:33 AM »
Hopefully you'll take this as the compliment that I it mean as, but I've been noticing that the prose in these 3rd drafts is flowing much more smoothly than in some of the earlier chapters/drafts.  It's going to be fun to go back and see how you've revised the earlier chapters, once the whole thing has been posted.

Two notes:

First, a minor nitpick: wasn't Lightsong stabbed in the shoulder not that long ago, causing pain that was "greater than, literally, he’d ever known in his short life?"  That seems to have been forgotten in the past 2-3 chapters.  No mention of shoulder pain, and in this chapter, his robes are "dirtied from crawling through the tunnel, then sitting in his cage" -- but not from bleeding.  Easy enough to fix.

Second,

(Usually it is followed by the "it doesn't matter because there's nothing you can do now that I've captured you, so let me reveal all my plans" device -- hopefully we avoid that here.)

:'(

MattD

24
Brandon Sanderson / Re: fiction, philosophy, and rhetoric
« on: April 12, 2007, 03:49:07 AM »
I'd agree that fiction with an explicit moral is generally worse than fiction that doesn't try.  And yet, some of my favorite pieces are ones that have an obvious rhetorical motive.  Have you ever read "Harrison Bergeron" (sp)?  Or, "The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas?"

In fact yes -- two of my favorite authors (edit: and sadly I just read http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/11/books/11cnd-vonnegut.html).

Le Guin presents the opposing viewpoint in all but the last two paragraphs of "Omelas," and that adequate inclusion of an alternate perspective is really all that I called for.  She does everything she can to present Omelas as a utopia, to the point where we can certainly imagine people choosing to stay.  I didn't say anything about an "explicit moral," although Le Guin never does have her narrator say "and the ones who walked away were good and the ones who stayed were bad," in the way someone like Rand might have.

Vonnegut doesn't explicitly state his moral, either; but you're right, it is an example of story that doesn't give any airtime to an opposing point of view.  I also think you're right in that the expectations are somewhat different in short fiction -- and also in satire.  I did write "generally considered bad fiction," because there are always exceptions.  I confess I was thinking more of novels, spurred on by talk of Rand and Goodkind.  At the same time, I do distinguish between whether or not I like a story of any sort and whether it is "good fiction," in the same manner you've been grappling with in some of your recent blog essays.  In this case, the questions might be  "in a story like this with an obvious rhetorical motive, how well is that motive conveyed and could the story actually convince anyone who wasn't already convinced?"  I think the lack of an opposing point of view does lessen "Harrison Bergeron" in both respects.  It may not be "bad" but neither is it as good as it might have been...good-bad fiction is a continuum, not a duality.

I don't think, by the way, that having an "explicit moral" is the same as having an "obvious rhetorical motive."  I dislike stories with a simple rhetorical motive, but the stories that have left the greatest mark on me are ones where I felt that the author considered their story important, vital.  Left Hand of Darkness is a good example of that.

MattD

25
Brandon Sanderson / Re: fiction, philosophy, and rhetoric
« on: April 12, 2007, 12:14:52 AM »
Fiction that presents only a single viewpoint, or an obviously stacked deck, is generally considered bad fiction; hypothetical (i.e., fictional) situations and dialogues are a cornerstone of philosophical inquiry, dating back to Plato and Socrates. Both fiction and philosophy attempt to reach a shared understanding of truth through language.

The problem is that the critic is generalizing from a single bad example.

MattD

26
Brandon Sanderson / Re: Warbreaker: Free Ebook
« on: April 04, 2007, 11:02:48 PM »
And so some of the questions do get answered. Very cool. Talk about plot twists. That makes both of the Sisters getting betrayed by the One Person they each thought they could trust (Denth and Havarseth)

Yes, and both pull the same trick of stating their method plainly, out in the open where nobody will notice it.  Nice!

The Lightsong-Llarimar relationship was also very cool; I was wondering the same questions as Qarlin after the last chapter, but this pretty much clears them up.

What does bug me somewhat though is that in past chapters, while it was mentioned that Pahn Kahl existed before the Hallandren arrived, it always seemed to be referred to as a separate kingdom somewhere nearby, not as "just another province, part of the kingdom of [its] conquerors."  Granted we've been hearing the history from the victors, but more evidence, however subtle, in previous chapters of their conquered, "second-class" status would make this work better as a twist.

What I'm trying to figure out now is whether what we're seeing now was the plan, or if the plan was to go ahead and start the war while still orchestrating things behind the scenes, and something happened to change it.

MattD

27
Brandon Sanderson / Re: Warbreaker: Free Ebook
« on: April 01, 2007, 06:46:02 PM »
Well, at least a Blushweaver-God King Priesthood-Denth connection. ;)

Oh, pshaw: I never said Blushweaver and Denth were dating, just that I thought they must be part of the same warmongering faction.  And if you look back, I speculated that there would likely be some third group involved as well, because none of those we knew about seemed to have sufficient motivation.  That, BTW, is still true.

MattD

28
Brandon Sanderson / Re: Warbreaker: Free Ebook
« on: March 29, 2007, 05:00:06 PM »
So like I was saying last week, the Blushweaver-Denth connection is made.  :P

MattD

29
Brandon Sanderson / Re: 10 flaws
« on: March 28, 2007, 03:36:03 PM »
To be fair, they gain a bunch of new allies in Rivendell, which I think is central to Vadia's complaint.  But I agree with your general point, there are plenty of places like the house of Tom Bombadil and Lorien where they do stop, take off their boots for a bit, make plans, and then continue on.  And there are plenty of encounters that start out decidedly neutral: the ents; the Riders of Rohan; Denethor; Faramir...

I think good writing is a continual balance of selecting details that both augment the story and make it believable to readers, while not including extraneous details that bog the story down.  Obviously different readers like and look for different levels of detail and different kinds of details, which is part of why different books all have their adherents.

MattD

30
Brandon Sanderson / Re: 10 flaws
« on: March 28, 2007, 02:48:21 PM »
This flaw sounded like a variant on the magic idea to me: make sure your readers understand why a coincidence can happen before it does.

To expand on that, I tend to think that coincidences are useful in setup, but not resolution.  From what I have seen, a lot of readers, perhaps especially fantasy readers, like stories where some coincidence launches an adventure out of an otherwise normal life.  It adds a sense of possibility to our own lives.  But as Brandon wrote, once the adventure begins it's important that the characters begin to use their own abilities to guide the story.  A story that revolves around coincidence invariably ends up feeling like proselytizing either for the empty meaninglessness of the universe (if the coincidence is an unhelpful one) or the active hand of a God or Gods in the world (if the coincidence is a beneficial one).  Either may work in some cases, but rarely in a novel-length story for general readers.

MattD

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