Timewaster's Guide Archive

I was actually rather suprised by seeing Blushweaver like that.  She was the victum, right?  So if she was behind the war, why would she be trapped?

Well, either she wasn't behind the war, her allies turned on her, or it's some clever trap to deceive Lightsong...

MattD

I liked the latest chapter, good to see Lightsong-the-detective back in action.  His actions at the end didn't bother me, he thinks of himself as an invulnerable God.  Plus who knows, if he can bleed, maybe he also can get at least a little bit drunk....

And yay, a Denth-Blushweaver connection is made.  It's fun to get these things right every now and then.  If, um, not quite what I had expected. 

Question: does Lightsong have a lot of Breath, or does he just naturally have a lot of BioChroma as a Returned God?  I've always understood the Returned Gods as needing regular infusions of Breath because each Breath they gain runs out over the span of a week or thereabouts.  The idea of Lightsong having a lot of BioChroma, with which to sense life, hasn't been mentioned before I don't think.

MattD

I think the phrase "mind control" was used because of the related discussion in the thread about magic.  I didn't get the impression it went quite that far, but it did (and does) seem odd that this "emotive" facet of Breath hadn't come up in the book before.  As for purity...is Vasher more "pure" then Vivenna?  My thought had been that he was less afraid than she was, which is something children and animals do pick up on, Breath or no Breath.  As I read that previous chapter, it didn't seem like Vasher was packing extra Breath when he calmed the child in the cage, while Vivenna was.  So yes, I think this could use some clarification.

Moving on to this chapter, I really enjoyed the opening dialogue between Lightsong and Blushweaver.  They are an odd mix of ally and adversary, with mutual feelings of affection and respect yet also a wary distrust.  Theirs is probably the most complex and adult relationship in the book, and the way they (Lightsong in particular) express it mainly by talking around it is rather touching, in a sad sort of way.

Although...

"They're lazy," Lightsong said.  "They want others to make the difficult decisions for them."

...this from the God who just a few chapters ago was trying to give his Command Words to Allmother?

Siri's part of the chapter seemed a bit contrived to me...both that she waited this long to talk to Lightsong (see DavidB's post a few pages ago) and that she and Seb were going separately.  And like vadia, I'm confused about what she hoped would happen.

Was "Weatherlove" mentioned before?  It feels distracting to be mentioning new names this late in the book.

MattD

@Tjaeden,

Books like The Lord of the Rings, The Last Unicorn, Watership Down, Gene Wolfe's Peace, Jonathan Carroll's Wooden Sea, K.J. Bishop's The Etched City, any of Kelly Link's stories (I'm looking over at my bookshelf and reading off titles) all violate your suggestion.  I don't think pointing out one or two exceptions to a generalization renders the generalization useless, but I do have a problem with any generalization that excludes so many good books.

I'm with you, though, in enjoying books where magic is more of an art than a science.

@DavidB,

I don't think any of my nomenclature suggestions are great, either.  I'm just tossing ideas out at this point, because I don't know whether we should be emphasizing color, life, sound, essence, soul, etc.

Some of the words you mentioned in your list of Susebron clichés might be interesting to look at here.  Radiance is evocative, and vibrance would be a good word to play off of because it is strongly visual but also (via vibrate) is linked to sound.

Another possibility is that if Iridescence is the word of choice, then adjust the magic to play down the saturation aspect and instead make those people with many Breaths appear more iridescent and/or make them experience the colors of what they see as changing and shimmering rather than static-but-saturated.

MattD

I thought this was a really well-written chapter, especially the constant interplay between descriptions of light and darkness.  With the book so focused on colors and light, I'd love to see more of that in earlier chapters, too.

Night in T’Telir was very different from her homeland.  There, it had been possible to see so many stars overhead that it looked like a bucket of white sand had been sprayed into the air. 

Here, there were street lamps.  Beyond that, there were taverns, restaurants, and other houses of entertainment.  The result was a city full of lights--a little like the stars themselves had come down to inspect grand T’Telir.  At first, Vivenna had been surprised at how few stars she could see in the sky, and had attributed it to the lower altitude.  However, she was beginning to suspect that it was the light.

That's beautifully written in itself, shows an enlarging of Vivenna's inner ability both to appreciate beauty and to deduce, and it's a nice example of a slightly more primitive level of cosmological understanding in action.  (N.B., she's looking up at the street lamps, which to someone not used to them might look like "stars [that] have come down.")

(I do note that she's having these poetic thoughts while being a drab...I still don't know what if anything being a drab does to one's mental state, but I thought I'd point that out.)

Other thoughts/comments:

- The D'Denir statues have been mentioned often enough that it now feels like foreshadowing.

- Can you say anything about your writing process and these 3.0 chapters you've been posting recently?  Oddly they seem to contain far more small errors than the past 1.0 and 2.0 chapters (missing words, "she" instead of "he," that kind of thing).  Or is this just a sign of how busy you are with all the other projects you're working on?  (Congratulations on the Alcatraz news: even if it is very preliminary it's still very cool!)

---

As far as nomenclature, the basic problem I have, as I mentioned above, is that there are too many different, unrelated names for things.  Some terms like "Breath" and "Awakening" seem to relate to life; others like "Iridescent tones" relate to color and sound; "BioChroma" is really the only word that links them; and then there are others like "First Heightening" and "Commands" that don't fit into either.

I don't like "Iridescence" because that word has a specific connotation of shifting colors -- it just doesn't mean what you need it to mean.  Nobody has much "Iridescence."  (It also sounds too related to "Idris.")  Ditto with "Prismatic."

Something like "Chrominance" might work although it is long and like "BioChroma" suffers from sounding very scientific.  You could perhaps shorten it to just "chroma":   "She grimaced, then did as told, sending her chroma into her shirt with a basic, and non-active, Command."

You could also make BioChroma feel simpler and less technical -- and more foreign -- in the same way, by lowercasing it and putting it in italics: "He didn't have much biochroma" or "He gave away his biochroma."

In fact, I don't know if you've already considered this and rejected it, but what about replacing "Breath" with something else?  It seems to be the word that least accurately or poetically conveys what it in fact is and does.  You can give away your Breath and still breathe and live; you can Awaken something with Breath and it does not breathe or live.  The word may cause more conceptual confusion than it is worth.

This is also a perfect place to invent a word, I should add, since the concept isn't something that exists in our language.  Of course, I'm still trying to figure out what exactly it is, so can't be of much help for another 10 chapters...

MattD

I agree about Peprin in Warbreaker, although remember what we've been reading are just early drafts so it's not quite equivalent to the two published books as an example.  Hopefully by the time the book is published Peprin and his relationship to Vivenna, and Vivenna's reaction to his death, will all be fleshed out a little more.  I also would suggest however that his death is not meant to be comparable in emotional impact to a death like Hrathen's (who BTW I respected but never "liked").  I wouldn't be at all surprised if there is death to come in Warbreaker that does better fit your principles.

MattD

As I read it, your main point seems to be that Sanderson's First Law only applies to magic systems. In particular, you're saying that it doesn't apply to Spiderman. You might also be saying that it doesn't apply to the prologue of Warbreaker (but I'm not sure whether that's what you mean).

Essentially I am saying that most books including Brandon's own seem to violate the law and to good effect, and many great books violate it to great effect (Tolkien is just the beginning).  I write "seem" however because I'm not sure I understand his definitions -- "magic" and "magic system" are both used (interchangeably?) and as we've seen, there's even debate about what "conflict" means.  Books where deus ex machina is appropriate for what the author wants to convey, however, violate the law inarguably, it sounds like.  This is why I have been calling it an "idea" and not a "law" -- it is demonstrably not universal, and to call it a law doesn't seem to me very different than the "only the kind of fiction that I write is good" comments of Goodkind.  The best parts of the essay were I think the discussions about how different methodologies could help convey an impression or mood, and it might be better if the "law" similarly focused less on what to do and more on why or in what situations to do it.  Help beginning writers understand, don't just tell them what to do.

I don't think we're going to get any further by arguing about it more. I vote we let Brandon field this one, if he wants to.

That was in fact my hope all along...

MattD

Ookla, I don't think David's example fits any of the three definitions you listed -- are you suggesting otherwise?  (Dueling edits: there is no "jam" that the character is getting out of and the power mentioned would not be inconsistent with what people have been speculating about on the message board for months.)  I think my definition is reasonably consistent with the second you suggested, with echoes of the first because I was keeping in mind the definition ("contrived endings") that Brandon gave in his essay.  I do try to understand and use other people's definitions as much as I can.

My point was that nearly every magic is unexpected before it is used for the first time.  People keep secrets, and surprise is a wonderful dramatic element.  What makes something a deus ex machina is not that it is unexpected, but rather its separateness (the "artificial" feeling) from what in the story has gone before and its centrality in resolving a key conflict.  A story where everything that happened was expected, right up until the end, would be a fairly lame story.

This definition is also hardly the central point mentioned in my previous post.

MattD