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Accepting the Apocalypse
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May. 15th, 2008 @ 11:00 am
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Appropos of my post immediately below, and the comments thereto -- there is a point at which a recurring character's story is fully told. This will (obviously) vary from author to author and character to character, but once that point is reached, it is important not to resist. That is the time to end it and hopefully end it well.
Now, having a character's story fully told doesn't necessarily mean the character must die, retire, disappear, or do or suffer something similarly final. It just means that the character's story has been explored and some of kind of story closure is appropriate; further exploration is not, as that would be creatively fruitful for neither writer nor reader. |
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Recurring Characters -- Pros and Cons
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May. 14th, 2008 @ 11:13 am
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I take a great deal of pride in having created a character in Erevis Cale whose story arc will ultimately reach across more than ten novels, five short stories, and some hundred and fifty years of "in-setting" time. That's a very cool thing as far as I'm concerned. But writing a recurring character has both pros and cons, some obvious, some (perhaps) not.
Some Pros:
1. Writer and reader get familiar with the characters. I know these characters like they're best friends. Some of you know them like close drinking buddies. That kind of understanding makes writing them easy and enriches the reading experience.
2. I can develop longer, more elaborate story arcs. Some story elements reach beyond the books and trilogies of which they're a part and create a longer, multi-series arc. There's an entire thread regarding Cale's god that readers can trace from Shadow's Witness to Shadowrealm, and perhaps even a bit into the next trilogy. That is rewarding for both writer and readers, I think.
3. New readers figure there's enough material about the character to justify taking a chance on the stories. After all, if he/she likes what she reads, there are many more books and stories to read.
Those are some obvious high points. I'm sure you can think of others.
Some Cons:
1. That selfsame familiarity. It can breed complacency in a writer and boredom in a reader. I've tried very, very hard to avoid this in the Cale stories, keeping constant growth/evolution of the character(s) foremost in my mind.
2. Simple fatigue. Writers and readers just want something new. Doritos are good, but I wants me some Buffalo-Ranch Super Doritos, and I want them now. I don't feel this fatigue about the Cale stories right now, so that's a good thing.
3. The abundance of novels featuring the characters can, contrary to the third pro above, dissuade readers from getting involved out of concern that they must invest too much time and effort to learn what the heck is going on. This is another way of restating an entry-point problem. Where can a new reader start and not feel lost? If it's only at the beginning (think Wheel of Time), some readers may pass. If it's anywhere, because the books are standalone (think Dresden Files), the novels may lose the nuanced connections that make reading a long series rewarding. I've tried to take a middle ground, where I think I've got a few decent entry points to the novels (in the form of either
Shadow's Witness, Twilight Falling, or Shadowbred).
4. The writer gets better (that's bad? :-)) and the early books aren't as strong as the later books. In this case, the writer is more stuck than usual with his/her early work, and if that early work is the only good entry point for readers, the problem is compounded. This is what happened to me with Eye of the World, from The Wheel of Time. I thought that novel was bad for a whole host of reasons and never continued on with the series, though I understand from friends that the subsequent books were much better.
Again, those are some Cons that jump out to me. Thoughts? Additions to the list?
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Sometimes Nothing Can be a Real Cool Hand
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May. 13th, 2008 @ 09:20 am
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Yesterday, my three year old son, Riordan "Cool Hand" Kemp, ate three hardboiled eggs. This, of course, put me in the mind of one of the great movies of all time, Cool Hand Luke.
Luke: I can eat fifty eggs.
Dragline: Nobody can eat fifty eggs.
Society Red: You just said he could eat anything.
Dragline: Did you ever eat fifty eggs?
Luke: Nobody ever eat fifty eggs.
Prisoner: Hey, Babalugats. We got a bet here.
Dragline: My boy says he can eat fifty eggs, he can eat fifty eggs.
Loudmouth Steve: Yeah, but in how long?
Luke: A hour.
Society Red: Well, I believe I'll take part of that wager.
Ah, yes. Great stuff. Folks too young to know otherwise might think of Paul Newman primarily as the voice of Doc Hudson in Cars, or the guy on all the Newman's Own brand foodstuffs. If you're one of them, do yourself a favor and check out Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or The Sting, or Cool Hand Luke. You'll be glad you did.
And here is perhaps the most well known scene from Cool Hand Luke (and you thought it was just something from GnR's Civil War:
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Shadowrealm Snippet
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May. 9th, 2008 @ 09:19 am
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Snippet from Shadowrealm, featuring Cale and Riven, is behind the cut. I hope you enjoy.
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Odd but Cool Short Story Sale
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May. 8th, 2008 @ 03:06 pm
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I've sold a reprint of One Thousand and One Words, my WWII-era Lovecraft pastiche, to small press Danish publisher H. Harksen Productions. You may recall that I originally self-published this story as part of "Four Bit Stories," my experiment in donation-funded online writing (I've since taken the Four Bit Stories page down). The anthology in which One Thousand and One Words will appear should be available, in English and Danish, later this year. I'll post a link once matters solidify.
Neat how this sale came about. The publisher read my short story, The Signal (itself a story with a Lovecraftian vibe, though not explicitly Mythos based), in Horrors Beyond II, and liked it enough to contact me through my Myspace page and ask if I had any Mythos based stories he could consider for his forthcoming anthology. I explained the history of One Thousand and One Words and sent it along. He enjoyed it, wanted to buy it, and here we are.
I wish sure wish all sales worked this way. :-) |
| » Other Writers on Royalties |
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Apropos of my recent post about royalties, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) matociquala, jaylake, and jimhines all talk a little about royalties, here, here, and here. Go forth and be enlightened or bored, as the case may be.
The business side ain't so glamorous, eh? Nailbiting every three months to see if you've grown, tanked, or merely tread (treaded? trod?) water isn't quite the same image as lounging in leisure on the coast of the Atlantic while pondering the WIP. But the writing life does have its upsides.
May. 8th, 2008 @ 10:01 am
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| » Rolling Stone Undercover on a Fundamentalist Retreat |
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Have a read. The reporter, Matt Taibbi, goes "undercover" on a retreat run by John Hagee's church. In my teenage years, I went through a "born again" phase and saw something very similar to what Taibbi describes. This is the money shot:
By the end of the weekend I realized how quaint was the mere suggestion that Christians of this type should learn to "be rational" or "set aside your religion" about such things as the Iraq War or other policy matters. Once you've made a journey like this — once you've gone this far — you are beyond suggestible. It's not merely the informational indoctrination, the constant belittling of homosexuals and atheists and Muslims and pacifists, etc., that's the issue. It's that once you've gotten to this place, you've left behind the mental process that a person would need to form an independent opinion about such things.
In other words, certain brands of fundamentalism demand the suspension of critical thought. I mean, the demon of anal fissures? Really? I'd think it was a Saturday Night Live skit if I hadn't seen such things firsthand and knew them to be just so (speaking in tongues, in particular, was popular at the Pentacostal church I attended).
Fundamentalism makes me angry when I see it infect policy discussions (e.g., the attempt to ban evolution from the curriculum), but in general it just leaves me saddened. What a waste.
May. 5th, 2008 @ 09:31 am
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| » There Can Be Only One |
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Today Roarke asked us when he would die. Striking question coming from a three year old. It seemed premature to tell him that he would never die, being sired, as he was, by me, a man born in 1518 in the village of Glenfinnan on the shores Loch Shiel, and who is immortal.
But that day will come.
May. 4th, 2008 @ 08:34 am
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| » Classy Guy, His Maverickness |
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Much foul language follows behind the cut. You are warned.
May. 2nd, 2008 @ 09:22 am
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| » Royalty Discussion |
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[Changed to public entry, lest I be hoisted on my own petard; fewer secrets indeed :-)]
So, if your royalties are net-30 and on the calendar quarter, you have or soon will receive this quarter's statement. For most of us, this is a time of high emotion that may result in exhiliaration, despondence, or maybe just stunned silence. I've been through all of those. I'm writing this entry because I remember how it felt as a new writer (with only paperbacks in publication) when some of the royalty payments I received seemed utterly trivial. I asked myself often whether or not I should bother continuing. Perhaps you've asked yourself the same question. But then writers need to write, don't they? So I hung in there and here I am (and here you are).
Here are some round numbers from my experience. In my best year as a writer, all in (advances and royalties), I earned about $50,000. In my worst years, I earned maybe $5,500 (these were the early years). That's quite the spread. These days, an average year is in the $22,000-$30,000 range. Not a ton of money as far as I'm concerned (an average year as a writer represents a small fraction of my legal income, where the fraction has a one for a numerator and a double digit denominator), but not trivial either. And for a variety of reasons (none of which I've been able to announce just yet), I expect my earnings as a writer over the next few years to markedly outpace that average.
Generally, my writing income has consistently increased year over year. I don't think that's all that uncommon as long as your books stay in print. So, even if things aren't where you want them today -- perhaps you've got just one or two novels out there and royalties are enough to go out to eat but not much else -- things could be better tomorrow. The longer your backlist, the more likely that is. By way of example, I have nine novels (I'm counting mmpbs, hardcovers, and gift sets separately) and four anthologies in print, all of which have earned out and now earn royalties. You don't need to sell a lot of units of each for the totals to start to add up to something that feels significant. So, if you really have to write, but that first or second book didn't exactly hit the bestseller lists, hang in there.
Now, is there anything you can do to keep your current books in print and get that next book under contract? Well, nothing sells like sales. It's a bit ugly to think in those terms (this is an artistic endeavor, after all) but here's what I do.
First, I write the best book I can. We all do this. I conceptualize it (as I've mentioned before on the blog) as "re-earning the audience." I never, ever take them for granted. They spend their hard earned money on my words. I try to make them the best words I can. In that way, I hope, I keep the readers I have. This is the customer retention component of the sales strategy.
Second, I reach out to prospective readers directly, mostly by maintaining a robust web presence. N.B., I don't do conventions, I don't spend a lot of time networking with other authors, editors, or agents (there are costs to that, though; you don't see me getting a lot of anthology invites, for example; even so, and notwithstanding my lack of effort on that front, I've met some great fellow authors and editors online), I don't worry too much about awards (except inasmuch as they're fan selected awards), and I don't concern myself with reviews in Publisher's Weekly or Kirkus or similar publications (fans don't care about those, though book buyers for major chains might).
Instead, I focus my online marketing/promotion activities on what I consider direct-to-reader outreach. This is another component of the sales strategy: growing the customer base. This blog is one way I do that. Participation on various messageboards is another. Myspace is another. Reader-to-reader online review sites are another (Graemes, Jay Tomio, Fantasybookspot, The Gravel Pit, Grasping for the Wind, Flames Rising, Fantasy Book Critic, Rob at SFFWorld, The Beezer Review, etc.). The point of all of it is to transform prospective readers into actual readers, then re-earn their loyalty with every book. Writing a recurring character helps a great deal, too, but it carries its own pitfalls (the subject for another post). Note, too, that attending cons, networking, et al., obviously does not preclude the direct-to-reader approach, but I don't have time for both approaches, so I focus on the one that I think will be most effective for me.
I consider myself to have had some success with these efforts. All of my books remain in print, all of them sell pretty well (and sales have actually been growing), and there are some truly wonderful things happening just over the horizon. If I had quit early in my career because the remuneration was so small, I wouldn't be looking at the modicum of success I've had. I'd just be a corporate lawyer writing Firefly fanfic under some silly screen name.
Here's the upshot -- if you're not jumping up and down at your royalty statement, fear not. Most authors, even the ones you consider successful, have been there. Few of us have huge breakout sellers. Godspeed to those that do. But even if you're not one of them, it's possible to build a nice writing career over time.
Also, let me add (lest I be misunderstood) that I don't regard my fans or the review sites who've reviewed my novels as unwitting cogs in my sekrit marketing machine. I appreciate (really more than I can say) the enthusiasm of my readers and the willingness of review sites to review my work (they aren't my drinking buddies and rest assured, they'll pan my stuff if they think it deserves panning). In the end, I look at it this way -- I network not so much with other authors and editors but directly with readers (or readers who run review blogs, but are fans of the genre rather than paid critics). That's the way I like it. Me luvs me my fellow folks. It's fortunate for me that it also happens to work pretty well as a business strategy.
Now, I don't know if that was of any use to you at all, but if so, there you go. I've been meaning to do it for a while. Too much secrecy in our business.
May. 1st, 2008 @ 10:27 am
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| » This Month in the Realms |
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This month we have releases set on either side of the Spellplague.
The first, taking place on the near side of the Spellplague, is james_p_davis's The Shield of Weeping Ghosts, part of the Citadels series of standalone novels.
The second, and the first novel set in the post-Spellplague Realms, is Swordmage, by Richard Baker, the first book in Rich's Blades of the Moonsea trilogy.
May. 1st, 2008 @ 09:10 am
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| » What I'm Reading (in the event you care) |
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Clockers, by Richard Price. I never saw the Spike Lee movie based on the novel, so the story is new to me (though the book was first published back in the 90's). I heard Price interviewed on NPR a while back. During the interview, he spoke about Clockers and I was intrigued enough to pick it up.
I'm only a quarter or so of the way through. My impressions so far -- great use of voice, subtle characterization, stark presentation of the subcultures of inner-city drug dealers and the cops who police them, more or less workmanlike prose. Can't say much yet about the plot as it's just getting revved up.
In short, I'm enjoying it.
Apr. 30th, 2008 @ 10:37 am
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| » The Scalzi One Star Challenge |
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Because John Scalzi's blog is consistently entertaining and insightful, I accept the Scalzi One Star Challenge.
As you might expect, the best of my one-star reviews relate to Resurrection. Yeah, I keeled that drow mage you lurved, byatches. I keeled him good. Deal. :-)
Without further ado, here are a few choice one-star reviews:
I hate this book with a passion. I hate it because it destroys everything the previous ones have weaved so carefully with blatant disregard to good storytelling. Why? Instead of clevery creating an unexpexted, yet clever resolution, finally paying off on all the setups, it squanders all its potential on the senseless killing of all but one interesting character while cheating the reader out of any meaningful confrontations. It's like in a videogame. Oh, sorry your party got eaten by a bunch of low-level, but numerous monters. In earnest. Only no pressing continue here. Paul S. Kemp should be put on the writers blacklist for this.
As it happens, I am on a writer's blacklist, but not for this book. Instead, I'm on a list for certain events that occurred in June of 1985, which involved Saran Wrap, a goat, three bottles of olive oil, a box of Kit-Kats, and two lovely Swedish exchange students who knew only three words of English. But I digress....
What a waste of time, money, paper, ink....if it was possible i'd give 0 stars. I thoroughly enjoyed the first 5 books, despite early worries that Salvatore wasn't actually writing them; just editing them. I'm a huge Salvatore fan. I've read all of his works with forgotten realms and I'm just about through the demon war series. I was more than a little bit afraid that the series wasn't going to stand up the standard Salvatore has set for Drow works. I was plesantly surprised with the first 5 novels, and I was definitly looking forward to the last book. I was HUGELY dissapointed. Salvatore needs to scrap this book, rewrite a new final (one that's actually a good read), and give anyone who wasted their money (or gift certificate in my case) a free copy.
Ah, but if you gave it zero stars, mein freund, it wouldn't qualify for the Scalzi One Star Challenge. Count your blessings.
And for the win....
Pretty much every complaint has been covered in the past 60+ reviews, so I'm just going to add input of a personal nature.
I think this book was awful, and it completely ruined the series for me. The rest of the authors in the series (Byers, Baker, etc) show great talent and will develope into fantastic authors. Mr. Kemp, on the other hand, shouldn't quit his day job, which his bio proceeds to inform us is the legal profession.
The story itself is extremely disjointed, Kemp has a very amateurish writing style, and the ending is simply atrocious, with every major character makeing completely incomprehensible choices that simply to do not click with the way the characters have progressed in the rest of the series.
My advice: Read all the way up to book 5 then decide you want the series to end yourself; you'll be much better off than wasting money on this trash.
I'll add a bonus from one of the Cale trilogy novels, Midnight's Mask. This one's a double whammy, in that it still gets a jab in at Resurrection. Good times!
I did not like this book. It was too much like "Resurrection". At the end the bad guy's motive to destroy the world is "just because". The only worse ending to a series was "Resurrection". Yet if you like dark books without any humor, very serious, and a good guy who is bad then this is the book for you.
Unfortunately, one of the best negative reviews I ever received for Resurrection occurred on this blog rather than Amazon. I don't remember all of the particulars but I do recall the reader writing something about how he/she "did not like the huge fly demon with the giant corkscrew schlong."
Beautificus, sez I, and so it goes.
Apr. 29th, 2008 @ 01:03 pm
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| » Fourth Edition Dungeons and Dragons |
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Well, are you switching over as soon as the core books are available in June? All of my gaming buddies are buying the the Core Rules Gift Set through Amazon, which looks to be the way to go from a price perspective (sixty six dollars and free shipping for all three books is hard to beat).
I'll get the 4E books as soon as possible but won't switch our current campaign to 4E. Once the current arc runs its course, we'll start an altogether new 4E campaign in the 4E Forgotten Realms, but I think that's about a year away. The playtest descriptions I've seen of 4E have me excited about game play, though. Some very interesting options for characters right out of the gate.
As for fiction, I don't foresee an underlying change in the rules affecting my fiction at all. I tend to play somewhat fast and loose with the rule set anyway. Of course, the setting changes to the Forgotten Realms for 4E will affect my next trilogy set in the Realms (since many of the changes to the setting are profound in nature) but I'm mostly excited about the opportunities there, too.
So, for you gamers out there, how's it going to be? Cutting over to 4ed in June, delaying the transition for a time, or skipping 4E altogether?
Apr. 24th, 2008 @ 12:16 pm
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| » Epiphanies of Craft |
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As most every author observes, writing is a craft, with all that the use of that term implies. There's no mastering it; there is always more to learn.
But the learnings come in different ways for different writers. For me, there's been regular incremental growth punctuated from time to time by something akin to a writing epiphany, a kind of intuitive leap, which is then followed by growth too significant to be called incremental (or at least the jumps seem to me like epiphanies and sudden surges, but perhaps the process has been more gradual and I'm too close to see it).
In any event, something like that happened with my prose not long ago. For those keeping score, characterization and pacing come pretty easily to me. I continue to refine those things with each book, and I learn from other writers, but I'm pretty confortable with my skill level there. Plotting and prose do not come as easily, and are areas where I think I've grown the most as a writer over the years. Improvement in plotting has been gradual but painless. Plotting is subject to systemization, easy conceptualization (in terms of structure), and, as a result, is amenable to self-evaluation and improvement. Is this too complicated? Not complicated enough? Twist or reversal of fortune here? And so on.
Prose, on the other hand, is messy, pure art, ranging from the spare to the baroque. As such, it's a hard thing to evaluate, much less improve upon. Quality prose is mist, very hard to catch and hold. For much of my writing career, I subscribed to the idea that I wanted my prose to be clean, crisp, evocative in places, but mostly invisible, a medium through which the story was communicated, but nothing much of itself.
Then I immersed myself in Chabon and Delilo for a while. And marvelled. Then I wrote Shadowrealm and found that something had changed. My prose was different, bolder, more daring. But what's odd is that the process was not conscious, at least not at first. I'll give you an example.
Once I would have written this: Thunder rumbled.
Now I write this: Thunder rumbled, lingered overlong, the sky with bloodlung.
I realize this is one sentence, not especially powerful, but I'm not certain I could have written the second sentence two years ago. And when I realized that, I tried to figure out what had happened (it wasn't conscious, you'll remember).
The answer turned out to be simple -- my perspective had changed but had forgotten to tell my conscious brain. Reading Chabon and Delilo with more experience behind me caused me to internalize what they had done. Without realizing it (at least not at first), I moved away from the notion that I should make my prose invisible, to the realization that my prose could be more daring and still not distract from my strengths (storytelling, pacing, characters).
Anyway, I wonder if you'll see a significant difference between the prose in Shadowrealm and that of my other novels. Note that I'm not downplaying my previous novels and work -- I'm quite proud of them actually :-) -- but I think there's a noticable leap in the prose between Shadowstorm and Shadowrealm. So, if you thought the former was good, I think you'll think the latter is better.
What about you? What's the pace of your growth as a writer and how does it happen? Have you experienced a leap in growth? Or has it been (as it is mostly with me) a more incremental process?
Apr. 22nd, 2008 @ 02:30 pm
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| » Time Column |
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Michael Grunwald, from a column in Time:
Obama's memoir dripped with contempt for modern gotcha politics, for a campaign culture obsessed with substantively irrelevant but supposedly symbolic gaffes like John Kerry ordering Swiss cheese or Al Gore sighing or George H.W. Bush checking his watch or Michael Dukakis looking dorky in a tank. "What's troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics—the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial," he wrote.
Last night at the National Constitution Center, at a Democratic debate that was hyped by ABC as a discussion of serious constitutional issues, America got to see exactly what Obama was complaining about. At a time of foreign wars, economic collapse and environmental peril, the cringe-worthy first half of the debate focused on such crucial matters as Senator Obama's comments about rural bitterness, his former pastor, an obscure sixties radical with whom he was allegedly "friendly," and the burning constitutional question of why he doesn't wear an American flag pin on his lapel — with a single detour into Senator Hillary Clinton's yarn about sniper fire in Tuzla. Apparently, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos ran out of time before they could ask Obama why he's such a lousy bowler.
Jerry Springer politics is the state of much of our public discourse. I'm bracing myself for the inevitable storm of nonsense that the Right's noise machine will gin up for the General and that will be duly repeated by the press (I do not think the Right wants a discussion of ideas, particularly not in this election): Obama is a secret Muslim, hates America, is elitist, is married to an America-hater, is a criminal, is a scary black man (not one of "us"), is a socialist/Marxist, an egghead, and on and on. The Right is very effective at this; one need only look at 2004. The notion that John Kerry (a man who shot at and was shot at by his country's enemies) was some effeminate elitist while George Bush (who avoided service, grew up rich, and whose experience with shots involved not weapons but Tequila) was a man's man, should have been laughter-inducing. Yet there it was and is. The Left is either less effective at this or just doesn't engage in it to the same degree. I have never received an email with a personal attack about John McCain (though I'm on various left-leaning mailing lists). But I have received a dozen or so emails attacking Barack HUSSEIN!!! Obama as this or that (and I wasn't even aware I was on a list for those kinds of mails). Hell, the worst personal comments I've heard about McCain from the various left-leaning sites that I read are that he has little head for policy (especially economic policy) and has a terrible temper. The most vicious personal attacks I've seen leveled at McCain came in the 2000 primary and originated with another Republican (our current President, class act that he is).
I hope that this kind of absurd character nonsense plays second to serious policy discussions in the General Election. There are significant questions at stake this cycle, more than usual, given the state of our country.
I hereby choose to be optimistic. I think the electorate has tired of this (even if large, lazy swaths of corporate press haven't).
Apr. 18th, 2008 @ 09:41 am
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| » Access to Post-Secondary Education |
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Taken from Americablog -- interesting chart that sorts students by standardized test scores and family income level then looks at college attendance within two years after high school graduation.
There are a few obvious problems with the data, but it still shows an interesting (and to me, bothersome) trend -- namely, that lower income students are much less likely to attend college than their higher income counterparts within the same standardized test score quartile.
Why is this bothersome? Two reasons. First, I'm a firm believer in the value of a college education as a tool to improve one's life generally (not to mention financially) and to understand what it means to be a citizen. Second, I think college is the best tool we have for cultivating and developing the "talented tenth" of our population. Both of those purposes benefit all of us, and greater access serves both quite well.
I've been pleased to see the steps Harvard and Stanford recently took in that vein (potentially making attendance free for certain students whose families earn below a relatively generous income threshold). I'll be curious to see if other private schools follow suit and the effect it may have on state schools.
Apr. 15th, 2008 @ 12:06 pm
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| » Several Things |
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jamesenge, quoting Joseph McCullough, offers a definition of Sword and Sorcery that captures its pith: "Fantasy with dirt." I like that a lot. It gets at the core of The Cale Trilogy. The Twilight War is also fantasy with dirt, but it tries to sneak up a bit on epic fantasy.
charlesatan provides his thoughts on Shadowstorm. Bleak, eh? Indeed, sez I. :-)
And speaking of Shadowstorm, it has won The Second Annual Fantasybookspot Book Tournament. Thanks to all of you who participated. You all are great. The fun of it is in the battling, of course, so the winning itself is a bit of an anti-climax. Still, I do love the smell of napalm in the morning. Anyway, I hope you saw some other titles in the tourney that intrigued you. Lots of great books there.
I am still working to convince WotC to let me post a free download of Shadowbred in its entirety. I'll keep you posted.
Twilight Falling has gone to a fourth print run.
Hope you had a good weekend.
Apr. 14th, 2008 @ 08:45 am
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| » The Two Gentlemen of Grosse Pointe |
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And I'm not one of them, seeing as how no one would mistake me for a gentleman. :-) Growing up rapidly, no? This is the two of them helping Mom make eggs in the morning.
On another note, the Beezer Review is holding a contest for a giveaway of Obsidian Ridge. Check out the details here.
Apr. 12th, 2008 @ 10:39 am
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| » The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova |
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I've been reading The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. I'm perhaps four fifths of the way through. I'll finish it, but the novel really doesn't do much for me.
The book is an ode to Stoker's Dracula and plays off it a bit (particularly in the choice to use an epistolary approach to much of the novel, but more of that anon). The main plot revolves around a pair of related mysteries. The first is Dracula's true history and ultimate fate. Perhaps he really was a vampire and still lives. The second is the fate of the protagonist's father, an Oxford scholar who disappeared while investigating the disappearance of his own mentor, which mentor himself is caught up in the mystery of Dracula's true fate (much of this turns on the inexplicable appearance of mysterious books featuring heraldy suggestive of Dracula and the Order of the Dragon).
The story is told primarily from the daughter's first person POV, looking back through the lens of time on events, and through the letters of the father (and the father's mentor), written to record his pursuit of his mentor and Dracula. But it's these POV choices that cause the book to fall down. The daughter's POV, because it's a look back, lacks urgency and tension. The father's letters, and the father's mentor's letters, on the other hand, do carry tension and urgency but suffer for the epistolary form. They lack an interesting voice (even a distinctive voice as between the two of them) and suffer monstrously from a boring prose style.
On the whole, the characters in the novel struck me as uninteresting, mostly archetypes without nuance. We have the good natured, loyal English scholar (both the father and his mentor), the plucky scholar's daughter, the hard-nosed Eastern European scholar who also happens to be the spurned daughter of the missing mentor. There are some ancillary characters, too, but all of them follow the same mold -- archetypes lacking nuance and an original take. I can't think of an interesting turn for any of the characters. They exist on page three-hundred much as they did on page one.
The pacing of the novel is slow. That's not all bad for mysteries. After all, the mystery itself keeps you turning pages. And some authors can pull that off (hell, some authors make you enjoy slow pacing), but there have to be other rewards in the meantime (stellar prose, a protagonist you'd enjoy reading about even if he or she were just walking to the newstand, a mindblowing setting that's a joy to watch unfold, etc.). The Historian has none of those, and its pacing just plods. Lots of pages get spent describing events that add little to the tension, add little to the reader's knowledge of what is happening, and add little to the already stiff characterization.
Finally, the prose. As I mentioned above, it's boring and uninteresting. This is a long book and I'm a few hundred pages in, but I have not come across a single passage that I consider to be striking, a turn of phrase, metaphor, or anything else that caused me to put the book down and just appreciate the words. Not once. I can't read a paragraph of Chabon without going through that exercise (true, Chabon is Chabon). It's rare for me to encounter prose that moves me so little.
In sum, I found the novel mostly mediocre, with little to recommend it above the multitude of alternatives available. Maybe the ending will redeem the novel somewhat, but I'm not all that hopeful. As always, YMMV.
Apr. 11th, 2008 @ 09:48 am
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