Category: Books & Writing

The Briar King

Posted on by Nimgimli

The Briar KingI’ve been a lazy SOB. I finished Greg Keyes’ The Briar King quite some time ago but never got around to posting a review of it. Or whatever you call these short verbal spewings about books that I do…

And the damned thing is, The Briar King is the best fantasy book I’ve read in a long time! Keyes has a talent for breathing real life into his characters, making sure that each is an individual. And he has a talent for weaving several plot lines into a coherent whole. Like Mike Stackpole in The Secret Atlas, Keyes rotates through the various plots on a chapter by chapter basis. This does create the same problem that one could run into with Atlas, which is a loss of continuity if you’re reading one chapter every other night or something.

So what is it about? Well, its about the end of the world, apparently. The end of this fantasy world. The titular Briar King is a kind of boogeyman creature: used to scare small children but not considered real. Except, well, he is. And he’s wakened from his long, long sleep. Legend has it that him stirring means the end of the world is near. With him come all kinds of other things that go bump in the night.

We have a broad cast of charactors, from the forester (born as his mother was being hung!) who looks after the king’s forest, to the king himself, and his family. Toss in a very noble and pure of heart knight, a bookish monk, the king’s rather wild daughter, and the forester’s rather young love interest, and stir them up with lots of intrigue, gruesome sacrificial murders, forbidden texts, and spirits of ancestors, and you get an epic fantasy tale that isn’t even close to finished at the end of The Briar King.

Which is why I’m mid-way through the volume two, The Charnel Prince. Volume three is set to hit stores right around now, if it hasn’t already. [Ach! It’s been delayed until July!!! -dc]

In a lot of ways this series reminds me of George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series. I don’t think this is a coincidence. Heck, the series is called “The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone.” If you liked Ice and Fire, you’re going to like Thorn and Bone. A lot.

An enthusiastic two thumbs up. If you love fantasy, you must read this book.

Anda’s Game

Posted on by Nimgimli

I just finished listening to the podcast version of Cory Doctorow’s Anda’s Game (and yes, its a deliberate play on Ender’s Game). You can get it at Doctorow’s site or as part of Voices: New Media Fiction at Podiobooks.com.

I highly recommend the story, and particularly to gamers. Its all about a MMORPG and a young girl’s adventures in it. She’s a good player…good enough that there are people willing to pay her real cash to do in-game missions. The intersection of real-world and in-game economies is a fascinating topic to me, and that’s all I’m going to say about the plot, because I don’t want to spoil anything.

Its read by Alice Taylor who is charmingly real. She stumbles here and there, not enough to be distracting but enough that it feels like honest story-telling.

If audiobooks aren’t your thing, the story is also in text form at Salon.

Cycle of Hatred

Posted on by Nimgimli

Cycle of HatredI’m back to playing World of Warcraft again, and as usual I’m totally caught up in this world that Blizzard has created. They’ve crafted such a rich history, but we only get glimpses of it. I have to cop to buying the paper & pencil RPG sourcebooks just to get more backstory. Yup, I’m a serious geek.

Which brings us to Cycle of Hatred by Keith R.A. DeCandido. Here is a novel set in the Warcraft world, and specifically it takes place between the end of The Frozen Throne (the last Warcraft strategy game) and the start of World of Warcraft (the MMRPG). Somewhere during that time the alliance between humans and orcs broke down, and I hoped from the title that maybe this book would describe what happened.

This isn’t my first Warcraft novel. I’ve read three others, and they varied between pretty good, and pretty bad. So my expectations were pretty low. And still I was disappointed. The book is totally without substance. What scraps of plot it has are routine, the characters are all cardboard cutouts and the only reason the world feels the least bit alive is through the Warcraft tie-in. It does nothing to add to the mythos of the world, or fill in any gaps in the history that Blizzard has crafted. The only thing this book has going for it is mention of places and people that Warcraft players “know” via the games.

Avoid at all costs.

The Secret Atlas

Posted on by Nimgimli

The Secret AtlasI actually finished reading Mike Stackpole’s The Secret Atlas quite a while ago, but I’ve been holding off on writing this review. Why? Because I like Mike Stackpole and I really wanted to like The Secret Atlas and, well, I didn’t.

We have here an interesting world that has been torn asunder by a cataclysm and is slowly rebuilding itself. There are political shenanigans going on as a few Machiavellian princes vie for power. There’s a subtle (at least at first) kind of magic that seems to arise from someone getting really good at something. There’s a whole passel of characters running hither and yon. In short, there’s a lot of good stuff in here.

But sadly, the execution fails. There are too many story threads going on here (four main ones) and the chapters rotate through them. So chapter x is about plotline A chapter x+1 is about plotline B, x+2 is about plotline C, x+3 about D, and then chapter x+4 is about plotline A again. And maybe I’m just getting old and senile, but by the time I come back around I’ve forgotten what’s going on and why I should care.

You see, the plotlines are so cleanly divided that it almost feels like I’m reading 4 books at once, reading a chapter of each before returning to the top of my stack.

Also, this is very much a volume 1. DO NOT read The Secret Atlas until the next volume is on store shelves, because there is very little closure at the end of this book. I think that the series can come together and be really fun, once you have them all in hand (and assuming you read your books in big chunks…these days I’m happy if I can squeeze in a chapter a night, which really made the rotating plotlines a big problem for me). But Atlas starts with a traveller entering a town, and half-way through the book, about 7 or 8 days have passed and we’re still in this town, talking a lot about the Big Adventures to come, but not actually going anywhere. We get a LOT of base material, though..we learn a lot about the world Stackpole has built, and it seems very rich indeed.

So although I didn’t like The Secret Atlas as a stand-alone volume, I still have hopes for the series as a whole, and I will read the next book when it hits store shelves.

Abandon Book!

Posted on by Nimgimli

The careful observer will notice that I deleted Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words by Susan Goldsmith Woolridge, from my “Reading” column over on the left. And yet, no review… what could possibly be happening!!?

I’ll tell you what. The books was so saccharine and fluffy and downright insipid that it actually made me angry to read it! Seriously, this woman lives in some kind of fantasy land, and I simply couldn’t stomach it.

Its full of advice like “Cut words out of magazines and paste them to cardboard. Label things around you! Label your refridgerator “Some pig”! And she goes on to regale us with stories of how much her children loved cutting out words and labeling things around the house. It was like a Captain Kangaroo flashback.

Gaah, that’s just one example and already I feel the need to take a shower. But I can’t judge the book because for some fluffy little bunnies who want to write poems about children playing in the rain and flowers and home baked cookies, its probably a fine book. I just prefer my poetry to have some depth…

1 week ago

Posted on by Nimgimli

So a week ago right about now I finished the first draft of my NaNoWriMo novel. See my fancy badge over there? Yay me!

At the time it all felt rather underwhelming, honestly. Almost anti-climactic.

But since then, and you’ll think this is silly I have no doubt, but since then I’ve felt different. I see things, some of the time, with a different set of eyes. I read something in the paper or overhear people talking and I start imagining the events fit into one of my stories, usually with a twist.

Its cool. I don’t know how to keep this feeling, though, and I fear it’ll slip away. I guess I just have to keep on writing!

Next steps

Posted on by Nimgimli

Well, this isn’t really the next step, its a few steps out, but space is limited, first come, first served, and all that rot.

I just bought a membership to the World Fantasy Convention that is being held next November (yes, a year off) in Austin, TX.

If you’re a fantasy fan, the list of attendees should interest you. Mike Stackpole says that this is the place to go to meet editors and other authors who might help you to get a book published.

And no, I don’t really imagine I’ll have a book in publishable form by then, but I still want to start networking…

No Plot, No Problem

Posted on by Nimgimli

No Plot, No Problem Having finished writing my NaNoWriMo novel, I sat down to read the final chapters of No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty. The book is all about writing a novel in a month, and though it says you can pick any old month, it was clearly designed to promote and/or accompany nanowrimo.org. And I was forbidden to read these last chapters until after I finished!

Baty has a lot of fun with the book and its a nice read even if you’re not intending to do NaNo. He walks you through getting ready to write, coming up with a starting point, and then sends you off. But the back part of the book has a chapter for each week of November, and it was uncanny how accurate they were. When he said I’d be struggling…I was struggling! When he said words would be flying by, they were.

The end of the book talks about next steps. Determining if your NaNovel is worth polishing into a finished novel or not, and if it is, how to go about doing that. (Interestingly, he suggests it’ll take about a year to do re-writes on the book you wrote in a month!)

Throughout this month-long process, No Plot? No Problem! has offered tips as well as inspiration. Doing NaNoWriMo would be really freakin’ hard on your own, I think. I was lucky enough to have friends who supported me in ways beyond imagining. But if you were on a desert island, cut off from humanity, this book could serve as your friend and cheerleader.

Absolutely recommended, but probably not until next fall when you’re gearing up for NaNo. (I’ll be re-reading it then, too.)

The End

Posted on by Nimgimli

And so it comes to an end.

The last 5000 words were almost physically painful. I ran out of story before I ran out of words. In a real world setting, the difference between 48000 words and 50000 probably wouldn’t be that big a deal, but dammit I wanted 50000!

So I went back to the beginning and started editing/adding. But it felt like every time I added something, I cut another bit. Finally at 49,200 words I said ‘screw it’ and went back and gave my main character and his love interest an explicit love scene.

If I were ever to try to make this into a sellable novel I’d clip that bit out since it doesn’t really fit in with the tone of the story, but then I’m sure in the course of editing the whole thing I’d make a lot of additions and changes and who knows where the word count would end up.

But I wanted to hit 50K today. I got out of bed, started writing, and aside from 1 or 2 very brief breaks, I’ve been sitting here every since (its almost 4 now). I just NEEDED to finish!

I wish I hadn’t had to go cheap with the sex scene, though. But oh well. I need to get up and stretch. 🙂