A long time ago, it was always night. Only Crow, who flew far south and north again, knew of daylight, and he told many stories of the brightness and shadow to the Inuit people. In time, they began to ask for daylight themselves, but No, said Crow, I am too old to drag daylight so far north for your hunters to see by. Please, said the people, and finally Crow agreed to spread his old wings once more and fly beyond the horizon to find daylight for them. He flew…
I just finished reading Carol Berg’s THE DAEMON PRISM (which, like nearly everything Carol writes, is on my list of Favorite Books), and it got me to thinking about what makes epic work and what makes it work on a huge, international bestseller level. Carol’s epic fantasy usually focuses on a handful of people, rather than a cast of thousands, like (for example) GRRM. They’re very different storytelling styles and obviously bring different things to the table, both of which I find appealing in different ways. I wonder if one…
Revisions on SHAMAN RISES are taking a ridiculously long time, because I have to keep looking up details–names, aura colors, locations–in other books. I have only had to resort to Twitter twice, although it might in general be faster to ask Teh Intarwebs instead of searching my own manuscripts. :) I also finished watching the first season Downton Abbey last night. I think…that I will probably not continue on. The final episode left me disgusted with the two older sisters, I loathed the Lady Grantham/O’Brien story, and generally don’t think…
I went through the entire SHAMAN RISES manuscript in one pass today. This may have been a mistake, since it’s nearly impossible to retain any degree of impartiality after about a hundred pages in one day. But I’ve done the first revision pass, and holy crap, that book hits the ground running and doesn’t let up. And either it hangs together a lot better than I thought it would or I’m far too close to it right now to see its glaring errors. After a few detail fixes and a…
Okay, that’s awesome. I just got an email from a friend–the father of the boy that Billy Holliday’s son Robert is named for, in fact–who said he was hanging out with his son’s class on a beach day, and he (the father) was reading the Dresden Files. A girl asked what it was about, and he said “A wizard in Chicago.” “Oh, cool,” she said. “I’m reading something similar, but I can’t remember the writer’s name right now. I’ll get it for you.” “Heh,” my friend said, “I actually know…