Everett Renshaw

An aspiring author of genre fiction

Hi! Welcome to my thoughts about writing and what I'm working on. Thanks for visiting!



Epic Terminology

I read another chapter of Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings the other day. All right, I get that it’s an epic fantasy with an epic world filled with epic people, lands, animals, and plants. But in the first non-prologue chapter, the reader is slammed with an epic number of unfamiliar phrases and terms. I usually enjoy these kinds of things, but in this case I found myself asking “who or what or where is that?” quite a lot. So much that I started highlighting them:

  • Stormfather
  • shortspears
  • longspears
  • darkeyes
  • lighteyes
  • Shardbearers
  • Brightlord Amaram
  • fearspren
  • slickrock
  • rockbuds
  • highstorm
  • Alethi
  • Gare
  • Veden
  • Stormblessed
  • Shattered Plains
  • Parshendi
  • Highprince Sadeas
  • the murder of King Gavilar
  • skyeels
  • wild axehounds
  • on the ground like cremlings
  • chull rustlers
  • Kusiri, who had run off with the cobbler’s son
  • Hallaw
  • battalionlord
  • the Heralds
  • painspren
  • the Almighty

In my opinion, only a handful of items on that list were explained enough for me to visualize or understand them. All you can do is guess based on the names. Which kind of works for “wild axehounds” but not so much for “chull rustlers.”

I imagine there is a giant glossary in the back of the book, but we Kindle readers are out of luck (because going to the back of the book screws up your reading position). Even if it did work, I don’t really want to have to go to the glossary every three paragraphs.

So, future epic fantasy writers, have pity on your poor readers!

UPDATE: Oh lol, the murder of King Gavilar was in the prologue. There was about a month  between the time I read the prologue and the time I read the first chapter.

Leave a reply

Four Is Enough?

I thought I would next tackle The Fires of Heaven, the fifth book in the Wheel of Time series. But I don’t seem to have the same enthusiasm I did with the first four books. After reading the prologue and one chapter of Fires, I’m getting a bad feeling.

The Prologue was a mind-numbingly gigantic info-dump that went on forever. Chapter One follows Min with Siuan, Leane, and Logain. It wasn’t terrible but Min is the only one I care about in that bunch. Then Chapter Two gets us back to Rand, who, I’m sorry to admit, is one of my least favorite character in the books. (Possibly eclipsed only by Mat.) Reading Rand and Mat chapters always feels like a chore.

Jordan’s prose in Fires seems much more verbose than I remember, too. And it was pretty verbose in the first four. Don’t get me wrong, it’s richly detailed and descriptive, and a worldbuilding tour de force, but it’s considerably more detail than is needed to advance a story. So I’m starting to think to myself, maybe the first four books is enough for me.

Leave a reply

March Writing Update

At the end of this weekend, I should be around 50,000 words into The Sovereign of Tel. I hope to be finished with a decent first draft by the end of April. I am not completely happy with it right now, but I’m soldiering on anyway in the hope that I can patch it up in a rewrite.

My coolest achievement for the month is this nifty spreadsheet to keep track of my word totals. It does nifty gradients and everything. I set a 7,500 word goal for Monday through Friday, and originally I set a 5,000 word goal for the weekend, thinking I would obviously have more time to write. Well, perhaps counter-intuitively, it turns out, after a week of a day job and writing, I don’t seem to have the energy to write a lot on the weekend. So now I’ve shifted it back down to the regular 3,000 words. (I can’t remember where I read it, so I can’t give credit, but somewhere I read that setting a weekly word count goal might work better than a daily word count goal. So far it’s working for me.)

image

I have also planned out my writing schedule for the rest of the year, and hopefully every subsequent year. I will write a novel from January-April, take May off, then write a novel from June through September, then take October off, then do NaNoWriMo in November, and take December off. The idea is to write as many novel drafts as I can.

With this Tel book, I tried to outline everything in the book from beginning to end, so I wouldn’t get to the end and find myself struggling to figure out how to tie everything together like I usually do. Well, it didn’t work. My outline wasn’t detailed enough, and I still don’t know how to tie everything together. So lesson learned: Either a) Spend more time outlining the ending, or b) Just plan on “discovering” the ending no matter what.

I did a more detailed outline because I wanted to find out if I work better as an “outliner” than as a “discovery writer.” Outline writers plan everything out beforehand and work from that. Discovery writers basically make it up as they go, and fix continuity problems in a rewrite. Thus far I’ve been more of a discovery writer, but I wanted to try outlining.

As it turned out, I still deviated from the outline. So I guess even with an outline, I still want to “discover” things. On the other hand, an outline is very useful for giving me at least a framework of what’s going on, and at least a fuzzy idea of where things are going. When you’re staring at a blank page, it’s really helpful to bring up the outline and re-remember what’s supposed to be happening.

So I guess I’m sort of a half-outline, half-discovery writer. It seems like I outline to the point in the story where things need to start getting resolved, and then I start discovering. It’s kind of a frustrating way to work, actually.

Leave a reply

Kindle Edition Editors

Can I have a word with you people who take published books and turn them into Kindle books? Let’s talk about the Kindle version of The Stone of Tears by Terry Goodkind.

Seriously, what kind of crack were you people smoking when you gave this project over to a high school intern? The number of typos is astronomical. The intern apparently speed-typed the text without ever looking back at what he’d typed. Possibly on a smart phone with auto correct enabled. Or, more likely, somebody OCRed it but never bothered to look at the results.

There are no paragraph indents. There’s no table of contents, either. Words are missing from sentences. “Than” is usually seen as “that.” And it’s not just here and there, like in the first book, it’s on every page. It’s really a masterpiece of editing sucktasticness. Self-published books are better edited than this thing was. Oh, and get this: The publisher charged $8.54 for it. In other words, FULL PRICE.

This is a clear case of a publisher giving a big old F U to their e-book customers. And they wonder why people think they’re evil. I should seriously get a refund on this steaming pile of typographical chaos.

P.S. I purchased it on 3/14/2012. The Kindle version was missing from Amazon for a while after that. As of this typing on 3/25, it’s back. I can only hope they at least fixed the paragraph indents. If they did, I hope they’re planning to push me the updated version.

P.P.S. The story was pretty good. :) Which makes it all the more infuriating.

Leave a reply

My Outline Is Letting Me Down

For my current WIP, I spent what I considered to be a fairly lengthy amount of time writing a cohesive outline of the events that would take place in the novel. I actually did it three times because I had to toss out the first two. So imagine my surprise when I reached somewhere around the 2/3rd mark of the story, consulted the outline for what comes next, and realized, "This outline is incomplete, and all wrong."

I’m at the part where I should be moving toward resolving some things, but I seem to have left the resolutions completely off of the outline. It just sort of says, "Then the good guys win." (Not precisely that, but something similarly vague.)

For example, Lady Elenora just had to flee from an attack on the castle by the Andalorans, and now she’s supposed to pick herself back up and go save the day. Nowhere in my outline does it say how she’s supposed to do that. A rather significant omission which I’ll need to fill in by using the tried-and-true “make it up as I go” method of writing.

Leave a reply
Page 1 of 3