Sign up for my newsletter to receive news and updates!

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

I knew him when . . . .

Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in a hearty round of applause for ninja_turbo, who has just sold his first novel(s):

Michael Underwood’s GEEKOMANCY, discovered at the Book Country website and pitched as Buffy The Vampire Slayer meets Clerks, to Adam Wilson at Pocket Star, in a two-book deal, in a nice deal, for publication in 2012, by Sara Megibow of Nelson Literary Agency (World).

He was a member of my crit group way back when he was an undergrad, so pardon me while I have a bit of a “he’s all growed up!” reaction over here. 🙂

(Not too growed up to do a public Kermit flail, though.)

fundraising reminder

In the wake of Rush Limbaugh’s disgusting attacks on Sandra Fluke — and when I’ve been reading articles like this one on funding cuts in the UK for domestic violence shelters — it seems an opportune time to remind everybody about the random little fundraiser I’m doing.

More details at that link, but the short form is that, as a part of my ongoing analysis, if you donate to a women’s charity — you choose which one; it could be a shelter or rape counseling or pro-choice or anti-discrimination or whatever — and send me the info, I will buy used copies of various bits of Wheel of Time merchandise, and blog about them for your entertainment.

Because I’m really tired of feeling like we’re backsliding on women’s rights, like the Overton window has shifted to the point where we’ve got a major presidential candidate speaking out against all forms of birth control, and people cheering him for it. So I hope this encourages some of you to donate to a worthy cause.

Proud to be a Dragon

Warning: the following post will not make the blindest bit of sense unless you’re familiar with Legend of the Five Rings. If you aren’t, please continue on to the next blog post. Thank you for your time.

***

So in our session tonight, one of the PCs — a Shosuro trained in the Bayushi courtier school — goes with our NPC companion to hunt down this Yogo who’s wanted for a crime. In the course of questioning the peasant innkeeper, she realizes he’s lying. And, being a Shosuro, she opts to subtly intimidate him into telling the truth, rather than backhanding him across the face for lying to a samurai.

A Crane in the common room of the inn overhears this. He’s a Doji trained in the Kakita dueling academy, and is trying to make a name for himself as a duelist, so he comes over and starts blustering to the Shosuro about the way she’s treating this innkeeper — basically ginning things up into an offense so that he can challenge her to a duel. She (very rightly) calls him out for eavesdropping on somebody else’s conversation and butting into business that isn’t his, and so thoroughly upsets him that he tries to slap her. Whereupon the NPC companion — a Mirumoto bushi from the Iron Mountain school — steps up and rams the butt of his katana into the Doji’s ribs.

Stuff and things, we run and get a magistrate to okay the duel (to first blood only), the two guys face off. This could go badly, because the Mirumoto is a great skirmisher, but is much less experienced at dueling. The Shosuro, however, has told him that his opponent has the Brash disadvantage, so the PCs and their NPC companion are doing all kinds of little things to needle the Doji and put him off his game. Which we succeed at well enough that a) he basically false-starts, gets bashed in the ribs again, and has to be ordered back into position by the magistrate, and then b) he continues with his strike even though the Mirumoto went first, and the duel is therefore supposed to be over. But he misses — not because he meant to, but because of the damage he took from a certain now-broken rib and the first cut — and so it’s an all-round disgrace for the Doji.

And this is where things start to get fun.

homebrew system for Dragon Age

Tossing this out there for the gaming geeks to play with: I think you could run a Dragon Age tabletop using the Pathfinder system.

(I know there’s a DA-specific system out there. I haven’t heard very good things about it, and particularly object to the way each book only covers five levels, requiring you to buy four books to have a “complete” game. True, Scion did something similar — but they also did a remarkably good job of putting other worthwhile content in all of their books. Very few companies pull that off.)

I figure that, at its core, you make warriors into fighters, rogues into . . . uh, rogues, and mages into sorcerers. A spells-per-day system is rather different from the mana-based system of the video game, but on the other hand, the video game is wall-to-wall combat, which a tabletop game wouldn’t be. (And this opens up the potential for mages to have spells useful for any purpose other than nuking people. Seriously, one of the great flaws in DA worldbuilding is that as near as I can tell, mages are only good at killing and destruction — there’s no peacetime use for their magic, with the lone exception of healing, that would allow them to be anything other than a threat to society. And how often do you see them out in public, healing people?)

The nice thing about Pathfinder is its (relative) adaptability: if somebody wants to play a Dalish hunter, say, they could play a skirmisher — a ranger without the spellcasting abilities. You can customize the differences between a Dalish Keeper and a Circle mage by using the sorcerer mechanics, but letting them pick from different spell lists (like druid and cleric), and also by picking different bloodlines. You can toss in some Traits to vary things a bit more, too. And then specializations you model with prestige classes: borrow the barbarian rage mechanic for berserkers, maybe some paladin mechanics for templars, cook up something for blood mages, and so on.

You’d have to tack on a few additional rules, like something to handle demonic possession or action in the Fade. But I think this would strike a decent balance between accuracy and simplicity: it comes vaguely close to the feel of the actual game (with level-based advancement, feats as talent equivalents, etc), while not requiring vast amounts of untested modding to make work. (I originally thought of modding it a lot further — replace Charisma, Intelligence, and Wisdom with Magic, Cunning, and Willpower; make d20-style mechanics for the talents in the game — but that rapidly became a nightmare of effort.)

I haven’t played Pathfinder very much yet, though, so I don’t know if there are improvements or problems I ought to think about. Any thoughts from the peanut gallery?

The DWJ Project: Unexpected Magic

Last of the collections, both in terms of my (totally random) reading order, and publication date. It’s also the largest, and contains a number of stories not found in the others; on the other hand, it reprints a lot of the weakest stories from Warlock at the Wheel, and I have no idea why.

Things that are new:

“The Girl Jones” — non-fantasy story about a girl who ends up looking after a bunch of younger children, and screws it up in a way that ensures nobody will ask her to do that again. Not much to this one, and I’m really not sure why it was chosen to open the collection.

“The Green Stone” — sort of proto-Derkholm, from the perspective of the “recording cleric” for a Quest that’s about to begin. Unfortunately, because the cleric doesn’t know much about what’s going on, the plot kind of comes out of nowhere, and doesn’t get fleshed out very well.

“The Fat Wizard” — an iteration of the “unpleasant person gets their just desserts” trope. Better-written than most of the iterations in Warlock at the Wheel or Stopping for a Spell, but still not all that great, and (as the title suggests) it’s likely to bother people offended by her treatment of weight issues.

“Little Dot” — this, however, is fabulous. (And I don’t just say that because it involves cats.) I want, as I usually do, more background for the threat, but this story excellently displays one of Jones’ great talents, which is characterization. Henry’s six cats — sorry, let me correct that; the six cats that own Henry — all have highly vivid personalities, from the brave and resourceful Dot to the gorgeous and deeply stupid Madame Dalrymple. Watching them go to town on the woman who invades Henry’s house is a thing of horrifying beauty. 🙂

The main reason to own this book, though, is for Everard’s Ride, which was published by NESFA Press in 1995, but is almost impossible to find for a reasonable price.

The thing that fascinates me about it that to the best of my knowledge, it’s actually the earliest thing of Jones’ that has been published. Changeover came out in 1970, but the publication notes at the end of this collection say that Everard’s Ride was written in 1966. fjm said in the comments on Witch’s Business that her first couple of novels were meddled with by editorial influence, and reading this makes that quite apparent. Granted, I don’t know how much (if at all) Jones revised Everard’s Ride before its publication, but this feels far more like her style than her first couple of published fantasy novels do.

And there’s enough meat to it that I need a spoiler-cut.

(more…)

The DWJ Project: A Tale of Time City

Okay, two things first.

1) Has anybody written the fanfic where the Pevensies get kidnapped away to Time City, and Vivian goes to Narnia? Because really.

2) OMG I WANT A BUTTER-PIE.

Ahem. No, seriously though — maybe lactose-intolerant people and such can read the description of a butter-pie and not want one, but my god they sound good. (The name, not so much. But the description . . . yes please.)

Anyway, as for the book itself:

Time City — built eons from now on a patch of space outside time — was designed especially to oversee history, but now its very foundations are crumbling from age. Two boys are convinced that Time City’s impending doom can be averted by a Twenty Century girl named Vivian Smith. They also know that no one will take the wild schemes of children seriously, so they violate nearly every law in the book by traveling back in time to pluck her from a British railway station at the start of World War II in 1939. By the time the boys learn Vivian’s just an ordinary girl, they realize it’s too late to return her safely — unless, with her help, they can somehow manage to get Time City’s foundations back on the right track. It’s either that or she’ll be stuck in the far-distant future forever!

“Wild schemes” is right: Vivian realizes fairly quickly that Jonathan and Sam, the two boys who more or less kidnap her from the railway station, were — well, they were acting like kids. Kids on an adventure, and they didn’t really stop to think the whole thing through before it blew up in their faces. What’s great about that is, Vivian catches herself acting that way a few times, and catches some (supposed) adults at it, too. I think I love that because, really, let’s face it: a lot of us are readers, and if we suddenly found ourselves caught up in events that seemed more like a story than our daily lives . . . well, depending on the events, we’d either shriek and curl into a little ball — or start thinking of ourselves as if we were the protagonists of a book. So that part rings really true to me.

I also love the cleverness of the entire Time City premise. The history of human beings is shaped like a great horseshoe, stretching from the Stone Age up to the Depopulation of Earth, and Time City — perched not only on its own patch of space, but time (which makes it not so much “the far-distant future” as something else entirely) — travels backward along that span, to keep it separate from history. Then there are the polarities, whose nature has been forgotten to the point of making them near-myth, and the stories of Faber John and the Time Lady, who founded the city, and even the political question of how Time City handles tourists from the Fixed Eras, and tries to keep the Unstable Eras from spinning out of control.

(There’s also one other thing that amuses the hell out of me, from the scenes where Dr. Wilander sets Vivian at translation — but that’s a long enough story, and enough of a digression, that I’ll have to do it in a separate post.)

Spoiler time!

(more…)

The DWJ Project: Power of Three

I’m way behind on posting, so expect a couple more of these soon.

This book, more than any other, illustrates how idiosyncratic my divide is between my first-tier favorites and the second tier. Power of Three is in the latter category, not because of any flaw in the story — it’s excellent, probably one of her best — but simply because it never quite got into my imaginative foundations the way some of her others did. I don’t know what made some books do that, and others not; all I know is that it isn’t a question of quality. This is a wonderful book.

From the back cover copy, because my brain is too lazy to come up with its own plot summary:

Something is horribly wrong on the Moor. Gair and his people are surrounded by enemies — the menacing Giants and the devious, cruel Dorig. For centuries the three races have lived side by side, but now suspicion and hatred have drawn them all into a spiral of destruction.

With the existence of his people threatened, Gair realizes that evil forces are at work. For the Moor is blighted by a curse of ancient and terrifying power . . .

A good summary, except that the final bit is quite wrong. I know it sounds more fantastical to talk about ancient curses, but one of the things I like about this novel is that the curse isn’t ancient. It was placed within living memory — it’s the first thing that occurs in the book — and is the simple, horrifying consequence of somebody being greedy and foolish and violent. And, as in The Magicians of Caprona, it’s at least in part up to the younger generation to undo it. (Not entirely up to them, though. One of the other things I like is the role played by Gest and Adara, and Mr. Masterfield and Mr. Claybury, and at the center of it all, Hathil.)

There are lots of other things to like, too. The little grace notes in the worldbuilding, like the respect Gair’s people pay to bees, and the customs of the Dorig. The perspective on what constitutes magic. The very believable relationships: not only are there lots of great sibling setups throughout this, but once again, as with Caprona, Dark Lord of Derkholm, and a few other books, we get imperfect-but-strong families, instead of abusive parents and neglected children. And the ending is a lovely balance of the mythic and the personal, which is one of the things I have always loved Jones for.

That’s a lot of what I wanted to say, but a few more bits do involve spoilers.

(more…)

quick question

Has anybody tried to send something to my P.O. Box and had it returned?

Two people on the Month of Letters forums have contacted me to say their letters/postcards have bounced as “undeliverable.” I’m not sure why that’s happening (since other stuff has gotten through just fine), but now I’m concerned that other people may have had the same problem.

Angsty Fun Times

alecaustin and I had a long conversation today about how fiction sometimes needs to have depiction of horrible things, and the fine line between “necessary horrible” and “voyeuristic horrible,” and the way that readers have sometimes been conditioned toward voyeurism regarding horrible things (see: the problem of depicting rape), and so on. And he got me wondering what I would consider to be the worst violence I’ve inflicted on a character of mine.

Off the top of my head, I decided it was the stuff that happens to Seniade in drafts of what eventually became Dancing the Warrior. It isn’t actually the most damaging violence — she doesn’t die of it — but it’s horrible because it’s being done to her by a sadist, and she knows it, and she accepts it because she think it’s what she needs to do. Plus I dwell on the details of it, the step-by-step process and the pain that follows, which I don’t generally do otherwise. I called it “borderline torture” in that conversation, and only leave it at “borderline” because Sen could walk away at any time.

For all that, though — as I told alecaustin — it bothers me less than, say, the plague stuff I wrote for In Ashes Lie. Partly because Sen volunteers for it, but partly because most of us are desensitized to violence. And then that made me realize that what I find “worst” about the DtW stuff isn’t the physical suffering after all, but the psychological: what’s going on inside Sen’s head. (Which is why it’s the drafts, not the final version, that are the worst. One of them — not so much a draft as an exercise — is a pure, unadulterated inner monologue.)

And then I started thinking, you know, that might be why I tend to prefer torturing my characters psychologically, rather than physically. Because it bothers me a lot more. <g>

I’ve known for a long time that I’m a sucker for suffering and angst. It only works if you get me to really care about the character first; angst in an unlikeable or boring character will just make me roll my eyes. And it has to be the right kind of suffering; my taste tends toward the operatic end of the spectrum, rather than the grinding, day-to-day banality of things like “how will I find the money for rent this month.” But if you hit the right notes, on a character I’m invested in? I will eat it up with a spoon.

I can’t say it’s fun, exactly. “Magnetic” would be more apt. The next-to-last scene of the film The Wind That Shakes the Barley is excruciating to watch; something truly horrible happens, and there’s no resolution afterward to let me feel it’s All Okay Now. But it’s an amazing scene. (One which I didn’t see until after A Star Shall Fall was over and done with — but if you want to know what psychological note I was aiming for near the end of that book, watch the movie. Or, y’know, watch it just because it’s a bloody brilliant piece of work from Cillian Murphy. It’s streaming on Netflix, and worth it for the ending alone.) I can’t look away from such things, and they stay with me long after they’re over.

Really, it’s cathartic. And yet — why do I enjoy the experience? Why am I so often a sucker for drama over comedy? And what determines what kind of suffering I’ll enjoy, versus what will just depress me? I’m still working on the answers to that. So I’m curious to know how others feel about this kind of thing. Do you like angst, and if so, what kinds, under what circumstances? Which kinds of suffering bother you more, and which are you desensitized to? What can you bear to write, versus read, versus watch?

I’m hoping your answers will help me understand what’s going on in my own head. 🙂

observations from tonight’s round of letter-writing

1) I should have written Irrith’s letter after Delphia’s. She’s a terrible influence on my attempts at nice handwriting. 🙂

2) Re-reading bits of the books to get myself back in the heads of the characters . . . and you know what? I still like them. Quite a lot.

3) Certain songs from the book soundtracks still get me right in the gut. (Particularly “The Monument,” from A Star Shall Fall. But others, too.)

4) I really, really need to write that short story about Edward Thorne. Though I should decide which I want more: for it to be from his point of view, or for it to be the Sir Peregrin and Dame Segraine Buddy-Cop Extravaganza. (The two are, alas, mutually exclusive.)

5) Ditto “This Living Hand,” aka the Story About the Willow Tree What Killed All the Romantic Poets.

6) Although I do love my new series, and my new protagonist . . . I miss the Onyx Court.

con updates

First of all: I regret to say that I will not, after all, be going to ICFA this year. It’s the week before FOGcon, and doing both back-to-back last year was really draining. Add in the fact that I’m already heavily booked for cons and other appearances this year — not to mention that it costs a lot more time and money both to get out to Florida, now that I’m on the West Coast — and I’m just going to have to pass this year.

I’m delighted with my schedule for FOGcon, though. They haven’t posted the panel descriptions yet, so all I have to share with you are titles, times, and panelists, but these look pretty good:

  • Judging a Book by the Girl on Its Cover – Friday, 3:00 p.m. (Jaym Gates, Marie Brennan, Jean Marie Stine, Elsa Hermens)
  • Equal Time for Non-Vampires – Friday, 4:30 p.m. (Mickey Phoenix, Anaea Lay, Marie Brennan, Jaym Gates)
  • Roll 1d6 on the Plot Hooks Table – Saturday, 8:00 p.m. (Marie Brennan, Steven Schwartz, Gary Kloster, Alec Austin, Alyc Helms)
  • Mutations/X-Men – Sunday, 1:00 p.m. (Ian Hagemann, Katie Sparrow, Marie Brennan, Naamen Tilahun)
  • Reading – Sunday, 1:30 p.m. (Marie Brennan, David Levine, Phoebe Wray)

Plus the writers’ workshop, which I’m doing with David Levine and Cassie Alexander.

I’m particularly looking forward to the “Plot Hooks” panel, which is about the relationship between gaming and fiction: Alec and Alyc are both in my writers’ group, Alyc is running a Pathfinder game Alec and I are playing in, and the gaming history between me and Alyc . . . it goes back twelve years, if you count the jerry-built Changeling game she ran during Castell Henllys field school, which led to me playing in the Bloomington Changeling LARP, which led to me running Memento, which led to the Onyx Court series. To name just one example.

Think we’ll find anything to talk about? 🙂

Last call for Onyx Court letters

February is nearly over, and with it, the Month of Letters! You have a few days yet in which to write a letter to the Onyx Court; I promise to answer anything mailed to me before the end of the week (to give a few days’ grace period).

And then we’ll have the fun of seeing how long it takes the inkstains to fade from my fingers. 🙂 (No really, that trope of bookish types in fantasy having stained fingers? It’s totally true. I just wonder if there’s some trick I’m missing for not leaving little inky fingerprints on other parts of the page, because nobody every mentions that bit.)

for those with an interest in LARPs

My friend mikevonkorff has been doing a series of posts about live-action roleplaying games — their design and execution, what players look for in a game and how they pursue it, etc. Chewy stuff, especially since a lot of his commentators are part of a circle that has played a bunch of games together, but I’m coming from a totally different gaming community. Makes for some very enlightening comparisons.

I’m taking a particular interest in this because kniedzw and I are likely to be running a one-shot LARP based on Changeling: The Dreaming in a few months. (If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, will be around Memorial Day weekend, and think you might like to play, drop me a line.) I haven’t done a lot of LARP-running, so it helps to watch other people talk about the stuff you need to consider, and the different ways those topics can be approached. Especially when those people do things very differently than I do.

Anyway, if you have any interest in the topic, check his posts out. And feel free to jump in, even on the older posts; the more perspectives, the merrier.

Things Not to Say

Hey, guys?

If you are upset about something, and you want to yell at somebody about it, it’s worth taking a moment to make sure you’re yelling at the right person.

For example, do not blame the author for Amazon’s decision to ship print copies of a novel two weeks before the sale date, but not to send out the e-books at the same time. Aside from the fact that retailers aren’t supposed to ship anything before the street date, the author has precisely ZERO control over what Amazon chooses to do. (And is probably even more upset than you are, because that potentially screws her over in career-affecting ways.)

And if you are upset about something, take a careful look at how you’re expressing your feelings.

For example, is it productive to call the author “stupid,” “greedy,” “ungrateful,” or “a narcissist”? Probably not.

And it is definitely not productive — nor even okay — to call her a “bitch,” a “whore,” or a “cunt.”

Seriously. The person on the other end of that e-mail you’re about to send? Is a person. One who, in this case, has no actual control over the thing you are upset about; she didn’t cause it, and she can’t fix it, and she’s upset about it, too. But even if those things weren’t true . . . what the hell, people. How fragile is your world if the UTTER APOCALYPTIC DISASTER of NOT BEING ABLE TO GET YOUR E-BOOK NOW NOW NOW justifies heaping misogynistic abuse on the person who produces the thing you love?

Please. Be smart enough to aim your criticism in an appropriate direction, not at a fellow victim. But more than anything . . . act like a human, not a hyena.

The Wheel of Time Plan — including bonus fundraiser!

Okay, so after some reflection, here’s the plan.

I’m going to delay posting about the novels until later this year — probably starting in September, with two posts each for The Gathering Storm and Towers of Midnight. The first post will be pure reader reaction (as pure as I can make it, anyway), and the second will be analysis.

In between now and then, I will post about related WoT things. Which ones? Well, that depends on you.

There is a companion book, a short story (which I think is in the companion book), a role-playing game, a video game, and some comic books. I own the first (and therefore possibly the second), but none of the rest, and unlike the usual novels, I can’t obtain them from libraries. Ergo, investigating these things would require me to shell out money as well as time. But, on the other hand, I don’t actually want to solicit money from you guys for what amounts to a random hobby project.

Stick a pin in that for a second, and follow me down a divergent thread, which is that I am deeply furious with the retrograde stuff going on right now in the United States with regard to gender and reproduction. I won’t get into specifics, because I don’t want to turn this into a political thread — but that collided in my head with some of the complaints I’ve made about gender in this series, and lo, an idea was born.

It goes like this: donate to a charity that supports women and/or their right to control their own bodies, and I will subject myself to assorted bits of Wheel of Time merchandising for your entertainment.

It looks like it’ll cost me about $25 a pop to obtain the RPG book and the video game [edited to add: used copies of both], so let’s set those as our minima: if you guys raise twenty-five dollars, I’ll read and report back on the RPG, and if you raise fifty, I’ll do the same for the video game. Seventy-five gets you a more fully-baked version of my homebrew hack for a Wheel of Time RPG, and a hundred gets you a solemn promise that I’ll play the entire video game, come hell, high water, or my complete suckitude at first-person shooters. And if you raise $150 or more, I’ll even hunt down the comic books — which are a rehash of New Spring and The Eye of the World, rather than new material, which is why I’m putting them last.

Donate to a suitable charity — you pick which one — and e-mail me a copy of the receipt at marie[dot]brennan[at]gmail[dot]com. I’ll keep a running tally. There’s no immediate deadline; this part of the project is intended to occupy me through August, so you can donate at any point before then. But do feel free — nay, encouraged — to signal-boost. At a time like this, when a congressional representative can think it’s even remotely excusable to convene a panel on the topic of birth control and stock it entirely with men, I’d like to see women’s rights get a bit of support.

Anatomy of a Ninteenth-Century Penmanship System

One week (plus a leap day) left to get a letter from the Onyx Court! (I’m slightly behind on answering a few letters I’ve received, but vow not to let “slightly” become “a lot.”)

A while ago I mentioned the Spencerian System of Practical Penmanship, which kniedzw had bought a while ago — a reproduction of an 1864 course in penmanship. I struggled with the conflicting impulses to doooooo iiiiiiiit and to run far, far away, and ended up falling partial victim to the former. Being a grown adult with fine motor control and experience in writing, I decided I didn’t need to fill out every workbook in its entirety . . . but it wouldn’t hurt me to do the first line of each page.

(This was mostly true. Hand cramps were, however, a genuine factor.)

So if you would like to follow me on my odyssey through the nineteenth century — including many illustrative photos — come behind the cut . . . .

In which the system is both too fascist, and not fascist enough.

account hack

One of my gmail accounts got hacked. So, first of all, my apologies to anybody who got hit with spam because of me.

Second — since this is the first time this has happened to me — tips for what I should do? I’ve already changed my password, and as I type this, I have a program scrubbing my computer for malware. I don’t know if there are things I should do beyond that, though.

Other than find the person responsible and stab them in the face.

a saga of ye gods and little stick figures

I know some of you read The Order of the Stick, one of the oldest and best D&D parodies on the web. But whether you do or not, I have to direct you, with suitable awe, at the saga of its Kickstarter project.

Creator Rich Burlew set out to raise $57,750 to get one of the collections, War and XPs, back into print. He blew through that goal in less than twenty-four hours. As I write this post, he has raised $868,072 — and that number will certainly have gone up by the time I hit “post.”

You can follow the tale via the project updates. Scroll down to the bottom to find the first one, and then do the same for the more recent ones. It is, I think, an amazing testament both to what Kickstarter can do, and how to do a Kickstarter project well. Burlew has done an excellent job of adapting to the overwhelming success of his fundraiser; not only did he rapidly set new goals (reprinting other out-of-print books, increasing print runs, covering the increased expenses for all the rewards packages), he found a lot of clever ways to reward people for their support. And throughout, he’s been highly transparent about the entire process, so that nobody is going to walk away thinking he’s put their money to a use they didn’t expect. (If anybody is displeased with what he’s done so far, they’re still free to cancel their support: nothing is final until the fundraiser ends.)

It’s a marvel in a number of respects. And if you have any interest in this kind of crowdsourcing model, his experience is worth studying.

End as you began

Ahahahaha.

When I set out to do my Wheel of Time re-read and analysis, I based my schedule on the projected release date of the final book. But I have enough experience with this series that I knew better than to assume it would come out as planned in November 2011, so I deliberately aimed to overshoot that date.

Well, I didn’t overshoot by enough. As Sanderson says in the above post, the new date for A Memory of Light is January 2013. We were doing so well, right up until the end . . . but of course this series has to end with a massive delay. Because that’s how it goes.

This means I need to think about how I want to handle my posts for The Gathering Storm (which I’ve been meaning to do for, well, months now) and Towers of Midnight. I don’t want to lose every bit of momentum I had with this blog series, but I also don’t want to be left waiting for nine months or more before the final book. (However fitting that might be.) If I’d known there would be this large of a delay, I would have started stretching things out last summer — but too late for that now.

What’s likely is that I will do two posts for TGS, one that’s pure reader-reaction (what I think of various plot developments), and one that’s analysis. Then I’ll do the same for ToM, in the latter half of this year. But I’m open to other suggestions, too: should I post about “The Strike at Shayol Ghul”? Or the companion book? How should I kill time until this thing is finally done?

Three things make something closer to a post

First: it’s the sixteenth, and that means I’m over at SF Novelists again. This time I’m continuing my points from last month, with “Competence is hot, part two.”

Second: the same guy who does the Page 69 thing also had me contribute to My Book, the Movie (reposted over here). Long-time readers of this journal may recall that I’ve been on that blog previously, when I talked about my mental castings for Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie; this time I update it with A Star Shall Fall and With Fate Conspire.

And third: if you’re going to be at FOGcon, then a) so am I and b) I’m also going to be one of the critiquers in the writing workshop, along with David Levine and Cassie Alexander. I don’t know when signup for that closes, but I believe you still have time to join, if that’s your cup of tea.

Since I’m combining things here, I’ll leave comments open — but on the competence thing, please do go leave your thoughts over on the SF Novelists site, rather than here. No login required, but if you’re a first-time commenter please give me a little while to fish it out of the moderation queue.