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Posts Tagged ‘wheel of time’

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?

holy crow

It feels a bit mean to say this, considering. And it’s really unexpected, too, given that I’ve bounced off every other book of his I’ve previously tried to read.

But you know what?

I’m glad Sanderson is writing the end of the Wheel of Time.

As in, glad it’s him and not Jordan.

More later. After I’ve finished the book. Now if you’ll pardon me, I’m dying to see what happens next.

(Re)visiting the Wheel of Time: Knife of Dreams

[This is part of a series analyzing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels. Previous installments can be found under the tag. Comments on old posts are welcome, but please, no spoilers for books after this one.]

After more than eight and a half years of waiting, I finally get to find out What Happens Next.

I read this last month, but it’s taken me a while to sit down and post about it. See, I’m doing two things now: analyzing the structural decisions and their effects (the general purpose of these posts), but also reacting to new developments in the story. I actually considered making two posts, one for each purpose. This is already an epic enough undertaking, though, that I decided to keep it to one, and see if I can’t handle both tasks.

On the reaction side, then: was I satisfied by this book? No — but I don’t think there’s any world in which this book could have satisfied me. I’ve been waiting for the story to move forward since January 2003, y’all. After the disappointment that was Crossroads of Twilight, this book would have had to walk on water and raise the dead for me to be entirely happy with it. Was it an improvement? Hell YES. (But then, there was pretty much nowhere to go but up.)

I’m going to take this in order, I think, so as to balance reaction and analysis. And it’s going to take a while.

(Re)visiting the Wheel of Time: New Spring

[This is part of a series analyzing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels. Previous installments can be found under the tag. Comments on old posts are welcome, but please, no spoilers for books from Knife of Dreams onward.]

It occurs to me that it’s no longer accurate to title these posts “Revisiting the Wheel of Time,” since from here on out I’m not re-reading stuff; I’m reading it for the first time. But calling them “Visiting the Wheel of Time” sounds odd, so we’ll go with the parentheses approach.

The schedule, of course, has been one book every two months — but Crossroads of Twilight being the wasteland that it is, and New Spring being so short (it isn’t really; it’s 122K, which is perfectly respectable, but svelte next to the usual doorstops), I decided to “double up” for this round. It was the right decision; there isn’t really enough here to make me feel it would be worth that kind of pace.

It’s an odd book, really, and occupies an odd position in the series: a prequel written while Jordan was mired in the deepest part of the bog. It started out as a novella, then got expanded to a novel; I know I read the original version, but don’t remember exactly what it consisted of. (Did it start with Lan’s arrival in Canluum? I feel like it might, since that starts with a line about “new spring,” and it’s also where Lan comes back into the story, after being largely absent for the first 200 pages.) Sometimes novellas get expanded by tacking on more material before or after — and I’m pretty sure that’s at least a big part of what happened here — but I don’t know if the novella material also got expanded or altered.

I’m also not sure who the book is intended for. New readers? There’s so much in here that doesn’t get explained in the least, like who the Aiel are and why the rest of the continent is at war with them; I don’t even think the story gets around to explaining what exactly happened to Malkier until near the end of the book. Current readers? There’s too much explanation of things that were made abundantly clear long ago, and on the flip side, there just isn’t enough in here that’s new — that isn’t expansion of things we’d already been told about in the main books.

Is it possible for an author to fanfic his own work?

Revisiting the Wheel of Time: Crossroads of Twilight

[This is part of a series analyzing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels. Previous installments can be found under the tag. Comments on old posts are welcome, but please, no spoilers for books after this one.]

This is the book that killed me.

Prior to the publication of Crossroads of Twilight, I was willing (if not happy) to wait two or three years for each Wheel of Time book, slowly plodding my way toward the conclusion. After this one, I was done. I would not pick the series up again until the end was in sight — as indeed has been the case. All the way through this re-read, I’ve been bagging on CoT, dreading its arrival . . . but wondering, subconsciously, if maybe I had mis-remembered; maybe it was just the disappointment of having waited more than two years, or the disconnect caused by not re-reading previous books, and it wasn’t really as bad as I thought.

Reader, I did not mis-remember.

This book is, from beginning to end, the Catastrophic Failure Mode of Epic Fantasy Pacing. It is everything I’ve been critiquing since The Fires of Heaven, writ extra large, with underlining. Hell — to the best of my knowledge, it is the one book about which Jordan ever publicly admitted, “you know, maybe that wasn’t a good idea.” Given the flaws I’ve been pointing out along the way, that admission should tell you something.

Going into it, I wondered how I should approach analyzing this book. What could I say that I hadn’t already said before? I suppose this post could consist of me tearing out my hair and going “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH,” but that’s not too helpful. Instead I decided to approach this systematically: reading the book, I noted down the number of pages in each chapter, the point of view character(s), and, in no more than one sentence, what important events take place. What changes in the chapter? What new thing do the characters (or the readers) learn? What fresh problem starts, or old problem concludes? Having done that, I now have a wealth of evidence to back me up when I tell you:

NOTHING BLOODY HAPPENS IN THIS BOOK.

And I don't just mean in the hyperbolic way people usually accuse this series of.

Revisiting the Wheel of Time: Winter’s Heart

[This is part of a series analyzing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels. Previous installments can be found under the tag. Comments on old posts are welcome, but please, no spoilers for books after Crossroads of Twilight, as that’s the last book I read before starting this project.]

Took me a while to get around to posting this one. I actually read the book last month, but my notes have been sitting around for a few weeks now — possibly a sign that I’m running out of steam. This is the ninth book, after all, and I’ve been doing this since January of last year; after a while, momentum does become an issue. (Doesn’t help that the next book is Crossroads of Twilight. I think I may have mentioned how little I’m looking forward to that one, once or twice. Or three times. Or more.)

But anyway. Winter’s Heart. Which is, indeed, better-shaped than the previous book, though still suffering the characteristic problems of the Bad Three.

So let's get on with it.

Revisiting the Wheel of Time: The Path of Daggers

[This is part of a series analyzing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels. Previous installments can be found under the tag. Comments on old posts are welcome, but please, no spoilers for books after Crossroads of Twilight, as that’s the last book I read before starting this project.]

After reading A Crown of Swords, I found myself realizing that I organize the series into four generalized groupings, based on the narrative momentum. It begins with the Good Four, which are The Eye of the World, The Great Hunt, The Dragon Reborn, and The Shadow Rising. Each has its flaws, but on the whole, they’re the books in which the scope and complexity of the story manages to be a feature rather than a bug. They’re followed by the Wobbly Three — The Fires of Heaven, Lord of Chaos, and A Crown of Swords — during which, as I’ve documented in past posts, the structural decisions made during the Good Four start to have destabilizing consequences for the pacing and shape of the narrative. Those three do still achieve interesting forward progress on the plot, though, despite their increasingly swampy nature.

This month, however, we start in on the Bad Three: The Path of Daggers, Winter’s Heart, and (god help me) Crossroads of Twilight.

The boundary between the Wobbly Three and the Bad Three is indistinct, and may well owe its placement to the fact that I had to wait two years for The Path of Daggers to come out. I don’t entirely think so, though. It seems to me that, although we’ve been running into increasing structural problems since TFoH, this is the first time that the shape of an individual volume has fallen like a badly-made souffle. There’s no arc to this book, no feeling of growing tension or climax at the end. The most exciting stuff happens around pages 100-150 and 300-350, but the book is 591 pages long. The actual ending coasts along mildly for a time before saying without warning, “oh, by the way, some shit,” and then you’re left staring at the Epilogue.

This gets, um, very ranty. I told you I call these the Bad Three, right?

why, brain, why?

So I’m hauling laundry out of the dryer, and my brain randomly decides it wants to distract itself from the tedium by figuring out how to hack an RPG system to run a Wheel of Time game.

I have no intention of actually running a Wheel of Time game, mind you. But as I said to kniedzw, I think it’s the fanfic impulse gone sideways; there’s stuff I really like about the setting, but also stuff that really annoys me, and a game would give me a way to mentally inhabit my preferred version of that world — maybe even critiquing it in passing. I have no concept for such a game, and probably nobody to play in it anyway (since it would go best with people who know the series), but every so often my brain likes to play with mechanics, and today was one of those times.

Yeah, sure, there’s already a rulebook for it. It’s d20, people. Which may be the Official System for Epic Fantasy Gaming — but it’s abysmally unsuited to handle the magic paradigm presented in the novels. Anybody with an interest in system hacks or running their own Wheel of Time game is invited behind the cut to see how I would do it.

There's more than one solution, I'm sure. But I like mine.

Revisiting the Wheel of Time: A Crown of Swords

[This is part of a series analyzing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels. Previous installments can be found under the tag. Comments on old posts are welcome, but please, no spoilers for books after Crossroads of Twilight, as that’s the last book I read before starting this project.]

Back in the day, I think A Crown of Swords was my favorite book in the series. As I’ve said before, it’s the one I waited the right length of time for (enough to build anticipation, not enough to become annoyed); furthermore, it has a lot of Mat, and also some really good moments for both Elayne and Nynaeve. In retrospect, it isn’t as good as The Shadow Rising — which will probably remain the best-constructed slice of this sprawling narrative, unless Sanderson really knocks my socks off — but it’s okay. Its major weakness is probably the fizzle of confrontation at the end. (A lot of people apparently complain about how little time passes during the book, but a) man, that must take obsessive work to figure out, since there are no dates given and b) I don’t care about time so much as plot elapsed. And while this one is firmly in the throes of “too many new plots, not enough resolution,” stuff does happen.)

I’ll get to the plot construction in a minute, but first: exciting news! I think I’ve figured out Faile. But I need other people to check my characterization math, because I don’t have a copy of Lord of Chaos around to see if I’m correctly remembering her behavior there, and I don’t remember what happens later well enough (especially the bits from Faile’s pov).

Follow me behind the cut . . . .

Revisiting the Wheel of Time: Lord of Chaos

[This is part of a series analyzing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels. Previous installments can be found under the tag. Comments on old posts are welcome, but please, no spoilers for books after Crossroads of Twilight, as that’s the last book I read before starting this project.]

In my post on The Fires of Heaven, I said that we were beginning our journey into the swamp of bad pacing.

With this book, we jump into it feet-first.

This is rather worrisome, since my recollection was that this aspect didn’t get really bad until The Path of Daggers (two books from now). I’m hoping that was just when I took off the rose-colored glasses, as the alternative is that the pacing tanks twice: once here, and again there. I’m rather afraid to see the result, if that’s the case. But it cannot be denied that the story starts wandering badly in this book, much more so than previously. Stuff happens — this isn’t Crossroads of Twilight, thank whatever deity you like — but it’s padded out with a whole bunch of crap that doesn’t deserve nearly so much page time.

We get off onto the wrong foot with the prologue. The funny thing is, back in the day, I quite liked the prologues. Remember that I didn’t pick the series up until just before the publication of A Crown of Swords; by then, Tor had gotten into the habit of posting the prologue online, some time before the book’s street date, as a kind of “trailer” to get people excited. It worked, at least for me; the prologues touch base with a lot of characters, reminding you of where they are and what they’re doing, and providing hints of what’s to come.

The problem is, outside of that context — a pre-publication goodie — they really don’t work at all. They fundamentally aren’t prologues, not in any meaningful sense; the only thing separating them from ordinary chapters is their (increasing) length and the number of points of view packed into them. Furthermore, they rarely contain anything truly exciting: their main function is to remind you of the current state of affairs, rather than to launch anything important. The significant content of most of these scenes could be condensed to a single sentence — and not a complicated one at that.

Rather more ranting this time, I’m afraid. But also a few positive notes.

Wheel of Time side post: On Women

I promised a while ago that I would make a post about the depiction of women in the Wheel of Time, and have had the result sitting around not quite finished for more than a month. Since I’m about to buckle down for the last push on revising With Fate Conspire, I might as well get this out of the way and off my mind.

Before I get to the complaints, though, let me say a few things about what Jordan does right. To begin with, he passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors. Even in the first book, Egwene, Nynaeve, and Moiraine are all significant characters, and once the story moves off to the White Tower in The Great Hunt, the importance of women to the plot is firmly assured. I can think of a distressing number of recent epic fantasies that don’t do half so well on that front.

Furthermore, the women aren’t there to be damsels in distress. They don’t get captured or tortured or raped, or killed off to upset the hero. Rand’s angst over the death of women aside, I’d have to go searching to find anyone stuffed into the refrigerator; no significant examples of that leap to mind. Heck, most of them aren’t even love interests: Egwene and Nynaeve both have their own romances, rather than being the object of someone else’s, and while Elayne may have been introduced in that role, it isn’t long before she’s doing far more important things.

That stuff is all good. So why do the women of the Wheel of Time get so badly up my nose?

Spoilers, of course. Also ranting.

Revisiting the Wheel of Time: The Fires of Heaven

I’ve picked up quite a few new blog readers since the last post in this series, so to recap: I’m going back through the Wheel of Time, partly as a reader (so I can read the ending and know what the heck is going on), but partly as a writer, to look at it with a professional eye and see what works and what doesn’t. This has particularly meant looking at the structure, to see what really happened to the narrative pacing as the books went along, but there are some content-level bits of analysis going on as well. I stopped reading after Crossroads of Twilight, so please, no spoilers for Knife of Dreams or The Gathering Storm. If you’d like to see and/or comment on previous posts, just follow the Wheel of Time tag.

So, The Fires of Heaven. In which we begin our journey into the swamp.

By that I mean, this is the book where I see the pacing consequences of Jordan’s decisions in TDR and TSR coming home to roost. Once TFoH gets going, I enjoy it just fine . . . but it takes a while to get going. We’re skirting the fringes of the swamp, bogging down occasionally, and if memory serves that problem will get worse before it gets better.

Let’s step in a bit closer than usual, to show what I mean by this.

In which we consider the effects of point of view.

Revisiting the Wheel of Time: The Shadow Rising

I misspoke when I called this the Everybody Goes to Rhuidean book: it is, in fact, the Most People Go to Rhuidean, But Elayne and Nynaeve Go to Tanchico and Perrin Goes Home Book. For the first time in the series, the main characters don’t all draw back together for a single finale.

Which is kind of key, from a structural point of view. I said in my discussion of The Dragon Reborn that Jordan’s decision to not decide on series length was tantamount to taking the brake off the plot; to continue that metaphor, now he’s removed the steering wheel. There’s no longer any kind of balancing factor to keep the various parts of the narrative properly in harness. If the series had a predicted length, Jordan could have used that to decide when to complicate and when to conclude different strands; if he kept everybody together, that would have restrained the fractal growth and kept the length in check. Dump both of those, and you’re pretty much relying on instinct and a healthy dose of luck to make the whole thing hang together.

And we all know how well that worked out.

It has other ramifications for pacing, too. I’m indebted to John Scalzi for pointing out the natural consequence of multiple points of view: if you write a 120K book about one character, that’s 120K words of forward progress on that character’s plot, but if you split it among three points of view, now you’ve got only 40K devoted to each. Naturally it will feel like “less happens,” in terms of forward movement. The beginning of this book shows how you can partially get around that; a Rand pov scene will advance Rand’s plot, but a Perrin pov scene can do the same thing if Perrin’s hanging out with Rand. In fact, if you step back and look through The Shadow Rising, Rand doesn’t actually get much perspective — more than in TDR, but that’s not saying much — but the difference is that Perrin and Rand and Elayne and Egwene and various other characters spend time around him, so despite that lack of perspective, he doesn’t reprise his role as Sir Not Appearing in This Book. He appears; you just mostly aren’t in his head. Once people separate, though, it’s going to start slowing the plot down.

If you were one of the people asking about Odin imagery, answers lie within.

Revisiting the Wheel of Time: The Dragon Reborn

In my anecdotal experience, there’s a distinct cadre of people who stopped reading this series at The Dragon Reborn, on the grounds that “I could tell it was never going to end.” While that turned out to be rather prophetic, I don’t think it had to be; as of TDR, there was no obvious reason to believe the series wouldn’t be, say, five or six books total, instead of the fourteen-and-a-prequel we’re getting in the end. While long, that isn’t endless.

But I think the people who made comments to that effect were onto something, even if it wasn’t quite the something they articulated. Namely, not only did this book establish that clearly this wasn’t a trilogy (which was what most people probably expected), it transformed the work as a whole into a very odd beast: an open-ended arc plot series.

Most open-ended series are done on an episodic model: the characters may grow and change over time, but there isn’t a metaplot trending toward a definite endpoint. (Mystery series exemplify this type.) Conversely, series with metaplots and defined endpoints usually have a planned length — think Harry Potter — even if that planned length changes in the execution — think Martin. But TDR sends the clear message that, while we’re still heading for Tarmon Gai’don, the length of the journey is now anybody’s guess, Jordan’s included. It won’t be four books; will it be five? Six? Nine? Who knows.

The problem with this is that it pretty much sacrifices structure on the spot. A trilogy is a well-recognized structure in fantasy; experienced readers will have a sense of when the action is going to rise and fall, and take delight in (successful) variations from that pattern. Quartets and quintets and so on are less familiar, so reader expectation plays less of a role, but there’s still something guiding the author. The number, whatever it is, provides a standard by which to judge when the plot should be allowed to branch, and when it should be drawn back inward again. Abandon that metric, and you make it much harder to balance your story. Inasmuch as you succeed, it will be by instinct and good fortune, neither of which can sustain you forever.

TDR does not, in and of itself, set up an endless series. But it removes the plot brake, which leaves the author in less control of the vehicle than he was before.

And as a corollary, the writing relaxes into a degree of inefficiency. It’s not the degree seen later in the series, where hardly anything seems to happen, but you can see one major pattern emerge here: the establishing info. Some of which is very repetitious — like Min and her visions, which get explained for the third time in the opening scenes of TDR. While that might be useful for people reading these books a year or more apart, at any faster pace — or on a re-read, when these things are abundantly familiar — it gets old. And that’s paired with a prose-level inefficiency that requires me to read these books at speed, because if I slow down I’ll start mentally rewriting every other sentence . . . but hey, you know, these books sell like hotcakes despite flabby prose. From a cost-benefit perspective, I’m not sure it would have even been worth Jordan’s time to copy-edit his words down to something tighter. Whatever the reason, it’s undeniable that this is not a tight book, and neither is anything that comes after.

But that’s enough macro critique; on to the specifics of TDR.

I’m afraid this post is even longer than the last one.

Revisiting the Wheel of Time: The Great Hunt

On the assumption that I would be halfway out of my tree on Vicodin, I decided to spend this past weekend reading The Great Hunt, as part of my revisiting the Wheel of Time project.

In retrospect, I find it ironic that this is the book which got me interested in the series (after I’d bounced off the first volume), because I don’t think it’s nearly as well-executed. But I can spot the things that probably hooked me, and despite me remembering this as the Book of God I Hate Mat, he isn’t nearly as prominent in the story as I thought. So anyway, onward to the analysis, starting with some thoughts on how and why the series started to grow so large.

(Kind of like this post . . . .)

Trilogy, my functioning left foot.

epic pov

A topic of conversation from ICFA: I’ve noticed that one of the things which makes it hard for me to get into various epic-fantasy-type novels lately is the way point of view gets used. As in, there are multiple pov characters, and shifting from one to the other slows down my process of getting invested in the story.

But hang on, you say; why “lately”? Why didn’t that bother you in your epic-fantasy-reading days of yore?

Because — and this was the ICFA epiphany — the epic fantasies of yore weren’t structured like that. Tolkien wasn’t writing in close third person to begin with, but he pretty much just followed Frodo until the Fellowship broke at Amon Hen; he didn’t leap back and forth between Frodo in the Shire and Aragorn meeting up with Gandalf and Boromir over in Minas Tirith and all the rest of it. David Eddings’ Belgariad, if I recall correctly, is almost exclusively from Garion’s pov, with only occasional diversions to other characters when the party splits or Eddings needs to briefly show a political development elsewhere in the world. My recollection of early Terry Brooks is much fuzzier, and I’ve almost completely forgotten the one Terry Goodkind book I read, but again, I don’t recall their narratives being multi-stranded from the start.

Even the Wheel of Time, which is pretty much the standout example of Many Points of View, wasn’t like that initially. The first book is all Rand, all the time, until the party splits; then it picks up Perrin and Nynaeve for coverage; then it goes back to Rand-only once they’re back together again. Eventually the list gets enormous, but you start out with just your one protagonist, and diversify once the story has established momentum.

The examples I’ve tried lately that present multiple povs from the start — Martin, Abercrombie, Reddick, others I’ve forgotten — are all more recent. And with the exception of Martin, I’ve had a hard time getting into them. Because character is my major doorway into story, and if I’m presented with three or four or five of them right at the start, I don’t have a chance to build investment in anybody. Martin is probably the exception because his different points of view overlap; the characters are not off in separate narrative strands, but rather interact with one another. It’s less fragmented.

Mind you, it’s funny for me to be criticizing this approach when I appear to have an obsession with dual-protagonist structures in my own books, and my pairs are not always connected at the start of the story. But I think this is a new development in the subgenre of epic fantasy, generally speaking, and it might explain why I’ve been less interested — despite the fact that the new epic fantasies often have more originality going on than the books I loved as a teenager. They jump around too much, try to present me with too many threads at the outset. I’d rather read a story that starts small, then builds. I’m curious to know what other people’s mileage is on this particular question, though.

for those who find my pace too slow

I should mention, btw, that Leigh Butler has been doing a Wheel of Time re-read over at Tor.com. Possible spoilers through Knife of Dreams, but I read the TEotW posts and the only post-Crossroads of Twilight bits I found boiled down to “and this thing still hasn’t happened yet.” Much more detail there, since there are multiple posts per book.

Revisiting the Wheel of Time: The Eye of the World

As promised last month, I have begun a leisurely re-read of the Wheel of Time. (Very leisurely. One book every two months, on the twin principles that this will keep me from burning out, and have me finishing shortly after the series itself is done.) I will be blogging this process, but not very intensively; the intent is to make one post per book.

Needless to say, this will involve spoilers. Potentially up through Crossroads of Twilight (the last book I read), until of course I move on to the books after it. (Corollary point: if you’ve read Knife of Dreams or The Gathering Storm, please don’t spoil those. I’d like to read them with as fresh an eye as possible.) But this isn’t just Nostalgia Lane; I will be doing some craft-oriented critiquing, musing on the subgenre of epic fantasy, etc. So if you’re interested, follow me behind the cut.

It’s so excited, it gets exclamation marks.

Dammit, I lost my bet.

I’ve been wagering since about 1998 that the Wheel of Time would end up being thirteen books long. Looks like I’m wrong.

Official Tor press release.

Brandon Sanderson, who’s finishing the series, on how he’s ended up doing four times as much work as he signed on for.

I never believed, from the moment Jordan announced the series would end at twelve, that it could wrap up that fast, and I was right about that. But my money was on thirteen, and even that turns out to have been optimistic. (There’s something hilarious about the line in the press release, that “somehow it seems fitting that what began as a trilogy will also end as one.” Trilogy, my foot.)

At some point, I will write a lengthy post or two about my history with this series. Suffice to say that I do intend to read the end, and in fact I will almost certainly re-read the series one final time on my way to that end. I have that much investment left in it, though not much more.

But man, I do NOT envy Sanderson, who almost certainly got paid a flat fee for finishing the series, and is now having to crank out three books instead of one, all of them longer than the original estimate. While also keeping up with his own books. The man is insane.