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To be totally fair to the Tom lovers.
I remember in the Wheel of Time books as they started to expand…I was like, “Where’s the Rand” who cares about most of these others!
I mean, I did like them, but I was so impatient to get back to the Rand story, about 1/3 of the other POV’s drug out way too much. It got worse as the series went on.
There will be more Tom in Book 3, but the others will still be there.
I agree on continuity and major plot points. Those issues are so broad of scope that I see them as their own topics.
We can create as many topics in the forum as we want. I think the idea of “plot issue: Chapters X, Y, Z” or similar would work good.
I will be running through Calibre, so I can produce an epub from that as well as azw3. What app are you using smw? My concern would be any tables or things like that which get tricky. In the final version, for publication of the book, I turn tables into images for older Kindles. But I don’t want to do that until they’ve been edited.
Hmm, yes, and the symbology does get even more important in book 2 and I want the books to have consistent overarching covers.
One of the big issues is that people get caught up in reading too much into symbols, portents and events and start to bring catastrophe on themselves.
Belief in something can make it real/or come true.
See, that is the thing, one reason for the Grove is a lot of people wanted to know more about other non-human races and since the Grove has about as many in one place as you are going to find.
I think it needs pizzazz and some trimming and I am thinking of cutting the in and the out of the roller coaster. Have them just come out puking or something 🙂
Yes, I kept wanting Tizzy to call Gastrope’ and rattle his chain, but there aren’t a lot of fires on a cloud. High air content, high water content, but not much fire….and that’s what Gastrope’ would use to summon him.
That makes that complicated. This is why I’ve been planning the reconnect for Murgatroy.
Well, this is sort of shoved under the rug by me. I don’t ever explain my logic in the book, you have to guess it…my bad.
There are two ways that demons travel between planes, gateways or a wizard/priest/shaman summoning.
The summoning is when a wizard calls a demon, the demon fades out and then fades in on the wizard.
This is also how a demon typically leaves, and does leave when they are killed.
But, they always go back to where they last were. Where they were when they were summoning.
Tom learned badly with the ring and Jehenna and then compounded it with Verigas. He focuses in on a summons upon him and then rips a whole in reality to where he wants to go (hence he walks through a gate rather than fades) instead of fading through.
Keep in mind, in book 1 when he did the gates he only went back to his cave, it was the only place he “knew” and could visualize in the Abyss.
The exception being when he dropped Talarius through. In that case they popped up somewhere random in the sky and had to make their way back to Tom’s cave.In book 2. Other than visiting Damien he never went through a gate to a different world and tried to come back after it closed.
All but the trip to Damien, the gates he has opened in book 2 are to someplace someone is calling him. I.e. he’s honing in on a beacon. Those stones that the shamans have are meant to do exactly what tom is using them for, beacons for Orcus and to aid dreamwalkers and spirit walkers as beacon/end points.
All those gates, Tom opened kept open and went back and forth between.
I don’t discuss how he got back from visiting Damien and Vaselle…and that is technically a good point. How did he know to get back to Mount Doom?
Off screen he did that by following his links to Mount Doom. He has massive linkage with Doom and could find it anywhere.
I’m ignoring the 60’s and half the 70’s for video games.
computer gaming, as we know it now, or as we are discussing it now did start on main frames and minicomputers in the 70’s and then migrated to apple’s and pc’s, vic20/commodor 64, atari etc. I don’t mean console games, in this case we are talking things like Dungeon (which was a text based video game that used text characters to represent walls in a dungeon and *’s for monsters (or maybe people and & was a monster, don’t recall) and you fought with keyboard commands…and of course Zork and all the various similar text based video games.
They were primitive, but fun adaptations of choose your own adventure and RPG’s.
I think it’s very important to distinguish bad technology/special effects from bad story. Michael Bay is the example for incredible look and feel and special affects with no story whatsoever. District 9 for example, is much lower grade FX but much better story.
Gotta run for moment…more later.
I do like the succinctness.
I think the full version might actually be hard to fit on the back cover of the physical book.
Of course, I could have two different ones, particularly since 99.99999% chance that anyone buying the Dead Tree Edition will be buying it online and not on a regular bookshelf.
In the last year and a half, I think I’ve only sold 4 DTE’s via Expanded Distribution (meaning not through Amazon) my guess is that those are people who went to a local bookstore and had them order it. Everything else has been on Amazon.
I suppose technically rails on the super long cliff would be no worse, and in fact easier than the crazy roller coaster, no need to build a platform.
Hmmmmmmm
OK, it’s up.
The problem was all technical. I spent quite a bit of time screwing with various formats and not being happy.
I then go to upload and it’s too big to upload (a limit I can change) so had to RDP in and copy over VPN…
The problem with a secure download, here, would be SSL and that gets awkward with DNN (the site tool that I use) because it uses host headers for multiple DNN sites (astlan.net and a couple other personal ones of mine, like my resume) That means that they all have to be in the same domain for a given IP. All DNN sites share the same IP. I can do *.astlan.net but the problem is that other sites are like *.langland.com so I can’t SSL all of them.
So…heck if Chinese hackers want to pirate my book…let them…
🙂
First of all…
If you got more than one copy of the email about beta demons…[b]sorry[/b]…it’s prepackaged software and I sent to “All registered users” and I know that some of my test accounts got like 5 or so messages.
Here is the link to become a beta demon
[url=http://www.astlan.net/Default.aspx?rsvp=DoAHHBetaDemon&portalid=9]Heavenly Host Beta Demons[/url]
Post here if you are having issues.
Remember there is a time delay between the signing up and the visibility of the forum!
T-A-G
It’s a [i]name[/i] of the central life giving entity in most cultures. So it has great symbolic and cultural relevance. Think about all the sun gods in different mythologies and such.
Here, Fierd (like the english fiery) is central to astrology, the seasons, magic, the elements (fire), it’s just very much wired into the magic and tradition of the land. If you look at the astrology, calendar etc you’ll see it.
Do they know the word “sun?” Probably, in a generic sense, just like we know the word “star”
Why do we not call the sun a star? It is. We just have a lot of tradition in English call it the sun, in Latin and related languages it is Sol (like solar system)
Actually this ties out to a problem I have, you will note that I am rather slipshod on capitalizing the word Fierd/fierd/Fierdal/fierdal etc. This is similar to “The Sun”
it’s a name of something, not a generic description. The local star/sun is [i]named[/i] Fierd. But people have turned it into adjectives.
I think when I say “fierd” it should be Fierd, a name, when I used the adjective, it should be fierdal or fierdy.
We are very sloppy about this in English with the sun…incidentally, notice how I capitalized English? Spell checker demands it because it is a name.
Just so I am clear
You like it worked into the paragraph?
I mean it’s my normal mode is that if there is a large break in time, I mention it with “Jenn had spent the last 6 days cleaning up the rubble made by demons bursting from the walls.” (Hint that doesn’t actually happen)
Otherwise I assume or try to imply, that the next section is sequential or at best simultaneous, and if a break of a few hours, I try to speak of the time delay
The big problem is that in this book, there are lots of scene changes and you can be whipping between timezones on a plane (i.e. the sun is lower in eastern locations) as well as completely different planes or other places where time is complicated or different.
There is a lot of activity. Lots of quick scene changes.
There are some very big events but….
It’s about half of where I thought book ii would go.
So in many ways, it will set a very big stage for Book III & IV. [i][b]I now cringe to hear people groan as I type this.[/b][/i]
Long and short of it, the events at the end of Book I were so huge (in terms of freaking out the observers) that I felt it necessary to go into pretty good detail on the reactions and aftermath, particularly since those actions and the aftermath were sort of like opening the door to [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibber_McGee_and_Molly]Fibber McGee’s Closet.[/url]
All sorts of crazy starts spilling out now and the motives of some of the players become much clearer.
Yeah, the original formatting was ideal for say an iPad or something with a colorful display and lots of fonts.
Or for print in black/grey (that allows any font I can upload).
For anything b&w or with limited fonts it was a disaster. Not doing that again.
If it’s at the end, their is less reason/need for formatting.
The idea was to use an antique/arcane font and color to clearly distinguish it from the other text.
This actually works great on something like and iPad or most any color tablet. Sucks everywhere else.
Also, in a traditional book, it’s very easy to skip past the stuff when the font is weird, just flip the pages until funky font is gone. Much bigger pain in an ebook which scrolls.
So next book and if I redo to back of book, this will all be stripped. I did partial stripping for some formats (Smashwords which is very strict)
Kindle isn’t so strict because some stuff works on some kindle apps and the Fire, but on everything else it pretty much goes nasty.
If the fonts come back it will be in an iPad specific version that has fonts, graphics and illustrations.
Not sure when that will be since, quite honestly all the other platforms (iPad, Playstore, Smashwords, BN/Nook, Scribd, Oyster) had absolutely miserable sales compared to Amazon. Mainly because it’s impossible to find on those sites, search is crappy. So I went Kindle/Amazon exclusive for 90 days and will renew. Basically this puts it in the KLL and available at KU for people. And I do get a decent number of people reading through those.
