@Rosver
Yes, I know your opinion, I have read all the reviews and opinion, and no one is calling anyone anything, including JMX etc. Different people have different perspectives. Reading and stories are subjective experiences. They are far more personal than TV or Movies because you have to use your own imagination to bring the words to life. What works for some people doesn’t always work for others. Reading is a joint experience between author and reader.
I can’t possibly write a book or books that pleases everyone. I just have to try to please myself and as many others as I can.
Given your complaints listed in this thread, I would say, as I said during the beta, you are not able to see the forest due to all the stupid trees in the way.
Not everything has to make sense immediately. In life, some things, the actions of some people around you and towards you won’t make sense to you for many years, and maybe never. The same thing is true in a complex book in what we call “epic fantasy.”
Just because “you” can’t see or understand something immediately doesn’t mean it’s stupid or useless or has no point. Maybe the problem isn’t the character or the substory line, maybe the problem is that you haven’t read the entire book (and again Demons of Astlan is one book in multiple volumes) and so you do not yet know how these things are going to play out.
I said this many times in beta. It’s a long book and I can’t cram everything into a single volume. These books are NOT sequels, they are one very long book. There is a beginning that happened at the start of book 1, but there will be NO ending, NO closure until the last page of the final book (and even then…there could be new beginnings after that) [i][b]But the end of each book is just an arbitrary break point. A resting point to take a breath during a very long journey. [/b][/i]
I really don’t know how much I can stress this.
If you have to have closure in a single book, then I suggest you wait until you see: “Demons of Astlan: The Final Volume” and then read them all at once. I will also do an omnibus volume (or two) at some point. I think the total story will be about 2 million words. We are around 500,000 in right now. So we are 1/4 of the way done, probably.
But I warn you, even then, I may not wrap up every loose end to your satisfaction.
Life does not have tidy endings, nor should stories. Part of the joy of life is not knowing where things are going, following leads/ideas/adventures for their own sake, and not for the sake of some future goal.