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[quote]Maou>Personally I felt that the art seemed to come from multiple formats in a very limited space.[/quote]
Can you elaborate? Not sure I follow.
Yes, it’s his hoof…and you are not the first to comment; before release I was showing it to a friend, and he said the same thing so I redid it, and believe it or not it’s better. I don’t see it, but I think the reason is that I know what I’m looking at having seen the image in 3 Dimensions.
It is odd that once my friend saw “working” images of the entire scene from other angles, he mysteriously stopped noticing the foot so much.
I think this tells us something about how the brain interprets things. People seeing the foot “cold” so to speak may interpret it vary differently.
Which means, as something that presents a “cold opening” it’s a problem. If you have to know what you are looking at when you first see it. It’s not doing its job. Thanks…that helps.
In terms of the description etc. I myself was feeling very burnt out by the classic fantasy “tropes” and wanted to write something for people who had “read it all, one too many times” and wanted to turn the story on its ear.
So I take a lot of liberties and assume that most readers have “been there, done that” and like to see the board shuffled. It’s key in my mind, to play by the “rules of the genre” but to take a really experienced and more objective look at it.
So for me, it’s hard to be objective to understand how people outside this group might interpret it, since I’m firmly ensconced in the “read too much fantasy” category.
OMG “the lamb head”
I never saw that or thought of that or anything, but now that you say that…I can totally see it.
I’d love to say something like the head looks that due to symbolism: “Tom was an innocent, condemned to hell as a sacrificial lamb for the betterment of all demonkind”
Or something good and cheesy like that…but it was/is a total accident…
#-o
[quote=eugene2k;152]Oh, hey, let me say another thing that you probably never thought of. Every time I look at the scales on the hooves I’m thinking: “Why the hell is this demon wearing pantyhose like a transvestite hooker?”[/quote]
Ahh…that will be explained in book II 8-[
No…no it won’t be explained….I am joking…don’t want to freak anyone out….
Maou,
You hit on some key “framework ideas” I have.
Some of which you won’t be able to fully see until later books, but you hit on them here.
1) the value of human life, and how religion affects that
2) the “haves” vs the “have nots” culture/race warfare and discrimination and irrational biases
3) the idea that super powerful entities or countries can just rush in with overwhelming force and solve any problem and impose their “will” and values on others.
4) there is always more than one side to every story
5) everyone is hanging on by the seat of their pants, just trying to do their best to stay afloat (this is how things really work)Tizzy is going to want you to join some strategy sessions, by the way…
Cool, I will check out M4D tonight and see if there is some easy crossover/export/import stuff and see about getting you stuff.
Hi,
One thing that comes up in a few of the Amazon reviews is that people who say they really liked the book also say they were hesitant to purchase it or had some reservations.
I am curious about this.
Obviously I completely get the not interested, or doesn’t sound interesting to me thing. There are lots of books that don’t sound that interesting to me.
But for people who are tempted, because it sounds like it’s the sort of thing they normally like but are “hesitant” for some reason, I’m interested in the reason why?
In particular for those that get the book and really like it, but had reservations at first. I see this as a “marketing” issue.
If you were hesitant, meaning “I should like this but…I don’t know…” and something was holding you back, what was it? I’d like to know if it is correctable. I’m a huge reader, so the story part, I think I get, but I’m a crappy salesman so marketing I don’t get.
Obviously feel free to elaborate in a message.
Hmmm good point on the cover.
That thought had crossed my mind.
In a previous millennia, as a lad, shortly after the first 3 books of Thomas Covenant had been published, the first editions were all quite colorful, but on the back, above the description was a box with a black border and a gold background that contained a blurb quote from some reviewer saying something that the book [i]”was one of the best works of [b]adult[/b] fantasy in many years”[/i]
I really wanted to read the books and I went to the bookstore many times and peered at them. But I was too scared my mom or dad would pickup the book and read the back and think I was reading pornography!
I eventually, after several months, got the courage to get the first one and just kept it very “buried” with my other books, I’m sure they never saw the back cover…
Of course, it wasn’t porn, just seriously negative and depressing and definitely not Young Adult so I’m sure that’s what the guy meant but at the time…
Thanks…
Hmm…well…I guess I’d say it’s a hybrid.
It’s all about training. You get XP and then you spend time training in something or with someone, you can choose to train in your profession, or your skills or your abilities and basically spend your XP. So it’s sort of like buying, but you can “buy” levels, attributes (e.g. knowledge/strength), stealth, etc.
So there are levels like in a classic system, but you don’t have to spend your XP going up levels, you could start learning a new profession, or new skills that don’t tie to a possession. The skill system is rather like the ones used in better MMPORPG’s but it predates all of them.
And I literally mean that; at the height of game development, AOL was a rising star! [Modem noises ensue]
So reading that you’d might say it’s a “buy” system. Except we use levels for determining chance of success, whether that’s in casting a spell and not dying or picking a lock, or making a clay goblet.
Incidentally, if you have the mana, and have studied a spell, a wizard can certainly “try” to cast a spell beyond their own level, just like in real life. Just be prepared to “fumble” it. Sort of like the wizard with the Cloud of Destruction.
[i]BTW: before anyone reads that bit about AOL rising…it literally hasn’t taken me that long to write the first book. So you don’t have to fear for the second, thinking “this guy makes George Martin look like a Harlequin Romance Writer in terms of speed”
I got stuck, paused, had to write my dissertation and then go out and get a job. I didn’t return to “writing” for about 7 years and in the mean time (10 years) have equally not finished several more long novels before finally, last fall realizing how to get unstuck and started cranking on cleaning up/finishing up Volume I. And am now cranking away on two, and have the plot through the third and maybe longer (if that’s what’s needed–and it probably will be).[/i]
That’s my goal. There are a number of factors that aren’t particularly tied to the writing of the story.
Issues like editing/consistency (the longer the arc goes on, the more consistency editing there is) and where to put the next break point.
The break point is a function of both the story (where does it make sense) and ebook economics. Many people prefer shorter/cheaper/faster books to the classic “tome” The question is, does it work for the story? That was a huge issue for book 1, how/where to break the story.
Yes, I know it’s very cliff hangeresque…but at least where it breaks, it presents a “breather,” a punctuation point. This is snowball type story, it’s very hard to put a “break” or a “brake” on a fast moving snowball.
The other factor is how much time does promoting the current book take and what does my “day job” look like timewise.
I think the ARC and beta reader ideas are actually pretty good ideas. That can help a lot. Objective readers who haven’t lost sight of the story due to all the letters on the page. At some point in the editing process, my mind went numb.
So I think I will definitely due something along that line.
Yeah…I (may) have written some net fiction under pseudonyms where that sort of thing happens…but that’s really not the reading audience I’m trying to capture in this book…
o:)
OK, to be completely honest, the reason I used “9 inches” for the nails was thinking about NIN–Nine Inch Nails the band.
However, to proportionalize things, when standing normally on his digitigrade hooves he’s about 11.5 to 12 feet tall, if he were to really stretch his legs out then from hoof to horn tip he’s 13 feet tall.
I am short and have short stubby hands. I’m 5’6″ standing as straight as I can or 5.5 feet, and my middle finger is 3″ long. So Tom is 2.36x as tall as me and has proportionally even larger hands. So, his middle finger should be at least 7″ long, if the are as stubby as mine. Given that his hands are giant sized I would be willing to guess, and was guessing that his middle finger is close to 9″ long. So his nails are about as long as his fingers…roughly.
so if he closes his fist as best he can, the tips of his fingers resting on the palm of his hand, his nails would probably extend about 30% the length of his forearm.
In hindsight, definitely something that SHOULD have been mentioned/brought up, that really does require remarking on….but…it doesn’t keep him from punching things.
So this is one of those things that brings up a serious question about new book technology.
In the old days, books were like movies, once “published” they were fixed in stone. Today, they don’t need to be. An e-book can be changed at any time. Depending on the platform, propagating the changes to people that have the book can be tricky (or not)…but it’s easy to change the book.
I can even change the paperback, it’s printed on demand, so any new copies would have changes corrections.
I have in fact uploaded newer versions of the book that fix formatting issues, particularly for the “Articles of Evil” that improve formatting of tables and fonts/colors for different readers. But I have never changed the content.
Should authors, in general, change their work over time?
One big problem with this is that if the ebook is truly living, the context that someone gets from reading the original book and someone reading the same book 20 years later that the author has been improving/making changes to, may have a fundamentally different experience.
You’ve lost a historical perspective in some ways.
Now, clearly fixing things like the nails etc in this book don’t have that profound an effect. Clearly fixing spelling and grammatical mistakes shouldn’t be that big a deal…but at some point there becomes a fine line, where I am thinking you lose more than you gain.
The question is, where is that point.
Again, I’m not so much talking about this particular set of “oops” mistakes, but more philosophically. Just because the ebook format allows us to “correct the record” should an author be able to go back and undo their mistakes after publication?
I actually did go back and forth on the Karate chop thing…many edits later.
I decided to leave it because 1) as you say more common and 2) Tom was a bit of a slacker in terms of discipline which is one reason he had stopped doing Tae Kwon do so I figured it might actually be in better character.
I say this, having also made this decision after work on another book where the main character is much more serious about his Tae Kwon Do and still actively practices it.
Of course it now sounds like I have a martial arts addiction for characters, but it’s really on 2 characters in two “worlds” out of about 6 book universes I’ve got in process…
Hi,
Thanks for the suggestions on the inserts. They ended up being much more of an issue than I’d expected in a number of ways. They were always going to be on the website, but a lot of people don’t seem to find the website. So I thought I’d include them in the book where relevant. And originally they had a different font and color and would be easy to skip. Then formatting limitations of the all sorts of various devices came into play. Not just black and white, I’d been aware of that and the paperback has the same issue, but there was the font difference, but then there were older kindles and Sony’s with no real font support. So by the I finally got it approved through various bookstores with all sorts of formatting corrections…it just kind of stuck and blended in distractedly. Not sure what I’m going to do next time, but considering the consternation they’ve caused…I think it will be different. Think I’ll see what can be done with hyperlinks, say to an appendix at the back. But again…difficult for some devices.
I think your point on Tom’s rather subdued reaction to the Courts is a valid point. He probably should have shown a reaction like “Why the hell am I living in a cave, when there is a city I could live in?” I tried to capture some of that reasoning with Antefalken’s visit to Tom’s cave…but should have had more from Tom.
However, to clear things up: Tom doesn’t know about the Courts until Antefalken takes him there. Tizzy had previously mentioned them to Rupert, but Tom wasn’t paying attention, he was too preoccupied by what was going on. Antefalken shows Tom and Rupert the bar and then goes off to talk with Lillith. Tom and Rupert explore the city, they return to the bar to wait for Tizzy and run into Boggy who is recovering from his bender. They talk, he sees link spells for the first time. Out of scene Antefalken returns, they go explore Ramses’ palace and return (we hear about this second hand).
And that’s basically all of Tom’s experience with the Courts. All other interaction there is really just Antefalken.
There was no bar fight that Tom was in with Boggy; Boggy was just really hung over, and may have been in a few battles of his own…but Tom wasn’t involved.
Or so is my recollection of what I think I wrote…there have been a number of changes and edits and I tried to keep the continuity up and keep reactions correct, I think I clearly missed a good reaction on Tom and the Courts…it was a bit underplayed.
I think a real problem one has as an author is that you write, read, edit, reread over and over again so many times that sometimes what’s in your head doesn’t match what’s on paper. Which is why the idea of Beta Readers who can point out stuff like this is a good idea that someone has mentioned. I’d been using friends, but they’re probably heard too much from me discussion wise and so aren’t as objective.
As an example, I was going through one of my later continuity edits and I suddenly realize the scene where Antefalken, Rupert and Tom go to Ramses’ palace wasn’t there…and I couldn’t find it…so I think I only wrote it in my head…
Hmmm OK, looked into the first and second Lillith. The first encounter we don’t see live, only Antefalken reflecting on their night.
He had come specifically to gather information on what was happening with the intrigues and the various “demon” plots in Astlan (and for some romance)There is a presumption in the second meeting that he’d talked to her about the Type IV demon etc. It’s more of a clarity thing, however a good point…
Yes, Tom should have had that reaction, given the depth we see of all his other reactions…but it’s a bit more complex as Antefalken points out at one point when he is wondering himself why Tom is in the cave. Antefalken’s assumption is that it was typical of Boggy/Tizzy since they are loners and neither are huge for the city. Both are entrepreneurs and travel around the Abyss and aren’t that crazy about them.
Also as Antefalken alludes to, if you are a Type IV on the outside, people in the city are going to assume you are a Greater demon and treat you accordingly, so sending a 16 year old to the “big city” when he looks like a Greater Demon would be tossing him into the deep end, since everyone would start playing politics. Antefalken comes to the conclusion that Boggy/Tizzy understood this and wanted Tom to get settled in first.
Probably not spelled out well enough.
On the shape shifting of the eyes…I can see where you would get that idea. However, in my mind he’s not actually changing the appearance of his eyes so much as how they work. So in my mind, his eyes didn’t change much, they didn’t get slitted or anything, he basically just adjusted is rods/cones, sort of like changing between his ability to see in the dark.
Demon vision/wizard vision/Seer’s Sight/elven sight/etc are all pretty similar. It’s more of a magical ability than a physical characteristic. But I see where the language doesn’t make that clear. But he’s really doing the same sort of thing that Maelen does when he looks at Tom in a weird way.
These are great things to note. I’ll probably be setting up a beta reader list for people to volunteer for beta reading Book II to catch this sort of thing…
Thanks!
Will add it to my list of typos and inconsistencies.
I try to accumulate them, because it’s a royal pain in the buttucus to republish. Particularly, the dead trees…and worse now, the original dead trees were all Create Space and they’ve now migrated to a unified Kindle Platform, which, as of book 3 was far crappier (and CS was a royal pain) so I stuck with CS even though Kindle was doing dead trees. (CS was bought a long time ago by Amazon).
So I don’t think I’ll dead tree updates to existing books, until I’ve done the next book on the new platform and understand how it works.
The big dead tree nightmare comes from if you make changes (god forbid a font change), pagination can change ever so slightly, then the cover size is off and that’s a huge pain to deal with. Also just getting the format right.
On the Kindle side, there are also lots of idiosyncrasies and tweaks to make that work, and several tries…
But then on top of all of this you have to synchronize all these files.
Because of all the tweaks for each platform, it’s easiest to work with the last version you uploaded and tweak that…but that means you have to go back and edit dead tree and kindle separately, as well as my master file…
Then, also, if I make too big of changes, the text starts to diverge from the audio book…(although a few minor things are no big deal people will live)
And then of course, say I fix stuff–existing kindle readers have to actually ask to get the newer version, I can’t push it out, because they may have notes and highlights and any new version overwrites that and I can only imagine what happens to X-Ray which is all position based and if you insert text or delete it, positions get off.
I don’t want to think about having to completely redo X-Ray–ack ack
