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dr_pretentiousI confess, I would be even happier if Martha Burns’s “Highly Recommended” verdict applied to the whole book, and not just the middle novella in Tales from Rugosa Coven. But hey, that one novella is still “worth the price of admission.” “Fun” and “insightful” sound pretty good. I’ll take it. Getting reviewed at Tangent Online is lovely. And if the praise comes with caveats, fair’s fair. I often write reviews like that of books I enjoy and admire on the whole but not in all their minute particulars.
And maybe I should have sequenced the novellas differently. I considered putting them in the order in which I wrote them, so that readers could discover the characters in something like the way I did. Instead, I put them in chronological order for the events within the stories, with the result that the novella I wrote when I knew the least about the characters is the one that gets the last word.
Burns proposes that I should have put the Ria story first, because its length allows the most relaxed, most accessible way of introducing the ensemble cast to the reader. I hadn’t considered that option. But I will say that several readers who found Jane an immensely sympathetic character when they read “Atlantis Cranks Need Not Apply” alone – it was the first of these stories that I wrote — find her much less sympathetic when they read “Atlantis Cranks” right after “And Ria’s from Virgo.” It’ll be a question to return to if these novellas ever see another round of publication after the whole series is finished.
On a cheerier note, I got to review a book I unabashedly loved over at Black Gate. Sebastien de Castell’s Traitor’s Blade hit nearly all of my sweet spots. Of all the books written by people who aren’t James Enge over the past three years, this one is probably my favorite. De Castell’s novel is full of swashbuckling, and failed states fallen into warlordism, and warrior-magistrates who put me in mind of my father and his fellow officers of the JAG Corps. Okay, maybe you don’t light up when besieged heroes break into a debate about the rule of law or sing their constitution to its traditional melodies, but I do. And if you don’t, that’s okay, because the sword-fighting scenes rock, and the first-person-smartass narration is endlessly entertaining.
And maybe I should have sequenced the novellas differently. I considered putting them in the order in which I wrote them, so that readers could discover the characters in something like the way I did. Instead, I put them in chronological order for the events within the stories, with the result that the novella I wrote when I knew the least about the characters is the one that gets the last word.
Burns proposes that I should have put the Ria story first, because its length allows the most relaxed, most accessible way of introducing the ensemble cast to the reader. I hadn’t considered that option. But I will say that several readers who found Jane an immensely sympathetic character when they read “Atlantis Cranks Need Not Apply” alone – it was the first of these stories that I wrote — find her much less sympathetic when they read “Atlantis Cranks” right after “And Ria’s from Virgo.” It’ll be a question to return to if these novellas ever see another round of publication after the whole series is finished.
On a cheerier note, I got to review a book I unabashedly loved over at Black Gate. Sebastien de Castell’s Traitor’s Blade hit nearly all of my sweet spots. Of all the books written by people who aren’t James Enge over the past three years, this one is probably my favorite. De Castell’s novel is full of swashbuckling, and failed states fallen into warlordism, and warrior-magistrates who put me in mind of my father and his fellow officers of the JAG Corps. Okay, maybe you don’t light up when besieged heroes break into a debate about the rule of law or sing their constitution to its traditional melodies, but I do. And if you don’t, that’s okay, because the sword-fighting scenes rock, and the first-person-smartass narration is endlessly entertaining.
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Date: 2014-06-25 04:59 am (UTC)It would have been lovely to give Bob's story more breathing room. When I prepared that for its first publisher, Drollerie Press, it was important to them to bring the final version in at not more than 30,000 words. I don't remember any of the things I cut, except that none of them was essential to the story. I can well believe, though, that compressing the work overall sped up the pace of new information, which is not always a good thing. Sprawl can be a virtue.
Ria's right in the end about how big a problem her deceptions and concealments are. Her part of the coven's dysfunction-on-the-way-to-resolution isn't her woo-woo worldview, but the fact that she wasn't willing to share her actual self.
By the woman who won the contest, do you mean the Asatru character who won the axe-throwing competition, or the Lakota shaman character who was named after a real person who had bid in a charity auction? It sounds like you mean the latter, but I'm not sure.
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Date: 2014-06-25 12:24 pm (UTC)I meant the shaman character. I understood that this was a character based on a woman who won a contest, and I thought she was an interesting character- I was waiting for them to need her for something, since she seemed to be important and had come a long way, but if they did, I missed what they needed her for - possibly my meandering brain - possibly my not knowing what shamans do in particular at this sort of event.