The New Thing I'm Hooked On Now That I've Given Up Caffeine

[dr_pretentious]

Every time I stopped at a red light, I was sorely tempted to pull it out of my handbag and try to cram in just one paragraph, just one, before the light turned. I was annoyed that I didn't get forgotten for long enough in the doctor's waiting room, because maybe I could have reached the end of a chapter. My morning student was twenty minutes late for our session, and I was annoyed that he wasn't even later. I've been very nearly useless all week for everything but this story. The list of crucial other stuff I'm neglecting is pretty long by now.

And for once, the story I'm hooked on isn't the one I'm writing.

Now that I think of it, I can't remember the last time I enjoyed a book this much that wasn't, well, mine.

As I approached the last chapter of the second book, I had to drive around to all the local bookstores to see if they had the last volume in the series. (Phoning ahead would have delayed the moment when I could have held it in my hands, had any of them had it in stock.) None of them! Damn and blast! It would have been faster to order it online, but I backtracked to the local Borders where my friend Joe is an assistant manager, so I could persuade him, while I ordered volume three and almost everything else marthawells has ever written, that he needed to make sure the whole Fall of Ile-Rien series was in stock at all times. As a service to humanity, I said.

Only once I knew the last volume was on its way could I sit down and finish the middle volume. And then I could breathe.

Rush out in a buying frenzy, everybody. Start here.

Comments

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

Hmm hmm.

I read all of Martha Wells' earlier stuff, and I liked it fine. But I got to the first book of this trilogy, and my reaction was "What? What's going on? What does this have to do with any of her earlier books involving these people? Why do I care?" I got to the end (having possibly ignored one of the universes involved), and never even looked at books 2 or 3.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I wonder whether I would have liked these so much if I'd read the others first and gone in with expectations of closer continuity.

Tremaine is a delightfully screwed-up protagonist. I'll watch her do anything. In the first volume, it's clear that the trilogy will have some sort of romance among its plot threads, but the second volume did stranger things with the romance than I expected. I had a pretty good sense of when the various plot threads were going to have escalations, but I was usually wrong in my guesses about how they were going to escalate.

After reading a long run of books by various authors who failed to surprise me in any way, I found Wells refreshing. She gets it that plot is not the only kind of structure worth thinking about.

I'm in danger of writing a long post about plot and structure. There's nothing more boring than a book in which the only thing going on is the plot.