Origin of Farlander magic

Posted on May 25, 2013 by Matthew Schick

Here I was, promising a Saturday post, and I nearly forgot to do so. Luckily, the time exists for me to do this now as opposed to waiting until the evening or tomorrow.

Last week, I started talking about the world of our upcoming book, Nosamae Ascending. Our “human” races, Mar and farlander — and yes, sure, there are no doubt others, but are they relevant? No, not now — share their magic from the same “source,” which is called the myst.  But, by race, they are stronger in certain areas of that magic.

Is it a genetic thing?  I’m not going to go so far as to say that; after all, our hero in Lesson of the Fire, Sven Takraf, becomes a master with several aspects of magic that are not primary to the Mar.  He’s no less a Mar for it.  There are some farlanders, as well, who can work exceptionally well with the motes they are not supposed to be good with.

Two other races, the Wen and Turu — which I’ll get into more next week — have a similar relationship that is far more delineated, despite being, probably, far more closely related than the Mar and the farlanders.

Anyway.  Way, way back in time, two other, older races intermingled to create the Mar, and cousins of those same races intermingled to create the farlanders.  This happened, essentially, on opposite ends of the same continent that contains Marrishland from LotF, Turuna from Kingmaker, and the various states and kingdoms of the Flecterran Union in NA are located.  There are several other countries/regions on the continent, but, you know, they’re irrelevant right now.

The Mar ended up in an incredibly inhospitable deadly swamp, essentially living on the borders with Hell and taunting its denizens.  In order to survive, day in and day out — I am very much simplifying this story, by the way.  The first Mar didn’t have or need magic — the magic they used had to lean toward destruction, healing and mobility.  The races they sprung from treated them as worthless and vile abominations, and those races, on the whole, were struggling to kill each other, too.  It was a terrible place and time, and a very stimulating read.

The farlanders were treated differently, and a large portion of them traveled from their homeland down into the Flecterran Valley, at the time, home to the Wen.  The Wen are no less violent than the two races that fought in Marrishland, but the farlanders didn’t start out on the kind of negative footing that happened there.*  The farlanders could communicate, and well.  They had their magic, and had been treated fairly, on the scale of poor to great.  The land they came from was, mostly, urbane and friendly, and the Valley was, despite being an overgrown jungle, at the very least, friendly.

* Short story about that: When one set of Mar ancestors arrived by boat, there was some miscommunication and they desecrated a few graves of the locals.  The locals, who are the other set of Mar ancestors, did not react well.  The first “Mar’ weren’t born for quite a long while into this what-seemed-like-a-forever war.

The Wen and the farlanders, of course, have had their wars, but not as races. Factions have fought over the years, farlanders and Wen, Wen and Wen, farlanders and farlanders, and alliances have been formed.  And, like the two races that met and bred the Mar and farlanders, the farlanders and Wen have bred a third race for the region — Wefals.  Don’t forget that name; I’ll get to it later.

So farlander magic became the negotiating magic: Presence, Knowledge, Wisdom and Elements.*  How to deal with the factions.  Wen are related to Turu, and their magic is gone when they are adults. If farlanders had Mar magic and temperament, they may have won the Valley back then.  But in their creation, the world they were born into, there was no war. They had guidance in learning their magic (to the Mar, who discovered it on their own, magic is a gift; to the farlanders, magic is birthright).

* I could devote a whole blog to Elements, and I will someday, but let’s simply define it at magic resistance for now.  If you’ve read LotF, you know that it has other tasks.

Oh, I’m long today.  So much to discuss!  And plenty of ideas for next week.  Thanks!

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Art and a Cough

Posted on May 20, 2013 by Eric Zawadzki

Minneapolis just had its annual Art-a-Whirl event, which is when all the art studios in my neighborhood open their doors to the public for the weekend in hopes of selling lots and lots of art. It’s quite the party atmosphere. Growing up in a more rural part of Indiana, we didn’t have massive, neighborhood-wide art festivals. To my knowledge we didn’t have artists, but that’s probably just shows how ignorant I was of such things as a kid.

In spite of having multiple relatives by blood and marriage who are now visual artists of some stripe, that particular bug never bit me. I was never compelled to doodle or sketch, and anything more advanced like knowing the difference between oil paints and watercolors was likewise foiled by my total ignorance of the existence of either (watercolors are like paint-by-number, right? kidding!). This has never been a fact of which I’m proud. I hold no deep-seated contempt for people who can render a landscape or capture a mood with nothing but lines, colors, and textures. I don’t even really have the vocabulary to talk about art – only a few scraps picked up here and there over the course of my life.

Some part of this was temperament. If the passion for a medium isn’t there, appreciation is tricky enough (although it can be taught and learned), and creation is pretty much impossible. Because if visual arts are anything like writing, you’re going to wind up spending more time reading (or looking at) than writing (or painting/sculpting/etc.) by a couples of orders of magnitude. But I feel like part of it was I simply wasn’t exposed to a lot of art or artists at a young age. While fantasy and sci-fi authors didn’t exactly read their latest work aloud in my parents’ living room, our library kept that section well-stocked, and I never had a shortage of books to read.

Having a small child in a neighborhood with a thriving art community is exciting for me in the same way as raising him bilingual is. It gives him an opportunity I never had to have experiences I cannot personally give him. When Beth was pregnant, I had a very vivid dream of meeting this new baby and trying to decide what music to play for him/her first, because sharing all the things is a fundamental part of who I am as a father. The memory of that dream still puts tears in my eyes. I can share music and poetry and literature and geekery with William, and even if his tastes go in wildly different directions he’ll at least have the language. But if he takes an intense interest in sports or visual arts or a hundred other things for which my experiences have not prepared me to teach him about, I’m going to have to rely on other people. Dozens of art studios within a mile or two of our house seems to have that angle covered.

I wandered around Art-a-Whirl with my 15-month-old son for about an hour yesterday. Last year he had just started to see and enjoy colors. This year he can name a few colors and representational subjects. He was, in fact, a bit irritated that I wouldn’t let him touch the stuffed animals, but his eyes were open and interested (until he started getting bored and wanted to look over the 2nd floor railing, instead). I intend to keep bringing him back each year and I look forward to when he can ask questions of the artists as well as of me. Maybe a lifelong passion will kindle in part because of this opportunity, or maybe he’ll beg me to stop dragging him along in ten years, shrug his shoulders, and never look back. Either way, he’ll have an opportunity to decide whether or not it’s for him – whether as an artist or an enthusiast.

As Matt alluded to, work on Nosamae Ascending has temporarily ground to a halt because I’ve been sick for more than a week. Official diagnosis amounts to “a bad cough,” but suffice to say I’m so tired after coughing all day long that I’ve been falling asleep almost as soon as William is in bed. This is not conducive to productivity. I would much rather be writing and editing than lying in bed coughing myself hoarse, but I wasn’t exactly given the choice. So it is.

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Near future preview, and magic

Posted on May 18, 2013 by Matthew Schick

I’m very excited — we are very excited — that our next book, Nosamae Ascending, is progressing well.  We had aimed for a release date within spring 2013, but that should be amended to summer.  We are, at the end of the day, writing these books not as a career (yet), but as a “second job,” and that means we are beholden to our own deadlines.  Suffice it to say, we’re pretty good at making a few of those flexible.

If, though, you are a fan of some of the more popular fantasy authors of this day and age (George R.R. Martin, J.K. Rowling, Robert Jordan, Melanie Rawn), you may have experience true delay before.  Ours, we promise, is minimal.

I haven’t written about the books in a while, and maybe I should.  I’m going to start showing you what you can expect from the world of Nosamae Ascending.  Without giving anything away.  After all, we have not written the cover blurb yet. As a caveat, some of the titles and names in these notes are still subject to change; however, if any of the mechanics or details are wrong, it’s entirely my responsibility.

If you’ve read Lesson of the Fire, you are familiar with Robert Wost.  Wost is from the land, the Flecterran Union, in which NA will take place.  If you’ve not read LotF, then please do!

The people in LotF are called Mar, and Wost is referred to as a farl.  Farl is short for farlander, a race more closely related to the Mar genetically than, say, the Turu of Kingmaker. Think of it this way: If the Turu are elves, the Mar and farl are humans.  We started out with humans, elves and dwarves because we love fantasy.  But as the books progressed, we realized our distinctions were straying further from the traditional definitions of these races; we already had the other names for all of them (except Turu, that came later), so why not make the sub-races the names of the races?  Easy enough.

Wost and his Mar acquaintances use magic in a similar fashion.  The short answer for this is that they are “both human” but we took out the word “human.”   However, the Mar and the farlanders developed differently, and so their strength in magic is different.  How they developed is for the next post.

Both races see the myst, an ethereal body of motes permeating the atmosphere (and planet, and space, probably; we’ve never really discussed if it’s bound by gravity, and to be honest, I don’t think it matters in the visible world the characters live in).  The myst has eight component motes, often distinguished by a color.  Each mote controls a certain aspect of the world — you know, it’s magic, so the language isn’t precise.  One of the mote types deals with power: Pushing things around or lifting things and so on.  One deals with presence: How charismatic you are, whether you can be seen, etc.  There are six more.

The Mar are stronger with the physical mote types: Power, Energy, Vitality, Mobility.  The farlanders are stronger with the mental mote types: Presence, Knowledge, Wisdom, Elements (which itself is a fairly meta term to be discussed later).

That’s a start, I think.  Farlanders and the Flecterran Union.  A story where the magic is going to be more “mental,” which turns out to be a good word in more than definition.

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Going to Saturday

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Matthew Schick

Recently, my work shift shifted back in time two hours, eating away at my mornings like 17-year-old cicadas.

I enjoy the new shift; I sort of requested it.  I’m happy in the role.  But I have struggled to adjust the rest of my life around it.  Specifically, my writing productivity has taken a hit.  I have not yet found a new space for it in the new free time I have.

This blog is not something that I sweat too much, as evident by every typo and half-baked thought in it, but I am waffling on even being able to turn on the oven of ideas on Thursdays anymore.

With that thought in mind, I think I need to push my regular postings to Saturdays, beginning this Saturday.  It may yet stay on Thursdays, but I assure you, there will be a post on Saturday that has my signature writing style in it.

Many thanks.

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When Kickstarters Run Out of Gas

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Eric Zawadzki

I encountered a spirited conversation about Kickstarter over the weekend. For those not familiar with the concept, Kickstarter is a site that allows a people to propose a creative project to the Internet at large. People can then choose to back the project by pledging an amount of money. The person proposing the project sets a minimum threshold of how much money they need to raise in order to fund the project. If they don’t get enough pledges, the Kickstarter fails and no one pays any money to anyone. If they attract enough interest to fund the project, they get the money they need to deliver the project they promised. People who launch Kickstarter projects usually offer aditional perks to backers who pledge larger amounts of money, and there are additional complications like Stretch Goals that can come into play, but the overall principle is pretty simple.

Kickstarter has made some big news in the last couple years with hugely successful campaigns raising over a million dollars. To be sure most projects are much smaller – with goals from a couple thousand dollars to a few tens of thousands of dollars. They have funded board games, card games, video games, tabletop roleplaying games, short story magazines, anthologies, studio albums, music tours, novels, and movies. It has become a great way to patronize artists who are just starting out and need some seed capital to bring their ideas to the market or, more selfishly, to get your hot hands on a niche product that would never exist if a few dozen or hundred folks like you weren’t willing to pony up the cash to make it real.

Not only can a successful Kickstarter raise the capital the creator needs, a failed Kickstarter can prevent a creator from devoting large amounts of personal capital to a project that is not likely ever to break even. It sucks to have your hopes crushed by the cold calloused hands of Internet obscurity, but it probably beats making a five-figure investment in a project that will never recoup the investment. I’m not saying that creating something without a clear opportunity for profit is a bad thing, only that you’re less likely to spend more than you can afford to lose on a project you’re mostly doing for your own amusement.

Kickstarter isn’t all sunshine and roses, of course. It has been observed that oftentimes the kind of folks who use Kickstarter to fund projects are not the kind who are naturally adept at project management. Lots and lots of successful Kickstarters deliver the goods later than expected. My experience has been that most Kickstarter backers take this in stride to a point. Sturgeon’s Law applies – everything always takes longer than expected even if you take into consideration Sturgeon’s Law. Transparency about delays seems to go a long way toward allaying fears that the creator has decided to take the money and run.

This however brings me to the larger problem, which is that some creators launch successful Kickstarter campaigns and then never deliver – or at least give no sign that they ever will. I don’t know how widespread this problem is, but backers who have been burned after funding a project are often vocal about it. They ponied up cash for a project they felt they were promised within a reasonable time frame, and they have not received the goods. Project delays crop up, sure, but some of these situations are really beyond the pale. I’ve seen reports of creators who used funds generated by one project’s Kickstarter to instead fund multiple unrelated projects, creators who really did take the money and run, and similar tales right out of the annals of political sleight of hand and con artistry.

It doesn’t surprise me that people get upset when this happens. What surprises me is there always seems to be a certain contingent of people out there who seem to think this is okay or, at the very least, something the backers should have expected. The favorite argument goes that venture capitalists fund businesses all the time, and many of the businesses they fund fail, so Kickstarter backers should take it in stride just as those high risk investors must.

At this point they completely lose me.

You see, in my day job I have contact with actual investments, and it drives me nuts to see people misuse the word “investment.” I remember when I bought my wife’s engagement ring the jeweler babbled something about it being some kind of investment – the round piece of metal, not the relationship itself – and that made me groan inwardly too.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the purpose of a financial investment is to make money for the investor when they decide to sell. Oh, they can be patient about it. No sane person expects to make a fortune overnight. But an engagement ring you expect to wear until death do you part? Not an investment because you’re not going to sell it unless things don’t work out. Maybe your heirs will, but I still think it’s still a stretch to call it an investment.

A college education? Okay. Sure. One of the reasons people go to college is to increase the likelihood that they will make more money than they spent on the education. A house? While some people intend to live in the same house their whole lives, most don’t, and selling for more than you bought it for is something everyone hopes for. Children? That’s probably a stretch because kids are so expensive. Of course so too is elder care, and they might be able to lend a hand with that, but it’s still likely to be a poor return on investment. A car? Often cited as the opposite, although I must say being able to get to and from work certainly helps with making a living.

I’m not saying these things are not worthy of pursuit for reasons other than the potential financial benefit. I’m only saying that the definition of “investment” is a mite bit narrower than “anything I spend a fair amount of money on,” which seems to be the one folks seem to be using when they try to apply the word to backing a Kickstarter campaign. When I back a Kickstarter, I’m expecting a product. Whether the campaign is 100% funded or 10,000% funded, it’s not earning me any money. Sure, maybe I’ll score a stretch reward, but that’s not in the same ballpark as the return on investment of a lucky venture capital gamble.

That false equivalency drives me crazy.

In short, while a bit of due diligence is wise in choosing Kickstarters to back, people putting down money have good reason to believe they will get the product they paid for. Scoffing at them for expecting creators to deliver is blaming the patron who complains that the new bar served them rubbing alcohol and called it vodka. That’s just childish.

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Time, Google, bees and crafts

Posted on May 9, 2013 by Matthew Schick

I think anyone can take a look at our present from their own microcosm and extrapolate a future from it. My latest one involved what would happen if I set fire to my poison ivy infested thicket. I guess that’s not exactly what my topic is, but boy, I can follow that idea out to becoming president or being incarcerated. Um.

Neat stories this week regarding the future: A book coming out talks about how the information economy is hacking the middle class; once again, a notable percentage of bee colonies passed away mysteriously over the winter; and people in big cities are more often eschewing traditional work to get crafty.

One time in college I took three articles from newspapers that seemed to have no correlation and wrote a composition about how these signs mean humans should leave North America.  I got an “A” on it, and no one seemed worried about any end-of-the-world propensities in me.  Was the world that different then?  Luckily, I’m not that guy anyway.  I’m inspired by those articles because of the near-future events that could be the formula for a story.

It’s no accident the extinction story and the crafty urban people (come on, folks, yes the story is talking about women in particular but men do this kind of stuff, too) are in the same “issue” of the online-only Daily Beast/Newsweek.  What’s interesting is the Time conversation with the book guy coming out in the same week.

When sci fi authors were touting the rise of the machines as one of the great ways humanity could end itself, which it has from the 1950s to the 1990s at least, it’s fairly evident that what they were thinking was, in essence, a robot apocalypse.  There were a few computers doing the dirty work, but anybody with half a brain knew that so long as you did not accede to their wishes and give them hands or control of the doors and windows (or guns, or … well, you get the picture), you could control them.

No one thought it’d be something as “benign” as a search engine, which we already knew was attacking our privacy, but had no idea was laying the groundwork for the collapse of our economy.

Luckily, we’re all (or at least, many women in larger cities are) getting crafty, and creating an idealized mini-manufacturing marketplace that, while it doesn’t generate a middle-class, certainly generates a larger sensation of success.  Someone will get around all that loss of wealth to Silicon Valley, and the end of bees and collapse of the larger farming network.  It’s a probably groundwork for an information-centric world.

And I can’t help but looking at pictures and movies (also idealized, I’m sure) of so-called Third World countries and seeing people doing what Americans are rediscovering — how fleeting is the security of wealth and nation, in light of humanity?

Doesn’t that sound like a good story?  I’m not being alarmist here; the future is infinite and one look at it won’t be completely accurate.  But when a sci fi author wants to write a story, the best ones are written with some familiar aspects.

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Spring at Last

Posted on May 6, 2013 by Eric Zawadzki

The God-Machine Chronicle is now available on Drivethru RPG. It includes a big rules update that is also available for free download. As I’ve mentioned before, I did a fair amount of work for it – the Introduction, specifically – So I’m happy to see it has been getting a lot of positive reviews and just generally nice feedback.

Sure, there have been the usual arguments and concerns about the new rules, but that’s inevitable. Some people love the changes, while others feel they should have been done differently. Any experienced GM will modify, customize, or ignore some of the rules of a game. It’s a creative hobby, and no one can disagree violently over the right way of doing something like creative people. On the whole, however, reception has been positive and sales appear to be strong so far. This is good because a successful project reflects well on the freelancers who contributed to it, and I wouldn’t mind doing plenty more work for the World of Darkness line.

Work on Nosamae Ascending continues. I’ve mostly outlined the next section I have to write, and now it’s just a matter of putting in the hours. My household (and about half my office) had another round of colds last week, which slowed things down a bit, but hopefully this week will be less, um, remarkable.

William and I had a wonderful weekend while Beth was playing a show in Des Moines for Demicon. She had a fun time in spite of catching the awful cold that flattened the rest of us. He has started babbling in complete sentences with intonation. It is completely unintelligible but gives the distinct impression that he knows exactly what he’s saying, and I’m just too dense to figure it out.

He has also started asking to go on walks and seems to completely disregard weather. He had us out with the stroller on Friday evening when the sky was pelting us with ice pellets. Ice pellets! But he just sort of sat there totally chill and watched the world go by without a care in the world. Sunday’s warm temperatures and clear skies were more conducive to that sort of thing, and the three of us walked to the Dairy Queen about a mile and a half away from our house.

The last little delight of the weekend involved a stuffed walrus (which he calls Wuhba) in a strange game of Ghost in the Graveyard – hide and seek except when you find the hider, the hider chases you instead of the other way around – with the walrus. Oh my God, the shrieking giggles were amazing. Yes, there were sound effects to the effect of “wuhba, wuhba, wuhba.” No, I’m not ashamed of them. There is literally no amount of dignity I would not sacrifice to hear more of those giggles.

And that’s pretty much how my life goes these days. I may not have achieved all my heart’s desires (yet) as far as being able to write full-time, and parenthood has plenty of ups and downs, but I’m finding it easy to be optimistic about just about everything. This may be a good time to mention that it is currently sunny and mild (low 70s) after an April of snowstorms, rain, and cold. I’ve always been a spring flower, and this time of browns with hints of green that promise warmer days to come make it easy to find hope in the little things.

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Yay, it’s the weekend

Posted on May 4, 2013 by Matthew Schick

We prepared ourselves for homeownership. There were a lot of discussions about how our time on the weekends would need to be used, and how we would divvy up some of the new chores. This was before we liked, and purchased, a house about the same size as our apartment, essentially making all the indoor chores the same (although the apartment had a dishwasher) and simply adding in a nearly 1-acre yard.

Simply a 1-acre yard. That hadn’t been maintained or cared for in more than a year. We have a thicket (that’s supposed to be a few bushes) in front of a forest (that’s supposed to be there) that is overcome with greenbriar, Virginia creeper, and poison ivy, and one or two other unidentified plants. At least two plants back there, I’m wonderfully allergic to, which has been an experience in preparation, patience, pain and laundry. And lessons in all of those, too.

This was, in part, why I missed writing the blog on Thursday.

It’s amazing how pain can occupy the mind, nearly completely, and on a scale of 1-10, I’d say this is only a four (it’s just steady and unchanging); if it wasn’t for work this week, I would have been completely useless.

In terms of writing, of course, this sensation is a great exercise — I’d far rather experience a terrible rash of poison ivy than, say, be tortured. And this is mild compared to that effect. But I understand better the science on pain, which should help my writing in the future. It’s always one thing to read about something, and another thing completely to experience it.

I think that’s one of the biggest helps to a writer; experiencing what they write. I write fantasy fiction, so that makes a lot of things difficult to experience (magic, monsters, etc.) and I’m usually a little dissatisfied with the approaches used in movies. But it’s always set in a mundane world, with, often, mundane means being the primary way people live. Pain, from whatever source, happens a lot.

So this weekend, I’m back out in the yard for various reasons, but I’m avoiding the thicket. The next time I get out there to work on controlling it, I’m going to have a hazmat suit on.

Iron Man 3 opens this weekend, too. I’m not a comic book person. The Sunday comics growing up was often too much for me — too wordy sometimes, and if a strip wasn’t funny, what was the point? — so I had no experience of Iron Man when the first one came out. Not knowing anything, I was skeptical that a “non-mainstream” hero would sell movies. I realize I was stupid.

And now I’m extremely excited to see this movie, which may be a couple weekends away (like when Star Trek opens), but at least I’ll be able to watch them without the distraction of a skin condition.

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Another day late

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Matthew Schick

Due to circumstances beyond my control, my contribution to the blog for this week will not appear until Saturday. Sometimes, weeks like this happen.

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Another random week of reading and revising

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Eric Zawadzki

I’ve had a fairly productive week of writing and editing Nosamae Ascending. Telling you “I wrote/edited X words” is pretty meaningless, but I finished one pretty significant subplot section and edited a second rather important piece. Right now I’m trying to figure out exactly where I want to put in the extra heist I’m adding in, as well as exactly how I want to write it. Most of the book is nominally from a single character’s point of view (the heroine’s), but there are now three sections that are significant departures from that voice.

In the meantime, I’ve finished Ship of Magic, which I originally picked up because it was described to me as an epic fantasy novel where the characters’ actions are driven by economic hardship rather than the old standbys of survival, love, prophecy, or revenge. In that way it actually has a lot in common with The Name of the Wind. It isn’t that there is nothing of those classic story drivers, but they’re not the main engine of the book. It did a good job of maintaining the sense of peril and conflict.

The only thing that bothered me a bit was the use of slavery. While I felt Hobb did a pretty decent job of describing its horrors in a way that wasn’t purely “misery porn,” she ultimately fell prey to the use of slavery in fantasy as shorthand for “this person/country/culture is evil.” Make no mistake. Slavery is a terrible thing. But too many times I’ve seen it used in fantasy along with genocide, rape, and torture as a cheap way to dehumanize a character with whom the author does not want the reader to sympathize. I’m not saying authors should whitewash those terrible crimes (they definitely should not), but I wish they’d quit perpetrating them on innocent sympathetic characters for the sole purpose of making their antagonists look like horrible people. It’s lazy writing.

This was my sticking point with Mistborn: The Final Empire, as well. Sanderson took such absurd steps to show us that the Lord Ruler and everything he stood for was absolutely and completely evil that it got rather silly. Slavery and torture? Check. Senseless slaughter of innocent people, up to and including genocide? Of course! Evil church? Why not? Inhuman minions incapable of mercy? Yup. Blighted landscape that makes Mordor look like a lovely place for a picnic? We wouldn’t want you to think the Lord Ruler was the good guy!

Maybe that series got better. I haven’t read them and probably never will. I just have difficulty with fantasy worlds of black-and-white morality. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have heroes and villains, but villains should be more than just a large collection of vices and wicked deeds. People are more complex than that. It was just too much. Many of the heroes were two-dimensional, and the protagonist was essentially a blank slate. It’s not that I liked nothing about the book. The magic system was interesting, the audacity of the initial plan was amazing, and many individual scenes were really good, but I just didn’t feel like the story, characters, and world had enough depth to intrigue me through more books.

In the case of Ship of Magic, there’s enough other awesome stuff that I’m willing to cut Hobb some slack when it comes to the black hats some of her characters wear. Most of the conflict of the book is between flawed but entirely believable characters. Kyle is not the kind of father I would wish on anyone, but he is genuinely trying to save his family from economic catastrophe, which lends a bit of a humanity to a fairly dispicable character. Malta is self-absorbed, vain, and childish, but she’s a 13-year-old girl accustomed to being wealthy, and immaturity is a character flaw we’ve all been guilty of at one time.

The stubborn certainty of the most deliberately likable Vestrit is not without cracks and flaws, either. At times they bend in the wind, and sometimes that works to their benefit, other times not so much. Hobb make this feel like what it is – not an inconsistency of character but a moment of weakness in the face of strong opposition. The characters are stubborn and have a strong sense of right and wrong, but they’re not perfect. I appreciate that because it is a realistic portrayal of the way humans often work. We mean to follow our principles in the face of impossible odds…but often don’t measure up to our ideas as much as we’d like.

Just a gentle reminder that just because I say harsh things about a book I’ve read doesn’t mean I hate it and everyone who enjoyed it. I’m vocal in my criticism for two reasons. First, as someone who is ostensibly trying to write something that hasn’t been done better by other people a thousand times before, I’ve had to develop acute trope sensitivity. I need to know what’s been done before so I am aware enough of that history to consciously use, subvert, or shy away from those things. Second, I’m keenly aware of what I like and dislike, and I spent several years learning how to explain why I feel the way I do. This is partially a sort of reader awareness (I know my tastes).

I know many people who loved Mistborn. Possibly I was simply expecting something different from what it was able to deliver. Just as likely, I’m not its target reader. Brandon Sanderson probably shouldn’t fist-pump at the prospect of my having discovered his first novel, but he’s found an audience of readers who are clearly into the sort of stuff he does.

Me? I prefer something where the narrative voice is subtly biased. Lesson of the Fire? A propaganda history compiled and edited by the protagonist’s daughter. As a result, he looks less bad a person than he was. Kingmaker? The young hero really knows next to nothing about the world or the nation’s politics, and the book reflects that naivete. With Nosamae Ascending we’re primarily looking through the eyes of someone who feels the actions of the heroes are justified and that all her companions are best friends. When we delve into some of their points of views, however, we get little glimpses of what is really going on. The story is never far removed from the one telling it, and I consider it a lot of fun to contemplate what the narrator thinks is going on versus what is really happening, even if the narrator never learns the truth.

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