Book Review: Dawnthief

From the moment I saw the silhouette cover, I wanted to read this book. For whatever reason, good covers excite me and make me want to read a book (case in point, Black Sun Rising) but that doesn't always turn out to be the best policy as the adage dictates.

However, I will say first that I enjoyed Dawnthief, and it wasn't the easiest book for me to enjoy. Fan of fantasy though I am, it takes a little more than magic and elves to impress my imagination and with characters in this book dying left and right it was all I could do to keep up with the ever-changing members of The Raven. Hopefully that didn't spoil things for you but it isn't untested waters that characters should die. If you'll recall I had the same "recoil in horror" reaction upon cresting the halfway point of The Lies of Locke Lamora. But that's mostly where my complaining ends.

The first hundred-or-so pages of Dawnthief were the most unimpressive part. It's tough coming into a well-established dynamic (The Raven's team mentality above all) and still believe this is only the first book in the series. The characters not only fight like they've been doing it a long time but Barclay basically writes about them like you're well aware of their habits and functions. So it isn't until the first bits of story have been digested and I actually was used to the characters (the ones who remain alive) that I really began to enjoy things.

Dawnthief reminds me a lot of a Dungeons & Dragons based book I tried to read ages ago, or at least the magic does. There are "mage Colleges" and "mana shapes" - concepts that reminded me throughout that the magic in my own novel was more aloof and just "there" rather than having a history and explanation. I guess I prefer to take the "video game" approach to magic where I just assume that the reader assumes that it is what it is and bears no lengthy exposition about what sets it apart in this particular fantasy franchise. Not that Barclay did anything of the sort, I'm just saying his magic "system" is something you could base/write a tutorial on (if you so desired) to enhance whatever experience you get from reading the book.

All in all, the book is neither bland nor pedestal-worthy but it's a good learning experience for basically well-written prose and a solid story. There are a few cliches wedged in here or there but some of them probably became cliches after this book was published (and some of them are clarified later and become not-so-cliche). Another plus is that it's not an astronomically long book. I'll definitely be checking out the next in the series of The Chronicles of the Raven, but for my next read I have A Game of Thrones. So very exciting since Martin's books are lauded with so many accolades they might has well have won a Grammy by now, too.

Book Review: Red Seas Under Red Skies

Don't judge a book by its prequel.

While I hadn't planned on fostering a talent for "eating my presumptions" during my late-twenties, it is something that I've found I'm rather good at lately. Not the least of these particular situations is reading the second novel by Scott Lynch, Red Seas Under Red Skies (Book 2 of the Gentlemen Bastards sequence). If you read my "review" of the first book, you know I wasn't exactly eager to jump into this second one as I figured the sweet juices of adventure and intrigue had been squeezed out to their very last drop already.

How wrong I was.

Yes, I admit I was wrong. Gladly, in fact. Now, it's not that I thought the book was going to be bad by any stretch of the imagination. I had a very distinct feeling that the book would be just fine, in the way that books are "fine" when you cease to care what the main character is doing and read it mostly for the prose/literary value/brownie points. Oddly enough, and due to some a very fortuitous coincidence, I found myself actually enthralled with the book. I liked it a lot, probably more so than I would have if I assumed it was going to be a masterpiece of character-weaving.

Regardless of my own presumptions, I can say that I am quite excited about the next installment (of which there are a planned SEVEN, yikes!) of the Gentlemen Bastards "sequence." I was even so apologetically riled up that I sent Scott Lynch a nice piece of fan mail. Yes, yes, we all know by now that I want to be him in a couple of years, but let's not let that stop us from focusing on our own lives for a bit longer.

Read Lies of Locke Lamora and Red Seas Under Red Skies. You won't be disappointed.

Numb3rs (pronounced numb-thers)

Just wanted to share some counts.

First Draft of "Part 2":
Final Word Count 75855
188 pages of 12pt Verdana font
44 chapters (including prologue and epilogue)

Combined Word Count of Third Draft Part 1 and First Draft Part 2 = 152,246

Wow.

Book Review: The Lies of Locke Lamora (UK Edition)

Based on a recommendation from James over at Speculative Horizons, I picked up a copy of The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch, while I was in Toronto last month. Since I was in a country that has offerings of the international market I was able to grab the UK edition which has better cover art (though probably not much in the way of dialog changes).

Right away I was enthralled with the characters Lynch created. The main character, Locke, starts out the story as a devious little fellow and his plots and schemes are revealed with the proper build up and respect that the protagonist deserves. The plot itself is weaved with quite a bit of flourish, encompassing not just petty thievery but grand larceny involving the richest nobles and the most prominent crime family of Camorr, where the entire story takes place. There's some magic thrown in there as a device to move the story forward and as a limiting agent for what the characters can get away with but I'd say it was barely required so folks who aren't huge fans of "wizardry" need feel unafraid to pick this book up.

Though the entire story takes place within the boundaries of a single city, Lynch describes the various neighborhoods in such great detail that it never feels limited in scope. Each area of the city is introduced with similar historical attention to detail and though there are hints at a much larger world there isn't much reason to care until the end of the book.

I won't focus too much on the actual story because that's what the back cover is for. I will, however, restate my opinion that the first half of the book is completely through-and-through solid gold while the latter half seemed to deviate completely from what was established. I can't say that I was disappointed in this, though, because the storytelling was great. It's just that I enjoyed it more before half of the cast was killed off in the span of about two chapters. The chapters themselves are broken up by "interludes" which appear as functional flashbacks to sometimes explain the themes of a chapter but also give us valuable insight into characters' motives and origins.

All in all, Lies of Locke Lamora is a fantastic read and I would recommend it to any fantasy fan wanting to deviate from the swords-and-sorcery norm. While not quite perfection, it did drive me forward and there was a lot of culture to eat up along the way. At the end of the story, though, there are hints for the next volume in the series which, due to the several axings I mentioned earlier, seems a bit unnecessary. I'm sure it would be a fun read as well but I'm not rushing out to pick it up anytime soon.

Phase 2 complete!

Cue the computer voice, "Phase 2 complete."

That's me geeking out and I can't help it because I'm a little excited. Yesterday during my well-deserved day off, I spent about 4 hours at Starbucks putting the final chapters together as I had planned to do. I'm proud to say that I actually did it; the novel-part-2 main "writing" portion is complete.

The novel project itself, though, is by no means "complete." There is a ton of re-writing to do, quite a bit of continuity problems, locality problems, and a general axing of non-essential characters to do for this first-draft-of-part-2 as well as part 1 before the two parts can be combined into a mighty magnificent ready-to-submit-to-publishers novel project. However, the task doesn't look nearly as daunting as it sounds.

I will continue to work on the editing and rewriting this month, as projected, and after a few gallons of highlighting and lots more typing a final draft will be ready to go. Very exciting!

Escape

I didn't meet my end-of-may deadline as I had been hoping to way back at the end of March. Things seemed so possible before a period of professional upheaval barred my way by elevating my stress level and distracting me from the task that I truly want to complete. Not that I'm trying to throw excuses out there, but I am in fact throwing one. Life is too busy for someone as disorganized as me to devote my focus so liberally as to concentrate on something other than destressing after a long, hard day. And if this happens consecutively, what can a man do?

But that's not what I felt like talking about today. Believe it or not, I actually did a bit of cramming yesterday and was able to put down about 2500 words during my lunch hour and after I got home. Unfortunately, the [lack of] functionality with my PS3 was more attractive than the aforementioned task at hand and I spent over an hour troubleshooting why I couldn't play media off my laptop using my gaming console, without resolution. So, along with Sunday's many thousand words, I had a bolstering jolt that put me a bit closer to the true end of the first half of this novel project.

Today, I find myself back in the slum of watching YouTube and surfing various other websites to avoid responsibilities, including writing. Some days it is easy to write "while" I "work," and some days are just too busy for it. Today has been filled with potholes but I admit I could have got some writing done. Unfortunately, today I just felt like I needed to escape.

Whenever I look at the breadth of my novel, I start to get a bit nervous. This happens while I'm pondering the tenuous deadline I've selected for having the thing edited and rewritten. In a perfect world, a month should probably be long enough for that process even on a 150,000 word epic dragon of a thing, but that doesn't give me much hope in view of the current situation. When I start thinking about all the changes that need to be made, especially the ones based on the redrawing of the map I did awhile ago, I start to lose a little bit of that confidence that I so eagerly covet when blazing away at the keyboard.

Not that I'm disheartened, really, or stuck in some kind of mire of feared incompletion. I know I am going to finish this novel and I know it will shine like the diamonds plucked from the unmentionable regions of some Greek goddess of days long past. No, the problem is that it takes a lot of momentum and willpower to get moving again on days like this. I remember when I had days like this when I was writing my first draft of my then-planned-trilogy, I would create Excel spreadsheets so I could count how many chapters were devoted to each character and how many pages that meant total.

Today all I feel like doing is messing with the formatting of my two Word documents and possibly combining them into the immense manuscript that they are destined to be. Formatting, doing office-type tasks, that sometimes becomes my escape when I want to "work" on my novel but can't really work up the creative drive to put more words into the text itself. This isn't writer's block; it's just a moment to stand back to take a breath and view the landscape before I head toward the next hill to climb.