Fatal Revenant, a review.

Hi all,

I have finally finished reading Fatal Revenant by Stephen Donaldson. It is the second book in the Final Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and eighth book in the Thomas Covenant Chronicles. I am a great fan of Donaldson’s writing having enjoyed his superior fantasy writing in the first seven books of the chronicles, and also in his two volume Mordant’s Need series and five volume Gap Into series.

I enjoy the way Donaldson immerses a reader in his character’s heads. He really shows the complex array of emotions his characters are going through. There are rarely one dimensional characters in his novels. But this strength of his work can be overdone when too much time is spent in a character’s head, in this case Linden Avery, and the plot stagnates, as she repeats over and over her concerns and doubts about her next actions. I think Fatal Revenant could have lost 200-300 of it 760 pages with no harm to its plot. 
If a reader new to the chronicles attempted to read Fatal Revenant first, I wonder whether they would finish it. I had to wait until the last few pages for something to happen that will get me reading the next volume. 
There are also too may Deus Ex Machina moments in Fatal Revenant, where Sandgorgons or Giants drop in unexpectedly to save the day. 
I have heard that the third volume is not due out until 2010 with the final volume due in 2012, so I think I will wait until 2012 before reading the third volume. Time lags between books meant I had trouble remembering why some characters were foes of Linden Avery and the land she is trying to protect. The glossary failed to enlighten me.

I hope that the third volume will be a return to form as this volume has put me off high-fantasy for the foreseeable future, maybe even to 2012.

Graham.

My writing week (27)

Hi all,

I am three thousand words into chapter eighteen, currently one of my characters is hiding and I am having trouble getting the other character to find her. As soon as I find her, that should be the end of the chapter. But it looks like I have added another chapter to the novel because a lot of other things were supposed to happen in this chapter. The novel is 86,000 words and growing.

I did my first critique of a short story for a while. I didn't like the story at all. It got off to a bad start as the author had mislabelled it science-fiction when the only genre it fell into was thriller. It was another one of those revenge stories, like half the movies coming out of America. I'm sick of watching them, I certainly don't want to read them. The characters all seemed very immature too as I wondered if the author had issues with women. I probably wrote the most negative sounding critique, mainly around the plot, that I have written, but the author seemed to take it okay, judging from an email I got from him.

I've nearly finished reading the fantasy epic that has been occupying most of my limited reading time for the past few months. When finished, I will be only reading short books for a while.

A couple of quotes on writing that I read in The Age last week. From Stephen King: "Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word". I only use a thesaurus when searching for replacements for a word I have overused. Kurt Vonnegut's first rule of writing: "Do not use semicolons...all they do is show you've been to college." I use semicolons, I haven't been to college, but I have been to university.

Graham.

Review - How to Build a Time Machine

Hi all,

I finished the non-fiction book How to Build a Time Machine by Paul Davies a few weeks ago, but I have not had time, until now, to write a quick review of it.

It is a short book at some 135 pages (excluding the bibliography) and would be even shorter if some of the totally unnecessary drawings of people like Stephen Hawking were removed. But a short book is a good book for me at the moment as I struggle to finish reading another 760 page fantasy epic (another review next week maybe).

In places, I found it hard to understand the science Davies was describing, and I one of the small minority who actually read A Brief History of Time from cover to cover, and thought I understood it at the time. My science background is just year 12 physics at high school, which I did reasonable well at.

The main premise of the book is the feasibility of building a time machine by creating a wormhole. This would enable both forward and backwards time travel between the times at each end of the wormhole. The energy involved is massive, more energy then produced by our sun, so the likelihood of such an engineering feat is not great.

I, as well as others, have argued that if it was possible to travel into the past, then why aren’t those travellers here now and why hasn't someone from the broke, sweltering and seawater inundated world of the future come back and knocked off George W Bush before he stuffed up the world. Davies counters by saying that future time travellers will only be able to travel back to the time when a wormhole was created.

Having said I had trouble understanding some of the science, I also found that I was familiar with the concepts and ideas in other sections of the book.

I did get one idea for a story out of reading How to Build a Time Machine.

Overall, I would recommend this book to a reader who knows a bit about science who has not read much about the concept of time travel.

Graham.

My writing week (26)

Hi all,

My word count is on the way up. I am currently writing chapter eighteen and the plot is diverging from the outline due to recalcitrant characters.

I printed out a story from critters.com to critique, but I haven't got around to reading it yet.

I read very little due to tiredness.

Overall, not a great week for my writing aspirations.

Graham.

My writing week (25)

Hi all,

So far this year I have written at least a couple of sentences of my novel on every single day. This was my aim and I had hoped it would lead to an impressive increase in my writing output, unfortunately that has not really been the case. Although my average daily word output has increased, the writing every day goal has seemed to become an end in itself. Just to be able to say 'I did it', I will continue to write every day this year. Next year things will change. I am thinking of setting a goal of 7,000 words a week, written on one, two or seven of those days.

I have now written 82,000 words of the novel I am working on. Yesterday I pulled out the outline and divided the what happens next section up into three more chapters, perhaps 15,000 words. The end is near. But last night I got to thinking that I was still finishing the story with a potentially unresolved ending - depending on how much the reader had read into what had happened - and wondered if I should add an extra chapter.

The novel is all about trust and I want its readers to decide if they trust the main character's version of what is going on or think that he has misinterpreted events. I was not going to tell the reader whether the main character's version of events was correct, just let the reader decide. The extra chapter would answer the question of whether the main character's view of the universe was correct. I think I will probably end up writing it and then decide whether to include it.

I've read yet another article about an author who took years to write their first novel. Steve Toltz, the Australian nominated for this year's Booker, took four years to write it after struggling for 13 years to write a novel. I think I should stop thinking about all these novelists who take years, sometimes a decade or more to write a novel because it makes me feel okay about taking forever to produce something. It's time to place some time limits on my writing goals.

I intend to finish writing the first draft of this novel by the end of this year and then return to the first draft of a previous 126,000 word novel that needs a total rewrite. My goal will be to rewrite it in 130 days. A modest goal by the standards of many writers, but nevertheless a goal that should see my output increase markedly.

Graham.

My writing week (24)

Hi all,

I mentioned last week that I was sick, so I did very little writing. But even though I was feeling a bit depressed about my ongoing, active/not active illness, I still managed to write every day.

After a bit of should I or shouldn't I, I eventually decided to risk work today, without any problems, so there are signs that one of the many medications I am currently taking might actually be doing its job or time might just be the healer, as I have read it is in 80% of medical complaints. I did zero reading and critiquing last week. I hope to write more this week.

Graham.

My writing week (23)

Hi all,

My long-term illness has struck back with vengance in the past couple of weeks, particularly this week. I haven't been to work this week, but because of tiredness, brought on by stress about the illness, I have been doing very little writing, just constantly contacting doctors and specialists.

Last week I had a good writing week. I sent the critique of the novel I had spent about four months critiquing, and the author was happy to get it. It helped her in a few decision she was making about it.

Got to go, got another doctor's appointment.