Posts Tagged ‘Brandon Sanderson’

General Updatery

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

Hopefully it will come as no surprise that my NaNoWriMo push this year is about where it was when I mentioned I’d try for it.  I did allude to the insanity of the plan, after all.

What surprises me is the backup I found the other day.  I was looking through my flash drive backups for something else entirely, and found a backup of nothing but my programming folder — which was, it should be noted, the only significant casualty to my flash drive dying earlier this month.  It was an up-to-the-day backup, too.

This borders on being a religious experience.  I think Great Cthulhu wants me to continue work on that roguelike.

In other news, life is pretty awesome.  Things are looking up in general; my kid is doing great (save for some acid reflux and colic), and has begun occasionally sleeping as much as four hours at a stretch.  (This is actually better for Kat than for me, as I sleep like the dead.  She doesn’t.)

And, I now have a signed copy of The Gathering Storm.  A friend of mine got it for me and shipped it down, for which I am now eternally indebted.  I’m reading the book now, and of course it’s great.  It also has me thinking.  See, Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson have a funny place in my writing/reading history: they’re the two writers who, more than any others, got me writing.

I’ve wanted to be a professional writer for a long, long time.  My earliest major writing project would have been when I was about ten, when I decided to write a sci-fi trilogy.  For years, that project (called Trikan) was the largest body of cohesive text I had managed to assemble.  (I’m looking it over now, and it’s . . . er, not as bad as I thought it would be, actually.  It’s also eight thousand words long.  Go, younger me.  But it’s still never seeing the light of day.)*

After Trikan, there was a lengthy period when I didn’t get any really significant writing done.  It was Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time that inspired me, the summer before I left for ASMSA, to get to work on a big project again.  That was when I started the project formerly known as The Storms of Heaven, and when I wrote most of the novella Ghost Ship — which astute readers (and people I’ve trapped in conversation long enough) may recognize as the work that formed the basis of Derelict.  If I hadn’t read The Wheel of Time then, there’s a pretty good chance these would never have gotten written.  It was a pretty influential work for me, to say the least.

Fast-forward to last year.  Having heard of Brandon Sanderson via his connection to The Wheel of Time, I picked up the books of his that were out at the time (Elantris and Mistborn: The Final Empire — I didn’t spring for The Well of Ascension until it came out in paperback.)  I read them.  I loved them.  And they inspired me to write again.  If I had to pick a single influence that got me started on Derelict in its full novelish glory, I would pick Brandon Sanderson.

I didn’t make these connections until recently — not as such, anyway.  The knowledge was there, in the back of my mind.  The reason it comes to mind now is because now I’m reading The Gathering Storm, which is by the two authors who have influenced and inspired me the most.

I wonder what’ll happen this time.

*Interestingly, the science vessel from which the characters of Trikan hail was named the Blue Star, and the salvage vessel from which the characters of Derelict hail is the Blue Star IV.  I was not aware of this, and to my knowledge wasn’t aware of it at the time that I wrote Ghost Ship.  Funny how the mind works.

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Nomenclature

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

I’ve been thinking a bit about nomenclature in fiction lately.  More specifically, I’ve been thinking about words and names derived from real-life people and places.

But first, credit where credit is due.  While this sort of thing has bugged me for years, I’ve been thinking about it lately due to a post by Peter Ahlstrom on Brandon Sanderson’s boards.  (Have I mentioned Sanderson enough?  Go read Warbreaker.)

The characters don’t speak English, so what we read is a translation into our language. [. . .]

I do think it’s a good idea to pay attention to anachronism when using metaphors and idoms, but that’s also something that can be taken too far—for example, trying not to use any words with latinate roots because there was never a former empire of that type in the universe you’re writing in. That would probably be impossible because English is what English is, and the book is written in English.

-Peter Ahlstrom, assistant to Mr. Sanderson

He was talking about a turn of phrase used in the Mistborn trilogy, but the point obviously holds for a much broader spectrum of fiction.  And it’s one that has bugged me for years.  When, in my Zosias campaign, the gnomes developed rifled guns, I didn’t call them rifles and I didn’t call the process rifling.  The process is called spiraling.  This was due to the belief that “rifle” comes from the name of the inventor of the process, though my google-fu is having trouble coming up with a reference for that.  Maybe I’m tired.  Maybe I was wrong.  Maybe I should have just named it after Rifle Bottleblower.

Most of the time, I think, Ahlstrom’s point holds.  For the most part, making up a new name for something just because the etymology doesn’t hold up in court is pointless and confusing.  Most of the time I just gloss over it these days.

But I still think there’s a place for it.  Renaming something basic can add flavor to a setting — if you don’t mind the confusion — and I think that, used sparingly, it makes a great spice.

Even so, in Zosias I’ve mostly taken to naming the troublesome ones after Bottleblowers as a form of lampshade hanging.  That’s mostly my friend and co-developer Michael’s fault.  The Bottleblower clan of gnomes has been a running joke for years now.  (Seriously, I don’t remember the last time we ran a gnome that wasn’t part of the Bottleblower family . . . )

Eh, so there you go.  Have some random thoughts.

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A few random notes

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

Warbreaker was released today.  If you’re not yet familiar with Brandon Sanderson, this is a good place to start for a lot of reasons.

First, you can read it free.  During the writing and revision process, he posted each draft of the story on his site as he went along (and the final version is up now).  I have read it this way, and I positively love it.  (As I do the rest of Sanderson’s work.  Really, check him out.)  And really, I like to support people who are nice enough to give their stuff away.

Second, there are a couple of good reasons to pick this book up in stores this week, if you’re into hardcovers.  How well a book does during its first week of sales has a huge impact on its reception in the publishing industry, as well as the industry reception of later books from the same author.  Sanderson would really like this book to do well for a couple of reasons beyond the obvious.  First, he wants to prove that giving digital copies away worked; and second, he’s finally getting major support from Barnes & Noble, and he’d rather not let them down.

It’s probably worth noting that I won’t personally be picking up a hard copy this week.  There are a couple of reasons for this, but the main one is I just don’t like hardcovers much.  I prefer paperbacks.  Not just because they’re like a quarter of the cost, but because I honestly prefer holding and reading a paperback to holding and reading a hardcover.  (Even so, I’d probably pick up a copy this week to support the whole giving-copies-away thing if it weren’t for the fact that I’m trying to save money for the move.  I kind of suspect that there will be plenty of buying going on, though.)

On an almost completely unrelated topic, my wife and I watched one of the commentary tracks for Ocean’s Eleven the other day.  First let me say that Ocean’s Eleven is an amazing movie.  I’ve probably seen it five or six times, and considering that I only rarely watch movies to begin with, and only occasionally re-watch them, that’s saying something.

What caught my eye this time around — mainly because it was pointed out several times in the commentary — was the shot economy in the movie.  There were no wasted cuts.  Many times, situations where you’d normally see a cut from one camera to another were instead handled by panning the camera, sometimes rather quickly.  One shot that sticks in my mind has two or three groups entering the building, and each time it follows the group up the walk and then whips to the next one.  It’s subtle, but very effective.  I like that it gives the movie a more dynamic feel; I like the vague but strong impressions you get of the surroundings panning past them rather than just cutting from one angle to another.  In short, I was very impressed with the technique, once I realized it was there.

But I’m a novel writer.  As awesome as that is, I’m not planning on writing screenplays any time soon.  Does that mean I don’t get to play with that trick?

Not at all.  I think there are parallels to be drawn here.

Specifically, let’s look at scenes.  I believe a good scene should be merrily doing several things at once.  If I’m watching a movie, reading a book, or reading a comic and the scene/shot/series of panels has nothing going on but the most obvious main thing going on, I’m anywhere from subtly bugged to seriously annoyed.  (Depending, of course, on how interesting the main thing is.)  In the visual media, I think it can be much easier to subtly throw in background details — people talking, side characters doind funny stuff in the back while the main characters talk, etcetera.  This may be trickier in novels, because all the text is going to be read in order — instead of being subtle by virtue of being drawn in the background, minor details like that must be written in subtly.  (This isn’t intended to bash the visual media, I should add.  There’s an art to the placement, choice, and emphasis of background stuff, but I don’t know as much about it.)

But I’m actually a little off topic here.  As nifty as that is, what I’m really talking about is cut economy.  Is it necessary to write a scene in a tent, then a scene break, then a scene five minutes later in the next tent over?  Well, maybe, maybe not — it depends on what you’re trying to do — but the point is that both using and not using a scene break are valid options, with their own merits.  Instead hitting enter twice, maybe you could write a sentence or two giving a quick sketch of what’s in between – the verbal equivalent of a camera pan. I think there’s a real potential to strengthen scenes by compounding them, but then there’s also a certain punch you get out of a scene break.

Compounding scenes is going to be one of my major goals in the second draft of Derelict.  The rough draft is largely just to get everything worked out and in place — there are a lot of small scenes that are there to do exactly one thing, because I needed that one thing done at that point in the story.  They were always intended to be rolled up into larger scenes, but it’s easier to juggle them and move them around in the early draft if I don’t have them all tangled up like the Flying Spaghetti Monster in a game of Twister.

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