So would it be, you know, okay if I made a confession? Because we've been together for some time and I think we know each other pretty well. And you've always been nice to me, for as long as I can remember. And I think it's something that needs to be said. Something that we have to get out into the open.
Because sometimes, when I put on women's clothing, it feels-
Hm. No, wait. That's not right. Wrong support group. This is the one for writers. You know, the weird one.
But in any event, I was saying. No. I should preface it first. You're all familiar with the founder of this fine website and the stories of his that he occasionally posts for our reading enjoyment, especially the ones involving that most boisterous of scribes, Odan. You've all read them, I'm sure. Which is nice. You're all fine people for doing that. That's real . . . oh, right, right. Sorry. A confession. That's where I was going with this.
What I'm getting to, is this. If there's anything you don't like in the Odan stories, it's probably my fault.
Oh, sweet hyperbole, how you refuse to let me clarify.
Over the past few years, Dan and I have had an ongoing conversation via the magic of the Internet. This age of global communications is really a wonderful thing, beyond the proliferation of adult websites to every corner of the planet, because I think it enables you to share ideas and thoughts with people who could be anywhere in the world. I know of nobody within driving distance who I can have a reasonable conversation with about writing, because none of my friends really have a lot of hard experience doing it, they're just dabblers while for me it's more of a second job that I don't get paid for. However, with the Internet, I can log on and easily find other people who share my sensibilities and engage in a long discussion over the finer points of whether, you know, the Agents should go all sparkly when they teleport, or just simply fade in and out. Deep things like that. I'm a firm believer in exposing yourself to as many different ideas and points of view as humanly possible, which is why I read things that I enjoy and things that I know I might not be that enamored of, simply because you never know what you can take out of something. That doesn't mean I go to extremes, though, I do have my limits. But I'm sure Danielle Steel will somehow go on existing, when all is said and done.
I think it's already been said that Dan and I go way back, in the sense that "way back" in this accelerated hyperage of the new century, means "like three or four years." We found each other via the AOL message boards, where I caught his attention by basically being the usual asinine person you see here before you and he immediately distinguished himself by being one of the few people who actually listened to the mad stream of babble that was being emitted from my keyboard and then bothering to answer back to try to keep the conversation going. And it's been going ever since, in a number of variations. This is probably more a credit to Dan's patience than it is to me, because I'll talk to anyone, no matter what the topic is, no matter how random. I write reviews of books I read on Amazon and sometimes people will e-mail me questions either for recommendations (or, in the case of one kid, was blatantly trying to get me to do his English paper for him) or just to answer random trivia questions. Those people, unfortunately have no idea what they're in for when they do a silly thing like that. And if that girl who e-mailed me those questions about the Elric books a month or so ago is out there reading this, let me apologize now if I didn't back then. That was way more information than you needed.
But in terms of writing, we're probably different in as many ways as we're alike. We both have our main characters who are the focus of epic, interrelated novels, we both have a fascination with unconventional writing techniques, we're both convinced that it's not a story unless you drag in as many mad ideas as possible and we both would probably rather be writing than doing our actual jobs, but our real jobs aren't so bad and you have to pay the bills somehow, right? Our styles, of course, are completely different, with my narratives tending to be ultra-complicated and dense, while he goes for a looser, more immediate feel, with more declarative sentences and more rapid action. I also tend to alternate between bizarre science-fictional adventures and more realistic escapades, while he tends to concentrate on a pulpier take on the fantasy genre that winds up being rather balls-out and unconventional (although as we've seen, he can be adept at other genres, I just tend to use the same characters no matter what the setting). And perhaps most pointedly, Odan often gets some while Tristian, alas, does not. Read into that what you will. Oh my.
Writing is like giving birth in the sense that it does take some coaxing, but if you just let it go long enough it tends to fall out naturally. But you don't want to drop the baby. Or the metaphor. Or . . . okay, enough of that. What am I trying to say? That stories don't often burst out of our heads like the mythical and clichéd Athena, that you've got to hammer and hammer until you get it just the right shape so that round peg that appears on the page somehow fits into the square hole that it first appeared as in your head. And while the author has to be the one who handles the hammer, sometimes another person can show you the weak spots where hitting hard might give the best results. That's sometimes where I come in. Odan stories by their very nature, tend to be big, epically big and when you're trying to figure out the big picture of where the story is going to go, you still have to concentrate on the small picture because that's where all the action is. You can't stay all huge and cosmic the whole time or else you get Last and First Men and you have galaxies forming and dissolving and colliding in the space of five pages and all you succeed in accomplishing is blowing your readers' minds.
Dan has a good idea where this is going, that much is clear from the scattered chapters we've seen over the past year or two. During the gestation period of the chapters, via the magic of the instant messaging system (and the occasional essay length e-mail), Dan will often toss ideas to me and use me as a sounding board, which I'm always very flattered by. Typically when I describe my plots and situations to my friends around these parts, all I get a glazed eye stare and a bunch of people staring at their watches and inching toward the door. Dan might do that as well when I send him a long e-mail telling him about my latest "brilliant" plot twist or whatnot, but he hides it well. He doesn't want the story to be simply Odan trapped in some generic fantasy plot, he wants to do something original, or if that's not possible, at least something interesting, and entertain himself and the rest of us at the same time. This early on in the story, it may not be so clear. It's hard for me to say, because I'm close to these tales, I may not be the midwife but I've stood by and watched them be born, through however many incarnations and rough drafts and revisions so that a lot of things are obvious to me that may not be to the average reader coming into this cold. A lot of these ideas have been bounced off me already, in a number of conversations, with me injecting my two cents into whatever aspect comes my way because we all know how much I keep my opinions to myself. It's not collaborating in the sense that we're both writing the story and I'm definitely not angling for any kind of credit on this stuff, the ideas and the writing are all Dan's and I think it would be pretty noticeable if I started sticking my large Italian nose into this. I've mentioned before that I would be absolutely terrible as a collaborative partner because of my dogged insistence on dragging the story in whatever foul direction I think it should go in. And paired with the right writer, one who would constantly drag it back to where he or she wanted the tale to be, the resulting tension might be interesting to see. But under most circumstances I think we would just have a mess. Dan knows how bad it could go as I pepper his plot descriptions with a zillion ideas of my own, as I attempt to rewrite the Odan story in my own image. Fortunately, I think the back and forth helps him clarify his own ideas and figure out how to put them down in coherent form (without my zest for backwards sentences and cascading sheets of words) and for his own good he doesn't listen to any of my wackier ideas. We've known each other long enough that he can separate the keepers from the duffers as I constantly strive to turn Odan into a more talkative Tristian, or at least one who scores more often. Which shows you how narrow my interpretation of the character is.
So what does all this preamble mean, other than yet another way for me to waste space and increase my column inches (you'd think I was getting paid by the word or something)? In a way, while I do critique his stories for the website because hey, I'm all about equal opportunity, going over these stories are different because a) most of the time I've seen these chapters in earlier, embryonic forms and b) I actually know the author, so I know where a lot of this stuff is coming from. Gabe (to use an example) seems nice enough (he puts up with me reading his chapters) but I don't know much about him other than he hates when I don't read the song-poem-things. Which is probably exactly where he wants whatever nebulous relationship we have to be. I can't blame him.
Keep that in mind then, when reading critiques of these stories, that it may not be so much me "reviewing" the work as much as adding yet another segment onto that ongoing conversation of ideas between the two of us that I mentioned earlier. The rest of you are invited along, of course, but I think in this case you may want up being innocent bystanders. With all the good and bad that it entails.
That said, I think we'll wrap up for this month and . . .
Yeah, like you'd get off that easily.
One of the factors that accounts for the rather slow release of chapters from the author's brain to the written page, beyond the full-time job and trying to maintain this website and those things that harder men might call "hobbies" (what, writing isn't one?) or perhaps the archaic term "recreation", is the fact that Dan is a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to chapters, at least in my view. Unlike my rough and tumble methods, where the words "quality control" are met with a boisterous round of laughter around the writing roundtable in my head ("Have Tristian punched in the stomach again?" goes up the question at the roundtable. "Why not, nobody complained the first ten times you did it. I'm sure it's just as fresh."), he's a little more deliberate than I am, with the net effect that chapter do come out slower but are generally more finished, whereas mine are like Comet for your eyes, scouring away all sensation. That said, everyone likes more output and he's no exception. So it's quite possible that maybe I might have at some point suggested just throwing caution to the winds and just flat out writing, slamming out words as the ideas came. If you let them percolate in your head, sometimes you keep revising and revising and revising in your brain and never get to the point where you can just put them down on the page and be happy. I prefer to just write and get it over with and move onto the next thing.
So, this time at least, I think he ran with that idea. So did I create a monster? Has my influence, meager as it is, ruined the story for all time? I think not, though the success of the chapter is all Dan's, and has nothing to do with me. If I was midwife at all, then that's flattering but I'm under no illusions that I'm some great inspiration. It would have been written, regardless of whether I was around or not to see it. The difference between him and me, of course, is that he does believe in a little something called "revision". What you see here probably isn't the eventual final word on what this chapter will be. Of course, all we have to work with at the moment is this piece and while it may be something different some day, we can't really discuss that because that day isn't here. All we have is this.
And this is a good look for the first time at the scribes that populate so much of Dan's writing. We've heard a lot about them (at least I have, during the world building stages of this) but rarely have we actually seen how they operate or what the inner workings might be. All we've seen so far is Odan, a bit of a renegade scribe, a little more colorful than your average scribe apparently. But Odan is also way up the chain, so that he's clearly more of a legend, a bogeyman you use to scare the other scribes, analogous to He Who Must Not Be Named, to quote a certain popular book series that you might have heard of. And yet this a flipped perspective, instead of the good guys trying to bury the evil, we have it the other way around, where the current scribes try to suppress mention of Odan, perhaps because he reminds them of what they could be and how far they are away from that. Or maybe it's just Moultrance being petty. Evil is like that, sometimes.
I like the backroom discussion element of the first section here, the fact that we're getting a glimpse into the politics that go into being a scribe. It's lonely at the top apparently, knowing all kinds of things that nobody else knows, but it seems clear that the scribes in the upper echelons of the order tend to look down on everyone they consider lesser beings. And they consider everyone lesser beings. This attitude and a comment they make toward the end of the chapter make me wonder how human they actually are, or if they were human but at some point switched over or even they've been around for so long that the word "human" no longer applies. Time changes us, of course, but people don't tend to change the longer they live, once they settle into a groove. Drop a man from five hundred years ago into society today and he'd seem utterly out of place, totally out of step and after a while, if he were to live the intervening years he might feel displaced, totally separate from what he use to call his brother human beings. A bunch of immortals sitting around a table clinking cocktail glasses together and having a jolly laugh at all those stupid people who only live fifty to sixty years or so. How do you even relate, when you're so far past everything that they might even consider relevant. Especially when we're talking a feudal, fantastic society where people are probably plowing fields and selling goods and not really thinking about gods fighting and scribes writing and people maneuvering to get ahead in some ten thousand year old game. It's so far away that you don't pay it any attention, except on the rare occasions that it might tangentially touch your world. Gee, that was some weird lightning on the mountain the other night? Wonder what it could mean? But I can't think about it too long or we won't be eating tonight. The times really didn't give you much of a chance to dwell on stuff, since you were probably too exhausted at the end of the day to even think about going to bed, let alone ponder the machinations of the universe. It's a wonder how any baby-making got done, but it was probably the only release they had in that world, just something to pierce the grime, to feel something other than back breaking toil.
And yet here we have the scribes in their distant keep, debating things that are beyond the understanding of the common man. A little more detail actually would have been nice in this section, a brief description of the surroundings. Is the chief scribe surrounded in opulence? Or does he exist in a more austere setting? The former speaks to a man well vested in luxury, the latter perhaps the mark of a hypocrite, or at least a very sincere liar.
I have to say, I . . . I don't even know what a tontine is.
The mention of the Court of Moultrance is full of portent as well, especially since it's all capitalized, making it seem to be a proper thing, like Moultrance's Traveling Circus of Fun. We've only seen Moultrance once, in a brief sequence at the beginning of the story, taking out Odan, but we don't know how long ago that was, if it's even the same Moultrance or perhaps a group of people who are just using his name and carrying on what he wanted to do. He remains as distant to the scribes as they are to us, a mere suggesting, a name dripping with importance. A name fraught with metaphor, the kind of massive, irresistible object that you can't say but has an effect on everything you do anyway, a freight train bearing down on you in the dark. You can hear it coming but you aren't really sure where it's coming from or where it is or even why it's coming after you. I like the idea of a hierarchy, that the Court sits somewhere way above the scribal order, connected to it in a way that nobody can really describe and sometimes you have commands being issued that from distant place that people follow because . . . well, nobody wants to really contemplate what might happen if you disobey, hm? All the backroom things that you never really consider, it would have been nice actually to see the scribes studying in their rooms, just a glimpse of their day, if only to contrast the mundane routine with the bizarre politics going on in the places that they aren't looking. You may disagree, I'm the type of writer that always wants to add more and cover all the angles, while others prefer to have the minimalism. You don't need it explained, they say. All the pieces are there, figure it out for yourself. And if he did spell it all out, there would be no need for me to speculate at length here. So in essence by leaving gaps, he's forcing me to face them and try to figure out what might go in there. The infamous "black box" of psychology, you know what goes in and you know what goes out but what happen inside you have absolutely no idea. You can only guess. That's what I'm doing, that's what I'm steered into doing. So is it better to invite speculation, or let the story rest where it is, all its innards laid bare? I don't think it's really for me to say.
With all that said, what Dan excels at, almost to a frightening degree, are these marvelously bizarre near psychedelic passages, where you can almost imagine him somehow injecting something purely cosmic (think the Silver Surfer of the old Marvel comics, with all the bombast and mind-blowing images that those stories entailed) and coming up with this stuff. It may not further the plot all that much but when the digressions are like this I really don't care at all. We're introduced to the scribe with no name here, already mentioned earlier as being part of some plan. I would like to see at a later point a little more clarification on what actually happened to his name, did he never have one to begin with, or was it taken from him, so that he would become even less detached from the rest of the scribes. Or even, on a more sinister note, perhaps the heads of the order took his name away because by taking away the name you reduce a person to a thing, you strip him of any kind of potential identity, making it far easier to brutalize someone. Face it, what's easier to do, go punch good ol' Barry over there or stick a red hot poker into the eye of "that guy". Names help you identity, connect, why do you think we name our pets? To set them apart from the rest of the animal world, to help cultivate affection for them, to develop an attachment. You take away a name, you take away all the history attached to it. You leave them blank, constantly recycling themselves, always wiping themselves clean.
And here, in the Cave of Capitalized Importance, the scribe has a vision that perhaps changes everything we know. We see what appears to be a version of the Great Rebellion, of the angels giving God the finger and saying, "We're going to do things our way." And of course a fight erupts and God wins, but this time there's an important difference . . . a dragon helps win the fight and as such is blessed by the Almighty to basically go and have its way with the human race as reward for standing fast with the Lord. Then all goes blank and the Bible begins with its first proper words. All of this is told is fantastically rapid prose, images tossed out like someone dropping a stack of flash cards in front of a mad camera constantly clicking away. We only get snapshots, fractions of a second, but it's enough to start to get the story. But there's still the gaps, the unexplained. What roles do the dragons really have to play in all this, and what does this apparently God-granted dominance mean? The word "fornicators" is tossed around, not quite the word of choice that any God I know would use but we're definitely not in Kansas anymore, we've taken a detour and come out in the upside-down world. Forget all you knew because it's not going to help you now. But that bit implies that the dragons are going to have their way with us and by "having their way" I mean they are going to do to us roughly what Rome did to Carthage, but you know, without getting the giant elephants involved. If he actually runs with this idea I think it's a good avenue to explore, as long as we don't get into too much carnal detail, there's always been a latent sexual subtext to fantasy (go read Samuel Delany's Neveryon series for one take on that angle), at least in an idealized sense, with half-naked barbarians and slender, shapely woman and everyone getting all fired up and bombastic over relatively minor things . . . to push that into reptile/people territory might take it somewhere very disturbing but also highlight some of the inherent kinkiness of this sort of thing, by throwing it up against something unexpected. In a world where magic exists and people sit side by side with fantastic creatures, is it at all unlikely to think that some might have some . . . exotic appetites, so to speak? Again, it will be interesting to see where he goes with this.
It will also be interesting to see how deeply he makes the connections between our world and this one. Obviously by name-checking the Bible (or at least the Old Testament, which may be more relevant to him) he's drawing some kind of line between what we know and what exists in his fantasy world, but how the line is drawn we're going to have to wait and see. Hopefully he'll follow up on that in later chapters.
I like how the scribe calls the cave one thing and the head scribes call it something else entirely. The Cave of Forgetfulness? Is this the source of his lack of a name, was this place the heart of the process that took it all away from him. Or was it always gone (the beginning implies that he had been bred to this) and this was just the last step, erasing any other traces that might be there. I like to think that it was always gone, but he was sent to the cave just to make sure, the idea of the head scribes sending him there with the intent of malice, to destroy any remnants of himself that remained, so that all is left is their tool, he's just an instrument of whatever plan they're attempting to enact. If there even is a plan, they just seem to want to kill him in an elaborate a way as possible. Behead him? Nah, we'll send him on a suicide mission. Even better, we'll make it a tradition. Actually it doesn't seem to indicate that this is a recurrent thing, but it would be interesting to see the same useless quest constantly repeating itself, all so that when the guy who comes along that you actually want to kill, nobody will think it odd that you're sending him to his death. After all, everyone else did it.
Whatever the reason, the head scribes clearly aren't a fan of this fellow, verbally abusing him every chance they get, reminding him of how lowly he is. You wonder if they treat all the scribes this way or if they're always done this because they know the scribe has some kind of higher purpose in his potential and they don't want him to ever realize it. After all, if you're face down in the dirt you really can't reach for the sky now, can you? In modern terms, he's not empowered. Perhaps all he needs is a hug, but I don't think that's going to happen. A gem would be nice and here we have references to the fact that the head scribes don't really consider themselves to be human. I have to confess, I really don't get the whole "gem" thing . . . not that I think it's a bad or useless thing, not at all, I think it does a great job of setting the story apart. But what I don't get, I don't know what the purpose of the gems are (they apparently hold your "life essence" if I read that right) and I'm not really sure how you get them or what sets the gemholders apart from everyone else. The dragon slaying party earlier all had gems, if I recall, and the implication was that you can resurrect people with the gems, perhaps not a straight "hey, I'm back" but maybe something akin to reincarnation. But they seemed human, unless they had some kind of special status due to their profession. And of course Odan was human and he's got one (even if you can't say his name . . . don't say it! Don't!), but his was taken and hidden I think, so he can't come back. Otherwise it's gems, gems, gems and I can't make heads or tails of it, at least in the context of the story. Do humans not get it? And what are the head scribes, if they aren't human? I imagine we'll see later how someone gets one installed, I'm just raising these questions now, not in the hopes that he'll revise this chapter and answer every single one but hopefully as the chapters wind up we'll start to see some answers as to exactly what impact the gems have had on society and what part they plan in shaping the lives of the people who live here. Are they blessings, or just another anchor placed by the Man to keep things down. Damn the Man! And his pretty gems.
Also, and this is just an aside, where exactly do the gems go? I was always under the impression that were lodged in your chest, near your heart, which makes sense to me if they're at all tied to your lifeforce or whatever. However this chapter seems to imply that they're lodged in your forehead, which makes sense if you consider them the repository for your memories and knowledge and so forth . . . but I always thought they went in your chest. Still, it really doesn't matter either way. Maybe it can go wherever you want, like some people have them jammed in their bellybuttons. Or in the back of their heads, that's what I'd do. Paint an eyeball on that sucker and freak out everyone standing in line behind me. "Hey, hey, none of that! Eyes on your own, pal!"
The ending of the chapter both serves to wrap things up and propel us into the next stage of the adventure. The little touches that Dan sticks into the chapter, briefly describing the surroundings of the complex, casually noting that a "singing gem" is recording the meeting, bits like that add some color to the proceedings and offset the fact that the majority of the plot is carried by dialogue with minimal description. Sometimes it seems to me to be a bit too sparse, everything is carried by simple descriptions and declarative sentences. My personal preference is for something a bit lusher in tone, but again it might be added during revision. Once you have the outline you can always sketch in the rest later. Or he might like it that way, stripping fantasy down to its elements, a direct reaction to the styles of people like Robert Jordan who enjoy describing every stitch of clothing and every leaf falling on the path. You don't need all that, what makes fantasy fantastic is not the elves and knights and waterfalls running backwards, what fantasy needs is a sense of wonder and a touch of the unreal. Too often people concentrate on the surface elements and think if they throw in arcane references to magic and populate the land with lots of the typical stuff, trolls and dwarves and evil creatures, that you can somehow capture that magic simply by going through the motions. Dan, I think, understands that there's a deeper muscle that has to work here and all the glittery gems in the world don't make a damn bit of difference if you don't have the heart for this, if you don't understand what wonder is and how to trigger that emotion in people. It's the reaction of the characters to it all, really, because we live the story through them and it's a combination of the fact that they live in this world and at the same time they're astounded by the forms it can take. You could have a fantasy story set in this world, go get one of those National Geographic books with all those nature pictures and tell me there's not magic in there. Or photographs of fog shrouded London or the countryside at night? It's the sideways trip into the impossible, but it's just possible enough so that you could imagine yourself there. As I've said before, one of reasons I think Tolkeins' Middle-Earth endures for so long (even before the movies were released) is because he turned that land into a place that people wanted to go to. The magic was in the place, the land and the people. And I think when you crib too many of those surface elements, when it becomes wizards throwing spells at each other and elves reciting long speeches and so on, you start to lose what makes it all magical and you become little better than someone's fan-fiction account of the local Renaissance Fair. Have at thee, indeed.
And Dan manages to convey this, to some extent. Some of the dialogue could be massaged a little, I think, it comes across as a little too Ernest Hemingway sometimes, with all the choppy sentences, everyone speaking in stark, brief syllables. The best moment for me, is the little stutter Gazine gives as he takes the scribe away to be given his mission. It betrays a second of doubt, it gives you a brief insight into the character and what his thoughts might be, that all the rest of the dialogue really can't tell you. For all the talking these people do, we really don't know them all that well. It could be all posturing, their thoughts really aren't open to us and all we have of them is what they say. I think a little internal narrative would go a long way toward helping us connect with all of this. I'm not saying turn this into a fantasy version of Ulysses (which makes our snotty literary name dropping quota of the month), although a stream of consciousness day in the life of Odan might be amusing as an experiment (ideas like that are why Dan shouldn't talk to me) where the internal monologue overwhelm any kind of action at all . . . but otherwise you get little more than a stage-play with an awfully large budget and unless the dialogue is more resonant then you're just watching the people move across the screen, without really knowing why. Instead of being evocative, it winds up being exposition, moving the story along until the next grand description. People wind up talking at each other instead of to each other and you lose the back and forth that make dialogue so much fun. It's not so much conversation as much as people having parallel conversations at the air. When they converge, that's where you have the story.
But the story moves on its own, a freight train barreling toward the station without any breaks. The last section holds all the ammunition, everything we need to launch ourselves into the next chapter. The Quest is assigned, finally, and the scribe has to go get a Relic. What is the Relic? I think I know but the rest of you don't and it should be fun finding out. Maybe it's nothing at all, just as LOTR wasn't about the stupid ring as much as how people acted when the world was falling apart, how you could be a hero when nobody expected and the lengths you would go through to save the world. And our hero gets a traveling companion, which is probably a good thing so that he doesn't have to talk to himself all the time (I have a feeling he won't be alone for long though). I like the idea of using something non-human to keep him in line, with the rather chilling thought that it's like being assigned a minder, someone to make sure you're staying on track. How will the troll know what's in the quest, though. What if the scribe just decides to go to a bar and is like, "Well, I'm gathering material for research and fortifying myself." Who can say, then? As much as a blank slate as the scribe appears to be, I think he's far cleverer than he looks, especially in the way he throws out that comment about the care and feeding of dragons, showing that maybe he knows more about what's going on than it seems. Or perhaps he's learning to question everything, in the hopes that it will lead to further revelations. Although if the elder scribes had any brains they would just claim the book was a work of fiction written by a madman, held in the library only because of its status as a novelty. I think a place like the scribal library would contain the secret history of the world, but not in a book called "The Secret History of the World", just scattered in the various books, in the things they couldn't hide, so that if you bothered to look long enough you might be able to piece together what really happened to make the world the kind of place that it is. And the scribe, I think, in that comment makes the first step toward becoming an actual person, as opposed to the blank slate that he is. Because right now he's ultra-passive, hardly even reacting to anything that comes his way. The elder scribes put him on a suicide mission and he just says "fine" even while acknowledging that, yup, it's a suicide mission. He's been following orders all his life for reasons that he really can't explain and maybe he's not dead inside but he's fairly close. And I think we'll see him start to become his own man, to become a person, period and that's what part of this will be about. I'm sure it will be about more than that because a story can be about more than one thing, dammit, but any chance we have for some honest character growth can't be too bad.
This is all prelude, I think. I liked this chapter but I think Dan is saving the big guns for the later chapters, when the action finally starts ramping up. This is the part of the story where you put all you pieces on the table, lay your cards out and dare the reader to guess where this is going, before you start flipping the bastards over and moving things around. With everyone nearly in place, I'm sure hilarity will ensue. That said, this did turn out a bit sparser than usual, except for that grand middle section where everything just goes nuts, but it makes up for it in plot and hints that things will be converging soon. But I like the world he's created, both for the familiar aspects of it and the stuff that's totally new. I like the different factions he's setting up, and even if the tension in the story won't be overtly political (he can do subtle, but I think the slant will be more action and fantastic oriented, if that makes any sense) it will still be people playing other people off of each other in order to get ahead. In the end, it makes you think of possibilities and invites speculation. It makes you wonder what's going to happen and want to read further and that's what a story has to do at the end of the day. It's what Stephen King does, just on a bigger scale than the rest of us. It's making people care that is the hard part and Dan does a good job here. We see ourselves in the scribe, I would definitely stress the fact that he has no name, that he's barely a person, flat and blank, and that the worst part is that he doesn't realize there is a problem. He's always been this way and he doesn't know anything different. And when he does realize that something is wrong, I think we'll see the revelation that "it doesn't have to be this way" and that's when the changes begin. But if you don't know where you have to be, how do you know how to get there? If you don't keep a personal sense to the epic action, you're going to lose people. Time will tell if the story gets overwhelmed in its own epicness, but I think we'll be okay.
Good job this time out, Dan. Each chapter adds a little bit more to the mythos and the ongoing plot and I think the degree of care you put into each chapter and to the story at large really shines through. In fact, it barely shows any of my influence at all. Ha! I think if you develop the stuff you started here, you're going to have quite the tale on your hands, between the struggle with the dragons, the scribe's search for identity, and the scribal brotherhood going through a bit of schism, with Moultrance trying to maintain power even as Odan shows up to threaten it, perhaps pushing the whole order in a new direction. The good thing about this story is that you can look at all the factors and see a million ways they could bounce off each other and that's a good thing.
So, nice work. That conclusion makes it worth reading all eleven pages of this crap, I'm sure, although I'm sure the thought of a mind fanatical enough to devote that much wordage to discussing this stuff in all its permutations is frightening enough to give chills to even the most hardened literary soldier. But, hey, that's what I'm here for.
Oh, and this column? Totally my fault. Just so you know.
I await the rotten tomatoes of your renewed ardor.
• MB
11.23.05
"You are sleeping at bus stops, wondering how you got your name and what you're going to do about it . . ." - Belle & Sebastian, "Lazy-Line Painter Jane"
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