Still
plodding along on the sky-pirates thing – slowly. I haven’t exactly taken the
bull by the horns and leapt into this new year with the vigour for writing that
I intended and this must be remedied. Excuses aren’t worth much, but as a token
effort I’m going to blame the Australian Open somewhat for playing havoc with
my sleeping schedule. I love my sleep. And again, whilst I drag my heels in the
writing department there has been a lot of background thinking going on
including a complete overhaul of the second part of my fantasy series, but
words are wind I know.
It may
not surprise you to hear that I’m a slow reader too. This month though I’ve
finished ‘A Storm of Swords’ (both parts), torn through ‘A Feast for Crows’ and
also cut a swathe out of ‘A Dance with Dragons’ as well. Needless to say the
quality of the reading has contributed a great deal to my haste and the formula
is one that encourages use of the invented word ‘unputdownable’ that I read in
a review somewhere. But I have found my first gripe with it as well.
For
those of you unfamiliar with the series the chapters are written as point of
view and the world is vast, so not everybody is in contact with each other and
there are many stories running parallel too with lots of awesome overlapping
and chain events affecting others both directly and indirectly. Not having an
established ‘good versus evil’ vibe also means that we follow characters in
direct opposition to each other with allegiances swapping about all over the
place and petty in-fighting as well. There is an awful lot to cover and as
events unfold down the timeline new places are dragged in and it gets
increasingly wonderful, but increasingly detached as well.
After
the events of ‘A Storm of Swords’ the seams burst and George R R Martin had to
make a decision. He chose to split the next part into two separate books with
some of the characters disappearing to follow their stories in the second, but
with both set just after ‘A Storm of Swords’. At the back end of ‘A Dance with
Dragons’ the stories will join back up again and the characters followed in ‘A
Feast for Crows’ will be reintroduced but I haven’t got that far in my reading
yet to see how smoothly it happens.
I have
to admit, I found it slightly irritating to be thrown back in time to begin
with. One scene in particular got my back up because it adopted the same
technique I’m planning on using and I didn’t really enjoy it. In said scene one
character followed in ‘A Feast for Crows’ interacts with a character followed in
‘A Dance with Dragons’. The second character’s account is almost identical but
with his own thoughts, feelings and reasoning behind decisions in place of the
first, and I found myself putting up with it rather than enjoying it because
there wasn’t really a case of a revelation happening the second time around to
make it any more exciting. I have to remember though that there was five years
between the two publications so perhaps if I had read it in accordance with
release dates it may not have been so fresh in the memory.
I’ve
taken the feeling into account though and perhaps I can approach the same
situation when it happens in my writing differently. So I have to thank the
learning curve here. Things with the series are wonderful again now and it’s
obvious that the partition was necessary so as not to lose touch with
individual storylines being spaced too far apart. It does raise a question
about writing such complex and vast stories though. Is there such thing as a
perfect size? As in the optimum amount before a story gets too big and has to
broken down like this? I don’t know. One idea I’m looking at is to write
characters accounts as series that work as stand-alone series but for other
readers can be taken into the whole chronology of the world if chosen. That
would mean releasing books of several different series at the same time though,
and with my track record I better not get ahead of myself eh? Till next time.
