Good morning, and I hope you all had an excellent Memorial Day! I went hiking with my family… in jeans and a heavy shirt, without a hat or sunglasses, and didn’t bring water with me on the hike. Still ended up being an excellent day, but next time I need to prepare a bit better before I go hiking.

The YANCON Lecture

Since I’ve mentioned it a few times here I wanted to provide a followup after the fact: YANCON this year was excellent! As for my lecture, I ended up having too much to say and lectured through most of my Q&A time. Oops.

For anyone here that discovered me through YANCON, welcome! I hope you find my musings useful, particularly my chronicling of my self-publishing journey.

The Failed Technomancer

We got some sales! Considering I have a marketing budget of $0, this is wildly exciting. Nothing huge, mind you—just a few copies of ebook and audio—but still, it leaves me practically glowing.

The hardcover hasn’t been finalized yet, but once it is I’ll have reached the end of my The Failed Technomancer updates, at least until I can start talking about the sequel, or until reviews start coming through—fingers crossed!

Newsletter

The votes are in! And the votes for good “newsletter cookies” are, essentially, “Do all of the above.” I somewhat plan on doing that—I have two short stories I am polishing in preparation for the newsletter, and I have first-draft manuscripts for The Failed Technomancer and the upcoming Inner Demon handy—what form I decide to provide those manuscripts in will influence how much commentary I can leave in the manuscripts.

As for deleted scenes, I’ve decided that’s going to be low-priority, because giving you all first-draft manuscripts will mean you already have access to some deleted scenes and many heavily changed scenes. As such, in my opinion, there’s no real value to dedicating time to a “deleted scenes” cookie unless I have scenes that were added after the first draft but deleted before the final draft and and interesting enough to warrant the effort. In my opinion, I might have one or two scenes that fits the bill for Inner Demon, but not for The Failed Technomancer.

Next step is to read Newsletter Ninja 1 and 2 and learn everything I can. (Again, no affiliate links here, I just weirdly enjoy hyperlinking everything I can.)

Inner Demon

I have completed…

drumroll

Three chapters of editing! That’s including the prologue.

That’s far less than I wanted to be at, but I also openly admitted to myself that I needed to prioritize finishing my lecture last week, with what time I had, and that ended up eating more time than I expected. This week, though, every day I’m editing at least one chapter before everything else. Including working on this blog, which is part of the reason I’m a little later than usual!

“Bloggyness”

The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England (Brandon Sanderson) ended up being a bit of a flop for me. The book itself is gorgeous, of course, and in particular the doodles gracing many pages are an absolute delight. If you are experiencing this book in audiobook form, or ebook, I highly, highly recommend going to Steve Argyle’s website and checking out the artwork. In particular, look at every sketch of Mervin the Wizard—those aren’t in the ebook, but they tell a really cute and heartwarming story all on their own in the physical book. At least, the nice Kickstarter copy. I don’t know what the paperback published through TOR will contain.

ahem

See how I quickly got off topic? I felt that way very often reading this book, and that’s the short, no-spoiler version of my review. For me, all the most interesting parts of Frugal Wizard’s Handbook weren’t related to the story I was reading, but were related to Mervin the Wizard, or the slight hints of deep worldbuilding, and I spent a lot of time wishing I were reading the stories being hinted at rather than the one I was being given. Which isn’t to say there’s no value to John’s story—I did have fun in parts, and the “Sanderson Avalanche” at the end was still fairly satisfying.

For everyone reading who loved this book, good! I’m glad it came together for you. I’m just describing the experience I had.

Now, Sanderson has an incredible track record of producing tons and tons of books of exceptional quality, so I think it’s fair to give him a pass when one book comes through that doesn’t quite stick the landing, but I still want to talk about this in more detail—spoiler warning—because I find wondering why this book just doesn’t work (for me) a good mental exercise. If nothing else, it’s a good lesson on what not to do.

There are so many great ideas in Frugal Wizard’s Handbook, many of which could (maybe should) be a story on their own. Unfortunately, for me, they ended up conflicting with each other and distracting from each other rather than building into a sum greater than their parts. I often felt that the amount of great ideas Sanderson was juggling in this book, combined with the short length (relatively speaking, with regards to typical Sanderson novels), prevented any of them from reaching their full potential as we just didn’t have time to dive deeply into any of them. So let’s take a look at some of these elements that, on their own, are amazing.

The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook Itself

The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook is an amazing concept that was depressingly underutilized. After all, the name of the book being The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England, to me, promises that the Handbook will play a major role in the story! Instead, the Handbook is mostly destroyed on page 1 and the surviving contents of the Handbook are largely useless and don’t come up very often. They play a minor role in helping John (the protagonist) getting some of his memories back, but the biggest role the Handbook itself provides is paper for John to draw on.

For greater context, this book is filled with inserts (mostly FAQs) from the Handbook. These inserts provide a lot of laughs, do lots of worldbuilding, and give a clear picture of Frugal Wizard, Inc as an unethical, farcical megacorporation just looking to make a quick buck regardless of the damage it might be doing to other dimensions. That alone is an amazing idea that kind of makes me think of Aperture Laboratories, which I consider a very positive comparison. There’s tons of room here for a hilarious romp through dimensions trying to thwart this selfish organization, or just survive its machinations. My imagination was buzzing from all the effort and love that went into crafting these parts of the book.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t amount to anything. John at one point notes that he grabbed a copy of The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook to help him survive whatever dimension he ended up in, but that’s it in the story itself. All this building, all this interesting creation inserted here and there, and all it amounts to is a one-sentence explanation in the book itself why John has the Handbook. He might not even have used Frugal Wizard, Inc to jump dimensions in the first place! That part isn’t super clear.

Unfortunately, despite being so removed from the story, the Handbook and the FAQs just distracted from and damaged the main story. Their tone didn’t match with the rest of the book very well—tonal contrast can be used to great effect in stories, but it didn’t work for me in this one since these two elements of the stories weren’t actually meshed together. In addition, the Handbook and the FAQs did so much worldbuilding before the story itself could that I began to feel that the story couldn’t support itself. This isn’t true—the necessary worldbuilding and exposition does happen within the story, but that doesn’t change the feeling I got that the story needed this ultimately extraneous exoskeleton in order stand on its own two feet.

“River” Dimensional Travel

Dimensional travel is anything but unique in science fiction, but Sanderson still managed to create a dimensional system that was fascinating and felt distinct. In this universe, dimensions have two primary comparisons: rivers and color spectrums. Here’s how the two comparisons work.

First, our current dimension could be thought of like a river. Alternate dimensions are like branches of our river—since they branch off of our dimension, it makes sense that they mimic aspects of our dimension. You can also travel down a branch of the main river, then a branch off that branch, and so forth if you wanted to, but you can’t travel “sideways”—if you want to travel to another branching dimension, you need to travel “upriver” far enough, then go back “downriver” again. Finally, “downriver” dimensions are lacking in substance—meaning, for whatever reason you can’t take anything from a “downriver” dimension and bring it back to an “upriver” dimension. This creates some fascinating limitations in travel and character action—for example, you can’t save someone in a dying dimension by taking them “upriver” into your dimension, because taking them to an “upriver” dimension will disintegrate them. (This doesn’t happen in the book.)

Second, there are a theoretical infinite number of “branching rivers” coming off of our dimension, and here’s where the color spectrum comparison comes in. If you look at a color spectrum, strictly speaking there are an infinite number of colors presented, though most of those colors are only minutially different from their neighbor in shade. Similarly, dimensions “nearest” to ours downriver have only minute differences, being almost the same “color” in the color wheel, but if you explore enough and find “farther” dimensions (maybe even a completely different color on the color spectrum) you could find dimensions with much bigger changes. but that still clearly were derived from our own in some way.

The technological level of John’s people gives them awareness of these alternate dimensions, but doesn’t give them the ability to accurately “zoom in” on any of them. Instead, dimensional travel begins as stabs in the dark, just discovering what can be found. Once a portal has been made between dimensions, an anchor can be left in the dimension, allowing it to be accessed again. Critically, if the anchor is destroyed then the dimension likely will never be accessible again, just because of the odds of finding that same dimension among an infinite number of other dimensions is so low. Thus, there’s a real risk of being permanently stranded if something goes terribly wrong.

Now, there’s not necessarily a story here yet, but it’s a really interesting setting that promises a lot of sci-fi travel, not-quite familiar locales, and so forth. This alone is a perfect setting for the Frugal Wizard, Inc stuff I mentioned above, or could be the backbone of a completely different story on its own. Either way, there’s a ton of depth to this sci-fi setting that largely goes unrealized in the current story, even though you learn a lot about it. And because so much time is spent learning about this aspect of the setting, you don’t have as much time to marinate in the setting John is actually in, being possibly the most unique dimension his people have ever found, as described below.

Magic and Skops and Wights, Oh My!

The magic of the dimension that John ends up in is really cool. The people he befriends are trapped between two destructive forces that want little more than to see them dead, and their only protections are these land-spirits called wights that can create and destroy. Skops (essentially skalds or bards) travel the land, shoring up defenses against their enemies by using “boasts” to strengthen friendly wights and scare away unfriendly ones. There’s also a fascinating relationship between the people and the deity of this land, who is clearly trying to betray his people.

And if that seems weirdly brief compared to what I described above (despite being really promising), that’s because it is! So much focus goes into the sci-fi aspect of this story that, despite John being actively in a fantasy world, we don’t get a lot of the magic and the wonder until the very end. The two most major worldbuilding elements end up conflicting with each other and bringing each other down rather than building each other up.

John’s Past

Adding even more to the story that needs to be described and explained, John is a blank-room protagonist, meaning much of the story is centered around him rediscovering his lost memories. And the things John remembers, the things going on in his past that he’s lost, are way more interesting than what John is doing right now. I’d rather read the prequel that tells me how John got to where he is!

Blank-room protagonists can work, and can work really well. Sanderson describes The Bourne Identity as one of his inspirations for the blank-room protagonist side of his story, and The Bourne Identity is amazing. But I don’t think it was right for this story.

Perhaps part of the reason I didn’t find John’s story interesting in this book is how payoffs happened. There were several points where I guessed John’s past pages before he did, leaving me feeling that John was pretty dumb, and there were other points where I correctly guess John’s past but didn’t find the next “revelation” all that interesting in the context of the current story and who John was.

Too Much Stuff!

If you’re still with me at this point, here are the combined layers of “required learning” necessitated by the above:

• To understand the story and allow for a meaningful conclusion, we need to understand John and learn his backstory
• To understand the story and the world to allow for meaningful things to happen, we also need to learn the world John finds himself in
• To understand the story and the world to allow for meaningful things to happen, we also need to learn the general worldbuilding of dimensional travel and how John got here in the first place

That is a ton of stuff that the reader needs to be taught and needs to understand (at least, as presented within this book, and along with the characters) in order for the characters to have the power to act in ways that feel meaningful for the reader, and I think it was unnecessary. At least one of those layers should be removed—maybe two—and the reader could get right into the story, characters, and plot without getting caught up on anything. If we look at Bourne as an example again, those stories are set in the real world, significantly lowering the learning curve and allowing us just to focus on Jason Bourne’s past. (It also helps a lot that what’s happening now with Jason is really engaging.) With Frugal Wizard’s Handbook, we have three different levels of worldbuilding and exposition we’re cramming on as we build toward the conclusion, which learning takes most of the book! And it isn’t helped by the fact that a fair amount of pages are dedicated to the Handbook itself, which doesn’t actually matter for the story or worldbuilding.

Sefawynn’s Defiance

In addition to all the above, and perhaps the biggest tragedy of all, we have Sefawynn’s defiance! Sefawynne is this story’s skop, and a big part of her arc is her failing faith in her god, Woden (intentionally a knock-off Odin). The big, climactic resolution of the story rests heavily on her finally realizing that her god has abandoned her and his people, defying him and spitting rebellion in his face, and then being blessed with immense power from other gods as a result, saving the day and restoring this people’s power to protect themselves from their enemies. As the story is, the culmination of Sefawynne’s arc is still a really strong moment that saves the overall experience, but it could have been significantly more powerful if the story had just been about Sefawynn in the first place, if the story had focused on her rather than shoving her to the side. This, for me, was the most interesting and strongest part of this story, but it only rarely gets a chance to bring its head above the river of previously-mentioned exposition and worldbuilding.

Granted, the dimension-hopping gets tied back into Sefawynne’s story slightly at the end of the last chapter, but not in a way I found very satisfying. Essentially, John’s presence is poisonous to the wights of this world, so by sticking with Sefawynne he can protect her from Woden’s anger. It would have been nice if this had been important enough to not just bring up as a last-second justification for the hero to not kill himself.

Mervin the Wizard

Oh Mervin! The diamond in the rough, my favorite part of the book and completely unrelated to the main story. As I mentioned earlier, much of this book has doodles in the margins telling the story of a cute, magic-less wizard named Mervin. I immediately fell in love with this little guy as he adventured around, did good, made friends, befriended enemies, tried to save lives, died in the process, and was rescued at the very last before bringing together all the people he had met to build a thriving community of unique peoples. I felt so deeply invested in Mervin’s story that about halfway through Frugal Wizard’s Handbook I began skipping forward just to see all the doodles, only returning to finish the “main” story after I had finished Mervin’s.

Mervin’s story is completely unrelated to John’s story, or Sefawynn’s. It’s not even related to the Frugal Wizard, Inc, as Mervin accesses the ability to hop dimensions at “Beardy’s Bolts, Brews, and Burnintators Wizarding Emporium.” Other than being a wizard with no magic, the only connection Mervin has with Frugal Wizard’s Handbook is being doodled in the margins of the physical book! Despite how absurdly delightful his story is, he’s so unnecessary that ebook and audiobook readers will never know he existed, but he completely stole the show for me!

Combining Ideas

One of my favorite book series is Codex Alera, by Jim Butcher. This series was written on a dare, essentially—someone told Jim that a good book could not be written off of a bad idea. Jim said terrible ideas can be turned into bestselling books and essentially promised, “Give me two of the worst ideas you can and I will write one of the best fantasy series out there.” The two ideas he was given were “Pokemon” and “The Lost Roman Legion.” And thus, Codex Alera was born—and it rocks!

Unfortunately, Sanderson had way more than two amazing ideas in Frugal Wizard’s Handbook, but they just weren’t combined well, and as a result the sum feels less than the total of its parts. It was really disappointing, but it still left me with a lot of good things to take away from the book. For one, if Sanderson ever does write a sequel to this book (which I assume is unlikely, but hope happens), I would be stoked, because there’s so much unrealized potential here that I’d be genuinely thrilled to see come to light. Especially regarding the epilogue—boy howdy, I won’t spoil this, but something spectacularly interesting gets promised there, made all the more frustrating by the knowledge that I might never get to see it realized!

Anyway… this was way too much. I rambled, I tangented, I’m not sure I brought it together well at the end, and I think I repeated myself too much. If you made it this far, I hope you had fun anyway. I’m re-reading Sanderson’s Way of Kings next, and given the length of that book I don’t predict I’ll be very bloggy in a post for a while. (That said, Way of Kings is an immediate classic and I’m not sure I can add much to existing conversation about its, so I might not feel the need to review it when finished. We’ll see.)