Hello!

As I type this out over the weekend, it is hailing outside with ferocity, coupled with winds that could probably carry my baby away if I granted her wish and let her wander out into the elements. And here I am, inside, warm, comfortable, doing my best not to be distracted by my wife’s anime playing in the next room. (Most of my experience with anime is as an over-the-shoulder or one-room-over observer.)

The world we live in is absolutely amazing. Most humans for most of history were largely prey to the elements, but now it takes a pretty real disaster to stop modern life. But that doesn’t mean all of these blessings aren’t fragile, in many senses, as I discovered when the power and internet went out for several hours for unknown reasons.

I think I’m going to go throw a snowball at someone.

The Failed Technomancer, chapter 29, is live! I’ve also gone through and added pages to the website for all future chapters, which will make it a little faster for me to update everything in the future, and help prevent hiccoughs from turning into weeks without an update. I hope it doesn’t hurt navigability, but I guess I’ll learn whether or not this works based on any feedback I get.

Bloggyness Review: Murtagh

I didn’t like Christopher Paolini’s latest entry into the world of Eragon (Murtagh). I don’t think I’ve made that a secret in recent posts. While it was exciting to revisit a world that captivated me in middle school and high school, and while it was briefly delightful to check in on characters I really liked, the excitement wore off quickly and was replaced with boredom and bafflement.

(As an aside, Murtagh inspired my blog post on vanilla fantasy. But I like some vanilla fantasy, and find myself returning to it. Murtagh won’t be on that list of books.)

Despite not being a fan of Murtagh, I want to start off with some positives. Murtagh and Thorn, as characters, are generally likable. They’ve been given the short end of the stick their whole lives, and as a result it’s easy to root for them as underdogs. They also frequently have interesting nuance in their decisions, as they have so many very good reasons to abandon the world and go do their own thing, but often choose to put themselves in danger to help others anyway. It’s an interesting dynamic that very successfully makes them feel like tarnished heroes, and in some ways like lone cowboys riding into town, uninterested in being noticed or stirring up trouble, and then being forced into resolving local conflict anyway. In concept.

Murtagh also retains a lot of what made the other books in Alagaësia fun, including an extremely flexible magic system, cool dragons with a perspective of the world that feels different enough from the other creatures, and some exciting action. The mixture of many different (familiar) magical creatures together—elves, dwarves, and essentially-orc-urgals—makes the world feel very familiar and D&D-esque. To the right people, these things will all be extremely appealing. Unfortunately, what Murtagh is lacking is the epic adventure featured in Eragon and its sequels, focusing more on a character study of the titular character and, to a much lesser extent, his dragon, Thorn; how much mileage that gets you depends on what you want out of the book. It didn’t work for me.

That said, if you enjoyed Eragon and its sequels—specifically, if you read them recently and enjoyed them—and you want more, the odds are favorable that you’ll have a good time with Murtagh. I do think this book would have been stronger and worked better for me if I had read it shortly after Brisingr, rather than with around a decade between me reading Murtagh and the last book of the Inheritance Cycle.

If that’s all you want to know, or if you don’t want to risk me poisoning the well any further, stop now, skip to the next section, because what follows are my criticisms.

Murtagh had very little drive to it. The book starts with Murtagh and Thorn stumbling on something clearly dangerous and wicked, something that might foreshadow a terrible threat to the entire land, and continues with them deciding to just check it out and see where things go. They never have a personal stake in the main plot, or any reason to keep on investigating beyond just being decent enough people, I guess. I was left with with many, many moments where I wondered why Murtagh and Thorn kept intentionally pushing themselves into danger rather than alerting others (Eragon, Arya, or Nasuada), who would have more of a direct reason to confront the vague threats Murtagh discovered. The book attempts to address this by having Murtagh and Thorn ask themselves why they are going on this adventure frequently, but I was never fully satisfied with the answers. There are no hard rules in writing, but if you are going to break one of the most basic firm suggestions—give your lead a personal stake in whatever is going on—you should replace it with something equally compelling. Paolini’s creative decision just didn’t work for me in Murtagh.

How the book was written frequently annoyed me as well. Much of the book is written in very short, choppy scenes that don’t appear to go anywhere or serve much of a purpose. I suppose I could justify many of those scenes, if I wanted to, by saying they gave us deeper insights into Murtagh or Thorn as characters, but if that’s all those scenes do then they don’t justify their own word count, and they weren’t interesting enough to me to feel like a little treat. Again, no hard rules in writing—it is possible to write amazing scenes that do only one or two things, or nothing at all, and have them elevate a story anyway. It’s hard, it’s rare, but it’s doable. It just didn’t work for me as Paolini handled it in Murtagh.

Another how the book was written that bugged me, I got tripped up by the many, many times that, for some inexplicable reason, a seemingly random scene break was inserted in a spot where no scene break was needed. The scene would be moving, there would be a break in the middle of a page, and then the scene would continue exactly where it had left off. This feels to me more of a failure of editing and formatting than writing, but I don’t actually know who insisted on these intrusive breaks.

A final how, the flashbacks didn’t work for me in this story. I found they often ground what little pacing this book had to a complete halt, particularly given how long most of them were. The flashbacks featuring Nasuada felt especially unnecessary. Maybe my mind would change if I had read the previous books more recently, but Murtagh’s awkward pining over Nasuada—particularly in moments where he should be thinking about almost literally anything else—left me annoyed with Murtagh, rather than sympathizing with him and growing closer to him.

But the real, biggest issue with this book is that the entire second half shouldn’t have happened. I really, truly don’t agree with the character and plotting decisions Paolini made. To attempt to be brief, the book makes it clear that Murtagh and Thorn value freedom above all else—but staying alive is a close second. They even avoid making promises, seeing them as too binding at times. They are then presented with this witch who is extremely, obviously, incredibly evil; is very evidently in possession of magic that Murtagh is incapable of defeating with his nature-of-magic-altering-powers; and clearly either has significant mind-control powers or significant skill with brainwashing. Despite all of these red flags, Murtagh and Thorn repeatedly put themselves at this witch’s mercy to “figure out what’s going on” (almost their exact wording) ultimately resulting in them being captured, enslaved, mind-controlled, and forced to commit atrocities. It was somewhat painful how often I was shaking my head, saying to myself, “Murtagh would not do that, he would leave,” but for some reason Murtagh chose to stick around and dig himself deeper in, very nearly chaining his own arms.

Finally, Murtagh’s attempts at cosmic horror just did not land for me. A lot of this book is spent hinting at this terrible, unknowable, horrible villain lurking behind the curtain of reality, just waiting for the stars to be right so it can wake up and destroy… everything? The emphasis on dreams and dreaming, in particular, felt very intentionally Lovecraftian to me—I think Christopher Paolini was trying to make his own brand of Cthulhu Mythos in this fantasy world. But as soon as these things started being hinted at I said to myself, “It’s just a really big dragon underground, isn’t it?” I was right. And there’s nothing cosmically scary about a dragon, so once this became clear what little tension and horror the book had collapsed.

Dragons are too familiar of creatures to be a source of cosmic horror. They can be scary, sometimes, and probably can be used for effective fantasy horror, but the whole purpose of cosmic horror is to hinge on the unknowable. Making the “unknowable” a giant dragon sleeping underground just doesn’t work, no matter how dangerous the dragon might be!

As I type this, I can’t help but think the Bone graphic novels did so much of what Murtagh attempted, and so much better. Those books featured dragons, dreams, a weird cult, a threat of a giant underground dragon that was effectively a deity waiting to wake up and destroying everything, etc. I don’t remember Bone trying to call upon cosmic horror to get its point across, and that was probably for the best. You know what? That’s my suggestion. If you want cults and sleeping dragons, long-term stuff threatened in the background, and characters with direct investment, go read Bone.

Bloggyness Review: Atom Bomb Baby

Atom Bomb Baby, by Brandon Gillespie, is a “dystopian science-fantasy story” set in a future world where humanity colonized the stars, aliens attacked, and humanity responded by nuking each planet into an apocalyptic hellscape. Now we have a setting not unlike Fallout, but also interstellar, and featuring bizarre alien creatures.

This book wasn’t for me. I don’t have nearly as much to say in that regard as I had to say about Murtagh; I really wanted to like the book. It promised at an interesting emotional dilemma for the lead, it had a psychic six-year-old, the world and the promised threats within were interesting, and I genuinely like the atom punk setting. I wanted to like this book. Even when the first few pages had way too much exposition, way too many moments where I thought, “Why don’t you just show me these cool-sounding things instead of telling me?”, I kept pushing forward because I wanted to get hooked. But it didn’t happen. So, even though I typically try to finish every book I start, I ended up putting Atom Bomb Baby down about a quarter to a third of the way through.

That said, this is a book I’m putting on my shelf for my kids to read in middle school. I think it will be a solid book to introduce someone to the hobby, but not something that will easily please someone who knows the ropes. It’s not sold as a middle-grade novel, but of what I read things promised to be clean enough that I wouldn’t be afraid to hand it to my future middle-schoolers.

Do I enjoy reading anything? Anything at all? Is it possible for me to be entertained by modern writing? Tune in eventually when I finish my next big read to find out.

Writing Updates

Hazel Halfwhisker is at almost 43,000 words. That’s a bigger jump from last week than it might appear on the surface; though my official word count was 38,000 words last week, Hazel Halfwhisker got cut down to 35,000 words before I began my experiment in pushing forward to finish the first draft with no stopping for revisions, period. So I wrote closer to 8,000 words in five days. That’s some pretty good writing! I have this next section of the novel pretty well planned out, so I hope I’ll be able to keep up a similar pace for the next few weeks. At least until I get to Part 3, where I won’t go back and start editing, but I will need to do some more planning of details in order to ensure I hit my end-goals for this book.

Give me two or three months and I think this book will be finished, draft one anyway. I think I will be done at about 150,000 words.

As for The Courage in a Small Heart and Inner Demon? Been a bit since I gave an update on them. Well… The Courage in a Small Heart still shows “Application Submitted” at Writers of the Future, and Inner Demon still shows “Manuscript Submitted” at Baen Publishing. The wait goes on, but hopefully won’t exceed the limits of this month.

Hopefully, hopefully, hopefully.

I’ll accept waiting much longer than this month if it ultimately leads to success, though.

Send-Off

Adios, my friends. Have an excellent week. Stay warm!