No blogging lately, but don't feel neglected, since I'm not doing anything else on the computer either. I didn't even have a chance to turn Malaya's laptop on Sunday, and that's after I spent maybe 30 minutes late Saturday night reading over the first 1/3 of the nearly-completed chapter 6. I've been doing stuff with the parents, shopping, eating out, eating in, watching TV, and generally being a lazy son of a bitch. What is this, a vacation? Plus, since I once again forgot to bring along the 50 foot Ethernet cable, I can't get this laptop online without carrying it into dad's office, unplugging his computer from the router, and plugging this one in. And as instant gratification as I am about blogging, it's hard to find the interest to type stuff out in here on wordpad, and then walk in there and hook it up and get it online.
It's funny too; I've been toiling away, on and off, for more than 3 years on a novel that only two people have seen any of, but that seems fine. I have no burning desire to stick parts of it online, though I have with a few deleted excerpts. Yet I can't find it in me to write a few paragraphs for a blog entry when there's a 2 minute delay built in by technical issues? Bleh. (Make that 10 minutes, since the blogger page turned every asterisk I pasted over from Apple Word into ASCII gobbledegook.)
If I were here for longer I'd do more, but with my return scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, I'm in a "I'll catch up tomorrow" mood. I've not written a word about the Blizcon stuff, either for my own use or for the D2 site's, and I'll have to get on that Tuesday evening, while some memories remain. I'm just going to go through the dozens of pictures I took from there and do a sort of retroactive live blogging thing, with images to comment on and spur my memory. It will be an entirely content free article, when it comes to gaming info, but what else is new around here...
One thing I am enjoying on this trip/vacation is a book. I brought along Harry Potter 6, finally meaning to get started reading it, especially with the much-desired
Feast of Crows coming out in a week. Yet as I sat in the Oakland airport Thursday afternoon, over an hour early for my departing flight (They make you check in an hour and a half early so you’ll have more time to wait at the gate, I think.) what book did I pull out? Not Harry Potter, but another one I brought on a whim.
First King of Shannara, by Terry Brooks.
I picked it up in paperback at a library give away some months ago, but had never opened it until Thursday. Why I picked it up or brought it along is unknown, given
my unmitigated scorn of the first two Shannara books by Brooks, but I'm going to blame it on curiosity. He'd written around twenty best sellers in his fantasy universe -- they couldn't all be that bad, could they? He had to get some original, non-Tolkien/lite ideas eventually, didn't he? His prose had to improve after his first couple of dull, seemingly-unedited novels, didn’t it?
Well there's good news about all of the above.
First King of Shannara is the 13th novel in the series, and while it's still not very good, and it's kind of "Fantasy Novel 101" in form and characterization, it's not unreadable. The action scenes are okay, the battles make sense, the characters aren't loathsome, the bad guys are bad, the good guys are noble and heroic, and the writing is tolerable. Plus it's not so blatantly Tolkien-derived as to make my teeth hurt (unlike the first two ADA-sponsored efforts). I'm on page 337 with about 100 to go, and while I've never for an instant doubted that the good guys will triumph and the evil lord will be defeated, their various quests and adventures along the way are enjoyable enough to keep me reading.
This novel is apparently a prequel, of sorts, or at least it's set like 800 years before events in later books. Fortunately for Brooks' need to be lazy, his land has seen zero technological development over that time, so everything in this one reads exactly like things did in the first two novels. I just think it's set earlier because I recall references in the first two novels to events and characters that are featured in this one. And I'm probably glad I don’t know the later books well enough that these would give me
Episode 1-3 douche-chills as everything is foreshadowed with 2x4 subtlety.
On the down side, the dialogue is still quite wretched, with endless long expository monologues where one character explains exactly what they've been doing, how they feel, what they're thinking, and so on, and then the other one in the "conversation" does the same thing in turn. It's not as bad as the first two books were, but it's still very artificial and jarring when you witness it.
The characters are also pretty lame, just in terms of being cookie cutter fantasy types, following the mold created by Tolkien and others (including Brooks himself, I suppose). The mages are mysterious and powerful, the warriors are noble and hot-headed, the women are mysterious and beautiful, and so on. Brooks is also very lazy about the races; there's really nothing to set elves, dwarves, gnomes, humans, and trolls apart other than height and physical strength. They could all be humans of different tribes without making the slightest difference in the book. No one has any cultural issues, they all speak the same language (or else the characters who meet up conveniently all speak overlapping languages), and if Brooks doesn’t actually say, "So and so, the elf" you have no way to know what sort of character is now being encountered. Not that it ever really matters.
There's also zero insight into the bad guys. They're just bad and evil and murderous and they want to kill and destroy, and they don't need a reason. The good guys are pretty much the same though; none ever consider running away or trying to negotiate or just avoid conflict. They march nobly out to face the enemy, and they want only to achieve freedom for their people, and they just want everyone to be friends and live in peace, and so on. None have any private envies or jealousies or desires, or fears, or sloth, or anything that would make them human. There are various characters on the side of the good guys who do betrayals or stupid things, but that's their one-aspect; they're as one-dimensional as the heroic good guys and the dastardly bad guys, in their own way.
For a fantasy novel targeted at the undemanding "young adult" market though, it's just what it needs to be. It doesn't make you think, it gives you a lot of adventure, and the plot keeps moving with one event after another. It can't really be compared to quality adult fiction, but I've read worse. Frequently by the same author. I'll add a full review once I've finished it, an event that will likely occur on the flight home tomorrow.
And yes, I've laughed at myself a few times while reading the novel, as I give the author a soft little golf-clap for not completely sucking. Terry Brooks, multi-millionaire, multi-multi-best selling famous author, who surely has winning the mild approval of random aspiring author idiot with a blog right on top of his, "please God before I die" list.
