Bum On Seat, Fingers On Keyboard: Here’s How.

Posted by Pip Hunn on April 10, 2011 7 comments

Some days, starting to write is harder than it should be. A vital part of the writer’s craft is getting through this hard part. You’ve got to get the words out.

On a good day.
Sometimes, everything works. You know what it’s like. Some days, you sit down, think quickly about what you’re going to write, take a deep breath…

Time passes…

And you emerge, tired but satisfied, a few hundred (or thousand!) words later, content with what you’ve done. You had some output. Got the article or chapter done. It might need some reviewing, but you can go reward yourself with a cup of hot chocolate and an episode of The Wire.

The Bad Days of Writing
Sometimes, that’s not going to happen. You might not have slept well enough. You might have had an argument with someone, got a depressing email, had a swathe of bills come in. You might have a splinter under a fingernail. You could be cranky. Sleepy. Hungry. Gassy.

Sometimes, a little bellowing can be cathartic.


That’s OK! Sometimes what you need is a little kick in the pants. What you need is a little upside-the-head slapping. You’ve just got to sit down, start, and power through the resistance. Now, this isn’t for every day. If you have to force yourself to do this every time you sit down to write, there’s something deeper going on. Make sure you’re not lying to yourself. If there’s a bigger problem than one or two days of stuckness, this approach isn’t going to hekp you get past that.

A Kick In The Writing Butt
Time to get ready for a session. Here is a list of 7 simple things you can do, in twenty minutes or less, that will make get you ready.

1. Go to the toilet
Don’t take anything to read. You don’t want to interrupt yourself later. Don’t rush, but don’t dawdle.
2. Turn off your mobile phone
Go on, turn it off. How long are you going to write for? 2,000 words? Two hours? Nothing is going to need your attention in that time. Turn off your goddamn phone.
3. Turn off the Internet
No, you do not need the Internet. Not even to do research. If you need to research something, put a [placeholder] in what you’re writing and come back later. If the Internet is accessible, then you’ll be tempted to just ‘flick’ over to Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader… And then half an hour will have slid by when you aren’t writing anything. Switch off your modem. Disconnect it if needs be.
4. Grab a glass of water and a snack
No excuses to get up while you’re writing. Your snacks can be as healthy or disastrous as you want. I don’t care.
5. Turn on all the lights
Make sure the writing environment is a happy, productive, warm, welcoming one. Don’t work under a fluorescent light if you can help it. I don’t care if your desk is messy, if the room’s had something explode in it… None of that is important. Feeling good in your writing environment is, and warm, yellow light is the quickest way to achieve that.
6. Experiment with music
Try playing some music. Ideally, you want something that pumps you up but without overpowering lyrics. I’m a fan of Immediate Music, who make nicely generic, trailer-style music for Hollywood consumption. If you think it’s going to distract you, skip this.
7. Set a firm limit and start.
Set a word limit, not a time limit. Make it achievable. 500 to 1,000 words is enough. Make sure you write enough that you can finish, stand up, walk away, and go ‘Hey, today wasn’t the greatest in terms of output, but I wrote something.”

Hit your limit. Even if it hurts. Then stop and walk away. Get a housemate or spouse to high five you.

Fantastic!
You did it! You pushed through an uncomfortable spot and got some writing done. Sure, it might not have been your best, but the important thing is that you did it. You didn’t give in to the fallacy of ‘writer’s block’.

Bookmark this page, or print it out and tape it to the wall. The next time you sit down and immediately feel stuck, look over this list, do it all, and you know you’re on the way to writing success.

What have I missed? What other ways can you think of to push through that feeling of stuck-ness? Write a comment below or email me, editor@write-thing.com

Cheers;
Pip

15 More Awesome Things To Write About

Posted by Pip Hunn on April 3, 2011 1 comments

It’s time for an update to the Ultimate List Of Cool Things To Write About! Too long has it slept unattended, while an increasing amount of cool things have populated the world. Each of them deserve mentioning in stories, although fitting them all into the one narrative would prove to be quite a challenge.

Here, then, are 15 more things that, if you write about them, will make you cooler than the testicles of a cryogenically frozen Wooly Mammoth.

1. Hallucinations
Hallucinations can come about through a number of ways. They can be brought on by periods of extreme mental and physical stress, by poisons or sickness, or by hallucinogenic drugs, and by mental illness. Each of these avenues to hallucination brings about new cool things to write about, and gives you a boosting point for a story or some of your plot.

Stress: Walking through a desert, dying of dehydration? Classic oasis hallucination, coupled with the phenomenon of mirages. Simply explained… Or is it? Sleep deprivation does strange things to one’s mind. Once, I stayed up several days straight while out camping I hallucinated a complete lounge set, including matching upholstery, sitting on the opposite face of the valley I was camped in. After passing out, it had been mysteriously removed.

Illness: A staggering amount of plants, mushrooms and other edibles are, if consumed in sufficient quantities, both poisonous and hallucinogenic. Often the two go hand in hand; some of the more extreme symptoms of poisoning from several plants include hallucinations before lapsing into coma or death.

Drugs and poisons: Hallucinations brought on by drugs and poisons deliberately consumed or administered can range from a mild shift in the perception of time and colour to full-blown psychotic episodes, where people lose the capacity to ‘see’ reality and envisage things entirely in their own minds. It can be terrifying and traumatising for those suffering the hallucinates, and people on the outside may not be able to effectively communicate with them. Poisons and drugs with hallucinatory effects are usually ingested orally and take some time to kick in, often with milder effects at first and then increasingly intense hallucinations as more of the substance is absorbed by the victim.

Mental illness: People suffering from a wide variety of mental illnesses view the world in distorted ways. Their conditions may be permanent or temporary, and triggered by any number of things. A heightened emotional state. Exposure to something seemingly innocuous. Flashbacks may occur at random. Those suffering both form permanent psychosis and temporary affliction may experience visual and audial hallucinations seeing things that are not real and hearing voices that are not their own It is nearly always a terrifying and deeply unsettling experience.

As you can see, hallucinations can be triggered from a wide variety of sources. How realistic they are to the viewer depends greatly on their mental fortitude and the cause of the hallucinations in the first place. Hallucinations clearly provide fantastic fodder for inclusion in your story.

2. Troglodytes
Darkly muttering figures in caves have had a bad rap in the Fantasy press. Generally represented as dank, dangerous and stupid. Often blind, finding their way about through touch and some sort of weird, unexplained echo-location. Often resembling bipedal slugs. Stupid singly. Dangerous en masse. Cn be tricked into worshipping people who bring sources of light into their caverns. Spread throughout underground networks. Bad-smelling.

3. Bitterness
Bitterness is a sign of a poisoned mind. Something bad has happened to a character, enough to turn their mind towards the darker side of the options presented to them. Bitter characters often speak with the voice of experience, foretelling doom and destruction on more idealistic characters. Bitterness can lead to betrayal; if someone expects to be set upon at every turn, they’ll often take ‘the initiative’ in betraying fellow adventurers. Bitter characters can have their hopes raised and then dashed, leading them further down a path of misery, or they can be redeemed by their own hand or by the actions of others. Adding a level of bitterness to one or two of your characters gives other characters a mirror to reflect their qualities off, and adds an enjoyable level of cynicism and tension to dialogue and group dynamics.

4. Poisons
What isn’t there to like about poisons? With poisons come poisoners, plots, treason, sneaking, suspense, discovery, horror, despair and danger. Who’s been poisoned? How was it administered? Can we denitrify it What about that spectacular death? Poisons get cool names, like Widow’s Kiss and The Barbed Strangler. Poisoners are the lowest of the low, the scummiest of the scummy, universally reviled… And yet extremely useful to the politically minded. Poisons are small, concealable, deniable weapons. Tip a vial into a pot and you poison a mercenary troupe. Dribble a little into your nuncle’s ear and become a king. Throw some scorpions into the sultans bed and marry a grieving princess a few days later. The opportunities are endless.

5. Cave networks
Quick! Hide! Where? In this cave!
So begins many fantastic adventures. What’s in the cave? A tunnel, leading into darkness? What could be in there? Troglodytes? Goblins? Orcs? A dragon? Treasure? Nazis? Carefully-obscured Nazi lookalikes (Thanks, Enid Blyton.)? An escape route? Who knows their way through? Do you have a dwarf in the party? What if people get lost? Can they find their way out? What lurks in the darkness?

Cave networks can be natural or artificial. Mines get made and abandoned, rusted equipment left lying to trip the unwary. The deepest, darkest caves can hold whole hosts waiting in their depths. THey’re very rarely mapped out and signed, leaving adventurers to rely on markings, instinct, memory, air flows, half-remembered guesses…

6. Torture devices
Thumbscrews. Tooth pliers. Eye pokers. Wang Manglers. Sharpened but rapidly growing bamboo stakes. Interpretive dancers. Mind leeches. The list goes on. Once you’ve got a captive, then you’ve got to torture them, right? They might have valuable information. Or you might just want to hurt them. Torture doesn’t need to be all subtle and elaborate traps, Saw style Smashing someone’s feet with a hammer does the job quite well. But if you’ve got a little bit of equipment, preferably laid out with glittering precision on black velvet trays… Well, now you’ve got atmosphere.

7. Minstrels
With a hey-nonny-nonny and a merry ballad, minstrels – particularly travelling ones – add a welcome element of lyricism and history to your story. A minstrel is the perfect excuse to a little bit of disguised info-dumping. Minstrels are inveterate gossips and slandermongers, usually possessed with an excellent memory for names, faces and scandals. That, and they’ll know everyone’s favourite songs – the balladeering equivalent of Baby Got Back. Sneak in the names of a few famous tyrants, castles, battles and victories, and you’ve laid out your world for us in iambic pentameter.

8. Submarines
Water is pretty cool. Travelling on it is even cooler. After all, that’s where pirates come from. But what about underneath the water? Well, now you’re talking. Submarines take us to where humans aren’t meant to go – well, not for more than thirty seconds of pearl-diving, anyway. What lurks beneath the surface of the ocean? Mega sharks? The Kraken? Davey Jones? Rogue submarine commanders, armed with nuclear torpedoes and deadly accents? Submarine warfare is the very definition of suspenseful. Lurking in vents and ocean valleys, hunting prey with invisible pings of echo-location, torpedoes burrowing through the water, sleek and deadly… Ye Olde Submarines have their own unique attractions, too. The image of bespectacled adventurers and scientists peering out at aquatic wonders revealed to them is a fantastic one, and something you can weave into a story of adventure and discovery.

9. Clockwork
Clockwork is all about precision, engineering, delicacy and planning. Clockwork makes watches tick, orreries rotate, and automata shuffle. Clockwork in your story can range from the simple to the complex. A clock in the town square. A simple spring-driven motor on a dirigible. A low-power electrostatic generator. The gubbins of a Victorian Time Machine. You’re only limited by your imagination on this one. Plus, it makes for a fantastic hand-waving device for anything unusual built around the Elizabethan through Victorian era.
“Zounds, man, is that a Demon Machine?”
“Faugh! Stuff your superstitious nonsense, old boy ‘Tis powered by clockwork!

10. Uniforms
There’s nothing quite like a shiny, spanking new uniform. Unless it’s an old, tattered, blood-stained uniform. Uniforms give a sense of identity to a group, and also make them an easy target for the enemy. Without uniforms to distinguish who you should whack with a sword, ground battles would be even more chaotic and messy than they already are. An individual can have a uniform, of course. Usually something either over-the-top balls-to-the-wall all-out impressive, like a Barbarian massive codpiece/black leather straps combination, or something they wear out of habit or allegiance.

11. Maintenance
Swords need sharpening. Cars need inspections. Bows need re-stringing. Lutes; tuning, guns; cleaning, muscles; workouts, moats; dredging. A wooden ship stays afloat by constant, vigilant maintenance. Armies function by constant drilling and practice. Skills un-practiced grow blunt. Lockpicks need to thieve. Master swordsmen need to duel, or at least run through training exercises.

Showing characters maintaining their skills and equipment speaks of where their focus is. A group of hardened men might sit around a campfire in filthy clothes, smelling like a boar’s flatulence, but ten gets you one they’ll be keeping their blades sharp. Showing a lack of maintenance is just as telling. What does it say when things are left to rot and ruin?

12. Logistics
Logistics are a challenge to work successfully into a story. Often taking a back stage to the action and adventure, a quick thought on logistics is necessary to keep any semblance of reality. Two adventurers strap on some swords and head out into the jungle, unequipped, to find the Lost Gem of NgThungu? Two days later, one’s dying of dysentery and the other’s gotten lost.

Any adventure is bound to end up in pedestrian disaster without maps, food, water, shelter, weapons and all the other things someone sensible would take with them. Logistics are a necessary element of any story. Don’t feel obliged to give us a full-on packing montage, replete with itemised lists of what everyone’s got. This is a story, not reading off a D&D Character Sheet. But give reasonable thought to what’s going to be necessary. Is anything rare or difficult to get hold of? Would the acquisition of it be a worthy part of the story? How much can people take with them? What do they have to leave behind? What will they regret not bringing?
“Boy, it sure would be nice if we had some grenades, don’t you think?” – Jayne Cobb, Serenity

13. Drugs
Drugs do wonderful and terrible things to people. Administered properly, they save lives ease pain, open the mind, relax tension, and take people on journeys that are profound and life-altering. Abused, they can drive people insane, lead to life-destroying dependencies, cost vast sums of money, fund criminals, and end lives.

Very rarely is a drug all positive or all negative. This balance of influences creates enormous tension, especially for this using, administering, creating, smuggling, selling and policing drugs. Medicine and recreational drugs can be bought and sold on black markets all over the world. Drug companies with budgets bigger than countries influence entire governments.

14. Cryptography
This is Neal Stephenson’s forte, but I’m sure there’s something left over for you to play with. Cryptography, the art and science of hiding messages from those who shouldn’t be reading them, is as fascinating as it is complex. From simple letter substitutes all the way up to 1024-bit encryption and beyond to quantum fiddlings, people have wanted to keep secrets as long as there have been lies to tell. A clever code-breaker is an invaluable tool to whoever owns his services.

The military, spies, industrialists, lovers, criminals, plotters, inventors, investors and schemers all have excellent reasons to communicate ideas with a select audience, while being concerned about their messages falling into the wrong hands.

Facing off against them are the code-breakers and cryptanalysts, working furiously to break codes, extract secrets, and take advantage of the fruits of forbidden knowledge. Warning: researching cryptographs will put you in the realms of some scary, and scarily smart, people. Don’t get too sucked in, or you’ll never finish your story.

15. Facial hair
Twirled cryptically. Stroked luxuriantly. Grown ineffectually. Beards and facial hair can be a marker of gentlemanly respect, barbaric danger, manly gruffness, grandfatherly wisdom, grand-vizierly plotting, test-pilot adventurousness, musketeering dexterity, piratical rapscallionism… The list goes on, limited only by design, density, colour, and whatever you can find on the World Beard And Moustache Championship gallery.

Well, that’s enough inspiration for one article! Make sure to check out the updated Ultimate List Of Cool Things To Write About for more ideas, and, as always, your comments are welcome.

Great Writers are liars: How lying improves your creative writing

Posted by Pip Hunn on March 27, 2011 None comments

Great writers are liars, and if you can train yourself to lie better, it will serve you well. A capacity to lie fluently, creatively and convincingly will let you paint stories that your readers will believe and enjoy. If you’re written a story, then you are a liar. Forget what your parents told you, for the moment, about lying being bad. You’re making a story up. I’m giving you permission to tell things that aren’t strictly true. So make the most of it while you can.

You are a liar, and what you’re writing is a lie. It’s a creation, spun from your imagination into sticky threads of semi-truth. You hope that if you weave this well enough, we, your audience, will become enmeshed in it. We’ll gloss over the holes in the web and fill in the blanks from our imagination. If you don’t tell us with conviction, we’ll break free. We’ll say ‘the story didn’t grab me’. We want to get stuck in your story. Make it happen.

I am an accomplished liar.
This is a skill that I’m quite proud of. Many things that I do for fun let me develop my skills at lying. When I play cards, I lie with my face, my body and my words to throw off my opponents. “I’ve got the answer to what you’re doing”, I confidently tell my opponents. I When I fence, I lie with the my sword. I say “Look here while I stab you”. I want you to become a great liar, too.

Believe everything I tell you.

You’re a liar, too.
I know this because a huge barrage of sociological tests tell me so. Lying is a social coping mechanism, a way of us smoothing the way for our relationships to continue. You lie all the time, often unconsciously.

“Have you sent that email to Accounting?”, your boss asks.
“Yup”, you confidently reply.
Crap, I’d better send that email to accounting now.

See? Easy, smooth, no harm done. The email gets sent as soon as the boss isn’t looking. Accounting gets their email. Everyone is happy. Writing a story is simply an extension of this tendency of ours to lie to push the world into a better shape.

Writing is a lie
Writing a story is the best lie you can ever tell. You’re in control of everything. What happens. How it happens. How your audience is going to relax. You can do it free of interruptions, of contrasting views, of arguments. You can rehearse and craft your lie until it’s perfectly indistinguishable from the truth.

And then people will applaud you for it. Think about it. The stories that make your heart sing, the ones that fill you with emotion and keep you coming back for more, are the stellar stories. They are the grand lies that we love being told, being sold on.

Lies can be hard
Anyone who’s watched children’s cartoons on a Saturday morning will know that lying often backfires. It seems simple enough. You tell an easy lie to get out of a hard situation. Then you find yourself needing to tell two more lies to cover the first ones. More people become involved. They aren’t stupid. You build a network of lies, piling them on top of each other, faster and faster.

Then one of two things happen. Either you build your network well enough that everyone accepts your ‘truth’, and you get away with your lies, or the real truth is exposed, and everything comes crashing down around you. In the cartoon, we usually learn a valuable lesson about friendship and listening to adult authority figures. In real life, a crashed pile of lies leaves your friends distancing themselves from you and your relationships suffering.

So don’t think that lying is going to be easy. We’ve all been trained, our entire lives, to accept certain untruths but be suspicious of others. We all want to believe that the vacuum cleaner we buy won’t break down one month after its warranty expires. That it’s OK to tell children that magical faeries exchange money for teeth. That the bus is going to turn up on time today.

The larger lies, though, we’re naturally suspicious of. We want to check out this seemingly amazing apartment before we sign that lease. We intuit that just because something’s ‘fat-free’ doesn’t mean it’s good for us.

The glory of telling a good lie
If you’ve ever told a good lie, an excellent lie, then you’ll know what I’m talking about. People lean in to listen to you. Their eyes gleam with enthusiasm. Maybe you’re telling a favourite story, embellishing a little as you go. Perhaps you’re repeating a bit of slander that neither of you believes is true, but you both want to be.

Your pulse quickens. You speak lowly, earnestly, quickly. You nod, waiting for your audience to nod in agreement with you. Your words fly out of you, searing with the red-hot truths you’re imparting, branding themselves across the consciousness of the recipient.

There are few better feelings in the world.

The best thing about lying is that you can do it, without hurting anyone, and without any ethical concerns, simply by writing.

What is writing?
Writing is a lie that is willingly shared between the writer and the reader. It is part of a secret, unspoken compact that runs like this:

”I will entertain you, and give you a glimpse of something splendid. Another life. Another world. Another time. Trust me.”
“I know that what you’re telling me isn’t true, but I’m going to let go anyway. Take me on this journey.”

When you write a story, what are you doing? You’re pulling something out of your head. The story comes together out of ideas that you have. You put together a plot to glue it all together. Populate the world with characters you’ve imagined. Generally, yo try and make sure everyone has a reason for doing things, somewhere they want to get to, and you think of obstacles to put in their way.

The fact that none of these things are real means nothing at all. For the purposes of storytelling, there’s no difference between you repeating the story of what happened to your mate’s mate’s girlfriend last weekend, and recounting a story of a knight fighting a dragon. Between yourself and whoever’s listening, there’s that same shared experience there.

Practicing lying
Any skill needs a conscious application to improve upon. Writing, and lying, are no exceptions. The better you are at putting your mind into your story, experiencing it as fully as you can, the better you can communicate this to your readers.

Lying for fun and profit
Build worlds in the history of your imagination. Here’s an experiment. Think of a story of an adventure that one of your friends has had. It might be something that happened to them at school, on the way to work, while they were overseas. Recreate the story in your head, except substitute yourself into their shoes.

Imagine you are going to tell the story to someone you’d just met, who doesn’t know that the story is really someone else’s. Try saying it out loud, or running through the story in your head. Rehearse it like the guy from Reservoir Dogs. And what you’ll find is that, with each repetition, small details start to creep into your head.

Your brain is an amazing machine. By taking a story – one that wasn’t yours to begin with -and telling your mind that it actually happened to you, over and over again, your imagination solidifies into something that feels as real as a memory does. This is a fantastic resource for writers.

(Incidentally, this is why so many of us get upset when we see movie adaptations of our favourite books. If you’re read something twenty, thirty, forty times, then you’ve probably got a solid and mostly unchanging view in your head of what’s going on. It’s extremely unlikely that you and the director are going to agree on all the minutiae.)

Convincing yourself
The more you think about your writing like this, the more solid your story will become in your mind. The first, second, third times you run through it in your head, things will still be a little hazy. Motivations might not be clear. The lay of the layout hasn’t occurred to you yet. Some plot holes might prove bigger than you’d thought.

What this rehearsal and revision of the story does is tighten everything up. If you’re telling a story you’ve told an audience a dozen times before, and someone jumps in with an interruption, you answer it easily. You can clarify a point they’re not clear on. Repeat yourself. Focus on a detail that one audience will appreciate more over another.

The same applies to your story. Telling it fluently, as though it’s actually happened, is a matter of convincing yourself so you can then convince others.

Stronger story building
You can see where this exercise is leading. By thinking your stories through repeatedly, you niggle out all the uncertainties. There’s a world of difference between your initial, inspiring idea and the finished product. A good, finished story will be solid, undoubtable. By believing in it yourself, you will add a weight of certainty that will clear away any lingering cobwebs of doubt.

Become an accomplished liar. Tell a story that sells itself to your audience. Convince them, while their eyes dance over your pages, that the world you’ve created for them is as real as the one they’re in.

Go write. And lie consciously.

Of Blood And Honey, Stina Leicht

Posted by Pip Hunn on March 23, 2011 None comments

The cover image for Stina Leicht's Of Blood And Honey
Of Blood and Honey, by Stina Leicht

Night Shade Books, Fantasy, 296 pages, paperback edition.

My copy: Purchased.

Pros: Meticulously researched. Grittily Irish. Strong worldbuilding.

Cons: Lags in places, Fae under-utilised, may be too dark for some.

In a line: Irish half-breed struggles with his demons through The Troubles.

”On your feet, taig.”

Rating: 7/10

Stina Leicht’s debut, Of Blood and Honey, is a melding of historical fiction, mythological horror and dark, gritty fantasy. Leicht’s meticulously researched story paints a convincing picture of life during The Troubles, an unusual setting for dark fantasy, but an effective one. The mythology of Ireland has roots extending back hundreds of years, and Leicht draws upon them to create even more trouble for the Irish.

Troubled young man
Liam Kelly is a classically troubled young man. Not only is he growing up in the middle of The Troubles – and if you don’t know anything about the amazingly harsh treatment the Irish have gone through, this book will educate you – but he doesn’t know who his father is. Not only is he brutalised by the authorities, but darkness is creeping into the edges of his world. He has dark flashes, a temper that’s increasingly hard to keep in check, and perhaps something a little more sinister in himself.

To make things worse, Liam is brutalised – physically and sexually – while in prison. He essentially collapses as a person, and this lets the monster in him surface. When it does, Liam starts to drown, losing parts of himself to the dominant force within his own flesh and blood.

Despite these disadvantages, not everything goes against Liam. He works to carve a place in the world for himself, falling in love and working on a family. A priest keeps an eye over him, providing some support and watching over Liam’s growing troubles. His friends and colleagues – workmates and political allies – alternate between ignoring and exploiting his supernatural condition. As the story

Religion and politics
Religion and politics play as important a role in the story as character and mythology. Leicht has done a fantastic amount of research into what life was like for the Irish when the book was set, and talks about that in more detail in a blog post at the Night Bazaar. She makes an analogy to research being like an iceberg of facts floating in the sea of story – mostly submerged, but powerful nonetheless. Leicht’s iceberg is of Titanic-smashing proportions.

Leicht doesn’t waste time with unnecessary exposition. She either assumes that we know enough to get by, or has faith we’ll stick with her. To an extent, this works fine. Leicht is a talented writer and the first quarter of her book pushes along at an excellent place. Her writing is swift and sure, with ventures into a vernacular that opens up a new side of language for us.

When we move into the mystical parts of the story, Leicht lags a little. Her exploration of Irish mythology and history is not as comprehensively immersing as the mundane parts of the book. This is understandable in part, as our hero doesn’t know what’s going on with him until much later. Still, there is ample opportunity through the book when more knowledgable characters occur for some more exposition, and this left me feeling a little unsatisfied.

Comparatively, Leicht’s focus on the political and religious parts of The Troubles is superb. Her attention to detail and representation of actual history is brilliantly done, and she weaves what little mystical elements she shows us into the story deftly and with skill. Leicht’s writing of things like the internment camps, the splitting of communities along religious lines, and the amazingly strong ties of family and tradition that bind Irish families are all outstanding.

The story itself is strong if, as mentioned, a little imbalanced. Time passes quickly and we see Liam having to deal with crisis after crisis. Some of Leicht’s strongest writing is when she shows us how Liam deals with the horrible situations he’s forced into. His moments of weakness, of letting his inner monster surface, have a visceral solidity which make the most powerful scenes in the book.

Relentless darkness
This is not a cheery book. There are no wise men giving quests, no pots of gold, and definitely no leprechauns. And if leprechauns arrive in the next book, I bet they’re cynical and coated in poisonous quills. Like the constant misfortunes and obstacles the Irish face, Of Blood and Honey has a sense of beleaguered resilience about it.

It reminds me of a slightly less cynical Tales of Thomas Covenant. It requires some stamina to get through, simply because sympathy for the hero has us wincing every second page as he is beaten, assaulted and betrayed. The hero is set about on all sides by enemies, some invisible, some plain to see. He has powers that he acquired unwillingly but cannot use easily. His allies flicker and fade, or prove to be unreliable, and his actions puts his loved ones in danger.

A brilliant start
Of Blood and Honey comes across strongly as a ‘part one’, despite not being marketed as such. The climax doesn’t resolve most of the issues raised in the books, only settling immediate problems of survival. Dozens of questions are left unanswered or unaddressed, and a sequel will hopefully expound on the fantastic, if uneven, setting that Leicht has prepared for us. If we can delve a little more into the workings of the Fae and Fallen, explore the mystical world as well as the mundane, then I have high hopes for an excellent series from this talented debut author.

As it stands, Of Blood and Honey is an excellent novel, and one that has me eager for a follow-up. The bleakness of her hero’s life is heart-wrenching, and we can’t help but cheer him on through adversity. My only minor quibble – the leaving-out of such fantastically intriguing mythology and mysticism – stems not from a weakness of Leicht’s writing, but my own enthusiastic impatience to see more of this world she’s crafted for us.

Of Blood and Honey gets 7 mischevious Faelings.

Buy Of Blood And Honey at Amazon

Wise Man’s Fear, Patrick Rothfuss (Part 2)

Posted by Pip Hunn on March 12, 2011 1 comments

The Wise Man’s Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss (Book 2 of the Kingkiller Chronicles)
Gollancz, Fantasy, 994 pages, paperback edition.
My copy: Purchased.
Pros: Outstanding, lyrical prose, an improvement on the debut of the decade, masterful heroic fantasy.
Cons: None whatsoever.
In a line: Fantasy is alive, worlds as beautiful as ours exist, heroes can still capture our hearts.
“I thought, why not let these two nice fellows rob me, then beat me to a pulp?”
Score: 10/10

(For the harrowing story of how I actually came to own my copy of Wise Man’s Fear, read Part 1 of this review.)

This review is long. So is Wise Man’s Fear. You’re going to end up reading it. So what I suggest you do, if you’re in a hurry, is print out a copy of “A Visual Guide To Reading Wise Man’s Fear”, settle down, and enjoy the book.

Now we’ve gotten rid of the lightweights, let’s begin.

Revelling in Prose
One of Rothfuss’ strengths is his narrative style. Exemplified in NoTW and his shorter fiction (Road to Levinshir, anyone?), Rothfuss writes in a style that’s hard to find and easy to appreciate. His voice has a melodic cadence, like each word is being whispered to you. When I read Wise Man’s Fear, I felt like I was a kid again, tucked up in bed with my parents reading me to sleep. I felt safe, warm, and comforted, even in the unpleasant parts of the book.

Rothfuss’ language is slow but precise. It’s no surprise that, along with making Tor.com’s Best SFF Novels of the Decade, I’m struck by similarities to another entrant in that list: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke.

In Strange, Clarke builds her Napoleonic-era England not through description of the world itself, but by carefully chosen nuance. Both of their vernaculars are perfect. I have little interest in whether the maple trees of Rothfuss’ world are a particular colour. And, luckily, he and Kvothe don’t waste my time telling me.

One of the few complaints from other reviewers is the pacing of the book. I can see how this could throw you out if you were expecting a blazing series of explosions, magical duels, cryptic quests, clues, bits of treasure and the rest. Wise Man’s Fear was never going to be about that. It’s about seeing how a hero is made, experience after experience, mistake after mistake. It’s about having a window into a remarkable life.

I can’t wait for the audiobook of Wise Man’s Fear to come out. I can only imagine the challenge awaiting the narrator to do this justice. Another writer whose work is fantastic read aloud, Chine Mieville, does a similar thing in his books. Both talented authors choose their words carefully, but while Mieville delights in swoops and eddies of rhythm and timbre, Rothfuss hews closely to his chosen path. Majestic, solid, confident, Rothfuss weaves his world with simple threads, but the resulting tapestry is magnificent.

Reading Wise Man’s Fear is a departure from the experience we’ve had from NoTW. Kvothe stops being a child and grows into a young man. We are naturally sympathetic to him, after all, as he’s narrating the story as he wants it told. His professed honesty at the start of his story is, like a great narrator, clearly tempered by his own views.

“I’m giving you my story with all the grubby truths intact. All my mistakes and idiocies laid out naked in the light. If I decide to pasover some small piece because it bores me, I’m well within mt rights. I won’t be goaded into changing my mind by some farmer’s tale. I’m not an idiot.”

Kvothe has thought over the experiences he relates to Chronicler and chooses his words carefully. We are still left aware of the young Kvothe’s follies. His pride. His impetuousness. His temper, most of all, which drives him to rash actions more than once. Kvothe is a more empathic hero than most young-boy-does-good models we find in heroic fantasy. We see the thoughts that flash behind his eyes. Feel our hearts twinge in sympathy with him, even as he makes stupendous blunders.

Expanding Adventures
We left NoTW with epic expectations. Kvothe had called the name of the wind, temporarily beaten Ambrose, and defeated the (somewhat unusual) dragon at the end of the book. So what does Rothfuss serve up in Wise Man’s Fear?

The world gets expanded a little. We see more of the University, and not just from how it affects Kvothe’s life, either. His friends and fellow students are going about their lives, too. We get pulled into seeing the mundanities of the reality of Kvothe’s ascension. His constant worrying about money. His studiousness. His reckless thirst for knowledge. His prickly sense of pride, and his unpredictable anger.

Ambrose returns as the initial villain, and does a sterling job of making Kvothe’s life hellishly hard. He’s great to hate, and gets a more rounded fleshing-out than in NoTW, where he was a more one-dimensional bad guy. The seriousness of his attacks on Kvothe show just how powerful the young lord’s son is, and what an enemy Kvothe has made himself.

Kvothe gets to leave the University and town, and then the story falls into a more familiar story-within-a-story structure that regular fantasy readers will be familiar with. He is sent to serve a powerful man, the Maer, ruler of a neighbouring country and nearly as powerful as a king. His adventures while gaining the Maer’s trust and respect are what you’d expect of Kvothe – he gets into dire situations through ill luck and his own abrasive disregard for social status, and resolves them with a handful of luck and a pinch of skill.

Through these adventures we see more practical demonstrations of what Kvothe’s learnt at the University. In NoTW, we only saw hints, a glimmer around the edges of the Arcanist’s art. In Wise Man’s Fear, Kvothe and his friends are far more open about the magic they can harness, and even give a demonstrative lecture or two to interested bystanders. The exposition is nicely done and fits the story, and gives a wonderful feeling of completeness to the magic systems Rothfuss has created. Best of all, the rules that govern the systems are as natural to grasp and intuitive as, say, Newton’s Laws of Motion or basic geometry: marvellous in application, magical to the uninitiated, utilitarian to the regular user.

Kvothe’s adventures extend beyond the service of the Maer, though. He goes from treating essentially domestic problems – internecine strife within the Maer’s domain – to some far more exotic and shadowy locations. To say more of them would be to spoil the excellence that Rothfuss has stored up. I’ll speak smilingly of the Fae, and of a society of near-invincible warriors, and leave you to find out for yourself.

Through Kvothe’s narration we frequently break scene to come back to the current setting – Chronicler, Bast and Kvothe in their inn. The breaks show us a much darker mood falling over the characters in the present day. The outside world shown in NoTW was a grey afternoon, now, the mood has shifted to an unquiet evening. Something is very clearly not well within the world. Talk of war spreads through the tavern. Farmers mention demons and other ill things in their gossip. Kvothe, hero though we know him to be, seems frozen in his character as a simple barkeep.

We’re left at the end of Wise Man’s Fear both satisfied and longing. Satisfied from an excellent successor to the outstanding Name of the Wind. Rothfuss has outdone himself in weaving a story that’s near to unique amongst heroic fantasy. He keeps us grounded in the real and the mundane long enough and well enough that when he does show us the unexpected and the marvelous, it’s all the more magical. Longing, like the end of all good stories, for what comes next. Even if the wait is another half-decade, it will be worth it.

Searching for Flaws
It’s at this point that traditionally, in a review, I highlight what I see as the deficiencies of a book. There’s nothing for me to write here. Others may gripe about the lack of action. The slow, deliberate progression. The tropes that Rothfus gives us.

To which I say, approach this book differently than others you would read. Don’t look at Wise Man’s Fear like the literary equivalent of a Michael Bay movie. It isn’t all shaky-cam and special effects. What Rothfuss has given us is a story, and if it was told by mouth, it would be a legend.

The ‘lack’ of action is nonsense. Enough things happen to fill nine hundred pages of book. All of them superbly written.

The deliberate progression is a gift. Slow yourself down, and enjoy the book as it unfolds. Let the rose open itself; don’t clumsily try and force the petals.

Are some of the characters familiar? Are there moments of recognition and precognition? Yes. But even when there are, Rothfuss’ art as a writer rises him above the perils of cliche and predictability an portrays familiar themes with quality and grace.

A Masterful Performance
Patrick Rothfuss stormed onto the world’s stage five years ago, bellowing and waving an amazing book in his hands. We laughed, we cried, we fell in love. Then the curtain fell, and he’s returned for a second act. The performance has matured. The protagonist grows stronger in his skills, and fonder in our hearts. This is a play I will watch over and over again, and all I can do now is wait expectantly for the third day of stories from the red-headed innkeeper wrapped in the patient, cut-flower silence of a man who is waiting to die.

Wise Man’s Fear gets, deservedly, ten legendary swords.

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