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Messages - comprex

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1
DF Books / Re: Honestly Will the Dresden series ever be finished.
« on: March 15, 2024, 07:12:50 PM »

The alternate way to look at it is that by the time new material is published, reviewing the old books is like getting dynamic, exciting prequels for free.       I'm not fussed to see the finish; as Frodo and Samwise knew,  the best tales never end.

I dropped DF for a literal decade - and coming back is fine.    I wish I'd gotten the early work in hardcover - all of my paperbacks up to PG are acid-paper wrecks by now.     

Quote from: Lord Kinbote on March 11, 2023, 03:37:18 PM
The most personal question:  Do you think the series be finished during your life expectancy?  I have a friend in her late 70s who has quit reading the series because she knows she won't be around for the finish but even more immediate, the gap between books became long enough that she had to do homework to remind herself about where things had been left, the peripheral characters, etc. and that wasn't worth it.

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Calendar Event Discussion / Re: Signing in Washington D.C. (McLean, VA) on 8/1
« on: August 07, 2011, 04:30:21 PM »
Quote from: Aine on August 07, 2011, 03:55:41 PM
That's really good quality, Toe-mas! It was weird watching myself text Fyrchick

Is that you in the corner, stage left?

Quote
what Jim's shirt was wearing as he started.... :)

 ;D  that is funny.

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Calendar Event Discussion / Re: Signing in Washington D.C. (McLean, VA) on 8/1
« on: August 05, 2011, 04:28:30 PM »
Quote from: Stiletto on August 05, 2011, 02:51:47 PM
  Fred (I assume that was Fred to the left behind Jim?) had awesome reactions to things.

The one thing lacking here is a Fred-POV cam.    Someone fix this at next signing, eh?

4
Author Craft / Re: Overused Types of Characters
« on: August 04, 2011, 07:03:50 PM »
Quote from: the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh on August 04, 2011, 06:48:37 PM
It's not possible to write a bestseller by setting out to write a by-the-numbers bestseller. That much is solid.

You stand much more chance of taking off if you write the stories that work for you than defining the stories you tell solely by what's marketable.

Some time ago we were talking of Jack Chalker's work and you used the term YKIOK.   At the time I understood you to mean 'kink' in the sense of story twist.     

Did you instead mean 'kink' as in perceptual kink, the kink in our, the readers', personal context as the artist proceeds to expand said context?    The same kink Proust tries to explain when he talks of Renoir?

Tangential to topic at hand, sorry, but I'm trying to expand on 'what works for you'. 

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Author Craft / Re: Overused Types of Characters
« on: August 03, 2011, 05:41:44 PM »
Quote from: Nickeris86 on August 03, 2011, 05:12:55 PM
However characters that rely on their logic over their emotional responses come across cold and are harder to relate to as a person. take the show Bones for example the main character is incredibly logical and relies more on her mind than on emotion, its fun to watch because it creates conflict between her and the rest of the cast who are emotional beings as well as scientific especially her partner.

The classical example I was going for in my post preceding neuro's is Mr. Darcy.      Darcy is defined by action from perfectly valid starting principles.   

 It comes across as /pride/ in the book, but that is really a misleading name for it.  Truly prideful characters would tend to fall under neuro's bullheadedness category.   

My point was to try to tease out a further category of character that I find objectionable: The (Wo)Man of Resolved Starting Principles.   Spock, Data, Bones fall into this category by default because they do not have trained subjective responses, but the category is much bigger than that.   Darcy is definitely in it.   Genuine crusaders are in it.   And every one of them that isn't in the (Spock/Data/Bones) set with some Asperger's Syndrome expression is a Mary Sue.      A Mary Sue because we like to flatter ourselves that we act out of principle instead of acting from an emotion set that our environment trained us into.

Another way to put this is: All Rebels are really without a clue.   The ones we think had a clue are the ones who are really good at lawyer-type after-the-fact justification and rationalization.   


6
Author Craft / Re: Overused Types of Characters
« on: August 03, 2011, 03:57:17 AM »
Quote from: the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh on August 03, 2011, 03:44:14 AM
I don't know.  There seems to me something fundamentally immature about characters whose emotions are overwhelmingly their principal justifications for what they do; we do generally try to teach two-year-olds to share their toys and don't regard their tantrums as a good thing, and I don't find a supposed adult who acts with the unmediated impulses of a two-year-old particularly sympathetic, nor credible except as a very rare case.

I am saying that all those teaching efforts can easily get lumped into Category1:  'environmental acclimatization of emotional, subjective and psychological factors' instead of Category2: 'setting up a sound platform of non-conflicting rational principles to be consciously used by the two-year old as it grows up'.     

I am saying that characters who act on starting principles instead of trained subjective reasons and trained emotional responses are, in fact, overused.

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Calendar Event Discussion / Re: Signing in Washington D.C. (McLean, VA) on 8/1
« on: August 03, 2011, 02:35:43 AM »
Sweet.   

Anyone have other pics?

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Author Craft / Re: Overused Types of Characters
« on: August 03, 2011, 01:36:33 AM »
I confess to being a fan of Michael Shermer's work.   

I confess I consider characters who act according to principles* instead of according to readily justified emotion to be Mary Sues.

*should really read "ab initio principles" but the sentence was getting klunky.

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Author Craft / Re: Overused Types of Characters
« on: August 02, 2011, 02:37:13 PM »
Quote from: the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh on August 02, 2011, 03:25:45 AM
I am finding it hard to think of an arc that pure; have you any specific examples in mind ?

To my mind Dickens' Pip comes astonishingly close.

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Author Craft / Re: Overused Types of Characters
« on: August 01, 2011, 05:31:38 PM »
Quote from: the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh link=topic=27643.msg1191082#msg1191082
- Bullheadedness as a virtue, in general.  Characters we are supposed to admire because they stick to their principles when the world presents them with evidence that those principles might not be the best way to proceed, rather than reconsidering whether their principles are actually for the best.

Do purely emotional arcs without a proven ability to form, change or follow personal principles fall in this category?

11
Author Craft / Re: How do YOU plan your stories?
« on: July 31, 2011, 05:01:43 PM »
Quote from: meg_evonne on July 31, 2011, 04:38:21 PM
Longest sentence so far in author craft, I suspect.

Are you sure you included the ones where neuro did the Dumas pastiche?

12
Author Craft / Re: How do YOU plan your stories?
« on: July 30, 2011, 06:46:05 PM »
Quote from: Nickeris86 on July 30, 2011, 04:40:57 PM
this will sound weird but i act out scenes of my stories when i am alone, usually in the car on my way to work. i also jot down my insane thoughts in my note books, each story has their own individual journal.

*Imagines evil cackling scramble to find the notebook where -exactly- that idea was written*

Hold on

It's here somewhere

I wrote that only the week before last

I know I have it

Yeah, I know the conversation is past it but AHA!  here it is!

Well, OK, not quite exactly that idea, but if you squint just right...   ;D

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Calendar Event Discussion / Re: Signing in Washington D.C. (McLean, VA) on 8/1
« on: July 28, 2011, 02:32:31 AM »
*is officially a "No"*

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Author Craft / Re: Power...
« on: July 25, 2011, 03:05:41 PM »
Quote from: Quantus on July 25, 2011, 02:43:25 PM
The "good guys" are the ones trying to build something, and they do it in an organized, Ordered way; while the bad guys (demons torn from the essences of the Ahriman's Dragons) are trying to corrupt and destroy, with the ultimate goal of ending Creation (which they think was never a particularly good idea in the first place).

You've made organization an aspect.     The ability to organize could have been seen as a power, and it definitely makes possible all the other powers you list.

Be extra careful: if you make financial Power and resource Power separate you will need an ECON degree to credibly navigate mapping of finance to resources.   Separating the two is nothing other than dropping the gold standard.   In order to do that, and not automatically default to some other standard (a resource,e.g. Spice), you need a very strong state, with long-term stability and effective police.   The financiers in the second scenario become indistinguishable from mechanisms of the state.

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Calendar Event Discussion / Re: Signing in Washington D.C. (McLean, VA) on 8/1
« on: July 22, 2011, 10:03:06 PM »
Quote from: habu987 on July 22, 2011, 09:40:37 PM
And hasn't someone said that Jim will sign up to three items?  For publicity sakes, if B&N says you can only bring one item in, while the author says he'll sign up to three, that's very bad form on B&N's part.

The two statements are not in direct opposition.  

For example,   the author will _not_ sign 4 books for the same person, even if the person purchased all 4 books on site and brought nothing in (the hypothetical person being thereby fully in compliance with B&N policy).    Both B&N and the author would be OK with signing 1 t-shirt brought from home and 2 books purchased on site.

Does that help explain the difference?    Since the statements are not directly contradicting each other, I don't really see one being 'bad form' in view of the other.

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