4. The White Council will finally believe Harry has gone warlock and will attempt to kick him off the council.  Eb, the Gatekeeper, and others will push it to a full vote of the council.  The merlin will list everything Harry has done that is terrible.  Someone will stand for Harry and defend him, listing all of the times he has prevented catastrophe.  Surprisingly, the council will vote to keep Harry on the white council.  He will be stripped of his title as Warden, but will still be THE Warden of DemonReach.

Of course he'll stay Warden of DR.  Who's going to take it from him.

That'd be a fun scene to read.  I can't decide if it would be more fun to end or start a book with.

I regard him as the proof that there is no setting, no universe, and no genre that a sufficiently determined author can't fold, spindle, and mutilate enough to force it to have Napoleonic-type sea battles or their exact equvalent in.

Why anyone who really wants to write Napoleonic sea battles would not just straightforwardly write Napoleonic naval novels is completely beyond me (well, except for the fact that the standard for comparison for those is Patrick O'Brian, and that would be terrifying because Patrick O'Brian was a genius.)

I just get upset at the clumsy foreshadowing(Rob S. Pierre?  COME ON).  Also, I'm completely unattached to any characters at this point.  But I'm so many thousands of pages of reading inertia I still read him.

I probably won't if I ever trim this 90 minute commute though.

That and I have to roll my eyes at the revolutionary technology stuff.
I still want a treecat though.  Along with an Alaspanian Mini-Drag and Pernese Dragon.

And for Weber to stop using his books as political/economy soapboxes.

Its about time Jim got with the times.  Personally it doesn't go far enough but that's just about all I've got to say on that matter.



The Deposed King

His house, his rules. He'll go as far as he likes.

If I walk into a store that sells AD&D 3rd edition source books but refuses to let me open the book to read any of it before purchase, it may be the owner house and his rules, but I still plan to sound off and give the owner my advice.

While I fully endorse the man's right to make the decision.   I don't really agree with the decision itself and I do recognize that while my money is where my mouth is that this doesn't mean a much as my site's not fully up and running yet and I'm not nearly as successful as the man himself.

These are big decisions and I don't mean or intend to make light of them.  But when you're wrong you're wrong and still very much free to do whatever it is you like.

The Deposed King

Ugh I want TT back.  IP is always fun to get into.

I thought fan fiction was fine, it just had to be in it's own forum and by posting it there you cede the rights to Jim?

For those of you who read Elizabeth Moon, she wrote the lead up to a character death, the death itself, and the aftermath absolutely wonderful in her latest book, Limits of Power.

Doesn't GMail sell your emails? Not like to anyone worth being annoyed about, but just little advertisers. Or is that only in-line text?

They analyze them so they know what ads to offer you. Not the same thing as selling. Nobody sees them.


Well, other than the NSA, of course.

I don't think things necessarily have to be explained.  I've been reading a lot of Elizabeth Moon recently, so I'll use her as an example.  In her Vatta's War series, the mechanics of FTL are never even hinted at.  They aren't the story, and have nothing to do with setting or character development-it's enough that it exists.  Communication is the story.  The 'how' for that isn't explained either.  The story rests in the chaos of disrupted communication.  And it works.

In Heinlein's 'Time for the Stars', I don't think the technology is ever explained either.  But the time dilation from traveling at relativistic speeds, and those effects IS, because that is actually plot relevant.  The engineering is not.

Granted, one can't do infinite research and the story has to get written at some point if it's to exist at all.  (To a first approximation, so far as I'm concerned, that means never write about guns, horses, or sailing ships; those appear to be the killer topics where no matter how much research you do you will always find readers who know as much or more, disagree with you about technical details and will be vocal online about it.)

Don't forget fencing and other martial arts.

Depends on the real people.  You write from the POV of a scientist or an engineer or a programmer working with a problem in their field of expertise, thinking about the technical details is pretty much true to life. (Speaking as a scientist and programmer myself.)

If you're writing from those perspectives and delving into their professional knowledge, I suspect you're probably limiting your potential audience just a tad.   That would be a hard book to pull off.