|
More time for a re-read then!
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2015 21:13
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 11, 2024 06:54 |
|
|
Errant Gin Monks posted:New tweet.. No book until end of 2016. Where are you getting this? I see the tweet where he confirms Day 3 won't be coming in 2015, but I can't find where you're getting end of 2016 from. If Doors of Stone comes out in 2016 or 2017, he will have written it in pretty good time. So here's hoping.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2015 21:18
|
|
|
Wittgen posted:If Doors of Stone comes out in 2016 or 2017, he will have written it in pretty good time. So here's hoping. Compared to GRRM, maybe.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2015 21:58
|
|
|
Hearing that makes me pretty happy that WMF largely eliminated my desire to continue reading his books.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2015 22:16
|
|
|
Pong Daddy posted:Compared to GRRM, maybe. Nah. Compared to anything. The books are really goddamn long and complicated.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2015 23:14
|
|
|
I feel like a lot of have been spoiled by Brandon "I started a sequel and accidentally wrote its sequel and a novella" Sanderson.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2015 01:16
|
|
|
Wittgen posted:Nah. Compared to anything. The books are really goddamn long and complicated. Boggles the mind. LASER BEAM DREAM posted:I feel like a lot of have been spoiled by Brandon "I started a sequel and accidentally wrote its sequel and a novella" Sanderson. Or one of any other number of authors who can turn out a series of long and complicated novels on a fairly regular basis.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2015 01:27
|
|
|
Habibi posted:Boggles the mind. Seriously? Your mind is easily boggled then. You don't even need to have any understanding of writing to get that Rothfuss is writing at a reasonable pace. You can just use math. I've never seen anyone imply that Jim Butcher is lazing about or that he's writing at a ridiculously slow pace. He took a year and a half to write Skin Game. Rothfuss got WMF out in four years. WMF is about three times as long as Skin Game. So, very similar pace. Lord of the Rings also serves as a comparison. It took Tolkien 16 years to write the trilogy, and that trilogy is about 50,000 words longer than just WMF.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2015 02:28
|
|
|
Wittgen posted:Seriously? Your mind is easily boggled then. You don't even need to have any understanding of writing to get that Rothfuss is writing at a reasonable pace. You can just use math. My mind is indeed easily boggled by fanboys with blinders. 4 years for WMF is, as correctly pointed out, a nearly GRRM worthy pace - and the next one potentially five years? Haha. Yes, I can use math. Seems like a damned long time for books that barely even get edited. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2015 04:04
|
|
|
For the record, WMF (993 pages) is only a bit over twice as long as Skin Game (464 pages). And there was a great deal of backlash towards Jim over how it's been taking him longer and longer to write his books, so much so that he exploded at someone on his forum over it. Granted, that was for Cold Days, but the meat of the message is the same (and, honestly, applies just as much to Rothfuss). Tolkien is not a great comparison, either, because while it took him nearly 20 years to write LotR, it was published in its entirety in a year. Further, you need to remember that Rothfuss has been working on this series for like 20 years or so. When NotW was first published, he made a huge deal about how the other two books were substantially complete and only walked that back when he realized (or was told by his editor) that what he wrote as a college student was worthless as anything more than a detailed outline. GRRM is actually a pretty apt comparison because both authors tend to be easily distracted by other projects. Don't get me wrong, Rothfuss (and GRRM, for that matter) can take as long as he wants to finish the series, I have plenty to read in the meantime, but arguing that his current pace is anything short of glacial is laughable.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2015 06:33
|
|
|
Ornamented Death posted:When NotW was first published, he made a huge deal about how the other two books were substantially complete and only walked that back when he realized (or was told by his editor) that what he wrote as a college student was worthless as anything more than a detailed outline. Yup. quote:April 18, 2007 In November 2012, Rothfuss thought he would have to "rush" to get Day 3 out by the end of 2013. You'd think two extra years would be enough to fix that "rush" problem. but apparently not. Hilariously, he later then said it "probably won't be 2015," which people in 2013 took to mean "2014" rather than "2016 or after I'm dead." quote:[Update: Pat has said in another interview that “It probably won’t be 2015, but it isn’t going to be this year as well.” Which means the release date for book 3 will probably be in 2014. — Just thought I’d add this is, since most of you have come here from trying to find the release date
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2015 06:45
|
|
] –
|
Ornamented Death posted:For the record, WMF (993 pages) is only a bit over twice as long as Skin Game (464 pages). And there was a great deal of backlash towards Jim over how it's been taking him longer and longer to write his books, so much so that he exploded at someone on his forum over it. Granted, that was for Cold Days, but the meat of the message is the same (and, honestly, applies just as much to Rothfuss). I used kindle's "locations" since page numbers is a pretty dubious way of measuring how long a book is. I'd prefer word count, but I can't find it. People are seriously angry at Butcher for his pace? I underestimated nerd's shittiness. My bad. Ornamented Death posted:Tolkien is not a great comparison, either, because while it took him nearly 20 years to write LotR, it was published in its entirety in a year. Further, you need to remember that Rothfuss has been working on this series for like 20 years or so. When NotW was first published, he made a huge deal about how the other two books were substantially complete and only walked that back when he realized (or was told by his editor) that what he wrote as a college student was worthless as anything more than a detailed outline. The point about his promises is well taken. People being overly optimistic about how long things will take and making way too ambitious promise is lovely. It's incredibly common and I came to the series after Rothfuss learned his lesson, so it doesn't bother me. I can see how it's a legitimate grievance though. I really don't think Rothfuss or GRRM writes glacially. They're certainly not speedy writers, but I haven't seen any evidence that they are writing at a significantly slower pace than other authors. It certainly feels glacial. An unfinished story gnaws at you. But are they taking more time than most authors for comparable word count? You haven't offered any evidence to that effect. I'll offer another comparison. Harry Potter was about a million words total. When Doors of Stone comes out, Kingkiller Chronicles should be pushing a million words as well. Harry Potter was published over ten years. If Doors of Stone doesn't come out until 2017, Kingkiller Chronicles will also have been published over ten years. Again, I would agree that it feels like they're taking forever to write these books. But when I compare their word/day output to other authors, they don't seem that slow. I think the problem is not the pace of their writing but rather circumstances around it. It's the overly optimistic promises they break. It's the current publishing climate that demands authors do a lot of their books marketing. It's the internet showing you every time they do something not writing but never showing you when they do write. It's the fact that their writing comes out in such big chunks. You can think this stance is laughable if you want. If you have evidence that they actually are writing slowly, I'd be happy to change my mind.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2015 07:07
|
|
|
When I refer to pace I'm almost strictly talking about the frequency of releases rather than how many words they can type in a day because the latter is kind of a useless measurement. I'm sure Rothfuss can knock out several thousands words in a day. The problem (such as it is) is that he doesn't spend very many days of the year working on Doors of Stone. He shuts down for at least two months every year to work on his charity. He does at least a handful of conventions every year. He's spent what I would assume is a fair amount of time writing side stories to the main series. And he has a few other writing obligations that aren't related to Kingkiller (working on Torment comes to mind). Plus he has two kids, one of which is less than a year old. I also don't think it helps the pro-Rothfuss argument to keep comparing him to authors that produced a similar number of words in a similar amount of time, but release twice as many books. That means people are getting to read new (albeit shorter) parts of the story on a much more regular basis. Now I don't think it would help for Rothfuss to split his books into two or three parts each because, frankly, he covers in a thousand pages what other authors can cover in half that. The man is verbose as gently caress, but that's his style and he makes it work.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2015 07:33
|
|
|
Khizan posted:I always thought it was that she didn't want to sleep with them and tried to avoid it, but sometimes circumstances forced her hand. I read her "every horse is going to be ridden" comment as a sort of 'cost of playing the game' sort of thing; sometimes a con goes south and you've got to follow through. Denna was talking about becoming a high class escort and squashing the notion that it might mean she would not have to have sex if she went that route.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2015 09:03
|
|
|
Ornamented Death posted:When I refer to pace I'm almost strictly talking about the frequency of releases rather than how many words they can type in a day because the latter is kind of a useless measurement. I'm sure Rothfuss can knock out several thousands words in a day. The problem (such as it is) is that he doesn't spend very many days of the year working on Doors of Stone. He shuts down for at least two months every year to work on his charity. He does at least a handful of conventions every year. He's spent what I would assume is a fair amount of time writing side stories to the main series. And he has a few other writing obligations that aren't related to Kingkiller (working on Torment comes to mind). Plus he has two kids, one of which is less than a year old. I get the impression that he treats 'being a writer' as his job and fills in time actually writing when he can, whereas the likes of Brandon Sanderson treat 'writing' as their job (i.e. writes - puts words on screen - for full-time or more than full-time hours), and the side bits of being a writer like con attendance and publicity as just that - side bits. Listening to Writing Excuses is interesting in that regard.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2015 11:02
|
|
|
If people have actually got mad at Butcher for taking a year and a half to write a novel then that's embarrassing for them, not Butcher.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2015 14:38
|
|
|
Well, yeah, but after WMF it's hard to imagine things that would embarass a Rothfuss fan. Now there's a book that cured me of any expectations for a sequel.
anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 14:48 on Jan 17, 2015 |
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2015 14:40
|
|
|
Peel posted:If people have actually got mad at Butcher for taking a year and a half to write a novel then that's embarrassing for them, not Butcher.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2015 15:18
|
|
|
Wittgen posted:I'll offer another comparison. Harry Potter was about a million words total. When Doors of Stone comes out, Kingkiller Chronicles should be pushing a million words as well. Harry Potter was published over ten years. If Doors of Stone doesn't come out until 2017, Kingkiller Chronicles will also have been published over ten years. Harry Potter - 4224 pages (taken from a NYT article presumably using the US editions), released over 8.33 years (September 1998-July 2007). So 507 pages of story released / year. Kingkiller Chronicles - 1677 pages (taken from Amazon's page showing the page numbers for the US Kindle edition), released over 7.83 years so far (March 2007-January 2015). 214 pages / year so far. Even if Day 3 were to come out today and be the same size as Wise Man's Fear (so another 1001 pages, for a total of 2678), Rothfuss would be at 343 pages / year, or significantly slower than Rowling. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire clocks in at 262 pages / year by this metric, for the record. So it seems to me that Rothfuss is significantly slower than your Rowling example in releasing pages of story, and that Rothfuss is clearly on the Martin side of the spectrum (and Martin is known to be frustratingly slow).
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2015 16:19
|
|
|
Wittgen posted:I underestimated nerd's shittiness. quote:You can think this stance is laughable if you want. If you have evidence that they actually are writing slowly, I'd be happy to change my mind.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2015 17:59
|
|
|
ulmont posted:I'd be interested in your word count data for this. As I see it: Page counts are a terrible metric generally, but even worse when using a children's story. Have you ever looked at a printed copy of Harry Potter? All of mine had big fonts, large margins and a lot of space between lines. There's also the question of hard cover vs paperback for page counts. Basically, don't use page counts.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2015 20:54
|
|
|
Yeah, page counts are worthless. I have different editions of the same book with wildly different page counts. I got word counts from a Yahoo answer, but they are also on the HP Lexicon. Also, Philosopher's Stone was published in July of 97. September of 98 was the American release date. Ornamented Death, I am not measuring his writing speed by how many words he can "type in a day." I am looking at the word count of finished, published books divided by the time it took them to get published. It's not a perfect measurement of writing speed, but I can't think of a fairer way to do it. Again, I'm not denying that it feels slow. But there are people saying he doesn't take writing seriously, or he's not really working at writing the books. I don't think that is true. It isn't consistent with the fact that he produces publishable words at the same pace as many other authors.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2015 21:51
|
|
|
Wittgen posted:It isn't consistent with the fact that he produces publishable words at the same pace as many other authors. I guess GRRM qualifies as being more than one author, on average.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2015 22:52
|
|
|
Peel posted:If people have actually got mad at Butcher for taking a year and a half to write a novel then that's embarrassing for them, not Butcher. Whalley posted:Especially because it took him a year and a half to write one of his longest novels, as well as planning out/writing stuff for an entire new series that fans had been wanting for ages, getting about a dozen shorts out in the time, and just generally who fuckin' cares because that's a pretty drat good pace for most any novelist. People got really used to the 1-a-year release schedule of Dresden Files, and failed to update their expectations as the series got bigger and more complex.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2015 23:56
|
|
|
jivjov posted:People got really used to the 1-a-year release schedule of Dresden Files, and failed to update their expectations as the series got bigger and more complex. Jim himself didn't help. I can't find it right off hand, but there's another post he made on his forum maybe a year before the one I linked earlier where he blows up a fan for daring to suggest that he (Jim) won't meet the one-a-year schedule he'd been keeping.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2015 00:34
|
|
|
Everyone has their own way of writing and there are plenty of authors that can take several years between books. As much flak as I and others give Rothfuss, I can't fault him for taking his time. I'd prefer a massive delay over Rothfuss putting out something he feels unsatisfied with.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2015 01:59
|
|
|
If the delay means we get something similar to WMF then there won't be much point in following him or buying his books anymore. Spending the better part of a decade to write something that average is pretty hosed up. I can definitely believe this story is something he originally wrote in college though.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2015 19:18
|
|
|
Evil Fluffy posted:If the delay means we get something similar to WMF then there won't be much point in following him or buying his books anymore. Spending the better part of a decade to write something that average is pretty hosed up. I can definitely believe this story is something he originally wrote in college though. Are you attempting to imply that writing time should have a directly proportional relationship with quality? Cause that's pretty hosed up. Sometimes great stuff happens fast, other times people spend years polishing a turd.
|
|
#
?
Jan 18, 2015 20:28
|
|
|
Evil Fluffy posted:If the delay means we get something similar to WMF then there won't be much point in following him or buying his books anymore. Spending the better part of a decade to write something that average is pretty hosed up. I can definitely believe this story is something he originally wrote in college though.
|
|
#
?
Jan 19, 2015 16:22
|
|
|
jivjov posted:Are you attempting to imply that writing time should have a directly proportional relationship with quality? Cause that's pretty hosed up. Sometimes great stuff happens fast, other times people spend years polishing a turd. I'd say it's perfectly valid to bring up when the author himself acts like one of the big reasons for the long stretches of time between installments in his series is cuz he's a perfectionist about his writing.
|
|
#
?
Jan 19, 2015 20:37
|
|
|
To be fair the terrible parts about the book are the ideas, not the writing, the man clearly knows how to put words together. Too bad they tell a story that's boring at its best and idiotic at worst.
|
|
#
?
Jan 19, 2015 22:16
|
|
|
anilEhilated posted:To be fair the terrible parts about the book are the ideas, not the writing, the man clearly knows how to put words together. Too bad they tell a story that's boring at its best and idiotic at worst. Fingers Plough Keyboard
|
|
#
?
Jan 19, 2015 22:32
|
|
|
Habibi posted:Fingers Plough Keyboard This guy. This guy gets it.
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2015 00:31
|
|
|
I don't really get the praise for Rothfuss's prose either. It's not the worst I've ever read, but it's nothing special - it reads without incident at best and makes me cringe a little too often. It's all permeated by this sense of smugness where he seems to think he's much cleverer than he actually is, and that grates.
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2015 02:13
|
|
|
Well, the way I see it: the first book has next to no plot and extremely generic setting. Something must have made me stick with it the whole time through.
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2015 08:37
|
|
|
anilEhilated posted:Well, the way I see it: the first book has next to no plot and extremely generic setting. Something must have made me stick with it the whole time through. The concept of sympathy and then the way they apply it was kind of neat. Kvothe is an entertaining character in the way most Perfect Assholes are.I even liked the Fae and the weird tree and stuff. It's hard to tell where the line is between Kvothe being a goony sperg and Rothfuss being a goony sperg because I enjoyed WMF up til about 70% in when he started loving his teacher. I didn't particularly mind the bit with Felurian even, because that trope he used to escape goes all the way back to Arabian Nights. Only thing I would have changed is that he probably should have had a reference to Kvothe knowing how to escape because that story has existed forever rather than leaning on how great he is even more.
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2015 18:04
|
|
|
To get slightly off topic, I think a big problem people had with Martin was that he refused to talk about the book. All he ever posted to his blog was football and pizza chat which left one with the impression: 1. He's not writing 2. He's going to die from a pizza football related fatality. Now, I don't follow Rothfuss as obsessively as I did Martin (See: gang tag) but I do get the impression he is writing. He can take his time. Also with Martin, there was definitely a "I finished reading 3 books and want moooooorrrreeee!". Wise Man's Fear was well written, but the story was mediocre and I don't really care about the characters all that much, so I'm not chomping for Doors Of Stone or whatever it's called. I can wait. ...now China Mieville on the other hand...a short story collection is nice but I want more novels! 
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2015 18:43
|
|
|
Snuffman posted:To get slightly off topic, I think a big problem people had with Martin was that he refused to talk about the book. All he ever posted to his blog was football and pizza chat which left one with the impression: Mieville should rewrite the Rothfuss's trilogy. That would be a loving series.
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2015 19:13
|
|
|
Benson Cunningham posted:Mieville should rewrite the Rothfuss's trilogy. That would be a loving series. Not that it would be a bad thing by any means.
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2015 19:17
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 11, 2024 06:54 |
|
|
anilEhilated posted:To be fair he'd probably axe the whole Mary Sue issue and made some proletarian nobody the one who actually did poo poo while whatshisface gets the credit. If he could at least give Rothfuss the name of his European cover artists I would be eternally grateful. U.S. Book covers are just awful.
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2015 20:31
|
|