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Oh my oh my. I am absolutely ashamed at how absolutely ready I am for this. One thing I don't think I mentioned in my prior posts about growing up near Jim, but that's probably worth sharing: Since he was a Big Shot Author and his wife was an editor for Tor Books, they got a LOT of promotional copies of things, and over summer breaks they'd invite me over and I'd crawl through the big piles of extra books and they'd let me take what I wanted (within limits of what they were allowed to keep / discard / give away). So I spent a lot of time in his library (basically a whole separate carriage house behind the main house). I read much of the Aubrey / Maturin series for the first time sitting in a corner of the floor on the second floor of his library. He had a very large library that was very obviously curated to hold reference books for being a fantasy writer -- not just large sections on mythology, but also things like a whole section on renaissance and medieval clothing styles and fashions, etc. There was a large section containing nothing but anime / manga, including reference works about manga. And this was back in the early 1990's when you couldn't just find that stuff in the local Waldenbooks. In other words, going by the content of his library, I'm pretty sure the heavily animesque structure of WoT was both conscious and deliberate on Jordan's part.
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Sep 17, 2019 23:36
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Gnoman posted:I was referencing the rather poor Dune prequels with Kevin J Anderson. Anderson was, in fact, suggested by higher-ups at TOR as a potential author to take over the series after Jordan's death.
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Dec 10, 2019 04:13
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Data Graham posted:I mean let me be clear, I wasn't criticizing it. I wasn't taking any stand. What would usually happen would be that I would bring up my inability to write fiction well, and he would say "Well let me tell you about MY guiding example of Best Author Ever and Best Worldbuilding Ever", and I would say "well I can't speak to WoT having not read it, but as a Tolkien nerd here are the things I admire about his stuff", and he would say "gently caress Tolkien and his fairies and unicorns, what you need is to read WoT which is all about OORAH POWERFUL MAN written by VIETNAM VET who ACTUALLY SAW WAR unlike sissy fairy Tolkien". Upon which I would retire to my quiet dark corner to nurse my grudge. That dude sounds like a dick. Jordan was a gentle giant and a gentle man and his clearest statement on war was Thom going "in wars, boy, fools kill other fools for foolish causes."
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Oct 15, 2021 17:05
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Johnny Joestar posted:as obvious as it is to us hopefully we can avoid spoiling stuff about rand early on My brother got real mad about the cover to The Dragon Reborn when it came out because he felt the cover and title together were a spoiler. I remember between Eye and Hunt, begging Harriett to tell me whether Thom was alive or not and she told me that that was the only thing she'd been able to get Jim to tell her, and despite that she wouldn't tell me !
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Oct 22, 2021 21:05
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I would go to a screening if there were one near me. I've been to a few WoT related events over the years. The first time someone introduced themselves as "Hi, I'm [name] Sedai and this is my Warder, [name]" I got kinda thrown. But in retrospect they were just ahead of the curve and I wasn't on their level yet. These days though I'd just be "cool, what Ajah?" and make sure their shawl didn't have a black fringe Point being yes there are gonna be weirdos but these days we might as well all let our freak flag fly. What's the worst that could happen? A plague?
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Nov 8, 2021 19:29
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Sinteres posted:I've always wondered if the back half lull happened in WoT because Jordan just naturally got bogged down with all the balls he was juggling (speaking of GRRM) and had a harder time cutting through to the important bits, or if it was a deliberate choice to keep printing money and Tor either agreed or didn't disagree enough to make an issue over it. The real answer's probably a little bit of each, but when I was younger I pretty much flat out assumed it was the second reason. GRRM completely failing to write anything in a decade has made me more sympathetic to the idea that writing epic series is really hard though (even if he's obviously distracted by other poo poo too). I still think the books got a little too caught up in every lord being a cynical schemer who wasn't just trying to position themselves for the day after the Last Battle but didn't give a poo poo if their scheming blew everything up before the Last Battle either. It was that he got bogged down (and maybe a little bored with the main storyline). Or at least that's my take, anyway. There's a few reasons I think this: 1) Anyone who talked to him in that time period and asked him about it, he'd talk about how he had more ideas for books than he had time to write them, and then he'd start talking about how he wanted to write the Mat/Tuon "outrigger" novels etc. He didn't need to pad things out; at that point he was printing money regardless and he had plenty of ideas for other things to write. "I feel like padding this out" doesn't fit, but maybe "I'd rather write a bit about Morgase than do another Elayne chapter right now" might fit better. I don't think it was deliberate padding but it might have been distraction. 2) Pretty much every book in the whole series has a basic structure of "things happen at the beginning" "kinda boring middle that sets up the end" "big dramatic ending." It makes sense that the series as a whole would have that same structure also. Good books to kick things off, some relatively humdrum books in the middle to get all the pieces in place for the ending, big cataclysmic ending with fireworks. There are some other things that may have played into it though. One big one was time pressure. He had The Great Hunt already written when Eye was published. After that it took him about a year or two to write each book, and over time he lost his lead, and during the slog there was sometimes as little as a month total time between "finished draft" and "books in stores." So I suspect the "slog" books just had less editing time. DarkHorse posted:Wasn't there a theory that Jordan was padding out the middle because Harriet was having health issues at the time? This doesn't quite fit to my mind -- I really doubt medical bills as such were an issue -- but she *was* having health problems around that time so was probably less able to help with the editing. People make a lot of "lol his wife is his editor" jokes but Harriett is absurdly intelligent and very actively helped with the earlier books and with the last few.
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Dec 9, 2021 14:01
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Nitrousoxide posted:I still can't get over the fact that Lanfear joined and stuck with team shadow because she couldn't get over her boyfriend dumping her 3000 years ago. The other funny thing is that Lanfear is basically a direct insert of the title character from H. Rider Haggard's She -- same description, same motivation, same character beats, etc. I actually asked Jordan once if it had been intentional and it took him by surprise and he said that it wasn't intentional but he had read She when he was a kid so he couldn't rule it out.
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Dec 15, 2021 16:36
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crepeface posted:"cool story bro" I have several ! Here's one: A year or so before his diagnosis I think it was I stopped by the carriage house to say hi and I found out Jim had just bought a Porsche this was a big deal because he didn't really spend his money on big $$$ stuff, but apparently he'd always wanted one so finally he was like "it's time, I'm gonna buy the Porsche of my dreams" I don't remember specifically what Porsche it was but I remember looking it up at the time and it was a new Porsche that cost approximately 100k in the early 2000's The funny part was: he had a really hard time finding a Porsche that he could actually fit inside He was 6'5" and not small and that turns out to be a problem when Porsche-shopping They ended up having to measure him all around and the finally found one that he had a few inches of clearance in all around I saw him driving it around Charleston a few times, very zippy Another one: Around the time Hurricane Hugo came through Charleston, so like 1989, and I'd read Eye because I got an early copy, and I think we'd gone over to Harriett and Jim's to borrow some Sterno or some other hurricane supply, and we were standing around talking and I was like twelve or thirteen and I was trying to convince the other people standing around to read the books and they were good So of course I piped up with (possibly the first use of?) the "You should read it! It's Wheel-y good!" pun Jim threatened to "introduce me to his set of flaying knives" if I kept saying things like that
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Dec 17, 2021 03:16
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Hollismason posted:Very excited! I am a harpstring, vibrating faster and faster, vibrating to invisibility and faster still
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Dec 22, 2021 17:33
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Oh, I think people missed this -- There was a neat interview with Harriett in the local Charleston paper back in November: Not sure if it's paywalled or not though
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Dec 23, 2021 16:20
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ChubbyChecker posted:you read 15 elf books, so read a non-elf book for a change Jordan read them and was a fan too so it's on point
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Dec 31, 2021 02:40
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Brolander posted:he's an interesting fellow. i'd watch a biopic. I want to read his ballet crit He used to hire staff assistants (as in, assistants for Maria and Alan) from the local dance companies, I suspect as a way of supporting the dancers by giving them easy day jobs
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Jan 6, 2022 02:01
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Gambor posted:The only thing from Jordan I can find on it is this: I asked Harriett once what was up with those scenes. I don't remember her exact words but they were along the lines of "a lot of the readers of this series are young men, we have a thing coming up later that could be awkward [I think she was referring to Mat / Tuon, though those books weren't out yet], and we wanted to show young men why that kind of thing was bad." So I tend to read the Tylin section as "Jordan was trying to show why rape is bad and fumbled it" but those scenes are ambiguous enough that I think a lot of different readings, including harsh ones, are valid. Nobody has to give Jim a pass, they're some pretty hosed up scenes and each reader's reaction is their own.
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Mar 23, 2022 19:46
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Jedit posted:Tel'aran'rhiod almost certainly gets its name from Caer Arianrhod in the Mabinogi. It literally translates as "fort of the silver wheel", but it was likely that Jordan just liked the sound of it. I once heard Jordan tell a lengthy story -- this was of course decades ago and I don't remember the story well -- about being in a Welsh bookshop and the lady behind the counter, a young woman with beautiful curly red hair naturally, had him hanging on her every word because even like 'that will be four pound six" or whatever sounded beautiful in a Gaelic accent. And so he talks with her for a bit and he's hanging on her every word and at the end as he's leaving the store she says "I so love the sound of your accent" because of course to her he sounds southern and exotic.
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Aug 19, 2023 20:03
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ChubbyChecker posted:m'veren Oh goddammit pik_d posted:He was also a pretty tall dude, somewhere close to 6'3" I think. He then went on to make Rand and Perrin super loving tall, and while Mat isn't quite there he's certainly no shorty. I'm 6'3" and he was taller than I am, about 6'5" I'd guess, and broad also (that photo with the hat is post-diagnosis I think and he'd lost a lot of weight). At one point he decided to buy a porsche (I think he'd always wanted one) and they had a big problem finding one that he could fit into. They ended up measuring all around him and finding one with like an inch of clearance each way. I saw him zipping around Charleston in it once. RembrandtQEinstein posted:Also Loial/Thom. I think most of the male characters were some aspect of his personality but Thom and Loial were the closest direct matches at least as I knew him, Thom especially -- Thom the public persona and Loial the more rarely seen private. Thom even had his same limp which I'm sure was deliberate. His Divine Shadow posted:Kevin J Anderson did such a fine job with Dune he should get to do it. Y'all don't know how lucky we are. No joke. I literally heard Tom Doherty (the founder of Tor Books)float this ("Kevin Anderson did a great job with the Dune books") at the reception following Jordan's funeral. Everyone standing around just sort of grimaced. Calenth fucked around with this message at 23:48 on Nov 27, 2023 |
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Nov 27, 2023 23:46
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