Commonweal Thread: Goddammit, Sorry Graydon(s)

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Commonweal Thread: Goddammit, Sorry Graydon(s)

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Danhenge posted:

nobody has uncles,

Slow mentioned uncles in book 5 when talking to Radish.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2022 23:49

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 12:14

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

habeasdorkus posted:

. Am I missing something or did the final collapse of Reems happen real quick between 543-545 Year of the Peace Established after twenty-ish years of war and destruction?

Halt took out an awful lot of sorcerers that would have otherwise slowed down that invasion.

# ¿ Dec 30, 2022 22:43

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Lead out in cuffs posted:

Was Kynefrid ever gendered? I don't think I ever saw them referred to with anything but gender-neutral pronouns.

Chloris complains about there only being two dudes in the group.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2023 21:19

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

D-Pad posted:

Edit 2: I see now he has an unrelated story called The Human Dress. Is it worth reading?

Parts of it are good (vikings! zombies! dinosaurs!) but at its worst the prose is way more confusing than anything in the Commonweal series and it goes on just a little bit too long at the end. I'm thinking in particular of most everything after the scene with Tyl's parents ghosts

I've read it twice, the second after seeing some discussion on the mailing list about a critical detail of the setting and being bothered enough as to how I could have missed it the first time that I wanted to see how it changed things. I don't think this counts as a mailing list leak, as a sufficiently-attentive reader could and maybe should have figured it out but there are no humans in the story.

Also while looking for a non-list source of that I found this 2015 post on rec.arts.sf.written:

quote:

There's The Blessed Novel, aka :Ravens in a Morning Sky:; short, dense (kindly disposed readers used the word "neutronium") in part because I was trying to use saga conventions. (70 kwords; first full draft was just fifty, much "make this clearer" from early readers. No plans to epub.)

There's the Doorstop, aka :The Human Dress:, which is what happens when I try to write a big fluffy fantasy brick. (kindly disposed readers used the word "tungsten" to qualify "fluff"); kinda what happens when I read William Blake when happy. 313 kwords. (Recently been sent to copy-editor to see if they view this as a sensible undertaking. May well get epub'd in the fullness of time.)

I subsequently bounced off a couple sequel ideas for the Doorstop -- I could never get the shape-thief to grow a personality -- and took some advice to write to a simpler target as a means of making the resulting book easier to read.

So I tried to write a D&D novel, serial numbers lightly filed off; the result of that was about 10,000 words of something that was rapidly sliding into the twin problems of evil and divine grace, wasn't noticeably easier to read, and then it was stuck. "Stuck" stemmed from my eventually-recognized inability to believe in a just empire or a created universe even for fictive purposes. (Brian was really helpful with names for this one, and I'm kinda sad it never managed to go anywhere.)

Some years later, I wound up re-reading all those of Glen Cook's books in my possession -- Cook is sadly underestimated as a prose stylist -- at about the same time one of James Nicoll's periodic laments about the systems of government in fantasy drifted through my awareness, and I went "I could write the contra-positive of a Black Company novel. That could be interesting, and it wouldn't have to have a horrible system of government" and by the time I was done that isn't quite what I had but I had :The March North:. (81 kwords)

I was having fun with the setting, so there's :A Succession of Bad Days: (183 kwords), just now escaped into the wild, Commonweal #3 of the uncertain title (128 kwords pre-edit), and Commonweal #4 of the uncertain structure and irritating narrative recalcitrance but probably :A Mist of Grit and Splinters:.

So, nope, :The March North: is not the Doorstop, and hopefully the above unscrambles the dolorous consequences of years of book-nicknames and coy phrases on my part.

-- Graydon

# ¿ Mar 11, 2023 13:20

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

I really like The Dubious Hills and I'd think that most Saunders fans would too. It's been a long-rear end time since I read The Secret Country and the sequels, I should probably fix that.

Early Cherryh is all about people in strange situations being confused by what's going on and it doesn't surprise me at all that they'd have been an influence. (now I'm thinking about the azi and the various created-to-obey-the-sorcerer races in the Commonweal....)

# ¿ Mar 14, 2023 17:35

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Lead out in cuffs posted:

So I think the ocean, and the Sea People, came from the east more broadly, and mainly from the southeast relative to the Second Commonweal. The First Commonweal is to the northwest, ie in the opposite direction. I suppose it's not impossible that there's geography on the other side of the First Commonweal that would allow the Sea People to invade, but it seems unlikely to me?

Reems, and so now the Sea People, had an invasion route into the First Commonweal via Meadows Pass.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2023 18:21

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 12:14

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

Wake, Grue, Rust, Halt, Block ?

# ¿ Dec 13, 2023 15:50

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Commonweal Thread: Goddammit, Sorry Graydon(s)