Recent content by atheling

Finished GotM(oo) re-read. I liked it more than I remember, even the ending--tho he did wrap it up awfully fast. I guess his little verbal ticks are bothering me less this time around, but maybe that'll change in the next couple of books. Reading this again, I think he didn't expect to write a...

That's a can. Also a tin, if you like (and I've heard people call steel cans "tins"). What was invented in 1933 was specifically the beer can: the company was looking for a way to sell beer in metal containers (probably in the hopes that it would be cheaper than glass bottles)--beer in...

Sure. I'm a Tolkien fan, too. And I do love slow starts. But remember that you have to earn the patience of the reader: if it's the first book from a new author, you don't know if this guy knows what he's doing or even remembers what story he set out to tell, so if the beginning drags... the...

I don't think the prologue to GotM (Erikson) was an infodump: how could it possibly be, he didn't give you even one scrap of useful information? Actually, I'm not sure what the purpose was. It was kinda like certain (old?) TV shows that (used to?) do a throwaway intro scene before the opening...

As it turns out, I'm in the middle of GotMoo right now (a re-read, but I didn't finish the series the first time around--maybe 7 or 8 books? I forget). It's better than I remembered it being. It's stronger than a lot of other writers' first novels. But there are some things that I find, not...

The movie intro to LotR, about the One Ring and all that, was not in the book at all: the story introduces this material as Frodo learns about it. There was just a Prologue (after a Forward, not part of the story) with the title "Concerning Hobbits". It ends with a short (3 page) summary of...

Canning was invented in the 19th century, I think, but it originally meant putting cooked food in jars (I think "tinning" is a UK term for canning specifically in tin cans--so, more specific). By WWI manufactured canned food, in "cans" just as we use the term today (not jars), was certainly in...

I doubt there's any basis for this in folklore: I'm pretty sure werewolves and vampires come from different folklore traditions in Europe (the name is a dead giveaway here: "were" or "wer" is an old word for "man" in the Germanic languages, not the regular one any more in any language as far as...

your mood icon is oddly appropriate for this post...

I guess I got confused because I was thinking "author intrusions" (e.g. when the author passes judgment on the viewpoint character in a scene--Stephen King does this now and then, for instance), but it sounds like you mean "narrative" (as opposed to dialogue). Yeah. I mean. The book is somewhat...

oh right. voice = author voice. okay, well, I don't remember that about the novel, but I also forgot about the present tense until I glanced at it again a few minutes ago, so I'm not confident of my memory here. I don't remember being bothered by it, and I think I would have been (for what it's...

Too much voice? don't think I follow you there. I mean, the present tense thing is a bit weird, but I got used to it after a few pages (so I recall). Is that what you mean?

My father has this massive textbook on a shelf somewhere, something like "The History of Western Art" or some such (big subject, big book, many pictures). One day he was looking something up in that book and found a squashed spider in between two pages somewhere in the middle (not a very big...

I know someone like that, too... (not naming any names)

and @TomTB said that was "optimistic", LOL