Just you wait. It'll be another Ayn Rand movement. Slowly, he'll gather young intellectuals who are into his enlightened ideas about the humane and the metaphysical. He will slowly brainwash them in a semi-cultist like fashion. People will begin infiltrating big business and politics and push they Saccoccacian ideals. And in about 80 years, The Tale of Onora will be the most bought and read book by the world! Ayn Rand 2.0!
And she had a philosophy. Aside from that stuff in the forward about how we are all god and the universe and a thought and a feeling of each other (which is the ponderings of an LSD user, not a philosophy), there's really no philosophy there.
“Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the Weather.” ~Bill Hicks
Good point. Rand's wasn't a philosophy I found particularly compelling for the real world, but I remember reading both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged all the way through and enjoying them, even though I didn't necessarily agree. It's been a long time since I read them though.
It's not free for Canadians and I refuse to spend money on this. So I'll just read the snippet and assess - The forward - Horsepucky. First we are God, then were are gods separately no capital. Which is it to be? He's contradicting himself. First sentence isn't too bad. But the next few try too hard. Everything has it's own descriptor. He's really overworking the seed metaphor in the second paragraph. Why is he refusing to name the cloaked figure? I wonder how long he carries that on for. I sure as hell wouldn't want to just as a writer. How many times can you type out The cloaked figure did this and the cloaked figure did that without it sounding asinine. The descriptions rather than being awe-inspiring like he hopes are kinda of having a big fish effect on me - everything is described as ultra-incredible, not to be believable. Gates aren't just tall - they scrap the sky. So now I'm pretty skeptical. Sky scaping hmm, now is that more than twenty feet? Destruction magic is that a label or does he mean destructive magic in general? A guard from the city watch called down. Might've been easier to say a watch guard shouted. Ew - does graphic violence usually find it's way into fantasy? Anyhow. Even for graphic the word choice is off. Ooze sounds slow and fountain sounds gushy so the blood coming out the ears is contradictory. And I don't think the guard is looking at his hands just to see what his blood looked like. He's in pain and probably trying to figure out what's happening. Eye projectiles. It's coming across a little more funny-ugg than revealing that the cloaked figure is dangerous. Guttersnipes, beseech me, baptize. Huh whaat? that speech is Very Heavy Handed. Couldn't the wizards have used a shut up spell before he got that whomper out. Also, who are we supposed to be following the clown in the cloak? He's a little grim for the mc or is this a prologue I forgot. And why would the wizards try to shame a man - shouldn't they be punishing him for killing someone? Dead dandelions losing their seeds to the wind - but they're not dead per sey. And it's not a loss. All the word choices seem to be wrong. And the metaphors pretty cliché. That crack sentence tripped on and on. like a conductor orchestrating a symphony - in their time would there even be a conductor who orchestrats a symphony? discharged a smile. I'm all for experimenting with verbs but this doesn't work here Corpses can still twist? He's head hopping. does a striking meteor really need to be relentless? His death and destruction scene is pretty meh, lots of visuals but no impact or care on any of the people. He tries to bring in emotion but he's so caught up in visuals and pomp there's nothing left. I have no idea what the hell is going on and every time the cloaked figure opens his mouth it makes things worse. All I have learned is there is a pissed off guy busting shit up. Gardens of dead bodies. Everytime he tries to do a metaphor it seems to contradict itself. The gardens of dead bodies sound neat but truly it doesn't make sense. Gardens grow things - now a zombie world could have a garden of dead bodies - but his is just a graveyard. It might've been better had he worked in more matchable metaphors. The boy enters - the tone hasn't changed much even though it's a boy now. And rather than be worried about food in winter he's noticing that the destruction of the city is still mathematically perfect? Hmm - the boy gets four very bloated paragraphs and nothing much is said. It's all a teaser. Holy Toledo all that wasn't even chapter 1 - lol platinum, waterfall braided hair. Hmm. I don't get this image. Actually I find the waterfall image works better with hair taken out of braids. I'm getting the big fish feeling again - a woman is hysterically crying and I have no idea why. The writer is toying with me. She finds a diary opens it it's her husbands now I'm lost is the story about to become one big flashback? Another character enters the scene an older dude. snowflakes fell like angels from heaven - not too impressed with that one it seems too heavy and doesn't mix well with the scene. I'm so lost I'm not even curious about weird colored eyes. Another boy ? Dueling heros? feelings being crushed - hopes, dreams, desires, might've worked better. I don't know how many pages I read but it seems off to a pretty slow start with a lot of info to be sorted from the convulted dialogue. Good luck, you brave readers!
That sums it up well. I tried to read it, honest I did. I didn't get far; it was just too painful. After reading the disputed reviews, I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. Too many of the reviews commented on him and his antics and never mentioned his writing, leaving me to wonder if the reviewer had read it at all, and was just lambasting him. Saddly, I didn't make it past page five, and it was a struggle to get that far. The review that sparked the whole thing called his writing 'wordy and pretentious'. He took offense and they were off to the races. After the small bit I was able to force myself to read, calling it wordy and pretentious is being polite.
Saccoccacian sounds like a virus hehehe 1 in 5 adults will contract saccoccacia in their lifetime, though those in their 20s are particularly susceptible. Chances of contracting the virus decreases with age. It is mostly harmless - symptoms include irritability and an incredible urge to burn the Tale of Onora, though some experience the opposite and are inflicted with an obsession to devour the book, literally, instead. Treatment include calm, soothing voices from healthier minds untouched by the Tale of Onora and, most importantly, exposure to actually good books.
I can see this might have worked if it was a graveyard transformed into a garden and the effect was to contrast these two - death and life. But it would have to be worked into a paragraph I think, with a much softer touch - it should convey more the atmosphere of the place and how it makes you feel as opposed to anything visual. I couldn't resist... Hear hear. I'm neither brave nor, more importantly, that patient! Dune is waaaaay more fun to read
I don't have time at the moment for a longer commentary on Chapter 1, but let me say that the use of nameless characters (the cloaked man, the woman, whatever) is starting to irritate me. I don't like it much when authors do that even for a short period at the start of a book. This guy has definitely taken it too far for my taste.
Obviously it's a Choose Your Own Adventure book. The characters are your family and friends! That also explains how everything is so vaguely detailed. The details are up to you!
Sorry this didn't go up yesterday, as chapter 2 is 31 pages long! I was trying to get to the end of it, an endeavor that became increasingly difficult, as we'll see in a moment. Here we go. Chapter 2: The Morning of a War (part I) Events: Yay! We have a named character now! Olywn. How she is connected to any of the previous events we don't know at all, but who cares, things are finally moving. What's she doing? She's running at night. Is she carrying something? Why yes she is. Is it her newborn baby? Now you must have read a fantasy novel before! That's practically cheating in this game I just made up. She's running from a city for reasons that will surely have to do with her giving birth to a child of prophecy, Saccoccio hasn't spelled that out for us yet, but again, this is a fantasy novel. She's some kind of political prisoner too, or maybe an underclass of some sort, it's not really clear. So she runs, and while she's running Saccoccio takes the time to tell us everything he can about the world she lives in. We'll talk about it in writing but this is where the novel ground to a fucking halt. Olywn is thinking about where she wants to run to, and has to document the history of every race in a hundred mile radius as she does so. It's not really events so I'll try to sum up in a way that won't cause you to burn your monitor out of boredom. Woden Caliph, they guy that wrecked all the shit in the prologue was king a while back and did a bunch of stuff Some guys are basically rocks, others are merefolk, some fucking race only has one male born every 100 years. Magic stuff happens Then there's a bunch of line breaks I'm going to try to keep track of, spring happens somewhere and there's a stampede of animals. An army marches and they're ominous as fuck. We don't know who they are, and we don't know why they're fighting, but you can bet Saccoccio spends a good 5 paragraphs telling us about their special attacks. Olwyn comes into a forest. There's some bullshit about a magic tree. I guess some fucking race is going to protect the child and her. So she gets really tired and is about to black out for some reason, and has to drink some water, so she lays the child on the ground and fucking crawls to a stream. Hang on, it gets more asinine from there. A bear shows up, because that's how things happen. It can't smell the blood on the baby (we've been told there's still blood on the baby), it just wanders around. Then it gets between Olwyn and the baby and she has to kill it, which takes a good two pages of describing all the magic shit as it happens. Then we go back to describing the army again, and that's where I cut off in order to write this. There's totally an army you guys, and it has people in it. One of them is a girl, and some other motherfuckers are there too. Writing: I've "hoo'boyed" the writing before, but this is the mose "hoo'boy" I've ever "hoo'boyed." Lets start with pacing. There isn't any. The rush of Olwyn fleeing the city is immediately lost as she ponders all of the races on this earth and their creation for 10 fucking pages. Then spring happens somewhere. Then for no reason, Saccoccio has to talk about how the schools of magic are arranged, why all the structured magic sucks, and how it's better to just go off and practice magic for yourself for a bit. The parallels to Saccoccio's writing career couldn't be more obvious if he had just replaced the names of the magic school with the name of the 9th grade writing teacher who told him where he sucked. This history has no bearing on the plot, by the way, it's just there. Just because Saccoccio made it up in his head, and it's really important to him that you know it, right fucking now! Within the first two pages of the second chapter the narrative has ground to a complete stop. Saccoccio clearly thinks I read fantasy because I want to hear all about the nuances of his magic system, which couldn't possibly bore me more. The scene with the bear is particularly painful because there is so much time spent going over every sensation of the magic, that I had to go two fucking pages just to find out she killed a bear with an ice spike. What happens in a couple of seconds does not need 500 words of description. About that. I'm glad that Saccoccio like World of Warcraft. WoW is useful because it keeps terrible players away from really good games, that take skill to play. It's the reservoir tip of the video game word, keeping people who can't understand games away from ones they might ruin. But WoW is a terrible way to write a book. If I had known that Saccoccio was going to use the term "mana" right up front in the text I would have punched myself for thinking about reading it. But I'm in too deep now. It's pretty clear that Saccoccio has arrayed his characters by their race/class, and has given a great deal of thought to their skills and tech tree. It tells me nothing at all to know that a race is "skilled in subtle attacks" unless I'm about to go over a list of cooldowns and mana costs. This is lazy writing at its laziest, facts and figures devoid of narrative. There was criticism on goodreads that Saccoccio has very one dimensional characters. I'd say that criticism is not strong enough. Saccoccio has events with arms and legs. Olwyn's thoughts or feelings when a bear comes to eat her baby are given a grand total of none words. Not even a sentence. The army that's marching around? No idea what they're doing. I don't know where they are or what they're fighting for, and Saccoccio spends much, much more time going over the different fighting styles of each unit, than he does even on their physical descriptions. The phrasing is still horrible, I just wanted to remind you all of that. Here's a passage that I think sums up Saccoccio's impression of the reader in his usual ham-handed way: "One ignorant enought to mold his beliefs on the narrow shape of his perspective could never understand the Shadekin." This launches a paragraph on how they're a magic idea of some kind. But the subtext is clear. If you don't understand his concept then you don't deserve to read his novel. It's not for you. It's for people who get Saccoccio. He doesn't need to spend words describing who they are, or what they are doing going into battle. More from the second half of chapter 2 tomorrow, probably.
@Jack Asher Hmm.. What do you think of the generic term mana? I personally use it as I just always did and everyone knows what mana is. As a reader, does it turn you off? I never thought about it before and realize my MS deals a lot in "mana". P.S. Reading your comments on ToA makes me want to read it... That's so messed up.
@Tenderiser I thought manna was like, how much magic your character got left. You know, you use manna to cast spells and when you run out of manna, you can no longer use magic. It's a gaming thing. But if there's yet another meaning to manna, then I don't know it. What did you find on google? There's also manna from heaven - bread from heaven - that God gave to the Israelites when they wandered the desert after Egypt.
I've heard of that type of manna. Go me! Wiki says: Mana is a word found in Austronesian languages meaning "power, effectiveness, prestige," where in most cases the power is understood to be supernatural.[1] The exact semantics depends on the language. The concept is a major one in Polynesian cultures. It is part of contemporary Pacific Islander culture. The term came to the attention of western anthropologists through the reports of missionaries in the islands. Its study was included in the topic of cultural anthropology, specifically in the anthropology of religion. Links were seen between it and an earlier phase of western religion, animism at first, then pre-animism.
More importantly to the conversation, mana became a gaming term within the card game, Magic: The Gathering. It's what's called a player resource, or sometimes just resource. It's a depletable quantity, on which magic, spells or skills rely. A character with 100 mana, for instance, would be able to use a spell that cost 5 mana twenty times before needing to find a way to replenish. It's found in everything from table top games, to first person shooters, but I've never seen it in a book before, because that's a fucking stupid idea. Mana exists to make a game harder and change the difficulty of a situation. Unless your reader is counting the number of fireballs your character has cast, the only reason to include it would be to give your character a reason they can't keep casting magic. And in that case, why not just write that they're too tired? Real life does not have resource costs.
life has no resources? Let me tell that to all the people worried about trees and water supplies. But seriously, i always imagines it as an energy you expend and this get you tired mentally just like physical work to get you tired
Describing details and not emotions? Managing resources? I think Saccoccio just wanted to write a wiki, not a book. Unfortunately, wiki-itis is a common disease. You only want to describe how everything works on a functional level, not actually how it could incorporate into a story. I've only ever seen one person actually write a wiki on all their stupid ideas rather than a book. They were schizophrenic and lashed out at anyone who criticized their wiki, by the way. That also explains why Saccoccio never ever ever bothers showing. All his "conveyed emotions" are told, and I never feel a single one.
