Moments when a piece of entertainment completely lost you.

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Tue Apr 26, 2016 8:13 pm

I know. I just don't care. I had to assure my sister at the end of the last season that he was coming back. He simply doesn't matter to me as much now. It's like Arya Stark. She mattered to me for a while now I don't really care about what she is doing.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue Apr 26, 2016 8:14 pm

MGuy wrote:That's where I am. I was invested in Snow but now Tyrion is the only character that I even care about.

??? I mean, sure if you believe he's really dead. Like a sucker.

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Tue Apr 26, 2016 8:20 pm

He's been caught dressed in Stark costume on set. So not only does he return from death, he weasels his way out of his Night's Watch oath because it expires upon death.

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Tue Apr 26, 2016 8:26 pm

Guys... I never said that I only liked Tyrion because he was the only one left alive.

SlyJohnny · Post by **SlyJohnny** » Tue Apr 26, 2016 10:38 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:They are meaningless to the story being told. Digressions into other stories that take place in the same world but are ultimately meaningless to the story being told. That makes them a waste of space. They could be perfectly fine as standalone stories, but if they are sitting in another story that they ultimately have nothing to do with, they represent the author shitting the bed.

Stories can have subplots, and fantasy epics always tell lots of stories at once. Fantasy epics are all about that sweet window dressing, and the multiple themes beyond just the main struggle.

This monologue doesn't need to exist, for example, especially as GRRM by his own admission likes to "celebrate the glory of war" in his writing.

"Ser? My lady?” said Podrick. "Is a broken man an outlaw?"

"More or less," Brienne answered.

Septon Meribald disagreed. "More less than more. There are many sorts of outlaws, just as there are many sorts of birds. A sandpiper and a sea eagle both have wings, but they are not the same. The singers love to sing of good men forced to go outside the law to fight some wicked lord, but most outlaws are more like this ravening Hound than they are the lightning lord. They are evil men, driven by greed, soured by malice, despising the gods and caring only for themselves. Broken men are more deserving of our pity, though they may be just as dangerous. Almost all are common-born, simple folk who had never been more than a mile from the house where they were born until the day some lord came round to take them off to war. Poorly shod and poorly clad, they march away beneath his banners, ofttimes with no better arms than a sickle or a sharpened hoe, or a maul they made themselves by lashing a stone to a stick with strips of hide. Brothers march with brothers, sons with fathers, friends with friends. They've heard the songs and stories, so they go off with eager hearts, dreaming of the wonders they will see, of the wealth and glory they will win. War seems a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know.

"Then they get a taste of battle.

“For some, that one taste is enough to break them. Others go on for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in, but even a man who has survived a hundred fights can break in his hundred-and-first. Brothers watch their brothers die, fathers lose their sons, friends see their friends trying to hold their entrails in after they've been gutted by an axe.

"They see the lord who led them there cut down, and some other lord shouts that they are his now. They take a wound, and when that’s still half-healed they take another. There is never enough to eat, their shoes fall to pieces from the marching, their clothes are torn and rotting, and half of them are shitting in their breeches from drinking bad water.

"If they want new boots or a warmer cloak or maybe a rusted iron halfhelm, they need to take them from a corpse, and before long they are stealing from the living too, from the smallfolk whose lands they’re fighting in, men very like the men they used to be. They slaughter their sheep and steal their chickens, and from there it’s just a short step to carrying off their daughters too. And one day they look around and realize all their friends and kin are gone, that they are fighting beside strangers beneath a banner that they hardly recognize. They don’t know where they are or how to get back home and the lord they’re fighting for does not know their names, yet here he comes, shouting for them to form up, to make a line with their spears and scythes and sharpened hoes, to stand their ground. And the knights come down on them, faceless men clad all in steel, and the iron thunder of their charge seems to fill the world...

"And the man breaks.

"He turns and runs, or crawls off afterward over the corpses of the slain, or steals away in the black of night, and he finds someplace to hide. All thought of home is gone by then, and kings and lords and gods mean less to him than a haunch of spoiled meat that will let him live another day, or a skin of bad wine that might drown his fear for a few hours. The broken man lives from day to day, from meal to meal, more beast than man. Lady Brienne is not wrong. In times like these, the traveler must beware of broken men, and fear them…but he should pity them as well.”

When Meribald was finished a profound silence fell upon their little band. Brienne could hear the wind rustling through a clump of pussywillows, and farther off the faint cry of a loon. She could hear Dog panting softly as he loped along beside the septon and his donkey, tongue lolling from his mouth. The quiet stretched and stretched, until finally she said, "How old were you when they marched you off to war?"

"Why, no older than your boy," Meribald replied. "Too young for such, in truth, but my brothers were all going, and I would not be left behind. Willam said I could be his squire, though Will was no knight, only a potboy armed with a kitchen knife he’d stolen from the inn. He died upon the Stepstones, and never struck a blow. It was fever did for him, and for my brother Robin. Owen died from a mace that split his head apart, and his friend Jon Pox was hanged for rape."

"The War of the Ninepenny Kings?" asked Hyle Hunt.

"So they called it, though I never saw a king, nor earned a penny. It was a war, though. That it was."

Meribald doesn't need to exist. He isn't going to get the story where it's going. He humanises the Poor Fellows/Sparrows a little, and he offers a different perspective on war, and the book is better and the world it's trying to sell is more fleshed out as a result.

phlapjackage · Post by **phlapjackage** » Wed Apr 27, 2016 1:36 am

Kaelik wrote: 1) It is not really holding out, since watching GoT is basically shit.

My "holding out hope" line was referring to the chance that we'll see a new book period ("hold out hope for new books from GRRM"), not whether it'll be better than the TV show (and I agree, the TV show is not good at all. Kit Harrington is terrible...).

Kaelik wrote: 2) Uhh... "he clearly has no interest in writing a book, as evidence I point to the fact that he released a book and then started writing the next book, and the wait still hasn't been as long as it was between Storm of Swords and Feast for Crows yet."

Last book he released was kind of a frankenmonster from the giant opus that he ended up cutting in half and releasing as two books. I give him half marks for that last one. It was where the cracks began to show, to be sure.

Kaelik wrote: I mean look, he clearly is a slow writer, all things considered (or at least in later ASOIAF books) and he may be dedicating a fair amount of time to not writing because he doesn't enjoy it as much as he used to, but I think you might be a little impatient in your declaration that no future book is forthcoming.

You're right, that was hyperbole that was a little stronger than it should have been. Let me retract a bit, rephrase it for you: "It does seem that GRRM's heart isn't in the ASoIF series anymore, I wouldn't be surprised if we never see a new book, although we probably will. In my opinion."

SlyJohnny wrote: The chapters he's released of the new book have led me to think that as an author, he's Still Got It. Writing fantasy epics takes a long time, I imagine, and writing the same thing for so long must be exhausting. I'd rather he took his time and aimed for writing classics instead of just shitting stuff out to satisfy his contract.

That's my point too, it must be exhausting. I'm not at all knocking GRRM (or if it sounds like I am, it's unintended). I can totally understand the burnt-out feeling. Dude has tons of money now, does things he's interested in (football, other books, the TV show). I see a lot of reasonable...reasons...that he might not finish the series. Maybe he could farm it out to Sanderson or whoever...

And the whole "take their time instead of shitting stuff out" line is getting old with me. "Taking their time" now seems synonymous with just not getting stuff done in a timely manner. Any time anyone misses a deadline, it's not "you fucked up", it's "well, I'd rather you took your time and got it right". In small doses it's acceptable, but that shit seems everywhere now. </rant>

Blade · Post by **Blade** » Wed Apr 27, 2016 8:28 am

I stopped reading at some point, because I realized I was just reading to see where it would go and didn't enjoy it much.
Felt like those series where you have boring episodes where nothing happens until a few minutes before the end when there's an exciting new event, and when you watch the next episode it starts with the reveal and then the discovery that it wasn't that exciting.

So now I suggest people read the Romance of the Three Kingdoms instead. It's also very long, it also has an empire that falls into civil war, many POV characters, the death of some of them, brutality, heroes and epic battles, and even magic with a limited scope and role but the story progresses quickly and it's actually completed.

If only there had been more Mongol invasions back then, you could have had White Walkers (well, probably Riders) as well.

Starmaker · Post by **Starmaker** » Wed Apr 27, 2016 10:04 am

I got into fantasy via historical novels, so I used to like GoT precisely because anyone could die. I still hated the characters, though, but the faux-historicity made the books readable. When the books reverted to playing the worst fantasy tropes straight (pedigrees, the chosen one bullshit), that's when I stopped caring.

FrankTrollman wrote:They are meaningless to the story being told. Digressions into other stories that take place in the same world but are ultimately meaningless to the story being told. That makes them a waste of space. They could be perfectly fine as standalone stories, but if they are sitting in another story that they ultimately have nothing to do with, they represent the author shitting the bed.

I seriously don't see how this aligns with the IMHO skill post. GoT isn't literary masturbatory award bait where the only casuality are the protagonist's and the author's hopes and dreams. It's epic fantasy where people are dying left and right. If a character is telegraphed as unkillable, I don't care whether he lives, either. Now that's a waste of space.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Apr 27, 2016 10:21 am

Starmaker wrote: I seriously don't see how this aligns with the IMHO skill post. GoT isn't literary masturbatory award bait where the only casuality are the protagonist's and the author's hopes and dreams. It's epic fantasy where people are dying left and right. If a character is telegraphed as unkillable, I don't care whether he lives, either. Now that's a waste of space.

Reading a book is not a game. There is only one outcome. There are not two paths, there is only one path. The author decides what the ending is, that's the end of the story. Literally the end of the story.

Whatever story they are telling has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And if they include plotlines that get dropped and don't impact the story actually being told, then that is a different fucking story that had its own beginning, middle, and end. In a cooperative storytelling game, you don't know what plotlines are going to end up going the distance and which are going to be dropped, and that's OK because nobody else knows either. It's a game. In a single author fiction, the author actually does know which threads are unimportant and their conscious choice to include them anyway is them wasting your fucking time on purpose.

I get the impression that Game of Thrones would be a whole lot better as a series of standalone "Tales of Westeros" pieces that were mostly self contained and could get to a fucking point and then stop. Jumbling it all together into ponderous tomes that jump all over the continent and regale us with the adventures of people who end up being inconsequential footnotes in the history being presented makes everything shit.

Note: there exists a genre called "Mysteries" wherein irrelevant plot threads serve a useful purpose of making the underlying puzzle of the book harder to solve. Game of Thrones is not such a book, and has no such excuse. Although the thing where GRRM is bizarrely convinced that fanfiction authors can steal his copyrights by successfully guessing his plot twists and writing them before he does suggests that he is probably incorrectly under the impression that he does.

-Username17

TiaC · Post by **TiaC** » Wed Apr 27, 2016 10:55 am

TOZ wrote:It's like character death in killer GM games. The players stop investing.

Now I want to play a campaign that starts with a long-established adventuring party that has had such high turn-over that we don't even know what the original quest was, only that it was extremely important. We could constantly have encounters with allies and enemies from before any of our time but who love or hate us just the same.

Blicero · Post by **Blicero** » Wed Apr 27, 2016 4:43 pm

TiaC wrote: Now I want to play a campaign that starts with a long-established adventuring party that has had such high turn-over that we don't even know what the original quest was, only that it was extremely important. We could constantly have encounters with allies and enemies from before any of our time but who love or hate us just the same.

That was basically how my first 3.5 campaign went, except that the absurd character death rates were actually developed in play. It went pretty well I think.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Wed Apr 27, 2016 6:01 pm

TiaC wrote:
TOZ wrote:It's like character death in killer GM games. The players stop investing.
Now I want to play a campaign that starts with a long-established adventuring party that has had such high turn-over that we don't even know what the original quest was, only that it was extremely important. We could constantly have encounters with allies and enemies from before any of our time but who love or hate us just the same.

The Fellowship of the Stone was created 217 years ago, before the fall of Ruthan, for the purpose of bringing the Stone of Askohar to the tomb of King Wilgar the Just, which would have resurrected the powerful wizard-king and allowed him to crush the armies of Lord Volderon and usher in a golden age usher in a golden age for the Kingdom of Ruthan.

Though the Kingdom has long since ceased to exist in any recognizable form, the Fellowship remains. Every time a member died, a new one was recruited, creating an unbroken chain of adventurers stretching back over two centuries. Unfortunately, due to poor recordkeeping, none of the current Fellows knows what the original purpose of the Fellowship was. They have long since lost the Stone, along with countless artifacts that the Fellowship has collected and discarded over the centuries. Of the original Fellowship, only their name remains.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Wed Apr 27, 2016 6:26 pm

I've been reading this terrible fantasy novel called the Crimson Claymore. I'm gonna do a full rageview at some point, it's hilariously awful.

Meikle641 · Post by **Meikle641** » Thu Apr 28, 2016 8:05 am

hyzmarca wrote:
TiaC wrote:
TOZ wrote:It's like character death in killer GM games. The players stop investing.
Now I want to play a campaign that starts with a long-established adventuring party that has had such high turn-over that we don't even know what the original quest was, only that it was extremely important. We could constantly have encounters with allies and enemies from before any of our time but who love or hate us just the same.
The Fellowship of the Stone was created 217 years ago, before the fall of Ruthan, for the purpose of bringing the Stone of Askohar to the tomb of King Wilgar the Just, which would have resurrected the powerful wizard-king and allowed him to crush the armies of Lord Volderon and usher in a golden age usher in a golden age for the Kingdom of Ruthan.

Though the Kingdom has long since ceased to exist in any recognizable form, the Fellowship remains. Every time a member died, a new one was recruited, creating an unbroken chain of adventurers stretching back over two centuries. Unfortunately, due to poor recordkeeping, none of the current Fellows knows what the original purpose of the Fellowship was. They have long since lost the Stone, along with countless artifacts that the Fellowship has collected and discarded over the centuries. Of the original Fellowship, only their name remains.

So, sort of the Black Company.

Mechalich · Post by **Mechalich** » Thu Apr 28, 2016 10:18 am

Blade wrote:So now I suggest people read the Romance of the Three Kingdoms instead. It's also very long, it also has an empire that falls into civil war, many POV characters, the death of some of them, brutality, heroes and epic battles, and even magic with a limited scope and role but the story progresses quickly and it's actually completed.

Three Kingdoms is about 800,000 words - depending on which version you read. ASOIAF is already more than double that. Personally, even though I've read the five extant books multiple times and have read longer series, that's too long. Bloat is becoming a real problem in contemporary fantasy, with GRRM not even close to the worst offender - he's not even in the same league as Steve Erikson. I'm not sure what caused this trend, though certain technological advances have definitely contributed, but I am quite eager for it to see some push-back. Not sure when that's likely to happen though.

MisterDee · Post by **MisterDee** » Thu Apr 28, 2016 12:08 pm

Mechalich wrote:Bloat is becoming a real problem in contemporary fantasy, with GRRM not even close to the worst offender - he's not even in the same league as Steve Erikson. I'm not sure what caused this trend, though certain technological advances have definitely contributed, but I am quite eager for it to see some push-back. Not sure when that's likely to happen though.

Two things:

1-"Contemporary Fantasy" is actually a term of art in the field - it means stuff like the Dresden Files, not fantasy written in the nineties/ought.

2-The publishing business is to blame. If you submit an adult fantasy, agents will autotrash your query if you're not close to a hundred thousand words (by contrast, 80 000 is enough for most other genres, with romance being publishable at 45k.) And they'll be happier if you're a 110 000, and nobody's going to trash your fantasy for wordcount reasons unless you exceed 120k.

Obviously, agents do that in part because they live to crush your hopes and dreams, but also because editors won't look at short fantasy novels, because apparently they don't sell (apparently, they've never heard of the Belgariad.)

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Thu Apr 28, 2016 12:12 pm

DSMatticus wrote: Even if I were prepared to concede that the failure of Rob's rebellion deprives Ned's death of narrative meaning (which I'm not particularly inclined to concede, what with the way it's scattered the remaining Stark children to various exotic plot advancing locations)

I guess I wasn't looking for any more narrative meaning in Ned's death other than "Joffrey is a petulant, short-sighted boy-king who will accidentally throw the country into war just to look like a big man for five minutes" combined with a bit of "strictly honorable people have a hard time playing The Game of Thrones".

DSMatticus wrote: ASoIaF is hemorrhaging characters that are actually enjoyable to read about - when Tyrion dies I'll probably apathyquit.

Tyrion has been my favorite character since the beginning. Given how many characters are dead and how many new characters I don't care about, I would probably lose a lot of interest in the story, as well.

hyzmarca wrote: It's rather obvious that Snow isn't going to stay dead. They've telegraphed his resurrection for miles.

I've heard this theory before, but I'm unaware of the details of what was telegraphed.

Mechalich · Post by **Mechalich** » Thu Apr 28, 2016 12:28 pm

MisterDee wrote:2-The publishing business is to blame. If you submit an adult fantasy, agents will autotrash your query if you're not close to a hundred thousand words (by contrast, 80 000 is enough for most other genres, with romance being publishable at 45k.) And they'll be happier if you're a 110 000, and nobody's going to trash your fantasy for wordcount reasons unless you exceed 120k.

That doesn't seem like it's all of it though. A trilogy with each book at 120k each would be lengthy, but not absurd. A Dance with Dragons is almost that long all by itself, which is nuts.

I wonder if its an author leverage thing, because early novels seem to be more restrained in length, and then established authors go of on these insane tears to produce sagas that have word counts in the millions.

Starmaker · Post by **Starmaker** » Thu Apr 28, 2016 1:35 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:Reading a book is not a game. There is only one outcome. There are not two paths, there is only one path. The author decides what the ending is, that's the end of the story. Literally the end of the story.
...
In a single author fiction, the author actually does know which threads are unimportant and their conscious choice to include them anyway is them wasting your fucking time on purpose.

All single-author fiction is wasting my fucking time on purpose. It's made up so there's no ethical compulsion to care about the characters, and there's only one story which is already written and printed that I can't contribute to in any way -- so if I'm curious how it all will turn out, I can just scroll to the end.

A large part of following the story and empathizing with fictional characters is pretending to not know how the story is going to unfold and pretending to have no way to discover it other than by reading (or watching). Stories where stakes aren't too high can get away with extracting good drama from nonfatal setbacks. People die when they are killed on GoT. If there's a Cannot Die tag on a character, his or her story loses its drama. Which might be okay if they're an inconsequential background character, but a nope if they're a viewpoint one and a large part of the book is about them. That's a waste of my time. "Oh noes, a dragon is attacking me, I'm gonna die!!!1!" "No you won't, it's v1 of a trilogy, stop whining you fucking idiot." I'd rather read the proverbial wsj editorial.

MisterDee · Post by **MisterDee** » Thu Apr 28, 2016 1:40 pm

I can't speak with any experience here, because I'm still at the "beg agents to look at my book" stage, but I imagine that once you've launched a successful series, your editor is going to be wary of pissing you off by asking you to edit down.

Also, there's probably an incentive to having a big fat book once you know it has a certain amount of captive readers: a large book ends up more visibile on library shelves.

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Thu Apr 28, 2016 3:24 pm

You guys posting about the OotS here made me go check it again.

It's still shit.

Also, I checked something: You're now manually aware that Xykon's last appearance was in comic #901, almost 3 years ago. If the fillers continue at their current glacial pace, the main villain will be on hold for longer than the entire D&D 3.0 run.

CapnTthePirateG · Post by **CapnTthePirateG** » Thu Apr 28, 2016 6:24 pm

Mechalich wrote: he's not even in the same league as Steve Erikson.

Been reading Malazan lately, and compared to that GRRM is pretty tame, especially with some of the criticism being thrown at GRRM can be applied to Erikson in spades.

Now I just finished book 7, so I can't say it's completely lost me but I'm kinda meh on finishing the rest of the series right now. It's not bad, but...

Confusing Magic Bullshit
So one of the big things with the series is that magic and gods are really complicated but play a big part in whatever the narrative is supposed to be. Now, part of the fun of the series is figuring out what the confusing magic bullshit is and how it works, but at least part of it kinda sours when some random bullshit you haven't heard of gets piled on to solve the problem of the week with more magi babble. We also get into the problem where no one can really relate to all the random magi babble crap and more of it gets poured on all the damn time. Oh man this mage is using a Hold instead of a Warren, and now the characters have figured out its due to some random magic plot element that you the reader would never figure out because the rules are never well explained at all. Characters will throw around magic babble and dumb shit will happen for poorly explained reasons (sure the not-orc is exploding into white light in the middle of a city center, go with it).

Where the fuck are we going?
As far as I can tell the main overarching threat of the books is the reawakening of the Crippled God, who is an evil dark god that the other gods fear and has a pain/slavery motif. OK, sounds legit. So, so far his evil plans have been:

-Taint all magic with chaos which does, um, something bad. Corrupt the user or some shit, I don't even know. Apparently the world's magic users figure out a way to fix this after book 3.
-Get into the real gods league which lets him...I think appoint champions but also fight the other gods in vaguely defined ways. Or something. Fuck!
-Launch 3 different evil empires/movements, which have all been destroyed by the Malazan Empire
-Empower random hobos to do evil things, then sit back and watch those hobos get killed.

So the end result is that the Crippled God keeps making vaguely defined plans and they all seem to get ended in a book or 2. Book 3 sees the heroes against an evil empire called the Pannion Domin backed by the Crippled God. It goes down in the book and is never mentioned again.

The weird apocalyptic movement inherited by an angry sexual assault victim in book 4 turns out to be backed by the Crippled God as well and is then destroyed by the Malazan army. It is then never heard from again.

Another evil empire made by not-elves arises when the Crippled God gives a magic evil sword to a dumb kid who goes on a conquering spree. The empire rises in book 5 and is destroyed by 7.

This is not to mention the many plot interludes that go nowhere - can you tell me what the point of all the Toc the Younger stuff is? No? Why the fuck are Bauchelain and Korbal Broach hanging around?

There is some genuinely funny stuff, and some cool moments, and the writing is rather interesting, but I'm just kinda meh on the series as a whole right now.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Thu Apr 28, 2016 6:34 pm

I think Malazahn completely lost me when it devoted half a book to some girl becoming a willing sex slave.

Mechalich · Post by **Mechalich** » Thu Apr 28, 2016 8:36 pm

CapnTthePirateG wrote:This is not to mention the many plot interludes that go nowhere - can you tell me what the point of all the Toc the Younger stuff is? No? Why the fuck are Bauchelain and Korbal Broach hanging around?

Without getting into spoiler territory, there is really no point to anything in Malazan. Fiddler and most of the people he hangs around with (some of whom you care about, most of whom you totally don't) come to a resolution at the end of book 10. The Crippled God plot is resolved, I guess, in some sense. And then the series just stops (apparently there's 3 other books written by someone else that wraps up slightly more but I can't be bothered to go there). Most everything else, like the fate of the freaking empire itself are just completely left hanging.

There is a point to the Toc the Younger stuff I suppose, buried beneath all the horrible crap that keeps on happening to him (there's probably 100,000 words between the various books composed entirely of Toc undergoing physical or emotional torture), but it sure takes a while to get there.

CapnTthePirateG wrote:There is some genuinely funny stuff, and some cool moments, and the writing is rather interesting, but I'm just kinda meh on the series as a whole right now.

Erikson can write a cool tactical fight sequence - like a really cool one. Periodically you get one, which is great. He can also write really visceral scenes of brutal suffering, which starts out evocative and stops being so after they just start piling up like horror dominoes (the whole Ribby Snake subplot is nothing more than torture porn that the Erikson is inflicting upon the readers for no good reason). As for everything else, blah. I read through the whole series because it was (per page) really quite cheap on kindle and I had a lot of time to kill, but I'd never recommend it to anyone.

Blicero · Post by **Blicero** » Thu Apr 28, 2016 10:16 pm

CapnTthePirateG wrote: Been reading Malazan lately, and compared to that GRRM is pretty tame, especially with some of the criticism being thrown at GRRM can be applied to Erikson in spades.

Now I just finished book 7, so I can't say it's completely lost me but I'm kinda meh on finishing the rest of the series right now. It's not bad, but...

I think book 7 is as far as I got before I stopped. Stopping at that point was not a particular conscious decision, I just never got around to the last three. I really quite liked Deadhouse Gates and Midnight Tides, thought Memories of Ice was often lovely, and had a decidedly mixed relationship with the other four. (I have only the vaguest memories of anything that happened in The Bonehunters or Reaper's Gate, for example.)

From what I've read, what allowed Erikson to churn those things out so quickly was extensive and thorough prewriting and a profound reluctance to go back and edit things he had written more than a few days ago. And you can really tell in the writing and style.