#my tendency to ramble is why I included the short answer at the very top

[misc-obeyme]

would u consider obey me a dead fandom?

Um. Nope. I sure wouldn't.

If there's anybody out there who thinks Obey Me is a dead fandom, I would say they're probably confused about what a dead fandom actually is.

I think an argument could be made saying that there is no such thing as a dead fandom. But I'm going to assume you mean that fan content is at an all time low.

Friend, I have been in fandoms where the content was like... you get a fic or two every year if you're lucky. This for a media that hadn't put out any new content in decades.

Obey Me? I get an average of five asks per day about Obey Me. I can queue 10 posts per day about Obey Me. I still average over 800 notes a day on this here Obey Me blog. In the past few months, we've had new artists and writers joining the community and posting their Obey Me fan works. The game is still active and updating. There are two apps even.

So no, I personally would not consider the Obey Me fandom to be dead by any means.

It's certainly been more active in the past. I'll never forget the surge of activity that happened when Nightbringer first came out. My Solomon fics seemed to double their notes over night lol.

But we're also in a bit of a lull right now because we aren't getting new chapters. Every time an event happens, there's another burst of activity. And then things die down just a little before they surge again. That's the nature of fandom.

Another common fandom thing is people coming and going. I've been here for almost two years, but there are others who have been here for four. And then there are some people who've only been in the fandom for a couple months. And then there are the people who were here at the beginning, but have since moved on. Maybe they only stayed for a few months before moving on. Maybe they're only casually in the fandom, dipping in now and again. This is also just the nature of fandom. There's no right way to do it. And it doesn't reflect on whether a fandom is alive or dead.

Hell, we even have plenty of discourse and toxic stuff in this here fandom, too. More of that when there's nothing else to do, I think, which is unfortunate, but also kinda... just part of fandom.

And all of this is just how it is on Tumblr. I know there are active Obey Me communities on Twitter/X and Instagram, too. I'm just too old and tired to maintain that many socials. I actually have accounts on both of those apps but I rarely use them.

And lastly, I'm a big proponent of being involved in fandom no matter how active the community is. By this I mean, if I still have an Obey Me hyperfixation in ten years when the apps are closed down and nearly everybody else has moved on, I will still be here posting fic. Because I won't leave a fandom until I am ready to move on from it, dead or not. (Sometimes this can mean you are one of the few people still creating for said fandom, but you might be surprised at how many people will still enjoy what you create.)

#tl;dr this fandom is far from dead lol #my tendency to ramble is why I included the short answer at the very top #obey me #obey me nightbringer #anon asks #misc answers

[byamylaurens]

On Structuring Plot: A List Of Useful Resources + My Recent Process

I was asked on Instagram last week how I go about structuring my stories, whether there’s a set way I like to do it, or if it’s different for every story, or what. I promised an answer last week, and that didn’t happen, but hey! It is this week and now I can answer! 😀

The truth of the matter is, I feel very self-conscious about plot structure. It’s the area of writing I’m least comfortable with, and so my attempts either end up with me just writing and ignoring structure entirely (A Fox Of Storms And Starlight), or else plotting everything else in meticulous detail, usually with the help of Liana Brooks (How Not To Acquire A Castle, as evidenced in our epic plotting video).

And then there is everything else, which tends to fall in the middle. Honestly, it depends on the book, and the mood, and how much of a concrete, specific handle I need on the story before going in.

Because that varies widely, too. When Worlds Collide, the final book in the Sanctuary trilogy that won Best Children’s Book 2019 in my state? You’re reading the first draft, prettied up with some proofreading for typos. The first book in the series, on the other hand? That’s the …eighth, I think, draft? And again, everything else falls somewhere in the middle, though generally speaking I plan my novels more than my short stories, and things that feel “fast paced” more than things that luxuriate more in the prose. Though even that’s not entirely true. And it overlaps with the length tendencies.

SO. Rather than continuing to ramble about my actual processes (variable), I thought I’d share with you a range of resources that you might find useful (if you’re a writer) or simply interesting (if you’re not, or even if you are I guess).

1. Liana Brooks’ Outlining Sheet

Liana, who you probably know is my writer-buddy and co-conspirator with regards to Inkprint Press, is excellent at plot. She does developmental edits for a really reasonable rate, and is absolutely stellar at what she does. So it’s without shame that I recommend first up her outline sheet, which is a take on the Lester Dent Plot Formula (google it).

2. Beat Sheets.

For when a general outline with key touch points isn’t detailed enough, there are beat sheets. The best ones I’ve found came from Jami Gold, and you can download them here. I’ve also converted them to word docs with scenes numbered for a 40-scene/chapter book and a 20 scene-chapter book, and you can grab those here (word docx download).

3. MICE Structure.

I posted this video on Friday, but Mary Robinette Kowal’s MICE theory has been hands down THE most useful plotting resource I’ve encountered for me personally. I’ll elaborate on this a little more below, where I’ll talk specifically about a project I’m working on right now.

4. Brandon Sanderson’s Plot Lectures.

I listened to these nearly a year ago, then relistened recently and was interested to discover I’d done something similar with Moon Shot, the project I’m currently plotting. Definitely worth a listen. It’s a little more general in scope than the preceding resources, but very necessary for a sound understanding of what your plot should be DOING.

You can also check out the posts I wrote on plot structure years ago, starting here.

Okay, now to the specifics. On Tuesday, I posted the following to Instagram, which is what precipitated the question that resulted in this post:

This is me working on Moon Shot, and it’s the first time I really used the MICE process on a longer work very deliberately, and I LOVED IT.

So I thought I’d quickly delineate for you here exactly what I did. (ETA: Quickly, ha.)

Worldbuilding. I had a giant conversation with Liana about the worldbuilding for the world, and how the main sci fi element works. She took notes and emailed them to me.

Brain Dump. I did a stream-of-consciousness dump into my notes just rambling through things roughly sequentially, and stopping to research the sciencey stuff I needed.

List Of Questions. From this, I listed out on my small whiteboard (A4-ish size) all the questions that would be asked and answered in this book. Will they escape? Why can’t they go to Earth? Who are the kidnappers? Etc.

MICE. I then colour-coded each question according to it’s MICE category: milieu, inquiry, character, event. If that doesn’t make sense, go watch Kowal’s video first (resource 3 above).

General Plotting. I broke out the bigger whiteboard (A2 size?), separated it roughly into quarters across the ‘page’, and added every question to the board. Some questions are asked right at the start of the story, so that’s where their coloured line started, then I estimated roughly when the question would be answered in-plot, and ended their coloured line there. This was hands-down the most useful part of plotting, because it let me see a bunch of things in macro: I’d overloaded the third quarter with too many answers, and there wasn’t enough in the second quarter. Certain questions COULDN’T be asked until other ones were answered, and if I left the answering too late, the next arc would be too squished before the end of the book. And so forth. So I played around, adjusting arcs until I got a fairly even spread of questions and answers across the book, with little clusters at the 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 marks. I also looked to make sure that I had enough strong questions asked in the beginning that weren’t answered until the very end.

Specific Plotting. For each arc, I now knew WHEN in the book it had to be. So I grabbed three A3 pages, taped them together in a long line, divided the page into 25 columns (see point 8 for why), and wrote headings with the basic beats of a story. Call to action, midpoint, final puzzle piece, act 2 antagonist, and so forth. See resource 2 above. Then I took my MICE arcs and started filling things in: this scene needs to answer this question and raise the next one. This scene needs to answer this question. That sort of thing. Not the specifics of what the characters are doing, but the underlying bones of what the SCENE needs to be doing.

Conflict! Once the beginnings and ends of each MICE arc were in place, I referred back to the MICE principle to figure out what kinds of conflict I needed to add. For example, one of the opening MICE arcs is a milieu question: How did the kids escape? Knowing that this is a milieu, I know I need to add points throughout the story where they run into dead ends in their attempts to escape, all the way until they actually make it out. Another MICE arc revolves around a mystery, so I knew I needed to throw red herrings and misleading information in there to influence the decisions the characters are making. I used different coloured highlighter to mark the main long-running arcs to make sure I was sprinkling them evenly throughout the book, and not accidentally ignoring one for too long.

Point Of View. I now had a really good idea of what was happening in each scene, so on to POV. Most books wouldn’t need this step necessarily, but part of the POINT of this book is that it has POV scenes from all 25 of my Year 8 students from a couple of years ago (you have not LIVED until you’ve tried this, oy, my head). AND on top of that, every character has one of eight different superpowers. So I wrote out all the character names on sticky notes, colour coded according to superpower. Then I played around. Which superpower would be useful in this scene? Which would lend an interesting lens to the events? Post-its meant I could test things and swap them around easily, until I got an order I was happy with, with the superpowers kind of evenly sprinkled throughout the book (as much as possible; they’re based on Myer-Briggs personality type, which, yes, most of the students were kind enough to do the test for me so I could allocate their powers accurately, HA, but it means some superpowers are more common than others).

Text Type. One of the only ways I could think of making this book hang together cohesively was to tell it via epistolary, which means including a bunch of other text types as well as narration (or instead of). So there are story bits, but also emails, letters, maps, interviews, transcripts and more. So once I had everything else in place, I figured out which scenes were going to be which text types so that again, there was a balance of them throughout.

PHEW. What a process. Still, overall it only took me about three hours, and it was SUPER FUN AND SATISFYING to do. I’ll DEFINITELY be doing at least steps 1 – 7 for a couple of future books, because it was just a really inherently enjoyable process for me, and makes me confident going into the book that the scenes will do what they need to do.

Here’s a sneaky peek at what some of the final outline looks like… 😀

On Structuring Plot: A List Of Useful Resources + My Recent Process was originally published on Amy Laurens

#Amy Laurens #Australian author Amy #beat sheets for writers #before you write #Brandon Sanderson #Canberra writer Amy #how to plot a novel #How to Write #Jami Gold&039;s beat sheets #Mary Robinette Kowal #plot plot plot the book #plotting masterclass #structuring stories with story structure like a well-structured story with structure #writing #writing resource #writing workshop #you too can write a story woo

[unavenged-robin]

I wish you would write a fic where Robin!Dick is looking after Baby!Damian? Please?

I guess if you’re a batfam writer you’ll eventually end up writing the baby!Damian AU one way or the other, uh? Must be a law or something. Anyway, enjoy! 

"I’d like to say that this is the strangest evening of my life”, he confides to the baby currently squirming in his arms. "But between me and you, for now it doesn’t even makes the top ten. Although I have the strong impression that this is only gonna get weirder and weirder from now on, yeah? What do you say?"

The baby blows bubbles at him and doesn’t say anything. To be fair, he’s not even one year old and too amazed by the wonderful discoveries of his own fingers to pay attention to Dick’s nervous rambling. Which is a good thing. In his fifteen years on this Earth, Dick has met and played with a lot of children, including many babies, but he suspects that bouncing them on his knees and making weird faces at them for five minutes doesn’t really qualify him as a good babysitter.

Plus, there’s still the little matter of the unconscious Batman currently laying on the couch of his living room.

Dick had to catch him from face planting on the floor as soon as he opened the door, and it’s still unclear to him how the hell he managed to hold both the baby that was shoved without a warning into his arms, and the two hundred pounds of Dark Knight that immediately followed without dropping either of them. And Bruce had not been helpful in the slightest, by the way. In his defense, he looked, and still looks, so badly beaten that Dick winces in pain by just looking at him - and Bruce being still knocked out twenty minutes later does say a lot about how bad this is. Which is like, really bad.

So yeah, if the baby starts to cry, Dick is gonna lose it. More than he’s already losing it. Lucky for him, this particular baby doesn’t seem to be much of a crier. More of a hitter, if anything, since he seems to enjoy slapping the chubby hand he’s not too busy sucking, all over Dick’s face. Dick doesn’t mind. Like he doesn't mind the drool on his favorite shirt. The blood stains on the couch, on the other hand... but no, that's a problem for another day.

He pushes the baby’s wet fingers out of his mouth and bounces him a little on his hip.

“Are you angry, kiddo?”, he asks, pacing around the living room to soothe himself more than the kid, who’s now just gurgling quietly at himself. Dick side-eyes Bruce’s still form again and sighs. “I don’t reckon we’ll find baby formula in his utility belt, uh? I mean, with him you can never be sure about anything, but-”

He’s my son, Bruce had muttered against Dick’s shoulder while he was dragging him across the room. He’d added something else, but Dick was not able to catch it, his brain already short-circuiting. Batman’s son. Bruce’s son. And Dick didn’t knew anything about it. He still doesn’t know anything about it. Where the kid was, who the mother is, how Bruce find out about him in the first place, when he got him, who attacked them and why. He doesn’t know anything because he wasn’t there, and he wasn’t there because he and Bruce had been in this stupid fight for weeks now, and Dick’s been staying with the Titans since then, away from home, away from Bruce’s life which, apparently, is even more full of surprises than Dick ever imagined.

And now Bruce won’t wake up to explain anything.

Dick swallows back the deadly mix of fear and guilt gripping his guts and tries to think. Prioritize. Be Robin.

He should call Alfred. Or Clark. Check the perimeter, make sure that Batman wasn’t followed, that they’re not going to be under attack any moment soon. Find something for the baby to eat. And a diaper, since he doesn’t seem to be wearing one under the blanket he's wrapped in. The diaper first, probably.

“I don’t even know what your name is”, Dick realizes, stopping his restless pacing to actually look at the kid for the first time tonight. The baby squeals in response and looks back at him with big, bright green eyes full of curiosity. “I hope you already have one, because I’m gonna tell you in all honesty that Bruce is really shitty at naming things. He’ll probably just call you Batson or Batbaby, you know?”

For some reason, the idea makes him laugh. Well, it’s more a bark than a laugh but still. It’s not even funny, but Dick’s nervous, and scared, and he needs an outlet. He also really, really needs to call Alfred.

“I’m Dick, by the way”, he continues, still giggling, a little bit hysterically at this point. The baby, at least, seems very fascinated with the sound and tries to push his fingers inside Dick's mouth again. “I’m your- well, I have no idea what I am to you. Your brother, maybe. But Bruce’s not my dad, you see, he’s my partner. What would you call your father’s partner? An uncle? I kinda feel like Clark is my uncle sometimes. You’ll meet Clark soon enough, I think. He’s Superman. Very cool guy. But I think I’m too young to be an uncle, you know? So let’s say that we’ll decide what I am to you later, okay?”

He’s rambling again. And he’s kinda crying. Maybe. Just a little bit.

Is Bruce even breathing? Dick can’t scrape up enough courage to get closer to him and check out, but he has to, right? Because Bruce can’t die angry with him. Or thinking that Dick is angry with him. And there’s… well, there’s Batbaby to take care of, now. The same Batbaby who’s starting to whimper, little fists balled up around Dick’s drool-soaked t-shirt.

“Shhh, no please, don’t cry”, Dick tries to shush him, rocking him up and down. “Please, please, don’t cry, Batbaby. That’s, like, the last thing I need right now.”

“Damian.”

Dick jumps. He shouldn’t, what with being Robin and all, but he does it anyway: he jumps. Later he’s going to justify himself by saying that Bruce’s voice was so roughed up that he could barely recognize it, and anyway let’s be real: his Batman’s voice could very well be a villain’s voice. It was studied to be so.

“Bruce?”, Dick all but runs to him, crouching in front of the couch to help him sitting up. “Bruce, are you okay? What the hell happened? Who’s this baby? Is he really-”

“Damian”, Bruce repeats with a grunt, propping himself up on his elbow and failing at hiding a wince at the motion. “His name’s Damian. Not Batbaby.”

He manages to sound so offended at the idea, and Dick can’t help but laugh again. This is one of the things he could never explain to anyone, not even his friends, because saying out loud “Batman makes me laugh” and meaning it, makes everyone look at you like you were some kind of a lunatic. But it’s true. Bruce manages to make him laugh more times than Dick cares to admit. And it’s a good thing. It’s nice, and familiar.

“Well, excuse me”, he snorts, already a little bit more relaxed because Bruce is fine - battered up, but fine - and if Bruce is fine then everything else is gonna be fine too. It’s how the world works. “You do have a tendency of naming everything as Bat-something. Like, if I hadn't chosen Robin as my name, can you honestly say that you wouldn't have called me Bat Kid or something on the line?”

Bruce blinks down at him.

“Dick…”

“Nevermind, I know I’m right”, Dick interrupts him. “Now, are you going to answer my other questions? Who’s Batba- who’s Damian?”

Bruce’s gaze shifts to the baby in Dick’s arms, and the wrinkles around his mouth soften up into the hint of a smile.

“My son”, he answers, reaching up to take him.

And it’s definitely not the first time Batman holds a baby to his chest, but this looks somehow different to Dick’s eyes. Something in the way Bruce touches the kid, maybe. Not only extra careful, but also a bit hesitant. Like Bruce himself is not entirely sure this is real.

“Your son”, Dick repeats, sitting back on his heels and waiting for Bruce to elaborate. “Okay. That was clear enough.”

Weird and unexpected, but yeah, clear enough.

Bruce pushes back his cowl, smiles down at Damian and caresses the baby's cheek with exceptionally gentle fingers. Damian squirms and kicks his feet, apparently very happy to be fussed over.

“Mine and Talia’s”, Bruce adds after a moment, readjusting the squirming baby on his lap. The blanket in which Damian's wrapped in slips away a little, revealing a small bare shoulder. And on the shoulder, clear as daylight, Dick sees the bloody handprint Bruce’s now also staring at.

“Talia Al Ghul? The daughter or Ra's Al Ghul?”

It's baffling to even think about it. The blood on Damian’s skin is dry, Dick notices. And the handprint is slim and elongated, but little, clearly belonging to a woman’s hand.

“Talia Al Ghul”, Bruce confirms with a sigh, avoiding Dick's eyes. “She didn’t- I don’t think she had any intention of telling me about him anytime soon. I had to fight my way into the League’s compound to get to him. And then to get him out.”

Well, shit, Dick thinks.

“Well, shit”, he repeats out loud, standing up only to plop down on the couch next to Bruce.

For a while they just look in silence at Damian, who’s now fussing very loudly, trying to put Bruce’s fingers into his mouth, armored gauntlet and all.

“He’s kinda cute”, Dick decides. “To be your son, I mean.”

“I know.”

There’s the hint of a smile in Bruce’s voice. Dick frowns, reaches out an hand and boops the baby on the nose, making him chuckling in delight.

“I would’ve helped even if I was - am - still angry at you”, he adds accusingly. “You only had to ask me, and I would've come with you.”

“I know.”

“You always know everything”, Dick scoffs, but Bruce’s admission is already a win on its own in his book. “And yet here we are.”

“Here we are”, Bruce repeats. He doesn't sound as exasperated as Dick feels, though.

Bruce sinks back a little into the cushions, head tilted to the side, one arm still wrapped around the baby, the other one on the back of the couch, almost around Dick’s shoulders. His ribs must be killing him, but he doesn’t seem to mind. Truth to be told, underneath all the bruises, and the blood, and the dust, he looks kinda happy, which is always a good look on him, Dick believes.

He gently brushes a thumb over Damian’s shoulder, rubbing off the dry blood from the baby’s skin. He looks up at Bruce.

“I guess I’m coming back with you then, uh?”, he asks, hating the hesitation in his own voice. It’s not like Bruce would ever kick him out of the Manor, for god’s sake. And it’s only a flash, but Dick catches it anyway: the relief in Bruce’s eyes as he looks back at him.

“I…”, Bruce starts, voice unsure. Then he coughs and looks away. “That would be very thoughtful of you. Thank you, Dick.”

“Thoughtful”, Dick repeats with a dramatic sigh, resting his head on Bruce’s shoulder to get closer to Damian’s little, very chubby face. “Heard that, Batbaby? That’s an example of the shit you’re gonna get once you grow up, I hope you know that.”

“Language”, Bruce grumbles above them.

Dick ignores him altogether.

“Did you already call Alfred? Does he know yet?”

Bruce's face twists as if he had sucked on a lemon, which is enough of an answer for Dick.

“That’s gonna be so much fun”, he grins, leaning forwards to nuzzle his nose against Damian’s round one. “But only for me and Batbaby, of course.”

#dick grayson #bruce wayne #damian wayne #i'm writing too many au #but it's not my fault they're fun #Anonymous #asks #my fic #shari writes

[preserving-ferretbrain]

Review and Digression: The Black Magician Trilogy and Fantasy in General

by Dan H

Friday, 04 January 2008Dan remains unnecessarily complicated~

I don't read a lot these days. I'm lazy and easily distracted. When I do read, I tend to read fantasy. Growing up on Narnia, D&D, Warhammer and Terry Pratchett left me with the kind of mind which adapts to fictional worlds far more easily than real ones. Unfortunately despite having an abiding infatuation with the Fantasy genre, I don't actually ... well ... like it very much. Leaving aside the fact that a lot of it just isn't very good (a criticism which could be levelled at any genre, including literary fiction) it tends to be overlong, rambling, and full of annoying details about the history of imaginary places. George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, for example, began amazingly, creating a rich and detailed world with a complex multiple-viewpoint narrative, creating a real sense of the unfolding of history, and I loved the early books with a passion. The later books, however, got horribly bogged down in history and worldbuilding and the annoying obsession with detailing every last second of events in the Seven Kingdoms as it unfolded. Similarly while I loved The Hobbit, I could never get past the first book of The Lord of the Rings because of all the goddamned scenery. And the least said about Harry Potter the better. 

I picked up Trudi Canavan's The Magician's Guild out of a smug sense of irony. The blurb on the back, which describes a none-too-original situation with a Magician's Guild who march through a city protected by a shield of pure magic driving out vagrants, only to find that a plucky young slum girl can penetrate their defences by means of her hitherto unknown magical power, left me with the impression that the book would be at best amusingly awful, but worth picking up on buy-one-get-one-free.

I started reading the book with the same patronising self-assurance, quietly laughing at the rather generic fantasy names and the peculiar made-up wildlife. About three chapters in, however, something happened. I realised that I was actually really enjoying reading the book. I wasn't storing up scathing comments to put on the internet at a later date, or constructing detailed point-by-point analysis of why the series was subtly advocating neo-Marxist doctrines through the medium of a story about wizards. I was actually enjoying it. Taking a moment to think about it, I realised that the source of my enjoyment was something I had seldom seen before in a fantasy novel: the plot was actually progressing. Every chapter, something happened which built on the things that happened in the previous chapter, and set up the things that were going to happen in the next chapter. It introduced conflicts and then resolved them, usually in the space of less than two hundred pages. Not only that but, wonder of wonders, once something had been resolved, it stayed resolved. There were no "protagonist gets captured, protagonist escapes, protagonist gets captured again, protagonist escapes again" sequences. Not a page in the book is wasted on irrelevant descriptions or pointless sidequests.

On her website (which I will say more about later) Trudi Canavan describes herself as having a short attention span, if she is bored writing something - says Trudi - then she assumes people will get bored reading it. Perhaps the reason I loved these books so much is that Trudi's attention span seems to match my own almost exactly. Every time I found myself thinking "okay, I've had enough of this plotline now," the plot would be resolved within two pages and taken in a completely new direction. Each book in the Black Magician Trilogy is in two parts, and in between parts one and two, the book changes gear completely. In The Magician's Guild, for example, the first half of the book focuses on Sonea (the protagonist) trying to avoid being taken in by the magician's guild, while the second half focuses on her trying to avoid being thrown out again, and the transition comes at exactly the point where you start thinking "okay, I've had enough of this girl running away from people now". This pattern repeats in books two and three, with the change of pace at the half-way point being both refreshing and genuinely surprising.

Canavan's mastery of pacing extends to the overarching plot of the trilogy as well as to the individual books. A common problem in Fantasy series is for it to be obvious from chapter one of book one how the series is going to end, which makes the rest of the series into so much pointless preamble. I know I promised I wouldn't bring up Harry Potter, but the last three HP books are an excellent example of this problem. Once Voldemort comes back, it's obvious that we're just waiting for Harry to hit eighteen so he can confront the bugger, and books five, six, and seven are just 1500 pages of buildup. Canavan, on the other hand, very carefully reveals her plot elements only at the point at which they become relevant. The plot of book two is set up in the last chapters of book one, the plot of book three is set up in the last chapters of book two. At no point do we have to ask ourselves why we care about subplot X when main issue Y is clearly more important.

To put it another way. Trudi Canavan is blessedly aware that she is writing a novel, a work of fiction intended to entertain a reader. There is a popular adage that a fantasy novel is like a window into another world, and too many fantasy writers take this literally, seeming to view their books as something which you look through in order to see whatever happens to be going on in their secondary creation at a given time. Canavan never loses sight of the fact that she is writing fiction, telling a story, trying to entertain people.

This becomes ever more apparent if you look at her excellent

personal website

, which is full of beautifully down-to-earth bits of information and opinion. A rather nice section on her weblog explains the sorts of fanmail questions she won't be answering, one of which is "Pedantic Irrelevant Detail Questions". In particular she points out that "You know, if I didn't mention it, it was probably not relevant". As our esteemed editor has already pointed out

elsewhere on Ferretbrain

there is a nasty tendency for modern writers (particularly fantasy writers) and modern readers (particularly fantasy readers) to view works of fiction as having some kind of set, external reality, and to view questions like "is Dumbledore gay" or "how do you explain the discrepancies between the Star Wars prequels and the implied backstory of the original trilogy" as having a definitive, relevant answer. Throughout her website, Trudi espouses a beautifully sensible view of her work. She views writing as a craft you get better at by practising, and her books as works of fiction she created to entertain an audience. She also comes across as charmingly geeky (check out her pinboards full of notes and hand-drawn maps).

Looking back at the above 1200 words, I seem to have been rather embarrassingly gushy. I'd love to redeem myself with some sarcastic barbs about style or characterisation, but I genuinely don't have any. I could make some kind of joke about the made-up animals (all of the animals in Canavan's worlds are fictional, with the peculiar exception of horses) but it seems frankly churlish to do so (particularly given the fact that she has explained and defended her decision to pack her world with invented rodents on several occasions). The Black Magician Trilogy is by no means great literature (which is good, because great literature bores my tits off), but it is well written, engaging fantasy. It's tightly plotted, masterfully paced, the protagonists are all interesting and likeable.

I still wish she'd call a cow a cow though.Themes:

Books

,

Trudi Canavan

,

Sci-fi / Fantasy

~

bookmark this with - facebook - delicious - digg - stumbleupon - reddit

~Comments (

go to latest

)

Wardog

at 16:31 on 2008-01-04Also she's hotter than Scott Lynch...

permalink

-

go to top

Rami

at 18:26 on 2008-01-04Yay! I liked the Black Magician trilogy too -- although I thought bits of it did seem just a tad contrived -- and I'm glad it's not been ripped to shreds :-)

permalink

-

go to top

http://davidlynch.org/

at 08:03 on 2009-11-25This is an excessively late comment.

I, too, really enjoyed the Black Magician trilogy, but there were two things in the final book which annoyed me enough that I'm unlikely to ever go back and reread it.

(Spoilers ahoy, gentle reader.)

First: Akkarin's death felt pointless, and seemed to mainly happen so that the trilogy could end on an "awesomely tragic" note. It sat poorly with the tone of the rest of the series, and broke my immersion in the world. Actually, the death itself I'm okay with... it was Sonea finding out she was pregnant that really got to me.

Second: The only character in the series who's sympathetic to gay people turns out to be gay... it's just he could never admit it to himself until now! This just bugged me. All it would have taken is for him to not be the only tolerant person, and I'd have been fine with it.

permalink

-

go to top

Dan H

at 11:22 on 2009-11-25I'm okay with Akkarin dying - I kinda felt it was heading that way. I mean once you've got life-energy transfer magic it's pretty much mandatory for somebody to sacrifice themselves with it.

The "and then she turns out to be pregnant" thing was a little bit irksome. If only because I'm beginning to get sick of the fact that people in fantasy settings only *ever* seem to get pregnant after their partners die (and then *always* do). It's like some kind of extremely severe population control policy in Fantasyland.

permalink

-

go to top

Wardog

at 13:27 on 2009-11-25This is completely off-topic but zomg, you write WoW add-ons! That is way cooler than being a director.

permalink

-

go to top

Rami

at 17:12 on 2009-11-25

zomg, you write WoW add-ons! That is way cooler than being a director.

I almost agree. I mostly think

lj.py

is much more amusing than Mulholland Drive;-).

permalink

-

go to top

#Ferretbrain #The Black Magician Trilogy #Trudi Canavan #Fantasy #Dan H