Shadow of an Empire Editing Rolls On · 8:03pm Jan 26th, 2018
Not much to say today, folks. Work on alpha editing Shadow of an Empire is rolling on, about halfway through the first pass now, and that’s been keeping me pretty focused. I’d forgotten how fun this universe was to play in. If you read the short story Ripperfrom Unusual Events, then you’ve already had an early taste of what Indrim has to offer. Shadow of an Empireis a lot bigger, though, being an epic novel. Ripperwas just a short story. Still, if you’re looking for a preview of what’s coming and don’t want to support on Patreon, grab a copy of Unusual Eventsand pay close attention when you read Ripper. Might be you’ll see some faces from there in Shadow of an Empire …
Anyway, things are pretty quiet on the site front mostly because I’m just plugging away at the editing process. Oh, and Monday’s Being a Better Writerpost is going to have to be on Tuesday, as I’ve got a long shift on Monday. So heads up!
Last but not least, I thought I’d throw out a comment made the other day on a discussion forum about books that turned to “High brow literature” versus “low brow literature,” as I feel it’s a good comparison. One poster was asserting that they only read “high brow” quality stuff, and none of the “low brow” stuff that’s popular and read in large numbers, because they wanted to “experience quality.” I made a comparison response that, I think, worked pretty well. Here goes, cleaned and trimmed a little.
Nice comment, although as usual I have some points to make about it.
First, it's absurd to think that carefully managed language and and interesting story are mutually exclusive as I'm sure you've pointed out before (although I haven't actually checked, so I'm not 100% certain you have discussed micro-scale pacing or rhythm/flow down to word choice at the sentence level). You can absolutely do both in the same story and will usually get a more enjoyable end product as a result.
Second, as an engineer, I would actually say the quality of that Corolla is better than that of most luxury cars because of their reliability and maintainability. The closer fits and increased complexity required to bring down the noise and vibration levels make luxury cars substantially more likely to break down and reduces their service life because it takes much less wear for parts to get out of tolerance and the smaller gaps also make it easier for moving parts to gum up. Furthermore, those tighter tolerances also make replacement parts more expensive because they have to conform to those tighter tolerances and makes repairs more difficult, both because of the added complexity making repairs take longer and because the relative rarity of the vehicles makes it harder to find mechanics who can do a good job on them (every mechanic under the sun knows the Corolla after all).
Third, just I did a quick check, and I'm pretty sure your "Millions of people drive Toyota Corollas" comment should actually be tens of millions.
P.S. If that discussion is still going on, you may want to throw my quality comment at that guy to point out the varying ways the word "quality" can be interpreted.
4782320
I agree wholeheartedly, and would add that this part of the comparison applies perfectly to "lowbrow books" versus "highbrow." Works trying to go for literary praise are going to suffer similar issues over that of books written to be straightforward, enjoyable stories.
4782333
Definitely, and that is even more true if the book in question is trying to do some kind of social commentary thing at the same time as many of those "highbrow" books do because that will usually annoy the majority of the public one way or another.