(no subject)

[shadowkat]

Watched a bit of NY1 which is still the best news channel I've ever watched - it's great. Had a profile of an Iman and Muslim leader in NYC (completely unbiased and straight forward) and reviews of all the off-broadway and on-broadway tv shows and happenings. It's why I refuse to give up Time Warner - you can't get it if you don't have time warner, well you can - but online.

Been making my way through Storm of Swords - this is one violent book. People are dropping like flies or rather being brutally murdered like flies. My difficulty with the series from the beginning is I'm not in love with the Stark clan (or rather the adults in the Stark clan not the kids, I liked all the kids except for Rob - who has no personality), so don't care that much when they kill them, which they've been doing with remarkable frequency and quite brutally not to mention gory fashion - I mean to the point in which if I were watching this on tv? I'd be fast-forwarding or hiding my eyes (because ewww.). That said, I do like the ones they've kept alive so far...which are the little kids and two daughters - rather adore the two daughters, Sansa and Arya (who are from all reports going to make it to the end and are as different from each other as you can imagine.) What is interesting about these books is how powerful the women are in a world in which they do not appear to have any power at all. All their power comes from their brain. One of the few fantasy writers that has written women well. (I've read a lot of fantasy novels by men and women, and most of them have a tendency to romance one gender and brutalize the other. This one has done a great job of exploring the people without generalization.)

I want more Jaime Lannister and less Davos (my least favorite). Although I could change my mind.
My only quibble about Storm, and according to his lj, grrm sort of agrees with me on this point, is he has too many points of view. Seriously, I have never in my life read a book with this many points of view and he has a cast of literally thousands. All inter-related. You know a book is convoluted when it has a ten page appendix listing all the characters, their relationships to each other and their family tree. If you thought Dorothy Dunnett was dense, you have no idea.

Comments

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

The way I read it - it was Dance with Dragons, The Winds of Winter, and Sweet Smell or something of Spring. But that may have changed.
It was on a site other than his lj.

It's not fair to compare BSG, comic arcs or tv shows against novels. Novelists have a luxury that is not extended to writers who do tv shows and comic books - the novelist is the only one writing it and more or less can take however long they wish. Tolkien took 20 years to write Lord of the Rings. What's the publisher going to do? Drop them? But a tv show writer has to churn out 15-22 episodes a year, has no time to check over it, and basically shovels out what amounts to the first draft. Same deal with comic book writers - who aren't independent and doing their own thing. The writing is different as are the demands of the medium. TV writing is less solitary than novel writing, but it
is also much faster. The writers on BSG had two days, if that, to churn out a script. GRRM has however long he wishes, he can move the deadline.

[(Anonymous)]

That's true of course, though when you keep on promising a "Plan" in every episode for four years, I think it's fair to expect that someone has put some thought into said plan a bit earlier than two days before the script deadline.

I agree that the media are different, but I think you should go only into things that you can in the end resolve, even if it takes a while.

[flake-sake.livejournal.com]

ahem, the anonymous comment was me, forgot to log on.