shadowkat | (no subject)

(no subject)

I keep nickle and diming myself to death buying kindle daily deals on Amazon. The latest?

1. Achilles: a Novel by Melinda Miller for $1.99
2. Collasping Empire by John Scalzi for $2.99
3. Digging in by (I forget) for $1.99
4. The Curious Dog at Night Time for $2.99

Seriously. I bought less books before Amazon.

I have over 600 books on my Kindle. I'll never read them all. But at least they aren't taking up space in my apartment. There's that.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Question from a non-electronic reader owner: Are those 600 books things you download from a cloud storage whenever you want to read them (once you buy them), or are they all stored in memory in the Kindle?

Wondering because what happens if the Kindle breaks or is stolen? Would you have to buy the books all over again?

The books are always stored on the cloud. You download a copy to read. Similar to music, photographs, blog posts, podcasts, films, videos and television shows.

IF the Kindle gets lost or broken, the book remains available on the cloud. If you delete the book from your Kindle, you can download it again from the cloud. Once something is on the cloud or saved to the cloud, the only one way to permanently delete is to delete it directly from the cloud. The cloud works as a sort of backup hard-drive, if that makes sense?

And I know this is true because I've broken a Kindle and deleted content from it, but was still able to access it from the cloud. (It's in my Amazon cloud account until well I delete information in it.)

Have you read the latest Kate Daniels novel yet?

Still working on Iron and Magic, the Hugh D'Ambray novel, which apparently needs to be read first. It's slow going. (Elara annoys me. And Hugh's - IA's boilerplate alpha male asshole hero. They are trying to redeem him, but I found him more interesting/entertaining as a villain.)

I skipped that book because the character doesn't interest me. I didn't think it was necessary to understand the finale, but it's possible I missed something I would otherwise have seen.

According to the reviews that I read on Amazon -- there's a few characters introduced in it that are major plot points in the finale. Apparently the writers wrote themselves into a corner and had to come up with a ex deus machina to save the day.

I've been noticing a trend with these urban fantasy series, which is similar to the mystery series...and that is the writer stretches the story too thin. The characters and story is popular. The publisher wants more and more books. But the writer loses interest in it by about the fourth or fifth book..because honestly what writer wouldn't? The characters stop talking to you after a while and your muse has moved on to other pastures. But alas you are stuck in a contract for a specific number of books, and they are best-sellers, and you are making money off of those books. And the publisher will only publish your other stories if you keep churning them out -- alas golden handcuffs. You're burned out, but you have to complete the order. So you do. And yes, the final three feel thrown together and phoned in, but hey...that's because the writer kept writing after they'd run out of story.

In television when this happens, they change show-runners. In books...you can't really do that.

It has happened with every single mystery series novelist that I've read from Arthur Conan Doyle, who tried to kill his character off to Patricia Cornwall. Also Jim Butcher, Kim Harrison, George RR Martin, Agatha Christie (who successfully did kill off hers, publishers be damned - I give her a lot of credit for that and she did it well), PD James, Janet Evanovich, etc.

I honestly think these crazy writers should just do five books and stop. Television serials? Five to seven or eight seasons if that, and stop. Fantasy serials? Three books, stop.

Go past that, and you start to repeat yourself and phone it in, due to writer burn out.

That said, I did buy the finale book in the series and will read it. But I don't think I'm going to read any other books past it by the writers. They've run out of interesting ideas and are just repeating themselves. Iron & Magic isn't bad, but it's mostly the writers attempting to retcon the storyline and fill in massive plot holes in the last three books. Not to mention explain the whole idiotic plot device of Curran pretending to be interested in the shapeshifter to protect Kate. It's obvious and annoying.

They should have stopped with their last book and called it a day.

This is why I self-published my mystery/noir novel, I did not want to have to write a sequel and I didn't want to cater to stupid publisher demands.

There definitely was a deus ex machina at the end, but I don't think I needed a whole book to get it. It was easy to get, though not really explained much, and I just went with it. That's what I mostly do with light novels.

Your comment sounds like it was meant for George Martin. :)

I wouldn't recommend you read Iron & Magic, I don't think it works. The writers are bending over backwards to turn poor Hugh into a woobie hero...or wounded hero. Which I adore. But...I don't think it works. Also the humor is NOT there.
They just don't have the same dry witty banter that Kate Daniels has -- in any of their books. I'm beginning to think it's just Kate's voice that possesses it.

Your comment sounds like it was meant for George Martin. :)

Unfortunately he's not alone. It also is directed to folks like Joss Whedon, Ilona Andrews, Jim Butcher, JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, and others.

And our stupid and incessantly greedy entertainment industry -- that is run by evil marketing people.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only