Kureshi Ironclaw

I'm not sure about the 10th anniversary edition, but I'm pretty sure you can get Elantris, Warbreaker, and the Emperor's Soul in a pack for around $20 (aud), if you're into getting sweet deals on ebooks you already own physically like I am.

I'm picturing thousands of books flying around like a swarm of bats. That makes it a bit more menacing in my mind. I think if you use the right words to describe the army of books it won't seem as absurd.

Oh boy, I haven't written anything in months. I want to do NaNo at some stage but it is always tough with my schedule in Novembers. It might give me an excuse to get back into writing though, but I don't see myself being able to get anywhere close to 50000 words.

I can't think of any off the top of my head, but I was once accused of being too Kvothe-like by a friend. I'm a musician but I doubt that was all she meant by it.

I felt like I was getting a pretty good sense of him just through his behaviour and inner monologue, and there were enough clues to get a sense for how he was staying young, so I don't think you need to change too much in that regard. You might run the risk of slowing the pacing too much or making it very expository. I think you've conveyed a lot of information through showing instead of telling, and the things I don't know are the things that make me want to read more to find out what is going on.

I think Lightsong's were the most fun, but Vasher with Nightblood is just so cool.

@Cyanic Yeah the Class 1 powers do interact like that, so Earth/Air is definitely floating rock bullets. Sadly no one in the story has the inherent ability to do that, but such people are present in the mythology. I use a bit of hand-wavium with the pairings involving electricity to justify things, except for with electricity/air which is shooting lightning and being able to do stormflight (no, not stormlight).

I've been listening to a fair bit of Symphony X this past week. I also had a brief stint of listening to Stravinsky.

I have a possibly bad habit of beginning to write before I've finished fully designing my magic systems so they can end up more on the soft side until I figure out the rules. The magic I have in my first completed novel is just called magic on-world and seams like a soft sort of elemental magic at first glance, but I've gradually worked out some hard rules that work in the background that I think make it more interesting. The characters in-world just don't really know what is going on with it so the full explanation of how everything works will probably never appear in the text, and mysteries surrounding the magic are key parts of the story. I can explain a little bit here but too much will be spoilers. In this system there are two classes of powers. Class 1 powers are the most powerful and are very similar to other elemental magic systems like in the Last Airbender, except I've added electricity into the usual four air, earth, fire, and water (but I've given them all fancy names like electrokineticism which no one uses in-world). Class 1 powers always manifest in pairs, where one power is a dominant power and the other is a subordinate power. The powers interact differently depending on the pairing and which power is dominant in the pairing. Not all pairings are compatible however and Air is only a pivot power and can never manifest as a dominant power. Other pairings can be incompatible in one of two ways -- full incompatibility or half incompatibility. Full incompatibility occurs between Fire and Water, Electricity and Earth, and Earth and Water, meaning that these powers cannot manifest in a pair. Half incompatibility occurs when two powers can be paired but one of the powers must always be dominant. There are two instances of this: Earth and Fire (where Earth is always dominant), and Water and Electricity (where water is always dominant). Those incompatibilities seem rather arbitrary when written like that but I envision these powers as existing on an axis of subordination which makes this all make more sense visually. Air, the pivot power, sits at the centre of the axis at position 0 and stretching out to either side are several degrees of subordination. Powers on the negative side of Air can have domination over powers up to two degrees in the positive direction while being fully incompatible with any power beyond this range, and half compatible with the power one degree behind them. The same rule applies on the positive side of the axis but all the directions are reversed. The axis of subordination looks like this: -2 -1 0 +1 +2 Earth------Fire------Air------Electricity------Water This axis gives eight different combinations of Class 1 powers, each with different effects and abilities. However, most of them don't appear in the story even though I have designed them. Class 2 powers work in a similar way to Class 1 powers, however they aren't really as flashy as Class 1 powers. They still function with an axis of subordination but there are only three primary powers as opposed to the five elemental Class 1 powers. These three powers are endoregenesis, exoregenesis, and dilation (the pivot power). This creates four unique pairs of powers. These are more common in the story but their effects are very subtle and often go unnoticed by even the characters using them. The cool thing here is the pairing of dominant endoregenesis and subordinate dilation which gives someone a version of superspeed wherein they exist faster than everything else around them. In sort-of-simple-pseudo-science terms, they have the ability to increase the gradient of their path through time. In addition to this, other powers exist that are mutations of other pairings where some of the rules of subordination are broken. These exist because of spoilery reasons, and just make my in-world scientists scratch their heads in confusion. As to what certain pairings do, and where the source of the power is, I can't say because spoilers. I might also share my magic system from my current project once I've figured it out a bit more. It's based off music and the harmonic series.

Wow! This is a really cool idea; I like it a lot. Your writing flows and is easy to read. The only thing I think it needs is more setting description to be really immersive. Other than that, I'm excited to see how this develops.

I think the best one I thought of was "what if a god became stuck in human form and was put on trial for crimes against humanity". Maybe a bit too edgy for me to tackle at this stage, but someone fond of religious commentary might have some fun with it and be willing to open that can of worms. Although I feel some people might just see it as a cheap avenue to bash religion, which I don't want anyone to do. I still think it is an interesting idea though.

I really enjoyed this! It will be really good with a good polish. I kept trying to figure out what the prompt was as I was reading and came up with a few cool incorrect ones that I might try out.

Wise Man's Fear:

I think to make that sort of long term training plot be interesting you need to show quantifiable progress so the reader knows the story is going somewhere. Making sure that each training scene is different will help things from getting stale as well. You could also introduce some sort of subplot so the character is doing something else interesting aside from training. And if your character has somebody teaching them, make the student/teacher relationship really fun and interesting to read. Those are my suggestions. Keep up the good work!

What first started me down the path of trying to write seriously was reading A Feast for Crows by George RR Martin when I was fifteen. I can't say it is the best book in the series, but what it did for me was make me question how it was making me feel certain things. I began looking for the little tricks Martin used to manipulate his reader's emotions and the way he was structuring his book and sort of just decided "hey, I reckon I can do that". I would encourage you to find a book you like, that makes you feel things, and have a try at figuring out how the author is conjuring those emotions within you. Doing that helped me see that good writing is more than just words on a page. In tandem with doing that, @Ixthos's suggestion of watching Brandon's online lectures by Camera Panda and Writeaboutdragons is a really good one. They are some of the best resources for new writers out there, in my opinion. They will help you with identifying things that writers are doing to make you feel a certain way. They were good for me in helping to remove the mystery from the writing process and show that writing is but a skill that we all can learn with the right tools. It made me have faith that I could write well if I put the time and effort in. The most important thing, though, is to persevere and accept that your early writing might not be amazing and it may take you a while before you become skilled. This is fine. You can always come back to your early writing and fix it up. The piece I wrote after reading a Feast for Crows was a mess that I was immensely proud of in tenth grade, and it had the seeds for a good story (in my opinion; I know I'm blowing my own horn a bit here ). After a couple of rewrites and revisions of that piece, and the continuation of that story I wrote in the years after, I now have a completed novel that I am truly proud of. The difference between the current draft and the first draft is so stark they barely seem like they are written by the same person. The story is all the same, but I've learned with practice how to present it in a way that readers can connect with (I hope haha). Have a go and stick with it. Writing is super fun! And feel free to ask me specific things about writing as well. I'm always happy to help

He was in Sydney for a convention (I can't remember which one) last year, but that is still pretty far away from most places that aren't Sydney. I think he might have stopped in Perth as well, but I doubt I will see him unless he comes to Melbourne or maybe Adelaide. This was all before Oathbringer was released as well, so he didn't come down to promote that book and he might just not see it as worthwhile coming down here.

Thanks for the mention. I had a quick look and I think it is pretty good. I don't know much about the idiosyncrasies of plays and I find that reading lines makes dialogue feel more stilted than it really is. I think what you're doing is really cool. I always meant to try writing a play in high school.

I tend to let ideas gestate in my mind for several months before I start writing. Any interesting thing I find out or think about gets thrown into a sort of mental dossier for different stories and settings and they start connecting together. Eventually it reaches a point where I'm starting to visualise scenes and figure out a plot, and usually around this time I will sit down and write a full outline. I actively brainstorm a bit more with the outline because I have to fill in the gaps between all the cool scenes I've imagined, but it's not a cool process of brainstorming. I just sit and think really hard for a couple of hours. For other mediums, I'm also a songwriter and I tend to avoid any active brainstorming for that unless I'm writing a song for a specific purpose. I just keep lots of ideas written down and recorded so when I get struck with inspiration I have a lot of material to draw on to make the song come together in one sitting.

Scadrial era 2, because it is most like earth and I would hope it would have jazz music and gangsters like we did in the early 1900s. Other than that, Nalthis seems to be a pretty nice place.

Thanks for contributing @TheVillageIdiot. For me, your real hook happens at the end of your first paragraph when you reveal that Gideon killed Time. I feel like the earlier this line happens the better. You probably don't have to spend as much time talking about Time. People have a pretty good intuitive grasp on it, even though I think you are personifying Time and putting your own spin on it. I'd say killing Time in your first line establishes pretty well that Time is different in your universe. Other than that, I am intrigued as to how somebody kills Time, and what the repercussions of this are. Keep up the good work!

Oh man I wish I could have seen them live when they were last in Australia. Valhalla was my ringtone for a while.

Ride into Obsession is awesome. I think my favourite is probably Wheel of Time, but Sacred Worlds and And Then There Was Silence are close behind. As you can tell, I like the big epic ones.

@Showman best way to get the action from the fourth line to the first is to simply rearrange the paragraph But in all seriousness, I don't feel like a first line necessarily has to have 'action' to be a hook. I think yours rephrased to something like "Miles Lavisan opened the door to find a cloaked stranger on his doorstep" could work really well. It's got an element of mystery, so the reader will want to find out who the cloaked stranger is and why they are on Miles's doorstep, thus they'll keep reading.

Touche

Final Empire. It was the first Sanderson book I read and it had me hooked pretty much straight away. As above, I loved the stuff with Vin and Elend at the balls, and just the overall mood of the story was great. Hero of Ages was also awesome but I would never have read it without Final Empire, so Final Empire has to take my top spot.