Just a Lifetime

This makes me curious who you think the other one is...

Yeah, he's the trickier of the two. I don't consider his background a spoiler, really, but you might enjoy figuring it out on your own. (More clues come in later books.) If not:

I wonder whether this one should be pinned as helpful general information... Liebt ihr alles?

Well, I too liked that character. There was just so much argument and speculation over the years about who had killed him and in what way that your earlier comment amused me enormously. Your hidden suggestion is a possibility, though not the only one. Also, there are two new characters named after knives... I recall the history of one of them being pretty straightforward to guess from their initial introduction scene. I expected as much, though I'm confident Sylas's "Reading" series will be spoiler-free. At the time of each post he only seems to be a few chapters further ahead in the book under discussion. (His most recent post is "Eight Questions I Hope to Have Answered by The Great Hunt".) Although I don't read the comments, some quick glances show good restraint about spoilers. Even though you've already read The Eye of the World and then some, it might be interesting/fun to read his commentary and see if he points out anything you might have overlooked. On my first read of The Eye of the World, for example, I completely missed the part where Mer(ri)lin tells the farmboy about the Sword in the Stone---even the bit in chapter 34 about "The Dragon is one with the land... and the land is one with the Dragon" didn't clue me in.

*cackles* I was fond of the 'theory' (joke) that Bela was the perpetrator (as well as the independent one that Bela is a darkfriend). One thing that made the meandering books more fun for me during my second and last read-through in 2011--2014 was reading Leigh Butler's Wheel of Time Reread in sync with the chapters in the books, but of course that's going to be filled with spoilers for you. I see there is an ongoing Reading The Wheel of Time series by Sylas K Barrett that might be interesting, though he seems to be going at a pace of six months or so per book. I've only read a couple of his posts so far.

If I may reawaken this thread, I'll represent (multilib) Slackware with XFCE. I had fun experimenting with various distros and software options (mostly through liveCDs) after switching to Linux in '04, but I haven't done much of that since getting comfortable with Slackware (and getting busier). Even by '05 I didn't bite when a classmate of mine recommended Arch. (However, he advertised it as 'Slackware with a package manager', which wasn't so compelling given that Slackware already had a couple of package managers by then.) I think my most recent liveCD is Xubuntu circa '15 or '16, and I no longer have a CD drive to use it.

Like StrikerEZ I'm not too familiar with many besides Tor, and even Tor I recognize in large part thanks to the various articles, re-reads, etc. on tor.com. But I do want to give a shout-out to Subterranean Press, even though I've never indulged in any of their special editions.

I worry we might be derailing this thread a bit, but I want to say that I think Pat is handling the third book better than he did the second one a decade ago. Back then he promised a (stupidly over-optimistic) deadline, and issued updates and apologies that were so self-effacing they could be uncomfortable to read (examples here and here). Later on he revealed that he had been working basically 15-hour days seven days a week for months on end to try to meet his self-imposed deadline, which perversely produced slower progress than if he had recharged by spending some time playing a video game every day or two. So the announcement he made during the Wise Man's Fear tour, that there is no deadline for the third book and he's working hard on it even if he doesn't constantly advertise that fact, strikes me as a much better way to go. The updates I've seen make it clear that the book remains a priority and continues to progress. I'm fully confident it will be finished, and I'm not bothered about when that happens. (In some of those past updates, Pat also clarified why his revisions are not amenable to steady updates and progress bars the way Brandon's are---instead of blasting straight through each draft, he pulls apart scenes, settings and characters that have problems, tries to rework them in some way that hopefully helps, reincorporates them into the manuscript, and then has to deal with the new problems that these changes have caused. This is an example I noticed while surfing around.) Pivoting back to "What Are You Reading", well, I'm not reading anything at the moment. I've been too busy since finishing N. K. Jemisin's Kingdom of Gods last month. It ended up my least favorite volume in her Inheritance Trilogy, so instead of moving on to The Fifth Season I'm planning a change of pace that will probably take the form of either Jim Butcher's Brief Cases or Mike Brooks's Dark Run. This should happen after I get through my fourth and final major July deadline next week.

I'm in a similar situation---I think N. K. Jemisin is the only new author I've picked up over the past couple of years, and the magic system in her Inheritance Trilogy is much "softer" than I tend to prefer. Instead (if others on the forum will indulge my fourth plug for this fellow), I would suggest Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London urban fantasy series. I find it a lot of fun, and although the magic system is not spelled out in detail, that's because the characters don't know the details. But at least some of them are convinced that there must be a sensible system behind it, and are determined to figure it out. Here's a taste: PS. The site has a profanity filter, though I played it safe and wrote that quote as it appears.

You said it, man. Nobody storms with the Harmony. Sorry. My mind immediately went to The Big Lebowski---kind of different from my mental picture of Sazed. Anyway, welcome to the Shard and have an upvote or two! Are there other authors who have done a decent job of satisfying your system designer's desire for well-designed magic systems?

We'll ask the questions here! Just kidding. No, I only heard of it through your earlier post. I just wanted to gently encourage some customization of questions to reflect what had already been written. Sorry about the math question---power of suggestion... This is a brief English explanation. Are the phrases you mention just things you've picked up here and there, or are you trying to learn more of those languages? If you're interested in Welsh, I would recommend saysomethingin.com.

Another possibility to consider could be the Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch, which has some similarities to the Dresden Files. It's modern-day urban fantasy with heaping helpings of irreverent humor, crossed with the police procedural (rather than PI) genre. The US edition of the first book was re-titled Midnight Riot but they kept the text the same, so I had to look up some British slang—worth it.

Eep! After five years on the job market (which was becoming increasingly not-fun), I received an offer today. It's even in a place where they speak something resembling English! Somewhat dazed, on the one hand starting to feel again as though I have a future, on the other worried I might screw it up. Well, I think I read somewhere, "Journey before destination". At least I've got a soundtrack already playing.

Dude. Congratulations! Any more in the works? e^(iπ) + 1 = ?

Ah, I thought there was something... odd about Sentinel of Darkshire's intro thread. This is a known issue with online forums. (I guess I should warn that there is naughty language at the end of that link.) It's the main reason I use my own real-life name in my handle. As far as I'm concerned this has all been satisfactorily resolved---so welcome back, BitBitio. Actually, there's one thing that doesn't satisfy me. If your profile is to be believed, you are almost exactly the same age as the meme linked above---which I saw live. *feels old*

Good stuff. It'd be nice to have someone with that sort of background as a beta reader for future Stormlight Archive books, to help make sure Urithiru isn't too crazy once it wakes up.

Welcome back! I'm pleased to see another long-time lurker become more active, and am resisting the urge to necro your original introduction. I also noticed some ennui the last time I lurked on the Jim Butcher forums---back before their move to the new site. Who's your favorite cosmere character at the moment? What sort of engineering do you do?

Hoid, in Oathbringer (not too spoilery): Kind of a dark turn, there. But anyway, a belated welcome to the Shard, @shankliketheknife! What is your favorite Sanderson book? (Usually that gets asked sooner...)

Different authors can work very differently. In this FAQ entry Brandon summarizes his drafting process: His third draft is usually the very first "polished" one to be sent to his editor, agent, writing group, and other "alpha" readers. Later drafts incorporate feedback from those alphas before going to beta readers. Given the size of some of his books, Brandon does what I consider a remarkably small number of drafts. On the other extreme, I have a vague memory of Pat Rothfuss saying he did something like 150+ drafts of The Wise Man's Fear, which is one reason it wouldn't make sense for him to set up progress bars like Brandon's. (Another reason is that he doesn't just blast straight through each draft the way Brandon does, which makes even counting the number of drafts a bit tricky.)

The Levellers were one of my favorite bands roughly 15 years ago, but I've been drifting away from them for a while, especially over the past five years or so as they put out a faintly ridiculous series of live albums and reissues. At first glance, I thought their recent 30th-anniversary album We The Collective was more of the same, but when I gave it a listen on Spotify today it turned out to feature really fresh acoustic/orchestral re-imaginings of a regrettably small number of their past singles. Not only am I enjoying the new takes, I'm also revisiting a lot of their back catalog that I haven't listened to in a while.

Hmm. If everyone was telling you about one WoT book in particular, it should have been Crossroads of Twilight, not A Crown of Swords. So you have that to look forward to.

Welcome to the shard! Who are your favorite (non-GA) audiobook narrators? I'm gonna be boring: I think this is just a consequence of those two scenes being written by the same guy. If I recall correctly, the personification aspect of spren persists even in the cognitive realm, independent of the Nahel bond that helps the spren function in the physical realm.

A couple of authors I mentally file in the same area of my library as Brandon are Jim Butcher and Ben Aaronovitch. All three I find consistently fun and re-readable, each with a different style. Butcher offers some sub-genre options: He's probably best known for the Dresden Files urban fantasy series (15 books published, plus a couple short-story collections, roughly 10 more to go). For swords-and-horses fantasy he wrote the Codex Alera series (6 books, complete), and he has also started a steampunkish series (The Cinder Spires). Only one Cinder Spires book is out so far (The Aeronaut's Windlass), and the series could end up with either 3, 6 or 9 volumes, still to be decided. Personally I found the first three Dresden Files books and the first two Alera books kinda rough, but I felt that those series improved significantly after that. (If I recall correctly, Butcher wrote each of those first three Dresden Files books as class projects during his MFA.) Aaronovitch writes the Rivers of London urban fantasy series, with six books so far and more on the way. From a craft perspective, I think he does a lot better than Butcher at writing diverse characters and voices at least in this genre. I could go on. Scott Lynch's Lies of Locke Lamora might appeal to a fan of the Kingkiller Chronicle, though I have not yet read further in the series it starts. George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire is great if you don't mind some darker stuff, and Joe Abercrombie can take you darker still if that's the direction you want. I just finished N. K. Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy, which I liked a lot as it felt rather different to me. The magic in that series is very 'soft' in the Sandersonian sense, which didn't bother me for the first two books but became an issue for me in the final volume. I read Grossman's The Magicians on Rothfuss's recommendation but didn't care for it at all. (Rothfuss also recommended The Dresden Files back in the day.) Joyce hurts my brain.

Huh. Sounds like a man took your Jolene. That's a switch. Let's see, questions... White Stripes or Dolly Parton? Done any critical mass in Belfast (or in England)? Worried about Brexit?