Monthly Spotlight: W R Gingell’s Shards of a Broken Sword

Thanks all for your comments on the post regarding the Harry Potter continuation, I appreciate the understanding.

Another shorter spotlight this month, for a trilogy of shorter books. These are a fairly quick read, but they’re funny and sweet and well plotted. Each of the three stands alone, but there is a core plot winding through them as well that ties it all together – the Fae are slowly beginning to take over human lands, and the broken sword of the title holds the key to banishing them, and various characters come across shards of the blade while enacting their own stories.

In Twelve Days of Faery a young enchantress comes to break the curse on a prince that seriously injures or kills any eligible woman he comes into contact with. The story is told from the point of view of King Markon, the prince’s father; the enchantress, Althea, is probably my favourite of the various characters.

In Fire in the Blood a dragon is bound to help a prince (not the same prince) pass the trials that will let him rescue a princess. I can’t say much else without spoilers but suffice to say things aren’t quite what they seem.

In The First Chill of Autumn we learn what the shards actually mean and what the main plot is, and various characters reunite to help the Chosen Ones attempt to remake the sword and banish the Fae.

W R Gingell has written quite a few other series and standalones, mostly dealing with fairy tales in some way and from the sound of things also some mythology and some modern urban fantasy. I have some of them in my waiting-to-be-read pile, and others I’m sure I’ll get to eventually, because her books are fun and happy and interesting.

In other news, I did a thing! More precisely, an author interview! Someone on fanfiction.net contacted me, they run a SSHG Facebook page and wanted to interview me. If that’s something that interests you, you can find it:

Here: https://relishredshoes.tumblr.com/post/184220751800/interview-taken-from-the-severus-snape-and
here: http://www.facebook.com/groups/199718373383293/
here: http://www.tumblr.com/blog/relishredshoes
and here: http://sshg-hub.livejournal.com/129691.html

 

Harry Potter, going forward

It’s time to address the elephant in the room that is the Harry Potter series. I keep getting asked whether it’s going to continue, which is understandable given how long it’s been. (Incidentally, I see all comments, not just the ones on the most recent posts. If your comment isn’t about the newest post, please try and leave it on a relevant post instead.)

The honest answer at this point is that I don’t know. I want to keep going but every time I think of starting up the next chapter I just don’t have the motivation. When we started, it was supposed to be fun; we were supposed to enjoy at least the first two books and gradually ease in to the bad stuff later on, and slowly pick it apart over time while still preserving the good parts. Yeah, that didn’t happen.

I never thought these books were the most amazing literature to ever grace the earth, but I really didn’t think they were this bad, and part of me doesn’t want to keep going because I don’t want to end up actively hating them. This series has been a huge part of my life and had a tremendous impact on who I am, dumb as that is, because of what it led to, and I don’t want to lose that or taint the memories. I’m also still planning to write more fanfics someday (ah, the elusive someday), and while I don’t think I’m ever going to end up hating my favourite characters specifically, I’m not going to be able to write about them if I hate literally everything about their entire universe and canon history.

Rowling is really not helping matters by her constant gleeful abuse of a very, very dead horse. Everything she says about the franchise makes me dislike it more, which makes me harsher when analysing it, which makes my opinion sink further.

So I don’t know. I’m doing some thinking and juggling some ideas, I’ll try to come up with a way to keep going without burning out and ruining things for me (obviously in consultation with Mitchell). It might be that he takes over and I just drop the occasional comment, though he’s not much more motivated than I am at this point. It might be that we stop doing every single chapter and just cover scenes we think are worth discussing. Not promising anything, it might well be that we stop completely.

[Honestly, the most likely outcome is that I take over so that the brunt of the impact falls on me. It helps that I’m more comfortable hating them than Loten is, so that particular issue isn’t a deterrent for me, but it’s still a matter of not knowing when I’ll have the energy. I’ve tried to start the next chapter on my own a couple of times and didn’t get anywhere, but I’m not giving up yet. One of the reasons we started this project was that it was something to do together, after all, and doing it separately is less appealing. There are a lot of things in the series I do think are well worth getting to, but I guess we’ll have to see.]

I am aware that most of you are only here for Harry Potter content and that the other stuff gets far, far less attention, but so it goes.

 

Character Development vs Character Assassination, a Failure Mode Analysis

Well, hello there. This is Mitchell, the person you’ve probably forgotten exists because I’ve barely written anything substantial for the better part of two years (fuck depression and fuck the ability of politics to exacerbate depression), but technically this is my blog too. I’m back to talk about a story about wizards and how it disappointed me. No, not that one, sorry. The other one.

Over two years ago, I wrote this post, and, more significantly, the Magic: the Gathering fanfic I link to in it. That context may be helpful to understand the rest of this post, but I’ll try to write this in a way that is comprehensible without it. I mainly want to use this opportunity to talk about character development, what makes it work and ways it can go wrong, but in order to do that I’ll need to go into detail about this particular example.

Honestly, writing about this at all is a bit self-indulgent, but please bear with me, I think there are some useful lessons to take from it.