Six Sentence Sunday #25 – Revenant (Part 5)

It’s Sunday and that means its Six Sunday time. This is the fifth part of my Six Sunday Serial, Revenant. Once again, this scene picks up immediately following last week’s six sentences, so if you want to catch up or need a recap then just follow this link.

I’d like to thank everyone for their fantastic words and ongoing encouragement. I promised last week that there’d be some action this week and I just hope that I don’t disappoint you – after all I did put the pressure on with my parting line last week.

So here we go …

    Ryan braced his weapon against his shoulder and initiated the command to open the airlock. His finger hovered over the trigger; these first few seconds could be deadly.
    A slight change in pressure told him the doors were open, and he fired immediately, the barrel of his rifle flaring as the husks attacked.
    The first one fell, its legs vaporised by the superheated plasma. Well-placed shots to the head and chest dropped the second one a heartbeat later, while a third closed quickly.
    ”Damn, these bastards are fast.”

You can find more Six Sentence writers here.

Thursday Threads

Hello all. I wanted to let you know about a little flash fiction competition that Siobahn is running over at her blog which you can visit here http://siobhanmuir.blogspot.com.au. The idea behind the contest is simple. She provides a prompt, usually a couple of words or a phrase, which must be used in the text and then its up to us to provide between 100 and 250 words that contain that line.

A few weeks back I was asked to choose the winners, and today I am one – Honourable Mention is still a win. Below is my prize which I display proudly…

If you are wish to see the other Honourable Mentions and the Winner then take a look here http://siobhanmuir.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/thursthreads-week-20-winners.html

Review: The Way of Kings (Part 2)

This post will include my review of the book The Way of Kings Part Two by Brandon Sanderson. It is the second part of the first in the Stormlight Archive series, released in June 2011.

The text below is taken from the blurb on the back of the book.

On the stormy world of Roshar a war rages on a ruined landscape called the Shattered Plains. There, Kaladin, who traded his medical apprenticeship for a spear to protect his little brother, has been reduced to slavery. In a war that makes no sense, where ten armies fight separately against a single foe, he struggles to save his men and to fathom the leaders who consider them expendable. Brightlord Dalinar Kholin commands one of those armies. Like his brother, the late king, he is drawn to an ancient text called The Way of Kings. Troubled by over-powering visions of ancient times and the Knights Radient, he has begun to question his own sanity. And across the ocean, an untried young woman named Shallan seeks to train under an eminent scholar and notorious heretic, Dalinar’s neice, Jasnah. Though she genuinely loves learning Shallan’s motives are less than pure. As she plans a daring theft, her research for Jasnah hints at secrets of the Knights Radient and the true cause of war.

I have read a lot of people complaining about the size of this book. The number of characters, the extent of the world building, the frequent flashbacks. What I don’t understand is why they find those things to be negatives. Yes there are characters that only appear in a single chapter. Yes there is a prelude as well as a prologue. Yes there are multiple storylines that don’t seem to have any relationship to each other but that is what makes this an epic.

There are calls to cut down the size of the book by as much as half, and to drop the one shot characters entirely. If that would have been done then no doubt this still would have been an excellent book but I loved the fact that I got to spend an extra 400 pages worth of time in the story. At no stage did I get to a chapter and wish I could skip this bit and get back to the part I just left off. Put simply I really enjoyed all of it.

Whenever the second book comes out (the real second book that is) I will most definitely be getting my hands on it and lock myself away from all distractions to find out what happens next, and it I only hope that it is going to be as big as the first one.

Review: The Forever Girl – Sophia’s Journey

This post will include my review of the book The Forever Girl: Sophia’s Journey by Rebecca Hamilton. This is an Urban Fantasy / Paranormal Romance first released January 26th 2012.

The text below is taken from the blurb on the back of the book.

A Cult. A Murder. A Curse. Sophia’s family has skeletons, but they aren’t in their graves… At 22, practicing Wiccan Sophia Parsons is scratching out a living waiting tables in her Rocky Mountain hometown, living under religious prejudice, the shadow of her bi-polar mother, and an unsolved murder. Sophia can imagine lots of ways to improve her life, but she’d settle for just getting rid of the buzzing noise in her head. When the spell she casts goes wrong, the static turns into voices. Her personal demons get company, and the newcomers are dangerous. One of them is a man named Charles, a centuries-old shape-shifter who Sophia falls for despite her better judgment. He has connections that can help her unveil the mystery surrounding her ancestor’s hanging, but she gets more than she bargains for when she finally decides to trust him. Survival in his world, she learns, means not asking questions and staying out of the immortal council’s way. It’s a line she crossed long ago. If Sophia wants to survive the council and save the people she loves, she must accept who she is, perform dark magic, and fight to the death for her freedom

Forever Girl has everything you would expect from a contemprary paranormal novel; Vampires (called Cruor in this book), shape-shifters, witches and some pretty cool world building. The characters were good, the relationships were good, the settings were interesting, and the way that the various immortals were tied to the elements was a nice spin on the more traditional vampire, werewolves, and witches mythology. Put simply there was a lot about this book to like.

I want to say that I am not a fan of the Twilight series AT ALL and there is no escaping that this book shares some similarities with Twilight (the first book anyway). That said the things I hated about Twilight were entirely absent in Sophia’s Journey. Where Bella was pathetic and indecisive, Sophia was strong. Where Edward was ashamed of his heritage, Charles embraced it. As I was reading I found myself wishing that they’d made the movies about this book instead.

I will say, though, that for all its strengths there was one aspect which I simply didn’t understand. The source / motivation / reasoning of the conflict just didn’t feel right to me. The key item which drove the action felt just a little bit contrived.

Now I want to be clear that I really enjoyed Sophia’s Journey and I found that the world where the action takes place was both interesting and well thought out. And once I stopped trying to understand what drove the “bad guys” (and I use this term only to avoid spoilers) to do what they did, I was able to sit back and enjoy the rest of the action.

I’m looking forward to seeing where Sophia’s Journey takes her next.

Six Sentence Sunday #24 – Revenant (Part 4)

This is the fourth installment of my Six Sunday Serial, Revenant. As before, this scene picks up immediately following last week’s six sentences. If you want to see the story so far please follow this link. I promise that next week he will actually leave the room he’s been standing in since the story started, but I wanted to set the scene for what comes next and six sentences is a teasingly small number to try and do that in quickly. I thank you for your patience

So here goes…

    The lights above the airlock showed green, his ship was now firmly attached to the dreadnought’s side.
    Implants embedded in his brain allowed him to control ship systems with a thought, and now that the link was in place, that control also extended to the derelict. At least it would once he restarted the reactor, until then, he’d have to do things the old fashioned way. Schematics appeared on his visor; the Drake’s engineering section was about fifty metres away, and getting there was his first priority.
    Preliminary scans indicated that, apart from the cryo-storage units in the ship’s hold, there were no other life signs aboard, but he’d been on sleeper ships before.
    It wasn’t the living he needed to worry about.

You can find more Six Sentence writers here.

Story Time Needs You

I am toying with an idea. It’s not a new idea by any means, in fact this idea has been around since at least the 1800s so it’s certainly an idea that is steeped in history. The idea combines the connectivity of the web, the ideal platform to allow writers and their audience to connect and interact, with the age-old concept of the serial story.

Serial Novels have been published by the likes of Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Orson Scott Card, just to name a few. It might be an idea that has fallen somewhat out of fashion for mainstream publishing but the internet is the perfect medium for delivering content and engaging with those people who have read the work.

The site I have put together is called Story Time. If you click on the title it will take you to there. There are two stories available on there at the moment but I am hoping to have many more.

That’s where you come in.

If you are dabbling with a new genre or you simply have an idea that’s been kicking around in your head but haven’t been able to formulate why not consider Story Time as the avenue to get it out there. The concept is simple. You write a chapter then at the end give the readers a choice about what happens next. The questions could be simple; should Neo take the red pill or the blue pill? Or world changing; should Frodo toss the ring into the lava?

I see Story Time as a way of building a rapport with your audience which is extremely important, and giving you as a writer an insight into how to plot a story with feedback and guidance from the very people you wish to entertain.

Some of you may have read about the recent furor over the ending of Mass Effect 3 or the changes proposed to TMNT canon. These two events resulted in a huge outpouring of emotion from fans which should tell all of us that our audience is more than just a passive consumer. They are engaged, invested and seek to be involved. Story Time attempts to make that possible.

This post sounds like enough of an advertising spiel, and that’s not really what my blog is about, so before I disappoint anyone I will stop here.

If you’re interested in being a part of Story Time (and you are all welcome) then please let me know. I think it might be fun.

Six Sentence Sunday #23 – Revenant (Part 3)

This is the third installment of my Six Sunday Serial, Revenant. As before, this scene picks up immediately following last week’s six sentences. If you want to see the story so far please follow this link.

    He set his excitement aside and reviewed the ship’s log. The Francis Drake was a sleeper ship, one of nineteen such ships, launched one hundred and seven years ago with the dream of taking humanity to the stars. Designed to function autonomously, the ships set out from Earth to the Gilese system, with enough equipment and supplies to start a new life for their cryogenically preserved cargo.
    Sadly, the dream became a nightmare.
    As with all nineteen ships, the Francis Drake turned back toward Earth when the computer detected genetic anomalies in several of the colonists. What began as a bold step toward colonising another world, resulted in the loss of Earth and the near extinction of the human race.

You can find more Six Sentence writers here.

Six Sentence Sunday #22 – Revenant (Part 2)

Welcome to the second installment of my Six Sunday Serial, Revenant. This scene picks up directly following last week’s opening paragraph, at only six sentences at a time this story is going to take a while but I am quite enjoying the challenge of crafting these sentences so that there is some small nugget of information that will (hopefully) maintain reader interest and carry the story forward. The sentences below have been written and rewritten at least two dozen times, and that was after they replaced the original six I had in mind.

If you want to see the story so far please follow this link.

    His heart raced. Finally, after a decade of searching, he’d found one of them.
    “It’s just a name on a list, Ryan, don’t go nuts,” he said. “There’s still plenty that can go wrong.” Perhaps talking to oneself really was a sign of madness, you’d have to be crazy to do what he did.
    Still, finding the doctor was huge step forward, and if he could get her off this ship humanity might actually be able to get Earth back.

You can find more Six Sentence writers here.

Review: Templar One

This post will include my review of the book Templar One by Tony Gonzales. It is another of his novels set within the EVE Universe and tied in to the EVE-Online MMORPG. Released January 3rd 2012.

The text below is taken from the blurb on the back of the book.

“There will be neither compassion nor mercy; Nor peace, nor solace For those who bear witness to these Signs And still do not believe.” Book of Reclaiming 25:10 New Eden: the celestial battleground of a catastrophic war that has claimed countless lives. The immortal starship captains spearheading this epic conflict continue their unstoppable dominance, shaping the universe to their will and ensuring a bloody, everlasting stalemate. But a powerful empire is on the verge of a breakthrough that could end the war and secure their rule over mankind forever. For deep in a prison reclamation camp, a secret program is underway…one that will unlock dangerous secrets of New Eden’s past. It all begins with inmate 487980-A . . . Templar One.

This is the second EVE releated book I have read by the same author, the first being “The Empyrean Age”, and I will start by saying I preferred this one to the other one. That said it took a while for the actual story to start and for the action to appear like it was heading in a consistent direction.

The opening 20 chapters were spent in outlining back story and introducing characters and I found myself wondering if there was any real plot behind all these scenes. Don’t get me wrong, I found the scenes interesting and as a fan of the EVE game I was very happy to learn more about the history of the EVE universe. About the Sleepers, the Jovians, and Empress Jamyl in particular.

But once the story got started it never let go. The action and politiking was relentless in the final parts of the novel and I cannot begin to imagine how many thousands of people were killed by the time I finished.

If you are a fan of the game and you are interested in the story behind the game then I thoroughly recommend this book. It is a good way to add an extra dimension to the gameplay without spoiling the online experience in any way. If you’re not playing EVE then this book may be little harder to get into. The names and places will be meaningless (and there are a LOT of them) and you may find it difficult to understand the signficance of the events in the story.

It’s a fun read but its probably not for everyone.

Mistborn By The Numbers

In my opinion, Brandon Sanderson’s writing is excellent. Others have described it as being technically perfect. His novels are epics in both concept as well as size but they are very accessible. He structures his sentences in ways that make them easy to read, I don’t need a dictionary beside me and he doesn’t give the impression that he swallowed a thesaurus. Put simply, if my writing in any way approached his I would be proud of myself.

My opening paragraph contains numerous subjective statements. I firmly believe that they are accurate but how am I going to prove them? The answer is, sadly, I don’t know that I can prove them. All I can do is put forward my opinion and – provided it is shared by enough people – I might be considered correct. The purpose of this post isn’t to prove my belief that Brandon Sanderson writes well, that is something that you will either agree with or disagree with, but there is something that none of us can deny. He absolutely writes well enough to have gotten himself published and to have him personally selected to complete another author’s magnum opus.

So, questions of quality aside, I thought it would be interesting to do a little digging, to pull apart his writing and see what its made of. In this post I am going to take all three of his hugely popular Mistborn books and break them down into some key metrics that will hopefully be an interesting baseline by which I might measure my own writing.

Before I start though I am making an assumption you are aware of the books I am talking about (and if you aren’t I will asume you either live under a rock or have just awoken from a coma). To refresh your memory here are the cover images. Click on them to take you to the amazon page for each book where you can read reviews and whatnot to assure you that his work is well liked.

Let me start with some high level numbers for the three books.

	Book 1	Book 2	Book 3
Word Count	213,348	245,172	234,908
Sentence Count	22,368	25,951	24,108
Paragraph Count	7,785	9,091	7,397
Unique Words	10,043	10,199	10,110
Average letters per word	4.5	4.4	4.4
Average words per sentence	9.5	9.4	9.7
Average sentences per paragraph	2.9	2.9	3.3

What does this tell me. Well firstly that all three books are very similar in terms of size and structure. The words, sentences, and paragraphs are all about the same size. Some of you might recognise these measures as being inputs into certain readability models. Regardless of which of the many such models you subscribe to the one thing they have in common is that words per sentence, and letters per word is relevant to how readable a particular bit of text is. So I would argue that the fact that all three of these books are very similar in these measures is no mere coincidence.

Next I want to examine the words themselves. To do this I have a table showing the ten most frequently used words in each of the three books. I will show the word, how often it appears in the text and then the average gap between subsequent occurences of the word.

For Book 1 the ten most frequently used words were:

Word	Avg Gap	Count	Percentage
the	18.4	11607	5.4404%
to	35.9	5934	2.7814%
a	42.9	4974	2.3314%
of	51.3	4159	1.9494%
and	61.3	3479	1.6307%
he	79.2	2678	1.2552%
she	82.2	2536	1.1887%
you	87.8	2418	1.1334%
her	88	2393	1.1216%
that	89.9	2372	1.1118%

For Book 2 the ten most frequently used words were:

Word	Avg Gap	Count	Percentage
the	19.3	12709	5.1837%
to	35.7	6873	2.8033%
a	46.5	5274	2.1511%
of	52.5	4666	1.9032%
he	59	4153	1.6939%
and	61.6	3977	1.6221%
i	78.9	3108	1.2677%
she	78.7	3104	1.266%
that	79	3102	1.2652%
you	86.9	2818	1.1494%

For Book 3 the ten most frequently used words were:

Word	Avg Gap	Count	Percentage
the	17.5	13444	5.7231%
to	34.8	6749	2.873%
of	43.3	5427	2.3103%
a	49.3	4756	2.0246%
he	55.6	4227	1.7994%
and	59.9	3922	1.6696%
that	71.4	3291	1.401%
it	79.5	2953	1.2571%
in	82.9	2835	1.2069%
was	83.8	2802	1.1928%

What strikes me is how similar these lists are. Sure there are words in some that don’t appear in others and some are in a different place but overall there is a huge correlation between the three lists. And not one of those words is a proper noun. In case you are interested there is a site that lists the most commonly used english words and their top ten is very similar to what we have here. I guess the message to draw from that is if your own writing has a wildly different top ten then maybe you have some revision to do.

So far there hasn’t been anything particularly mind blowing in any of these statistics. So I am now going to turn to those trouble words that editors warn you to watch out for. How often do they show up in the Mistborn trilogy.

Word or words	Book 1	Book 2	Book 3
Turn / Turned / Turning	386	530	389
These / This	1,007	1,154	1,196
Realized	46	48	71
Seem / Seemed	278	331	327
Smile / Smiled	249	220	161
had	1,331	2,096	2,577
“ly” words	1,333	1,179	1,258

As you can see, with the exception of the use of “had” in book 3 these are very low counts for a 250,000 word piece, even “had” only rates a one in 100 mention in that book. I selected these words (or types of words) because they are words that I typically overuse. Your habits may be slightly different and if you are curious how your pet word fares in the Mistborn series then ask me in the comments and I’ll reply with the results.

My goal in putting this up is to show you a statistical breakdown of a well respected author’s work for a highly acclaimed series of books. This alone is not the mark of good writing but it is a piece of the puzzle. So, if your writing results in statistics like this then you are at least somewhere toward having good sentence structure, and are selecting your words carefully. Of course you’ll still need to have a well considered plot and engaging characters and no amount of statistical analysis can show you how to do that.

I hope you have found the above data interesting.