An Epic on Any Landscape (pukey smiley)


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Dune Nerd
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An Epic on Any Landscape (pukey smiley)

Post by Dune Nerd »

Audbile.com emailed me about this and I figured I would pass it along to all you KJA fans out there....lol

http://www.audible.com/adbl/site/templa ... rson+Essay

Link above, text below. Enjoy.





Kevin J. Anderson
An Epic on Any Landscape
by Kevin J. Anderson


Since I started writing, I've published a great many short stories. (I've gotten over it, for the most part, although audible.com just released audio versions of some of my best dark fantasy pieces, Hunter's Moon and Other American Gothic Tales). However, I'm more comfortable working on a much larger canvas, something as big as the map of an unexplored world, or even spanning an entire galaxy.
A story so vast requir...
An Epic on Any Landscape
by Kevin J. Anderson


Since I started writing, I've published a great many short stories. (I've gotten over it, for the most part, although audible.com just released audio versions of some of my best dark fantasy pieces, Hunter's Moon and Other American Gothic Tales). However, I'm more comfortable working on a much larger canvas, something as big as the map of an unexplored world, or even spanning an entire galaxy.
A story so vast requires a lot of pages to tell, the literary elbow room to look at all aspects of the fictional universe and explore the side-stories, off-the-beaten-path places, the interesting characters and events that flesh out an entire novelistic backdrop. I found that I needed seven large volumes to tell my SF epic, "The Saga of Seven Suns". With that story completed, I have now dived into a trilogy of thick fantasy novels about sailing ships, sea monsters, and the crusades -- "Terra Incognita." Even at 600 pages in the first volume, The Edge of the World, the story is just beginning.
Instead of a small tale of a singular event or two in one character's life, I prefer to stage an epic where the story itself is a main character, a sweeping war-and-peace exercise that can take the reader through all different emotions. The Edge of the World features two continents, two religions, two cultures clashing. To tell that story adequately, I required viewpoints from both sides, both highborn and lowborn, heroes and villains and all the shades of gray in between. I needed plenty of characters to have wide-ranging adventures that would take them from one side of the map to the other, along with sailing ships, mounted armies, politics and scheming (and, of course, sea monsters).
Many years ago I was captivated by the legend of Prester John, a mythical Christian king who lived somewhere in an undiscovered part of the world. During the Age of Discovery and before, many Europeans believed that if only they could find the kingdom of Prester John, he would ally himself with Christendom against the Muslims in the Crusades, and the search for this mythical hero launched many of the great sailing voyages around the world. I thought that would be an intriguing springboard for a fantasy series, set in a world not unlike our own, but an imaginary place where some forms of magic actually worked, where sea serpents actually existed, and wwhere some of the nautical legends were real.
As a reader, I've always been drawn to big stories -- fantasy epics as well as thick historical novels, from Lonesome Dove to The Thorn Birds to Shogun. Frank Herbert's "Dune" chronicles and Dan Simmons's "Hyperion Cantos", Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings", Peter Hamilton's "Night's Dawn" series -- all of these are stories too big to fit into a single book, and they are tales that a reader can sink his teeth into for an extended enjoyable time. As a writer, that's the sort of project that interests me as well.
When I'm plotting, and writing, I like tackling big stories, where I can do my own cartography of a fictional landscape where I can explore a story all the way to the horizon. "Terra Incognita" will be three books, and I've already nearly finished editing the second volume, The Map of All Things, for release next summer. Set sail with me for points unknown.
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Redstar
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Re: An Epic on Any Landscape (pukey smiley)

Post by Redstar »

He seems to like "big" things. And frankly, that annoys me. Dune is about a sprawling empire of millions of worlds, yes, but how many characters are there in it? Somewhere around a dozen and a half, and that's in the entire series.

Frank wrote about characters who were more or less affected by the world they lived in. In most cases they acted, and the world reacted. KJA likes to switch that around, saying that Norma or some other avatar of the universe did something and the people scrambled to react to those changes. That's not exactly a bad thing, but it is when the writer is only doing it because they think it's easier than making strong, capable characters. The thing is, no matter what story you write the characters have to act as much as they react, even if the story you're telling is about a world, not characters, because otherwise it just wont seem real. KJA is lazy and tries to rationalize that by making up reasons for the "epic" themes of his stories.

There is no end to the idiocy coming from this guy. He'll be famous, yes, for years. But he'll be famous as one of the worst writers of the English language, right up there with Stephanie Meyer in a whole chapter on "The Deterioration of the American Language and Literature in the 21 Century." Hopefully that chapter ends up as "The Near Deterioration..."
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SandChigger
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Re: An Epic on Any Landscape (pukey smiley)

Post by SandChigger »

(Are you saying he's all about size? :shock: )

"...a trilogy of thick fantasy novels": yeah, he called that one. It's laid on pretty thick all right.

Thick fantasy. Are we DOWN with that? :P


(Yes, I have fuckall idea what that means. I speak Ivorics. :lol: )
"Let the dead give water to the dead. As for me, it's NO MORE FUCKING TEARS!"
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Rakis
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Re: An Epic on Any Landscape (pukey smiley)

Post by Rakis »

SandChigger wrote:(Are you saying he's all about size? :shock: )
He's all about what he doesn't have in size...
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Schu
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Re: An Epic on Any Landscape (pukey smiley)

Post by Schu »

I dunno, he may well be a size queen...

(nah, not really. He'd probably let anything up there - I mean, so much comes out of his ass, I guess he must put a lot into it.)
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SandChigger
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Re: An Epic on Any Landscape (pukey smiley)

Post by SandChigger »

Oh, Schu ... you just had to go and point at the maypole we were all dancing around, didn't you? :roll:

:lol:
"Let the dead give water to the dead. As for me, it's NO MORE FUCKING TEARS!"
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Schu
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Re: An Epic on Any Landscape (pukey smiley)

Post by Schu »

Well, the maypole you were all dancing around was that he has a small penis, wasn't it? I just pointed at the reciprocal maypole :P
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SandChigger
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Re: An Epic on Any Landscape (pukey smiley)

Post by SandChigger »

:shock:

Who knew there were two maypoles in the field! :lol:
"Let the dead give water to the dead. As for me, it's NO MORE FUCKING TEARS!"
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inhuien
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Re: An Epic on Any Landscape (pukey smiley)

Post by inhuien »

Kevin please fuck off.
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Kagemusha
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Re: An Epic on Any Landscape (pukey smiley)

Post by Kagemusha »

The Map of All Things, for release next summer. Set sail with me for points unknown.
I think he means for release in the next two weeks.
KJAはばかで、かれは本を書くことができない。
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