Teaser (And Review!) Tuesday 10/7/2014

Well, one review anyway, at flayrah.com, from April 2014, of Dragon Stones:

I do strive not to bore the reader! Unfortunately I am getting a little bored with The Sable City, which has a good story at its core, but the experience of reading it is a little bit like auditing someone else’s Advanced Dungeons & Dragons campaign. We have a low-level mage who spends each morning memorizing spells straight out of the Player’s Handbook (Sleep, Know History), and characters who are explicitly described in terms of what would be their AD&D classes, and various unfortunate run-ins with D&D monsters like Piercers, Bugbears, Bullywugs, and Hobgoblins, among others.

I’m still reading it, but I’ve started to skim the regional history info-dumps and multi-page descriptions of characters suiting up for battle, with precise descriptions of where they position their fourteen daggers and how they carry their blunderbusses or their maces. To amuse myself, I’ve also gotten into the habit of trying to guess what the D&D monster is just from its description before somebody actually identifies it (which they usually do, as they seem to all have copies of The Monster Manual handy).

She took careful aim low as it ran down the facing stairs, and a shot at its knees took it full in the chest, the hard pull of the composite bow driving the arrow through leather armor. The hobgoblin sprawled and rolled the rest of the way to the floor, spear clattering beside it.

Hey, hobgoblins! Tucker’s Kobolds would like you to know that frontal attacks are for amateurs. And speaking of amateurs, the last editing pass of Mercy and Bernard’s adventures through the looking glass (so to speak) is finished on The War of the Ravels, which means it’s now time to go through once more cleaning up typos. Oh, and maybe changing a few words here and there. But no more rewriting, honest! Sample typo:

“She stopped a few yards away, chuckling. “Good. I do not want to have to explain to our child that, owing to excessive curiosity, its father was consumed by the Æther before it was born. That would set an unfortunate precedent.”

Whoops, where did that first quote come from? Dialogue that I edited away, no doubt.  Perhaps it will show up as a deleted scene in the special features of the future epic fantasy film trilogy based on Shards, but I doubt it …