What I am reading, Part 2 and the Return of Sky Pride

TL:DR, oof. Necessary break, very necessary, but I am bad at this kind of rest. Vol. 5 starts on Monday, 10 am Eastern US time.

Longer answer:

I... have a cold. Not a very severe one, but it's here. Fortunately, I have started really investigating tea as part of writing Sky Pride, and it seems to be helping.

In addition to tea, I have been dipping in and out of a few books since I read the Herzog. Umberto Eco's Travels in Hyperreality is dated but still, somehow, precient. Which is Eco for you. If you want essays by Eco about his travels around America in the early 1970's, check it out. It's not an easy read, the man believed in using the whole dictionary, but it's fun.

I have also been dipping in and out of Queneu's Exercises in Style, which deserves a place in the bathroom of every author. Not an insult, it's just built for reading in short bursts. It's gimmick is this- a short, boring, pointless anecdote told in a new way every chapter. Same story, dozens of ways of telling it. Quite revolutionary when it was published in the 1950's, and still something I would use in a writing class today. If you ever wondered what "authorial voice" meant, or how to develop yours, I strongly urge you to find a copy.

Something I have been meaning to read properly and still haven't been able to do more than dip in and out of has been Emma Southon's A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, a book on murder (and crime more generally) in ancient Rome. Truly fascinating, and radically changes the way I look at Rome. Yes, they had laws, yes, they had judges and even lawyers. HOWEVER, what the system was really about was wealthy, land owning families securing their own wealth and power. I won't get lost in the details here, but you would likely find it very relevant to a lot going on in the world today. If you have any interest in Roman history, it's very approachable.

On the pile of things I haven't gotten to are Healy's The Blazing World, a history of Revolutionary England (Something I know a bit about, and it's one of the most fascinating and consequential periods of world history,) and the new Dalrymple. Dalrymple's The Anarchy fundimentally changed the way I understood the development of the British Empire, and I considered myself well read on the subject. He is a real scholar on India, so The Golden Road, talking about India's parallel to the Silk Road, will no doubt be excellent.

Something that I have spent a fair amount of time reading, and I won't be naming names since I intend to be somewhat unkind, is lousy Chinese webnovels. Not the good stuff, I specifically sought out the MTL crap, the choice selections of the Poison Tasters over on the Martial Memes subreddit. Some fun things slipped through. I can only acknowledge my weakness. But most of it was dreck. So why do it?

When a new meta hits, it's because one person had a good idea and everyone rushed to copy them. Doesn't mean it was good enough to build a whole long story off of, but it was enough to write something, and it's usually worth checking out and making a note of in case I want to riff on it later. For a lot of it, no. No I will not be stealing it. But in a honest-to-Quidan "Isekai'ed into the body of a loser in a cultivation world but I have a system and my childhood sweetheart is the reincarnation of a heavenly empress" dumpster fire of a setting, I did find some great charicter moments, decent wordplay, and more actual laughs than I have had in any other book in a long while. It's not particularly well written, the charicters aren't memorable, the setting is vague to the point of being almost insulting, but it was fun.

Then the anxiety of not writing overwhelmed me and I dove back into making edits to what I had written for Vol. 5. Massive edits. I am SERIOUSLY thankful that I took the time to rest my brain and rewrite big chunks of this, because JFC, it was not right before. I will keep rewriting sections right up until they launch, I suspect. A whole hell of a lot of exposition can be cut away without much loss, but that's a minor matter. Much more important was charicters acting like they had functional brains, their seniors acting like they, too, have functional brains, ensuring that the people who acted like assholes did it for a reason, and people who didn't have a reason to be pricks, werent.

It was a lot. Vol 5 picks up on Monday at the usual time. Thank you very much for sticking around and reading my books. I really appreaciate it, and you. This is the job I love, and I feel immensely blessed that I get to do it full time thanks to my Patrons.

-Warby