RE: Sun Fin...
So finished this at last.
Like I find whenever I read ROTK the period after Liu Bei's death just drags for me. With many of the earlier main characters dead or heading that way I just lose interest in the story.
I couldn't help but pity Zhuge in his last years, chipping away at Cao Wei with nothing but the "Plan F" Team and Wei Yan. Writing those last 20 chapters without the likes of Jian Yong and Zhang Fei was tough.
It's also very long! This doesn't bother me as I read very quickly and know the 3K era well enough to pick it up a few weeks later and not be lost but I suspect that others might lose interest due to length!
I would consider splitting similar length works in to 2 separate novels in future.
Seeing the printed version (more on this below) I am at times inclined to think that I need to scale down: it's the size of some of my programming textbooks.
All in all I want to thank the author for being the only person I'm aware of to actually have the determination and staying power to finish writing a 3K novel rather than just starting! (Myself, Crazed, scholar amongst many others fit in the category of people with stories left hanging).
Many thanks. Everyone should try and get their stuff out there. There's an audience, and with the new digital mediums to launch yourselves, no better time for you, Crazed, scholar and the many others to say "Here I am".
I've enjoyed reading it.
Many, many thanks.
You've also inspired me to make a really good go at researching and writing something myself in a way no-one else has ever done before.
And you should put it on Kindle at the very least. That's free to set up, and gives you an immediate global audience. By contrast, the ePub route - while it puts you on nook, kobo, iTunes, etc - costs a small sum of money (though I have done it, I only did it after I had Kindle sales to guarantee there being a point). With Kindle, you're allowed to make corrections for free (ePub resubs cost), and furthermore, you can point publishers and agents at it in addition to the usual printed subs, and people will find it and read it regardless, as they have with my work. If even one person sees it and likes it... well, there's no fuzzier feeling, I think. To everyone, I say do it.
RE: Nazne...
I'm a bit saddened that I didn't see this book earlier.
So am I, because your points may have influenced my final proof-read before I went to print, a mere 6 days before you posted (the book is now available on Amazon via their print-on-demand CreateSpace service. Pricey, but means I have a physical, tangible thing to look at now).
So, unfortunately, I can agree with criticisms but do nothing about them now, really, except learn for future projects.
Like Sun Fin, I really enjoyed what I've read so far (the Act I sample); the interactions between characters are much stronger than depicted in RoTK, and lends the historical RTK's events some flesh and blood.
Many thanks!
There are a few things that bother me, however - not about the plot, but about the writing style. I'm going to be a little pedantic here; I mostly noticed the below issues because this story was otherwise quite engaging to read, and these particular issues threw me out of the flow.
Ready and waiting...
Conversations are difficult to get through for me, because every time a character speaks you seem to use a different descriptive verb ("chortled", "chuckled", "sighed", "bleated"), or verb-adjective pair. The tone carried by that verb tends to contradict the tone of the character's words and makes the emotion behind a line of dialogue harder to interpret; the instances of "chuckled desperately" are especially confusing. If you ever edit or write more in the future, I'd recommend sticking to a neutral dialogue verb, such as "said", and letting readers draw their own conclusions about what emotional state the characters are in from the dialogue itself; show, don't tell.
I like artistic whimsies like having someone laugh sadly when they feel helpless, or give an order with contradictory feebleness (bleat it, rather than bark it), or say something that should carry one meaning by the words spoken, but are, due to true feelings, delivered with the true emotion rather than the intended one. It's something I veer between leaving in to make a point and removing because I fear confusing readers. It's a tough call for me to make.
I also noticed that there are a lot of ellipses used. I think ellipse usage is much more common in Chinese writing than English, and for a while I was under the impression that you were translating from Chinese and kept the ellipses to be faithful. However, overusing ellipses looks sloppy in English and I would recommend replacing as many of them as possible with other punctuation marks, which would also help clean up dialogue and make it "punchier".
I use a lot of ellipses in my writing to denote various lengths of pauses during dialogue, in everything I do, not just this book (I have 2 other works that are, admittedly, not performing that well, written under a different pseudonym to keep them separate from this, which is doing OK - they are written in a very similar way despite being a different genre). I don't really use them in narrative - there, I would agree, overuse is sloppy - but because I tend to make characters pause or hesitate a lot during dialogue, they do tend to show up a lot. I do try to keep them under control, believe it or not.
In general, though, I'm looking forward to sitting down with the full book later when I'm not so busy with academics, and I hope you'll continue to write to make RTK more accessible to an English-speaking population!
I intend to! Thank you for your thoughts.
Regards,
T. P. M. Thorne