Quote:
Originally Posted by shootingMaNs
I just finished Supervolcano: Eruption by Harry Turtledove. I'm a little disappointed in it. I didn't get attached to a single character in the book.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Apache
I seem to have that trouble with most of the Harry Turtledove books that I have read.
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Turtledove is kind of like that. He seems to be really more attached to telling the ideas that make up the story, than the characters who live through it.
That said, I did quite enjoy his alt-Shakespearean
Ruled Britannia, which I felt did a really good job of incorporating the characters personalities into affecting the changed-world of the story, and
In the Presence of Mine Enemies, while a bit more "big concept"-oriented, was mostly pretty decent in that regard, I thought.
I wonder if their being standalone instead of his usual trilogy+ makes a difference.
As for me, I did a quickie read of a freebie short story,
Making Room at Christmas which ties into the cozy-looking LGBT "Charlotte Diamond Mysteries" by
Olivia Stowe.
It was a lightweight bit of fluff that seemed charming enough that I went and picked up the rest of the series which was on offer at "buy the first 4 @ 20%+ off, then get the 5th for free" as
Rainbow eBooks' weekend special, which was my primary reason for even trying the story.
But it was really much more of a slice-of-life vignette piece which seemed to end rather abruptly with the apparent "crisis" resolved at the point where I thought there was going to be a surprise!murder found amongst the stranded guests hastily shoved into the emergency B&B accommodations, or at the very least, some stolen Christmas cookies for the retired FBI-now-amateur sleuth to show off her detective skills.
So I actually had to download the samples for the full novels from Amazon to read on my Kindle to see if it really was something I wanted to spend the < $8 on for all five books. But from the 2nd onward, they did read promisingly enough that I went ahead and splurged because it's a DRM-free MultiFormat retailer with a good offer and I'll be supporting a niche-ish specialty subgenre (as far as the non-porn versions go) I somewhat like where the author seems reasonably competent as far as stringing together coherent grammatical sentences into a semblance of an understandable plot goes (sadly somewhat rare in small-press work in certain niche-ish specialty subgenres, unfortunately).
Protip for any aspiring authors who frequent this thread: when writing a tie-in story as a promo to showcase your series, it might be a good idea to have it be a full story that's reasonably representative of what the series is actually like, plot and dénouement-wise. I imagine it would be pretty hard to sell on pure character fluff, at least to total strangers.