Audiobooks

We just finished listening to this. I only just ordered the last two books and so I've never known the ending.

Christopher Paolini was only fifteen when he first wrote the whole thing, never thinking of publishing. He spent another year revising it and then handed it over to his parents to read. It was they who decided it was good enough to go after publication. 

Can you imagine, sixteen years old, and your parents think you've produced something worthy of publications, or at least trying. Add to that, someone else reading it and agreeing AND promoting it to THEIR publisher, who ALSO agrees. WOW!!!! If only I had that kind of encouragement way back when - heck even like 1% of that kind of encouragement. 

The sad thing about that whole story - Christopher Paolini has not published anything else at all. Or if he has, it's under some pen name and not at all connected with this series or this author page on Amazon. It's in all the different formats and in several different languages, some of which the letters aren't even recognizable, meaning it's in like Japanese or some such - I can't tell. All that effort put into this one series, and yet there is nothing new. It's a great story, but really, it's kinda sad that there's only the one.

And to add insult to injury - the movie. 

Do I need to say anything about that? It's as if Stephan Fangmeier raped the first book and stole the title. Because of what he did to the storyline, there was no way the rest of the books could have ever been filmed. Don't get me wrong; the movie Eragon was a fine movie, but only if you never ever read the book(s). 

But really, I'm getting totally away for the reason for writing this post. My husband is not a reader; he had trouble comprehending sentences - my youngest son is the same way. But he does enjoy audio books so I have a few. I got a kick out of him yelling at the book, telling the main, Eragon, what he should or shouldn't do. Twice I reminded him that the writer was a fifteen-year-old kid who never went to public school, telling a story about a sixteen year old kid who grew up in an isolated village in the mountains. The funniest part was the ending. As foretold in book one, Eragon would sail away and never return to his home country. And there were tidbits of foreshadowing here and there along the way. But at the very end, he does leave. 

My husband riled at that for hours. Eragon might be seventeen years at that point, and throughout the entire series, he was hard in love with an elf princess who, though she liked him, she saw him as a child - NOTHING in common. She did her best to divert him too, but he just couldn't help himself. And then he sail off, knowing he'll never see her again. My husband's issue? The poor kid never got laid. He's going off to raise a bunch of dragon hatchlings with a few elf guys for company and help, and the poor kid is still a virgin. Plus, since he's heading off across the ocean, there isn't even any guarantee that he'll reach his destination. So - virgin + whale turds. He even made me go search today just to make sure there wasn't another book out there somewhere. I wish I could send Christopher a message. 

Thought you might enjoy this as much as I did. Oh, and give the book a listen. You won't regret it.
Gerard Doyle is a fantastic narrator. My husband wants him to do my books. Now if I could find a way to contact him.

Hmmmmm...

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Spellchecker is God

Is it? Is it really? No. Far from it. Don't get me wrong, spellchecker is an awesome tool, it has helped me SO much, but it's far from infallible. If you manage to screw up a word bad enough, you have to resort to the dictionary to find the proper spelling. Now isn't that a catch 22 - to find out how to spell a word, you need to know how to spell it to look it up. haha Well, at least the dictionary has more suggestions.

So what is my point here? Well, I just read a really great story. If you know me, it takes quite a bit for me to say a story is really great. In my opinion, all stories are good ideas, it's how the writer handles and develops the story that counts. This story, I just finished involved string theory and time travel. Super simplified, it's the theory that time is not linear but something like a coil. You can't really go forward or backwards in time because time itself is merely a pinprick. What you do is travel the course of time around the loop until you run into what you perceive as your past where you 'jump ship' to do whatever you wanted to go back in time to do. The only thing is, it's not really your past, it's just the next closest thing. Does that make sense? I hope so. Anyway, this book did a lot of hop, skipping, and jumping through time, making the concept quite clear and doing a great job of not losing me along the way. Under other circumstances, this book would have gotten a 4 or 5 star review from me. The only think I didn't like about the story was the main character; she seemed to have a rather unstable personality, going from ice queen killer, to down right jerk, to teary shrinking violet, to something sort of normal.

But now we get to my point. Though there were no outright spelling errors that I noticed, the kindle doesn't do those nifty squiggly red lines, the entire book was full of homonyms, missing words, wrong words (like then instead of the), misplaced words (like when you rearrange a sentence and forget to remove the extras), and above all, oodles of punctuation mistakes. As I understand it, coma placement is something of a personal style. I like to go by desired sound, which means I use more than most, but when the inclusion or lack of one changes the meaning of a sentence, it can be a little annoying. But coma placement, or lack thereof, wasn't the only punctuation issue. There were missing periods, of all things. In fact, I'm really surprised the nifty spellchecker didn't light the document with all kinds of those little green lines that point out grammar errors. They wouldn't catch everything, but they would have caught some of it.

The book was somewhat annoying to read because of this, and because of my dislike of the main character. I nearly put it down in favor of reading another book I've taken on from a friend, but then the time travel part started and it got interesting.

I've got to post a review on Amazon, but I'm really torn as to what to say. I'm not even sure how I'd rate it. If I had more choices, I'd give it a 1 or 2 for all the errors, but the story on it's own deserves a 5, I think. I'll have to think about it.

What would you do? How do you use your spellchecker? Do you?

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Magic

I got my first 2-star review ever the other day, but though it was low, I won't call it a bad review. He went to the trouble of enumerating what he thought my book lacked and that's great. Mostly, he saw cliches everywhere he looked. One of the first things I heard was that every story possible has already been told, all you can do is mix it up a bit and tell it anyway. Something I hope I've done. But that's not what this post is about. Everyone is entitled to their opinion and all I can do is hope to learn something from every bit of feedback. What I want to address is his comment about the magic.

"Magic is uninspiring and not explained well or described in any meaningful way. The main pretty much just does stuff with no take on how he does them or even what it looks like. Things are never really shown you are just kind of told he does such and such."

The way I see magic is that it is a skill of the mind. My character does not live in Harry Potter's world where magic requires certain moves with a wand accompanied by a properly pronounced word. Though I've never seen it, Uri Geller could move objects and bend spoons. He didn't need to do anything but concentrate on his desired task and it happened. This is how I see magic as it is portrayed in Prince in Hiding.

Early on, Sean was advised to learn how to work his magic without the use of his hands. I can see a beginner wanting to reach out and pick up a stone with his hand while intending that the actual task be accomplished with only his mind. And yet I can also anticipate his need to keep his actions secret, or maybe it's just a matter that his hands are preoccupied in some other way.

And finally, what does magic look like? You don't even 'see' magic in Harry Potter's world. There's no sparkly zing of lights that stream off the tip of the wand and lights up whatever it hits. In The Sorcerer's Stone, when Hermione was being attacked by the troll, Ron lifted it's club up out of it's hand. There was nothing to see but his word, the wave of his wand, and the club levitated. Take away the wand and the word, and you have the same thing in my book.

So tell me, if you were to be able to do magic, how would you do it? Really, I'm curious. How do you see the skill of being able to work magic? Everyone's idea or view of the subject is different. What's yours?