The idea is that the emotion should be conveyed by the content of dialogue and not the modifier.
The emotion could be conveyed by a description of the character's actions, or facial expression, or a more vivid description of the tone. Using adverbs is just kinda lazy writing. It's not necessarily awful, but you're missing a lot of potential for more vivid imagery.
I never really thought about that. In the couple stories I've written, my dialogue tends to be use "x said" just once per person and let the rest go without the "x said" bullshit.
Having just finished Foundation, I am now reading Hominids by Robert Sawyer. No idea what its about but it won a Hugo so ill give it a shot. First two chapters are pretty awesome... Good sign.
One of my podcast's most popular episode is the one where I reviewed Hominids. I was off my head on pain and pain killers, and the multiple rants still prompt emails to this day. I don't think I've listened to that episode for two years, but is one of the only episodes of my podcast I've listened to after the recording itself.
One of my podcast's most popular episode is the one where I reviewed Hominids. I was off my head on pain and pain killers, and the multiple rants still prompt emails to this day. I don't think I've listened to that episode for two years, but is one of the only episodes of my podcast I've listened to after the recording itself.
I'm almost afraid to ask...
Did you like it?
EDIT: “How the hell did this book win a Hugo award?†asks Luke.
Short answer: Because it was a CANADIAN book written by a CANADIAN author all about CANADA the year when the WorldCon (the convention where they award Hugos, and you have to have a WorldCon ticket to vote for the winner) was in CANADA.*
The real question I answer in that podcast is "What makes the book so bad that I had to question how it had won a Hugo?"
* Another way a book can win a Hugo is if the author of the book is invited to that year's WorldCon as the guest of honor, and so many of that author's fans want to attend. And you have to attend (or buy the right) if you want to vote.
Hugo Awards are a good guide to a good book. Except when they're not. Pity it's hard to tell in advance.
Short answer: Because it was a CANADIAN book written by a CANADIAN author all about CANADA the year when the WorldCon (the convention where they award Hugos, and you have to have a WorldCon ticket to vote for the winner) was in CANADA.*
The real question I answer in that podcast is "What makes the book so bad that I had to question how it had won a Hugo?"
* Another way a book can win a Hugo is if the author of the book is invited to that year's WorldCon as the guest of honor, and so many of that author's fans want to attend. And you have to attend (or buy the right) if you want to vote.
Hugo Awards are a good guide to a good book. Except when they're not. Pity it's hard to tell in advance.
Just finished Hominids.
I can't really say if it deserved the Hugo or not, having read maybe 3 or 4 other winners (Enders game, Speaker for the dead, Dune, Hyperion)
BUT..
I REALLY liked this book. I could not put it down, mowed it out in less than a week. It's certainly not "hard" sci-fi, its not a space opera or does not have any outrageous ideas, but its just a solid and very fun read.
I guess if I had to pick a word, yeah, I'd just say it was a *fun* book. Totally recommend it.
Just don't expect... A Dune or a Hyperion. Its not even close.
But it hooked me in hard, and I will read the two sequels very shortly, maybe I'll read a quick Dresden file to "cleanse my palette" and then back into it.
I am about 50 pages away from finishing Anne McCaffrey's Dragonflight (for the first time since I was 15). I'll have to check whether Luke's reviewed it.
It didnt really bring anything new to the table. The whole culture clash was pretty well covered in book 1 and book 2 was really just more of that, minus the exciting plot of "Dude be stuck in parallel universe, will he get home?"
Going to skip book 3.
Next up... Some book I found called The Windup Girl. Won a Hugo. Lets see how this goes. No idea what it's about. Don't really care.
I've been reading the Parker novels by Richard Stark -- the first book was the source material for the Mel Gibson movie "Payback", as well as several other movies. Darwyn Cooke has also adapted a couple of the books to comics. I didn't know that I liked crime fiction, but apparently I do. I'm on the third book right now -- they're not Shakespeare, just well-written, tightly plotted heist novels. The prose is very stripped down, so they read really quickly.
Kicking the pile into overdrive in preperation for Connecticon, I just finished the God of War Novel. If you played the first game, it is the novel to the T with all those cutscene fights told you you in a painful manner while attempting to build a character that was an asshole to a likeable asshole.
Now I can incorporate Greek literature into my panel with some ways to share the classics
Kicking the pile into overdrive in preperation for Connecticon, I just finished the God of War Novel. If you played the first game, it is the novel to the T with all those cutscene fights told you you in a painful manner while attempting to build a character that was an asshole to a likeable asshole.
After accidentally picking up The Dig, not realizing it was a book based off of a video game, and almost wanting to tear my eyes out, I'm not sure if I'll ever go back into that sub-genre of novels again.
I'm reading Homage to Catalonia by Orwell. It's his experience in the Spanish Civil war, and has some of the most wonderful quotes:
I began to wonder with increasing scepticism whether anything would ever happen to bring a bit of lief, or rather a bit of death into this cock-eyed war. It was pneumonia that we were fighting against, not against men. When the trenches are more than five hundred yards apart, no one gets hit except by accident...
When you wanted your rifle cleaned you took it to the sergeant, who possessed a long brass ramrod which was invariably bent and therefore scratched the rifling. there was not even any gun oil. you greased your rifle with olive oil, when you could get hold of it; at different times I have greased mine with vaseline, with cold cream, and even with bacon fat...
Georges Kopp, on his periodical tours of inspection, was quite frank with us. "This is not a war" he used to say, "it is a comic opera with an occasional death."
It's like if the Marx Bros. movie Duck Soup had been real.
I've been on a Niven & Pournelle kick lately. I just finished up Inferno (which was decent) and its sequel Escape From Hell (not as good, but still enjoyable) last week, and I've got Lucifer's Hammer and The Mote In God's Eye in the queue. Over the weekend I took a break from them and read an anthology of short stories hinging around transhumanism and the Singularity. It wasn't bad but like most anthology novels was a bit hit-and-miss.
I just started A Game of Thrones on audio book. I'm starting to think I should actually read it since it is hard to follow on audio book (I'm multi-tasking while listening to it).
I'm also reading Linux for Dummies hoping I can learn how to use Ubuntu exceptionally.
My problem with audio books is that I inevitably think I can listen to just a little more as I head to bed, then wake up to realize I've missed 25 chapters.
I've only listened to one audio book, over a year ago, and I basically just listened to a chapter every morning when I ate breakfast. That worked out pretty well overall, but it took quite a while to do it, even for a relatively small book. For books that I normally read, that method could take a few months (not that I normally read faster than that anyway ^_~).
IMHO, the best way to consume the Nabokov's Lolita is through the audiobook, because the book is mostly in third person and the reader is...Jeremy Irons.
I listen to most stuff on audio books now. I go for walks on my work breaks, + approx 20 mins each way of commute + approx 1 hour of exercise in evening...
I can easily spend 2-3 hours listing to podcasts and audio books a day, and since I only listen to a handful of podcasts now I can quite easily mow out a book in a week.
I listened to game of thrones, I actually own the books too, but just easier to listen. Some really slow chapters in that book, having 2x speeds it up perfectly
My problem with audio books is that I inevitably think I can listen to just a little more as I head to bed, then wake up to realize I've missed 25 chapters.
I run into the same issue and I have 2 ways to deal with it. Just try to remember the last coherent series of events I can remember and rewind to that part of the story. Listen to 2-3 minutes and fast forward 10 minutes (or about 1 chapter) at a time until I get to a section that is unfamiliar then backup one section (10 minutes or 1 chapter) and re-listen to a part that starts familiar but quickly gets me to right where I need to be. The other thing I have been doing more recently is to be a little more strict with myself and turn off the audio when I feel that I am sufficiently close to falling asleep rather than trying and hold out to the last moment before I nod off before turning it off as this very frequent fails and even if I remain coherent enough to stop the audio I inevitably think I was truly comprehending more than I actually was once I re-listen to that section the next day.
Actually not ALL of them suck, just most of them. Example of one the does it right was the Homefront Novel, yes Homefront has a novel. Instead of doing the narrative of the game we follow the Voice of Freedom and how a random gossip reporter turned himself into a DJ that spreads news from across a radioactive Mississippi River to the freedom fighters against the Koreans.
If you like Freedom Rights or Red Dawn check it out it is pretty good.
Solution: on the iPhone/iPod Touch, go to the Timer function in the clock app. You can set the alarm to different rings, or scroll to the bottom and select "Sleep iPhone." Set it to 20 minutes, listen, fall asleep, and then in the morning just rewind to when you fell asleep. For me that's normally about 8 minutes in. If I'm not so tired I set the timer for 30 or 40 minutes.
Solution: on the iPhone/iPod Touch, go to the Timer function in the clock app. You can set the alarm to different rings, or scroll to the bottom and select "Sleep iPhone." Set it to 20 minutes, listen, fall asleep, and then in the morning just rewind to when you fell asleep. For me that's normally about 8 minutes in. If I'm not so tired I set the timer for 30 or 40 minutes.
Brilliant! I use the timer so infrequently I forgot (or didn't know) that functionality existed.
While I don't think I enjoyed it as a whole as much as the previous books I freaking LOVED the "slog". It was like Cormack McCarthy wrote The Fellowship of the Ring.
Some spoilerish highpoints:
Esmenet paralleling Xerius on The Mantel The sampler platter of mental illness that are the Anasurimbor kids "And she thought: Holy fucking shit, Non-Men" "pendual phallisi" is a "wonderful" mental image Mr. Bakker
While I don't think I enjoyed it as a whole as much as the previous books I freaking LOVED the "slog". It was like Cormack McCarthy wrote The Fellowship of the Ring.
I agree. It wasn't great by itself. Very enjoyable, but not as great as the first set of books. The followup - White Luck Warrior -- however, more than makes up for it.
Finished Foundation this morning before leaving for work, and got "The Darkness that comes before" in the mail today, after repeated insistence by the entire FRC community on how good it is. I will judge for myself starting tomorrow.
Comments
Did you like it?
EDIT: “How the hell did this book win a Hugo award?†asks Luke.
Uh-oh.
The real question I answer in that podcast is "What makes the book so bad that I had to question how it had won a Hugo?"
* Another way a book can win a Hugo is if the author of the book is invited to that year's WorldCon as the guest of honor, and so many of that author's fans want to attend. And you have to attend (or buy the right) if you want to vote.
Hugo Awards are a good guide to a good book. Except when they're not. Pity it's hard to tell in advance.
I can't really say if it deserved the Hugo or not, having read maybe 3 or 4 other winners (Enders game, Speaker for the dead, Dune, Hyperion)
BUT..
I REALLY liked this book. I could not put it down, mowed it out in less than a week. It's certainly not "hard" sci-fi, its not a space opera or does not have any outrageous ideas, but its just a solid and very fun read.
I guess if I had to pick a word, yeah, I'd just say it was a *fun* book. Totally recommend it.
Just don't expect... A Dune or a Hyperion. Its not even close.
But it hooked me in hard, and I will read the two sequels very shortly, maybe I'll read a quick Dresden file to "cleanse my palette" and then back into it.
Meh.
It didnt really bring anything new to the table. The whole culture clash was pretty well covered in book 1 and book 2 was really just more of that, minus the exciting plot of "Dude be stuck in parallel universe, will he get home?"
Going to skip book 3.
Next up... Some book I found called The Windup Girl. Won a Hugo. Lets see how this goes. No idea what it's about. Don't really care.
Reading is good.
Now I can incorporate Greek literature into my panel with some ways to share the classics
I'm also reading Linux for Dummies hoping I can learn how to use Ubuntu exceptionally.
I can easily spend 2-3 hours listing to podcasts and audio books a day, and since I only listen to a handful of podcasts now I can quite easily mow out a book in a week.
I listened to game of thrones, I actually own the books too, but just easier to listen. Some really slow chapters in that book, having 2x speeds it up perfectly
Actually not ALL of them suck, just most of them. Example of one the does it right was the Homefront Novel, yes Homefront has a novel. Instead of doing the narrative of the game we follow the Voice of Freedom and how a random gossip reporter turned himself into a DJ that spreads news from across a radioactive Mississippi River to the freedom fighters against the Koreans.
If you like Freedom Rights or Red Dawn check it out it is pretty good.
While I don't think I enjoyed it as a whole as much as the previous books I freaking LOVED the "slog". It was like Cormack McCarthy wrote The Fellowship of the Ring.
Some spoilerish highpoints:
Esmenet paralleling Xerius on The Mantel
The sampler platter of mental illness that are the Anasurimbor kids
"And she thought: Holy fucking shit, Non-Men"
"pendual phallisi" is a "wonderful" mental image Mr. Bakker
/spoilers
Two more to go two more to go....