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potentiality_26What do I love? I love steampunk and I love westerns. What do I find when I go into the Barnes and Noble these days? Lots of steampunk novels, a lot of them westerns.
I should be really happy, but I'm sort of not. So few of the books look actively interesting, and the ones that do, that I buy, aren't that great.
I just read The Good, the Bad and the Infernal by Guy Adams. I should preface this by saying that I loved a lot of things about the book. Quite a few of the characters were great, some of the dialogue was lovely, and in general I adored the gritty spaghetti western atmosphere of it.
That said, it was very flawed stylistically. It was broken into three narratives, one first person, the other two were third person. Now, I don't mind that, except that I'm not talking every three chapters- I'm talking a first person narration that appeared about fifteen pages in and then vanished again for roughly a hundred pages without me having the first idea if it was ever coming back. The third person parts jumped into a million different heads (also something I technically don't mind) and a lot of the characters had such similar backgrounds (ex: two theoretically different men whose main background trait is that they spent their childhoods afraid of everything) and thus ran together. I don't think GBI was a bad book by any stretch-
But if I'd written that story and sent it as a draft to, say, an old collage professor and asked for feedback, he would almost certainly tell me that I had a lot of rewriting ahead of me. So, is it because Adams is an already established writer? Is it because steampunk westerns are "in" right now and if you send in the right manuscript at the right time you're golden (because I've read much, much worse ones than this)?
Also, a guy named Father Martin turns into Father Michael about two thirds of the way through. It's such a ridiculous mistake to make I almost think it was on purpose and will turn out to be on purpose in the sequel- but that's the kind of plot twist that just makes it look like the writer forgot one of his character's names for way, way too long.
I should be really happy, but I'm sort of not. So few of the books look actively interesting, and the ones that do, that I buy, aren't that great.
I just read The Good, the Bad and the Infernal by Guy Adams. I should preface this by saying that I loved a lot of things about the book. Quite a few of the characters were great, some of the dialogue was lovely, and in general I adored the gritty spaghetti western atmosphere of it.
That said, it was very flawed stylistically. It was broken into three narratives, one first person, the other two were third person. Now, I don't mind that, except that I'm not talking every three chapters- I'm talking a first person narration that appeared about fifteen pages in and then vanished again for roughly a hundred pages without me having the first idea if it was ever coming back. The third person parts jumped into a million different heads (also something I technically don't mind) and a lot of the characters had such similar backgrounds (ex: two theoretically different men whose main background trait is that they spent their childhoods afraid of everything) and thus ran together. I don't think GBI was a bad book by any stretch-
But if I'd written that story and sent it as a draft to, say, an old collage professor and asked for feedback, he would almost certainly tell me that I had a lot of rewriting ahead of me. So, is it because Adams is an already established writer? Is it because steampunk westerns are "in" right now and if you send in the right manuscript at the right time you're golden (because I've read much, much worse ones than this)?
Also, a guy named Father Martin turns into Father Michael about two thirds of the way through. It's such a ridiculous mistake to make I almost think it was on purpose and will turn out to be on purpose in the sequel- but that's the kind of plot twist that just makes it look like the writer forgot one of his character's names for way, way too long.
