Safe As Milk

Despite being an early and eager adopter of his Kingkiller Chronicles I haven’t followed him much otherwise. Here are a couple of recent videos I watched featuring Pat Rothfuss.

This first one is a roundtable discussion about storytelling in video games with Colin McComb (Torment), Jerry Holkins (From Penny Arcade), and Veronica Belmont (From Sword and Laser). It raised some interesting questions about storytelling but I don’t have the video game knowledge to get a lot of where they go. To me, Rothfuss came across as a whiny old baby crying because “they just don’t make them like they used to”. I hear this a lot when talking about modern music. That argument is bullshit. There is always good creative work happening but sometimes it takes more work to find it than you’re willing to put out. Holkins rightly calls him on it and Rothfuss gets it. It’s a good listen.

This Triangulation interview has a genuinely poor Skype connection but I liked Rothfuss a lot more after watching it. His process is something I’m definitely interested in. (That’s just a link to the page. I couldn’t get the embed link to work, likely an id10t error.) Here’s a tasty screenshot:

Links to both are via Patrick Rothfuss’ blog.

Last year, Ronan asked me if I’d read Wool and I’d never heard of it. At $6 from Amazon it was easy enough to take a chance on.

The omnibus is a series of stories set in a common environment. Howey wrote the first one and the response from readers was so strong that he wrote more in the same world. It’s a smartly-built environment but is not so impossible or unbelievable that you can’t understand the motivations in play. There is a pervasive tension that builds throughout the series but Howey makes plenty of room for some surprisingly sad and tender moments, too.

I liked it a lot. The first is free (for kindle) and if you like it you should definitely keep going. There are cool ideas in there. The stories get longer as you go with the first around 60 pages and the 5th over 250.

You Were Never Really Here is a new kindle single from Byliner by Jonathan Ames. I saw it linked over at Super Punch and bought it for when I’d be in between longer reads. I caught some time this week to read it but forgot what it was about. It turns out that it’s hard-boiled noir, which I have enjoyed, but this was noir that was too dark for me.

I guess this next bit might be a spoiler so I’ll put this sentence here to keep you from reading further unless you want to.

There was a lot of heavy violence in there but that comes with the “hard-boiled” and “noir” territory. What put me off was the fact that I’ve got a 13-year old daughter so the plot points based around the one in this story were disturbing to the point of taking enjoyment away. I’ve got enough irrational fear about my kids out in this world that I’m not looking for more fuel in my recreational reading.

It’s a punchy story that doesn’t slow down for much of anything. I’d recommend it to someone without kids, though.