Comments on: Blog for a Bindlestiff

By: Glenn

Glenn — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 05:07:17 +0000

It isn’t so much a matter of the places I would like to visit; it’s more about viewpoints I would like to acquire. I’d like to stand on planets whose night skies gave me an excellent, up close view of the Magellanic Clouds, or the Tarantula Nebula, and most especially the Polar-Ring Galaxy. (NGC 4650A, for the curious) I’d like to step outside our galaxy and see what it looks like from a hundred different angles. All of them, up close and personal, because the universe is very up close, very personal.
As to what to carry, I think Camilla had it right. Start out empty handed, because things are going to attach themselves to you no matter how hard you try to avoid it. The sole exception to the empty handed rule would be in deference to the sage wisdom of Douglas Adams. Always take a good thick towel. It will come in handy in more ways than you could possibly imagine.

BTW The most practical way to look at galaxies would be to go to the Hubble website. They have some fantastic pics.

By: Chuck

Chuck — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 21:33:53 +0000

@Randy 12:

So I didn’t get ridiculous enough?

I do notice that I’ve omitted romance from Books 1-4. (Plus we could always flesh out the travel to deliver the messages.)

By: Cat Rambo

Cat Rambo — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 20:55:24 +0000

With the Eddings series – doesn’t the second series go through exactly the same journey as the first one? Do the point where the heroes notice the similarity?

By: Randy Henderson

Randy Henderson — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 18:07:18 +0000

PS – whether said stretching out of a series is a bad thing or not is entirely up to the readers’ response, the quality of the work, and the believability of the reasons given and mechanisms used to extend the series.

Rachel mentioned Eddings’ series above. Talk about using travel to drag things out in a not interesting way. Oh look, they have to travel. Oh look, they have to travel again. Oh look, they have to travel back to that place they traveled from before setting off to travel some more. Even Tolkien’s “There and Back Again” didn’t overly bore us with the uneventful details of the “Back Again” part.

By: Randy Henderson

Randy Henderson — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 17:47:53 +0000

@Chuck 10:
Well, if you were a Robert Jordanesque writer, the messenger should have died at the end of book 5, possibly 7, but will die at the end of book 12. Er, make that book twelve part three (i.e. book 14. Or book 15, if you count the fact that they later split your book 1 into two books. Or book 16 if you count the prequel.).

If you are Donaldson or Feist or Herbert et al, your messenger will die at the end of the first series, but pressures from publishers and fans will lead you (and your successors) to create multiple spinoff and follow up series involving the returned messenger, and/or the messenger’s offspring and successors.

So, you know, you have options is all I’m saying.

By: Chuck

Chuck — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 08:20:29 +0000

Ow. Too many grammatical and word omission mistakes in that last comment. That’s what I get for posting while half asleep.

By: Chuck

Chuck — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 08:12:31 +0000

Randy:

I think I see a series developing…

Book 1 (perhaps titled “KILL THE MESSENGER”): The messenger delivers a message. Someone tries to kill him. What follows is a pages-long account of flight (not by dragon) and survival as the recipients scour the land and try to kill him. (Or are they trying to silence him? Perhaps shades of conspiracy to reveal themselves later, but our messenger is too young and naive to realize this at the time.) Stumbling around on his last legs, he happens upon a mysterious old man (will there be a “mysterious woman” later?) living alone in the forest. The old man (who maaaaaaaybe is the last of a shadowy, secretive order of messengers) instructs the young messenger in the combative arts. The messenger vows that neither he nor anyone else in his profession will never be pushed around again.

Book 2: The messenger begins teaching other messengers everything he learned, and they slowly become a formidable delivery force, successfully defending themselves in both individual combat and smaller melees after delivering their messages. (Although some of the messengers find themselves coming under mysterious attacks away from their delivery duties — assassination attempts?) The messengers score greater and greater victories … er, I mean deliveries, even as the hostility to the messages themselves grow. (Although, perhaps — as you insinuated — the ultimate meaning and importance derived from the messages may be diminished with the higher survival rate achieved by the messengers. But this isn’t stated outright at the time.)

Book 3: Despite their successes (and survival), the messenger find that greater and greater forces are being mobilized against them. Shadows are moving behind the scenes. The messengers accept strange assignments, commissioned by agents of other shadowy figures, to deliver messages into what places and situations that appear to be obvious traps. But, of course, the messengers have a duty to perform. In other cases, recipients of seemingly harmless message fly into what looks like feigned outrage, and attack the messengers. At some point the head messenger, who we met in the first book, comes home at night to find that a leader from the enemy camp (also shadowy) has sneaked into his home; but rather than start a fight, this shadowy leader begins giving a strange relating to your idea about how sometimes the messenger has to die.

Book 4: Is this where the messenger dies and comes back from the dead? Or will he come back from the dead in Book 5?

By: Randy Henderson

Randy Henderson — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 01:23:08 +0000

Chuck: Sometimes, the messenger just needs to be killed. After all, the recipient may need to demonstrate their power or ruthlessness. Or blow off some steam. Or it may be that the message would not mean as much if the messenger doesn’t die (martyrs, for example).

The trick, I find, is to not stay dead afterwards (and in a way that doesn’t leave you smelling like 10-day old dead rat, or thirsting for blood or brains). I drink the blood of unicorns myself(a practice that was completely and unfairly misrepresented in Harry Potter), but there are other ways, of course.

Then, and only then, can you truly fulfill all the duties and needs of a messenger.

By: Randy Henderson

Randy Henderson — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 01:16:54 +0000

@Rachel 7:
While on the surface this sounds like a good suggestion, I have grown wary of prescribing a fire breathing dragon (or a teleporting dragon, or a wise and ancient dragon, etc.) to people.

The problem is that witch doctors and crypto-therapists have abused the dragon solution. I’m not saying this is the case with you, but rather that “they” have ruined it for well-intentioned dracophiles like yourself.

No matter what you come to them with, they try and diagnose you with ADDD — Adult Dragon Deficit Disorder, and the solution is always the same — a dragon will solve your problem. They have big dragons, little dragons, red dragons, blue dragons, and they are all too quick to prescribe them all. I suspect they get kickbacks from the farm-a-pseudo-drac companies that grow the dragons.

Well, okay, if you come to them with marriage or sexual problems, they sometimes recommend that one partner become a vampire in order to reintroduce pseudo-sexual tension and excitement into the relationship.

But for everything else, the answer always seems to be dragons.

By: Rachel

Rachel — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 21:45:32 +0000

@ Chuck. I had never really thought about that. Good idea. Another option is to have the messengers ride fire-breathing dragons. That would definitely cool off the recipients