The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Cry of Justice... poll&discussion

Favourite character?

  • Portunista
  • Seifas
  • Jian
  • Gaekwar
  • Othon
  • Dagon
  • Pooralay
  • Bomas
  • Artabanus
  • Praxiteles

0 voters

My father received the book because he belongs to this site or something and first gave it to me to read, and I’ve just finished…
At least some people on this site have read it too, right?
And the author is here…

So I wanted to start a discussion thread… Comment, criticize, complain, predict, etc… about Cry of Justice.

Anyone else want to smack Portunista? {Although at times, okay… most of the time, I fell into her shoes and was able to understand her. With every book I find myself living through one of the characters… and this one it’s her. maybe it’s because she’s the only main female character… but I haven’t always become a female character when reading a book… when I read a book I basically live it. So yeah, but being in her mind so deep, I’m not sure how “good” that is…}

Anyway, actually, I’d first smack Dagon…

&&I love Jian!!! ((yeah, that first Jian vote is mine))

Anyway, the first chapters were dizzy-making, but once I got through them I was hooked! Then the end leaves one hanging, which is why there is a second and third of course… I can’t wait for the second book… so yeah, I’m officially a Mikon fan :slight_smile:

What are other people’s thoughts on the book?

I’ll expand more on mine if other people are interested in discussing the book.

Hello,
I got a copy for my daughter as well. I think she’s only gotten into the ‘dizzy-making’ aspects of the early chapters so far as she is busy devouring other books. I’m sure she will have some posts to make here once she is finished :slight_smile:

Plenty of readers… :smiley: Including numerous reviewers. Actually, I’m not sure I’ve met anyone who didn’t want to smack her… :laughing:

But that’s on purpose. Actually, quite a few people want to smack Jian, too… (Which is okay; I designed him that way as well.)

He pushes pretty close to getting his head taken off near the end of CoJ, doesn’t he?

He doesn’t get out of Book 2 quite as unsmacked, btw… :smiling_imp:

If I had to vote based on who I most consistently have fun writing, it would be either Pooralay or Gaekwar. But I have fun with all of them. Everyone gets some nifty things to be saying and doing. (Even Dagon, every once in a while.)

There are links to a 50 minute internet-radio interview, and to a (kind of bawdy) print interview, down in the Members Announcement section, btw. The print one has no spoilers at all for future books, but the radio one has a few hints about what’s coming in the rest of the trilogy. (And afterward!)

Thanks for the fan comments! {g} I hope you, your Dad and your family have had a great Christmas weekend!

I never really wanted to smack him, but sometimes he seemed childish, and suicidal {not suicidal like Seifas… but ya know}… but, okay… maybe I would’ve smacked him, but I would’ve smacked Dagon harder. I’m not sure if I could smack Portunista, 'cause then I would be being rather hypocritical… but I’d want to.

but anyway, thanks, hope your holiday goes well.
I listened to the one interview, and read the other… the latter was hilarious. The first I mostly paid attention to… like nine-tenths of it :smiley:

Started reading this with my girlfriend Jason, thanks for the book. Unfortunatley I have been swamped by book on Tudor history, I have to retake an exam soon. Will hopefully finish this in January :slight_smile:

One of my earliest readers read it in bed with his wife (a 2nd draft, somewhat longer than the final production draft.) :smiley: They thought it was very romantic at times.

Same here. :laughing:

(But then, I think the same about Dagon, too… :wink: )

.<

ugh…

yeah

Bump. Reminder to get to posting in here this weekend.

Not really sure where to begin. I never read an epic fantasy novel before (aside from bits and pieces of LOTR). But, anyway, didn’t think a fantasy novel could pierce through my heart the way this book did. Lots of insight and introspection.

I know others have said here that the first chapters were dizzy-making. Perhaps this is true, but I didn’t notice. Whether this was the Author’s intent or not, certain lines in the beginning chapters just leaped out the page, and led me into deep contemplation – things about God and death and suffering and sin and hope and salvation and love and justice.

I don’t even know if I get the main thrust of the book. There are lots of themes to draw out from it. But, there were things that really spoke to me personally. For e.g. I was almost completely knocked over by this in one of the early chapters:

It would be good if Valerie was still here to discuss. P.S it’s hard to want to smack Portunista when I identify so much with her.

I would have to go through my journal/reflections, and expand more later (though most of it is probably too personal :blush:)

One of these days I’ll get around to reading your book, Jason, one of these days :stuck_out_tongue:

yes me too. have a kindle now so easier to read. hate reading lots of text on shiny screens but now I have a kindle it is better.
am stuck in the wheel of time though at the moment…

CL, Yes, I’m a big fan of RJ’s WoT, too! – and can sympathize about being “stuck in it”, since the middle books can get rather sloggy (especially Crossroads of Twilight where literally nothing important happens until the last few pages of the book. :open_mouth: :angry: ) RJ, and then RJ + Sanderson (after RJ died) pick back up substantially in the final four books, fortunately – I like Knife of Dreams through Towers of Midnight as much as any of the earlier books up through The Fires of Heaven (though I’d still rank that one second place overall), and the last book Memories of the Light is my favorite of the whole series.

[tag]Alex Smith[/tag], [tag]Cindy Skillman[/tag], and [tag]SLJ[/tag] have certainly read CoJ (and even some of the sequel material!), and may want to chime in with their thoughts (and questions). I think some other forum members have, too, but I’m fuzzier about who exactly. I’ll tag [tag]Valerie-wa[/tag] for you CH, and see if she’s where you can discuss some things (maybe privately with you – I think y’all would get along very well. (She’s James Goetz’ daughter; I don’t know whether James has read the book though.)

CH, you asked me some general questions by pmail a few days back – would you like me to answer them here? I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t (they aren’t personally sensitive and don’t even feature story spoilers), but I was waiting until you commented here to see if you’d re-ask them again or otherwise signaled that you’re okay with a public reply. :slight_smile:

I’m super-pleased with the compliments, and with how much the book meant to you, in any case. :smiley:

One of my best friends, Marie Brennan, who grew up with me as a baby author (so to speak) and helped edit the early chapters into something actually readable (I thank her for that in the acknowledgments you might have noticed), used to say trying to edit the book was like trying to lift a truck with one hand because “it has all these themes!” I’m pretty sure she was being complimentary. :laughing: :laughing:

(Also, she’s on the short list of finalists this year for the World Fantasy Award for the first but hopefully not the last time, along with authors like Neil Gaiman, which she’s naturally super-stoked about, and for which I’m equally proud for my little author-sister. I might as well gratefully plug her work while I’m at it. She’s written a ton of short stories and many well-received novels so far, but the book for which she’s in the running this year is A Natural History of Dragons; with The Tropic of Serpentsalready released this year a few months ago. The third book of five in this series will arrive next spring, and the cover has already been released: )Voyage of the Basilisk. I know she’s especially happy about her success on this because these stories, though not her first completed novels, were her first attempts at novels back in high school. Go little author-sister, goooo! Okay, quasi-nepotistic commercial break over now. :mrgreen: )

As to the main thrust of the book… don’t feel bad, it has several main thrusts. :stuck_out_tongue: I’m not at all sure I could name them all myself – I watch out for concepts as I move through the plot, and try to bring various things out in an interrelated way. To give a more trivial example, I sort of dared myself to make the goofy milieu of the Blood Bowl turn-based fantasy-rugby strategy game more meaningful recently, and drafted up a narrative After Action Report for the wargaming forum Grogheads as a result. (Note that by its topic, it tends to be a little saucier than CoJ – I’m writing about someone building up and managing a team of women dressed in feathery bikinis after all. :stuck_out_tongue: ) So my point is that I would do this with any fiction I might be writing.

Still, you know. Death hurts but everyone has to deal with it. Bad things happen to good people. Bad people can be good people, and good people can be bad people. Competition and domination are natural behaviors but at what cost to people as persons? What is morality? How does pride naturally respond to that which it perceives as greater than itself? Is any kind of pride healthy, and is the dissolution of personhood the only alternative to competition and domination? Are there differences between joy and pleasure? What does it mean for people to be abused, or is there any such thing as abuse of persons? Can morality make any sense at all, even if God is admitted to exist? – and what if God’s existence is denied? – does that denial make things worse or better? Would God only be the worst of tyrants?

And a whole bunch of other concepts. Is there such a thing as true love? What can justice even mean? Etc.

Jason-

I have to run, but, yes! Go ahead and answer those questions here. (I had just assumed that since they didn’t have much to do with actually discussing the content of the book, the questions weren’t relevant enough to be posted in this thread).

I’m unsure from what you’ve said how far you’ve gotten, so I’ll try to avoid spoilers.

The Preface Author is a character I created back around 1980 or maybe a little before (9 or 10 years old), though I’ve upgraded him somewhat over time. :laughing: His unnamed wife goes back to 85 or maybe 89, I don’t remember exactly. Jian’s character dates back to around the same time, though I didn’t name him until I started working on CoJ (late 2000).

Portunista’s story started as a short story idea extended from another short story idea (both in early / mid 2000) which didn’t feature her but featured three other characters including her husband and son. I invented her after writing their little story – neither of those stories shows up in CoJ, by the way. One will be part of the ending of Book 3, one will be part of the ending of Book 6.

I had been kicking around the idea of working up a multi-book series synthesizing together a bunch of stories I had been working on since the 80s, but I didn’t have a clear beginning yet, so after writing those two short stories and thinking they had some merit as novel material I tested using it as a way to get into the PA’s story and realized I could fit them in quite well.

Then however I ran into a very big problem, with nothing but a clunky solution (after many years thinking about it and looking for another way): the PA had to be introduced as early as possible so that I wouldn’t be pulling his character out of nowhere late in the series. Considering his suite of abilities, I figured the most plausible solution would be for him to be researching the past history of Mikon to try to figure out how things went so far wrong, and to explain to his wife what happened so she wouldn’t entirely freak at hearing the explanation for his recent absence and why he’s so upset. So he has gone back to Portunista’s origin story and is starting there.

Ideally I would have preferred not to use a fictional author (much moreso three other subauthors) as the narrator, but I’m making the best of it that I can. :slight_smile: Having introduced the concept and established it solidly, I can (usually) proceed with a more typical narrative form and only call attention back to the PA and the subauthors (Seifas, 'ista, and Khase) when that seems like it helps the story somehow.

I had been reading several of Lewis’ medieval studies (including his entry for the Oxford History of English Language, on 16th century prose works), and somehow got the observation that as fond as they were of Biblical analogies (and allegories), and as fond as they were of the enchantress/paladin paradigm, they had never apparently thought to put both of them together.

Normally, the enchantress is only a speedbump in the story of the paladin. Several influential modern fantasy authors had already reworked the paradigm so that, in effect, the enchantress is the heroine and the paladin is an adjunct (and maybe only a speedbump) of her story. That’s a fine reversal of the trope, but I thought it would be an interesting challenge to go back to the original concept yet still from the side of the enchantress who isn’t all that heroic, and can be rather outright evil sometimes. Why does she do what she does? – how does the paladin affect her when he intersects her story? It didn’t take long playing with that idea before I started seeing convergences with the Bible’s story of Israel, especially as retold by the Prophets of the Tanahk (what we Christians call the Old Testament) in critique of Israel. Even though she isn’t the most important character, she has been chosen by God to be the heroine of the story – but she starts off more than half weak and more than half bad! – but precisely because of that Israel represents all humanity.

That’s the underlying concept, but I didn’t want to write a mere cut-and-paste analogy of the story of Israel, so I just kept the themes and used those as a basis for exploring the classic enchantress/paladin concept from the viewpoint of the enchantress.

Obviously I have a ton of other things going on – to pull a somewhat minor random example, Khase Sage provides several story functions while playing with a combination of folk anthropology and ancient histiographic methods. But I call the first three books The Penitent Empress Trilogy for a reason. :slight_smile: She’ll be important in the next trilogy, too, and to some extent out through the end of the whole story, but she’s certainly the main character of the first three books.

I usually preplot things in my head for a while (sometimes for a VERY LONG while), and then sit down one afternoon and start working my way through the plot points. Nowadays I build in a varying rhythmical scansion as I go, which helps keep the wordcount down while pulling the reader along and adding a bit of an alien or foreign flavor; my original drafts of Book 1 (and Book 2) didn’t have that, but during my largest trimming edit I reduced the wordcount from 206 thousand to 174 thousand that way! (Book 2 clocks in at 136Kwords by the way; Book 3 looks like it’ll be as long as the first two put together, but it’s the grand finale to the first big story arc: lots of action and plot resolution.)

So I’ll sit down and look at my list of Things To Get Done Next, and if I already know an action scene is coming I’ll spend time working that out several ways – though sometimes I’ll feel like adding some action on the fly as I go, but only if it brings out some meaning. I love writing action / combat sequences, but I hate writing meaningless action scenes. (My biggest problem with writing the aforementioned recent Blood Bowl AAR is trying to keep enough description of the gameplay to make it a genuine AAR while making the action meaningful. Which inherently, it usually isn’t, it’s just a game using the animated version of little pewter statues; it’s no more meaningful than chess.)

But otherwise, if no action is coming up, I’ll just kind of work out how the various characters would think about what’s happening, and look for themes to play with along the way if I can, and put them through their paces. I try not to get caught up trying to describe everything visually, but I worry I don’t describe things enough sometimes – that’s a fine line any narrative author has trouble walking. One of the narrative cats to juggle, is remembering to think about what the Preface Author might think about what’s happening, in case that seems important to him as a character, or to provide a handy transition or a little extra information about the situation which he can see but they can’t. Relatedly, with three subauthor characters which of them might have something to add in a little personal commentary about what’s happening? – that way I can sometimes signal which text the PA is following the lead of himself at the moment. Nowadays I go ahead and build the rhythmical scansion in as I go, and do a bit of quick pre-editing polish to tighten that up as well.

Every once in a while I’ll ask myself if I’m getting bored writing a sequence; and if so then I look for ways to either ditch it and try something else, or to spice up what’s happening. But I expect it would be very boring for someone else to watch me ‘composing’, even if they would otherwise find the result exciting or at least interesting! :laughing:

I enjoyed reading CoJ a few months ago & am now enjoying the sequel - about 1/3 of the way through it :slight_smile:

Thanks, Jason, for taking the time to write such detailed answers to my questions. I will try to be back in here on Sunday, (or later this week), and will edit with a more worthy response.

[tag]JasonPratt[/tag] last night I finished reading Edge of Justice (the sequel to Cry of Justice)! I enjoyed it, although there are some dark moments in it. Eager to read the next one… how’s it coming along?

Alex,

thanks! Yeah, darker than the 1st book for sure.

Book 3, currently titled Song of Justice, is about 2/3 done so far as I can tell – I’ve written up to near the beginning of all the plot resolution scenes, with the Macro-Fight Sequence on the horizon and soon to kick off.

But I stopped there, because I didn’t foresee being able to publish Books 2 and 3 in a respectable format anytime soon, so I might as well spend my time and energy doing other things like a new forum I was invited to be a guest author and admin at. :mrgreen:

My current draft copy of SoJ has several spoiler-note reminders of where I’m preplanning the plot to go, but I’ll pm you a non-spoilery pdf of the plot up to the point where it’s solidly set. That’s about 96% long as CoJ in itself, so you’ll still have plenty of plot development material and several action sequences (already more than in EoJ if I recall correctly) including a Micro-Macro-Fight Sequence. :mrgreen:

It isn’t as dark as EoJ overall, but still darker than CoJ. After the “sharp cliff” incident, things can’t just go right back to ‘normal’; and the villainous threat level is at a high watermark. So, more Arty (and his lieutenants Noth and Alt), more Bomas (and his renegade juacuara especially Isililo), more of all six of the Cabal (not just Traught but also Atroza, Gaignun, Char, Baladon, and Saprona), more Annarth, and more of one or two or three villains who have been working secretly in the background for a while in various ways and who may or may not continue doing so in similar or different ways… :laughing: (You’ll have heard the name of one of them before from EoJ in passing.) And more Yanziska, if he counts as a villain or not. And more of Atroza’s furias. And the reveal of Gaignun’s equidonts. And, um, Portunista, duh, since at this point she basically counts as a villain protagonist. :wink:

So yeah, time to thin out the cast! – copious butt-kicking of the unrighteous must accrue!! http://www.wargamer.com/forums/smiley/danceRoman.gif

Cool thanks!! Sent it to my Kindle for reading :smiley: Remembering all the names can be a challenge I find :laughing:

^^ Do you need a plot / character recap doc? I do my best to help catch readers up as I go without being simply redundant (and while keeping in mind the fictional reader of all this, the PA’s wife, wouldn’t need a catchup accounting of the characters and situations since he expects she’ll be able to read the whole huge work in an hour! :open_mouth: – that’s one of several clues they’re far from normal people. :wink: )