Brendan Moody

I’m just getting at how much difference text size and formatting can make to page count. Most of the work done in creating The Children of Húrin was a matter of rearranging that material from Unfinished Tales and The Silmarillion into a continuous text. Very little of the 227 pages of narrative in the former isn’t part of that 115ish pages of the latter. But it’s really impossible to say, as apparently this book follows the jumbled-texts “history in sequence” approach of the Beren and Lúthien book, so there’s no way to know how things will be broken up. I think they’d be trumpeting it in the press releases if there was much new beyond the odd passage, but time will tell.

Considering that The Children of Húrin turned about 100 pages of Unfinished Tales and about 15 pages of The Silmarillion into a 320-page book, I doubt there’s necessarily much new here. The Edelweiss catalog listing mentions that the Eärendel story is outlined here; I imagine there’s a lot of contextual stuff like that.

The way Gollancz and Lynch announced the September 2016 date in May of that year made it sound like the book was done and would have been out even earlier if not for the opportunity to time it to coincide with Lynch visiting the UK. But they never actually said it was done, and Lynch said later that the ending was outlined but not written and earlier material needed substantial revision. They were evidently trying to do what GRRM did with A Dance with Dragons, setting a final date and starting the push toward publication while the author finished up the final draft. If so, it obviously backfired in the worst way possible.

It’s kind of ironic that as The Two of Swords finally shifts from slow-burn preliminaries to conflict and action, the format changes in a way that makes the world-shaking events feel much less meaningful. I assume Parker had some trouble figuring out how to structure the conclusion— that must be why the series took a hiatus of a year and a half— and this was what he felt worked best. But it loses a lot of what made the series unusual and interesting. The last four parts are basically the final third or so of a more conventional Parker novel. Which means they’re funny and dark and thoughtful, but still there’s something of a damp squib effect compared to the promise of parts one through fifteen.

It's been so long since I preordered #16 at Amazon that the order was glitched, asking for an update on my payment method and refusing to accept anything I tried to use. Fortunately I could just redo the order from the product page. Interesting change in format for this installment.

Yes, Merry played a role. There's a passage in Appendix A about it:

When the pub dates were changing Amazon sent notifications of a delay. These say outright canceled. And at this rate further delays would have individual installments coming out after the omnibuses. I guess they just decided not to bother, or Parker needed more time to finalize the text than installment releases would have allowed.

It's "only" the first half of the book that takes place over a single day; the rest of it covers three weeks or so, which is about average for one of Jordan's later WOT novels. A Crown of Swords spans nine days, and the whole first half of Winter's Heart is two days. But when you foreground the fact that so little time is passing, it's just going to heighten readers' frustration with how slowly the plot is moving. If Jordan had kept the "everyone reacts to the (spoiler thing)" scenes to a prologue, and left the chronology of the different plot strands in the background as he usually did, I think Crossroads of Twilight would be less hated. Still hated, though, because almost nothing happens in it. (Ignore the spoiler box below; it's empty and I can't figure out how to make it go away. This may be a metaphor for The Wheel of Time.)

I would guess it was a pseudonym for business rather than personal reasons. Booksellers order copies of new titles based on the sales of an author's previous work, so pseudonyms are sometimes used to get away from the cycle of low sales and low orders associated with the author's earlier books. If the stuff published under Volsky's real name sold too poorly, or if the publisher thought the new series had a chance to do significantly better, they might have asked for the change. That was what happened with Sarah Monette. Tor picked her up after Ace dropped her, but on the condition that she use a pseudonym for her new work, which is why The Goblin Emperor says Katherine Addison on the cover even though Monette has always been open about being the author.

The sale lasts through the 20th, according to a Facebook post by an Open Road employee. I was at 277 "bought" by the time I got through the full list. Some other authors with at least one book, and sometimes a dozen or more, included: May Sarton, Fritz Lieber, Hortense Calisher, Pat Murphy, Iris Murdoch, Greg Keyes, Mary Gordon, Rick Moody, Francine Prose, Fred Kaplan, Denton Welch, James Jones, Tariq Ali, John Shirley, Barbara Hambly, Tanith Lee, Jane Yolen, Carol Shields, Andre Dubus, John Ashbery, Alice Walker, John Brunner, Bel Kaufman, Poppy Z. Brite, Anne Perry, Paul Monette, Frank O'Connor, Joe Haldeman, Peter Dickinson, James Beard, Lawrence Durrell, Clifford D. Simak, Patricia C. Wrede, Mary Renault, Theodore Sturgeon, John Gardner, Roger Angell, Harlan Ellison, George Steiner, Alison Lurie, and Samuel R. Delany.

Looks like it has-- I just got an Amazon notification moving it to March 2017. Which means almost a full year between installments.

The US Kindle omnibus of the Harry Potter books is $14.99 (about $2.14 per book) at Amazon right now.

Gregory Maguire's Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West is free at several US e-tailers for the day. Here's an Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Wicked-Life-Times-Witch-Years-ebook/dp/B000FC14JY/

Some Robin Hobb e-book deals, presumably to promote Fool's Quest. I imagine these will be US-only, but it can't hurt to check. I've linked to Amazon, but the deals seem mostly to be good at multiple sites:   The Rain Wilds Chronicles are discounted, to $0.99 for the first book and $1.99 for the other three. Amazon links:  www.amazon.com/Dragon-Keeper-Rain-Wilds-Chronicles-ebook/dp/B00338QEUG [url=http://www.amazon.com/Dragon-Haven-Rain-Wilds-Chronicles-ebook/dp/B003H4I5SU/]2[/url] [url=http://www.amazon.com/City-Dragons-Three-Wilds-Chronicles-ebook/dp/B005LC1N6M/]3[/url] [url=http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Dragons-Rain-Wilds-Chronicles-ebook/dp/B0089LOD6Y/]4[/url]   Also, the e-omnibus of the entire Soldier Son trilogy is $2.99:  www.amazon.com/Soldier-Son-Trilogy-Bundle-Renegades-ebook/dp/B007Z4SH5O   And, while this isn't a new discount, Assassin's Apprentice is still $1.99: [url=http://www.amazon.com/Assassins-Apprentice-Farseer-Trilogy-Book-ebook/dp/B000FBFMG6/]Amazon link[/url].   Edit: OK, no idea why two of those links wouldn't format right, but I've left them in as plain text.

Ken Liu's The Grace of Kings is $1.99 in the US Kindle Store for the month of August. Not matched at other e-book sites so far.