Pat Rothfuss XVII: Games, Bets, and Minecraft

[Rhom]

18 minutes ago, Ran said:

The difference here is that the publisher does not own the property. They pay for the right to publish it, they don't own it. There is no one that can legally write a Kvothe book but Rothfuss, just as no one can do a Locke Lamora book but Lynch or an ASoIaF book but GRRM. So there's no "replacing" it. 

The good things for publishers, OTOH, is that there is very little cost entailed in waiting for a book. It's the publication and marketing around it that is their big money sink. No manuscript, no publication and marketing.

 

Ahhhh... if only Kvothe were like Drizzt Do'Urden and they could just hire someone else to write a book about him.   

[jurble]

Wait, they took Drizzt from Salvatore?  I haven't read any Forgotten Realm tie-ins in years (I believe Wizards stopped publishing all them various books generally?)

[Werthead]

10 hours ago, jurble said:

Wait, they took Drizzt from Salvatore?  I haven't read any Forgotten Realm tie-ins in years (I believe Wizards stopped publishing all them various books generally?)

Almost. In 1996 Salvatore decided he wanted to kill Drizzt off at the end of the novel Siege of Darkness, as it was the ninth book to feature the character and he felt he was played out, but TSR (who were going bust at the time and needed every cent), who owned the character, threw a shit fit and said he'd write more Drizzt books or they'd find someone else who could (all D&D/Forgotten Realms novels were work-for-hire, and all characters created for them became the legal property of TSR). Salvatore agreed to keep Drizzt alive through the end of that book but was really unhappy and the contractual wranglings over the next book got pretty fierce. TSR contracted another author, Mark Anthony, to write a Drizzt novel called Shores of Dusk, which he apparently completed and TSR waved it in Salvatore's face to say, "See? We don't need you! Now take the money and write more Drizzt!"

Salvatore backed down and agreed, which is why the next few Drizzt books were pretty crap, and a couple didn't even feature Drizzt outside of cameos or mentions. After Wizards of the Coast took over TSR and installed a new book team, they restored friendly relations with Salvatore and you can see the books improving after Salvatore gets his mojo back. Salvatore's also said now he thinks killing Drizzt would have been a mistake, given how many people have said they find the character inspiring etc. I'm sure the extra several million dollars he'd have been passing up also made a strong argument in retrospect.

Salvatore is also now the only tie-in author producing D&D fiction, at least until Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman release their new Dragonlance trilogy.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

So, one of the Facebook Rothfuss groups has posted a screenshot from Rothfuss’s twitch feed and he claims, openly, to be 400,000 words into DoS.  That’s also, what I see as, a good sign?

 

Edited December 8, 2021 by Ser Scot A Ellison

[Derfel Cadarn]

20 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

So, one of the Facebook Rothfuss groups has posted a screenshot from Rothfuss’s twitch feed and he claims, openly, to be 400,000 words into DoS.  That’s also, what I see as, a good sign?

 

Didn’t he claim in 2007 that the first draft of the whole series was done and just needed editing?

[sologdin]

assuming it came into being as 1000 pages long, this means the draft is growing backwards like benjamin button. in another 20 years, it will be down to a reasonable length.

[Proudfeet]

1 minute ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

So, one of the Facebook Rothfuss groups has posted a screenshot from Rothfuss’s twitch feed and he claims, openly, to be 400,000 words into DoS.  That’s also, what I see as, a good sign?

Scot, I'm not telling you how to live your life, but when it's done, the news will travel. Speculating and following his progress is just a waste of time.

Unless you're of the opinion that he doesn't work, he's probably written and rewritten enough to fill a couple of books at least. It isn't done because he can't reach a satisfactory resolution and is stuck.

But if you're of the opinion that he doesn't work, then sure, every word is progress. It still doesn't tell you how much longer it will take though, since you have no information on how much of that is new even if you can make a rough estimate on an end target based on his previous books.

[Myrddin]

Does it count if the 400,000 words is just "All work and no games makes Pat a dull boy" pasted 40,000 times?

[Garlan the Gallant]

10 hours ago, Proudfeet said:

Scot, I'm not telling you how to live your life, but when it's done, the news will travel. Speculating and following his progress is just a waste of time.

Unless you're of the opinion that he doesn't work, he's probably written and rewritten enough to fill a couple of books at least. It isn't done because he can't reach a satisfactory resolution and is stuck.

But if you're of the opinion that he doesn't work, then sure, every word is progress. It still doesn't tell you how much longer it will take though, since you have no information on how much of that is new even if you can make a rough estimate on an end target based on his previous books.

Wasn’t his publisher of the opinion that he didn’t write anymore?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

23 minutes ago, Garlan the Gallant said:

Wasn’t his publisher of the opinion that he didn’t write anymore?

She said she hadn’t seen any of his writing in years…

[Proudfeet]

12 hours ago, Garlan the Gallant said:

Wasn’t his publisher of the opinion that he didn’t write anymore?

Felt like it was more interpreted to that effect than anything definite. Don't think it was ever established as fact from a reliable source.

[unJon]

35 minutes ago, Proudfeet said:

Felt like it was more interpreted to that effect than anything definite. Don't think it was ever established as fact from a reliable source.

You don’t view his publisher as a reliable source?

[Proudfeet]

17 minutes ago, unJon said:

You don’t view his publisher as a reliable source?

I don't think they've ever laid it out plainly. Context, choice of words and all that.

[Ran]

Here is an article on her remarks. Someone speculated that Rothfuss hasn’t worked at all on the book, and Wolheim agreed that it was possible and that she believed he hadn’t written anything on the book in the past six years.

Is she right? No idea. But she definitely said what she believed, and also what she knew to be a fact — that she had yet to see a single word of the third book.

[Proudfeet]

24 minutes ago, Ran said:

Here is an article on her remarks. Someone speculated that Rothfuss hasn’t worked at all on the book, and Wolheim agreed that it was possible and that she believed he hadn’t written anything on the book in the past six years.

Is she right? No idea. But she definitely said what she believed, and also what she knew to be a fact — that she had yet to see a single word of the third book.

Yes, that's what Scot said. It's not like she said that yes, he's admitted that he has nothing done. She said that she hasn't seen anything. 

It basically goes down to whether you're willing to extend Rothfuss the benefit of the doubt. The charitable interpretation is that he's stuck and unwilling to seek help, the other end of it is that he's doing nothing. 

Either way, we're still not any clearer on his progress, the whys and hows lead to the same result, which is why I'm taking the stance of official announcement or nothing.

[Werthead]

All Rothfuss is saying in that video is that he expects the book to be around 400,000 words long, which is reasonable because that's what The Wise Man's Fear was and is the semi-hard-limit on how long a book can be before needing to be split (it might be more like 450,000 or 500,000 words given Rothfuss's level of success now, but in that ballpark). He doesn't say anything about how far through that he is, or if he has that already and if it still needs rewriting or editing. So as a statement, it's pretty meaningless.

[Lord Patrek]

2 hours ago, Proudfeet said:

I don't think they've ever laid it out plainly. Context, choice of words and all that.

Straight up, Betsy told me that she hasn't seen a single word of TDoS and that was months before the linked article. Since then, who knows? But Rothfuss is a perfectionist and never turns in anything before he's fully satisfied with it. So chances are that she may have seen nothing of the manuscript thus far.

[Werthead]

Yeah, Betsy has said that she was convinced that Rothfuss had not written a word of The Wise Man's Fear in six years (so 2014, up to that point) and the failure of the book to appear was damaging DAW's bottom line. Although given that the first two books must shift more copies each year, even now, than most of DAW's list, that's a surprising thing to say. It might be that sales dramatically dropped off over the last two years as "Rothfuss will never finish" started putting people off, or the mild blowback the series has received recently over its iffy sexual politics started resonating.

[Garlan the Gallant]

I assume people have seen his blog post where he now says the if he beats some video game before the money is raised he’s not going to share the prologue or the self contained chapter?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

1 hour ago, Garlan the Gallant said:

I assume people have seen his blog post where he now says the if he beats some video game before the money is raised he’s not going to share the prologue or the self contained chapter?

That was always the deal.