Brandon Sanderson's focus on how the cost is an important part in making magic interesting reminded me of the problems I had with that. The most recent occurrence was with the magic system I was going to use in my nanowrimo novel last year. I had a magic system where people could focus their aura into various parts of their bodies to become strong/faster/better (inspired by the magic used in Hunter x Hunter for those of you that read manga or watch anime). The usage part of the system was working out fine. I felt like I had a good system were the limits on what they could do was easy for the reader to see and the visual aspect of the magic made it fun to write about. The only problem left was how to make the magic users not omnipotent compared to a non-magic user. If they could go around and enhance their own abilities the whole time it would create a strange power balance in the world.

In the story I wrote for nanowrimo I ended up using the simplest solution; they get very tired after prolonged use. That restriction turned out not to be enough. The nanowrimo story spiraled out of control as I wrote it. As soon as the main character learned how to use his own power I realized that any interesting challenge would require the antagonist, or his minions, to have the same magical power as well. This in turn created a world were too many had magical powers, while I had created the setting based upon the thought that the magical power was a rare attribute. Thus the whole world, and all the challenges that the protagonist met, started to feel very contrived.

I realized that the abundance of magic was the source of the problem, but until I read the post on Sanderson's Second Law of Magic I had not been able to pin point the exact cause. It had to be harder to use the magic.

Now that I know the cause of the problem I'm looking forward to reworking the setting, and seeing what will happen to it when I add a better cost to the magic system. Not sure what the cost is going to be, but now that I know where to look I should be able to find something fitting.

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The Great Gatsby is one of the classical novels that I have been meaning to read for a long time. Last year I got a copy for Christmas, and this month I finally found the right time to dig into it.

The story follows the life of Nick Carraway as he settles into life in New York during the summer of 1922. His neighbour is the elusive Gatsby, a man that throws great parties where no one really knows the host and very few people are ever invited. We see how Nick gets drawn into the social circles around Gatsby, and how he ends up dealing with the fleeting experiences they seem to live for.

This is my first time reading a book set America during the 1920's. I enjoyed getting a small glimpse into the excessive life style that the well off people indulged in during these years. In many ways it reminded me a of what I usually find in books set in the high society of late 19th century England.

I think the book did a very good job on portraying how a life can be fashioned around a dream and how it all can come tumbling down in the end. Knowing the history of the 1920's it is almost impossible not to see the correlation between the shattering of the dreams in the book and the shattering of the American Dream when the Wall Street crashed in 1929.

The protagonists somewhat passive role worked nicely in this novel. He gets a bit too sappy at times, but it never got to the point were it really annoyed me. His role was to observe how the other people shaped their lives and to give us an idea of how society viewed the splendour he found himself in. If he had been too active I think a bit of the magic that surrounded the setting and the other characters would have disappeared.

Once I got started the book was a very fast read, both due to its' short length and the easy language used. The easy language was especially noticeable in the dialogues, were the naivety and the main characters' strange view of life really shone forth.

After having finished the book I was left with mixed feelings. It was a very good book, but it did not quite live up to all the praise that I have been hearing about it.

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If you haven't read anything about the Elemental Assassin series by Jennifer Estep you should take a look at my review of Spider's Bite (the first book in the series) instead of this review which covers the second, third and fourth book.

Even though I read these books in quick succession after the first Elemental Assassin book, vacation and general procrastination has stopped me from getting this review written earlier.

These books are very similar to the first one - as one would expect of books in a series. They are quick paced, with lots of action and just enough plot twists to keep everything interesting.

As the books progressed the voice of Gin, and the personality of the characters around her, grew stronger. I think this is both a case of Jennifer Estep getting a better hold of who Gin is, and us learning more about the history that lies beneath everything.

Even though the characters' personalities grew strong and more defined in these books they all remained more or less the same. Gin is probably the only character that goes through any significant change, and even that change is barely visible over the four books I've read in this series. But that is not always a bad thing. These are supposed to be quick and action packed books, and you don't always need deep character development to achieve that.

There are a few things that started to annoy me as I read the books though. The first of these is the healing of Jo-Jo. Giving her the ability to bring heal everything, using only a few hours, seems very cheap. It makes all the sacrifices the characters make seem a bit hollow. Who cares about getting their ass kicked and their faces beaten to a pulp, when you can get everything fixed by the time you wake up the next day? Even after reading all four books I don't really understand what Jennifer achieves by giving Jo-Jo this ability. I think it would have been better to enforce a long recuperation time to allow her healing to take effect, or at least add something to make an injury affect the main characters for more than a few hours.

The second thing that started to bug me was the amount of repetition in the books. A lot of lore is repeated again, and again, and again. Often using almost identical phrases. The prime example of this is the explanation about how the elemental magic of Gin works. Almost every single time it is used you are given an explanation of it, even when it is an application of it that we have seen before. There is also a lot of repeated descriptions throughout the books. The sexy characters are described with the same words almost every time Gin lays eyes upon them, and her routine when coming home is explained with the same amount of details each time.

I think the repetition parts would have been less noticeable if I had not read the four books is such a quick succession. Luckily for me I now have to wait a little while for the next book to arrive, so I am looking forward to seeing if the break from Gin's world will make the repetition less apparent.

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I first heard of Jennifer Estep and her Elemental Assassin books when she wrote a guest post in John Scalzi's Big Idea "column". Reading about her reasons for starting the Elemental Assassin series was enough to make me want to get hold of the first book.

Spider's Bite is the first book in the Elemental Assassin series. The story unfolds in a strange version of the American city of Ashland. Dwarves, giants, vampires and humans coexist in the city, and to make everything a bit more extraordinary some people also have elemental magic - hence the name of the series.

The main character, Gin, is an assassin that has a bit of both Stone and Ice magic. Gin enjoys her job and she is good at it, but her life takes an upleasant turn when her handler is killed.

The book delivers on its promise to be fun read. Something is happening all the time, and even though the story is a bit predictable it has enough twists and turns to be entertaining to the very end. Just what I had hoped to get out of the book.

Ashland's place in the larger world is rarely talked about, and the deeper consequences of adding magic to our society is never explored more than necessary. Even with the magic and all the strange races everything seems just like a twisted version of our own world.

The characters in the book are all well made. Each of them have their own small quirks, and each of them has a back story that that you want to learn a bit more about. Most of them seem a bit one sided, either good or bad, but given the quick pace of the story the easy separation feels just right. Few of the people in the story undergo any real change, but this being a fun and easy read I had not expected that either.

In her quest for revenge Gin is joined by two other characters. One is a long time friend who has plenty of reason to tag along, and he plays an important role in the story. Both as a person that contrasts well with Gin, and as a character that has skills that Gin needs. The other character does not fit that well into the story. Without spoiling anything he felt like a strange add on to the story that never served any real purpose. It got a bit better as the book progressed, but he never felt like the same natural fit as most other characters.

One of the things that really impressed me with Jennifer Estep's writing was her description food. One of Gin's hobbies is cooking, and it has to be a passion of Jennifer Estep as well. Every once it a while she would give a detailed description of the food. It was rarely the fancy food that got described, but instead the sandwiches Gin made at home or the salad she prepared at the restaurant she worked. Each time the descriptions left my mouth watering.

Jennifer Estep's description of the sex scenes was also very detailed, at times a bit too much. I feel that sex scenes in book rarely add anything special so they can usually be boiled down to "and then they had hot and passionate sex" without loosing anything. Unfortunately I felt the same way when I read through this book. Luckily it did not happen too often, and it was easy to skim through until the story got going again.

In the end the book left me wanting to know more about Gin and the world around her. It was a very entertaining read, and I can recommend it to anyone looking for a fast and easy book with a bad-ass main character.

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Under the Dome is a big novel, probably one of Stephen King's longest books. In interviews he has said that this is a story that has been brewing in his mind for over twenty years, and after having read the story that does not come as a surprise. The story follows the whole population of a small town and the changing point of views, each with their own goals, keeps the story going at a very fast pace.

The story starts with a large, invisible dome falling on top Chester Mill, a small town in Maine. No one knows were the dome comes from, or why it is there. They only know that it has shut Chester Mill off from the outside world. Communication seem to work through the dome, but nothing else can pass through it. One of the strong sides of most of Stephen King's book is that he always lets the people be the important part and only uses the strange horrors to drive their actions. He has done the same thing here, the Dome is never in the fore-front of the story, but it lies behind almost every decision that the people make.

The population of Chester Mill comes alive as Stephen King writes about them. From the town drunk to the used car dealer suffering from megalomania. Recreating small towns and communities and then seeing what happens when they are locked away from the rest of the world is what Stephen King does best, and in this book it really shines. After only a few pages Chester Mill feels like a proper town and all the characters there seem real.

Only problem with the villain was that he had no good side, he was only evil. I think it would have been much better if he had one redeeming quality. Simply loving his family would have been enough, and I don't think that would have had any negative effect on the story.

The tension that builds up in the book between the factions within Chester Mill and their different approach to handling the Dome is great. Stephen King uses the Dome as a great backdrop to the conflicts that arise as Chester Mill tries to survive their current crisis.

Most of the book is written in a personal third person point of view, but in a few chapters we follow an omnipresent voice that talks directly to us as the reader. That story telling technique can work, but the usage in this book felt wrong. When you are pulled out from the head of the characters the tensions evaporates a little bit, and in a book like this that is not what you want to happen.

[spoiler title="My thoughts on the ending"]
After building up a lot of questions about the Dome throughout the whole book the ending feels very cheap. I like the fact that everything was done on the whim of small (alien) children. Meaninglessness is always a bit more scary than something that you can see an underlying purpose to. But I feel that the solution Stephen King used to make the Dome go away was too easy, as if he realised by the end that he had no way to save the people and having them beg was the first solution that popped into his head. I might actually have like it a bit more if the child had not listened and instead allowed everyone do die inside the Dome.
[/spoiler]

This is one of Stephen King's best books, even though I had a few small gripes with it. Going to sleep took an extra hour each night, as I had to read just one more chapter. Definitely worth reading if you like anything written by Stephen King, or want to get a (big) taste of what he has to offer.

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Whitechapel Gods is a strange take on steampunk. It is set in Victorian London. Or, Victorian London surrounds the "burough" of Whitechapel where the story unfolds. Alongside the steampunk technology there is a layer of magic and mysticism interlacing all parts of the story. The most obvious example is the two mechanical gods that control Whitechapel, but there is also the mysterious disease called the "clacks" which causes the victim to grow gears and mechanical parts under their skin.

In the book we follow the story of a few people as they struggle against the oppressive power of the machine gods. The viewpoint changes a lot in the first part of the book, making it very difficult to get a proper feeling for where the story is going. I think this is the case of Peters trying to put too much information about each character into the book. It is clear that he has created long and well thought out background for each character, but it often becomes too much as he tries to explain everything as the new characters are introduced.

As the story gets going, and the characters have been introduced, the story gets better and I started to enjoy the adventure and the challenges they encountered. Even though I found most of the characters to be likeable only one of them had much character growth, so by the end I was more interested in the overarching plot of the book that how the characters actually did. Not necessarily a bad thing, but something that I noticed as I kept reading.

The strange setting was very hard to grasp. It took a long time for me to get a feeling for the correct amount of magic and technology that I should expect. This led to a few cases where I felt like the author invented new things just to solve a problem with the plot, without actually thinking about how the choices he made should have affected the setting. What made the setting great though, even when it felt inconsistent, was the atmosphere created by the author. The characters in the book do not know much about the dangers they face, and that lack of knowledge really helped you get a feel for the fear that they felt. It reminded me a bit of the way Lovecraft conveyed the horror in his books; rarely describing anything, just describing what the characters think and fear. This is especially true as the descriptions/experience of the machine Gods arrive later on in the book.

After having finished the book I am left with a feeling that it could have been much better if Peters had given the story more place. That way he could have introduced the characters without rushing it, and I might have been allowed to get a better grasp of the whole setting. All-in-all it was a good read, without being anything spectacular.

Trying to find an answer to those questions was one of the reasons I wrote the last post; to help organise my own thoughts around magic systems and thus help me create better ones for my own fantasy settings.

The origin of the structure isn't really that important in my opinion. I care more about the actual structure and how it has (and will) affect the setting. If the magic is an inherit part of the world, power from another realm, or something given to people by their Gods does not really matter.

If the system is carefully laid out with mathematical formulas I, as a reader, don't need to know that. I want enough information to predict results and options within the system, but an approximation is enough in that regard. The difference between knowing the character can create a 10" fireball and a 11.5" fireball is not that important (in most cases), knowing the character can create a fireball is the important part. For the author it might be a good idea to lay out the rules with all the small details made clear. I know that I at least have an easier time keeping track of everything, and figuring out all the possible implications of my system when I have it clearly written in front of me.

Balancing the amount in information, and figuring out how to give is a very difficult task. The reader doesn't want an info dump with all the rules, but he should learn enough to anticipate the limits and available options set by the rules. I've noticed that it is often solved with the character learning about the system alongside the reader (e.g Brandon Sanderson in the Mistborn books or J.K. Rowling's approach in the Harry Potter books), but that option is not always available. I cannot think of a book that does it any other way at the moment, without info dumping, but there has to be some out there.

You can of course avoid all of this by making magic a secondary part of the story. If it is never used to solve any conflicts it does not require the same amount of exposition.

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After having read Boneshaker I was really looking forward to this book. The story is based around a journey from eastern USA to the west coast while the country is ravaged by civil war. Transportation ranges from walking on foot, to dirigibles, steamboats and trains. It sounds like a very promising start, especially when you know the great care Cherie Priest takes in creating her steampunk version of a late 19th century America.

It is a very fast paced story. The main character, Vinita "Mercy" Lynch, is never given much time to rest on her journey as new obstacles are thrown in her way. The only problem with all of these obstacles is that Mercy is never shaken by any of them, and the solution is always given too fast. That makes it harder to experience the tension that should have been present throughout the book. Another problem is that Mercy is rarely an active part of the solution to the problems. She does her part, but it never feels like she is actually driving the story forward as much as I would like.

I think another reason I found the tension lacking in this is that one of the main plot elements in this book is explained in the first Clockwork Century book, Boneshaker. So the questions and mystery around that part fell flat when I already I knew the answer, and thus had good idea of what was going to come.

But even with a passive main character, and knowledge that I might have been better off without, I enjoyed reading the book. Cherie Priest is a good writer and it is very fun to experience the world that she has created. The other characters in the book make for an interesting travelling party, even though we never learned a lot about those characters, and the quick pace of the story makes it easy to ignore the bad parts.

As I was rereading the conversations my characters were having I realised that they almost always ended up with one person acting as an information dump, while the other person asked (bad) questions to keep the information coming. Often this was information that both characters should have known, so the whole sequence was just to feed the reader with information.

I solved a few of those cases by moving the information to the thoughts that the point-of-view character had, or by removing the dialogue all together. The sequences became a lot better, but it reduced the amount of dialogue a bit too much. Dialogue can tell you a lot about a character and it is a great way to convey the difference between characters, so I did not want to remove too much of it.

As I listened to the pod cast from Writing Excuses I learnt another way to make my dialogues better. I should write each dialogue as an argument between the participants. This piece of advice also fit perfectly into the general advice that each scene in a book should have some sort of conflict, and an argument is the natural way to add conflict into a dialogue heavy scene.

Rewriting the information dumping sequence to become an argument forced me to flesh out the characters, and once that was done the information that I required felt like a natural fit on the page. The cases were I needed to convey more information I knew something more fundamental was wrong. At least the times I have come across so far have been signs of me trying to force the characters to take actions based only upon what I need for the story, not upon what would be natural for the characters.

This realization has caused me to rewrite large parts of the book as the characters have become more defined and I have gotten a better idea of what information both the reader and the characters require at the various parts of the book. At least I know this trick now and can take it into consideration from the beginning when I start my next book.

The magic system has always been one of my favourite parts of a fantasy setting. Magic is one of the things that set fantasy apart from other types of fiction, and as a kid I would often loose myself in daydreams of having magical abilities. But even though I have always liked magic I have never thought too much about what sets a good system apart from a bad system.

I have always seen a well defined system of magic, with clear rules and boundaries, as a good thing in. It makes it easier for me to associate with the magical users in the story, and it gives me another tool to use when I try to figure out how the characters are going to get through the next chapter. It is also important that the magic comes with a price, both when using it and when learning how to use it. Finding a balance between that and the amount of magic you want to have available in the world is a really hard balance act. Too little and you will end up with everything done by magic. Too much and no one uses magic. Each of the two extremes might work in their own stories, but I tend to find the magic systems that fall a place in between the most exciting to read about.

A great example of a well defined system that makes the story better is the system used in Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn. The rules for the magic is well defined and explained in the beginning of the books, so when it is used to solve problems later on you are amazed by the creativity of the characters as the apply the know rules in ways you would never have imagined.

My stance on the unclear systems is a bit more vague. Some of them I like, some I don't. Until I heard those episodes from Writing Excuses, and through them got introduced to Sanderson's first law, I had not tried to articulate my preference either. And after thinking it through I agree with Sanderson's approach to magical systems. An unclear system is fine, but it can only be given a minor role in the book. If an unclear system is given too great of a role in the story, it becomes a deus ex machina and hinders the readers from investing in the characters and the story.

I think that is why I love the use of magic in Tolkien's work, even though that is a very unclear and undefined system. On the other hand you have the magical system used in the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind, which I did not like. The magic in that series is unclear and often overused, so it comes off as a crutch to keep the main story going more than anything else.