Why are you tagged as a novice writer?
Heh. I picked the tag on a whim quite a while ago, and forgot it was there until this post. I felt like quite the novice at the time, surrounded in the field by giants like GRRM, Robin Hobb, and the like.
Maybe I’ll change it once I hit the ten year mark. (2015 will make it ten years from the publication of my first book.) It seems to me that I really haven’t been doing this very long. One of the things I keep reminding myself is that, in entertainment, there are a lot of flash-in-the-pan tastes of the week. I want to aspire toward more.
Why on Earth would you list Robin Hobb alongside yourself and GRRM?
I had the misfortune of reading her Soldier Son series while I was deployed, and I thought the entire concept of the story was terrible.
I looked at her website just now, and she’s not much more prolific of a writer than yourself, so what constitutes her as a ‘giant’?
**Tangent: Please develop your Stormlight series into something much more than a trilogy! With WoT completed, and GRRM writing at a snail’s pace, I need another inspiring epic series to fill the void. Also, I commend your writing work-ethic. /fanboyrant end
I’ll preface this by saying that I adore Robin’s work. However, Soldier Son is divisive among her fanbase, and is not as widely loved as her Assassin’s Apprentice series, which is where I suggest people begin.
That’s beside the point. I chose her deliberately because of her story as a writer, which is similar to that of GRRM. Both toiled in relative obscurity for years and years as writers. Robin published under the name Megan Lindholm for a long time, and never found huge commercial success. She finally hit it big with Assassin’s Apprentice, which was one of the bestselling epic fantasy trilogies of the 90’s. In a similar way, GRRM wrote and published for decades before hitting it big with Game of Thrones .
These are the kinds of writers I admire, and one day wish to join. The writers who have been through the ups and downs, and who have continued to press forward. They didn’t write their best work when they first broke in—they are doing it now, after years and years of growth, effort, and occasional failure.
As a side note, in 2006 I was nominated for the Campbell award for best new writer. I lost to John Scalzi, and was kind of down in the dumps. GRRM found me sitting on the side of a bed at a hotel party that night. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Don’t worry, kid. I lost that damn award the first year it was offered.” And he did—he lost it to Jerry Pournelle in 1973, two years before I was even born. GRRM handed me one of his famous “Hugo Loser” badges to wear with pride, gave me a pat on the shoulder, then continued on.
***As for the tangent, don’t worry. I have big plans for Stormlight…
Wait, so you’re published? Change your flair!
Ha, okay. Enough people have pointed it out, that I have officially done so. Flair changed. :)
Why, of all of the people in the internet, do you have ‘Novice Writer’ as your flair? I mean, I understand that you don’t have the ungodly library of titles to your name that someone like David Weber or Piers Anthony does, but I think once you write more than 1 best seller you have to at least upgrade that to ‘Professional Writer’ or at least ‘Journeyman Wordsmith’ or something!
Also, I must give you many many many thanks for the way you handled completed the Wheel of Time series. I admit to being overcome with trepidation when I heard that you were going to be completing the series because while I really really really liked the Mistborn novels, then didn’t seem quite in line with the feel of Jordan’s universe. I was worried. But you handled the completion of a series that has been with me since middle school incredibly well and brought everything to a satisfactory conclusion in some an artful manner that it was never at any time obvious that Jordan himself wasn’t penning every word.
I’m looking forward to more of your works in the future now more than ever.
See elsewhere in the thread why I chose that flair, but I’ve been persuaded that at this point, “novice writer” was strange enough on me to be out of place. So I’ve gone ahead and changed it.
Working on the Wheel of Time was one of the great pleasures of my life. Thanks for the kind words.
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