Hey Everyone!
So I didn't actual mean to dangle the prospect of Patrick Rothfuss spoilers over your head and then leave you hanging. Instead, as usual, there was some slight life implosion and then you know what happens? I get tired and don't want to do anything productive. Anywhere. I almost don't even want to read - which makes me feel guilty when I have NetGalley requests hanging around.
Luckily I'm starting to feel better. I'm feeling the juices of actual motivation to get things done, which includes rereading Silver Borne so that I can finally move on to River Marked. I know! I know! I'm horrible - it's been sitting on my shelf for weeks but I've been reaching for old standards and leaving it unloved. Anyway...to get back to the point that I swear I started with, Patrick Rothfuss. His Q&A was almost more of a discussion and very reminiscent of popular fiction courses back from when I was in college. It is not at all a negative thought, just reflection. It's a lot of fun to hear one of your favorites authors expand on a topic like oral tradition and fantasy in today's world. Still there were some questions pertaining just to him personally and his series and this is what I gleamed from them:
*On Nathan Fillion/Firefly - yes Fillion did say something along the lines of if he won the California lottery and had $300 mill he would buy Firefly and give it to Joss Whedon. And yes Rothfuss would be glad to help with this project but that is it. It's not even near any sort of stage where it could possibly happen as many - many - more people would be needed ("30 to 50 geeks with more money than sense")
*He's tried to present a realistic world; a pre-industrial, pre-information age world ("a world that is filled with uncertainty")
*He spends a lot of time looking at how information would move in this world
*'Narrata' - the individual narrative unit (he said it, defined it, so even with no context here it is)
*A lot of stuff in the books he's created from educated guess about what might/could happen. Sometimes those guess can turn out to be true, can be seen in real world examples from the past. (Eg - silk bras, the buggery (Library of Congress seriously used to de-bug books this way: the books were laid out in a circle around a log dipped in honey. You close the door and come back later after all the bugs have left the books to eat the log))
*How literate are the people? World more akin to renaissance Europe than anything else; troupers are of course eminently literate but most people have enough learning to read signs and that's about it - reading/writing skills are available, just not very important
*Why does he change the things he changes? Rothfuss makes changes to make the story better. For example, without tension there is no story - you have to have problems if you're going have to something actually happen.
And there you go people - out of a huge multiple hour long chunk of my life I ended up with 7 bullet points. But weren't those some fun bullet points?
Yet I still think something is lacking....something...something. GOT IT! You know what this post needs? Some completely without context
Memorable Quotes:
-"I'm writing a realistic world which means...people are dicks."
-"The bar bet is dead"
-"You hear what Newton said?"..."He's high on mercury!"
-"Why are you ruining bouncing?"
-"Cognitive dissonance...then you stroke and you die."
