amagicbeyond

Oh, don’t worry, I have come to realize that those phrases are synonymous, especially on Tumblr.

(KIDDING I’m just having fun with .gifs. Thank you, lovely!)

GO TO BED KELLI!

*insert .gif of Tootsie Noodles kissing Up’s head after Taz pulls off his moustache*

I love you!

Is that a threat?

(Actually, I’ve got about ten hours of train travel ahead of me in the next 48 hours, so I just might be able to comply. Can’t wait to see what you’re up to!)

Thank you - I’m so glad you like the story!

I’ve made a conscious decision not to reveal my take on LtD Up’s age because everyone has a different idea about it and I don’t want to take that away from them by telling them mine. Whatever you think it is - that’s the right answer!

(I know this response is unsatisfactory, I’m sorry…)

Now you know I’m not going to respond to that!

Okay, yes, well there is that.

There are many, many fantasy books out there that follow the Tolkien humans-elves-dwarves-Orc-like creatures formula, but I do have to say that Inheritance takes the cake for most faithful imitator.

However, we must allow for the fact that Paolini was very, very young when he wrote Eragon and the first book of the series was first self-published. That particular novel may be a bit of a Star Wars-meets-Tolkien mashup, but the fellow that picked it up for publishing must have seen something in it I didn’t, and look what happened. A highly successful MG/YA fantasy series which, alongside Harry Potter, Twilight, and Percy Jackson, is the only one I regularly see in the English sections of foreign bookshops.

So there’s that, too. :)

Of course you can, and I’m sorry, I may not have gotten your other message! What name would you like to go by? Ensign…

Taken care of, dear, thanks!

Savannah, there is an Eragon movie. It came out in 2006 and was so boring that I couldn’t even get past the first thirty minutes so I fell asleep and will probably never know if it got any better. I doubt there will be any more.

And that’s the sad truth of the matter.

No, don’t die!

She is now! (Um, that’s you, right? I get confused when dealing with people’s real names all the time.)

For everyone’s information, I want you to know that I’m not purposefully excluding anyone from the PA roster! I don’t feel comfortable adding people without their knowledge, so I wait until someone asks me to add them - for example, you won’t find Rear Admiral Ree on there, because she’s never asked me to be! :)

Thank you! Thank you so much!

I am so glad you enjoyed it, dear anon. <3

OH gosh, I am so rusty. It has been a year and a half since I read these.

I think the possibility of a let-down is very, very real when it comes to a multi-part series like this, especially one that wasn’t originally intended to be a multi-part series. This is something I have tried to be very, very aware of as I plan my fantasy trilogy - the one I haven’t ever talked about! - and something I think most authors must fear. Once your story gets popular, the pressure would certainly be there to deliver.

I personally was glad that Katniss killed the President, and that she wound up having a quiet life with the only person who would ever understand what she’d been through.

And I love that you made a Cosie reference there, as if Cosie came first, haha! :)

I would like to reread the Hunger Games trilogy actually, but I left my hard copies in Canada and don’t really want to spend the money on the ebooks… :(

I’m reading Inheritance now, the fourth book in Christopher Paolini’s series (which over here, oddly enough, every single volume in it is called simply “Eragon,” which I think must be confusing). I have a lot of thoughts about story construction with this series too, but I’ll reserve them until I’ve finished this volume.

(Can someone tell me if this is the last, or second-to-last, that’s planned? I can’t remember. I know it was supposed to be a trilogy originally.)

First of all, why were you using Internet Explorer? :P

re: Twilight. I find the first three books tolerably melodramatic, to the point of being absorbing. The last is a bit of a narrative mess - why introduce a dozen new and interesting vampires, gather them all together to fight, and then have all the tension diffused with about fifty pages of talking at each other (please note that it’s not the lack of fighting that bothers me, it’s the massive buildup to the utter lack of fighting). And then everybody gets EXACTLY what it is they want - even if they never knew they wanted it (cough cough Jacob imprinting on Bella’s infant child, who is conveniently going to stop aging in the prime of her youth, for example). Instead of feeling fulfilled and satisfied with this ending, I felt let down. It was somehow too happy, especially for a story dealing with the twisted, obsessive kind of love Bella and Edward had for each other.

re: Mockingjay. I get very sad when I read a fantastic standalone book (i.e. The Hunger Games) and then discover that the author has been influenced into turning it into a series when it was not necessarily her original plan (note I said influenced, not forced). I find it always tends to weaken the original story.

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy Catching Fire and Mockingjay - they just didn’t resonate with me the way the original did. I think, perhaps, that they explained too much, that some of the brilliant mystery and enigma of the first volume was lost.

Is there something specific about the ending you’re thinking of? What were your issues?

(I welcome any thoughts or questions anyone might have about books and series like this, I spend a lot of time thinking about story construction and enjoy talking about it too!)

:)