A Comfortable Familiarity

So, I recently decided to write a novel. Well, I say recently but I actually started the novel well over a year ago and just decided to pick it back up. I'm at about 10k words right now. I read somewhere that most publishing companies won't publish new authors with a novel more than 150k so a little less than that will probably be my goal. So far I think I'm probably just about on track. I'm probably about half way through with the first part of the novel (it will be split into at least two distinct parts possibly even three). The first part is really sort of just a long introduction though so I expected it to be short. I'll post the first part for everyone to read and give feedback on once I get it wrote and do just a little bit of revising for continuity and there have been some parts that I have sped through that I need to go back and be more descriptive.

Anyway, all this leads to the topic of my post, "A Comfortable Familiarity." I decided to go back and start reading through the Wheel of Time series again. It's been a while since I finished the last book and I wanted to get an idea how a master of storytelling does it for my novel. Also, Brandon Sanderson (the author chosen to complete the series according to the notes left by Robert Jordan and under the careful eye of Jordan's wife and editor, Harriet) has been hard at work for half a year now completing the final book. He says we should expect something on shelves by the end of 2009. The way I read this should put me right at it's release finishing up the first 11 in the series.

Again, to get back to my point; I can't believe how much I love the first book in the series and how familiar and at home I feel while reading it. Since finishing the eleventh book I've started other series. I've read all currently released books in the Song of Ice and Fire series by George RR Martin and read the Mistborn Trilogy by Brandon Sanderson. Both were great reads and very entertaining. I believe the last few books in Martin's series will be exquisite and Mistborn was really a fun read. However, neither are the Wheel of Time. Neither author has the mastery of wordsmithery (obviously I'm don't either lol) that Jordan had. His attention to detail, foreshadowing, and patience amaze me. I think most of his fans started to complain about this towards the end, saying he was artificially inflating the series. I don't believe he was. The man had more patience than any of us. He had this story in his head to tell and he wasn't going to cheapen the experience for us or himself by cutting it short just because people were getting impatient. He vowed to finish the series in book twelve and Sanderson has said he will keep that vow but that he has no control over how the publisher publishes it. He says it is getting so large (currently 424k words expected to be over 700k) that it will be hard to actually sell it in one cover. I think Sanderson will do a great job with the book but I would be lying if I said I wasn't just a little worried. I like his original work well enough. They were very entertaining but he isn't nearly as descriptive as Jordan. I enjoyed, while reading Mistborn, that the chapters were very small (normally about 4-6 pages in length) and the action went very fast but that isn't the Wheel of Time series and would make it seem out of place.