Turn Me Up When You Feel Low

[newsong]

Make me your radio
Turn me up when you feel low
I pray you'll never leave me behind
Because good music can be so hard to find

When I started writing this post, it was a couple of days ago and I was enjoying the different surroundings of sitting at Starbucks and playing on Paul's laptop while puttering around on the internet and waiting on hold to talk

Comments

[jesusphreaq]

Glad to hear you're busy with lots of work to do! Sometimes it can get overwhelming for sure... but I'm so happy that you have a job that has so much satisfaction when things are complete. :D And I'm glad you've got so much business!

Man, I hated Eragon. Mostly for the fact that the author just mashed up J.R.R. Tolkien with Dragonlance and called it a day, without adding anything new to the field of high fantasy. Oh, and the fact that he's an arrogant narcissist didn't help either. :) But I'm glad that you think it gets better.

I'm glad you had a good V-day! I loved the pic of you and Paul on fb. We had a good v-day too. :)

[newsong]

In the second book it becomes clear that his vision of all the peoples of his world are NOTHING like Tolkien's, it's just the bad writing (terrible? atrocious? I think that's the best invective I can muster on short notice) from the first book that obscures it. I actually think that his editor is the worst culprit for publishing it like that. It needed a good year - or five - of work. I'm sure he'd love to go back and re-write it if he could.

I didn't like Dragonlance and never got through it, so I can't speak to that accusation.

That pic on Facebook is from last summer... Someone found it presumably because of the self-portrait-with-camera I posted and then a bunch of people saw it. It was weird to have so many people like it so much later when I'd forgotten it.

[jesusphreaq]

Besides the fact that he uses the same (now done-to-death) cliche of mentor-and-student that Tolkien used while it wasn't as tired, probably only the way he describes things and some of the world is reminiscent of Lord of the Rings. But he says himself that he was going for that:

In 2002, Eragon was published privately by his parents. To promote the book, Paolini toured over 135 schools and libraries, discussing reading and writing, all the while dressed in "a medieval costume of red shirt, billowy black pants, lace-up boots, and a jaunty black cap."

[...] Incidentally, he gave a speech at Carl Hiaasen's stepson's school and Hiaasen enjoyed the book so much, he told his publisher, Knopf. An offer was made by Knopf for Eragon and the rest of the Inheritance trilogy. After another round of editing, the second edition of Eragon was published in August 2003.

With regard to his prose, Paolini has said, "In my writing, I strive for a lyrical beauty somewhere between Tolkien at his best and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf."
Wow!

[jesusphreaq]

Besides the fact that he uses the same (now done-to-death) cliche of mentor-and-student that Tolkien used while it wasn't as tired, probably only the way he describes things and some of the world is reminiscent of Lord of the Rings. But he says himself that he was going for that:

In 2002, Eragon was published privately by his parents. To promote the book, Paolini toured over 135 schools and libraries, discussing reading and writing, all the while dressed in "a medieval costume of red shirt, billowy black pants, lace-up boots, and a jaunty black cap."

[...] Incidentally, he gave a speech at Carl Hiaasen's stepson's school and Hiaasen enjoyed the book so much, he told his publisher, Knopf. An offer was made by Knopf for Eragon and the rest of the Inheritance trilogy. After another round of editing, the second edition of Eragon was published in August 2003.

With regard to his prose, Paolini has said, "In my writing, I strive for a lyrical beauty somewhere between Tolkien at his best and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf."
Wow!

[newsong]

Oh man, I feel rants coming on

[jesusphreaq]

Hey man, I hated Eragon way before I found out that Paolini was a jerk, and here's why. It came out, it was blah, it had an blah main character, blah plot, totally par-for-the-course tropes such as mentor-and-student, dragons-bond-with-you-and-talk-through-mind-speak (what book with dragons DOESN'T do that?), and warrior-elf-chick-just-because-that's-hot. The only character I liked was Murtaugh, because he was the only one who didn't *quite* rip off the type he was based on (Aragorn). He had hints of originality, so I liked him. The whole book, though, was unremarkable

[jesusphreaq]

Here is what I believe: it is a great purpose of all stories to inspire. And if a person can be inspired to take what they have seen (not only from one story, but from several or many) and weave the elements that inspired that person together into a new but similar story, while polishing and perfecting those original elements at the same time as they bring new ideas and story to the table--that is a wonderful, wonderful thing. (I would put most of my favorite books in this category, but for one example Ella Enchanted. Clearly it takes myth and fairytale elements, but creates a very new story from them. But a better example of this in my recent memory is the film Super 8, in which very little was new. You could see ideas and homages of many movies, but Super 8 outshone and did a better job than those, bringing those original good ideas to an even greater height.) However, for someone to take the original good ideas of several (Eragon--Lord of the Rings, Dragonlance, possibly other popular high fantasy books at the time) or worse, just