Okay. In keeping with my tradition of slapdash scheduling. I’m going to be doing a reading/signing/Q&A session next week up in Duluth. It’s at the local Barnes and Noble on Tuesday the 12th at 7:00.
More details are over on the tour page. I also created a facebook event, if you want to use that to invite your friends without having to go to all the unpleasant work of actually talking to them.
If y’all would help spread the word a bit, I’d appreciate it. I hate doing these things on such short notice, but I only found out last week that I’d be up in the Duluth area.
And now, a piece of fanmail:
Dear Mr. Rothfuss,
As you are no doubt aware, in your April 28th blog post, you mentioned that the manuscript would be done by September.
I’m guessing you are furiously trying to put the finishing touches on the manuscript, but us fans would love an update about how the work is going. I really enjoyed your August 16th post about what revision work actually entails, and always enjoy getting a view of what your day to day work is like.
Thanks for updating the blog so frequently, it makes the waiting a lot easier, and we love hearing from you.
-Asa
Asa,
I did actually get the manuscript to my editor on schedule. She’s probably reading it even as we speak. Um. Type. Or rather, as you read what I have typed. In the past.
You know what I mean.
That means I get a little bit of a vacation while I’m waiting to hear back from her. Or rather, it means that I would get a bit of a vacation if I wasn’t still obsessively tinkering with the book.
Yesterday, for example, I re-read 87 pages of book two.
(Note that these pages aren’t the length of a paperback page or a manuscript page. They’re my own page layout that I use for editing.)
Anyway, I spend yesterday re-reading these 87 pages of the book. As I read, I try to winnow out the extra verbiage, making the book quicker and easier to read. My philosophy is that if I take out everything that is merely meh, all that’s left will be the parts that are really super-wow. That means that the book will be, in the parlance of our time, good.
Sometimes while I was reading I would get an idea for a different part of the book, and I’d skip off to another part of the book to make the change. Sometimes I would make a change that necessitated making a few other changes throughout the book to maintain consistency.
But mostly I was just word-winnowing.
So yesterday I re-read 87 pages of the book. Pages that I’ve already read at least 100 times. It took 8 hours during the time that is, theoretically, my vacation.
At the end of those 8 hours, the book was 600 words shorter. I hadn’t trimmed a scene. I’m long past that stage. All the chaff scenes were gone months and months ago. These days if I want to tighten up the book, I have to hunt out little bits and phrases. Lines of dialogue that don’t sparkle. Non-essential snippets of description. Single superfluous words.
As I was going home, I wrestled with a familiar thought. Specifically, I wondered if I was insane.
Again, I’d spent an entire day making changes to the book that nobody would ever really notice. And I have to ask myself, is it really worth it?
Then I did the math.
A paperback page holds about 340 words, less if you use a lot of dialogue. (Which I do.) So by trimming 600 words, I’d effectively made my book about two pages shorter.
I’m guessing a quarter million people will read book two. In the US anyway. Last I heard, that’s about how many copies of NOTW have been sold.
That means, taken all together, I’ve spared my readers 500,000 pages of *meh* text.
Let’s assume it takes about a minute for a person to read a page. Roughly.
500,000 minutes = 8333 hours = 347 days.
That means, taken all together, I’ve saved my readers a full year of meh reading. That’s not counting foreign translations, book club versions, and people who read the book multiple times.
When I think of it that way, I guess it doesn’t seem so crazy. Which is good, because I don’t think I could stop being obsessive like this even if I wanted to.
Later all,
pat
Favorite Quotes….
So the other day someone asked me what my favorite quote was from The Wise Man’s Fear. I stopped to think about it. And thought.
And thought.
It took me a long while to think of any quotes at all from the book. Which seems odd to me, as I’ve spent the better part of the last year revising it.
For some reason, this isn’t a problem with The Name of the Wind. I have to know a hundred little quotable bits from that book. I can probably do a dozen off the top of my head right now.
There’s the classic ones:
“It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.”
“You may have heard of me.”
Kvothe obviously has a bunch of good lines, as he’s not only the protagonist, but the narrator for most of the book as well:
“The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.”
“We are more than the parts that form us.”
“Metal rusts, music lasts forever.”
A few from Bast:
“We all become what we pretend to be.”
“You are not wise enough to fear me as I should be feared.”
“You do not know the first note of the music that moves me.”
A few from Elodin:
“Blue! Blue! Blue!”
“You lack the requisite spine and testicular fortitude to study under me.”
“Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.”
And from some of the supporting characters:
“Yes I am, isn’t it wonderful?”
“All stories are true.”
“A poet is a musician who can’t sing.”
I could go on and on….
Despite this, I have a hard time thinking of The Wise Man’s Fear in terms of quotes. I think it might be because I’ve been focusing on it in terms of plot, character development, story arcs, etc etc. Not in terms of tidy little quotable soundbites.
Or maybe it’s just that The Wise Man’s Fear isn’t as quotable is The Name of the Wind.
So I’m curious, do y’all have some favorite quotes from The Wise Man’s Fear?
And since I’m asking, I wouldn’t mind knowing what some of your favorite quotes are from The Name of the Wind, too….
If so, would you mind posting them in the comments below?
Curiously yours,
pat
P.S. Also, a little attribution wouldn’t hurt. By which I mean it would be nice if you mentioned which book your quote was from, and who exactly said it….