Lessons Learned

scribblermendez

When I read books, I try to learn lessons from them to improve my own authorship. I am collecting those lessons here.

This was last updated 12/2/2023.

Kaiju Protection Society

  • Bathos is fun in the moment, but too much of it destroys your book.
    • Bathos is using comedy to undermine the serious moments in your book by adding a comedic beat too soon afterwards. It’s acceptable in small doses. Too much, and your book implodes. This book imploded hard.
  • Understand genre expectations for the book you are writing
    • This was erstwhile marketed as a kaiju book, but it avoided the genre trappings of the kaiju genre. Cities were not stepped on, there was only one kaiju v kaiju battle, there were no giant robots to fight the kaiju.
  • Describe things
    • This book lacked descriptions. What did the kaiju look like? What did the people look like? What did anything look like? This book felt rushed, with important padding left out.
  • Combine genres in an interesting way
    • I enjoyed the ‘alien ecology’ aspect of this book. This book took the whole ‘Godzilla breathes plasma’ aspect of the kaiju genre and developed an entire ecological system around it. The role of the Kaiju Preservation Society were as ecologists studying this strange phenomenon. Good stuff.
  • If you’re going to write a bad book, have charismatic prose
    • I’m not sure how helpful this lesson is to anyone, but one thing this book did well was having a charismatic authorial style. If the prose weren’t this strong, I think this book’s generally positive reviews would be sharply negative.
  • Beware of accidentally foreshadowing something, and not paying it off.
    • This book foreshadowed progressive and socialist economic theory, and paid off none of it. I was disappointed. I don’t even think the author intended to foreshadow economic theory; I think he just stumbled backwards into it by adopting a progressive cultural pastiche as the narrative voice of the story.
  • For the love of god, don’t try to be be “relatable”
    • This book felt like a twitter shouting match, referencing ‘college debt’ and ‘schwarma’ and ‘ukalele.’ I’d be fine with a book that references one or two of these per chapter. But one or two per page? Hard pass.
    • I don’t know, maybe all the Hugo voters are all Very Online People who genuinely find this stuff relatable.
  • Evil villains. Thanks to this book, I realized that villains exist within the tone of the story.
    • Usually I say stuff like, ‘This villain was unrealistically evil, he’s too mustache twirling evil.’ I don’t say that for this book, even though this villain was wicked as can be.
    • This book is campy; it needs a campy antagonist. If this book had a morally grey antagonist, it would have stuck out like a sore thumb amongst the surreal plot and characters of this book. This villain works BECAUSE he’s so bonkers evil.
    • The corollary of this is that when a book broadly strives to be ‘realistic,’ (such as Grimdark genre/the ASoIaF corner of the spectrum), having ‘unrealistically evil’ bad guys will equally stick out like a sore thumb. Having over-the-top villains in a ‘realistic’ book risks transformation into camp and silliness.
      • Example: Rita Repulsa works as a villain when contrasted against the Power Rangers. She would work as a villain against Harry Potter, or Granny Weatherwax. Hogwarts and Discworld both have cheese in their worldbuilding.
      • Rita would not work as a villain against Ned Stark, Rin or even Rand al’Thor. There’s not enough schlock in A Song of Ice and Fire, the Poppy War Trilogy, or Wheel of Time.
    • I really need to thank Scalzi and ‘Kaiju;’ this bit of insight has been bugging me for months now since I read a grimdark book which shall not be named. I can only now put it to words after reading this.

The Dark Lord of Derkholm

  • When writing a book with a strong ‘message,’ DO NOT make the whole book about the message. It gets boring fast.
    • This book excellently hid it’s message underneath layers of parody. The book was fun, and funny! Sugar makes the medicine go down.
    • It made the characters lovable on their own, so when they were faced with adversity from the ‘message’ (namely, predatory tourist practices from off-world), it made the ‘message’ seem all the more believable.
    • The book’s primary genre was ‘Chosen One Farmboy’ and ‘Parody.’ The message theming was going on in the background of every chapter, every scene, but it was subtle enough that it didn’t sound preachy.
    • In theory someone can write a book where the message is everything. But it’s hard; I’ve yet to see someone pull it off.
  • This, like Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, is a humorous setting. It uses the comedy of inverted ‘Chosen One’ tropes to tell a wonderful story while also exploring the human condition.
    • Laughter makes the medicine go down. Come for the fun, leave morally enriched.
  • Show, don’t tell
    • My strongest complaint about this book is that it needed to do more to organically introduce it’s ideas into the fabric of the story.
    • This book took a bird’s eye view of the evils of the D&D tourist parties largely, and barely went into the ground-level. It engaged at the ground level with Blade’s D&D group; I feel more of the book should have been devoted to that D&D group.

Yumi and the Nightmare Painter

  • I really liked the little moments the characters spent together in this, when the cyberpunk street artists were hanging out together in the noodle shop, chatting.
    • It made them feel like real people. I’ll miss that noodle shop, because it was a context which let the character repeatedly bounce off one another (aka exposition and character development) in low-pressure environment. More books could use this narrative mechanism.
    • The noodle shop risked being boring, due to it being low-pressure. However because Design lived there, and Design is funny, I always looked forward to the noodle shop because they were Design chapters.

The Judas Blossom

  • This book does a really, good job showing the social and political makeup of the Ilkhanate at the time of it’s formation. From a bird’s eye view, this is a masterful display of what Historical Fantasy should be. Research research research.
  • At the same time, it missed talking about the setting in much depth. The Mongolians were superb horsemen, and yet horses are not much discussed here. From a bird’s eye view, this is a great story, but up close it’s lacking in detail. Research research research.

Babel

  • Make sure you match your characters to the tone of the story you are telling.
    • This is a realistic book based on real-world events. However the antagonists are so mustache twirly evil they come off as being camp and theatrical at times. The mismatch between surreal antagonists and real setting is tonal clash.
  • Show don’t Tell, Tell don’t Show
    • A good author makes use of both showing and telling
  • Write an onion of a book
    • This is a message book. Good message books are written in such a way that the more you peel away at the book, the more layers of meaning you discover to the message. Subtext and subtlety are good for this, as are showing
  • Subtext
    • It’s okay to write blunt books with minimal intentional subtext. Just be aware that your readers will NOT be entering your book in the same mindframe as you. You might not deliberately writing the book with subtext in mind, but the reader will still engage in the subtext game and find meaning in your book.
    • Even if you write blunt books, do a subtext pass over at least once to make sure you don’t have any obvious unintended messages going on.
  • Understand your message, if you are writing a message book
    • This book backtracked on it’s message partway through. The initial message of the book was ‘The British control their colonies by puppeting the people of their colonies into doing the dirty work of oppressing people for them.’ However, the climax of the book does NOT involve the British puppetting people into being villains.
  • Research, research, research
    • At times, this book is well researched. I liked how the narrative folded the Poppy War and drug trade into the substrate of the magic system, and incorporated linguistics. Neat stuff.
    • At times, this book is poorly researched. Explore your message in the actual context of the setting of the time. This book’s use of racism seems best coded for the context of the United States in the present moment, as opposed to Britain in the 1800’s.
  • Character arcs are nice. The characters in this book all pretty much remained the same throughout.
  • I enjoyed how the character of Letty in this served to be a manifestation of historical forces. She was basically the manifestation of British middle-class acceptance of colonialism.
  • This book was very didactic (meaning preachy). It was also very long (~550pages). This combination didn’t work for me. I think it could have been didactic and short, or subtle and long. Didactic and long was a drag.
  • Understand the concept you are setting up.
    • This book’s concept was of a young half-Chinese, half-British boy caught between two worlds, with divided loyalty to both. Then the Poppy War happens between China and Britain. The story’s ultimate tension is the choice Robin must make: either China, or Britain, motherland and fatherland.
    • This concept was poorly executed upon; without going into details, he was so abused by the British that it was obvious from the start that he was going to chose the Chinese. Obvious books aren’t as fun, at least for me.

The Spear Cuts Through Water

  • Swing for the fences, and go wild.
    • This book uses 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person narration, sometime in the same scene.
    • The language the author used changes based on the setting; the 2nd person setting was drab and mundane, while the 3rd person was bright and magical.
    • This book has not one, but two frame narratives.
  • This book is a masterclass and utterly unique. I have no idea how it was written.

Daughter of Empire

  • It’s okay to make a society which wildly diverges from actual Earth society. The society in this books is deeply ritual and honor focused, to the point of being ridiculous. It works well.

Inanna

  • You can successfully modernize ancient tales. In the Legend of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh is a bloodthirsty warlord who kills whoever he wants and has sex with whoever he wants. In this alt-history, Gilgamesh is reinterpreted as being a violent warlord who is able to seduce whoever he wants

Way of Edan

  • Be consistent about using period and setting appropriate language. This book consistently used the word ‘kirtle’ to describe people’s clothing. This worked very well to consistently remind me that we were in a medieval setting, and gave the book a good texture.
  • Have a strong climax and a full arc for book 1 in your series. I gave this book 5 stars, but I fell this book didn’t have a full arc, and it might have been a bit better if it did.
  • Find clever ways to integrate magic with different aspects of your storytelling. In this case, this book has empathy magic. Due to how this magic interacts with a character’s psyche, using magic directly aids in characterization. This was very clever by the author.

Witch King

  • Link up your fantasy worldbuilding of magic with culture. For example, in this book the Immortal Blessed culture used divine magic to create magical artifacts. They view themselves as the natural rulers of the world, and consider themselves pious and just. Everyone else thinks of them as faux-rightous oppressors. This is GREAT worldbuilding, linking culture to magic to characters.
  • Avoid Narrative Friction
    • This was a dual-timeline novel, and it divvied up the timeline by going one chapter past, then the next chapter present. By switching between timelines every chapter, I felt narrative friction.
    • Narrative friction is when any aspect of a story’s mechanical narrative or structure causes a lapse in a reader’s suspension of disbelief.
    • In this book, I felt constantly on the back boot as a reader because this book alternated viewpoints so often between past and present.
    • This is because at the beginning of every chapter I had to forget all the plot and characters present in the prior chapter, and remember all the plot and characters in the other timeline. Having to do this forgetting/remembering in every other chapter was a lot of narrative busywork to force on a reader.
    • If I were to use a metaphor, consider a computer. If you want to start up a new program, you have to shut down the program you’re presently running and then begin another one. This process of shutting down and turning on takes time; that time is what I define as friction in this context.
    • I would compare this to when in an epic fantasy the narrative switches between different characters every chapter, and you have to forget/remember entirely new plot and characters.

The Will of the Many

  • Fully integrate the magic system with the theme of the book. In this case, the Roman Slavery theme is extrapolated into a magic system where aristocrats gain magic by enslaving people. This was a good example of combining the ‘message’ of a story with the worldbuilding subtext of the story. You can’t talk about this book’s magic system and not also talk about it’s culture.
  • This book does a good job of integrating ethnicity into the story. Not just because the aristocrats at the academy were prejudiced against Diago, but also when Diago and Eidhin were initially prejudiced against one another but later became friends, when it was revealed that they were from similar, but not the same, ethnicity.
  • When you adapt a setting, try to honor it. I feel this book did a great job of bringing Roman life to the page.
    • People often say ‘I want more non-medieval European fantasy.’ They’re right! But that doesn’t just translate to peeling the skin off of a medieval European fantasy novel and slapping on a skin of some other setting.
    • You need to actually go into the day-to-day life of that other setting, understand the mechanics of their society and government, and portray it reasonably faithfully. Remember that your book might be the only exposure your audience gets to that setting. Try to be a good historian and do a decent job of showing what life was actually like so your reader comes away with a reasonably accurate understanding. You are allowed to make changes, but make those changes carefully.

Eleventh Cycle

  • When writing Grimdark, remember that you can have morally good characters.
    • These characters were healers, defenders of the innocent, and yet nontheless were forced by grimdark circumstances to compromise their morality.
    • This is great writing. This book was heartbreaking when the protagonists lashed out when put under stress. And those heartbreaking moments were great to read.
    • There’s little tension in a morally bad character being forced to make morally bad decisions, but a skilled author can milk a LOT of tension out of a morally good character being forced to make morally bad decisions.
  • This book contained sexual assault. I didn’t think it was necessary.
    • Sexual assault is a tricky trope which frequently comes up in the Grimdark subgenre; some books use it well, others don’t. As a trope, it’s like a black hole in a character arc; when you include it, the entire character arc is either pulled in, or begins to orbit around it.
    • I personally feel that this book would have been better off without the trope.

A Touch of Light

  • Play your worldbuilding close to the chest. This story did that very well.
    • In short, there’s no need to explain everything which makes your setting unique. Explain the bare minimum through context clues, inferences and the like.
  • When writing a political scheming story, write your politics so they make sense in retrospect.
    • Write your book so new information can be taken away in a re-read, when you have greater context.
    • For a spoilery example, in this book there is a disease of madness spreading. In the first read-through, it’s though to be spread by a magical cult. By the end of the book, it’s revealed that the madness is an alchemical poison spread by a neighboring nation seeking to dominate the continent by causing dissent in enemy nations.
    • Reading this book the first time, I read the book at face value. The weird madness was magical in nature. When I read this book a second time, I’ll understand the madness is scientific in nature, and is the tool of conquest. The entire nature of the second-read-through is different due to this added knowledge.

Of War and Ruin

  • There are two potential methods for naming characters. You can name many characters, or few characters.
    • If you name even unimportant characters, you quickly establish a sense of depth for your setting. Characters have names suggest they have a full life as well.
    • If you name only the most important characters, then the reader can use that information to be clued into which characters are important and which aren’t.
    • Neither method is better. Both have advantages and disadvantages.
  • Tropes are good, actually. Writing a trope-y book is good because you potentially can market to a pre-existing audience. People know what they want, and you can give it to them in new ways. No need to invent a new wheel when the old wheel still works.
    • While writing, reflect common myths and legends, similar to how Gandalf has his ancestor in Odin, or Luke Skywalker’s ancestor is the Hero with a Thousand Faces. Understand where your novel/characters sit in the constellation of art going back millennia.
    • To be sure, write a different story than those which came before. But even if the melody is the same, change the dancing partners.

Of Honey and Wildfires

  • Drill down and focus on the emotionality of characters. Really stew on the emotions. That’s what this book did very good. Use vivid language to inspire empathy and catharsis in the reader. Don’t be afraid to simmer in emotions for many chapters in a row.

Echo of things to come

  • Use the 4 act format to explore a theme in microcosm, and then in macrocosm. Use the plotline of acts 1 & 2 to explore a small version of a theme, only to broaden it to a larger scale in 3 & 4.

Legacy of the Mercenary Kings

  • This series contained a metric ton of twists and plot reveals. While at times I got a little frustrated that there were so many twists, making them all hard to track, by the end of the book they mostly all paid off. The lesson is all in set-up and pay off. Foreshadowing is key.

Lost Metal

  • Don’t pull your emotional punches. If your protagonist dies after 4 novels, let me be sad. Pain is cathartic for the reader. I wasn’t sad here, and I felt no catharsis.
    • Wayne died in this book. Before he died, he resolved all his major plotlines and he also repeatedly stated that he felt unfixable guilt over the people he killed. Because Wayne both resolved those plotlines, as well as had unfixable trauma over his past, his death felt… empty, I guess.
    • There is a trope that sad, traumatized people die. Writers sometimes use this trope as a way of telling the reader “It’s okay that this character died. They were damaged, and were never going to get better.” That happened here. Authors use the trope as a way of giving permission to the reader to not grieve. I don’t really like the trope.
    • Additionally, Wayne had no lose threads going on before his death. If Wayne did have a few lose threads, his death would have left an unresolved feeling in the mind of the reader. That unresolved, niggling feeling would be more emotionally evocative for the reader.
  • I like gods to be numinous, and mysterious.

Empire of Gold

  • Less is more. If a POV character has a problem at the heart of their perspective, a problem so great as to cause suspension-of-disbelief-failures in your reader, it might be wise to include fewer chapters from their perspective instead of more.
  • Evil Queen Big Bads are fun! Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!
  • Be on the look out for promises you’ve perhaps unintentionally made to the reader, and try to fulfill those promises.
    • In this case, this series is deeply about religious conflict, zealotry, piety and faith. Religion was written deeply into this series’ worldbuilding DNA.
    • Due to the promises made by the worldbuilding DNA, I wanted comparative theology and interfaith dialogs. I wanted a discussion on the nature of God, and what it means to lose faith. Those themes never happened.

Eragon

  • Be very accurate when describing something. If you use an adjective to describe a noun, make sure that adjective is true to what you’re describing.
  • Infodump judiciously
  • Avoid Anachronisms where appropriate
  • Trope-y books are fun. If you’re writing in a sub-genre where using traditional tropes is part of what’s expected of an author, go hog-wild in using those tropes. Good artists borrow, great artists steal.

A Sorrow Named Joy

  • TENSION! Between this and ‘Legends and Lattes,’ I am now convinced that low stakes books can be high tension.
    • One way this book stimulated reader tension was by creating a mildly unnerving world which was just slightly out of key.
    • And then the author dangled a secret in front of the reader, and held off on paying off that dangling plot thread for so long that the tension just kept ramping up and ramping up and ramping up…
    • And then it paid off the tension! Right when the ramping tension was getting unbearably high, the author hit the landing by causing an argument between the characters. When the protagonist spiraled into depression after the argument, that paid off the high tension, and let the story transition into it’s next act naturally.
    • The lesson is that tension is cyclical. If you raise the tension, you need to lower it afterwards.

The Thousand Names

  • If you have a twist villain, let them have more than one function in the plot. If the twist villain does nothing plot-relevant throughout the entire novel, no one will be surprised when they suddenly become plot-relevant by being a twist villain.
  • If you have more than one protagonist, and they are all morally upstanding people in similar ways, make at least one of them have some spice to them. Maybe a fatal flaw or two wouldn’t go amiss. Like I said above, make a Venn Diagram of your characters’ personalities, and make sure there isn’t too much overlap in those diagrams.
  • When writing a genius character, don’t let them be a POV character. The closer the genius is to the lens of the narration, the more likely an author has to screw up the genius and suspend disbelief. In this case, Janus is very well done because he’s relatively obscured from the lens of the narrative.
  • Properly set up expectations. This book’s climax was a big magic fight, but there wasn’t much magic used throughout the novel. The magic fight in this felt like it came from a High Fantasy novel, while the rest of this book felt like Low Fantasy. This book needed to be High Fantasy all the way through, or Low Fantasy all the way through.

In the Shadow of Lightning

  • When you have multiple POVs, stagger high tension and low tension scenes between the perspectives, so your reader doesn’t overdose on too many high-tension or low-tension scenes in a row. THE EXCEPTION to this is at the very end of the story, when you have all the perspectives finish at a high point to make a memorable climax.
  • Lovecraftian Horror: the Lovecraftian aesthetic of being inexplicably terrifying works well as a fantasy trope, but only when it’s used to contrast an otherwise perfectly structured setting.
    • This book’s main magic system is all about chemistry and engineering. There is no room in this system for Lovecraftianism.
    • AND BECAUSE there’s no room for the Lovecraftian aesthetic in this system, is precisely why the aesthetic works so well. Lovecraftian Horror works by introducing inexplicable and disturbing factors into a well-ordered world. The contrast of Victorian tame sensibilities (in this book’s case, engineering magic) with the chaotic and strange from the colonies (the monsters.)
    • The Lovecraftian aesthetic works well here due to that contrast. It would have worked even better if the everyday world of this setting was further fleshed out, to make the setting more ordinary. What sort of breakfast do people eat? What tea do they drink? What sort of clothing do they wear? That sort of thing

Legends and Lattes

  • Low stakes can be more emotionally evocative than high stakes, so long as you handle them right. I care more about an orc’s retirement than the fate of the world, if you handle it right. Motivation matters; relying on stock motivations of ‘saving the world’ gets trite, so instead go for something smaller and more personal.
  • Found family stories rock. 

Servant Mage

  • Worldbuilding through ambiguity. I was left in the dark whether or not the restoration of the Monarchy would actually be a good thing or not. Was the Liberation justified? Clearly the Liberation went too far with the whole ‘indentured servitude of mages’ and ‘killing babies’ thing, but from what little we got it felt that the Monarchy also sucked. I enjoyed this ambiguity in this book, and would have enjoyed it even more if the author leaned into it a bit more.

Guns of the Dawn

  • If you have a midpoint twist which changes the tenor of the book’s plot and dramatically recontextualizes the book’s characterization, foreshadow it in act 1.

Never Die

  • Originality is overblown. The world building in this is like several other things I’ve read/watched on TV/video games I’ve played. And that’s fine. I enjoyed my time here, and the story used the tropes well.
  • Twist endings! Strive to foreshadow your twist ending, but hide it just enough that the reader can’t predict it. Be a stage magician who distracts with one hand while doing mundane trickery with the other, to set up the twist ending.
    • Also, this book did a good job of foreshadowing the ‘twist’ ending. I (the reader) anticipated half of the twist, but stopped guessing after I anticipated that half. The lesson here is to make part of the twist obvious enough that the reader stops looking for the other half (but be sure to foreshadow the other half! Just be sneaky about it.).
  • More on Twist endings… make sure your book is worth reading WITHOUT the twist. I enjoyed this book before I even read the twist. The twist itself was the cherry on top.
    • I’ve read some books with twist endings which I did not enjoy, until I read the twist ending which pulled the entire book together. I feel bittersweet about such books, because such books are slogs to read through until the very end when they finally get good.
    • I’d much rather read a book which is good from the first page and not a slog. And when the reader finally gets to the twist, the twist re-contextualizes the entire book and makes the story that much better.
  • In adventure party fiction, be sure to give every single adventurer at least a small plot arc/character arc. It might be hard to juggle, but it’s worth it.

In a Garden Burning Gold

  • Show your magic. Show your plot. Show the stakes. Show the tension. Don’t just tell it.
  • Use pretty prose to add a mystical edge to your magic system.
  • This book was combat and violence light. This lack of violence served it well; when the book finally did get violent, it hit all the harder due to how rare it is.
  • Siblings on opposite sides of a conflict works very well for stakes. In short, the stronger the emotional attachment between hero and villain, the better.

The Detroit Free Zone

  • I’m a sucker for books with joy and vitality despite the darkness they are set against. Hope in hopeless circumstances.
  • Have very good audiobook narration.
  • Let all your characters have distinct personalities; cheerful, despondent, stoic, reticent, determined…
    • Let their personalities leak through into their dialog, so you can always tell who’s speaking by their speech patterns
    • And let your characters change! Let them sometimes be the opposite of their core personality. If they are usually happy, let them sometimes be depressed as the plot demands.
  • Let your villains have character arcs. And even let them become heroes.

Rebel’s Creed

  • Know when to hold ’em, and know when to show ’em… about worldbuilding. Not infodumping is great! But a certain amount of infodumping can help flesh out the setting.
  • Don’t write defensively. Going back to give motivation to a character who died in a prior book doesn’t flesh out the characterization of this book, or make this book more compelling. I already got my emotional catharsis about Chapman when his story resolved with his death; going back to tell more of his story is like telling the joke after telling the punchline.

Vespertine

  • Keep the scale of your story under control. Don’t let the plot of your book scale out of hand. Focus on character arcs.

The Lost War

  • Get a good audiobook narrator. I was so-so on the ebook version of this book, but the audiobook brought the plot and characters to life.
  • If you’re going to subvert genre expectations with your book, start subverting them early so you don’t disappoint readers by making promises which you don’t ultimately fulfill.
  • Don’t rely on cliffhangers to make your book good.
  • This book’s twist ending was my favorite part of the book, which is both a good and bad thing. I truly enjoyed the ending… however I didn’t love everything up until the ending. Lesson: make reading the entire book before the twist as good as the twist.

The Poppy War Trilogy

  • Too much grimdark doesn’t work, at least for me. Soften it with some hopeful scenes.
  • Sympathetic villains can make fighting against them more enthralling.
  • Delve into unusual mythologies, and explore undertold stories.
  • I liked the malign, lovecraftian gods in this series. Don’t be afraid to take traditional tropes and invert them in new ways.

Gunmetal Gods

  • If writing alternate history fantasy, know your source material, and apply it well. Find aspects of your genre (Lovecraftian Horror) and your source material (eldritch Abrahamic angels) and combine them.

Absynthe

  • If you have multiple try-fail cycles in a row, make sure there are consequences for each failed cycle. Perhaps by using the “yes, but/no, and” technique.
  • You can stage acts around reveals of important information. This book is a conspiracy story; so the reveals of secrets worked well as act breaks.

The Hallowed Hunt

  • Show don’t tell about having a badass fighter protagonist. If you protagonist is a fighter, include fight scenes.
  • Make your various plotlines interact. This book had both a modern-day political intrigue plot, and an ancient curse plotline. They never interacted, save in the most barely touching sort-of way. It would have been better if at the climax they fully merged, so solving one solves the other.
  • In this book, the love interest character needed more agency and more personality. In the end, I felt as though she was included in this book solely to be a love interest and tool to advance the plot, and not to be her own person with her own goals and dreams.

Blood of the Chosen

  • The author uses a very good strategy of employing two protagonists who are opposed to one another for philosophical reasons. Both sides have good points behind their arguments, making the conflict between them more compelling. When they cooperate against a greater evil, it makes the cooperation feel earned.
  • Have a good idea, and implement it. In this case, the author wanted to explore the ethics of the whole ‘Jedi stealing infants’ thing from Star Wars. That worked well here.
  • Get a good audiobook narrator. This narrator was good.
  • After book 1, I was dreading the return of Kit. I personally wanted the author to write her out of the series. He didn’t write her out, and instead found a way to both stay true to her innate characterization while also making her less annoying. Lesson: the author stuck to his guns and made a character who annoyed the audience (or at least annoyed me), and made her one of my favorite characters in the book.

Cordelia’s Honor

  • Take your time to build up the romance between your characters. The first act isn’t enough.
  • Each act of your story should shake things up dramatically, either by changing the setting of your story or changing the objectives of your story. New tension and stakes in each act are advisable as well.
  • Every act should have something which upset the stakes. ‘Shards of Honor’ was a lovestory, and in every act of the story a different something could have broken up the romance. This worked well, making the lovestory feel constantly under attack.

Dragon Mage

  • This book doesn’t tread new ground genre-wise. This is a very classic Hero’s Journey. But it is nonetheless enjoyable. The moral of the story is that you can write a new version of an old story, but as long as you make it enjoyable it might find an audience.
  • Part of the reason why I enjoyed this book so much is because the protagonist reminds me of me. Having diverse characters in books is a good thing, because it lets a new audience seem themselves in their books.

Empire of the Vampire

  • This isn’t a writing lesson, but a reading one. Don’t judge a book by it’s cover. I was expecting a bad goth novel, but I thoroughly enjoyed this. The moral of the story is that I should try new things!
  • The author did a very good job of establishing weapons early on (running water, black ignis), and then using them in new, creative ways later. This felt really good to read.
  • The dueling narrative structure of ‘distant past’ and ‘recent past’ can work. It had flaws in this case- this book had a really long slow start because both timelines had slow starts- however the payoff for mingling the two timelines was fantastic and totally worth the slow start.
  • The characters are always actively doing something. There are few to none ‘talky’ chapters, where the characters sit around and make plans. Instead the heroes are constantly on the run, or fighting, discovering ancient secrets. They still make plans and talk with one another, but they do so while doing something else at the same time. This made the story feel propulsive, always moving forward.
  • de Leon was a fantastic character because he was the focus of 2 different timeline stories. I loved watching his character growth from naïve peasant to hardened holyman to excommunicated warrior who hates everything to rediscovering his faith and opening himself up to (platonic) love.

Red Rising

  • I initially didn’t care for this book’s first person, present tense storytelling. I think I would have had an easier time with it if the author had done either first person/past tense, or third person/present tense. Both put together was a bit much.
  • I didn’t like Act 3 because the themes of inter-caste conflict weren’t in the forefront in that act. This book’s best aspect was it’s inter-caste conflict. Therefore the lesson is to have you main plot/theme be present in every section of your story.
  • Eo’s death is an example of ‘fridging’ done right. Fridging is when an author kills a minor side character (usually a woman) to provide motive for the protagonist. Fridging is bad because it usually victimizes a woman with very little agency. In this case, Eo had A LOT of agency in her death. She chose to die. Because of her choice, it’s not fridging.

Sharpe’s Tiger

  • The author used a distant 3rd person writing style, sometimes falling back on head-hopping. Ordinarily this is frowned upon, but the author makes it work. Therefore, it’s okay to sometimes break the rules.
  • Unrealistic characters can be more compelling than realistic ones. Good storytelling must be compelling, above all.

Fires of Vengeance

  • I really enjoyed the narrative style of chapter 8, where the author mixed telling about the history on Osonton while moving the main plot forward.
  • When balancing antagonists, try to give them appropriate pagecounts. Odili was this book’s ‘final boss,’ but the majority of the individual fights in this book were against demons, not Odili’s Nobles.
  • This book’s great final act really pulled the novel together. I didn’t expect all the twists and turns of the final battle, which was a great on the author’s part. Goes to show that a good final act leaves the reader with a good impression.

The Song of the Shattered Sands

  • When writing a multi-book series with many POVs, it can be wise to kill off multiple important characters in the penultimate book to clear the board for the final book. This series did that well.
  • Slow corruption arcs are fun, especially over multiple books.
  • Use unique mythologies and settings. You don’t need to go back to Europe for your Fantasy.

A Master of Djinn

  • Discretion is the better part of valor. I got the feeling that the author wanted to include the scenes a)with the 9 Lords and b)the peace conference with kings and queens. The story would have been better off if those scenes were removed.
  • Establish your villains early on, and don’t leave your readers in the dark as to the motivations and plans of the bad guys. This is doubly true if your bad guy is the proactive force moving the plot to it’s climax, as was the case here. Abby wound up holding the villain ball because she wasn’t well enough thought out.
    • This is because knowing a villain’s motivations serves as foreshadowing of what is to come in the book.
  • Don’t be afraid to write combo-genre books. Steampunk+djinn=fun.
  • Always do a structural check of a story, to see if there are any obvious room for structural improvement.

The Haunting of Tram Car 015

  • Don’t be afraid of using multiple genres, like steampunk and mystery.
  • Know what message you’re trying to send, and send it. Try to integrate your message in with your plot arcs.
  • Small, compelling stakes are better than impersonal, end-of-the-world stakes.

Gideon the Ninth

  • Part of what makes something feel like it has high stakes and tension, is the possibility of negative consequences for the protagonist’s failure. Until the first body shows up, this book doesn’t present much in the way of the possibility of negative consequences for the protagonist’s failure. AKA low stakes and tension.
  • Anachronistic prose like Gideon’s dialog can be broadly popular, so long as such language has not reached market saturation (aka not too many books are written in that style). Therefore, it’s good to be somewhat adventuresome in your prose.
  • It’s better to have a single, memorable midpoint conflict than multiple tiny midpoint conflicts.
  • You can have twist villains, so long as they are sufficiently foreshadowed. But if you don’t foreshadow any villain and then have a twist villain, that villain might not work for all readers.
  • Goth-death-nuns can work. The moral of the story is don’t be afraid of having fun with your worldbuilding.

The Book of Rumi

  • Short, simple stories can be very compelling.
  • Don’t be afraid to write towards a theme or ‘moral of the story.’ Especially in short formats, it can work very well.

Unsouled

  • ‘Unsouled’ did a good job of using fascinating prose for the unique worldbuilding elements such as flower buds, strange ghosts, fruit trees, terrariums. This was a narrative tool, drawing the attention of the reader to that unique worldbuilding element, an element which would become important later. So foreshadowing, in a sense.
  • Readers find it very easy to root for an underdog protagonist, such as Lindon, in this case.

Terrier

  • When writing a mystery story, do the hard work of showing the characters following up clues and evidence.
  • Establish strong relationships between the protagonist and their surrounding characters, both their allies, enemies and side characters.
  • Own your style. Tamora Pierce is a good author in part because she honors her tropes so well.

Breach of Peace

  • I enjoyed how the narrative in this used horror tropes to instantly create tension and ask the question ‘how did this happen?’ right at the beginning of the story. I’ll try to replicate this in my own stories at some point.
  • When you write twist characters, make the characters compelling before you introduce the twist.
  • I enjoyed Khlid’s characterization. The author was unafraid to make her seem like a hypocrite. She was flawed but trying to be better- and that made the tragedy at the end all the more bitter. Good stuff.
  • Stakes are all about ‘Why should the reader care if the heroes succeed?’
  • Transitioning between one genre of story and another genre of story (in this case mystery and horror) midway through the story can work really well if it’s well foreshadowed. This book did that well.
  • When writing mystery genre stories, the solving of the mystery needs to feel earned.
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Published by scribblermendez