Mark Johnston > Recent Status Updates

I've been reading this really slowly, not because I'm not enjoying it, but because I've been doing other things.

It's definitely Wheel of Time influenced, which is not a judgement statement at all. I know my writing is heavily Tolkien/Jordan influenced as well.

Interesting characters and good world building. I think the reason it's such a successful novel beyond that is that Islington is good at slow reveals.

I LOVE The Dark Tower series and The Stand, but a lot of other King I didn't get into.

This one took a while to hook me, but I'm in now. Some connections to the tower, as always, and that's definitely part of it, but I'm also invested in the characters that (I assume) are just in this story.

Really enjoying it.

starting to pick up a bit, really digging it.

love jessyn making a certain realization, very solid scene.

reading too many books right now for school and editing my own, but this is the one I want to read.

I just spent so much time editing out any reference to second, minute, hour in my own Fantasy novel. This dude uses those time references all the time!

I should have just left them in I guess.

okay, finished reading. found a few little issues and some things I want to carry over / change in my editing of book 2.

I've updated my amazon files as well, so the ones there will match the cleaner edits I've made in a day or two.

Ugh, found an error where I used "here" instead of "hear". Fixed it, obviously, but that's a killer.

With 90,000 words, a few are bound to escape my notice, but that one hurts.

only found one little error (a instead of as)

rereading before I edit book #2 just for continuity, etc. glad to say I found no major issues to fix.

only big change I made was a line where I said something happened "right off the bat", which I looked up and is a 1800's term around baseball - makes no sense in a medieval fantasy. oops!

I am enjoying this story, but it's written really strange (?).

Every single thing is stated, and then clarified and then maybe someone else confirms what happens.

It reminds me of an Alan Gratz book where he's trying to teach kids about what the time was like and explain what certain items were, etc.

I dunno, I'm finding it really strange to read, like I'm being fed the story.