Bump. Reminder to get to posting in here this weekend.
Not really sure where to begin. I never read an epic fantasy novel before (aside from bits and pieces of LOTR). But, anyway, didn’t think a fantasy novel could pierce through my heart the way this book did. Lots of insight and introspection.
I know others have said here that the first chapters were dizzy-making. Perhaps this is true, but I didn’t notice. Whether this was the Author’s intent or not, certain lines in the beginning chapters just leaped out the page, and led me into deep contemplation – things about God and death and suffering and sin and hope and salvation and love and justice.
I don’t even know if I get the main thrust of the book. There are lots of themes to draw out from it. But, there were things that really spoke to me personally. For e.g. I was almost completely knocked over by this in one of the early chapters:
It would be good if Valerie was still here to discuss. P.S it’s hard to want to smack Portunista when I identify so much with her.
I would have to go through my journal/reflections, and expand more later (though most of it is probably too personal 
)
One of these days I’ll get around to reading your book, Jason, one of these days 
yes me too. have a kindle now so easier to read. hate reading lots of text on shiny screens but now I have a kindle it is better.
am stuck in the wheel of time though at the moment…
CL, Yes, I’m a big fan of RJ’s WoT, too! – and can sympathize about being “stuck in it”, since the middle books can get rather sloggy (especially Crossroads of Twilight where literally nothing important happens until the last few pages of the book. 
) RJ, and then RJ + Sanderson (after RJ died) pick back up substantially in the final four books, fortunately – I like Knife of Dreams through Towers of Midnight as much as any of the earlier books up through The Fires of Heaven (though I’d still rank that one second place overall), and the last book Memories of the Light is my favorite of the whole series.
[tag]Alex Smith[/tag], [tag]Cindy Skillman[/tag], and [tag]SLJ[/tag] have certainly read CoJ (and even some of the sequel material!), and may want to chime in with their thoughts (and questions). I think some other forum members have, too, but I’m fuzzier about who exactly. I’ll tag [tag]Valerie-wa[/tag] for you CH, and see if she’s where you can discuss some things (maybe privately with you – I think y’all would get along very well. (She’s James Goetz’ daughter; I don’t know whether James has read the book though.)
CH, you asked me some general questions by pmail a few days back – would you like me to answer them here? I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t (they aren’t personally sensitive and don’t even feature story spoilers), but I was waiting until you commented here to see if you’d re-ask them again or otherwise signaled that you’re okay with a public reply. 
I’m super-pleased with the compliments, and with how much the book meant to you, in any case. 
One of my best friends, Marie Brennan, who grew up with me as a baby author (so to speak) and helped edit the early chapters into something actually readable (I thank her for that in the acknowledgments you might have noticed), used to say trying to edit the book was like trying to lift a truck with one hand because “it has all these themes!” I’m pretty sure she was being complimentary. 
(Also, she’s on the short list of finalists this year for the World Fantasy Award for the first but hopefully not the last time, along with authors like Neil Gaiman, which she’s naturally super-stoked about, and for which I’m equally proud for my little author-sister. I might as well gratefully plug her work while I’m at it. She’s written a ton of short stories and many well-received novels so far, but the book for which she’s in the running this year is A Natural History of Dragons; with The Tropic of Serpentsalready released this year a few months ago. The third book of five in this series will arrive next spring, and the cover has already been released: )Voyage of the Basilisk. I know she’s especially happy about her success on this because these stories, though not her first completed novels, were her first attempts at novels back in high school. Go little author-sister, goooo! Okay, quasi-nepotistic commercial break over now. 
)
As to the main thrust of the book… don’t feel bad, it has several main thrusts. 
I’m not at all sure I could name them all myself – I watch out for concepts as I move through the plot, and try to bring various things out in an interrelated way. To give a more trivial example, I sort of dared myself to make the goofy milieu of the Blood Bowl turn-based fantasy-rugby strategy game more meaningful recently, and drafted up a narrative After Action Report for the wargaming forum Grogheads as a result. (Note that by its topic, it tends to be a little saucier than CoJ – I’m writing about someone building up and managing a team of women dressed in feathery bikinis after all. ) So my point is that I would do this with any fiction I might be writing.
Still, you know. Death hurts but everyone has to deal with it. Bad things happen to good people. Bad people can be good people, and good people can be bad people. Competition and domination are natural behaviors but at what cost to people as persons? What is morality? How does pride naturally respond to that which it perceives as greater than itself? Is any kind of pride healthy, and is the dissolution of personhood the only alternative to competition and domination? Are there differences between joy and pleasure? What does it mean for people to be abused, or is there any such thing as abuse of persons? Can morality make any sense at all, even if God is admitted to exist? – and what if God’s existence is denied? – does that denial make things worse or better? Would God only be the worst of tyrants?
And a whole bunch of other concepts. Is there such a thing as true love? What can justice even mean? Etc.
Jason-
I have to run, but, yes! Go ahead and answer those questions here. (I had just assumed that since they didn’t have much to do with actually discussing the content of the book, the questions weren’t relevant enough to be posted in this thread).
I’m unsure from what you’ve said how far you’ve gotten, so I’ll try to avoid spoilers.
The Preface Author is a character I created back around 1980 or maybe a little before (9 or 10 years old), though I’ve upgraded him somewhat over time. 
His unnamed wife goes back to 85 or maybe 89, I don’t remember exactly. Jian’s character dates back to around the same time, though I didn’t name him until I started working on CoJ (late 2000).
Portunista’s story started as a short story idea extended from another short story idea (both in early / mid 2000) which didn’t feature her but featured three other characters including her husband and son. I invented her after writing their little story – neither of those stories shows up in CoJ, by the way. One will be part of the ending of Book 3, one will be part of the ending of Book 6.
I had been kicking around the idea of working up a multi-book series synthesizing together a bunch of stories I had been working on since the 80s, but I didn’t have a clear beginning yet, so after writing those two short stories and thinking they had some merit as novel material I tested using it as a way to get into the PA’s story and realized I could fit them in quite well.
Then however I ran into a very big problem, with nothing but a clunky solution (after many years thinking about it and looking for another way): the PA had to be introduced as early as possible so that I wouldn’t be pulling his character out of nowhere late in the series. Considering his suite of abilities, I figured the most plausible solution would be for him to be researching the past history of Mikon to try to figure out how things went so far wrong, and to explain to his wife what happened so she wouldn’t entirely freak at hearing the explanation for his recent absence and why he’s so upset. So he has gone back to Portunista’s origin story and is starting there.
Ideally I would have preferred not to use a fictional author (much moreso three other subauthors) as the narrator, but I’m making the best of it that I can. 
Having introduced the concept and established it solidly, I can (usually) proceed with a more typical narrative form and only call attention back to the PA and the subauthors (Seifas, 'ista, and Khase) when that seems like it helps the story somehow.
I had been reading several of Lewis’ medieval studies (including his entry for the Oxford History of English Language, on 16th century prose works), and somehow got the observation that as fond as they were of Biblical analogies (and allegories), and as fond as they were of the enchantress/paladin paradigm, they had never apparently thought to put both of them together.
Normally, the enchantress is only a speedbump in the story of the paladin. Several influential modern fantasy authors had already reworked the paradigm so that, in effect, the enchantress is the heroine and the paladin is an adjunct (and maybe only a speedbump) of her story. That’s a fine reversal of the trope, but I thought it would be an interesting challenge to go back to the original concept yet still from the side of the enchantress who isn’t all that heroic, and can be rather outright evil sometimes. Why does she do what she does? – how does the paladin affect her when he intersects her story? It didn’t take long playing with that idea before I started seeing convergences with the Bible’s story of Israel, especially as retold by the Prophets of the Tanahk (what we Christians call the Old Testament) in critique of Israel. Even though she isn’t the most important character, she has been chosen by God to be the heroine of the story – but she starts off more than half weak and more than half bad! – but precisely because of that Israel represents all humanity.
That’s the underlying concept, but I didn’t want to write a mere cut-and-paste analogy of the story of Israel, so I just kept the themes and used those as a basis for exploring the classic enchantress/paladin concept from the viewpoint of the enchantress.
Obviously I have a ton of other things going on – to pull a somewhat minor random example, Khase Sage provides several story functions while playing with a combination of folk anthropology and ancient histiographic methods. But I call the first three books The Penitent Empress Trilogy for a reason. She’ll be important in the next trilogy, too, and to some extent out through the end of the whole story, but she’s certainly the main character of the first three books.
I usually preplot things in my head for a while (sometimes for a VERY LONG while), and then sit down one afternoon and start working my way through the plot points. Nowadays I build in a varying rhythmical scansion as I go, which helps keep the wordcount down while pulling the reader along and adding a bit of an alien or foreign flavor; my original drafts of Book 1 (and Book 2) didn’t have that, but during my largest trimming edit I reduced the wordcount from 206 thousand to 174 thousand that way! (Book 2 clocks in at 136Kwords by the way; Book 3 looks like it’ll be as long as the first two put together, but it’s the grand finale to the first big story arc: lots of action and plot resolution.)
So I’ll sit down and look at my list of Things To Get Done Next, and if I already know an action scene is coming I’ll spend time working that out several ways – though sometimes I’ll feel like adding some action on the fly as I go, but only if it brings out some meaning. I love writing action / combat sequences, but I hate writing meaningless action scenes. (My biggest problem with writing the aforementioned recent Blood Bowl AAR is trying to keep enough description of the gameplay to make it a genuine AAR while making the action meaningful. Which inherently, it usually isn’t, it’s just a game using the animated version of little pewter statues; it’s no more meaningful than chess.)
But otherwise, if no action is coming up, I’ll just kind of work out how the various characters would think about what’s happening, and look for themes to play with along the way if I can, and put them through their paces. I try not to get caught up trying to describe everything visually, but I worry I don’t describe things enough sometimes – that’s a fine line any narrative author has trouble walking. One of the narrative cats to juggle, is remembering to think about what the Preface Author might think about what’s happening, in case that seems important to him as a character, or to provide a handy transition or a little extra information about the situation which he can see but they can’t. Relatedly, with three subauthor characters which of them might have something to add in a little personal commentary about what’s happening? – that way I can sometimes signal which text the PA is following the lead of himself at the moment. Nowadays I go ahead and build the rhythmical scansion in as I go, and do a bit of quick pre-editing polish to tighten that up as well.
Every once in a while I’ll ask myself if I’m getting bored writing a sequence; and if so then I look for ways to either ditch it and try something else, or to spice up what’s happening. But I expect it would be very boring for someone else to watch me ‘composing’, even if they would otherwise find the result exciting or at least interesting!
I enjoyed reading CoJ a few months ago & am now enjoying the sequel - about 1/3 of the way through it
Thanks, Jason, for taking the time to write such detailed answers to my questions. I will try to be back in here on Sunday, (or later this week), and will edit with a more worthy response.
[tag]JasonPratt[/tag] last night I finished reading Edge of Justice (the sequel to Cry of Justice)! I enjoyed it, although there are some dark moments in it. Eager to read the next one… how’s it coming along?
Alex,
thanks! Yeah, darker than the 1st book for sure.
Book 3, currently titled Song of Justice, is about 2/3 done so far as I can tell – I’ve written up to near the beginning of all the plot resolution scenes, with the Macro-Fight Sequence on the horizon and soon to kick off.
But I stopped there, because I didn’t foresee being able to publish Books 2 and 3 in a respectable format anytime soon, so I might as well spend my time and energy doing other things like a new forum I was invited to be a guest author and admin at.
My current draft copy of SoJ has several spoiler-note reminders of where I’m preplanning the plot to go, but I’ll pm you a non-spoilery pdf of the plot up to the point where it’s solidly set. That’s about 96% long as CoJ in itself, so you’ll still have plenty of plot development material and several action sequences (already more than in EoJ if I recall correctly) including a Micro-Macro-Fight Sequence.
It isn’t as dark as EoJ overall, but still darker than CoJ. After the “sharp cliff” incident, things can’t just go right back to ‘normal’; and the villainous threat level is at a high watermark. So, more Arty (and his lieutenants Noth and Alt), more Bomas (and his renegade juacuara especially Isililo), more of all six of the Cabal (not just Traught but also Atroza, Gaignun, Char, Baladon, and Saprona), more Annarth, and more of one or two or three villains who have been working secretly in the background for a while in various ways and who may or may not continue doing so in similar or different ways… (You’ll have heard the name of one of them before from EoJ in passing.) And more Yanziska, if he counts as a villain or not. And more of Atroza’s furias. And the reveal of Gaignun’s equidonts. And, um, Portunista, duh, since at this point she basically counts as a villain protagonist. 
So yeah, time to thin out the cast! – copious butt-kicking of the unrighteous must accrue!! http://www.wargamer.com/forums/smiley/danceRoman.gif
Cool thanks!! Sent it to my Kindle for reading 
Remembering all the names can be a challenge I find
^^ Do you need a plot / character recap doc? I do my best to help catch readers up as I go without being simply redundant (and while keeping in mind the fictional reader of all this, the PA’s wife, wouldn’t need a catchup accounting of the characters and situations since he expects she’ll be able to read the whole huge work in an hour! 
– that’s one of several clues they’re far from normal people. 
)
[Mod note: this and several subsequent posts were ported over from a prior thread on the question of whether [url=https://forum.evangelicaluniversalist.com/t/is-accepting-jesus-a-sufficient-condition-of-being-saved/4972/1]accepting Jesus is a sufficient condition of being saved. ]
Thanks for the clarification, Jason.
And, great you mentioned CoJ, and “Portunista” (which I have nicknamed myself). CoJ, and this character specifically, has been one of major things in my life, presently, that has helped to change my attitude and perspective to one of letting go of resentment, and taking personal responsibility for myself and my actions.
Naturally you might not want to talk about a lot of that openly, 'ista. But Sonia and Cindy have both read pretty far if you want some motherly-hearted women to talk to about what you’re getting out of that book. (Very possibly I wouldn’t be appropriate myself! – but if you thought so, you could pm me about whatever you wanted to talk about. No pressure.)
Interestingly, I don’t really conceive of Portunista as someone who has trouble taking responsibility for her actions – on the contrary she’s so strong in that regard (which isn’t inherently a bad thing) that one of her besetting temptations is to pervert that responsibility into tyranny and resentment, over against the responsibility of other people, and treating their active responsibilities as being essentially a competitive threat to her.
Which by no coincidence, is typically how the demons operate and think of active responsibility, too. (And Artabanus. And Bomas in a somewhat different way.)
The characters who have trouble taking serious responsibility for their actions are Gaekwar and Seifas, each in somewhat different ways. Gaekwar has fine intuitions about justice, but uses his pain as an excuse to avoid accepting as much personal responsibility as possible. Paradoxically, that means he has to exercise some personal responsibility as a commander (which he’s fairly talented at) in order to avoid being saddled with all kinds of responsibility as a minor soldier! (Plus obviously he comes from a wealthy and privileged background despite his chosen nomme de guerre, or however the French spell it. He isn’t about to just give up the best standard of living possible in a situation. I’ll be putting that more to the test in Book 4.)
Seifas has painfully strong notions of personal responsibility, and doesn’t realize yet how hard he tries to dodge personal responsibility to protect himself from the pain of responsibility. That’s going to result in a tragedy soon. (After which his natural temptation will be to leap off that horse on the other side. Again, on plan for Book 4.)
What Portunista does need to learn about insisting on her rights and responsibilities, is that other people are affected by her responsibilities – which she already knows, because she intentionally tries to affect other people in her favor – in ways which she wouldn’t want to be affected herself. Which she also kind-of knows, but at the moment she thinks of that as being a reason to competitively protect herself. Do unto others before they do unto you. She starts to learn a little sympathy for people who pay for her choices in CoJ, but she has a long way to go on that, especially after hardening her heart again against being hurt again at the end (of the main narrative in CoJ, not her contemplations several years later.)
I hope that doesn’t cause problems with relating to her for purposes of your own positive growth; but I thought I ought to head off a potential problem at the pass: there are truly horrible ways to insist on personal responsibility, too.
Though you’re quite right if what you mean is that she shirks moral responsibility! – but she shirks that as a factor of what she sees as competing personal responsibilities trying to enslave her. She intentionally misreads one kind of threat (the glorious kind) as the other kind of threat (the horrible kind that legitimately ought to be fought – but not by turning into the horrible kind of threat herself! 
)
Well, I could type out thematics all night. 
Yes, I agree. And, I see that I didn’t make myself clear. What I meant, is that I was inspired by her (though she has her downfalls). Actually, the view of women portrayed in the book was very different and inspiring. At first, I had some trouble with it. I think I had a very warped view of women in leadership roles before reading CoJ… so that was particularly challenging at first.
Now, I did resonate with Seifas’ irresponsibility and the desire to protect himself from the pain of taking on that responsibility. At the same time, I felt I was able to identify with Portunista’s lack of sympathy for others affected by her choices and some what manipulative tendencies. I think I see myself as a spilt between Portunista and Seifas, although, that might be hard to imagine. I certainly won’t come across “Portunita-like” to other people, but, trust me, we have lots in common
Additionally, many of the themes in the book - particularly love & justice - really shattered other broken/distorted views I had, and re-inforced/cemented/complemented concepts about L&J I was already beginning to see. (If you remember, I had a specific thread here on the topic of love, where I was sharing new personal insights). Acquiring a new perspective of Love, has probably been the biggest paradigm shift I have experienced in my life thus far).
But, anyway, there is a thread here where I could and ought to post more, but, I admit I have been hesitant. I’ve read the book, and, I have started over. My nephew and I read a few pages each night (though, some times I have to let him skip over bulks of it).
Well, yes, I can imagine several chapters he should be kept away from for a while…
Yes, we seem to have taken over the thread in our own pocket conversation… I can try porting relevant posts back over to the other thread…?
Hm! Personally I worry that people will come away thinking that I mean women shouldn’t be in leadership roles because they’ll mess them up horribly; there is plenty of evidence to the contrary in CoJ but it tends to be muffled by 'ista (the main protagonist and the woman with 90% of the attention and dialogue) being often villainous, even though not nearly so much as the three leading men she’s opposing! But I don’t mean women would be inherently less evil as evil leaders than men either, of course. 
(Though Praxi-Gamin, Bomas, and Arty, all represent ways she could potentially go much farther into villainy.)
I really don’t have anything to say about women as women being leaders, other than that they can be good and bad leaders just like men. Bad leaders shouldn’t lead, or should work at getting morally better, regardless of their gender. That’s stunningly unoriginal, but I suppose it can answer radicals on either side who think only men should lead because they’re men, or who think women would always be better leaders because they’re women and not men. 
I suppose there’s possibly a difference between being a competent leader and being a good leader . . . and it sounds like you’re talking about people being moral and competent leaders as opposed to being merely competent leaders. ‘Ista takes care of and cares about her people for all her moral failings in other directions. Not as much as Jian would have her care, but certainly better in any case than the other leaders in the story. Much better than Lewis’ Jadis (queen of Charn), who sees her people as mere objects to obtain her desires and not really as people at all. I really think that Portunista is probably better than the nation she portrays was toward the more vulnerable members of her group, and better later than she was earlier. But it’s been a bit since I read the first book and maybe I’m forgetting some things or misinterpreting some things.
Then you might argue that there’s no indication that Jadis leads her people at all. She merely has the power to exploit them. To be a truly competent leader, maybe you have to be at least a good enough person to care about your people in general (if only for logistical reasons). Or at the very minimum, to care about those in your inner circle – those who make things happen for you. Just throwing this out there . . . not sure what I’m aiming at here, just musing on the whole leadership thing.
True, yes I meant morally good not competently good – though an incompetent but moral leader will have their own problems. (Seifas: painfully moral, rubbish so far as a leader. )
It would be an interesting project to go back and check to what extent Portunista cared about her people before Jian shows up and leavens things for a whole seasonal sloping (the Mikonese equivalent of a month, or 40 days). One of my ideas was that Portunista had gone as far as she could as a leader without significantly growing, and naturally in her mind ‘growing’ meant ‘finding some way to get personally more powerful’.
I don’t think I ever explicitly thought, however, about the degree to which 'ista cared for her people vs. them being a means to her advancement.
I did explicitly think a lot about the latter. In the future she’s awfully harsh about her intentions, and in the Macro Fight Sequence before she figures out how to activate the mass defense system she comes to criticize her previous attitude toward her troops which, as described, falls hard into what we might call Jadis territory. BUT – on the other hand she deserves credit for gathering together enough troops and civilian support to form a small brigade of four companies. They may be dispirited when Jian shows up, and I meant that to be largely thanks to her attitude – 30+ years later the archery sergeant and Kris Vivitar talk about how she often seemed like a Rogue up there in her command tent scheming to get ahead, but they wanted her to be better than that. Similarly, a significant part of Seifas’ initial depression is due to his disappointment over Portunista not being a proper replacement for his vanished Matron Cami; a disappointment she was actively fostering in order to undermine his moral principles in a despairing way so that she could still make use of his combat abilities without worrying so much about whether he would stage a coup or flat out assassinate her for not living up to his moral expectations. (Not incidentally, she starts running a similar plan against Jian in Book 2!)
Even so, the troops weren’t staying around out of fear of leaving her, unlike with Arty, Praxi, or even Gemalfan. So she had to be not only competently leading them (like Arty), but also caring for them to some significant degree that they could detect and appreciate.
Part of the narrative design is that by having earned greater loyalty from them by caring more morally for them, her resolution at the end of CoJ to protect herself at the expense of accepting Jian – who by now is effectively accepted by the people as their representative at command level – puts her on a collision course against her own people by proportion. (This is obviously one of many points where the analogy of 'ista == Israel breaks down, but then again I’m not writing an allegory so there. On the other hand, the leadership of Israel damn well meant to be regarded as Israel, for better or for worse, so maybe the analogy still fits. )