Karen Miller finishes The Reluctant Mage
Australian fantasy author Karen Miller has finished The Reluctant Mage, the next book in her Fisherman’s Children series, which is the continuation of her Kingmaker, Kingbreaker series commenced with The Innocent Mage.
“Shit. I did it. I can’t believe it,” wrote Miller on her LiveJournal page this week. “Well, you know, not done done. It’s up for a rewrite next, after I’ve rewritten Siege. But it’s done, it’s a book, it’s a lot of words with more to come. It’ll end up about the same length or a smidgin longer than Prodigal Mage. But that story is told now. And I think I’m reasonably happy.”
Miller said she had written five novels this year. She noted there were times she had “seriously doubted” she could do it. And she has another two to rewrite before 2010 kicks off. “That’s not a problem. Rewriting is playtime. Rewriting is the reward for the utter agony that is the first draft,” she said.
The Reluctant Mage clocked in at 131,909 words. The book is slated to be published in 2010.
The achievement was celebrated by fans on her site. “Congratulations on reaching the end!” wrote one. “Your determination and output are utterly inspiring (and quite scary at the same time). Hope you manage to get a decent rest now before starting on those rewrites.”
Commentary
Keeping the Door handed Miller a fairly negative review of her last book, The Prodigal Mage. At the time, we wrote:
“The book is a monument to one of the most tempting traps that an author can fall into: to focus so heavily on developing their characters and their interactions that they neglect to situate those characters in an interesting and complex world and with a plot that gradually reveals its twists and turns.”
There are arguments on both sides about Miller’s work. After posting the review, we received several comments from readers that expressed how much they loved The Prodigal Mage. “I loved the Prodigal Mage and while there isn’t as much action in this book as in the others to me it is a taster of things to come,” wrote one.
Other reviewers, such as The Mad Hatter, have described the book as a “fantastic read overall”.
But I have been following Miller’s LiveJournal posts updating fans with her progress on The Reluctant Mage over the past couple of months, and I feel they have given me some insight into what one of the problems might be with Miller’s style.
That problem seems to be that she writes so goddamn fast!
It was only on November 12 (4 days ago) that Miller still had some 30,000 words to write on The Reluctant Mage. Three days later, she had finished the book.
Something about that just strikes me as wrong. 30,000 words … in three days? That’s 10,000 words a day! Even assuming that Miller had done all the planning in the world before the commencement of writing The Reluctant Mage, that is still a phenomenal amount per day.
The reason I know this, is that as a professional journalist I have often been called upon to write a lot of copy per day. But even on my most hectic, insane, 10 hour days, I couldn’t write more than about 4,000 words per day. Nobody in our office could. The fact that Miller is doing so makes me really wonder if it is truly quality writing that she is putting out, or whether she is racing through the writing process too fast, without stopping to consider it all.
Article by Renai LeMay
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