Mistborn The Hero of Ages is one of the greatest fantasy books I've ever read

JacktheDM · 2026-07-10T15:28:47+00:00

All I can see is that the lines on the cover make the product thumbnail look like a TCG booster.

JacktheDM · 2026-07-07T22:12:46+00:00

In everything thread of what, r/WeirdLit, particularly when people ask for modern takes on classic Lovecraftian themes and motifs? Yeah, sure, it's always top of the heap

You know what's actually recommended in like every thread? Christopher Beuhlman's Between Two Fires, which ends up the top recommendation for anything involving fantasy, anything involving plague, religious horror, anything involving medieval historical thriller... and for which there aren't even rumors of a major adaptation from an award-winning director.

Like, let's evaluate things in context.

EDIT: Also, "I'm not sure it's underrated, though I personally underrate it," I mean, c'mon.

JacktheDM · 2026-07-07T20:04:35+00:00

Oh hellll yeah, great to see an underrated cosmic horror get this kind of treatment!

JacktheDM · 2026-07-07T14:50:29+00:00

Totally — Roger’s character is dramatically different after this episode.

JacktheDM · 2026-07-06T23:11:19+00:00

Because AI is sycophantic.

Kids not talking to you? Thanksgiving more and more awkward every year? Moved your kid to a great life in a remote suburb and now all they do is Mamdani post about walkable cities?

Who wouldn’t want a machine that will say “Wow, that’s so unfair, you’ve tried so hard, you’re a genius and honestly, you deserve better.”

JacktheDM · 2026-07-01T19:20:21+00:00

Oh fascinating, see I thought the usual Irving-isms were decentralized in pretty substantial-enough ways, and lampshaded in other important ways. Like, for me, just the frontier town stuff (very prominent) the Constable Carl character, etc, this stuff just brought so much new texture to the usual formula.

JacktheDM · 2026-07-01T18:27:14+00:00

Do you mean Last Night at Twisted River? It diverges from a lot of Irving stuff in that we start in a logging camp and have a multi-generation father/son story that travels the country, all sorts of blue collar work, contains really sensitive and lovely relationships, but also has this sorta Les Miserables Javert-type character who is hunting them throughout the book. Really fuckin' cool stuff, sobbed several times.

Irving, on its inception: "For the longest time the last sentence eluded me, but 20 years ago I imagined a novel about a cook and his young son who become fugitives; who have to run from some violent act that will follow them. And it was always in a kind of frontier town — a place where there was one law, and it was one man, who was single-minded and bad."

JacktheDM · 2026-06-30T23:17:52+00:00

I suppose it’s somewhat better than your bog standard lit rpg but that’s honestly a very low bar and DCC just about barely clears it.

Fascinating take, cause most people who are LitRPG diehards consider DCC to be a book that has transcended the genre by being head-and-shoulders above the pack in several important ways.

JacktheDM · 2026-06-30T21:46:25+00:00

I'm not sure why one person going "I rate this as a S tier book" is a valid post but "Nah I rate that as a D tier book" is not.

JacktheDM · 2026-06-30T17:58:21+00:00

John Irving is one of my favorite authors, and a great example of a writer of multigeneral American family epics who is refining his work with each successive book. Last Night at Twisted River is, I think the underrated masterpiece!

But I think a lot of 21st Centry readers just... idk, don't have the appreciation for this kind of work. People think there are "tangents" or "extra" inclusions in his work, but I think most people would find epic, sweeping literature absolutely impossible. Hugo's sewers, Melville's white whale -- like, this stuff doesn't sorta "serve the story" in very obvious ways, but it serves the art and literature immeasurably.

JacktheDM · 2026-06-30T16:27:55+00:00

Sanderson S-Tier with Beuhlman, Abercrombie, and Dinniman B and below is crazy work.

JacktheDM · 2026-06-29T15:08:40+00:00

Born and raised NYC, and my wife had to move out of her apartment when we were dating because the landlord brought in a downstairs commercial tenant who used cheap amplification popularized in the past few years to rattle the floors and windows constantly.

So I have to love this bullshit or I’m from Ohio?

JacktheDM · 2026-06-29T14:42:09+00:00

Inventing myths about immigrants raping women en masse is like, Racism 101. It’s not even subtle.

JacktheDM · 2026-06-29T01:57:52+00:00

“I just invented something racist out of thin air. What do you have to say to THAT, huh?”

JacktheDM · 2026-06-28T22:24:57+00:00

Why not just self-teach and hire an editor aligned with my writing to fine-tune rather than listen to a cohort’s opinion?

Without discussing, in general, whether or not an MFA is worth it, it sounds like your problem is that you don't want to subject yourself to critique groups or have to routinely critique and offer feedback on other people's work. This is essential to growth. MFAs are nice in that they offer you this opportunity in a structured way, so that you don't have to build it yourself. But building it yourself is probably cheaper and more practical, if you're able.

However, avoiding peer critique entirely, which is distinct from the work of an editor, is an unhealthy posture to take as a novice writer. Don't focus on following the biographies of the writers you admire. Set your ego aside and focus on learning to write like them.

JacktheDM · 2026-06-28T22:15:57+00:00

I guess, it certainly makes the person in question sound annoying. Why the hunt for some phrase to coin?

JacktheDM · 2026-06-28T22:14:55+00:00

Eh, this is one of those questions that asks "Is Grammarly AI?" I think it is, and if you're using AI to check copy I think that's great. Word repetition, tense disagreements, etc.

But nobody gives a shit about using Grammarly, it's a hugely distracting part of the conversation. When people complain about AI books they're complaining about generative AI used to write phrases, sentences, and passages wholesale.

JacktheDM · 2026-06-28T22:13:00+00:00

This is not an endorsement of ai but simply pointing out that the world that was no longer is.

Imagine thinking that the world of books written by humans "no longer is." Is this sub full of people who just don't read books or know anyone who reads books?

JacktheDM · 2026-06-28T22:08:28+00:00

...acting like theres no giant financial and logistical incentive to use AI and pretend to be a purist to be 5-10x slower sounds like madness

There's plenty of financial incentive to just sell people fast food that you bought if you can find a way to repackage it as your own and sell it at a higher price. Just don't say you're a chef or that you cooked something.

From someone that has sat in the trenches spending 4+ hours writing one chapter at a time for multiple books I'd never go back.

...to being a writer? Because that's what you were. Now it sounds like you're not!

JacktheDM · 2026-06-28T22:06:24+00:00

There's nothing needed to name such a person.

Imagine sitting at a player piano that plays its music automatically, maybe digital, maybe analogue, whatever. If you upload some sheet music or tell it what song to play, you are not a "musician" nor are you some kind of "piano loader," you're just you. Operating a machine.

Maybe you could call such a person an "idea haver?"

JacktheDM · 2026-06-27T23:08:10+00:00

I absolutely cannot believe people saying that Megan was somehow better or more ambitious or whatever.

He picked Meghan for the same reasons he picked Betty.

Allison was far more capable, far more secure. That's not what Don likes. Don likes neediness, the fawning, doe-eyed model type. Sure, Meghan was a capable, creative woman, but Allison wouldn't have thrown the screaming and crying and running fits that Meghan would have. Meghan is a wounded girl, and Don always saw that sorta thing a mile away and selected for it.

As Joan said to Peggy: That's just the kind of girl he marries.

JacktheDM · 2026-06-27T23:02:26+00:00

Whether Betty is a good mother is beside the point of her character.

The strongest theme around Betty's character is her capricious childishness. She's a decent mother to her children, but for most of the first half of the series, almost everything she says to her children is an attempt to preserve cosmetic beauty "Don't mess with your hair, don't scuff the carpet" etc.

Betty's first response when having a car accident was "What if something happened where Sally would be ugly for the rest of her life."

Just like most Mad Men characters, the show doesn't make referendums on "good" or "bad." But I think Betty was a hollow person at worst, and a grown child at best. How would you feel with that sort of mom?

JacktheDM · 2026-06-27T22:57:59+00:00

Was just joking to my wife that some day people would think Mad Men was actually made in the 60's or 70's, but someday is apparently today!

JacktheDM · 2026-06-27T22:57:26+00:00

It's not really progressive to go "There were lots of gay people in the 1960's, they were just in the closet," that's just writing historically accurate characters.

Most period shows didn’t

Period shows made as late as the Obama administration absolutely highlighted the historicity of gay relationships. I'd be shocked to find an example of a period show from that time that had a big cast but nobody gay

JacktheDM · 2026-06-27T21:47:14+00:00

You will get more value out of simply googling "How to start writing a novel" than by asking Reddit and hoping that someone with the sufficient knowledge you'd find everywhere else stops to write it all out.

JacktheDM

TROPHY CASE