SPOILERS==Shadow of Victory Comments, Queries and Opinions

fallsfromtrees wrote:I'm going to quote Emerson here
" A foolish regard for consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds". Let him call it what he will, just call it that quickly (The posited April 2018 date seems awfully far away).

Louis R wrote:I can only see one workable option: as soon as the draft is done, post it here [complete, no slippery edits!] and hold a title contest. Disqualify cthia d'office, and get, say, Duckk and Drak to weed out the fluff [i'm all in favour of puns, but _bad_ puns should be reserved for Xanth titles], and you should have a nice set of strong choices to pick from. The winner gets to be the next superhuman Big Bad whacked by Bahzell & Co. Or Alicia DeVries next would-be Evil Overlord, if you prefer.

runsforcelery wrote:
That is the current game plan. Exactly how I'll find a title with "Honor" that works is a bit more problematic.
Using her first name somewhere in every other book seemed like such a good idea . . . when I thought there'd be only six or seven of them.

Annachie wrote:"Honor majesties secret service"?

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munroburton wrote:
...

1 On Basilisk Station
2 The Honor of the Queen
3 The Short Victorious War
4 Field of Dishonor
5 Flag in Exile
6 Honor Among Enemies
7 In Enemy Hands
8 Echoes of Honor
9 Ashes of Victory
10 War of Honor
11 At All Costs
12 Mission of Honor
13 A Rising Thunder

I trust that makes the pattern easier to detect.

SoV clearly isn't a mainline Honor novel, whatever Wiki, Amazon, etc.. says. It belongs with the rest of the Shadow books.

jgnfld wrote:Forgive me for saying this, as I have loved David's work (well except for Out of the Dark) for so many years now. But having just read the book I simply have to come out and say it: I am at a complete loss to know how to feel when well over 300K words advance a plot not so much as a full day and still leaves lose ends galore just hanging around. At the moment I am utterly appalled.

Maybe that feeling will change, I don't know.

runsforcelery wrote:To be completely honest, I don't know what Baen had up about the book. I do know that we'd discussed it and I think they probably did expect it to move beyond the point at which it stopped. The problem is that I did, too, when I started, but I discovered that it can't (and I mean that literally) move past that point before I can get back to Honor's direct participation, and the events that got structured into Cauldron (and which there was no time to unstructure) mean that it (literally) can't get everyone else into the positions they need to be in to do that.

The story is spread over a vast distance, but that's not the real problem. The real problem is that Cauldron threw a huge spanner into the works. Don't get me wrong. I think Cauldron turned into a very strong book and I like it a lot, but there simply wasn't time on the writing side to work out a way to avoid the chronology issues before the book had to go to press.

That problem got put on steroids when I hit the schedule glitch from hell this year. I actually finished the initial draft of SOV in February, but it had some issues (mostly not the ones it's being castigated for at this point) that meant it wasn't the final rough, if you take my meaning. Unfortunately, I then had to let it sit while I did an all-hands-on-deck assault on Safehold. That meant that when I got back to SOV, there really wasn't time for Baen to change whatever description they'd written to reflect the differences between that and the book they got.

I, personally, like this book a lot although I do rather resent the comparison to self indulging in a guitar solo at a concert. I wrote the story I thought --- and think --- needed writing within the in-universe time constraints that were set in stone. Now, i could have just waved my hands and said "The hell with the timing; it turns out they can get people back and forth five times as rapidly as the streak drive. Just take my word for it." But I don't do that. My characters have to live with the constraints of the technology and the transit times I gave them in the beginning. Obviously, a lot of people wish I'd done just that, and to those who do feel that way, all I can say is it's not going to happen.

This book is what I wanted it to be from the time I started actually writing on it. It may not be what I would have wanted --- and written --- if my characters' constraints had been different, but they weren't, and one reason the series as a whole works is because I refuse to just slide around those constraints. i did not "phone it in" (and, BTW, I resent the hell out of that particular implication), I did not decide to "indulge" myself (in fact, I worked my butt off to get it done, including 14-hour days. Trust me, you are not "indulging" yourself), and there was not a single scene in the book that I had cut from an earlier book and decided to just shove in to make up word count.

Bottom line, it is what it is, and if the disappointment is too severe for some of my readers, I'm sorry but not at all apologeitc for the story or for the quality of the storytelling.

dscott8 wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:That is the current game plan. Exactly how I'll find a title with "Honor" that works is a bit more problematic.
Using her first name somewhere in every other book seemed like such a good idea . . . when I thought there'd be only six or seven of them.

Shadow of Honor?

Call it what you will, only PLEASE include a knock-down, drag-out fistfight between Honor and Anisimovna. I really want to see that beyotch get her ass kicked. And then Honor can turn her over to Torch for trial.

Fox2! wrote:Not Torch, but Kornati.