Excerpt from The Fork, the Witch, and the Worm

[hwium8]

https://www.hypable.com/fork-witch-worm-excerpt-eragon/

I'm going to read it and put my thought about it in the comments.

Comments

[ultramega10]

Judging purely by the spork, I'm going to come to Paolini's defense here. Something happened in this chapter. A dragon swooped down and laid a village to waste. There is action. Characters. It is established that there is such a thing as an evil dragon.

The sentences, of course, badly are in need of a run through the Hemingway Editor. But at the same time, I can tolerate them for the most part. As long as you skim through it, you get a relatively cool sequence of a huge dragon killing lots of Urgals.

Look, I realize this is faint praise. But keep in mind that something happening used to be a rarity in these books. If this were the Black Brick, this sequence would have happened offscreen while someone entirely unrelated did yoga stretches. Then it would have been described later. Poorly.

And hey, the bad guy is established as a threat. You can't see the main protagonist killing him. If this urgal girl is the main character, I'd be interested to see just how she will kill the dragon. Now knowing Paolini that won't happen, we'll just focus on Eragon or something. But I'm giving credit where it is due.

As for Paolini backsliding. He hasn't written anything in years. I don't buy for a single second that he has been working nonstop on his book. If he had it would have been released five years ago.

I know because I have a policy of writing one chapter a day, good or bad. And I've written upwards of a thousand pages this year alone. I'm fairly certain his 'busy schedule' has consisted of looking for things to rip off and writing an occasional drabble while feeling smug.