I like to think I was nicer to you, though, perhaps because of your personality. But yeah, I do tend to draw the ire of the more ardent defenders of the WoT faith at times, but I've been working on keeping it more about the writing and less about personality clashes But I did read the posts (even if I didn't comment frequently) that you and a few others wrote back in the day and when I saw your name here, I thought it'd be a good time to respond and say hey



I do, to an extent. When I wrote my review two weeks ago, I tried to focus more on structural issues that involved his difficulties in adapting his writing to the series. I have long complained about how his writing style too frequently fails to augment the potential power of scenes and while the differences between him and RJ's writing aren't as noticeable to me because I haven't read the older books in three years and only once in ten years before then for #1-9, I can understand the frustrations that Dom and a few others have with Sanderson's inability to mesh his writing with the series' style that much.



As a reader and freelance reviewer, I try to be careful to avoid the prediction game too much, as expectations can get in the way of appreciating other elements of a story. That being said, "predictable" is not always bad, as long as the story can hit the technical and emotional registers consistently enough. I just do not think this series did so consistently. I've thumbed through AMoL a few times since I wrote my review (mostly after reading some discussions here and at Westeros) to see what others were wowing (or moaning) over, and what I kept noticing, even more so than when I first read it, is that there would be an interesting scene, but it would not be set up well or it would be surrounded by a lot of wasted sentence space. The Dragon's Peace had the potential to be an emotional scene, yet it felt underdeveloped, with most nuances lost in the repetition of previously-established juvenile character traits. There was no real build-up to the finale of that scene because the characters felt less like complex characters searching for commonalities and more like caricatures of political leaders scrapping. There are many others from the first 2/3 that I could cite, but that scene is one that I thought was particularly poorly-done. Add to that my growing dislike of "battle" scenes, and yeah, not an enjoyable novel, but rather a series of interesting scenes interspersed among a lot of crappy ones.



Yeah, I bet that would be a culture shock! I've never been farther west than Kansas City (went there for three days with my youngest brother back in May), but the idea of whole swathes of land with so few neighbors around would be jarring to me and I grew up in an area that used to be semi-rural (35 miles west of Nashville, TN) until the past 20 years. Sounds like you've made some interesting changes in your personal life and that you're content with those, so congrats! I'm mostly the same, moving from residential treatment teaching job every so often because a place closes (I like to think not because of me, but despite me ), so I may be heading back to grad school part-time this summer to work on a second Master's degree, this time in teaching ESL. Had a couple of short story translations published in the past 18 months, one in a big anthology published here by Tor (The Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, both of whom I've come to consider to be good friends of mine), so if you ever wanted to critique the writer/translator's writing style in revenge for my critiques over the years, there's the perfect opportunity!

Take care, John, and hope to see you around at least occasionally