I'd forgotten this little chapter and hope the convention of the occasional "sheet of paper" from the world continues. It really is evocative.
Something that should have occurred to me first time around - if nothing else, Max-Earth could have influenced "SS-London" (shitty-smoggy" to have a sane currency.
Yeah, obviously there's a lot of extra time and effort involved in one of these report pages per word since it's a full graphic layout job that also requires full text. No "Lorum Ipsum" here!
Oh, no, I see the creation of a Triverse kept Britain from adopting the metric system!
Next, we'll discover decimalization never happened and British currency is still utterly batshit. I forget exactly how many horsehoofs are in a tripenny, or how many hatracks are in a pound*...
Anyway, in the context of the story, the 'photo' was appropriate, but, yeah, you probably won't (and shouldn't) put up images of all your other characters.
Your worry is founded. After all, if you were to, say, look up "A Song of Ice and Fire" fan art from before 2012 or so you'd see a lovely variety of designs based on the artist interpretation of GRRM's imperfect verbal descriptions. Look up recent fan art (or "Game of Thrones") fan art and, yeah, it all looks like the TV show. Of course, Danerys being drawn as Emilia Clarke rather than her book description does help hide that, in the books, she's still only about 14/15 years old and really shouldn't have so many gratuitous nude scenes.
My mental image of Fenris from TMC was quite different from the art you created and posted. Now, fan art doesn't affect my mental image of a character, overall, but YOU are the author, so your art, to my mind, became "official," and overrode MY Fenris, who had a bald pate (under a little cap), but longer hair in the back, a pointed van dyke, and Peter-Capaldi-ish "Attack Eyebrows." I won't say your images necessarily inhibit my own imagination, but, images provided by - especially created by - the author do have a "weight of authority" beyond any cover artist.
Anyways, I didn't think of Callahan as that thin, or with a "porn 'stache." But, 1970's, I should have anticipated the 'stache.
*Yes, yes, I know, except for the pound, none of those were units of currency, but farthing, ha'penny, thruppence, sixpence, shilling, florin, half-crown, crown, guinea and groat...? We can agree that (based off the penny) having 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 and 1/6d coins, then having 12 pennies to a shilling and 20 shillings to a pound was just... Y'know, I really need to look up how that system grew.
I'm very glad I was born after the British currency was made sensible. I may have to simply avoid the issue in TftT to avoid making my brain hurt. :P
Noted on the images of characters - that was much the same as my thinking. I am still looking into putting a cast list together, but I'll be sure to leave off any illustrations. :) Interesting what you say about GRRM's stuff, as well - I imagine LotR has had a similar 'fixing' since the movies, though in that case it's slightly more interesting/complex because the movies themselves were so heavily influenced by established Tolkien artists. Very circular!
As for Callihan's weight, perhaps that weight doesn't include his head.
Well. I just ran some Google Image Searches for LOTR characters and it's all movie influenced...
It took me a lot of scrolling to find a Legolas that wasn't Orlando Bloom. Interestingly, it's art from a game, so it's not even "fan art," but a commercial piece from a game company that obviously didn't want to pay for Bloom's likeness.
Needless to say, I found NO Song of Ice and Fire art that wasn't based on the actors. Pre GoT work is too far down the queue. Oh, I found some "halfway" art - where details from the books - like Danerys in a Meeranese gown described by GRRM as leaving a breast bare, but it's based on a mid-20's Emilia Clarke, not the 14/15 year old child Danerys should be.
As a side note the inevitable aging of the actors over an eight year production cycle did start affecting a story that's only taken a year - MAYBE two by the point the novels have reached.... In season 2 it took an entire season for Arya to get from King's Landing to about Riverrun. In the final season entire fleets of ships go from Dragonstone (a hundred miles south of King's Landing) to the Wall (hundreds of miles north of Riverrun) and back in an episode. M
It makes Westeros feel smaller.
Peter Jackson had similar scale issues in Return of the King. It's about 100 miles from Minas Tirith to Osgiliath, and another 50 miles from Osgiliath to the border of Mordor. I'm saying it's a very pretty and dramatic scene to watch Faramir ride to Osgiliath from Minas Tirith and begin battle while Merry sings a mournful song at a feast, but that, and the speed with which Faramir returns to Minas Tirith doesn't convey the true terror of being picked off, one by one, by pursuing Uruk-Hai and the Witch King of Angmar over an entire day of forcing mounts to go a hundred miles.
No, Gandalf cannot stand on a balcony in Minas Tirith with Merry and see magic events happening at the border of Mordor. That is you going to the highest point of Norwich and being able to see The Shard in London (turns out Norwich is 153 miles from London in a straight line - almost a perfectly equivalent distance). Very pretty, but it makes Middle Earth feel small. The scale Peter Jackson showed has Mordor not over the horizon from Minas Tirith, and that's just a day's march. Even taking into account the relative heights of Minas Tirith and the Mountains of Mordor, the visual scale doesn't work. Atmospheric haze still kills the sight line.
Distance is a real pain in storytelling, especially fantasy storytelling. In the first half of any story, it's exciting and feels like ADVENTURE! and EXPLORATION! Taking time adds to the sense of scale. In the *second* half of a story it all flips around and suddenly those established distances and timings become limiting and inconvenient.
It's something I had to wrestle with a lot in The Mechanical Crown, although hoooopefully I didn't break any of the established rules there. But certainly a lot of the challenge in the last third of that book was in simply moving the players around in a way that felt natural while still hitting the necessary story beats.
Ah, but, in TMC we started with a man walking. By the time you'd "compressed distance," we'd seen airships and the flying city and established the magic users, so, by the time you moved travel into high gear it felt natural.
I'm reminded of Babylon 5 where, between the pilot and first season JMS dropped the requirement for a half hour of deceleration after exiting the jump gate. First, while more accurate, at the time ships emerging "backwards" at full burn looked funny (shows like Expanse have now primed an audience for that), second, JMS decided dropping decel would let an episode "get on with it" to avoid the constant "passing of time" sequence.
I'm looking forward to the B5 reboot in a post-Expanse TV landscape. Both for the new VFX possibilities, and for that show having taken audiences several steps further towards accepting (and enjoying!) more realistic science fiction. The Expanse has really nailed how to make the limitations of science create drama, rather than using hand-wavy made-up science to solve plot holes.
I see I'm an inch taller than him! (Probably more now, given, well, you know). Also his birthday is the 22nd, which only confirms a belief in my immediate family that 22 is bad luck.
I'd forgotten this little chapter and hope the convention of the occasional "sheet of paper" from the world continues. It really is evocative.
Something that should have occurred to me first time around - if nothing else, Max-Earth could have influenced "SS-London" (shitty-smoggy" to have a sane currency.
I do hope to do more little documents like this - haven't had the time for a while, alas, though I have thrown in the occasional odd-one-out chapter.
Need more hours in the day....
Yeah, obviously there's a lot of extra time and effort involved in one of these report pages per word since it's a full graphic layout job that also requires full text. No "Lorum Ipsum" here!
6'1" and 150-ish lbs? Skinny dude!
Oh, no, I see the creation of a Triverse kept Britain from adopting the metric system!
Next, we'll discover decimalization never happened and British currency is still utterly batshit. I forget exactly how many horsehoofs are in a tripenny, or how many hatracks are in a pound*...
Anyway, in the context of the story, the 'photo' was appropriate, but, yeah, you probably won't (and shouldn't) put up images of all your other characters.
Your worry is founded. After all, if you were to, say, look up "A Song of Ice and Fire" fan art from before 2012 or so you'd see a lovely variety of designs based on the artist interpretation of GRRM's imperfect verbal descriptions. Look up recent fan art (or "Game of Thrones") fan art and, yeah, it all looks like the TV show. Of course, Danerys being drawn as Emilia Clarke rather than her book description does help hide that, in the books, she's still only about 14/15 years old and really shouldn't have so many gratuitous nude scenes.
My mental image of Fenris from TMC was quite different from the art you created and posted. Now, fan art doesn't affect my mental image of a character, overall, but YOU are the author, so your art, to my mind, became "official," and overrode MY Fenris, who had a bald pate (under a little cap), but longer hair in the back, a pointed van dyke, and Peter-Capaldi-ish "Attack Eyebrows." I won't say your images necessarily inhibit my own imagination, but, images provided by - especially created by - the author do have a "weight of authority" beyond any cover artist.
Anyways, I didn't think of Callahan as that thin, or with a "porn 'stache." But, 1970's, I should have anticipated the 'stache.
*Yes, yes, I know, except for the pound, none of those were units of currency, but farthing, ha'penny, thruppence, sixpence, shilling, florin, half-crown, crown, guinea and groat...? We can agree that (based off the penny) having 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 and 1/6d coins, then having 12 pennies to a shilling and 20 shillings to a pound was just... Y'know, I really need to look up how that system grew.
I'm very glad I was born after the British currency was made sensible. I may have to simply avoid the issue in TftT to avoid making my brain hurt. :P
Noted on the images of characters - that was much the same as my thinking. I am still looking into putting a cast list together, but I'll be sure to leave off any illustrations. :) Interesting what you say about GRRM's stuff, as well - I imagine LotR has had a similar 'fixing' since the movies, though in that case it's slightly more interesting/complex because the movies themselves were so heavily influenced by established Tolkien artists. Very circular!
As for Callihan's weight, perhaps that weight doesn't include his head.
Well. I just ran some Google Image Searches for LOTR characters and it's all movie influenced...
It took me a lot of scrolling to find a Legolas that wasn't Orlando Bloom. Interestingly, it's art from a game, so it's not even "fan art," but a commercial piece from a game company that obviously didn't want to pay for Bloom's likeness.
https://www.google.com/search?q=legolas+art&tbm=isch&hl=en-US&client=ms-opera-mobile&prmd=ivnx&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjL4fel57XzAhV2nnIEHcJ9Bb8QrNwCKAB6BQgBEKcC&biw=534&bih=678#imgrc=i0qsCgiq5LXKXM
... Callihan's weight, perhaps doesn't include his head? Oof. That's brutal, my friend.
Needless to say, I found NO Song of Ice and Fire art that wasn't based on the actors. Pre GoT work is too far down the queue. Oh, I found some "halfway" art - where details from the books - like Danerys in a Meeranese gown described by GRRM as leaving a breast bare, but it's based on a mid-20's Emilia Clarke, not the 14/15 year old child Danerys should be.
As a side note the inevitable aging of the actors over an eight year production cycle did start affecting a story that's only taken a year - MAYBE two by the point the novels have reached.... In season 2 it took an entire season for Arya to get from King's Landing to about Riverrun. In the final season entire fleets of ships go from Dragonstone (a hundred miles south of King's Landing) to the Wall (hundreds of miles north of Riverrun) and back in an episode. M
It makes Westeros feel smaller.
Peter Jackson had similar scale issues in Return of the King. It's about 100 miles from Minas Tirith to Osgiliath, and another 50 miles from Osgiliath to the border of Mordor. I'm saying it's a very pretty and dramatic scene to watch Faramir ride to Osgiliath from Minas Tirith and begin battle while Merry sings a mournful song at a feast, but that, and the speed with which Faramir returns to Minas Tirith doesn't convey the true terror of being picked off, one by one, by pursuing Uruk-Hai and the Witch King of Angmar over an entire day of forcing mounts to go a hundred miles.
No, Gandalf cannot stand on a balcony in Minas Tirith with Merry and see magic events happening at the border of Mordor. That is you going to the highest point of Norwich and being able to see The Shard in London (turns out Norwich is 153 miles from London in a straight line - almost a perfectly equivalent distance). Very pretty, but it makes Middle Earth feel small. The scale Peter Jackson showed has Mordor not over the horizon from Minas Tirith, and that's just a day's march. Even taking into account the relative heights of Minas Tirith and the Mountains of Mordor, the visual scale doesn't work. Atmospheric haze still kills the sight line.
But Jackson can have it, because, drama.
Distance is a real pain in storytelling, especially fantasy storytelling. In the first half of any story, it's exciting and feels like ADVENTURE! and EXPLORATION! Taking time adds to the sense of scale. In the *second* half of a story it all flips around and suddenly those established distances and timings become limiting and inconvenient.
It's something I had to wrestle with a lot in The Mechanical Crown, although hoooopefully I didn't break any of the established rules there. But certainly a lot of the challenge in the last third of that book was in simply moving the players around in a way that felt natural while still hitting the necessary story beats.
Writing is hard!
Ah, but, in TMC we started with a man walking. By the time you'd "compressed distance," we'd seen airships and the flying city and established the magic users, so, by the time you moved travel into high gear it felt natural.
I'm reminded of Babylon 5 where, between the pilot and first season JMS dropped the requirement for a half hour of deceleration after exiting the jump gate. First, while more accurate, at the time ships emerging "backwards" at full burn looked funny (shows like Expanse have now primed an audience for that), second, JMS decided dropping decel would let an episode "get on with it" to avoid the constant "passing of time" sequence.
I'm looking forward to the B5 reboot in a post-Expanse TV landscape. Both for the new VFX possibilities, and for that show having taken audiences several steps further towards accepting (and enjoying!) more realistic science fiction. The Expanse has really nailed how to make the limitations of science create drama, rather than using hand-wavy made-up science to solve plot holes.
I see I'm an inch taller than him! (Probably more now, given, well, you know). Also his birthday is the 22nd, which only confirms a belief in my immediate family that 22 is bad luck.
Yeah, I'd guess you're probably a good head taller.