This is part 3 in what's become an ongoing series on when to stop reading a book. Each post stands alone, but feel free to read part 1 and part 2 before jumping into this one.

We often think of only novels when someone poses the question,

"At one point do you give up on a book?"

Maybe the question is better phrased as:

"At one point do you give up on a story?"

Short stories, whether standalone or as part of a compilation, fall into the 'when to stop reading' conundrum just like novels. Especially those which infringe into the length territory of novelettes. The further we get, and the more our frustration grows, the more likely we're going to put (or throw) that book down.

For purposes of this discussion, I'm going to use an example: The Solaris Book of New Fantasy. TSBONF is a compilation of shorts by such notable authors as Mark Chadbourn, Janny Wurts, Jeff VanderMeer, Chris Roberson, Lucius Shepherd, Steven Erikson, and others. I just finished the book, so I'm at a good point to discuss it's highs and lows. In particular, there were stories I stopped reading simply because they were going nowhere or just weren't holding my attention.

Some people say you have thirteen lines in which to hook the reader of a short story. I found this to be more or less true as more often than not I knew just by looking at that first page whether or not the story was going to hold my attention. It's not a hard and fast rule, of course, but it's often easy to get a good feel for what the story is about and if it's your cup of tea.

In the following list I'm going to use some clever graphics to indicate whether or not I finished the story. "Thumbs up" means I finished. "Thumbs down" means I flipped through the remainder of that story and went on to the next one.

A quick tally shows that I finished ten out of the sixteen stories in TSBONF, or 62.5%. Six stories remained unfinished, or 37.5%.

I don't know what ratio indicates I didn't waste my money. I read ten stories, most of which I enjoyed. I remember a couple leaving me a little dissatisfied, but nothing like the sheer "WTF is this about?" I thought as I skipped through the six stories I did not finish.

For me, this is a lesson. Not only in what I like to read, but also what elements keep someone from putting a book down. I can only attempt to instill such elements into my own writing.

As always, I'll end with a question: What makes you put a book down?

Robin Hobb is one of my favorite writers. I devoured The Farseer Trilogy and tore through The Soldier Son Trilogy.

It was with the same excitement that I dove into Ship of Magic, book one of The Liveship Traders. Unfortunately, this particular journey ended in disappointment.

Hobb's greatest strength is twofold: her characterizations and her world-building. She has a knack for creating believable, likeable, even detestable characters. Also, the settings she creates are top-notch: well thought out, realistic, and most definitely populated by 'believable' characters.

Ship of Magic does not falter in these areas. But ultimately it did fail to present to me a character which I could readily identify with. Therein lies the true strength of The Farseer and Soldier Son trilogies. Both have strong yet flawed and very sympathetic characters. Ship of Magic has Althea, who fits this bill to some extent, but because there are so many other characters and other plotlines, she gets lost amidst the clutter.

Which brings me to my second contention with Ship of Magic: it's just too darn long. Standing in at a hefty 800 pages, this monster of a book is, in my opinion, about 400 pages too long. I've given up such weighty (no pun intended) series as George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire for wasting my time with books that go nowhere. While Hobb's pace moves along well enough, I still felt it suffered from bloat.

My last issue with Ship of Magic has to do with the characters, or rather my dislike of most of them. Kyle Haven is an ass. Wintrow is an unlikable wuss. Malta is useless.

Althea, already mentioned, stands out amongst these less than likable personas. Brashen, also, as a well thought out character whom I found myself genuinely rooting for.

At this point, I don't know if I want to invest the same amount of time in books two and three if book one is any indication of things to come. I don't know if either gets any better or worse in terms of page count. Also, as engaging as some (OK, two) of the characters are, the story lags. There's just not enough going on. It's mostly this trader family does this and the other one does that. The great thing about The Farseer Trilogy is that it has all the great characters but also an overlying mystery—what are the Outislanders doing to the people of the Six Duchies to turn them into such monsters and how are they going to stop the invasion? It's a strange happening that kept me reading on and on.

Ship of Magic just didn't have this same attraction.

This weekend's links presented for your viewing pleasure.

Amorality Tales: Elric
No matter how many of my remaining brain cells are eaten up by song lyrics or “Simpsons” catchphrases, there is one scene from a fantasy novel I shall never forget: Our hero has fallen in with a horde of savages as they ransack a town. To keep himself from getting caught up in their bloodshed, he takes refuge in a house that has so far avoided the “slaughter-madness,” only to have his sanctuary violated by a barbarian dragging a helpless female villager by her hair.

Rather than immediately leaping to the woman’s rescue, our protagonist tells the intruder to find a safe haven of his own. It is only when the barbarian refuses to leave that our hero draws his sword, attacking with such swiftness and ferocity that the would-be rapist is cleaved in two. Who said chivalry is dead?

DNA Tests Reveal Who Was Having Sex with Neanderthals 40,000 Years Ago
Are modern humans the hybrid children of early humans and Neanderthals? For over a decade, scientists have wondered what exactly happened to the Neanderthals, low-tech hominids who populated Western Europe, when homo sapiens arrived on the scene from Africa and Asia with sophisticated weaponry and the rudiments of symbolic art.

The New Hottest Spot in the Milky Way
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope revealed an image of what could be the brightest star in our galaxy: Wolf-Rayet star WR 102ka or, more fondly, the "Peony nebula" star. Astronomers say that it burns with the light intensity of 3.2 million suns — but that's a rough estimate, and one that might even stretch to 4 or 5 million suns.

The History of Science Fiction: 1900-1909
…probably even more significant was Albert Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity which he published in 1905. As well as giving us the only equation most people know (E=mc2), Special Relativity gave us the concepts of Time dilation, Length contraction and relativity of simultaneity. These are things that science fiction writers still use in stories today.

You, too, could be a superhero but don't plan on a long career
The dream of almost everyone who has flipped open a Batman comic book, to don the cape and to fight crime, is humanly possible, says a University of Victoria professor who has written a book about it. But the stress it would put on the body, similar to an Olympic athlete or champion boxer, would make a career as the caped crusader short-lived.

The Earth-Bashers
Mars isn't the only planet with awe-inspiring craters. Here on Earth, we've been pummeled by space rocks in the not-so-distant past, and our planet has the scars to prove it.

Authors Guild Warns on S&S e-Book Royalty Proposal
The Authors Guild has sent out an advisory to its members suggesting that they carefully review a letter from Simon & Schuster that looks to add an amendment to their contracts that will set the standard royalty for e-books at 15% of the catalog retail price for e-books.

The Frozen Waterfalls of Mars
This deep gorge known as the Echus Chasma was ripped into the Martian soil by gushing water, and scientists speculate that it may once have boasted giant, 4000-meter-high waterfalls.

Book Sales May be Much Greater than Previously Thought
In a report whose findings are sure to be questioned by many in the industry, the Book Industry Study Group has issued a report that says book sales have been seriously underreported.

Howard Andrew Jones gives us part 3 in his continuing series, "Honing the New Edge", where he delves into and examines the sword-and-sorcery genre, past and present.

In Part 1, Howard explained the differences between sword-and-sorcery and other types of fiction, including other sub-genres such as high or epic fantasy.

Part 2 covered the state of the genre from the perspective of what’s been published both before and now, and how society has influenced sword-and-sorcery over time.

In Jones's words, part 3 takes it further:

Now I want to revisit some of the conversations I had with Bill King and John Hocking and Clint Werner and Martin Zornhau, among others, and look at what we need from sword-and-sorcery today – and what many are already striving to do.

He goes on to list the steps authors should take to gravitate sword-and-sorcery to modern times. Specifically:

I mean setting aside the sexism and racism and the suspect politics, but embracing the virtues of great pulp storytelling: The color. The pace. The headlong thrill and sense of wonder. The celebration not of the everyday and the petty, but of those who dare to fight on when the odds are against them.

No doubt sexism and racism exist in sword-and-sorcery, whether it's in the setting of the story or simply there because of the way our own society was at the time those stories were written. But one has to keep things in perspective: many stories of the past contain verbiage considered racist in today's world. Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for example, hits upon the n* word more or less on the first page. In real life, Twain was a staunch advocate of emancipation, and while Adventures was number 5 on the ALA's list of The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000, the book simply would not have stood without the realism of language fitting of the period. In fact, it wouldn't properly or accurately represent the period without such language.

In some venues of sword-and-sorcery such realism is just as necessary. The genre may take place in made-up worlds, but those fabricated places simply would not be the worlds of sword-and-sorcery if they not contain a certain flavor—the sword-and-sorcery flavor—of sexism or racism.

In any case, Jones urges us to go beyond those things, to focus on the qualities that made sword-and-sorcery great in the first place. I say think of the characters themselves: Conan, Bran Mak Morn, Elric, Kull all come to mind immediately. They're legends. While those characters may be "old", what they represent remains vibrant. There's much to learn from them and their genre still.

A while back I blogged about when to stop reading a book. As the post detailed, there are many criteria, not the least of which is your own good judgement. But there's also quantitative measurements one can take, including the Page 99 Test.

The Page 99 Test is simple, and explained best by this quotation taken from the Page 99 Test web site:

"Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you." --Ford Madox Ford

I decided to try the test on my own book, The Hall of the Wood, which I've offered as a free download for some time now.

For purposes of the test, I'm going to start at the first paragraph on the page, so I'm leaving out about 2-3 lines at the top.

Here's the page 99 text from The Hall of the Wood:

Murik raised a finger to his mouth and whispered, "Shh."

The man trembled as he sat up and pushed himself backward. There was nowhere for him to go, though, as he backed into the wall. Murik knew he had found Graewol, for the man looked every bit the crazed lunatic Relk had made him out to be. He wore only pants with no socks or shoes, and his hair was a greasy black and gray with no order to it. His untrimmed beard shot off in all directions.

Murik held his hands out to the man. "I mean you no harm." The sorcerer's voice soothed him as his trembling lessened. "Are you the one they call Graewol?"

The man's chin rose, then went back down. He repeated his nod over and over, stopping only when Murik spoke again.

"My name is Murik. The citizens of this town say you are a wise man who knows many secrets."

Graewol smiled. "Ah know many. Many ah do. Secrets, secrets ah know. All the secrets."

"I need to know of only one this night, my friend. Can you tell me a secret about the lands around Homewood?" Murik tread lightly, not wanting to unduly upset him.

"Secrets, secrets, ah know the secrets..."

The first thing I immediately had to resist was the desire to clean it up a bit. I've noticed as I edit my current novel (The Five Elements) I'm much more judicious, and I dare say merciless, in chopping out unnecessary words, consolidating character movement, and just being more concise overall. But none of that is the point of this post. The point of this post is to determine if my page 99 makes The Hall of the Wood a worthy read.

I'm biased, no doubt, but I like what I see there. There's a certain amount of intrigue and mystery, and hopefully a desire on the reader's part to want to know what secret Murik is after. I'd flip to page 1 and give it a try.

So, for me, The Hall of the Wood passes the Page 99 Test.

Agree or disagree, let me know.

Tomorrow is it. The day Tor officially concludes their Free E-book Giveaway promotion and launches their new web site.

That means my own series where I dig into the books and their authors will also be concluding, though I have a few places where I need to go back and fill-in since I invariably skipped over an e-book or two along the way.

If you missed any of the downloads, see my series. I have links to the downloads (which will remain working as long as Tor doesn't remove the e-books from their download site). Or, visit Tor's site (after today, I'm guessing) as they're expected to make all of the downloads available one last time.

NOTE: As of 7/20/08, Tor has listed all the downloads (e-books and wallpapers) here. The list is supposed to remain up until July 27.

For more information about the launch, I'll mine some information from scifi.com:

[The new] Tor.com will feature original fiction, a group blog, lightweight social networking features and an extensive art gallery.

Patrick Nielson Hayden, senior editor and manager of science fiction, has this to say:

"On several occasions I have said--not entirely joking--to my own corporate masters that there will be times when you look at front page of the site, and you will see that it consists almost entirely of a half-dozen different bloggers having an extended and elaborate conversation about medieval siege engines, and that's fine," he said. "Because that's exactly the kind of geeky subject that tends to be of interest to people who are interested in science fiction and fantasy."

Also, the site will launch with an original story by John Scalzi called "After the Coup", set in his popular Old Man's War universe, and feature "Down on the Farm," a new story by Charles Stross, set in the same milieu as his novels The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue.

So, more free stuff and some potentially good conversation about fantasy and science fiction. I'm looking forward to checking it out.