On Tue, 11 May 2004, bonham15 wrote: > martin is interesting, and is willing to fiddle with the formula... when > people say jordan could write people into a coma, it isn't like in pool > where if you get shot into a coma you just watch someone take all your money > rack after rack. people who read the whole series literally slip into a > coma and drown in a puddle of their own drool on the couch. A little excessive, no? I think THE WHEEL OF TIME is a neat idea that got out of hand. It wasn't until the last book that he totally lost it, though. So far as I can see, the problem with WoT is that the plot has stopped advancing, buried under a tide of unnecessary description and unimportant characters. If/when the plot starts advancing, I'll stop complaining. As far as Martin v. Jordan goes, I'm not sure what you mean by "tinker with the formula." Jordan's not formulaic. Someone like Feist is formulaic; he tells the same story over and over. Jordan is telling the same story very slowly. I'm really enjoying A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, but Martin seems to be showing some of the same lamentable problems as Jordan. There's about fifteen necessary pages in the first three hundred of the third book and he's most of the the way through the fourth book of what was supposed to be a three-book series. And there's still at least two more to go. The tale grew in the telling indeed. -Dennis