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Old 05-08-2008, 05:24 PM   #18
Disillusionist
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Join Date: Dec 2007
Posts: 83
Disillusionist will become famous soon enough
Re: Orson Scott Card obliterates J.K. Rowling

I'm still amazed when authorial success is measured monetarily. HP Lovecraft or Stephen King?
Edgar Allen Poe's cutting-edge detective stories, or A. Conan Doyle's highly popular ones?

To me, a certain degree of an author's success is their success in -handling- success, should fame and fortune find them in their lifetime.
The author's work should stand alone, author ignored, the work speaking for itself. I enjoyed the Harry Potter works, because my son did, and I enjoyed reading them to him. So, I say, successful book, it entertained the children, and I certainly found them tolerable, and even managed to see a few literary tidbits that tell me she is a decent enough writer. It had the measurable effect of returning children to libraries, although not in historical numbers, stemming the mass migration away from the printed word that has plaqued the last few decades. To that, I can only applaud, but anyone who thinks that particular phenomenon doesn't involve a large degree of intentional marketing, luck and timing doesn't know much about publishing.

The gracelessness, however, of some of the sweeping laws engendered by her -very- high-priced lawyers, does indeed reflect on her separately as a person. Whether she is spineless enough to allow a bevy of attorneys to make her look like a literary tyrant, or whether she is the avaricious driving force of some of the litigation is -almost- irrelevant.

Maelgrim and Milawe were dead-on, in that a person can be judged by their actions, which only seem MORE intolerant when compared to her financial success. I wonder how many of the people she has taken to task fit her originaldemographic. It's almost as though some of her litigations are engendered to make sure there are no other Cinderella stories similar to her own.

Just my opinion.

[Edited to add: I wonder, since it was obviously such an important development for Dumbledore to make -any- reference to his sexual orientation why this wasn't done early on, when the marketing was in the 'wholesome' mode, heavily aimed at children, but instead only came to light after the last word was printed. It does smack of PC grandstanding, since not one reasonable person could honestly claim there is a single shred of evidence in the stories that this was part of his makeup at all. Dumbeldore as a literary device was Mentor, Kindly Elder, and Deus Ex Machina. If his sexual orientation was so irrelevant to the storyline that she didn't even bother to mention it even once, mentioning it all after the fact sounds a bit like retroactive crowd-pleasing, without attendant risks to sales.]

Last edited by Disillusionist : 05-08-2008 at 05:40 PM.
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