2020.04.25 14:52 FunkyChewbacca Mobile Homes, Trailers, and Trailer Parks
2019.08.19 19:21 KenBalbari Manufactured and Modular Homes
2011.06.12 19:55 I-----ThisMuch-----I All Things Campervan
2024.05.19 17:21 asmattt Bathtub faucet not getting hot water.
2024.05.19 17:17 Mediocre_Positive395 Viasat customer service sucks worse than their internet!
2024.05.19 17:15 stessmer12 Last cut here?
Is this a possible 16 land deck? Cut a rooftop assassin, two griffins and another stage coach security already - feel like I can’t afford to cut anymore creatures? submitted by stessmer12 to lrcast [link] [comments] |
2024.05.19 17:00 TheLotStore 1618 Strawberry Lane, Horseshoe Bend, AR 72512
1618 Strawberry Lane, Horseshoe Bend, AR 72512 submitted by TheLotStore to u/TheLotStore [link] [comments] Nice 1/4 acre mobile home friendly lot in an excellent location in the Ozarks! GPS Coordinates are 36.25338474072636, -91.73957468300196. Plenty of privacy on this lot and when you're ready for nearby some recreation, swing by either Diamond Lake or Crown Lake! Priced way below area comparable sales in the area! Debit/Credit Cards Accepted No Closing Costs Cash Price: $1,250 Finance with $200 Down and 12 Payments of $110 Per Month No Credit Check, No Income Documentation, No Prepayment PenaltyProperty Address: 1618 Strawberry Lane, Horseshoe Bend, AR 72512 (Map location is approximate) County: Izard Assessor Parcel Number: 800-00389-000 Legal Description: Lot 23, Block 3, Horseshoe Bend Tract B Zoning: Residential Annual Property Taxes: $4.87 About Horseshoe Bend: The best kept secret in north Arkansas is Horseshoe Bend. Nestled in the Ozark Mountains on the Strawberry River, this quaint town is the perfect place to find rest, relaxation, and recreation. The crown jewel of the town is the 640-acre Crown Lake. On Crown Lake, water lovers can participate in a variety of activities, including swimming, kayaking, paddle boarding, water skiing, and tubing. Crown Lake is best known for good fishing, but it is not the only sought-after fishing hole in the area. Besides Crown Lake and the Strawberry River, fishing enthusiasts can also visit one of the smaller fishing lakes – Diamond, Pioneer, and North. There are plenty of activities for young and old alike! Golfers have their choice between two par 3, 18-hole golf courses. Citizens and guests can also bowl, pitch horseshoes, and play miniature golf. The town has several stores, a library, three resorts, a community theater, a spa, and several restaurants. The citizens of Horseshoe Bend take pride in the community spirit and the ability to offer a memorable experience for all who come to visit. The Music in the Mountains show occurs every third Saturday of the month, and during summer, the Farmers’ Market occurs every Wednesday. Every year, the town celebrates Dogwood Days on the second Saturday of May, and Independence Day is celebrated every 4th of July with a parade and fireworks. The annual Christmas parade occurs on the first Saturday in December. There are many more events that happen throughout the year, thanks to the numerous civic groups which are active in Horseshoe Bend. All of these events embrace the unique Ozark culture of small-town pride and fellowship. The largest town in Izard County with 2,180 residents, Horseshoe Bend is accessible to the state’s most scenic highways. The town is centrally located and just a 3-hour drive to Little Rock, Memphis, and Springfield. With its gorgeous views, slower pace of life, and laid-back charm, Horseshoe Bend is the perfect place to stay a week or a lifetime. More Information on Horseshoe Bend can be found at http://ozarklandstore.com/. View our amazing property deals at TheLotStore.Com. Additional Information: https://thelotstore.com/property/1618-strawberry-lane-horseshoe-bend-ar-72512/?feed_id=10951 |
2024.05.19 16:52 TassieRCD Domestic to international connection question
2024.05.19 16:50 niffler1408 AKG K52
2024.05.19 16:38 UKROBEGGAR_STFU The Diary of Anko Franko EDITION: Ukrainians have been making videos showing empty streets following the mobilization law which came into effect yesterday. Most men are staying home so they cannot be kidnapped and sent to the frontline.
submitted by UKROBEGGAR_STFU to ukrainerussiareportII [link] [comments] |
2024.05.19 16:22 hieuhani Open-source news, forums and social network built with Nuxt
2024.05.19 16:11 snerusn Got this card in just one minute online
submitted by snerusn to CreditCardsIndia [link] [comments] |
2024.05.19 16:08 RobinThrobbin51 Mobile Home- adding some style to the ship.
submitted by RobinThrobbin51 to Starfield [link] [comments] |
2024.05.19 16:05 DavidWtube I have muted 994 subreddits and have maxed out my ability to mute any more. AMA
2024.05.19 16:04 Strange-Lychee-9100 4060 under 100$
What's the catch in it submitted by Strange-Lychee-9100 to laptops [link] [comments] |
2024.05.19 16:01 ReportsStack Vacuum Cleaner Market Size, Key Trends & Projected Growth Report from 2024 to 2030
2024.05.19 16:00 TheLotStore 612 Peace, Magnolia, AR 71753
612 Peace, Magnolia, AR 71753 submitted by TheLotStore to u/TheLotStore [link] [comments] Huge mobile home friendly lot in Magnolia, Arkansas. Property measures 120x147 and is ready for your new home! Debit/Credit Cards Accepted No Closing Costs Cash Price: $4,500 Finance with $400 Down and 36 Payments of $145 Per Month No Credit Check, No Income Documentation, No Prepayment PenaltyProperty Address: 612 Peace, Magnolia, AR 71753 (Map location is approximate) County: Columbia Assessor Parcel Number: 01-01904-00000 Legal Description: Lot 3, Kelso-Smith Addition Zoning: Residential Annual Property Taxes: $18.00 View our amazing property deals at TheLotStore.Com. Additional Information: https://thelotstore.com/property/612-peace-magnolia-ar-71753/?feed_id=10946 |
2024.05.19 15:35 adude00 HISENSE REVIEW - AKA come non fare un climatizzatore
2024.05.19 15:32 BashfulRain Tim can’t help himself, and yammer yams nonstop about:
2024.05.19 15:15 WhiteSpirt25 Solitude in safer country of friends and family in risky motherland
2024.05.19 15:14 pohltergiest Spoke broke part 4
Where were we, ah yes. We piled into the train, which was not empty but had enough room. It took us a few stops to arrange ourselves to not be in the way, but there's only so much you can do when you're taking up the room of six people at once. The sky steadily darkened as we headed north, the local train trundling along at a steady pace. It felt a little slow, but whereas we might go 120km/h on the highway back home, it's pretty common for major roads here to have a speed limit of 50 and it's not common for it to be exceeded. submitted by pohltergiest to RainbowRamenRide [link] [comments] We arrived in shinjo, awkwardly carrying our bikes through the station. It was night and we needed some food. Beside snack bars, there was a Korean place open, so we went there. It was on a dim street, lit only by the colourful signs of the handful of bars and restaurants on the street. The doorway was short, so we ducked into a low ceilinged place that looked like a basement ftom the 80's. Wood panelling, faded posters, and a bunch of fridges with cold drinks inside. The cook welcomed us in and we sat at a low table on the ground across the little room from a rowdy group of men who looked like they had been there for awhile already. We ordered karaage and stone bowl bimimbap. The chef seemed happy that we wanted it spicy. He kept popping out to make sure we knew how to eat the food, him stirring Bryce's bowl of bimimbap for him since Bryce has never had the dish. When we were nearly done eating and the other table had stopped shouting for more stuff, the chef pulled up a chair in the doorway of the kitchen and chatted us up. He said he was from Korea and he had been in Japan for 36 years. He loves skiing and wanted to show us his pictures. He loved to hear our story of us biking across the country, asking about different details along the way. When we were done eating, he brought out two small cans of Korean soda for us to enjoy and then when we had finished that, he said that the meal was on him. "My heart", he said, when we insisted that we should pay. We gave him as many candies as he would accept, but graciously took the offering. Outside we headed to our best shot at a campsite, a day camping spot about 5 km away, well outside of shinjo. It was very dark on the way out, but nobody was on the road and the road was good, so we had no problems. The campsite looked good, with working bathrooms. It was a little overgrown, which was a good sign. Don't want to be camping in a park that will be well used on a Sunday morning. We found a quiet corner in a stand of weeds across a little stream that looked like it hadn't had foot traffic in a decade. We got set up and got to bed, it being very late. A cat watched us atop a fallen tree, it's eyes glowing an eerie red in the light of our headlamps. We could feel the heat and humidity really starting to ramp up, so we were ready to get going. After packing up, we set off west for the coastline and the aquarium. We got about ten kilometers before I ran over what I thought was a branch, both of us paranoid of a broken spoke at this point. Just to be sure I checked my spokes, sure enough I had a broken one. My face getting hot from frustration, I sat down and started wrenching spokes to tighten what I could, swearing and cursing that we lost another one. This couldn't be that hard. I didn't have a proper spoke wrench, which was making this kind of maintenance very difficult. Regardless, it'd need to be replaced and while I had many spares now, shops were hard to find. We were 15km from shinjo, so we could head back, or go forwards and try our luck with some transit. We decided to go forward, as we'd spend all day going back to the city to get repairs done. May as well get them done in the place we were already heading to. There was a train station nearby, so we biked the 5km to get there. Along the way I noticed that I did a terrible job with the spokes, making the wheel wobble and bump as I tugged it into an egg shape. Not great. When we arrived, the train station looked permanently closed. The tracks had a layer of rust on top indicating that no train had run here for some time. We looked around and found notices that a replacement bus was running this line. Would it be a small passenger bus or a large coach bus with luggage compartments? We decided to wait the hour and find out. As we waited, it got hot and sticky. I read some guides on spokes and wheel trueing. I've had some difficulties with learning new things, but the upset feelings with losing the ability to bike confidently helped to spur me along. It doesn't look too hard, but I'll need a spoke tool. Next time we're in a city with a few minutes to spare I'll get one. From what I can see, it's likely the super fast sections we're doing where we're fully loaded and hitting bumps in the road at 60km/h. These cause wild tension spikes in the spokes and lead to fatigue and breakage. We just can't be doing such intense speeds and hitting things like potholes. We also need to check the spoke tension after big rides. I'm going to try to incorporate it into lunch breaks. Eventually the bus came and it was thankfully a coach bus. After some wrangling we got the bikes in the luggage compartment and got on the bus. I sat, a little dazed, as I looked out the window. I reflected on why bike failures cause me such grief, it doesn't matter if we spend the day trying to get repairs, and yet I'm upset like I've been mugged. I suppose the bikes are our independence and mobility out here, something we control. I get a sense of safety from them, knowing I can get to food and shelter. When they break, not only is my movement hampered, now I have a big awkward expensive dead weight that I can't leave for extended periods of time. Getting it fixed is hard and there are often only one or two places per city that can do it. It's scary having a breakage in the countryside because we have no ability to call a cab on our own. It's a long string of "ifs" to get back to moving and the cascading failure of plans makes me very upset. I tried my best to remind myself that this is all part of the challenge, and besides, I would never, ever, learn things in any way other than the hardest. All we need is for a massive failure on the bike to lead to an injury, that'd be the hardest way to learn. Sweating as we haul our bikes through station platforms instead of drinking lemon sours by the ocean seems like a decent enough pounding to get me to learn some maintenance skills. We arrived at the bus terminus and made our way up and over a train station and down to a platform to catch a train to tsuruoka. Both the departing station and arriving station were both super hard to get our bikes though, and people really liked staring at us as we struggled. There was just one chance in this city, one shop that looked to be equipped to fix bikes like ours. Would it be open today, we'd have to go there to find out. Riding the kilometer to the shop through the little city tucked in between two mountain ranges, we arrived to find the store was closed, but there was a biking team loitering around after finishing a ride. We greeted them and asked them about their team and if they knew anything about the shop. They indicated that they were closed for lunch and they'd be back in a while. Small town stuff. We decided to follow suit and went to find some lunch ourselves. A short walk and a nice chinese restaurant serving lunch meal sets later (I got shrimp in a chili sauce) we headed back to find all but one of the bike team members had left and an old man and a lady were there eating rice balls on a bench outside the shop, which had an open door now. Music was drifting out, so we poked our heads in. Nobody was inside, so we asked the guy from the biking team if he knew where the mechanic was, to which he indicated the old guy was the mechanic, much to our embarrassment. The old fellow jumped up and finished his rice ball and started right away after what our issues were. The spoke replacement was an easy one so he took the wheel inside and started on that. I was relieved, but still very stressed so I decided to sit down and clean my bike for the first time. I recalled my first engineering job where I was taught that the first step to repairing a machine was to clean it, and until you could manage that you didn't belong around tools. Bryce likewise tried to do some maintenance as well. I'll finish this story tomorrow, it's supposed to rain in the morning and I can catch up then. |
2024.05.19 15:11 roddy0141 Instal Process from Street to Home
2024.05.19 15:06 Top-Positive5840 Question about the roborock Qrevo
2024.05.19 15:01 ibid-11962 Writing and Publishing Eragon [Post Murtagh Christopher Paolini Q&A Wrap Up #6]
[When I start to write a new book] I have an image. There’s always a strong emotional component to the image, and it’s that emotion that I want to convey to readers. Everything I do after that, all of the worldbuilding, plotting, characterization, writing, and editing—all of it—is done with the goal of evoking the desired reaction from readers. In the case of the Inheritance Cycle, the image was that of a young man finding a dragon egg (and later having the dragon as a friend). [10]
Who's your favorite character to write? Well, for me, it's the dragon Saphira. She's the reason I got into writing a dragon. She came first? She came before Eragon? Like she was the catalyst? The relationship came first, her and Eragon. [33]
I was specifically inspired by a YA book called Jeremy Thatcher Dragon Hatcher by Bruce Coville, which is a delightful book. I just loved that idea so much of finding a dragon egg, I was like, "Well, what sort of a world would a dragon come from?" And I knew I wanted the sort of bond between rider and dragon that Anne McCaffrey had, but I wanted the intelligence of the dragons that you find elsewhere, and the language and the magic. And I wanted sparkly scales because it just seemed like dragons are fabulous creatures and they ought to have sparkly scales. That's the fun thing about writing your own books. You can make them exactly the way you want to make them, and hopefully then that appeals to the audience as well. [30]
All of that kind of was swirling around in my head, and I wanted to write about dragons in a way that kind of combined a lot of elements in a way that, "I like this", and "I like this piece", and "I like this piece", but I kind of wanted to have all these different pieces in one type of dragon, and no one had quite done it exactly the way I wanted. [30]
I live in Montana, and our library is an old Carnegie or Rockefeller library, and especially back in the 90s, it didn't have that many books. So once I read all the fantasy in the library, I thought I had read all the fantasy there was to read. Because I was not the smartest kid in the world sometimes. And I kind of thought, "Well, it's the library. They have all the books that exist, right? All the books that matter are in the library." And I really had no idea what to read after that. So I decided to start writing myself and to try and write the sort of story that I would enjoy reading. And of course, what I enjoyed reading was books about flying on dragons and fighting monsters and having adventures. [35]
Reading and literature was always important in our family. My father's mother was a professor of comparative literature and wrote books on Dante and all sorts of stuff like that. Was the myths and folklore part of your life at this time? Yes, but I should clarify that it wasn't formally introduced to me. It was in the house. People weren't wandering around talking about. It was just like the Aeneid is sitting on the shelf. I would go read things. I have a great uncle. He's 90 now, my mother's uncle. Guy is still sharp as a tack. It's amazing. But he gave me a set of cassette tapes of Joseph Campbell, who did Hero of a Thousand Faces. So that was my exposure to his theories of the monomyth and the eternal hero and all sorts of things like that. That got me very much interested in and thinking about the origins of the fantasy that I was reading because I was reading Tolkien and David Eddings and Anne McCaffrey and Raymond Feist and Jane Yolan and Andre Norton and Brian Jaques, and all of these you know authors who were popular at the time. I was very curious where does this come from. Tolkien, of course, felt like sort of the origin in a lot of cases but then I was discovering that, there are earlier stories that even Tolkien was drawing from. That was really a revelation to me. I really sort of got enamored with it. A lot of fantasy is nostalgic and that appealed to me because I was homeschooled and my family didn't really have a lot of relatives in the area, so I felt very unmoored from the rest of society. I think I was looking for a sense of tradition or continuity with the past and fantasy helped provide that. That's an incredibly articulate thought for a 15-year-old author. Or has that come with age? No, it was something I was feeling at the time. You were conscious of it at the time? Well, listening to the Joseph Campbell stuff, I was looking: Where are our coming of age traditions? Where is the great quest to go on to prove yourself as a young adult, as a man? Where's the great adventure? What do I do in life? Those are all things that are part of the adolescent experience and always have been which is why so many mythic stories about coming of age deal with those questions. I think it's a universal thing. That's why Harry Potter, Eragon, Twilight, all of these have appealed so much because they deal with adolescence. They deal with finding your place in the world as an adult when you're starting as a young adult or a child. [28]
What games have taught you to be a better writer either in creating characters or worldbuilding or plotting even? All of my gaming experience was computer games, video games. One that had a huge influence on me was the old Myst series. Personally I love solving puzzles, so that's the first thing. And also the concept of the series, especially with the second game, Riven, it's all based around people writing books that create new worlds. And you get to go in them and solve puzzles and understand how that world works. And that just tickled every single part of my brain back in the day. Now, I'm going to be slightly unkind here, and I apologize if the author [David Wingrove] is listening to this, but there were a couple of novels based off of Myst. And I was such a fan of the series that I got the books, and I started reading them. And my first thought was, "I could do better than this." And so I decided to rewrite the first Myst novel. And I created a document in MS Word, and I got exactly three sentences into my rewrite. And I thought to myself, "okay, I think I can do this, but I could never sell it. So I better go write something of my own." And the next thing I did was Eragon. So video games kind of had a direct influence on me writing. But actually reading something that I felt was not particularly successful was such an inspiration. Because it was like, "this got published, I know I can at least get to this level." And it was published. And then maybe I can shoot for a little bit higher. [pause] I think some people have had that experience with Eragon. [26]
I had the original idea, the concept of boy finding dragon egg, and I tried writing a couple of very short versions of Eragon when I was fourteen, and none of them panned out so I stopped writing for a while. [28]Real World Version
What do you remember about the early days of writing “Eragon?” Originally, Eragon was named Kevin and the story was set in the real world. But I only finished around 10 pages. [16]Arya Opening Fantasy Version
I wrote three versions of Eragon before I wrote the version that had the unicorn, which was the first major draft. The first version was set in the real world, and that's why he's named Kevin. And the reason it was set in the real world is I was inspired by Jeremy Thatcher Dragon Hatcher, which is set in the real world. [32]
I was specifically inspired by a book called Jeremy Thatcher Dragon Hatcher by Bruce Coville. By the way, Bruce knows this. If you haven't read it, it's a great book about this young man in the real world who, spoiler, goes into an antique shop and buys a stone that ends up turning out to be a dragon egg. And I really loved that idea of a stone that was actually a dragon egg and the young man becoming joined with the dragon. And so I tried writing the story. And I got exactly five pages or six pages into it and I ran into a brick wall, because a boy finding a dragon egg is a good event, but it is not a good story. And I needed to figure out what was going to happen after that. I didn't know that at first. [36]
But then I was going down the rabbit hole of, "Well, if there's a dragon, where did the dragon come from? What if it were an actual fantasy world where the dragons were native?" And then that led me to then write a second beginning--I didn't get very far with this--that was more of a traditional fantasy story, and it opened with Arya and a couple other elves escaping a dungeon with a big battle, and at the very end of the battle, they send the dragon egg away, and Kevin finds it. But I didn't have the rest of the story, so I stopped writing it in that format. [32]Research Break
So I tried writing a second version of the story. So the first version of that story I wrote was set in the real world. Second version was more of like a fantasy world. [36]
I had the original idea when I was fourteen. I even wrote an early version of the story where it was set in the real world. But I soon realized that it was a lot more interesting to have a dragon in a fantastical setting. [8]
I tried writing before and I always failed because I would only get like four to six pages into a story and then I didn't know what to do next. And that was because I didn't actually have my story. All I really had were the inciting incidents, like a boy finds a dragon egg in the middle of a forest. Great. But that's not a story, that's just one event. What happens as a result? So before starting Eragon, I was very methodical about this. I read a whole bunch of books on how to write, how to plot stories. [35]Unused Arya Outline
I realized I wasn't getting anywhere. And I didn't know how to do what I was trying to do. Now, fortunately for me, my parents had noticed that I was getting interested in writing. And all of a sudden, books appeared in the house. There was no comment, no one forced it, these just magically appeared, and I read them. Some of the books that were incredibly helpful to me were these books that were called The Writer's Handbook, which was a collection of essays published each year by The Writer's Digest magazine. I had one from 1998, and I had one from, I think, 1993, or something like that. And there were essays from Stephen King and John Grisham and I think Ursula Le Guin and all sorts of other authors about what it was like to be an author both professionally and creatively. And that was incredibly helpful to me because again, the internet was not a resource. But the book that really made the difference for me was a book called Story by Robert McKee. It's a book for screenwriters and it's all about the structure of story. And up until that moment, I had never really consciously thought about the fact that stories have structure and that you can control that structure for the effect on the readers. So I devoured that book and I said, okay, I'm going to try this again. [36]
Did you very much sit down and study structure and character development and etc? I did. It wasn't a formal course or anything, it's just that my parents started buying these books and they started showing up. In fact, I still have them here on my shelf. This bookcase to my right is full of research books, technical books, language books. I read a book called Story by Robert McKee, which is a screenwriting book, that was and often has been very popular in Hollywood. It's a fairly technical look at story structure. I would never say do everything he says because of course you shouldn't necessarily follow any one formula, but that book really got me thinking about the fact that stories do have structure, which I hadn't really thought about before that. And that one can control that structure, and that this gives you something to work with. Before Eragon, I tried writing a number of stories and I never got past the first four to six pages, ten pages, because I never had the plot. All I would ever have was the inciting incident which, in the case of Eragon, is a young man finds a dragon egg. Ok, fine, but that's not a story. So when I read that book, then I was like wow, so I can control the structure of this. [28]
The problem with all of my early writing was that I’d get an idea and just start — I didn’t actually have a plot. But I was a pretty methodical kid, so I started reading about how to write. Fortunately, my parents are observant, and these kinds of books magically began appearing in the house. And I read all of them. [16]
So at this point, I was 15, that's when I graduated from high school and I was very methodical about it because I hate failing. So I said, okay, I'm going to create a fantasy world. And I did that. And then I said, I'm gonna plot out an entire book in this fantasy world. And I did that too. And then I said, but I'm not gonna write this. This is just a thought exercise. I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna stick it in a drawer. And I still have that to this day, that world and that story, I still have it sitting in a drawer somewhere. [36]
Then I spent some time and I created an entire fantasy world and I plotted out an entire fantasy novel in that world and I did not write it. I just stuck it in a drawer and that's where it's been sitting for 25 years now. And then I just did that to prove to myself that I could plot out an entire book. [35]
Before writing Eragon, again I was very methodical even as a teenager, I created an entire fantasy world. Wrote pages and pages about the worldbuilding, and then I plotted out an entire story in that world just to prove to myself that I could plot a story, create a world, and then I didn't write it. I put it aside. I still have it all saved. Put it in a drawer. [28]
And then I decided okay now I'm going to plot out a trilogy, because all great fantasy stories are trilogies. I'm going to do it as the heroic monomyth, because that is, at least my understanding back then, is this is one of the oldest forms of stories. I know it works on a general sense. It's going to give me a safety net, and then I'm going to write the first book as a practice book just to see if I'm capable of producing something that's three, four, five hundred pages long. And that's what I did. That was about two and a half months of worldbuilding, plotting, creating this. Then I wrote the first book and that was Eragon. That was my practice book. I never actually planned on publishing Eragon. It was only after I'd put so much work into it and my parents read it that then we proceeded with it. I was aware of story structure. I continue to read lots of books on it. [28]The First Draft
And then version three is the version that everyone generally knows. And that's where I spent the time to plot out the whole series before writing, because having a idea of where you're going seems to help with the writing, at least for me. Usually. [32]
I originally saw Eragon as a practice novel, which is part of why it’s a very typical hero’s story. I knew that structure worked and it gave me the safety net I needed. [16]
The first draft went super fast. It went really fast because I had no idea what I was doing. And I just wrote that sucker. I wrote the first 60 pages by hand with ballpoint pen, cause I didn't know how to type on a computer. And then by the time I typed all that into the computer, I knew how to type. I did the rest in the computer. But this was back in the day when computers were fairly new. We had a Mac classic, which only had two megabytes of RAM. And the problem is that the operating system chewed up some of that memory. And my book file was around two megabytes large. So I actually had to split the book into two because I couldn't open the whole file on the computer or the computer would crash. So I had to open half the book and then close that and then open the other half. [35]
Once I finished the first draft, I was super excited and I thought, "well all of these things on how to write say that you should read your own book and see if there's any tweaks you wanna make." But I was really excited because I was getting to read my own book for the first time, and I thought this is gonna be awesome. And it didn't take very long while reading it to realize that it was awful. It was horrible. And just to give you an idea of just how bad that first draft was, in the very first draft of Eragon, Eragon wasn't named Eragon, Eragon was named Kevin. And there was also a unicorn in that first draft at one point, so you know it wasn't very good. [35]Releasing the Kevin Cut
If I heard correctly as I was reading, Eragon wasn't originally called Eragon? No, in the first draft of the book he was called Kevin. There's a reason! Look I have an explanation for it, okay. The explanation is that my original inspiration was Jeremy Thatcher Dragon Hatcher which is set in the real world. The original version of Eragon that I was developing was set in the real world and when I decided that it would make more sense to have a world where the dragons were native to and switched it over to this fantasy world and began to develop that, I just kept the name that I'd been working with, which was Kevin. Naming a main character is hard, especially when you get used to a certain name. I don't want to say I was lazy. I want to focus on the world building and writing the first draft and I'll worry about the name later. [28]
There is an early version of Eragon that no one's seen, that even my editor at Random House never saw. And that was my first draft. And in that first draft, Eragon encountered a unicorn in the Beor Mountains on the way to the Varden. And the unicorn touches him and essentially affects the transformation that he goes under during the blood oath ceremony with the elves in the second book, in Eldest. And his whole storyline with the Varden once he gets to Farthen Dûr is completely different because now he has these abilities and he and a team of people ends up getting sent on a scouting mission in the dwarven tunnels to go find the Urgal army and then they have to flee back through the tunnels to warn everyone of this huge army and I had a underground cave full of lava, and multiple shades, and a huge Urgal army. There was there was a lot of dramatic stuff. Finding the Ra'zac in Dras-Leona was completely different. This is the draft where Eragon was named Kevin. [32]
I haven't thought about that version in ages. I think Arya was awake all the way from Gil'ead to Farthen Dûr in that version. That's right, I had to completely rewrite that. It's an unpleasant ride for her. No, no, no, she was awake and healed. She was awake. That's right, God, I had to rewrite most of the last chunk of the book now that I think back, it's been a long time. [32]
The worst thing is, I think Kevin would actually take a larger budget [to adapt to film]. No, stop. Why would Kevin take a larger budget? Because the battles were bigger, there was more stuff going on. Seriously, there were more creatures, more travel. Yeah, I think Kevin would actually take more money than Eragon. [32]
You said that Eragon's name was originally Kevin. Was Eragon's name originally Kevin? It was. And I really regret I didn't stick with it because I think that as many books as I've sold, the series would have been at least twice as successful if it had been about the adventures of the great dragon writer Kevin. Especially just seeing Kevin on the front cover. Imagine the appeal to the modern youth. Kevin the dragon writer. I mean Eragon, it's confusing with Aragorn. Oregano. Oregon. But Kevin, Kevin stands out, Kevin's original. That's why I had to move away from it. [31]
So do you wanna share some of those drafts with us, Christopher? Just kidding. Well, I actually had a fan reach out to me. He's one of the big members of the online fan community on Reddit and elsewhere. And he's kind of interested in some of these early versions from almost an archivist point of view, a scholarly point of view. Which is certainly an interesting idea. I mean, there is an early version of Eragon that no one's seen, that even my editor at Random House never saw. ... I cannot describe how much the Internet absolutely needs for you to put out an edition of Eragon that just says Kevin. Should this be like Mistborn or Way of Kings Prime? This is the Kevin edition of Eragon. The Kevin cut. Oh my god. It's "Eragon: Kevin's Version". ... We absolutely need Kevin's Version of Eragon. That's something we need. It's bad. It's bad. Look, there are certainly people who can look at Eragon, the version we have now, and say, "we can tell this was a younger writer." I look at it and I can tell. I could do so much more now with the material than I could then. But if you think that about the published version of Eragon, man, if you saw the unpublished version, the early version, it really is the raw writing of a homeschooled 15-year-old, who wrote a 500 page book about Kevin. I don't know, the internet is very unhinged these days. They would love this. It needs to exist somewhere on the internet. [32]
So I wrote Eragon, and then I read the first draft and it wasn't particularly good, so I spent a good chunk of a year rewriting it as best as I could. I didn't know what I was doing but I was trying. I've heard it said that being displeased with your own work is actually a good thing because it means you know what is good work, and if you're not happy with your work because it's not good, it means you could at least have a goal to shoot for. If you read your work and you're like this is the best thing that's ever been written, you're never going to get any better. [28]Self-publishing
But I could see that the book needed work, so I decided to try to fix it as best I could, and I spent the better part of that year revising, rewriting, changing Kevin to Eragon. And then I gave the book to my parents and fortunately for me, they actually enjoyed what I had done. And they said, we think you have something, let's try to take it out into the world and see if anyone else wants to read it. [35]
[We] decided to self-publish the book as a joint venture since we didn't know anyone in the publishing world. That was again a good chunk of a year where we were editing the book as best the three of us could. Preparing it for publication, formatting, I drew the cover. [28]Promotion
Now you have to understand, my parents were always self-employed, have always been self-employed and we were always looking for things we could work on together as a family business. And Eragon was like the perfect opportunity for that. They'd had some experience self-publishing a couple of small educational books my mom had worked on. Because she was a trained Montessori teacher, and so she was trying to use that expertise to write some material herself. But I don't even think we sold 100 copies of those. So we spent another good chunk of a year preparing the book for publication with doing more editing, doing the layout, designing the cover. [35]
The first set of 50 books showed up while we were watching Roman Polanski's Macbeth, which seemed fitting because those first 50 books were all miscut from the printer. And as a result, we had to rip the covers off, send them back for credit from the printer, and then burn the insides of the books. So we had a proper book burning in our yard, and I actually saved some of those burnt pages just as a memory of that event. [35]
Self publishing wasn’t as viable then as a pathway to a career as an author as it is today. Why did it work for you? Everything completely changed because of e-readers. If you wanted to read an e-book, you had to have a PDF on your computer. There were no distribution systems like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Back then, the lowest amount you could print and not have the book be too expensive was probably about 10,000 copies. But we were fortunate because print-on-demand had just become a thing, so books were just printed as needed. Self publishing is a lot easier these days. Of course, today’s marketplace is a lot more crowded as a result. [16]
My family and I were going around the western half of the United States with the self-published edition of Eragon. I was cold calling schools, libraries, and bookstores to set up events. I was doing two to three one-hour long presentations every single day for months on end at various times. You have to understand that because my parents were self-employed, the time they took to help prepare Eragon for publication was time they weren't working on other freelance projects that would have been bringing in money. So by the time we actually had Eragon printed and in hand, if it had taken another two to three months to start turning a profit, we were going to have to sell our house, move to a city, and get any jobs we could. Because of that financial pressure I was willing to do things I probably would have been too uncomfortable to do otherwise. Like doing all those presentations. [28]Getting traditionally published
We were doing a lot of self-promotion. I was cold calling schools and libraries and talking them into letting me do presentations. And that worked pretty well because the librarians could take pre-orders for us. If we went into a bookstore, by hand selling, I could maybe sell anywhere between 13 to 40 books in a day. 42 was like the best I ever did, but usually it was around 15 or so books, which just didn't cover printing costs and travel and food and all of that. But going into the schools, we were doing about 300 books a day, which was excellent. [34]
Can you tell me a little bit about how you and your family self-published the first Eragon book and what marketing strategies you did? Oh, it was all nepotism, you know. I wouldn't have gotten published without my parents. There's nothing as powerful as a publishing company that's four people sitting around a kitchen table in the middle of rural Montana. So yeah, without Nepotism, I wouldn't have gotten published. You have to embrace something like Nepotism if you really wanna succeed in today's world. In fact, people don't realize that you actually get a Nepotism card. There's a secret club. You go to New York and there's huge network opportunities. There's branches of the club everywhere, especially strong in Hollywood, of course, in music. Taylor Swift is an example. So if you can get into the nepotism club, I won't say you're guaranteed success, but you got about 80% chance of actually making it that you wouldn't have otherwise. Do you think your mom and dad would be willing to be my mom and dad? No, absolutely not. No, no. You don't have brown hair, so it doesn't work. You have to have brown hair to be a Paolini. Okay, I'll try to find a different way in, I guess. [31]
So you were very much looking for that partnership? Well we were wary. But the thing is is we were selling enough copies of Eragon that to scale it up we were going to have to start duplicating all the things that a regular publisher does. We were actually looking at partnering with a book packager or a book distributor just to get more copies out. To do everything a traditional publisher could do for me was a huge amount of work so it made sense to pair with Random House or someone else at that point. But it was still nerve-wracking because the book was being a success and then handing it off to another company, we didn't know if it was just going to end up in the remainder bin two weeks after it came out. [28]Gaining Confidence
People in the book world were starting to take notice because of course, if you've been to public school, you may remember the Scholastic Book Fairs and all of the Scholastic reps in the different schools were seeing me come to the schools and selling these books and hearing the kids talk about it. And it was getting attention. So we would have gotten a publisher, I would have gotten a publisher eventually. [34]
The book sold enough copies and bounced around enough that we'd heard that Scholastic—because Scholastic does all the Book Fairs in schools in the US—was interested and that we might get an offer from them. Before that happened though... [34]
Eventually another author by the name of Carl Hiaasen ended up buying a copy of the self-published edition of Eragon in a local bookstore. Which now that I'm older, I'm rather shocked at because it takes a lot to get me to buy a self-published book. It's got to look really good. [35]
Carl Hiaasen wrote the young adult book Hoot as well as many adult books. He comes up to Montana, I think he's got a vacation home here in the valley, but he was up here fly fishing and he bought a copy of Eragon for his then 12 year old son, Ryan. And fortunately for me, Ryan liked the book and Carl recommended it to Random House and it sort of bounced around among the editors for a couple of months before my editor-to-be grabbed it and said, "Yes, we will. I want to take a chance on this teenage author and we're going to offer him money for a trilogy that only exists in his head and see what happens." [34]
How did you find an agent? We had the offer from Random House, and like two days later, we had the offer from Scholastic. And so we knew we didn't know what we didn't know. My dad participated in some online self-publishing forum sort of thing. So he posted up a question and said, look, this is the situation we're in. Does anyone have any advice? And another one of the members said, "well, I was just at this publishing writing conference and there was this young agent there and I was really impressed with his presentation, or him talking about the industry." So my dad got his information online and did what you're never supposed to do, which is he called the agent directly and left this long rambling voicemail message because it was lunchtime in New York and you take your lunch breaks in New York. And only at the end of the message did he say, "oh, yes, and by the way, we have two competing offers from two publishing houses." And when I asked him, I said, "why did you do that?" He said, "well, because if he's any good as an agent, he's going to listen to the whole message before he deletes it." And we found out later that he nearly deleted the message. Because my dad started off like, "I got this teenage son, and he's written this book", and yeah, that, OK. So it was like two hours later we got a call from Simon. And Simon said overnight me a copy of Eragon and if I like it I'll represent you. And Simon has been my agent for 21 years now. [34]
It was a big risk for Random House. And it was a big risk for me because the book was successful, self-published, and we knew that giving it to a publisher, you lose the rights to a degree, and most books don't turn a profit, and it could have just ended up in the remainder bin. So what really worked in my favor is that Random House, and specifically Random House Children's Books, and specifically the imprint of Knopf, which is where I'm at were looking for their own Harry Potter, essentially. Scholastic was publishing Harry Potter. And Scholastic also gave me an offer for Eragon, but I could tell that Random House was the one that really loved the book and Scholastic was doing it because they thought it was a good business opportunity. Scholastic actually offered more money than Random House. But I went with Random House and it was the right choice. And I found out after the fact that Chip Gibson who was the head of the children's department at the time basically chose to use Eragon as sort of something to rally the troops and put the entire children's division behind it, and I was the very fortunate recipient of that love and attention. Which of course would only get you so far if people didn't enjoy reading the book. But fortunately for me, they did a great job marketing it and then people actually enjoyed the book. Which is why when people ask me how to get published, it's like, what am I supposed to say? The answer ultimately is you write a book that people want to read, and that's a facile answer, but it is true. If people want to read it, it makes everything else easier. The agent wants you, the publishers want you, and ultimately the public wants you. [34]
And I didn't realize how much was behind that email, because large publishers do not just casually say, "hey, we want to publish your book". There was a whole plan there, and they had a plan. And so they did. Eragon came out and then I had to figure out how to write a book with everyone expecting the sequel. [36]
So you kind of went and peddled your books at schools, as I understand, right? It seems to have paid off though, because it eventually landed in the hands of bestselling author Carl Hiaasen, but not right away. First, your book got in the hands of his stepson, and the kid liked it so much that he told Hiaasen about it, who then got Eragon fast-tracked with Penguin Random House. I really admire the way that you went for the weakest links, manipulating the minds of our youth and using them to shill your book for you. It's a tried and true marketing strategy from Girl Scout Cookies to coupon books, and I applaud you for your ingenuity. My biggest question here is, do you pay Carl Hiaasen's stepson the agent royalties he so rightfully deserves? He tried to collect one time, but I had to hire a couple of guys to drive him off. But, no, you always go for the weakest link. Back when I was self-published and all that I even tried to get Eragon reviewed by Entertainment Weekly, so I called up the subscription number on the back of the magazine and told them I'd made a mistake and asked them to transfer me over to corporate, and managed to get right to their book reviewer and tried to talk him into reviewing Eragon. So you always go for, as you said, the weakest link. Which is corporate. Ryan, Carl's son, though, yeah, I probably owe him a ridiculous amount of royalties. I'd say so. He made you. Oh, he did, absolutely. Without him, I'd be nothing. I guess the lesson here for aspiring authors is that it's not really about finding your target audience, necessarily. You just have to find your target prolific author's stepson and let the kid take it from there. Yeah, absolutely. As I said, that's part of the nepotism package. The sort of networking inside the industry. This is the stuff that you can never access otherwise, and you'll never get published otherwise. So it's not like you can just grow up in the middle of nowhere in Montana, self-publish a book, and then just become a success, by promoting it. You have to have connections. That's genius. I think you could have had an incredible career in designing loot boxes for mobile games based on how good you are at manipulating the world. Absolutely, microtransactions are God's work. [31]
Was anxiety something you felt moving to this deal with Random House? Was that quite pressuring? Yes, it was a big change to go from writing for yourself as a teenager, homeschooled, living in the middle of nowhere, to knowing that there was a large audience for your next book and that they had expectations. I got criticized quite a bit, critiqued quite a bit when Eragon came out for, shall we say, my lack of experience on the technical side of things with the writing. I'd say some of those were certainly fair critiques. The great advantage of youth is that you don't know how difficult things are and you have a lot of energy. The great disadvantage of youth is you don't have experience, and there's no fixing that aside from time and effort. All of that was definitely in my head when I really started work on Eldest and it was pretty nerve-wracking quite honestly. [28]
When you finished the book, I mean your parents believed in it obviously. Did you too? Or were you like, "You know what, maybe the second book, maybe go all in on the second one?" I didn't feel like I was actually an author until my third book was published. Because the first one, well, that could be a fluke. Well, the second one, yeah, but you know. But once the third book came out, then I was like, okay, maybe I'm actually a writer. But even then, even after I finished the series, I still felt like, okay, now I have to write something that's not Eragon, just to prove that I can. So every book has been its own challenge and has been a way for me to keep feeling like I'm growing as an artist and learning to become a better and better writer. [2]
It took me, I wanna say almost 10 years to feel like I wasn't an imposter and that it wasn't just gonna get yanked away. You know what my dream was when Eragon was was going to get published by Random House? Like this was my pie in the sky because I didn't think it was going to happen. But this was my dream. I did all the math and I was like, man, if I could somehow someday sell 100,000 books, which is impossible. But man, if I could sell 100,000 books, that's a darn good living. Man, I could really make a living off that. I could support a family and 100,000 books. Man, that'd be amazing. And then it kind of took off from there. [33]
2024.05.19 14:58 AnusChakra Joost Klein's ESF staging was mediocre, imho