Okay...no one is going to be more surprised than me about what I'm about to post here, but the amount of bile I'm seeing spewed is really starting to be a little excessive, even to me.
I'm certainly no fan of TEA -- I still get people coming up to me at FanFest to talk to me about
my review of the book, and I still stand by most of the criticism I put in that blog post, despite the fact that I have mellowed somewhat on the vitriol that permeates much of the review. I am still not particularly happy with what that book did to the Caldari, nor do I particularly like the simplification of the factions that it did overall. Tony saying "who remembered anything about tube children?" in his presentation in 2008 is still something that causes me to grind my teeth into dust to this day.
However, that very same presentation shed a lot of light on a great many of the problems with that book which were technical and process-oriented, which I suspect severely impacted the quality of that book overall. The problems Tony talked about with the publisher -- having to edit his own work and do it on a very short timetable, to start with -- as well as the fact that it sounds like CCP did not really have any sort of storyline planning process at that point, with much of the events being dictated by other departments within the company, whether it was content, or game design, or marketing, or whoever, is not conducive to the creation of a great work of literature.
That does not excuse some of the creative decisions, but I think people would be surprised what a good editor can do to your writing. Having someone who can say to you "hey, don't you think this is a little over the top" or "I don't know, what if instead of X you had Y happen, because I think that would make character Z stronger", especially someone who has done this with many other writers, makes a huge difference. A good editor does a lot more than correct typos. When you don't have that editor there, and when you're doing everything on a very tight schedule, especially for a first time author (of a novel at least), you are bound to get something that feels very rough and uneven. And that's compounded when you don't have as much flexibility as you'd like because of external demands. I have talked to Tony a number of times at FanFest and elsewhere, when I've been lucky enough to get a few minutes of his time, and frankly, the first time I did so it was extremely embarrassing for me, personally and professionally, because I was thinking of the book purely as a creative endeavor and made the same mistake most of you seem to be -- TEA was, in large part, a marketing tool more than anything else, and I suspect, considering what CCP has said about the sales and a lot of the responses I heard at FanFest 2008, it was largely successful in that respect. I ended up berating him in a way that he did not particularly deserve and I still regret that -- well, I suppose loosely it could be called a conversation -- to this day.
For his part, whatever you may think of TEA or his other work, I have found Tony to be extremely willing to listen and respond to criticism when it is presented cogently and not with the insane hysterics of a wounded fangirl. Frankly, no one is more surprised than I am that he has actually been willing to talk to me after that first encounter and engage me on a topic that clearly I am very passionate about, and has been one of the most gracious people I've met when it comes to taking criticism without getting defensive, which I think it is fair to say is something I could work on myself.
I understand how many of you (especially on the Caldari side) may feel about what he's written. However, I would caution you against making this some sort of personal beef with Tony himself, because a great deal of what you probably have a problem with is not entirely his fault, and I don't think he is particularly deserving of the kind of bile I've seen some people throw around. Three years ago at FanFest, Tony was also the person who told me they really needed to do something like what the "immersion project" the content panel this year talked about seems to be doing (and is definitely necessary) -- there's no real central repository for most of that Eve canon right now, and when you are just one person that does make it hard to keep track of some of those more esoteric details. I know the Caldari like the back of my hand, but there's still some stuff with them that escapes me at times, and when it comes to the other factions I definitely have holes in my knowledge -- can anyone else here say differently? That another reason why a good editor or a researcher might have been good when TEA was written, but that just wasn't there at the time.
I've not really had the chance to talk to Abraxas (and after what I subjected Tony to, maybe that's for the best), and I admit I don't really like the style of his chrons at all, but I suspect the same pressures Tony had when he wrote his novel are there when Abraxas is doing his writing, so try to keep that in mind before you start throwing stones. You guys can be as upset as you want about what they've written, but it is a little painful to me to see people personalizing the problem so much because I made the same mistake all those years ago, and I don't like reliving that memory. If you really want to encourage the storyline of Eve to be better, you need to encourage CCP to make the storyline a bigger part of what goes into Eve's development -- personally, that's what I've been most disappointed by the last year or two, that the storyline seems to have slowly been pushed more and more to the wayside. That may be a business decision, but I'd like to think that an encompassing storyline that evolves over the course of months and years is one of the things that really makes Eve different from other MMOs, and is something else that is only possible because of CCP's unique commitment to the single-shard nature of the game. If you want storyline to be an important and integral part of the game, rather than an afterthought, the people who feel that way at CCP -- which I think Tony, Abraxas, and all the other writers at CCP are included in -- are your best advocates. However, you need to help them show that there is a business case for making storyline a strong aspect of Eve, and making it seem like
nothing they do will ever be right or enough for you is not a good way to make the case.
CCP is a business, and they have to make business decisions, and hiring writers, editors, and people to fact check stuff, like I think we all want to see, all takes money. That's also money they could spend on game designers, programmers, and marketing guys. All of those things are stuff CCP thinks will help them
make money. If you really want to help make Eve's storyline better, you should try to come up with ways it can be used to strengthen the rest of the game and show CCP that it helps get and retain customers. And quite frankly, from what I understand,
that is exactly what Tony's job description is.
I haven't read Abraxas' book yet (though the CAIN crew at FanFest bought it for me this year, in the hopes that I would review it -- which I will after I finish the second Song of Ice and Fire novel) but I can tell you that when I do it will be with a much different eye than I read TEA, and I am actually very curious to read Tony's new book -- I know that I may not like it, but I also want to see how he has developed as a writer and (hopefully) what a better process for writing has done to his work.
I also want to say that the storyline CCP has had over the course of the last few years since TEA, despite maybe not being paced the best, has been pretty good, and it's clear that a lot of the nuance some people may think was lost in TEA is not completely gone.
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