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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2014-09-28 06:44 pm (UTC)+: cool idea, and nice evocation of Black Company feel.
-: the writing feels like "this is why God made editors" or "why self-publishing has a bad name." Struggling with "who said this line of dialogue?"[1], wondering why militia and a district? council get called Wapentake and Gerefan. I've read enough about the Anglo-Saxon kingdom to think I know what a Wapentake is but don't see the connotative advantage to using the term; Gerefan was really obscure and seems to be "king's officials, probably corrupt".
Clarity or meaning redundancy don't seem to have been authorial priorities, which is a bit funny given that a review suggests civilizational redundancy is a later theme in the book.
[1] Though still not as bad as "professionally published" Brust-Tor, who produce dialogue cascades that I *know* have lost synchronization by the end, ABABABBA style, often enough that I wonder if Brust is deliberately pissing on the reader.