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A review by misophorism
To Sing of Damnation by Adam Washington
challenging
dark
funny
fast-paced
1.0
Yeah, this is my book.
Good ideas. The concept is pretty cool. However it's executed horribly. The reason for this is primarily that To Sing of Damnation was my second novel after transitioning from screenplays. The Misophorism Trilogy is in a non-fiction style, easier to adapt to, but TSOD is entirely fiction and presented as fiction. The prose is awful. The pacing is way too fast. The concepts aren't executed well. The characters do not exist. It's an all around disaster, and the only saving grace is that the concepts themselves are pretty cool.
You know, a criticism that annoyed me around the release date was people saying Jordan was melodramatic. "How could he be melodramatic? He's literally in the middle of a theological conflict over existence. Ekotl will destroy everything if he doesn't do what He wants, and he goes into a Church and is literally kicked out by God spiritually. How could he be?"
The pacing, Adam. The pacing is how. Every fucking 20-30 pages Jordan's mentioning suicide, punching something, breaking something, *whining!* You know, I could probably keep in all of that if they were spaced out by maybe 100 more pages. But the book is 160 pages long. That's way too much. Unlike TMT where the characters committing suicide is normal and expected given the content, we're literally stuck inside Jordan's head until, Ekotl be praised, we get a goddamn break from him with Temptatio Aeirias. And what do you know, in Part 2, Aeyar isn't nearly as annoying as Jordan. That's how.
TMT's issue was it drew too heavily on other works. My influence was on my sleeve. In the rewrite I made it stand more on its own, but I didn't want to change too much for returning readers. I would have had to strip a lot of its most recognizable qualities out, and I didn't want to do that for people who were already fans. TSOD, however, I would have to completely rewrite from the ground up to make anything decent.
I've had people tell me they really enjoyed TSOD, and if you did, I don't want to take that away from you. But I certainly hate it. It's a waste of good paper. If I had never published this, as I wisely chose to do with my next couple of books, then it would be sitting on a hard drive and with my current experience and awakened love for prose and novel writing, as opposed to just doing it because I was tired of scripts that are circuitous to share (you have to tell someone how to read a script; multiple people asked me what "beat" means, which isn't a stupid question, to be clear—people just never ask what "she paused" means, because everyone already knows), I could turn this into something that's actually decent. But it's already out there, and it's too late. Oh well. Lessons learned.
1/5.
Good ideas. The concept is pretty cool. However it's executed horribly. The reason for this is primarily that To Sing of Damnation was my second novel after transitioning from screenplays. The Misophorism Trilogy is in a non-fiction style, easier to adapt to, but TSOD is entirely fiction and presented as fiction. The prose is awful. The pacing is way too fast. The concepts aren't executed well. The characters do not exist. It's an all around disaster, and the only saving grace is that the concepts themselves are pretty cool.
You know, a criticism that annoyed me around the release date was people saying Jordan was melodramatic. "How could he be melodramatic? He's literally in the middle of a theological conflict over existence. Ekotl will destroy everything if he doesn't do what He wants, and he goes into a Church and is literally kicked out by God spiritually. How could he be?"
The pacing, Adam. The pacing is how. Every fucking 20-30 pages Jordan's mentioning suicide, punching something, breaking something, *whining!* You know, I could probably keep in all of that if they were spaced out by maybe 100 more pages. But the book is 160 pages long. That's way too much. Unlike TMT where the characters committing suicide is normal and expected given the content, we're literally stuck inside Jordan's head until, Ekotl be praised, we get a goddamn break from him with Temptatio Aeirias. And what do you know, in Part 2, Aeyar isn't nearly as annoying as Jordan. That's how.
TMT's issue was it drew too heavily on other works. My influence was on my sleeve. In the rewrite I made it stand more on its own, but I didn't want to change too much for returning readers. I would have had to strip a lot of its most recognizable qualities out, and I didn't want to do that for people who were already fans. TSOD, however, I would have to completely rewrite from the ground up to make anything decent.
I've had people tell me they really enjoyed TSOD, and if you did, I don't want to take that away from you. But I certainly hate it. It's a waste of good paper. If I had never published this, as I wisely chose to do with my next couple of books, then it would be sitting on a hard drive and with my current experience and awakened love for prose and novel writing, as opposed to just doing it because I was tired of scripts that are circuitous to share (you have to tell someone how to read a script; multiple people asked me what "beat" means, which isn't a stupid question, to be clear—people just never ask what "she paused" means, because everyone already knows), I could turn this into something that's actually decent. But it's already out there, and it's too late. Oh well. Lessons learned.
1/5.