If you actually read what you're quoting, you'd see that he was referring to what he was contemplating doing, before Tor had him split it into three volumes.
was not an easy choice. I knew it would anger some readers. I knew it would take a lot of time, and I would end up dedicating a great deal more of my life (and my family's life) to the Wheel of Time than I'd initially anticipated. At the very least, I was contemplating writing a book three to four times the length of the initial contract - essentially, doing four times the work for the exact same pay.
In other words, he knew that to get the whole story out in one book, he'd have to write three to four times as much as the initial contract specified, therefore doing four times the work for the same pay. And he was willing to do it, too. Remember, Tor wanted a book by November; Sanderson had to choose between "publish a railroaded, crappy story" and "split it into multiple coherent volumes".
Brilliantly intriguing, but be prepared for an eternity of non-closure.
Yeah, that's the one thing I haven't liked about A Game of Thrones. It's never a good sign when new apparently major characters are being introduced in the last 100 pages.
Fanboy? No, I'll freely admit that the Wheel of Time is longer than it strictly needs to be. I'll even concede that the story got out of control (in terms of length), and Jordan wasn't quite capable of containing it. And unlike Apple fanboys, I don't expect everyone to like it. I'm hardly a fanboy.
Sure, I've read the series multiple times. Sure, my online ID is derived from the Wheel of Time. Does it matter that I came up with the name in the context of a Star Wars game (Jedi Knight II)? Does it matter that I own the Lord of the Rings CCG, but not the Wheel of Time CCG? (Point being: Fan, but not a fanboy.)
Don't make the mistake of thinking "he's saying something good about it, so he must be a fanboy".
When you read the series not once, but four times, it becomes apparent that you aren't just claiming to like it due to the sunk cost of time; if you read the Wheel of Time four times, you actually like it, no question about it.
(Yes, I've read the Wheel of Time four times, and I'll start a fifth read before the release of the next book right after I finish my first read of George R.R. Martin's series. I don't keep reading series I don't like, even if I've invested a lot of time in them. For example, I stopped reading Stephen King's Dark Tower series halfway through the last book because it passed my tolerance threshold.)
He's getting paid separately for each book (he told me so in person), but it wasn't his idea to split the story into three volumes. Tor wanted to publish something this year (in November), but the story wasn't finished, so they asked him if there was a convenient place to split it; he's just doing what his publisher and editor want him to do.
I'd suggest you grab Warbreaker online for free, it's Brandon Sanderson's most recently published book; it was also available as a PDF through Brandon's website during the whole course of its writing.
Uh... I've never heard of a book author who gets paid by the word. (Or do you have reason to believe Jordan was getting paid by the word?) Authors get paid based on how well their book sells. Sure, established authors might get advances, or larger advances, but either way it's based on the volume of book sales, not based on how much ink was used to print the book.
Having met Brandon Sanderson in person, and discussed the 3-books vs 1-book issue, I can tell you that it wasn't his idea. Tor decided they wanted something to publish this November. In order to meet that requirement while still delivering a coherent story, he had to tear what he had written apart (move some things ahead to the next book), and fill in the gaps with other stuff. Discussing the result with Tor and RJ's wife, Harriet (who is basically in charge of the Wheel of Time), it was decided to publish the last book in three volumes over three years. The "Wheel of Time: A Memory of Light: Volume I" name got dropped later because it was too long, so the first volume was renamed.
Sure, Brandon's getting paid for his work, and he'll certainly get paid more for writing three books than he would for just one. But it wasn't his intention, so I can't in good conscience say he's milking the series. What I can say is that he's doing his best to follow in Jordan's footsteps as he writes the final sections of the Wheel of Time. We can judge based on the result. If after the third volume we can see that the three volumes were filled with needless fluff, then sure, we can say Brandon was making the books longer than necessary to get more money. But based on what I know of Brandon, and based on what we know about Robert Jordan himself, I do not think that will be the case two or three years from now.
In any case, Jordan claimed he'd do it in one book "even if they have to invent a new binding method." Had Jordan lived long enough to finish the Wheel of Time himself, I'd be willing to bet that the final volume would still have been multiple books, and you'd be complaining that Jordan himself is milking the series. (That is, I'm guessing you'd assign malicious, money-grubbing motives to either author, if the final volume turned out to be more than one book.)
The basic fantasy world was so derivative of Tolkien that I just wanted to barf
Having read both the Wheel of Time and the Lord of the Rings several times (as well as various LotR-related books like the Silmarillion), I'm not sure what you're getting at. I can think of only a few small similarities:
- Lan Mandragoran has a backstory similar (but not identical) to that of Aragorn, but the characters themselves are quite dissimilar. - The Myrdraal bear a passing similarity to the Nazgul, but only because they wear black and cause fear; the Myrdraal are otherwise entirely different. - The Trollocs bear a passing similarity to the Orcs, but only because they're the "bad guy" infantry; what we know of Trolloc and Orcish social structures are entirely different.
These are minor similarities at best; arguably, none of them are key to the plot. None of them are vomit-worthy, either. So, I ask you: in what ways do you think the Wheel of Time world is derivative of Tolkien?
The fact that there has since been *five* more books and they're still not done, with these last three still on the ledger, convinces me I was right to do that.
So a series is automatically bad if it is unfinished at the end of book eleven? I must say, that notion seems quite ridiculous to me.
(Disclaimer: I've read the Wheel of Time series four times. I've read other almost-equally-lengthy series as well. IMO, length doesn't make a series bad, poor writing makes a series bad. RJ's writing style is not for everyone, but it works for me; apparently it doesn't work for you.)
On a semi-related note, Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy I found to be very good.
Agreed. I would also recommend Warbreaker (available online as a free PDF, or you can get it in hardcover) and Elantris. If you have kids or youngish siblings, Sanderson also writes a children's series that I've heard good things about.
Actually texting doesn't cost the cell company anything at all, since texts are sent in (previously) unused space in the command channels (i.e. when the cell phone updates its location with the tower, it'll send a text if it has one to send). Since these updates happen anyway, they're essentially free for the carriers.
Yes, I agree that the standalone text messaging rates are ridiculous. I'll even add that the charge for the unlimited texting package is ridiculously high ($30 which covers all five lines). Ideally, they should be free (or at least included with the base plan), since they're essentially free for the carriers.
I'm just saying that they advertise "unlimited texting", and they give you unlimited texting (up to the natural limit where you can't actually type that fast).
I'm a former 1&1 customer for a reason... and I used to love them. Turns out they decided to really prove they don't care about their customers.
Others have answered your question... most of the limits are listed in your admin control panel. However, over the years I had my account with 1&1, they raised the price on me once without notification, and they regularly changed my bandwidth limits, database limits, e-mail account limits, and so on. By "changed" I mean "sometimes up, sometimes down".
One limit that you should be aware of is the unpublished "12 concurrent apache process" limit. Their techs won't check for it, but if your sites are down (giving 500 errors) that might be the cause. Runaway PHP processes are troublesome.
Another thing to be aware of is that if you go over the 100MB database size limit, they won't do anything about it until you hit 150MB or so; at that point, they'll make your db read-only (with delete permissions). Say you've got a large blog storing data there - if your blog software writes to the db at login, you'll be unable to log in (and, therefore, unable to delete anything to get back under the limit).
If you do somehow manage to get back under the limit (say, by deleting things manually in phpMyAdmin), your db account is not given write access again. The easiest thing to do at that point is export the db, create a new one, import the data to the new one, and delete the old one. It's not worth your time trying to talk to their techs.
But, why am I giving you advice on using 1&1 properly? You should leave 1&1 entirely;)
Unlimited means that there is no artificial limit. The natural limit, which is bandwidth*time, still exists, obviously.
The problem isn't that there's a natural limit, the problem is that a lot of companies use "unlimited" when in fact the limit is artificial, not natural.
Wasn't it just last year that Comcast finally admitted that their "unlimited" cable internet service (i.e. no transfer cap) was actually capped at 200GB/month?
Two years ago it was a Comcast sales guy who told me "there's no limit, but if you use too much we cut you off." He wouldn't answer the question "how much is too much?" except to repeat himself.
If I ever see the word Unlimited when advertising a service, I dismiss it out of hand and look for the small print.
While I agree with you in principle, I feel I should mention the one service I've seen that effectively does provide what it promises:
Unlimited text messaging plans from AT&T are true to their word. If there's a hidden limit on that, it's set higher than any sane person could possibly use. (My sister's first month with unlimited texting racked up something like 6,000 text messages, and that's on top of what the other four of us on the plan were using. AT&T never complained, so they must not care.)
They count on the fact that most people won't use their full quota because there's no way they could deliver what they promise to every user without ending up WAY in the red.
Not only that, but shared hosts put limits on customer accounts that they don't tell customers about.
For example, 1&1 puts a limit of 12 apache processes on each shared hosting account. What does that mean? It means if you have a PHP website, and 13 people connect to any domain on the account within the same second, at least one of them will get a 500 server error.
That might not seem so bad, but if something breaks and PHP processes start freezing up, then apache will spawn new processes to serve new visitors, and if those freeze up, your entire site goes down for apparently no reason - and since they don't tell you about the limit, and the first-tier tech support people don't check for it, you're going to waste hours on the phone with them until finally one of the second or third level techs says "we need your FTP password to check on things and oh by the way you're hitting your process limit". (Yes, they actually asked me for my username and password to their own system.)
It was this same incident that proved that when 1&1 techs say "I'm having the system reboot the server" they're flat-out lying.
I wrote a lengthy blog post about why I left 1&1, if anyone's really bored.
But that one box with the dedicated technician is in no way equivalent to the service that (for example) Amazon S3 provides. Their systems automatically replicate data across geographically distant nodes; your one box can't do that. They keep multiple copies of the data within the same data center, to minimize the risk of the data dying within one data center. Your one box can do that, but not if the box "only" has a petabyte of disk space and you want to store a full petabyte of data.
That means that if you store one petabyte of data on S3, they're actually physically storing three or four petabytes of data - you'd need three or four of those homebrew boxes just to match the storage space for redundancy, not to mention making sure they stay in sync and keeping them in geographically distant locations.
To get a petabyte, let's say you buy 100 1TB drives. What's the failure rate of those drives? If you end up with four of those 100-disk machines, you could very well be replacing a drive every day - at $90 per drive, that adds up pretty quick.
Not only that, but they're providing high-bandwidth access to that data from pretty much anywhere. Sure, your one guy with the one box might be able to do that if the box is only accessed over the local network, but if he has to provide storage to multiple locations, then he'd better have super-awesome upload bandwidth from the ISP; you wouldn't want to try serving a petabyte of data over a 2Mbps upload link, would you? ISPs love charging metric tons of cash for high-end upload bandwidth, especially if you're not a data center.
Then add in electricity, cooling, cost of the space used to physically store the machine, etc etc.
The point is, it very well could be $2.8 million worth of 'extra', when you take all that into account.
Oh sure, he wouldn't let them into the vanilla kernel. But a lot of distros use their own patched kernel for their releases, rather than the vanilla kernel, and there's absolutely no reason that (say) the Ubuntu devs can't write a patch or two for that purpose.
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If you actually read what you're quoting, you'd see that he was referring to what he was contemplating doing, before Tor had him split it into three volumes.
He said splitting the book into three volumes
was not an easy choice. I knew it would anger some readers. I knew it would take a lot of time, and I would end up dedicating a great deal more of my life (and my family's life) to the Wheel of Time than I'd initially anticipated. At the very least, I was contemplating writing a book three to four times the length of the initial contract - essentially, doing four times the work for the exact same pay.
In other words, he knew that to get the whole story out in one book, he'd have to write three to four times as much as the initial contract specified, therefore doing four times the work for the same pay. And he was willing to do it, too. Remember, Tor wanted a book by November; Sanderson had to choose between "publish a railroaded, crappy story" and "split it into multiple coherent volumes".
Brilliantly intriguing, but be prepared for an eternity of non-closure.
Yeah, that's the one thing I haven't liked about A Game of Thrones. It's never a good sign when new apparently major characters are being introduced in the last 100 pages.
Yes... but you didn't buy it when it was first published ;)
And I didn't mean to imply that it was being advertised as a trilogy, simply that that was Jordan's contract with Tor at the time.
Fanboy? No, I'll freely admit that the Wheel of Time is longer than it strictly needs to be. I'll even concede that the story got out of control (in terms of length), and Jordan wasn't quite capable of containing it. And unlike Apple fanboys, I don't expect everyone to like it. I'm hardly a fanboy.
Sure, I've read the series multiple times. Sure, my online ID is derived from the Wheel of Time. Does it matter that I came up with the name in the context of a Star Wars game (Jedi Knight II)? Does it matter that I own the Lord of the Rings CCG, but not the Wheel of Time CCG? (Point being: Fan, but not a fanboy.)
Don't make the mistake of thinking "he's saying something good about it, so he must be a fanboy".
When you read the series not once, but four times, it becomes apparent that you aren't just claiming to like it due to the sunk cost of time; if you read the Wheel of Time four times, you actually like it, no question about it.
(Yes, I've read the Wheel of Time four times, and I'll start a fifth read before the release of the next book right after I finish my first read of George R.R. Martin's series. I don't keep reading series I don't like, even if I've invested a lot of time in them. For example, I stopped reading Stephen King's Dark Tower series halfway through the last book because it passed my tolerance threshold.)
Agreed. Also, Warbreaker (his newest book) was released recently, and is available both in hardcover and as a PDF:
http://www.brandonsanderson.com/drafts/warbreaker/Warbreaker_hardcover_1st_ed.pdf
He's getting paid separately for each book (he told me so in person), but it wasn't his idea to split the story into three volumes. Tor wanted to publish something this year (in November), but the story wasn't finished, so they asked him if there was a convenient place to split it; he's just doing what his publisher and editor want him to do.
I'd suggest you grab Warbreaker online for free, it's Brandon Sanderson's most recently published book; it was also available as a PDF through Brandon's website during the whole course of its writing.
http://www.brandonsanderson.com/drafts/warbreaker/Warbreaker_hardcover_1st_ed.pdf
Uh... I've never heard of a book author who gets paid by the word. (Or do you have reason to believe Jordan was getting paid by the word?) Authors get paid based on how well their book sells. Sure, established authors might get advances, or larger advances, but either way it's based on the volume of book sales, not based on how much ink was used to print the book.
When Wheel was introduced, it was touted as book 1 of a 9 part series.
Actually when the first Wheel of Time book was published, it was supposed to be the first in a trilogy ;)
Having met Brandon Sanderson in person, and discussed the 3-books vs 1-book issue, I can tell you that it wasn't his idea. Tor decided they wanted something to publish this November. In order to meet that requirement while still delivering a coherent story, he had to tear what he had written apart (move some things ahead to the next book), and fill in the gaps with other stuff. Discussing the result with Tor and RJ's wife, Harriet (who is basically in charge of the Wheel of Time), it was decided to publish the last book in three volumes over three years. The "Wheel of Time: A Memory of Light: Volume I" name got dropped later because it was too long, so the first volume was renamed.
Sure, Brandon's getting paid for his work, and he'll certainly get paid more for writing three books than he would for just one. But it wasn't his intention, so I can't in good conscience say he's milking the series. What I can say is that he's doing his best to follow in Jordan's footsteps as he writes the final sections of the Wheel of Time. We can judge based on the result. If after the third volume we can see that the three volumes were filled with needless fluff, then sure, we can say Brandon was making the books longer than necessary to get more money. But based on what I know of Brandon, and based on what we know about Robert Jordan himself, I do not think that will be the case two or three years from now.
In any case, Jordan claimed he'd do it in one book "even if they have to invent a new binding method." Had Jordan lived long enough to finish the Wheel of Time himself, I'd be willing to bet that the final volume would still have been multiple books, and you'd be complaining that Jordan himself is milking the series. (That is, I'm guessing you'd assign malicious, money-grubbing motives to either author, if the final volume turned out to be more than one book.)
The basic fantasy world was so derivative of Tolkien that I just wanted to barf
Having read both the Wheel of Time and the Lord of the Rings several times (as well as various LotR-related books like the Silmarillion), I'm not sure what you're getting at. I can think of only a few small similarities:
- Lan Mandragoran has a backstory similar (but not identical) to that of Aragorn, but the characters themselves are quite dissimilar.
- The Myrdraal bear a passing similarity to the Nazgul, but only because they wear black and cause fear; the Myrdraal are otherwise entirely different.
- The Trollocs bear a passing similarity to the Orcs, but only because they're the "bad guy" infantry; what we know of Trolloc and Orcish social structures are entirely different.
These are minor similarities at best; arguably, none of them are key to the plot. None of them are vomit-worthy, either. So, I ask you: in what ways do you think the Wheel of Time world is derivative of Tolkien?
The fact that there has since been *five* more books and they're still not done, with these last three still on the ledger, convinces me I was right to do that.
So a series is automatically bad if it is unfinished at the end of book eleven? I must say, that notion seems quite ridiculous to me.
(Disclaimer: I've read the Wheel of Time series four times. I've read other almost-equally-lengthy series as well. IMO, length doesn't make a series bad, poor writing makes a series bad. RJ's writing style is not for everyone, but it works for me; apparently it doesn't work for you.)
On a semi-related note, Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy I found to be very good.
Agreed. I would also recommend Warbreaker (available online as a free PDF, or you can get it in hardcover) and Elantris. If you have kids or youngish siblings, Sanderson also writes a children's series that I've heard good things about.
Don't forget the shoes!
Actually texting doesn't cost the cell company anything at all, since texts are sent in (previously) unused space in the command channels (i.e. when the cell phone updates its location with the tower, it'll send a text if it has one to send). Since these updates happen anyway, they're essentially free for the carriers.
Yes, I agree that the standalone text messaging rates are ridiculous. I'll even add that the charge for the unlimited texting package is ridiculously high ($30 which covers all five lines). Ideally, they should be free (or at least included with the base plan), since they're essentially free for the carriers.
I'm just saying that they advertise "unlimited texting", and they give you unlimited texting (up to the natural limit where you can't actually type that fast).
I'm a former 1&1 customer for a reason... and I used to love them. Turns out they decided to really prove they don't care about their customers.
Others have answered your question... most of the limits are listed in your admin control panel. However, over the years I had my account with 1&1, they raised the price on me once without notification, and they regularly changed my bandwidth limits, database limits, e-mail account limits, and so on. By "changed" I mean "sometimes up, sometimes down".
One limit that you should be aware of is the unpublished "12 concurrent apache process" limit. Their techs won't check for it, but if your sites are down (giving 500 errors) that might be the cause. Runaway PHP processes are troublesome.
Another thing to be aware of is that if you go over the 100MB database size limit, they won't do anything about it until you hit 150MB or so; at that point, they'll make your db read-only (with delete permissions). Say you've got a large blog storing data there - if your blog software writes to the db at login, you'll be unable to log in (and, therefore, unable to delete anything to get back under the limit).
If you do somehow manage to get back under the limit (say, by deleting things manually in phpMyAdmin), your db account is not given write access again. The easiest thing to do at that point is export the db, create a new one, import the data to the new one, and delete the old one. It's not worth your time trying to talk to their techs.
But, why am I giving you advice on using 1&1 properly? You should leave 1&1 entirely ;)
Unlimited means that there is no artificial limit. The natural limit, which is bandwidth*time, still exists, obviously.
The problem isn't that there's a natural limit, the problem is that a lot of companies use "unlimited" when in fact the limit is artificial, not natural.
Wasn't it just last year that Comcast finally admitted that their "unlimited" cable internet service (i.e. no transfer cap) was actually capped at 200GB/month?
Two years ago it was a Comcast sales guy who told me "there's no limit, but if you use too much we cut you off." He wouldn't answer the question "how much is too much?" except to repeat himself.
If I ever see the word Unlimited when advertising a service, I dismiss it out of hand and look for the small print.
While I agree with you in principle, I feel I should mention the one service I've seen that effectively does provide what it promises:
Unlimited text messaging plans from AT&T are true to their word. If there's a hidden limit on that, it's set higher than any sane person could possibly use. (My sister's first month with unlimited texting racked up something like 6,000 text messages, and that's on top of what the other four of us on the plan were using. AT&T never complained, so they must not care.)
Rule 1: Never use 1and1 or as it's know in germanny 1und1. They are the shittiest company ever.
Seconded.
They count on the fact that most people won't use their full quota because there's no way they could deliver what they promise to every user without ending up WAY in the red.
Not only that, but shared hosts put limits on customer accounts that they don't tell customers about.
For example, 1&1 puts a limit of 12 apache processes on each shared hosting account. What does that mean? It means if you have a PHP website, and 13 people connect to any domain on the account within the same second, at least one of them will get a 500 server error.
That might not seem so bad, but if something breaks and PHP processes start freezing up, then apache will spawn new processes to serve new visitors, and if those freeze up, your entire site goes down for apparently no reason - and since they don't tell you about the limit, and the first-tier tech support people don't check for it, you're going to waste hours on the phone with them until finally one of the second or third level techs says "we need your FTP password to check on things and oh by the way you're hitting your process limit". (Yes, they actually asked me for my username and password to their own system.)
It was this same incident that proved that when 1&1 techs say "I'm having the system reboot the server" they're flat-out lying.
I wrote a lengthy blog post about why I left 1&1, if anyone's really bored.
On behalf of everyone who has never seen SMBC before, allow me to say:
Thank you.
P.S.: I hate you.
P.P.S.: If I lose my job over this, can I crash at your place?
But that one box with the dedicated technician is in no way equivalent to the service that (for example) Amazon S3 provides. Their systems automatically replicate data across geographically distant nodes; your one box can't do that. They keep multiple copies of the data within the same data center, to minimize the risk of the data dying within one data center. Your one box can do that, but not if the box "only" has a petabyte of disk space and you want to store a full petabyte of data.
That means that if you store one petabyte of data on S3, they're actually physically storing three or four petabytes of data - you'd need three or four of those homebrew boxes just to match the storage space for redundancy, not to mention making sure they stay in sync and keeping them in geographically distant locations.
To get a petabyte, let's say you buy 100 1TB drives. What's the failure rate of those drives? If you end up with four of those 100-disk machines, you could very well be replacing a drive every day - at $90 per drive, that adds up pretty quick.
Not only that, but they're providing high-bandwidth access to that data from pretty much anywhere. Sure, your one guy with the one box might be able to do that if the box is only accessed over the local network, but if he has to provide storage to multiple locations, then he'd better have super-awesome upload bandwidth from the ISP; you wouldn't want to try serving a petabyte of data over a 2Mbps upload link, would you? ISPs love charging metric tons of cash for high-end upload bandwidth, especially if you're not a data center.
Then add in electricity, cooling, cost of the space used to physically store the machine, etc etc.
The point is, it very well could be $2.8 million worth of 'extra', when you take all that into account.
I like my protip better: Mount /usr/portage/var (or whatever portage's working directory is) on a 9GB ramdisk, and set MAKEOPTS to -j9.
Oh sure, he wouldn't let them into the vanilla kernel. But a lot of distros use their own patched kernel for their releases, rather than the vanilla kernel, and there's absolutely no reason that (say) the Ubuntu devs can't write a patch or two for that purpose.
Awesome, that's very helpful, thanks :)