Alicornutopia

Has everyone here heard of Alexander Wales? If not, you'll probably like his writing. And he has a new project, Shadows of the Limelight, set in the Renaissance where fame = superpowers. It looks very good, and also probably very templateable.

Ooh, new Wales. I'm subscribed to him on ffnet but I guess this is original, thanks for bringing it to my attention.

I've been reading it since day one, and yeah, it's great. Plus it made me realize that he has a website where he's posted a bunch of other non-fanficcy one-shot stuff, which was a nice extra bonus.

I'd been reading this but I'd only half recommend it tbh. The world and magic system are interesting but the main character is extremely obnoxious, he makes me want to stop reading it at least once a chapter.

Alicorn wrote:Do you find Wales characters obnoxious in general? I would not call characterization his strong suit, but is this one especially hard to like?

It's not something that bothers me about his writing in general, it's specifically the main character in this. I find him hard to like because of a combination of things: he makes idiotic decisions, he's unjustifiedly arrogant and his motivations are nebulous but from the little we've seen seem largely to consist of wanting money and power as ends rather than means. I'm not sure if I expect my dislike of him to be shared by other people though, it's possible it's just an idiosyncratic response.

Obviously Xan is an illustrati of blood, that doesn't even require changing his powers.