Oh. My. God. You are killing me with this, sir. I know you're a faster reader than that. Let's fuckin' Gooooooo. I was genuinely surprised by how it ended and I want. to. talk. about. it.
I'm in the home stretch of Book 3. Reading slow because I'm also in the final act of the latest manuscript so I'm spending twice as much time writing than reading. Should be done in a day or two. I have COMPLICATED feelings about Elvar at this point and I'm hoping they change.
They won't!
My heavily distracted dumbass self finally finished Bloodsworn Trilogy. Great stuff overall. Couple of minor quibbles (one weakly implemented side-villain, an almost comedically obvious self-insert, and if I have to read "he/she/they had an axe and seax on his weaponsbelt, and wore a fine brynjar" one more time I may just lay down on a funeral pyre myself), but it resolved pretty much every character arc in a really satisfying way.
I have SO many thoughts about this series and I just have not had time, and still don't, to get into it all. Also, I doubt anyone cares that much.
I was JUST going to jump in and ask you for a recommendation after Bloodsworn. Because there was some stuff that drove me NUTS about it, but damn it's a fun trilogy and I'm glad I took your recommendation. (Funny thing - the narrator, same guy, changes the pronunciation of seax mid-series in the audiobook version. And the word appears like six thousand times per book.)
DEFINITELY 'The Burning' series if you can handle that it's not done yet. It's a trilogy and the third book is supposed to come out in January, I believe.
I would be FURIOUS. Also, it's "sax."
My vision is degrading by the minute and I write/edit for a living so if I want to read for fun, it's become audiobooks or nothing lately. I never liked audiobooks before but it's a desperation thing. I'd rather read-read a PRINT book if I had my way, but Jesus fuck the modern printing format hates the visually impaired.
I'm guessing maybe the author prefers the 'sea-ax' pronunciation so he asked them to change it for the second book? I dunno why else a narrator would suddenly change the way they pronounce things. Being an audibook narrator must be tough in the fantasy genre because there's so many words that you probably otherwise never encounter and you've got to smoothly recall how to pronounce them the same way every time. I don't envy that at all.
This is definitely an issue I would also have if I did switch to audio (which, again, I don't think I ever will or could); there's absolutely some accents I can't take seriously as it is. I'm actually surprised noticeable accents/dialects don't sort of soft-disqualify people from even doing audiobook narration.
This book took me six weeks and then I forgot to post about it.
I became friends with a ton of narrators when my first book was done as a full-cast audio and yeah, narrators are usually like MY KINGDOM FOR A FUCKING PRONUNCIATION GUIDE!!!! One of the first rules of training as a narrator is don't do it without verifying, because you don't want to go back and re-do the whole thing over again.
Yeah, I imagine it's similar to screen actors being typecast. That southern drawl is not going to work if you're narrating romantasy, I imagine.
