Stealing Ideas?

[peggy-2.livejournal.com]

This is sort of an early While She Knits post, because I'll be gone on Friday.  (sorry Checkers ~ smack me if it's excessive off topic book discussion).

The previous While She Knits mentioned Naomi Novik's Temeraire series.  I had given them to my son to read, on Emma's recommendation, and he really enjoyed them as well.  One comment he made was that it took a while to think of dragons the size of troop ships, after Eragon's one-person models.  He's a big Eragon fan.

Clearly Novik is either a Hornblower fan, or more likely an O'Brien one.  Reading the third book, I am beginning to think she may be a Dunnett fan as well.  So here's my  question.  Is it unfair to diss Paolini and his Eragon for being a rip-off of everybody else's ideas, but to give Novik praise for what fun stuff she is doing with other people's source material?  I didn't  think when I read Paoline that his writing stunk out loud.  And it certainly seems to have struck a chord in his target audience (MS/HS, especially boys).  Novik is not obviously head and shoulders better on a line by line basis.  Are we just unfair that we praise one derivative book, but slam another? 

Or is it just that I prefer her source material to Paolini's.  It's true, give me Forresster and  Dunnett over Tolkein.

A few announcements!

[emerald-happy.livejournal.com]

Hello all! Firstly, here is the reminder for our fortnightly chat! We've had quite a few new members recently and we're dying to know you all so come and talk if you can. In fact, we're due *kicks quasi-reality time* for some serious on topic discussion (or not as the case may be ;-)). Plus if you can't make the chat time there tends to be someone in the chat room to talk to and there is backlog to read to see what's going on Gen-wise so you can revel in the mischief and madness caused by us Reprobates. We change the chat times every month or so and rotate them to allow more and different people to make the chats.

The Chat will be held in The Conspiracy Room (the password can be found on this post) on Saturday, at:

9-10pm GMT Daylight Saving Time
4-5pm Eastern Daylight Time (US)
3-4pm Central Daylight Time (US)
1-2pm Pacific Daylight Time (US) 
You choose Quasi-reality time

This should be able to help if you need to work out other timezones. Stick a comment here if working out timezones is a problem. 

It's nice to see photos and posts from everyone who met up with esteemed author mwt! Yay! And rowanais due to poke y'all about readaloud chapters. Which she says she will do soon. Just warning you about that potentially scary mod voice and red beard (x infinity). I'm kidding Ro *glomps*

And lastly, congratulations to Jade and Costis on their elopement/engagement.