A Slow Walk Through a Beautiful Garden. The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri is a wonderful, beautifully written book. I was bored through most of it. That isn’t necessarily the fault of the author, I suspect it has more to do with my own expectations and preferences for pacing. However, I felt as though a large portion of the book was spent watching characters naval-gaze. This book definitely qualifies as a slow burn in my categorization.

Writing is hard. Not in the way that manual labor is hard, or even in the way that a puzzle or a level in a video game can be hard. Instead, writing is hard like getting in shape is hard, like therapy is hard, like your job is hard. Sometimes success pours out of you, and others you can’t get even the simplest of results. You get stuck, and making progress might as well be impossible.

Introduction For your reading pleasure is an early look into an early chapter of The Crystal Empire, my upcoming epic fantasy project. It is a rought draft, and things will likely change between this and the published version. This selection is from a bit later in the book. Mal 1 Things were not going according to plan. That wasn’t unusual for one of his plans, but Mal had hoped they could have avoided any major interruptions until they were within sight of the Wall.