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I recently finished the Mass Market Paperback of David Weber's War Maid's Choice.
Inside that novel there is a good slim novel trying to get out. If you're good at skimming and are familiar with how Weber writes you can actually get close to reading it.
Like much of his recent output, WMC is afflicted by bloat. This is due to a confluence of several factors:
1) He composes by dictation. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with this -- so did Winston Churchill -- and Weber has good reason to do so: he had an accident in the 1990s which pretty well destroyed a wrist. However, composing orally tends towards wordiness, and the sort of fine editing needed to compensate for it is extensive (read: print out everything, mark it up by hand, do extensive input in the editing stage. I used to be an editor).
I think that this is the primary cause -- you can plot the real beginning of the bloat at the time of the accident.
2) He has a tendency towards story structure which can bloat very easily (and he's had it since well before bloat became a problem): instead of having a tight focus on one character and narrowing down the reader's experience to that input, he jumps around between all "sides" of a conflict and among multiple characters. He also has a somewhat diffuse style of depicting an individual's train of thought or internal dialogue.
3) He likes to provide infodumps (and many of his dedicated readers like the infodumps). This is most notoriously true of his space battles, but it pops up everywhere.
4) Finally, he's reached the stage, not so much of being too big to edit, but of being popular enough that there's little financial incentive to edit. The following books all postdate the tendency to bloat and all have been on the NYT extended bestseller list:
Ashes of Victory
War of Honor
At All Costs
The Shadow of Saganami
Wind Rider's Oath
(There may be more, but there seems to be no single place giving me a list of all of Weber's books which have made the list). Given this fact, the incentive, for his publishing houses (Baen and Tor: the Safehold series tends just as much towards bloat as anything else) as much as for Weber himself, would be purely one of artistic quality, and Weber writes (I think consciously) as an entertainer.
Inside that novel there is a good slim novel trying to get out. If you're good at skimming and are familiar with how Weber writes you can actually get close to reading it.
Like much of his recent output, WMC is afflicted by bloat. This is due to a confluence of several factors:
1) He composes by dictation. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with this -- so did Winston Churchill -- and Weber has good reason to do so: he had an accident in the 1990s which pretty well destroyed a wrist. However, composing orally tends towards wordiness, and the sort of fine editing needed to compensate for it is extensive (read: print out everything, mark it up by hand, do extensive input in the editing stage. I used to be an editor).
I think that this is the primary cause -- you can plot the real beginning of the bloat at the time of the accident.
2) He has a tendency towards story structure which can bloat very easily (and he's had it since well before bloat became a problem): instead of having a tight focus on one character and narrowing down the reader's experience to that input, he jumps around between all "sides" of a conflict and among multiple characters. He also has a somewhat diffuse style of depicting an individual's train of thought or internal dialogue.
3) He likes to provide infodumps (and many of his dedicated readers like the infodumps). This is most notoriously true of his space battles, but it pops up everywhere.
4) Finally, he's reached the stage, not so much of being too big to edit, but of being popular enough that there's little financial incentive to edit. The following books all postdate the tendency to bloat and all have been on the NYT extended bestseller list:
Ashes of Victory
War of Honor
At All Costs
The Shadow of Saganami
Wind Rider's Oath
(There may be more, but there seems to be no single place giving me a list of all of Weber's books which have made the list). Given this fact, the incentive, for his publishing houses (Baen and Tor: the Safehold series tends just as much towards bloat as anything else) as much as for Weber himself, would be purely one of artistic quality, and Weber writes (I think consciously) as an entertainer.
