Quote from: SiL on Oct 19, 2021, 10:42:32 PM
The novelisation was still well written and fleshed out in interesting and creative ways. It's a bit disingenuous to dismiss the quality of the piece because somebody else wrote the foundation.
You're misunderstanding me. The heavy lifting in a good novel is the concept: the plot and characters. The rest of it is just grunt work, pounding out the word count. Music of the Spears was a complete story already, where she was just filling in the gaps and describing in words that which had been told in pictures in the comic. Perhaps adding some expanding dialog. And it takes skill to write well, but it is an entirely different skill from coming up with a story idea and characters.
On the other hand, in theory, the short story in the Bug Hunt anthology was completely her idea, and it was a bad idea. You can't write a good novel on bad ideas.
So sure, maybe her novelization of Music of the Spears was great. I haven't read it since it came out. But that still wasn't her story. It was Chet Williamson's. Whatever this Rift War ends up as, it appears to be an original story by her and her husband, and will have to stand or fall on the merit of those ideas.