Very wise move. It turns out I enjoy the series massively (if not its beginning but "Acts One" are always the roughest for me to enjoy in any story) - the one that grabbed my interest the most in many years - but I'm extremely happy I didn't have to devote myself to it the way I got trapped with WOT. MBOTF is an absurdly demanding series, even considering it pays off well and all - just the fact Erikson typically devotes one book to a group of storylines/characters and the next to another before returning to the first substantially increases the difficulty. I swing between being very impressed and totally baffled that many people were perfectly fine with reading these as published, without yearly re reads. I couldn't have done it myself, I would have had to re read at very least the last book in the storyline expected to be in the next one, or participate actively in discussion forums to keep fresh enough to skip re reads (just waiting three months before starting DoD was a bit challenging at first). I have an excellent memory, but part of my system to keep it that way includes not trying to remember hundreds of characters and zillions of little facts any longer than I must (I've given enough with WOT, thank you).



It's a weird modern phenomenon this and I'm often not sure where I really stand about it. I certainly enjoy the possibility of discussing with people from all over the world, but I'm less and less sure I enjoy so much what it does to my reading (or viewing) experiences, at least the ongoing ones ("book clubs" are a different thing - I enjoy exchanging about books I've read online or in person, if far less so when I didn't like a book as get fairly little pleasure out of that and I want to move on and find something else that will please me (my huge disappointement with the last WOT book has made me a bit impatient to put the series behind me).

It crosses a line somewhere, that used to exist between reader and writer. I'm sure this is heavily influenced by the "democratization of the media" in part. It's like everybody is a screenwriter/director/VFX designer nowadays, because they can put a crappy video of their own on YouTube. This is compounded by the damn polls. Despite massive means and some top talent, American TV in particular can get so abysmal at times (so many good series get totally wrecked along the way) because the networks no longer trust as they should the storytellers. They prefer to trust all those pseudo writers/directors in the couches at home who despite being totally unable to create their own stories and knowing very little about the storytelling craft now have extremely specific ideas (and often terribly conservative and boring) ideas of how the stories they watch should unfold. Forcibly, when you force the storytellers to follow the wishes of the masses, you most often end up with the lowest common denominators and ruined shows (a recent case in point would be Heroes. Awesome first season, and early in the second the audience and their expectations started interferring with the work of the storytellers, forced by the network to skate between the story they were building and the often very lame expectations the audience had and wanted to see on-screen, and that the network forced the creator to include. The show never recuperated, and it's not its creators I'd blame first for how it sank - it's the absurd power the networks give the audience. More and more US TV is pulling the plug very early on its best shows, another reason why I now prefer to wait for the DVD)

More and more I notice I enjoy a great more being carried somewhere by a writer and discovering it as I read than trying to second-guess where he's bringing me, especially with tons of other people. As you pointed out, it creates expectations that often aren't met, and for me in many cases I've noticed it undermines the power of the story itself somehow. While trying to second-guess the writer and build all sort of expectations, you end up missing the whole point of the story you're reading. Another insidious effect is that you end up investing so much time, a silly amount of time, into a work meant to entertain you for a few days, weeks, months, not fuel years' worth of discussions on MBs online. A book like COT was supposed to entertain readers for a few days (or not), but when you spend hours and hours online speculating and expecting what it will bring over two years before its release, and spend years dissecting it, you end up turning mild disappointement/mild pleasure into something totally insane.

I realise I actually had more fun reading and watching stories years ago, when I discovered them all by myself, when I was more passive toward the stories I read. I rediscovered this somehow with Erikson, by letting myself be immersed in it with very minimal interference from the online world. It wasn't exactly the fun I once had with Tolkien (at 12) or Herbert (at 14), but it was a bit like it.

It makes me extremely hesitant to ever repeat the WOT online experience with another series, to say the least. I certainly see that as much as I think objectively that Sanderson's TOM is a very lame duck I wouldn't have enjoyed anyway, my experience with it was made far worse by having invested so much time in the series.



I have not gone that far. But on the whole I prefer discovering a series after it has been cancelled.

LOL! I try to avoid those, unless I hear they're really awesome (eg: Firefly). At the moment I don't wait until a series is complete to watch it, if you thought it's what I meant.

At some point I just realised that I hated being enslaved by a weekly show, even those I enjoyed a lot. In America, 30% of it is advertising. You save an hour per three episodes not watching it on the air, but taped or on DVD later. It's insane. You watch 9 hours of TV a week, you lose 3 hours of your life watching ads (when I already spend 30% of my work hours creating such ads, the rest working on movies/tv shows, but that's a whole other story!). Nowadays I try to do most of my TV watching in winter and on rainy days - the rest of the year I've largely freed myself from that. Beside freeing my evenings for other types of leisure all it changed is that I'm forced to stay away from TV show conversations the next day (when I work at the agency and not from home, anyway), which often enough isn't such a bad thing.