[Mattastic]

I'm one of those people who will rarely delve into glossaries and other such things for fiction. This is probably a bit weird for me since I love designing fantasy alphabets and phonetic forms, and tend to develop names with sound combinations that don't exist in English quite often. I love a deep and complex background to any setting, especially when that extends to language as well.

However, this was one of the things that made me put down the first book in the Wheel of Time series after about a hundred pages. By that point I got the expectation that I was meant to have spent five days solid on Wheelopedia before reading page one. This is not a sign that the world has a well developed background so much as that the author missed the point of what novels are for. If at any point during a story the reader has to look something up to know as much as the characters do, then the writer has failed. Fact.

This also extends to pronunciation. No-one will applaud you for putting in clever pronunciation rules for a language that isn't even written in the Latin alphabet anyway. Names should read phonetically, and if they don't look right on paper when written that way, then it's a bad name. If it includes sounds that don't exist in English at all, then don't blame people for mangling the pronunciation. After all, that happens with real-life examples all the time.

Simply put, glossaries and appendecies shouldn't be there to support the story at all. If it isn't in the main story, then it shouldn't be considered vital knowledge.