I was not entirely successful in disguising the identity of this author. Oh, well. His errors are still good ones to avoid.
This is a challenging world, and we need our brains in working order. So don’t anesthetize them with bad fantasy. There’s more than enough of that available.
That business with really stupid and incompetent villains always gets my dander up. I mean, sure, evil people can be stupid–but if they were quite as stupid as they’re depicted in one of this guy’s fantasy novels, they’d be no threat to anyone at all.