YABookgate

[JJLiautaud]

very afraid « Uncle Zip’s Window

Got in a friendly argument about the necessity of worldbuilding with a friend, and he brings up this thing i found it hilarious and thought id share this is btw by M John Harrison

 

[Flexo]

very afraid « Uncle Zip’s Window

Got in a friendly argument about the necessity of worldbuilding with a friend, and he brings up this thing i found it hilarious and thought id share this is btw by M John Harrison

But much of it is a matter of ideology. The whole idea of worldbuilding is a bad idea about the world as much as it is a bad idea about fiction. It’s a secularised, narcissised version of the fundamentalist Christian view that the world’s a watch & God’s the watchmaker. It reveals the bad old underpinnings of the humanist stance. It centralises the author, who hands down her mechanical toy to a complaisant audience (which rarely thinks to ask itself if language can deliver on any of the representational promises it is assumed to make), as a little god. And it flatters everyone further into the illusions of anthropocentric demiurgy which have already brought the real world to the edge of ecological disaster.​

My feeling is that the reader performs most of the act of writing. A book spends a very short time being written into existence; it spends the rest of its life being read into existence. That’s why I find in many current uses of the term “active reading” such a deeply ironic tautology. Reading was always “active”; the text itself always demanded the reader’s interaction if the fiction was to be brought forth. There was always a game being played, between writers and readers (for that matter between oral storytellers & listeners), who knew they were gaming a system, & who were delighted to engage each other on those terms​

Omg... THIS is the asshole most responsible for the current spate of "blank canvas storytelling"??

Here let me put this in the simplest terms: if I, the reader, am doing most of the act of writing, then what am I paying you, the writer, for?

 

[JJLiautaud]

Does anyone know why the tread isn't showing up in the thread list? dare I summon Dear Leader to deal with it?

 

[Jet Fuel Johnny]

Omg... THIS is the asshole most responsible for the current spate of "blank canvas storytelling"??​

Blank canvas storytelling has been being peddled since at least the 1990's.

It's part of the whole "Pare it to the bone then pare it down more!" bullshit that is preached by a lot of people where you end up with blank cardboard cutouts standing in a white limbo doing nothing.

I blame it on editors who can't visualize anything, publishers who don't want to pay for a simple description of an area, and the whole "I need to see MYSELF in the character" blank slate narcissistic bullshit.

 

[JJLiautaud]

Blank canvas storytelling has been being peddled since at least the 1990's.

It's part of the whole "Pare it to the bone then pare it down more!" bullshit that is preached by a lot of people where you end up with blank cardboard cutouts standing in a white limbo doing nothing.

I blame it on editors who can't visualize anything, publishers who don't want to pay for a simple description of an area, and the whole "I need to see MYSELF in the character" blank slate narcissistic bullshit.

Well M John Harrison has been writing since the 70s so i think the timeline checks out

 

[Windows 10 Upgrade]

very afraid « Uncle Zip’s Window

Got in a friendly argument about the necessity of worldbuilding with a friend, and he brings up this thing i found it hilarious and thought id share this is btw by M John Harrison

There is a great and precarious balance between "hur-dur my plants photosynthesise using x-rays in my world, let me stop the story for a chapter on my totally made up biology" compared to (a quite recent fantasy book by a YA author) where there was very little light for generations and yet somehow people were riding through the FORESTS.

Having dabbled in writer's forums, there seems to be a species of wannabe writer who will develop an entire series bible about "magic systems" and "races" that go on for thousands of pages, yet there will never be an actual PLOT where Little Johnny heads off on his magical journey. Conversely there seems to be a huge lean into great characters (on paper) and a brilliant ideas (also briefly outlined) that are not entirely fleshed out and sort of dangle in mid-air without making much sense, so the story is flimsy and unsatisfying. Whoops - I just described modern YA, my bad.

(I have to add, I am not yet convinced that LGBT and Diversity topics are not just window dressing - rolling the incredibly bland 2D characters in the glitter of genderqueerdom so they become immune to "academic criticism")

 

[Rezza]

I like to talk about worldbuilding because it is the topic of the thesis I'm currently writing of. There is an increasingly popular view of anti-worldbuilding, especially among young "writers", which came from misconception bias against it. Basically some people thought that worldbuilding is a non-necessary process of writing, something itself has become redundant by the story. The problem is, worldbuilding is essential for it sets the tone, mood, setting, and even the behaviour of the characters. And yes, this also applies to works outside of the fantasy/sf genre

However, this doesn't mean worldbuilding doesn't have its own share of flaw, but it's mainly limited to the authors' mistakes. Some people just went above and beyond on making their world so detailed it took the attention away from the plot/characters, something that I must admit I also did sometimes (but can you blame me, it's just so much fun). But that obsession with details itself is an integral part of worldbuilding, something J.P. Wolf called "Completeness" in his book about the subject

But worldbuilding is also necessary, because by "bombarding" your audience with information of your fictional world will inevitably help your audience to immerse more with your story, so long as your fictional world is believable. And this is the biggest problem with many "writers" these days, they forget that the world of their story is not only have to detailed and "different than ours, it also have to be believable. And many failed in this regard

 

[Windows 10 Upgrade]

I like to talk about worldbuilding because it is the topic of the thesis I'm currently writing of. There is an increasingly popular view of anti-worldbuilding, especially among young "writers", which came from misconception bias against it. Basically some people thought that worldbuilding is a non-necessary process of writing, something itself has become redundant by the story. The problem is, worldbuilding is essential for it sets the tone, mood, setting, and even the behaviour of the characters. And yes, this also applies to works outside of the fantasy/sf genre

However, this doesn't mean worldbuilding doesn't have its own share of flaw, but it's mainly limited to the authors' mistakes. Some people just went above and beyond on making their world so detailed it took the attention away from the plot/characters, something that I must admit I also did sometimes (but can you blame me, it's just so much fun). But that obsession with details itself is an integral part of worldbuilding, something J.P. Wolf called "Completeness" in his book about the subject

But worldbuilding is also necessary, because by "bombarding" your audience with information of your fictional world will inevitably help your audience to immerse more with your story, so long as your fictional world is believable. And this is the biggest problem with many "writers" these days, they forget that the world of their story is not only have to detailed and "different than ours, it also have to be believable. And many failed in this regard

Sperging warning: Some people love that deep immersion - Neal Stephenson does it a lot, sometimes to the detriment of the story progression a bit. (I'm thinking Seveneves here.) But then big literary books do the same, and really if you want to dive deep and wallow in another world, why the hell not. There's always something for everyone

Jet Fuel Johnny mentioned blank canvas storytelling which I gotta say I can't stand. I LOVED the movie version of Any Weir's "Martian" but I found the book itself required too much heavy lifting on my part - he's the sort of writer who would describe the Sistine Chapel as "some paintings of people on the ceiling".

It appears with space/SF stories (and Western fantasy) there's sometimes such a cultural preconception of what it's going to look like - we've all seen a hundred movies to prime us up with a visual architecture of "space" or "Fantasy Landscape" - that the author won't actually bother putting details in. And that kind of sucks.

To make this YA Kosher and YA Gate Kosher there's this huge dichotomy of 'keeping the story going" which requires as briefly outlined details as possible, and the hunger from (adult) readers to have a fully immersible and detailed world in a CHILDREN'S book - so writers have been short-cutting it with boosting social and emotional worldbuilding. And oh boy, the writers will know all about it when they get THAT wrong, because everyone thinks they're an expert on their own trauma.

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

I dunno if this is BS or not, but I saw it on Twitter, so here it is. Make of it what you will. Self-insert jack-off harem fic with LitRPG overtones sells hundreds of copies, so I kinda find this hard to believe. Or did, until I realize how awful the current state of woke pubishing is. Twitter / Archive

 

[Rezza]

I dunno if this is BS or not, but I saw it on Twitter, so here it is. Make of it what you will. Self-insert jack-off harem fic with LitRPG overtones sells hundreds of copies, so I kinda find this hard to believe. Or did, until I realize how awful the current state of woke pubishing is. Twitter / Archive

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Holyshit, twelve?! I once sold more than that in a single con, and it was a shitty and rushed isekai doujinshi (self-published, not porn) novel

 

[Windows 10 Upgrade]

Surely

I dunno if this is BS or not, but I saw it on Twitter, so here it is. Make of it what you will. Self-insert jack-off harem fic with LitRPG overtones sells hundreds of copies, so I kinda find this hard to believe. Or did, until I realize how awful the current state of woke pubishing is. Twitter / Archive

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There was a Bookscan post going about on the Patrick Tomlinson/Lindsay Ellis threads that expanded to include some other authors including CR. This figure is the same, so the info is from the one source. I don't think it's a leak so much as open source info that sort of has to be accessed via a paid subscription. Everyone is just riffing off @Boston Brand's leak.

(Anyone can get Bookscan, but it's so expensive it's more of a thing companies buy).

Apparently Bookscan doesn't collect Walmart, mailing list, book clubs or direct sales, which given CR's current market placement and emphasis on hand selling to die-hards I suspect is what her main focus is at the moment.

 

[JJLiautaud]

I dunno if this is BS or not, but I saw it on Twitter, so here it is. Make of it what you will. Self-insert jack-off harem fic with LitRPG overtones sells hundreds of copies, so I kinda find this hard to believe. Or did, until I realize how awful the current state of woke pubishing is. Twitter / Archive

Whats so frustrating about this is the line people aren't reading just isn't true people are reading more than ever they just aren't reading stuff traditionally published.

 

[Jet Fuel Johnny]

SFFWA is the biggest grouping of pedophiles, dog fuckers, and deviants outside of a lolicon furry convention.

Most of them write terrible bullshit.

The fact that "Cat Rambo" sold 12 books is surprising since they're the President of the org.

I figured they sold none and were just really good at sucking Tor's dick.

 

[Windows 10 Upgrade]

SFFWA is the biggest grouping of pedophiles, dog fuckers, and deviants outside of a lolicon furry convention.

Most of them write terrible bullshit.

The fact that "Cat Rambo" sold 12 books is surprising since they're the President of the org.

I figured they sold none and were just really good at sucking Tor's dick.

When I was a baby writer it was almost the holy grail of acceptance - sell three pro-paid short stories or a novel and you could wear your SFWA badge with pride (especially since it became so easy to upload a phone book and 300 pages of Lorem Ipsum onto Amazon and call yourself a “published writer” - there has to be SOMETHING to prove you weren’t a flake)

But as soon as I became eligible for full membership, you could see there was no “there” there. Not even the forums are interesting, or helpful. I think the only thing that the SFWA can be commended for is chasing dodgy publishing contracts, and it’s only a secondary feature of a very closed “in-group” looking after each other and helping others accidentally.

 

[JJLiautaud]

Writing advice from a Drunken Scott

 

[Windows 10 Upgrade]

Writing advice from a Drunken Scott

This is totally true! Especially the finish the book part.

The only thing I'd quibble with is that if you live "outside" the UK or US it's FINE to get an agent from New York or London, simply because that for some genres there's literally only one agent in your entire country who reps it (coughfantasyorsciencefictioncough).

The phone from NYC to (my country) is fucking slow there, there is literally a 2 second lag. With my agent we ended up using WhatsApp/Voice Over Internet because we both sounded like retards trying to talk to each other otherwise.

 

[Rezza]

This is totally true! Especially the finish the book part.

The only thing I'd quibble with is that if you live "outside" the UK or US it's FINE to get an agent from New York or London, simply because that for some genres there's literally only one agent in your entire country who reps it (coughfantasyorsciencefictioncough).

The phone from NYC to (my country) is fucking slow there, there is literally a 2 second lag. With my agent we ended up using WhatsApp/Voice Over Internet because we both sounded like retards trying to talk to each other otherwise.

Wait, so let me get this straight. So theoretically you can query an American/British agent even if you don't live in either of those countries? A bit of PL, but I've been thinking of finishing my novels and sending query letters, but I live in neither of those countries so I don't know whether or not they're willing to accept me

 

[Kosher Dill]

I dunno if this is BS or not, but I saw it on Twitter, so here it is. Make of it what you will. Self-insert jack-off harem fic with LitRPG overtones sells hundreds of copies, so I kinda find this hard to believe.

If you go to Amazon there are precisely 12 "verified purchasers" who left ratings or reviews for "Hearts of Tabat".
https://www.amazon.com/Hearts-Tabat...F8&reviewerType=avp_only_reviews&pageNumber=1

Plus another 9 copies held in libraries. It wouldn't surprise me at all if that's all, and every single person who bought the book was a shill.

 

[Windows 10 Upgrade]

Wait, so let me get this straight. So theoretically you can query an American/British agent even if you don't live in either of those countries? A bit of PL, but I've been thinking of finishing my novels and sending query letters, but I live in neither of those countries so I don't know whether or not they're willing to accept me

Yup! MOST traditionally published authors in the SFF field in (PL Shitty Country) have either a US or British Agent. (Or they sell their books as magic realism/literary and go down that path where there are more agents)

The only issue is tax though, you technically get "paid" by your agent (as all the book royalties go through them), and the money will be taxed by the IRS or Her Majesties Income Thieves before it's posted to you.

Tax treaties with the other country usually mean its about 5%, but STILL that can be a couple of thousand at minimum for a bog standard Big 5 book contract

 

[Rezza]

Yup! MOST traditionally published authors in the SFF field in (PL Shitty Country) have either a US or British Agent. (Or they sell their books as magic realism/literary and go down that path where there are more agents)

The only issue is tax though, you technically get "paid" by your agent (as all the book royalties go through them), and the money will be taxed by the IRS or Her Majesties Income Thieves before it's posted to you.

Tax treaties with the other country usually mean its about 5%, but STILL that can be a couple of thousand at minimum for a bog standard Big 5 book contract

Thanks for answering. That is actually very reassuring for me since I've been wondering if I wasted my time writing my book. That's a big worry off my shoulders, and I can finish my project without any shred of doubt. The info about tax is actually a news for me, since I don't really know how taxes for this sort of stuff works