Bob, people pointing out that your book is fucking awful and that you have stupid Twitter takes is not harassment. As a movie reviewer, you should know this.
But seriously, is Bob under the impression that his book is actually good? How little self reflection can one man possibly do?
I have little doubt that Bob fancies himself as some underappreaciated intellectual and creative force. Yet when you take a magnifying glass to his body of work you see that he is a consumerist lamprey who doesn't have a single original thought or idea in his head. The man's Twitter banner uses assets from SMB2, for fuck's sake. What the hell? I thought 3 was the game that affected Bob on such a profound level that the mayo ghouls are incapable of processing it.
Brick by Brick is a sad attempt at a strategy guide/let's play of
Super Mario Bros. 3 with a little autobiography thrown in to give us some unintentional comedy. Had he been such a creative soul, maybe he would have channeled that energy into an (semi-)original work?
Fuck, he could have written a mash-up of
Ready Player One and
Alice in Wonderland where he could have inserted an avatar of himself in a Mushroom Kingdom-like fantasy world were he's forced to be the hero. A Shigeru Miyamoto stand-in could have been his Merlin or Gandalf, and hell, the villains could been marauding parodies of the X-Box bros he hated so much invading his pristine fantasy land. See that? I came up with the concept in less than five minutes. Bob couldn't even be bothered to muster the brain power because he would rather consume that latest
Bing Bing Wahoo or whatever MCU slop the Rat feeds him.
Perhaps that is why he is so defensive his book, because he made it so personal by adding in details of his childhood and adolescence that he sees any criticism of it as an attack on him. That is likely why he never paid an editor to proofread as ego bruises far too easily and I say that as many of the reviews on Goodreads ask if the manuscript even saw an editor. I get it, I recently self-published a sci-fi/fantasy book and paid a considerable sum to have it proofread among other services (and no, I'm not going to advertise it here.) One of the sad fact of being an author is that we become so attached to our work that we blind ourselves to the structural flaws. It is always sometimes a bitter pill to swallow, but I am glad that I had an editor give me the input to fine-tune the flaws while still keeping the core of the work intact.
Bob. Bob's skin is so paper thin that he cannot accept any form of constructive criticism no matter how well-meaning. He has to believe that
Brick by Brick is some thoughtful analysis of the impact of a game on his generation. He has to believe that he is a member of the costal elite because if he even had the tiniest mote of self-awareness, he would have killed himself over the existential despair of realizing that his entire life is built around a fantasy. What offends me most about Robert Chipman, the author, is that he is as intellectually lazy as they come. I spent five years toiling over multiple revisions of my first book, agonizing whether I was good enough to make it as an author, and putting aside my own artistic ego to make my work the best it could be. I plan on trying to get my book into bookstores and going out into the world to promote it (which may unfortunately nessecitate a return to Twitter) because I found the process creatively and spiritually fulfilling. Bob just shit out a brick and expected universal praise for the bare minimum of effort before resuming his consumerist lifestyle.
