YABookgate

[Table Country]

Filipinix sounds like an STD medication.

Ironically, it sounds more like a slur when you put x at the end.

 

[ArthuriusMartyrius]

Not true. "Filipino" is the term in Spanish for a mixed group of men and women, similar to "Latino."

Yes, it can be used that way, but the gender-neutral form is still "Filipino."

It's sex-neutral in the same way that using "guys" to refer to a mixed group of men and women is sex-neutral. So not really. Same with Latino, you don't refer to a group exclusively comprised of women as Latinos but Latinas.

Not that I care either way but it's what they mean when they come up with shit like "Filipinx" or "Latinx".

Sis, this is why no one buys your book. Your "book" is your therapy couch,

Literally, this broad clearly has some major identity issues about her true origins.

 

[Windows 10 Upgrade]

I really don't understand this need to have main characters, in books or in shows, start out perfect. Character development and protagonist journey seem to be taboo these days. To make things worse, these Mr and Miss Perfect all tend to be insufferable, sarcastic, self absorbed, whiny, and all around terrible.

The nice Woke white person writing this drivel is beset with a terrible conundrum of self awareness - they know if they make their Black/POC start out as a flawed person, they'll be accused of holding those ideas about Black/POC naturally. And that section of the social sphere is VERY CONCERNED about how others see them.

I think my favorite Margaret Weis trivia is that she literally NEVER reads Fantasy. Hasn't for decades by now.

My opinion is that most of that kind of Sword and Dragon Fantasy that Weis and others writes is strongly influenced by your standard Western Myth and Legend with a chunk of Old Testament - it's not really developed much for decades. Probably Grimdark was the biggest development as an offshoot.

I've yet to be convinced that canon in the original High Fantasy genre is important beyond Tolkien that you'd need to fully read the books much though . It's been incredibly static.

Makes sense, if you want to be creative you read non-fiction and then regurgitate it into more original, fantastic output. If you're going to read fantasy, you're just going to regurgitate cliches.

Kind reminds me of how Bill Finger used to fill up his brain will all kinds of random real-life facts which came in handy when coming up with plots for Batman stories.

The best non-genre writers really approach the source material that underpins Fantasy and Science Fiction and work from a solid foundation (see Margaret Weis). There's been a few writers who might have started in SF and realised that they would be better served doing literary work. It sometimes takes a few books to realise what they are good at.

On the other hand you get literary writers thinking that they were the first ever to write about a "robot who becomes apparently sentient" which was a real fucking thing that happened recently and no SF writer would be as clever as them to invent such a thing!

I'll quibble somewhat and say that newer writers to SFF can run into the danger of rehashing tropes they THINK are new, while not being aware they have been done. In the McEwan example, he says he had read lots of science fiction, then quotes 50 year old properties written from the time before computers.

Even my favourite Post Apocalyptic novel - THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy, was fine for a literary novel, but didn't have activity enough to be a science fiction post apocalyptic novel. The entire thing was Look at this! Look at that! I would have loved a sequel.

Not quite correct, Filipino is specifically for men, Filipina is for women. That being said, making up BS terms because using the correct, sex-specific terms is to danger-hair nutjobs like garlic is to vampires, is moronic. You don't save vampires from garlic, you let them choke to death on it.

In Australia it got shortened to "Fillo" by everyone including Fillipinos, because if a word exists, it must be shortened.

 

[Boston Brand]

With Larry Correia I think I was very lucky that my introduction to his work was SON OF THE BLACK SWORD - Monster Hunter International may be his money maker, but Forgotten Warrior is his masterpiece. I also love his short fiction, loved Servants of War, and really dig Grimnoir.

Monster Hunter got better later, and oddly? I think part of that is Larry grew as a writer, and he realized his mistakes in the first book and has worked to correct them - Owen got a lot less intolerable later on, and even strawman characters like Grant Jefferson got fleshed out and humanized.

Corriea is proof that a writer CAN improve given the chance. Sometimes leaps and bounds, I maintain Forgotten Warrior and Sevants of War are some of the decades best fantasy.

 

[SamTheEagle]

I listened to the audiobook of the first Monster Hunter International and later read a short story in the same series, but from the perspective of a trailer trash elf princess. While I found MHI entertaining, I didn't like it enough to continue with the next book. Though the short story does give me proof that Correia gets better like @Boston Brand said (and I'll have to look into those other titles you mentioned).

 

[Boston Brand]

As for John Ringo? Yeah, I burnt out on him years ago.

I suspect he writes very little of his coauthored stuff either.

Which sometimes works out - I loved "his" book from earlier this year, INTO THE REAL. I suspect because his "coauthor" Lydia Sherrer, is herself one hell of an author and did all of the work.

I listened to the audiobook of the first Monster Hunter International and later read a short story in the same series, but from the perspective of a trailer trash elf princess. While I found MHI entertaining, I didn't like it enough to continue with the next book. Though the short story does give me proof that Correia gets better like @Boston Brand said (and I'll have to look into those other titles you mentioned).

Son of the Black Sword. Start there and enjoy the ride, with book 4 coming out next year.

Correia's short fiction collections are also really good, and let you get a feel for his range, styles and settings.

 

[JJLiautaud]

As for John Ringo? Yeah, I burnt out on him years ago.

I suspect he writes very little of his coauthored stuff either.

Which sometimes works out - I loved "his" book from earlier this year, INTO THE REAL. I suspect because his "coauthor" Lydia Sherrer, is herself one hell of an author and did all of the work.

Have you read there will be dragons? Its one of his best series and i wish hed finish it.

 

[Boston Brand]

Have you read there will be dragons? Its one of his best series and i wish hed finish it.

One of the many reasons I gave up on John Ringo? The man simply will not end a series.

 

[ArthuriusMartyrius]

With Larry Correia I think I was very lucky that my introduction to his work was SON OF THE BLACK SWORD - Monster Hunter International may be his money maker, but Forgotten Warrior is his masterpiece. I also love his short fiction, loved Servants of War, and really dig Grimnoir.

Monster Hunter got better later, and oddly? I think part of that is Larry grew as a writer, and he realized his mistakes in the first book and has worked to correct them - Owen got a lot less intolerable later on, and even strawman characters like Grant Jefferson got fleshed out and humanized.

Corriea is proof that a writer CAN improve given the chance. Sometimes leaps and bounds, I maintain Forgotten Warrior and Sevants of War are some of the decades best fantasy.

I honestly don't think Correia has improved much. Sure, his dialogue is a bit less shit now but he still sucks at descriptions and his characters are still paper-thin cliches. Using cliches isn't bad but Correia's problem is that he doesn't add anything else to make his characters stand out. Forgotten Warrior was mildly interesting due to being seemingly based on South-East Asian culture but Correia seems to lose interest in that pretty quickly and goes for the standard European fantasy angle almost immediately.

But hey, if it sells, it sells. Correia has never really pretended to be some elite author and good for him.

 

[valis]

The nice Woke white person writing this drivel is beset with a terrible conundrum of self awareness - they know if they make their Black/POC start out as a flawed person, they'll be accused of holding those ideas about Black/POC naturally. And that section of the social sphere is VERY CONCERNED about how others see them.

As I'm sure you know, it's a problem with books with female main characters too: when I was a little girl a big thing was female characters starting out flawed and growing and developing into Fine Upstanding Young Women, but now they're never allowed to be flawed to begin with. So what does that tell little girls/actual disadvantaged minorities now? If you don't start out top of the pile, fuck you?

On the other hand you get literary writers thinking that they were the first ever to write about a "robot who becomes apparently sentient" which was a real fucking thing that happened recently and no SF writer would be as clever as them to invent such a thing!

I'll quibble somewhat and say that newer writers to SFF can run into the danger of rehashing tropes they THINK are new, while not being aware they have been done. In the McEwan example, he says he had read lots of science fiction, then quotes 50 year old properties written from the time before computers.

Is it perhaps also that alleged Margaret Attwood thing of being horrified at being accused of writing - *spit* - genre fiction, and never dreaming of lowering themselves to read it?

I've seen that attitude in a certain type of reader in relation to Iain (M) Banks: certain people would devour all the Iain Banks work and point blank refuse to touch the Iain M Banks books. Supposedly Virginia Woolfe wrote a bad book in between each masterpiece, and it felt like people treated the Iain M Banks books like the bad books in between without actually reading them because they were attached to a popular (eww) genre (ewwww).

These people were 1990s/early 2000s literature PhDs of a calibre that went on to good jobs in good universities, and to breed that attitude in the next generation of literature students, the lucky few of which got into academia or publishing and preserved these attitudes to pass them on to the next generation, and onward forever.

Even my favourite Post Apocalyptic novel - THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy, was fine for a literary novel, but didn't have activity enough to be a science fiction post apocalyptic novel. The entire thing was Look at this! Look at that! I would have loved a sequel.

I adore The Road. I also loved the start of The Passage by Justin Cronin but fuck me, for a supposed creative writing teacher he sure does love his Marty Sue.

 

[Fromtheblackdepths]

Forgotten Warrior was mildly interesting due to being seemingly based on South-East Asian culture but Correia seems to lose interest in that pretty quickly and goes for the standard European fantasy angle almost immediately.

Oh that sucks immensely.

 

[Fortunato Brown]

Author of the Battletech novels, Blaine Pardoe, was fired by his publisher after a pressure campaign by online people over his conservative politics.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/29/my-publisher-canceled-me-in-favor-of-an-activist-who-threatened-my-life/

 

[Kiwisee]

Author of the Battletech novels, Blaine Pardoe, was fired by his publisher after a pressure campaign by online people over his conservative politics.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/29/my-publisher-canceled-me-in-favor-of-an-activist-who-threatened-my-life/

Guess it’s time to start buying books by cancelled conservatives

 

[Boston Brand]

Oh that sucks immensely.

I don't get what @ArthuriusMartyrius means by that - three books in and its still wildly original and the two directions I see it going aren't standard European fantasy stuff at all.

Guess it’s time to start buying books by cancelled conservatives

AKA what people should have been doing ages ago to begin with.

Vote with your wallets. Feed into culture that you wish to grow. Support artists who think like you and love you for the support.

Or be another sucker who shills for brands whose owners despise you.

 

[Mukhrani]

Sis, this is why no one buys your book. Your "book" is your therapy couch, and no one wants to listen to a pretty lady whine about how oppressed she is unless they get paid to do so.

This is 100% the issue. In Thomas Merton's autobiography, he writes really insightfully about his father's struggle with cancer. He mentions how even though his father was dying and struggling, on an inward level Merton was experiencing more anguish than his father, who had come to some point of quiet grace. He points out a really important fact of life:

"Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture. This is another of the great perversions by which the devil uses our philosophies to turn our whole nature inside out, and eviscerate all our capacities for good, turning them against ourselves."

All of these writers are cut from the exact same cloth: kids from privileged backgrounds who spend all their time navel gazing, obsessing over their own angst and neuroses until they devolve into little self-obsessed knots of psychological pain. They mistake this ridiculous predicament for depth, and then it bleeds into their writing. You can see it in her breathless, broken sentences that try to sketch a picture of something that, in her mind, is of immense importance. But to anyone who isn't in her solipsistic middle- to upper-class bubble, it just looks like a spoiled pretty girl whining about something completely trivial, something that normal people deal with and surmount countless times each day, because they don't have the luxury of wallowing in self-pity 24/7.

 

[BlankSpaceBaby]

Guess it’s time to start buying books by cancelled conservatives.

He has a following, and now that he's seen as a martyr, there will be more people willing to support him should he self-publish his works. These days, publishers are no longer compulsory in order to make some money from writing.

 

[Windows 10 Upgrade]

Sis, this is why no one buys your book. Your "book" is your therapy couch, and no one wants to listen to a pretty lady whine about how oppressed she is unless they get paid to do so.

Selling books marketed to white guilt has made $$ bank $$ in a few occasions, but there's only so much self-flagellation that white people can endure on their downtime.

Maybe in the Trump era it was more of a Fuck You Mom kind of urge to buy the most painful, accusatory tome possible and read it the same way monks would wear a hair-shirt while pondering on their Original Sin, thereby purifying themselves and not being like the Other Sinful Whites but now it's like: I have an hour of free time - must I suffer upon my sin, or can I indulge in comfort and self-care and read a book about Jack Reacher winning another fight?

On the Blaine Pardoe cancellation:

From what it sounds like, this is beef between him and his autistic stalker - but the stalker (not even an activist IRL it seems) has discovered the Achilles Heel: Blaine is conservative, and Lefty accusations are kryptonite to anyone who is not spouting virtue signalling Evasion and Escape tactics.

Writing Battletech stories would certainly be one way to attract some Hikkomori weirdos, that's for sure. Maybe Blaine should burn the whole thing down by having a main character in a mutually satisfying heterosexual relationship. /sneed

 

[JJLiautaud]

I just found out that Eric Flint died on 17th of July. He's one of the few authors who made me want to become an author. I know this thread is big in supporting authors who agree with you politically but it should also be about buying good stories, no matter who wrote them. He will be dearly missed.

 

[Windows 10 Upgrade]

Who wants to hear some MORE spurious Science Fiction/Pedophile gossip.

An old and not very respected science fiction fan organisation - the Australian Science Fiction Foundation, also known as ASFF - had a reputation of being filled with old fannish folks that really didn’t do much except host a lot of General Meetings where nothing got done.

The oldest of them - Bill - died recently, and EVERYONE in the community knew for ages that he took trips to kiddie diddle in Thailand, but it was handled in a “let’s keep X away from kids”. He was already nearly 80 when he admitted it. What the fuck do you do, claim it senile ramblings?

So anyway the ASFF gets a new president, some random self-published person who nobody really knows. But keen, which is fine. She may have known Bill briefly as a nearly 100 year old dude.

She decides to start a new ASFF writing award for kids: “Bill’s Youth Writing Award”

People are up in arms and tell her that Bill had a shocking history, and a Youth Writing Award is right up there with the Jimmy Saville Youth Performing award.

Well, do they quickly change the award name?

Or do they block everyone and call them bigots and threaten legal action for “hate speech”?

Gentlefolk, I’ll leave this mystery up to you…

 

[Mola Ram]

Who wants to hear some MORE spurious Science Fiction/Pedophile gossip.

An old and not very respected science fiction fan organisation - the Australian Science Fiction Foundation, also known as ASFF - had a reputation of being filled with old fannish folks that really didn’t do much except host a lot of General Meetings where nothing got done.

The oldest of them - Bill - died recently, and EVERYONE in the community knew for ages that he took trips to kiddie diddle in Thailand, but it was handled in a “let’s keep X away from kids”. He was already nearly 80 when he admitted it. What the fuck do you do, claim it senile ramblings?

So anyway the ASFF gets a new president, some random self-published person who nobody really knows. But keen, which is fine. She may have known Bill briefly as a nearly 100 year old dude.

She decides to start a new ASFF writing award for kids: “Bill’s Youth Writing Award”

People are up in arms and tell her that Bill had a shocking history, and a Youth Writing Award is right up there with the Jimmy Saville Youth Performing award.

Well, do they quickly change the award name?

Or do they block everyone and call them bigots and threaten legal action for “hate speech”?

Gentlefolk, I’ll leave this mystery up to you…

I've been working on various fantasy stories for the last few years, and each new genre writer horror story -- holy fuck, they're all commies, perverts, predators, or all three -- makes me want to shift over to a more respectable genre, like maybe furry erotica. I'm not getting blackpilled so much as Hemingway Shotgun-pilled.