|
I mean, I can kind of understand why Wildbow would want to stay away from a professional editor - because they'd take a machete to a lot of Worm. There's a lot of Worm that you could safely strike out and not lose much, and that'd be generally anything that comes from pumping words into an update to make it substantial enough for his fans. A professional editor would expect things to be cut down to their major plot points. While a lot of the interludes could be made into prologues and epilogues for individual books, and some of them maybe turned into novellas or short stories, the majority would go. For example, you could probably excise the entire Travellers arc into a separate novel and lose nothing of consequence in the main body of Worm. The story would probably be distilled down into Taylor, the burgeoning supervillain and her rise to power, and Armsmaster, the hero in a position of power who falls as a consequence. Given that the average Worm fan doesn't understand ideas like 'themes', 'subtext'. 'implications' and 'deliberately unanswered questions for further speculations and sequels' their attempts to edit Worm would be absurdly terrible.
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2015 13:45
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 10, 2024 16:09 |
|
|
I feel like you could massively reduce the size without anything of substance being lost, due to what I said above about how Taylor thinks about herself and other people. Sy does it in Twig, too. Too much introspection. I hope there's someone on Reddit telling him how stupid it is to rely on fan editing.
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2015 13:48
|
|
|
Personally, I thought Taylor was a pretty uninteresting protagonist. Worm's real strength was the world and the secondary characters, all of whom were more interesting than Taylor.
|
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2015 14:09
|
|
|
Quote from Reddit:quote:Just a point of curiosity. I've got a survey/form here that you guys can fill out, which asks you to rate the individual arcs of Worm as if you were giving them 5 stars. It's not as bad as it sounded. It doesn't indicate he's passed over merits to the fanbase, just that he wanted to check if his thoughts matched up with others. ^^ Above. I kind of agree in that I thought all the non-Taylor chapters were better, but there are so many words written about Taylor it kind of needs her. I would've been really interested to see what happened if Aegis had taken over.
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2015 14:12
|
|
|
He's actually been editing seriously for some time, and he has talked to professional editors and when talking to them, they have taken machetes to Worm. With awful, awful suggestions.
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2015 17:53
|
|
|
'Professional' is a weird grading given how lovely many professional authors are at writing.
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2015 20:11
|
|
|
thespaceinvader posted:'Professional' is a weird grading given how lovely many professional authors are at writing. Your implied meaning of "professional" is weird. "Professional" means "able to get paid to do it more than a couple of times".
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2015 20:47
|
|
Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:He's actually been editing seriously for some time, and he has talked to professional editors and when talking to them, they have taken machetes to Worm. With awful, awful suggestions. That's weird because that post implies that he hasn't. What are some of these 'awful, awful suggestions' then? 
|
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2015 22:05
|
|
|
PM'd. Anyhow, that was one editor that made truly awful edits, but the point stands that Worm doesn't fit easily into a mold, so editing it might be something of a unique challenge. If anyone knows how to source an actually good editor, by all means, please step forward.
|
|
#
?
Dec 18, 2015 22:51
|
|
|
Wildbow wants the thing published in print at some point right? Then yeah, if I'm remembering right he is going to want to take a machete to it.
|
|
#
?
Dec 19, 2015 20:29
|
|
|
Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:Your implied meaning of "professional" is weird. "Professional" means "able to get paid to do it more than a couple of times". Well, that IS what professional means. It doesn't mean good, it means 'does it for a job'. Wildbow is currently a professional author (as, IIRC, patreon and donations are paying his bills). E: to be on topic about it, I'd struggle with the idea that Worm is ever going to be published under the current structure of the publishing industry except via self-publishing it as ebooks. 1.5 megaword epics which don't really break down well into volumes won't fly.
|
|
#
?
Dec 19, 2015 22:47
|
|
|
Merry loving Christmas, everybody! Edit: 
Goatse James Bond fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Dec 23, 2015 |
|
#
?
Dec 23, 2015 06:52
|
|
|
GreyjoyBastard posted:Merry loving Christmas, everybody! Did wildbow do something crazy or is this about the most recent chapter
|
|
#
?
Dec 24, 2015 18:31
|
|
|
The Shortest Path posted:Did wildbow do something crazy or is this about the most recent chapter The Tuesday chapter.
|
|
#
?
Dec 25, 2015 00:28
|
|
|
I love the whole creepy children thing that the lambs have. It's just too bad Helen isn't there right now.
|
|
#
?
Dec 27, 2015 00:23
|
|
|
So what would happen if early in the Apollo program, it was discovered that Abrahamic religions were verifiably true, the Firmament is real, and Kabbalistic names of God had real, tangible power? Unsong is really good, you guys.
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2016 09:58
|
|
|
TheRagamuffin posted:and Kabbalistic names of God had real, tangible power? And are copyrighted, apparently. This is incredibly bizzzare and strangely fascinating.
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2016 18:32
|
|
|
Yeah I'm into this. Good post.
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2016 18:44
|
|
|
TheRagamuffin posted:So what would happen if early in the Apollo program, it was discovered that Abrahamic religions were verifiably true, the Firmament is real, and Kabbalistic names of God had real, tangible power? A hell of a premise, and a damned good beginning. I laughed far too hard at Uriel's chapter.
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2016 21:21
|
|
|
Yeah that seemed kind of neat! Will be interesting to see where it goes.
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2016 22:01
|
|
|
Man, giving a soul to a computer along with the tools to potentially become literally godlike is just horrifyingly stupid and is quite the place for it to cliffhanger. Even if it doesn't become a malevolent AI, you still created a computer that will speak billions of random names and find tens of thousands of miracles, many of which are probably the apocalyptic sort, and can potentially remotely trigger Names through the internet. Having a world where anyone who can speak a certain phrase, with no apparent way beforehand of filtering out people who might know that name, can already destroy a city was probably bad enough. You have to wonder how they deal with that. Wolpertinger fucked around with this message at 02:54 on Jan 29, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2016 02:51
|
|
|
I gave Unsong a try, and you guys are right, it seems solid- kind of a fascinating concept to explore. And the Uriel chapter had me dying laughing, so.
|
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2016 03:57
|
|
|
TheRagamuffin posted:So what would happen if early in the Apollo program, it was discovered that Abrahamic religions were verifiably true, the Firmament is real, and Kabbalistic names of God had real, tangible power? Also, the author's other blogging doesn't inspire much confidence. Still. Maybe it won't go full Less Wrong? Edit: loving Uriel, get it together.
|
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2016 12:53
|
|
|
Ehhh, the premise is okay but the prose doesn't fill me with confidence and I have a suspicion it's going to turn into a digital physics IT geek wank-fest.
|
|
#
?
Jan 29, 2016 12:55
|
|
|
what's the irony level of the mencius moldbug namedrop in chapter 5
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2016 16:04
|
|
|
Samog posted:what's the irony level of the mencius moldbug namedrop in chapter 5
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2016 18:00
|
|
|
I have a long flight tomorrow, are the current Worm chapters archived in a .pdf or something that I can read since I don't care to pay for inflight wi-fi?
|
|
#
?
Feb 3, 2016 16:02
|
|
|
There's an epub floating around if you know where to look.
|
|
#
?
Feb 3, 2016 23:53
|
|
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/Parahumans/comments/454gb3/worm_news_editor_applications/ Preliminary shopping around for a Worm TV adaptation Wildbow seeking editors
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2016 06:19
|
|
Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:https://www.reddit.com/r/Parahumans/comments/454gb3/worm_news_editor_applications/ Can you seriously imagine adapting Worm into a TV series? I mean, honestly, because I can't. I can see a series of movies, an animated adaptation, things like that... but a TV series? Worm is far more grandiose than Heroes or any other superhero series on TV. Again, he needs professional editors who have experience with adapting for television and know what to strip out of the work while maintaining the key themes, plot beats and character arcs - not Reddit people whose circlejerking makes them opposed to actually discussing the work. Hate to say it, but a Worm adaptation would risk ending up far more like the Magicians than the Expanse, if we're going to look at recent adaptations of literature for TV.
|
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2016 11:27
|
|
|
Yeah, except those good pro editors haven't materialized (do you really think he wasn't looking?) and the ones that did had some really, really lovely suggestions.
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2016 11:35
|
|
|
Twig. 
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2016 19:42
|
|
|
Yyyyyup. On the brighter side, I wanna see how Lillian does with that plan.
|
|
#
?
Feb 12, 2016 13:01
|
|
|
So, about Twig. I don't 'get' Primordials. The idea is life build from scratch that is super-rapid evolving right? But aren't experiments like Helen also built from scratch? Is the implication that things like Helen are fully vat-grown but still based on normal life, and primordials are basically starting up a beefed-up version of the Miller-Urey experiments? Why would primordial life have super evolution anyway, more so than any random colony-entity? Or is the implication that primordial is dangerous because they have no idea on how primordial life is going to work, and you can't really make antidotes or engineer hard counter creatures if you don't have a clue how the primordial life is operating at a cellular level? I have read the primordial introduction part a few times, and I have the feeling the reader is supposed to get it, so I'm curious for other people's interpretation of them.
|
|
#
?
Feb 12, 2016 20:45
|
|
|
Helen is getting the parts for a computer and putting them together, installing the software you designed on it. At the end of it you have a computer that does what you expected it to do. The primordial life is Shodan. It's giving the machine the intelligence and capacity to upgrade itself and build its own hardware and write its own software. Helen will never change without Ibbots intervention, she won't hit puberty or grow older (correctly, at least, I think), it's all artificial. She has no capacity to change or, as far as the scientists know, evolve. Nettle Soup fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Feb 12, 2016 |
|
#
?
Feb 12, 2016 21:45
|
|
|
Twig nooooo, I don't want to lose another lamb, I like these three!
|
|
#
?
Feb 16, 2016 12:13
|
|
|
Twig is good, I really liked the primordial interlude. But, I think I'm gonna give up on Unsong for now. It's slowing crawling up it's own arse.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2016 22:25
|
|
|
Oh nooooooo. If the firstborn AREN'T the actual babies, then the fact that McCormick gave his child brain damage was both unnecessary (though from the sound of things, probably a kindness) AND dangerous - because he thinks his firstborn is damaged, when presumably it's completely healthy...
|
|
#
?
Apr 16, 2016 08:39
|
|
|
Samog posted:what's the irony level of the mencius moldbug namedrop in chapter 5 He's an author of a well-regarded  post where he tries give a Devil's Advocate explanation of neoreaction and a similarly huge Anti-Reactionary FAQ which gets linked around a lot as the definitive explanation why neoreaction is kinda dumb. Personally, he's against it but he's really into giving everyone a fair shake and having a conversation and examining everything rationally and so forth.
|
|
#
?
Apr 21, 2016 09:26
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 10, 2024 16:09 |
|
|
Megazver posted:He's an author of a well-regarded You're thinking of Scott Alexander. Moldbug is a Neoreactionary blogger discussed in the FAQ you posted.
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2016 05:32
|
|
