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I've decided that when I'm done with this current novel I'm gonna edit it to feel more like serialized episodes, then chuck it up on a website somewhere and let god sort out the rest. I have the best memories of stumbling on someone's story blog as a teen and getting totally engrossed in their weird story (only to have it end abruptly when they stopped updating). The way I see it, if my novel sucks (likely) then at least it's off in its own corner of the universe, not bothering anyone. And if it's good then haha gently caress you, weird hosed up SFF industry*, you don't get to have my extremely good novel. Nuts to you. *There are, as muffin points out, stellar people in the SF&F sphere. But the more people I watch go through the publishing wringer, the more I don't think I could handle it if it ever came to all that.
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Jul 30, 2022 10:37
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I think you should publish, I just think you should build up support networks external to SF/F. Do not rely on the 'community' for security, for love, for anything. Go carefully into Babylon, and do not go alone. There are wonders and joys, but many dangers too. The General might feel differently and has certainly seen more of this war than I have, so I dunno, maybe he's gonna swing in and entirely slap this down and he's probably right, but it does feel worth it to me. Like, I worry I have been crushingly negative about a thing that brings me a lot of joy, the opportunity to tell stories for a living, hot drat, I love writing, I love it when readers talk about how much they love my work, I love that I have a team who are dedicated to making my books the best version of themselves, I've met a lot of lovely people and done a ton of cool stuff it's just ... I mean Battuta's not wrong, the scene is an absolute shitshow SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 13:22 on Jul 30, 2022 |
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Jul 30, 2022 10:55
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Sitting Here posted:I've decided that when I'm done with this current novel I'm gonna edit it to feel more like serialized episodes, then chuck it up on a website somewhere and let god sort out the rest. I have the best memories of stumbling on someone's story blog as a teen and getting totally engrossed in their weird story (only to have it end abruptly when they stopped updating). The way I see it, if my novel sucks (likely) then at least it's off in its own corner of the universe, not bothering anyone. And if it's good then haha gently caress you, weird hosed up SFF industry*, you don't get to have my extremely good novel. Nuts to you. As a former web serial person, you'd probably do better just putting it on Amazon. However, I'm still semi-active in a Discord for RoyalRoad web novels that don't fit the usual LitRPG/isekai/whatever fare, so, that could be a stepping stone that isn't just putting it up on your own blog somewhere and hoping for the best. Especially because a lot of the sites for discovering cool online fiction, such as TopWebFiction, have been taken over by RR listings anyway! And to add my two cents to the publishing conversation -- yeah, I've been exploring that with this manuscript for the past twelve months or so and while it hasn't been a terrible experience, it's been enough of a window that I'm not sure I'm the right personality for it. And I mean, if I can self-pub with book cover art by Tommy Arnold, why would I do anything else?  And coming back to this because I checked my own post history... SurreptitiousMuffin posted:The vibe here? This is coming back, The Boys is one of the biggest shows around right now for a reason. Re trends, you've been out for a while but you're on the cusp of coming back in, I'd work that line. Yeah, I figured that might be a problem back when I was doing it, but The Expanse comp is absolutely meaning the novels which was the general prose and readability I was going for. I tried to be as accurate as possible, which is different to being as, I suppose, eye-catching as possible. Which is probably what plays into the comments re: marketability and such. I know some agents have mentioned the comps were interesting/caught their eye/etc. But knowing what I know now, I'd probably handle buzzwords and such better. 'A young woman's quest to avenge her father draws her toward a blood-soaked future in this queer superheroic retelling of the myth of Sekhmet. Gideon the Ninth X The Boys.' Even if the only thing I'd say it has in common with Gideon is the dynamic between protagonist and love interest, but perhaps that was a component to stress over the general multi-protagonist sci-fi thriller vibe of The Expanse. It'll be interesting to see what people think of it in a little bit! Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 11:29 on Jul 30, 2022 |
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Jul 30, 2022 11:26
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:I mean, having whinged about how terrible the scene is, I should say: Taz Muir is a fuckin real one, exactly as funny as GtN would have you believe and also super nice. There are absolutely good, cool people out there who are worth looking up to. I think you have the right approach too: there are a million people out there who want to be a Writer but remarkably few who seem to find joy in writing, and without that joy then there's just ... nothing? Being A Writer is alternately boring and scary, writing is the bit that fuckin slaps. That point about 50-60% of the way through an MS where all the streams flow together and suddenly the water's rushing downhill? Nothing like it. If you find joy in it, do it, do it recklessly and pointlessly, and occasionally you'll finish a short and put it down and six months later it'll still be bouncing around your skull and you know it needs expansion so you just start writing, drat the torpedos, and it's a trash draft who the gently caress cares and suddenly you're re-reading your final draft and crying because gently caress I'm good, gently caress I'm actually really good Yeah, I'm not sure how to describe it other than unlocking something in me where I'm like wait, I might not be cringe? and now that I'm in a better place than I've been in a long time I'd love to take it more seriously and improve, which is one of the reasons I'm happy I got so many book recommendations over in TBB when I asked since I'm hopelessly out of the loop. I'm in my early 30s and I'm still working off the loving stench of being forced to read a 1200-page multi-generational epic about the Florida citrus business in 10th grade killing my passion for reading fiction, I guess.
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Jul 30, 2022 19:04
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:That point about 50-60% of the way through an MS where all the streams flow together and suddenly the water's rushing downhill? Is it bad that I'm finding the opposite as my first draft approaches completion? I feel like the last 20k words is just a pileup of plans and promises I made that are working at cross purposes with each other. And everything is interlinked to the point where fixing one thing always breaks something else.
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Jul 31, 2022 03:07
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Sailor Viy posted:Is it bad that I'm finding the opposite as my first draft approaches completion? I feel like the last 20k words is just a pileup of plans and promises I made that are working at cross purposes with each other. And everything is interlinked to the point where fixing one thing always breaks something else. Yes, it's terrible, and you've hosed up at book. There's only one method for writing and if you're not doing it exactly right, everyone will know, and call you stupid, and punch you.
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Jul 31, 2022 15:53
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Published authors: how did you go about asking for blurbs? I know a few authors personally who have put out well regarded work (and some of them have hit best seller status) but god drat do I hate asking people for things. I’d feel insanely self conscious about coming off as transactional
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Jul 31, 2022 17:32
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Make your agent do it
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Jul 31, 2022 21:14
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Wungus posted:Yes, it's terrible, and you've hosed up at book. There's only one method for writing and if you're not doing it exactly right, everyone will know, and call you stupid, and punch you. Don't make me tap the thread title
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Jul 31, 2022 21:34
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General Battuta posted:Make your agent do it Find their email, just ask. Writers are just people, you don't need to be any more scared of them than anybody else, and we get blurb reqs all the time. I've never resented a blurb request, if I don't vibe with the work or don't have the time I just don't reply. Send a lot more than you need, b/c most will just ignore it, but some won't. If you're self-pub it'll be an uphill battle, but talk to people with self-pub/fanfic etc pasts who are much more likely to give you the time. SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 22:47
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Yeah this was just curiosity/speculative
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Jul 31, 2022 22:53
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Yeah nah I mean, it's a really common thing, it is vaguely transactional in the sense that if somebody blurbs me I'm gonna give their blurb requests more thorough consideration but I've yet to meet somebody who gets mad about receiving the things
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Jul 31, 2022 23:02
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Wungus posted:Yes, it's terrible, and you've hosed up at book. There's only one method for writing and if you're not doing it exactly right, everyone will know, and call you stupid, and punch you. I know this is a joke but Jesus Christ is it a hump to get over. I think I found discovery works for best for my imagination (at least I’ve never set out to write anything longer than, like, 2000 words) so whatever, let us book wrong together.
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Jul 31, 2022 23:12
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I'm curious what this thread's opinion is on AI text adventure / story generators. I've signed up for a month of NovelAI to test it (exploring short-cuts to getting better at descriptive prose, since that feels like a hard grind right now), and after being initially let-down, I'm starting to see the potential. Not looking to make a story from scratch - perhaps discovery writers can use it for that, but I don't think it's that strong in that area anyway. Instead, describing a scene in compelling prose is what I'm looking for here. These types of AI work by processing the text that you write into a box and continuing that text to the best of its ability, so for an example you can use that to 'cheat' it into giving you an alternate writing of a scene. I give it an example here, with intentionally bad and unimaginative writing: quote:I'm trying to write a descriptive scene of a banquet dinner, as viewed by a gluttonous man. He can't wait to dig into all the delicious food. However, the first attempt was really shoddy: I used the *** to attempt to nudge the AI in the right direction (so it's aware that the next example has started), but I'm not sure it's necessary. Then I hit send, forcing it to work off my prompt: quote:Mr. Porkins sat down, licking his lips in anticipation. The white sliced morsels, the small glistening little rolls, and the stuffed little wicker basket cakes with white bits and the peppery aroma that all clashed in his nostrils, all spoke in delicious little notes, teasing him into more and more hunger. He closed his eyes, taking another small sip from a different set of grapes he'd brought for himself, feeling the fresh sourness. The pale sliced bread was heavy with butter and so moist that it all clumped up and begged to be brought into the moistened crevasses of his mouth. As he continued to wait, and wait, and wait, his little heart hammered faster. A bite here and there. Another little snack, he'd pay no mind. He would sit for a time, watching them. Allowing it to linger in his senses. Another sip here, a nibble there. A bite now. The pale sliced meats danced all about the plates before him. He was all aglow from the cut and savour and richness of every bit, and just the simple anticipation of the food before him was enough There's flaws (some confusing parts and I'm not sure you sip on a grape, unless it's an imaginative way to describe wine?) but it's obviously a lot better. I especially like how it remembered the gluttonous detail, and imagined the man just savoring everything in his mind. And this was only its first attempt! If I'm going through a second draft and get stuck, or lack imagination, this seems like an excellent tool to establish a base-line paragraph I can tinker with (no matter what, whatever it produces needs at least some editing work). The question is if it'll help me or hold me back in the long run. Does anyone have experience using these types of programs? Or is it heresy to even suggest it?
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Aug 4, 2022 22:38
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Ovenmaster posted:If I'm going through a second draft and get stuck, or lack imagination, this seems like an excellent tool to establish a base-line paragraph I can tinker with (no matter what, whatever it produces needs at least some editing work). The question is if it'll help me or hold me back in the long run. This popped up in my feed recently: https://www.theverge.com/c/23194235/ai-fiction-writing-amazon-kindle-sudowrite-jasper Great piece on how some writers are finding it. Personally, I think it's just a tool, like anything else. Sometimes it can help and sometimes it can hurt, just depends on what you're trying to do. AI is being used in music and in design pretty effectively to do a lot of grunt work so composers and musicians and designers can focus on higher level thinking. So, yeah, I don't mind using it for grunt work, like writing descriptions that are needed for ~vibes~ but aren't particularly important to the overall scheme of things, so I can concentrate on getting bigger stuff, like characters, right. (Though arguably, if the description isn't particularly important, arguably the description shouldn't be there in the first place, or you should find a way to make it important...) I think where it gets troublesome is when the parts of your brain starts being outsourced completely to the tool. If I stopped being able to write WITHOUT the tool, then I think there would be a problem.
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Aug 5, 2022 02:11
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I think I broadly agree, though I am a guy who is completely and utterly fascinated by AI technology so obviously am a little biased. The first novel that's completely AI written and isn't a total laughingstock of bad grammar and awkward metaphors will probably fascinate me.
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Aug 5, 2022 02:32
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I think a few people have talked about getting AI image generators to give them inspiration, and I think anything AI generated in the next couple years is going to be similar in scope to that. Hit generate, get some interesting markov chains, find the good bits, repeat. If people start using computer-generated text more I imagine it'll be kind of like Photoshop or Procreate. It lets you automate some of the trickier stuff, but it still requires artistic skill to get something that's not just layer effects and sharpen artifacts. Also stuff like this has popped up at big moments in tech development before. Arcadia by Tom Stoppard and Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco were written right around 1990, when some of the cool new computer tricks was word processing and spreadsheets. These are always very promising on paper but have more limited practical use. One of the things with word processors was like "imagine if you could write literature in different typefaces! Every typeface means something new! You could even use colors, and control the placement of the words..." That's all cool and forward-thinking but we've been able to do WordArt in MS Word for like twenty five years now and it's so old and gauche it's either a nostalgic throwback or a local business owner/rambling internet rando with a single copy of Office 2007 on a computer they bought when Circuit City was still a thing. eta: Also worth noting there have been at least two brief recent booms in AI-assisted writing. There was one when Botnik got popular, and then a newer one with AI Dungeon and a couple similar tools. The results have been interesting but as yet I haven't seen bots that can convincingly and consistently reproduce things like structure or word choice. There's often a fun randomness to them, and that's a great source of entropy. I follow an AI researcher's blog and she does posts about all of the weird nonsense her test programs spit out, but a part of the process behind the scenes is her sifting through like two hundred results to get a list of twelve ones that are funny or good or weird. tl;dr: ai is cool for inspiration but don't throw out your copy of Ursula K Le Guin's Steering the Craft just yet Djeser fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Aug 5, 2022 |
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Aug 5, 2022 04:51
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I don't know for sure, but I fear that using (or over-using) AI writing tools will wither your own creativity. If you are going to spend a lot of your writing time giving directions and then revising the work the AI gives you, then you will see less and less of your own voice in your work. On the other hand, I do think that as AI improves, it will at least get to the level where it can write a competent short story with minimal human intervention. Longer fiction will be more difficult because of memory limits--I don't understand the technology all that well but I believe it becomes more computationally expensive the more preexisting text the AI can "see". To have it "see" 100k words and write the last 20k would be prohibitively expensive and slow, for now anyway.
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Aug 5, 2022 08:11
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Just wait a few years and we will find out the AI is a sex pest at conventions...
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Aug 5, 2022 10:08
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AI will deliver its first coherent, decent story right before eliminating humanity for good. Writing was difficult enough, but publishing and competing? Easier to not.
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Aug 5, 2022 12:35
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Interrupting AI chat (which is really interesting, btw, but I know almost nothing about it) to drop a link to my thread about the book I’m working on: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=1&threadid=4008761&pagenumber=1&perpage=40#post525210579 I could use some readers, if anyone felt like taking a look. Harsh crits are fine—I can handle it.
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Aug 5, 2022 14:02
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I think you’re very good! Your prose is dead on for the kind of story you’re trying to tell. My main and only critique from the section I read is that there’s not a spot of wonder, awe, or unease about ghosts, magic, or any of the other weird poo poo in your story. This may be the right choice for your setting - everybody probably would adjust to ghosts popping up or whatever - but for me it’s a mood killer whenever your narrator ducks into an aside to tell you what the magic cops are, or how he’s totally used to being haunted. It fills in some spots of potential intrigue with the totally prosaic. There’s no sense of sense to the magic, no weird unexpected details, like a moment I remember from Stephen King about the presence of evil making a dude’s prostate ache. The ghost in the opening scene might as well be a persistent robocaller - hell, a persistent weird robocaller might be more creepy. I’d point to something like The Library at Mount Char as a book I like that is comfortable letting the weird be a bit weird. That said I’m not an urban fantasy reader and my critique may well fall into the 2/3 of crits that are either wrong or wrong for your story.
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Aug 5, 2022 14:19
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Sailor Viy posted:I don't know for sure, but I fear that using (or over-using) AI writing tools will wither your own creativity. If you are going to spend a lot of your writing time giving directions and then revising the work the AI gives you, then you will see less and less of your own voice in your work. Yeah, that's the main thing I'm worried about, but then again I don't think I'm experienced enough as a writer to have a voice of my own. When I want to write a description of a 17th century frigate and I'm like "The ship was made of wood. It had... sails" before slamming my head into the keyboard in frustration, I don't think looking to the AI for help on occasion is going to be a detriment to my creativity... on the contrary, the next time I'm similarly challenged, I then know better how to fix it. Just like getting better by reading books, but instead of general prose you now have a direct comparison to what you're trying to accomplish. It's also good at coloring a scene with a POV character's emotion, meaning it can give me helpful pointers in how to show their state of mind, rather than telling it (also something I'm struggling with). As long as one uses it as a helpful tool, rather than a crutch, I don't think it's going to be harmful.
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Aug 5, 2022 14:27
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General Battuta posted:I think you’re very good! Your prose is dead on for the kind of story you’re trying to tell. Thank you! Very helpful crit. I agree that I struggle with adding weirdness, and originality in general. I was worrying about this exact thing as I wrote. And it’s always a hard line to walk trying to write a first-person narrator who’s not naive, but hasn’t quite seen it all yet. Probably standard urban fantasy stuff: jaded, supernatural world-weary protagonist (my story might be more ‘rural fantasy, maybe). I think (hope) the ghosts get weirder as the story progresses, but I’ll see what I can do to make it more distinctive right from the start. Thanks so much 
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Aug 5, 2022 15:00
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This may be a basic bitch writer question but I'm working on a horror scene that I can picture in my mind like a movie but can't seem to get out on paper in a way that makes sense. The protagonist, having saved the village through the awakening of her new power, is undergoing a magical healing ritual. She comes to realize during the course of the ritual that it's strikingly similar to a recurring dream of a magical harming ritual, and in her sight the two visions gradually merge until she freaks out and we cut to the next morning's "...well, we had to sedate you so you wouldn't hurt yourself..." What I come up with just looks no good to me. Anyone have advice on how to get a scene to make this transition from mind to WINWORD.EXE? Right now it looks like a bunch of paragraphs like these that attempt to ratchet up the tension. Reality, the hallucination, her reaction. quote:Rin under a cotton vestment. Feeling the iron chains tying her to the altar. I'm not at a point I want a crit or anything, I'm just trying to figure out how the hell to make this work.
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Aug 5, 2022 18:17
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It looks to me that this is written in images, but you want to write this scene in actions. So maybe try writing as many sentences as possible in terms of somebody doing something - i.e., with subject and verb. For instance, go from these images:quote:Rin under a cotton vestment. Feeling the iron chains tying her to the altar. to these actions: quote:Rin was lying under a cotton vestment. She could feel the iron chains tying her to the altar. Hope this helps!
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Aug 5, 2022 18:46
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I know it’s old hat, but there’s a lot of telling and not a lot of showing. I assume this is from Rin’s pov, so what do the iron chains feel like? Is the vestment light like cobwebs against her skin? Or scratchy and harsh? What can she hear and feel and see that’s making her skip back and forth between reality and the hallucination.
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Aug 5, 2022 18:55
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there's a lot of passive-like voice in this. try to avoid "feeling" or "seeing" and have things be immediate. for example, "feeling the iron chains tying" to "iron chains tied her." in a scene like this where the character is supposed to be losing control, i think its good to have the objects be the subject of the sentences. she doesnt have control and so she doesnt even get top billing in the sentences. also i think avoiding was in scenes like this helps make things more immediate. "her breathing was rapid and shallow" vs "her breathing rapid and shallow." "rin was lying under the cotton vestment" vs "rin lied under the cotton vestment" or if we wanted to go with my previous comment of having the objects being the subject, "a cotton vestment covered rin." more immediacy here i think sells the horror stronger, as theres no control and things keep happening and she cant do anything about it.
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Aug 5, 2022 18:58
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Luigi Thirty posted:Rin under a cotton vestment. Feeling the iron chains tying her to the altar. This looks like an outline. You are pointing out the relevant information that you want in the paragraph. What can my character see? Who else is in the scene? What can the character feel (Phyiscally) What is their body doing (Unconciously? Or is this what they are feeling emotionally, channeled into the physical reactions?) Now you need to flesh it out, you already have the important pieces there and know what you want to convey. So for example Luigi Thirty posted:Rin under a cotton vestment. Feeling the iron chains tying her to the altar. Becomes a paragraph, or even a single sentence, that conveys that information. This example sucks, but here we go: "The girl couldn't breathe. Not because of the taught chains that bit at her wrists, dried blood caking the iron. Not because of the heavy cotton blanket her captors had wrapped around her face. She couldn't breathe because of one simple fact: She was already dead. But that's where I come in, dear Rin. I lick your soul, it tastes nauseatingly sweet. A flick of my wrist, a snap of your soul, and your lungs compress. Rapid and shallow, to the beat of their impending doom." DropTheAnvil fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Aug 5, 2022 |
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Aug 5, 2022 21:18
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If you use the same sentence structure over and over in a row the reader’s brain gets bored and stops paying attention.
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Aug 6, 2022 01:46
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This is all very good advice that should be heeded but we have a thread for this and should probably take it there.
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Aug 6, 2022 03:24
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:This is all very good advice that should be heeded but we have a thread for this and should probably take it there. It would actually be p great if that thread got used, so yes please
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Aug 6, 2022 03:33
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sebmojo posted:It would actually be p great if that thread got used, so yes please Oh, I had no idea that thread existed. I thought this was for… that. Ok, thanks.
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Aug 6, 2022 08:02
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This is more generalist dicussion, crits tend to require a bit more space/focus, it's not like a CC crime to miss the crit thread (it fell off the front page of a very slow forum after all) but I think we do wanna encourage more people to actually use it.
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Aug 6, 2022 08:30
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My ruling is that some workshopping in this thread is fine. It gets the most traffic out of all of the non-TD writing threads I think, so for quick workshopping questions I think it's good. If you want a whole piece or long excerpt workshopped, then yes I think it's time to take it to the other thread. But I'm not going to chase people into a long-forgotten thread to talk about a very small excerpt. That said, I am open to talking about ways we could promote the use of other writing threads. The issues are 1) this is a generally slow subforum, with people primarily staying in their bookmarks and 2) a lot of people (including myself) have dedicated workshop groups offsite. So I can understand why people end up dropping their excerpts in this thread. Very open to solutions, if we all agree this is a problem.
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Aug 6, 2022 09:29
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Is there a more natural way to move discussion to other threads apart from pointing to a thread that hasn't seen a post in almost a year? Can you auto-move posts and notify users that the discussion has been moved to a different thread? The other thing is, this thread gets way more traffic than other threads in CC. I've seen users posts their own thread and get no responses. They usually post here to to let people know.
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Aug 6, 2022 15:59
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Let people post it here imo. With so little traffic on this forum, bookmarks drive discussion and putting it in this thread means people might actually get a response.
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Aug 6, 2022 16:11
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DropTheAnvil posted:Is there a more natural way to move discussion to other threads apart from pointing to a thread that hasn't seen a post in almost a year? Can you auto-move posts and notify users that the discussion has been moved to a different thread? Not with our software (radiuuuuuum) I responded in the other thread before the Official Mod Ruling, either way.  My suggestion would be, if you want people to use that thread, to note it in this thread’s title for a while so people who only look at bookmarks will have a reason to bookmark that thread too.
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Aug 6, 2022 16:29
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DropTheAnvil posted:Is there a more natural way to move discussion to other threads apart from pointing to a thread that hasn't seen a post in almost a year? Can you auto-move posts and notify users that the discussion has been moved to a different thread? i assure you even expensive forum or content management software cant do this
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Aug 6, 2022 18:44
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Luigi Thirty posted:This may be a basic bitch writer question but I'm working on a horror scene that I can picture in my mind like a movie but can't seem to get out on paper in a way that makes sense. To me, what you've got with a bit of editing (like other people have suggested) could work on its own, if it's a faster-paced piece. If you want to know what more you could say, consider what you want the audience to feel. Let's say I'm writing a scene where an assassin is just outside someone's window, waiting for the moment to strike. If I want to emphasize the assassin's inexperience, the extra detail would be things like small mistakes they're making or near-misses they have. where someone almost spots them. If I want the audience to feel sympathy for the character, I might use that space for detail to emphasize the challenge they're overcoming, or to describe their emotional state. I could do the latter by just using more of their internal monologue in the narration, but you can still keep a distant perspective and have them emote in other ways. "Fierce look of determination in the masked figure's eyes" or whatever. Making them intimidating is like the opposite of inexperienced--show them being hyper-competent, even to the point of seeming super-human. Most stories are going to be a whole bunch of these ideas rolling around. If I did a deep dive on something like a Redwall series book describing a feast the detail-space is filled with stuff like detailed descriptions of food preparation, lots of twee nicknames and references to funny events you weren't there for. They often made a point about which feast hall was being used, because there's one for formal dinners and one for rowdy dinners so it matters which one. Both the lavish food detail and preparation detail also contribute to the sense of excitement and celebration. 'They're busting out the nice napkins and the good wine that gets you funny monastery drunk, this must be a big one,' the reader thinks.
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Aug 7, 2022 05:07
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