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Comic sans trick, dawg: make a copy of the doc, switch it into comic sans, print it off and read it like that. It'll instantly feel like a book written by somebody else. I use it to clear those post-draft editing humps all the time, no idea why it works but it does, try it if you don't believe me.
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Sep 27, 2022 20:37
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 06:54 |
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r/fantasy IS useful for getting your book out there (back when I was indie I got a lot of value out of their kindle deal promotion threads) but like, integrating yourself in their community specifically to market doesn't feel workable to me, unless you actually enjoy hanging out there you're going to have a bad time and people can tell, folks who go in there just for promo have a really obvious vibe and down to get downvoted into oblivion it's also worth noting (from my time as an SEO jagoff, look I needed money ok) that reddit is one of the few places on the internet that can actively tank your google rating since it's one of the only big remaining "social bookmarking" sites, where people post links and others upvote/downvote – google knows if people are downvoting posts with your links in them and goes "this is bad and people don't want to see it" and your works slide right the gently caress off the front page
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Oct 6, 2022 06:02
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This is a pretty good watch, Zoe knows her stuff.
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Oct 27, 2022 21:34
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Yeah going out into the forest and just touching a tree for a while, I mean ... it sounds ridiculous but it's got me through two manuscripts so far, it really shouldn't be as effective as it is but also I don't knock what works drugs and alcohol have basically never helped, I tried it a lot when I was younger but they just gently caress my focus and I can't stay on-task, I really don't know how people do it. I've been known to engage in ... let's call it mind expansion, and I think it CAN give you ideas for later if you're able to hold onto them, but working while high is a shitshow and I suspect the talk about it, in large part, just bullshit mythmaking. SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 07:21 on Nov 16, 2022 |
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Nov 16, 2022 07:16
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Marsupial Ape posted:I'm a 42 year old man. I have an English Degree with a creative writing education emphasis. I used to teach writing. One day I realized I couldn't and shouldn't. What's the point of killing your darlings if they are all abortions, anyway? By pass the miserable still birthing all together. I really feel like this polly-anna 'you can do it if you Care Bear Stare long enough' attitude towards writing is incredibly toxic. Not everyone is equipped to be a storyteller, no matter how much they throw themselves against that wall. Divine muses or not, if you ain't got the juice, you ain't got the juice. The real tragedy of it is that most of us are perfectly equipped to appreciate art, to interpret and ingest it, but not to synthesis it into something new. Story telling is thaumaturgy, is wonder making, and not everyone is made to invoke it. To make someone believe that can actually do that magic, make their mind's eye visible to another person, but always be just out of their reach is a cruel abuse of hope.
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Nov 16, 2022 10:13
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Marsupial Ape posted:We obviously have very different economic backgrounds, personal experiences, and expectations about life outcomes.
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Nov 16, 2022 17:04
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All this poo poo I've been seeing in here lately about makes a REAL WRITER is horseshit, the only difference between thunderdome and trad pub is that thunderdome never made me wait a year for crits
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Nov 17, 2022 04:28
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Marsupial Ape posted:The vast majority of this community didn’t have the reading comprehension skills to recognize “what drugs should I take to be a better writer” as obvious irony. That’s either low reading comprehension skills or a lack of depth and breadth of literary exposure. I’m still agog that some one didn’t have the temerity or curiosity to google sunk cost fallacy before deciding to have a fit. To that person, I hold you no ill will and never meant you any. Please don’t not read the article just to spite me.
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Nov 17, 2022 21:43
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sorry, addendum: i'm SOWWY for huwting youw FEEWINGS i don't hate u for being an idiot asshoww, I take wesponsibiwity  gently caress offfffffffffff
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Nov 17, 2022 21:46
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Like, you want some realtalk? I hate throwing my weight around here but hi, I'm a big-5 trad pub author who does MS assessment for MFA programs. After over a decade of struggle, I now write fulltime professionally. I have a postgraduate qualification in publishing and I've worked in the industry as an editor, typesetter, publicist, and project manager. I know my poo poo. You're a bad writer for all the reasons you think you're a good writer. You waste $20 words on 10c ideas. You do this whole theatrical beating yourself up thing but it does not for a moment mask your towering arrogance; the reason you're not improving is because you're unable to pull your head out of your rear end, and you're baffled as to why nobody else can smell poo poo. Both your posting and prose have the neurotic, self-impressed affect of a teenage boy in a fedora trying to impress a girl who listens to The Smiths. GET OVER YOUR SELF SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Nov 17, 2022 |
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Nov 17, 2022 21:56
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The conceitedness + depression combo is one of the nastiest self-sealing grease traps – everybody trying to tell you it's the depression talking is naive and doesn't understand the real world etc, which leads to you talking down to people, which further isolates you, which inculcates your false sense of superiority, which further isolates you, which worsens your depression, repeat ad nauseum. I've been there, it sucks, I feel a little guilty for lashing out but come on dude, you're not some enlightened prophet coming down from the mountain with the true nature of the uncaring universe, you're just depressed.
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Nov 17, 2022 23:08
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General Battuta posted:Please don't sing dragula
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Nov 17, 2022 23:24
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Junpei posted:The thing I wanna say-and I'll admit this is an unproven theory-is that, even in the total absence of marketing people who are trying to find the next Harry Potter/Twilight/Hunger Games and will take any novel they can find to fit into that hole, or whatever the modern equivalent to the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew style ghostwriting book sweatshops are, certain people/writers just make 'more mainstream' novels than others, just as a result of their personal preferences, influences, and the like, and we shouldn't necessarily hold that against them.
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Jan 1, 2023 04:46
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General Battuta posted:I honestly have no god drat loving idea how this year went. I guess pretty lovely. I got about two hundred thousand words into a draft and realized it sucked and I needed to just start fresh blank page gently caress you all over. I have another book that's been trapped at the publisher for years and maybe they're actually moving on it? Who god drat knows.
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Jan 2, 2023 23:52
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Eric the Mauve posted:Pictured: An excerpt of prose that would never in a million years get past a modern publishing-house editor if they didn't already know Cormac McCarthy wrote it.
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Jan 29, 2023 10:39
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sebmojo posted:On a brief and extremely unscientific survey ai can write perfectly decent stories at a 12 year old kid level. They're not good, but they're also not conspicuously bad, so if someone put some time into it I can totally see an ai story being publishable. a self-driving car could probably navigate a town with a decent grid layout but it's not winning the Monaco Grand Prix any time soon
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Feb 23, 2023 08:11
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Adaptation brutally skewered McKee and I still rewatch it occasionally, Cox is so good, so smugly Straight Talkin Tell It Like It Is and yet so fantastically empty
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Mar 5, 2023 11:38
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General Battuta posted:So in this argument, people aren't really rational procedure-creators, they're terminals for this massive pool of cultural knowledge which comes and dwells in them. And, crucially, the process of receiving culture is lossless because people do what they learn to do without needing to understand why. (also yeah re everything else. While I've got no beef with Sando as a dude, he seems to have created this SF/F orthodoxy where there's no room for mystery or wonder, no space to play, where edges/quirks/obsessions are defects rather than signatures) It's not the SAME point but it feels related: Winning the Game You Didn’t Even Want to Play: On Sally Rooney and the Literature of the Pose quote:There is not a word out of place. Each sentence passes quality assurance: The above sentences are certified, not wrong. The writing of the pose is, first and foremost, about being correct, both in terms of style and content. Its foremost goal is not to make any mistakes. Its foremost gesture is erasure and its foremost subject is social anxiety and self-presentation. One never loses oneself in the writing. Rather, one admires, at a slight remove, the precision of the undertaking. quote:The enormous control of these works leaves the impression of fundamental futility: They are language trying not be language, with the combed-through feeling of cover letters to job applications in which a spelling mistake might mean unemployment. The style grows less personal even as the auto-fictional content grows more confessional. The more prominent the writer, the less individual the style. quote:I remember, at my son’s childhood birthday parties, we used to organize a game called “shark attack.” It was a version of musical chairs, in which the children dance around a blanket, and the music stops, and they all have to jump onto the blanket. Every round the parents make the blanket smaller, so that little by little fewer and fewer children can jump onto the available space until they all fall down and there’s room for just one standing. This is an allegory for the world as it is coming. There is less and less room. There is less nature, there is less humanism, there is less capacity for argument, there are fewer places to publish, there is less attention to go around. There is less space, generally, from which to affirm life. Sally Rooney is the one standing on the blanket now. “Aren’t we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended?” she writes. “We are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something.” SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 07:14 on Apr 4, 2023 |
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Apr 4, 2023 06:45
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I balk at the thought Sando writes bad books; he successfully does exactly what he sets out to do and there are clearly a huge number of readers who enjoy it, and I'm not going to poo poo on that craft. The issue (which Sando himself has said he hates) is the insistence by a lot of his most vocal fans that it's the only way to write, that if your goals are different from his then your writing is defective, and it's common enough that it is affecting the industry -- reviews make or break books and if a significant-enough number of readers think Not Writing Mistborn is inherently flawed then writers are punished financially and professionally for not writing Mistborn. The man is a god-tier line cook, he can sling juicy burgers with incredible speed and consistency. The issue is that people are going to Indian restaurants and giving them 1-star on Yelp because they don't have a cheeseburger. SurreptitiousMuffin fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Apr 4, 2023 |
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Apr 4, 2023 21:24
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Megazver posted:To defend him, he doesn't say that in his writing lectures. He also covers other kinds of magic (like LOTR's) and stresses that he just has a personal preference for hard magic systems. He also calls in guest lecturers for topics that he considers himself to not be the best at, like short stories, etc. SurreptitiousMuffin posted:The issue (which Sando himself has said he hates)
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Apr 4, 2023 21:42
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Waffle! posted:How do y'all feel about prologues? I heard some people don't even read them. I had an idea for an early peek at one of the creatures in my story. Nothing as encyclopedic as Tolkien, just something scary and weird to grab attention. It wouldn't be a huge time skip, maybe a month or few weeks before the rest of the story. If your prologue CAN be skipped otoh, like ... just cut it, you've identified something you don't need.
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Jan 17, 2024 08:14
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!!!!!!!!!!!
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Jan 23, 2024 19:01
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