TheGreatEvilKing posted:Awww. Either. I love the first four Dune books and would be interested in a critical take, but the Sanderson divinity stuff feels far more in keeping with this thread. I may give a brief take on Warcross, which felt like one of the most cynical, market-driven YA books I've ever read. I read it because I was curious about some of these YA books that I've seen recommended around the place. It was pretty bad, which is no surprise, but it absolutely felt like it was written to market which was the most interesting thing about it.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2019 02:31
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2024 09:42 |
|
|
old thread is re-opened. we stick with this one, orrrr?
|
|
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2019 02:48
|
|
FactsAreUseless posted:What are you talking about? he's been doing a bad gimmick for a while
|
|
|
#
¿
Mar 17, 2019 05:52
|
|
|
i do kind of wish people could get over this, like, 'i had one bad teacher so i wrote off a whole field' angst. but as a teacher, i can understand why the grudge seems to persist.
|
|
|
#
¿
Mar 17, 2019 08:39
|
|
I like seeing a good chapter-by-chapter readthrough, but I think with a lot of sf/f books the moment you start to do that you realize, like I did with Emperor's Blades, there's not really much to talk about without getting very repetitive.Karia posted:Worldbuilding is the biggest factor. And it's definitely not all for plot purposes. How much do you want to know about currency? We've gotten probably five pages collectively describing how they use glowing magical gems embedded in glass spheres as money, and how they leave them outside during storms to recharge the magic. Did you know that you can use them as reading lights? Or for lighting during surgery? But it's better if they're all the same kind of gem, because otherwise they give off different colors. Or how about worms? We've got a page describing how to remove worms from their crops so they won't eat all the grain. Or we can talk about the Purelake, and how it's a single lake hundreds of miles wide with lucky fish. Four pages. And of course, we get constant interruptions in the middle of all the battle scenes to talk about how cool their magic armor and swords are. Or we can talk about spren. There's this one kind that shows up around dead chasmfiends. Nobody knows why. I don't know if it's important but now you know! Isn't that interesting? All of this stuff always feels like it's there to basically pad out a short story into a novel. Like, they write maybe 50,000 words, the publisher says that's not enough for a sf/f novel, and so they just go back and shove words in.
|
|
|
#
¿
Mar 18, 2019 02:35
|
|
Karia posted:There's this massive army that's been sitting in the middle of a barren wasteland for six years. So maybe those worms I mentioned are going to eat all the grain and there's going to be a famine and this army with overextended supply lines is going to starve? I feel there's an irony here with what Sanderson says about using magic to solve problems.
|
|
|
#
¿
Mar 18, 2019 03:25
|
|
|
I mean, poo poo, just look at LitRPGs. Someone towards the top of that list was making like 200,000 a month off Amazon (until he got banned for plagiarism or gaming review scores). And there's no way success and quality correlates there.
|
|
|
#
¿
Mar 19, 2019 01:10
|
|
|
At the same time, genuine "so bad it's good" is a complex thing. The Room is genuine in that sense. Something like Sharknado 12: Time Sharks is not.
|
|
|
#
¿
Mar 19, 2019 04:10
|
|
Sham bam bamina! posted:It's much better if you read the prequel series. There's a lot of lore that gets unpacked and enhances the whole thing. This is wrong. Really, the only Dune books that're absolutely worth it are the first four. Five and six start to get weird and anything written by the abominable combination of Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson are just terrible. Dune's a strange book. I mean, I love it, but in a way that's different to most books. Dune has this sense of distance about it and it never seems to really engage the heart as much as it does the brain. I think Paul's a pretty interesting character, but even reading Dune for the first time, I found myself wondering what a version of Dune would be more like if it engaged with Paul's hero's journey in a more contemporary, emotional manner. Dune is fairly dispassionate at parts, which I guess makes sense because every character is some kind of super genius manipulator, but it makes it feel a bit weird if you're expecting a more 'generic' take on 'scion of a noble house retakes his title' kind of story. On the other hand, should there be that passionate, dramatic tension given that a key theme of the story is built around Paul being confined to his destiny?
|
|
|
#
¿
Mar 19, 2019 14:04
|
|
|
Nerds love canon and authorial statements for three very important reasons. 1. It allows the world to be explicitly codified, usually into a Wiki. 2. It rewards investment of time and energy, separating true fans from the normies. 3. It means they do not need to actually interpret the text -- the answers have all been provided.
|
|
|
#
¿
Apr 8, 2019 02:50
|
|
|
Is Broken Earth the one where the persecuted minority has the power to leech the energy out of everything around them with a thought? Because, yeah, bit of a metaphor collapse there.
|
|
|
#
¿
Apr 9, 2019 02:23
|
|
chernobyl kinsman posted:i read the first two books of malazan in high school and felt that it resoundingly sucked rear end. the only thing i remember about it now is a bit about a skeleton (?) with glowing blue eyes (?) who sacrificed himself by ascending to the sky in order to fix a hole in reality, which meant that he wouldn't die but would instead suffer in agony for eternity thank mr skeltal
|
|
|
#
¿
Apr 10, 2019 04:46
|
|
|
midichlorians?
|
|
|
#
¿
Apr 14, 2019 07:28
|
|
|
gas this thread please
|
|
|
#
¿
May 15, 2019 01:44
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:I don't get why this thread is suddenly contentious but if you don't like a thread, vote 1 and move on and read something else? this thread can do better than 'hey guys, power rangers and dragonball z? not the best at their plots, right? haha, anyway, check out what this guy said somewhere else on the forums'
|
|
|
#
¿
May 15, 2019 15:06
|
|
|
Chuck Wendig is maybe the author I don't understand or see why people like him. Even Sanderson, who I don't enjoy at all, it's easy enough to see that he has ideas that appeal to teenage boys or people who are still teenage boys mentally. Sanderson just writes YA But For Boys. But Wendig?
|
|
|
#
¿
May 15, 2019 15:12
|
|
Mel Mudkiper posted:that stuff is genre Oh, Mel. I contributed more to the previous thread in my three pages of posts than you did in twenty. Besides, you didn't critically analyze poo poo. You came here to basically do some weird Helldump-esque 'get a load of this guy, haha' thing. Yeah, real good insightful stuff there, Mel. You really got down into the details of why Power Rangers and Dragonball Z's plots aren't good or whatever, great critical looking. Good work. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
|
|
|
#
¿
May 15, 2019 16:06
|
|
|
LitRPGs are bolstered by the Amazon marketplace. Some of the people who churn them out make six figures a year, if not more. A new one that came out recently from a new writer made 14k in direct royalties in the first two weeks. Not bad for something that was riddled with grammar and spelling errors.
|
|
|
#
¿
Jul 24, 2019 01:26
|
|
|
I write a web serial so this is adjacent to me. LitRPGs come from a bunch of different factors. Generally, it's a bunch of people who don't really enjoy reading but understand that reading is a thing smart people do and, as nerds, they are smart so they must read. The problem is that they've never read anything other than MMO combat logs, as Mrenda pointed out a few posts ago. There's a significant crossover with Japanese light novels, translated Chinese martial arts novels, anime and manga, and the fact that a significant chunk of LitRPG readers come from countries where English is a secondary language. Hence, the ramshackle construction where little attention is paid to grammar and spelling, and less is paid to characterization, plot, themes, metaphor or even why they want to tell the story (beyond making money by churning out words.) What the audience cares about is 'things happening.' By things happening, they don't mean character development or so on, they mean 'the character got a new skill or a new sword' or 'the character beat the boss.' It is, essentially, the MMO loot cycle slammed into a novel, replete with the various terms and tropes such as 'starter village' and so on. It's the self-insert portal fantasy for a generation of people who have been so thoroughly ruined by late-stage capitalism that they can't even imagine themselves as some Mary Sue who lives in the fictional world and gets all the cool things, but they can only imagine themselves as playing a game and getting all the cool things by playing the game really, really well. There's no consideration for quality, either. Case in point, from the link Heath provided by 'the Father of American LitRPG.' quote:The Prince sneered at the back of the throne room. The sycophants and greedy court leeches pleaded their cases to the Dark Queen. Every day, every year, every millennia was exactly the same. Hearing their complaints of needing more power, or their false pride in capturing a few more souls, the Prince tried to summon anger, disdain, or hatred, but all he felt was boredom. What exacerbates their inexplicable popularity is that there's ridiculously good money in it, if you are either a. capable of writing this dreck without succumbing to shame or b. so lacking in self-awareness that you think this is something that has value beyond the money it makes. Like I said, a new one from a writer with no pedigree has made him over fourteen thousand dollars and he's released two books in that time, so, it's probably double that. I believe Aleron Kong makes over a million dollars a year and wrote his first six books in fourteen months - they've been turning a tidy profit ever since. There's so much money in this that it's more cutthroat than the usual Amazon self-pub drama: a few months back, there was an issue with LitRPGs authors apparently paying Russian botfarms to leave fake positive reviews and reads on their competitors so Amazon would kick them off for abusing the system (it worked.) It's all completely crazy. For stuff like this: quote:That pain was worse than anything he had ever felt! What the hell was going on? The pain dampeners were not supposed to allow ANYTHING to hurt that much, let alone just the sting of a wasp on steroids! He picked up a rock with his right hand, and activated his skill True Aim, and threw. The stone flew from his hand towards the wasp. It easily dodged to the side though, the rock missing and accomplishing nothing. That was not supposed to happen, he thought. At his high skill level, there should have been less than a 1% chance of a projectile missing when he activated True Aim. quote:“Well what have we learned?” the imp asked putting emphasis on the last word. quote:Picking up all four, he was awarded with new message notifications. They're not worth discussing. They're interesting only as a symptom of late-stage capitalism and seeing people churn these things out and make heaps of money in the process. I've tried to write one and I got about ten-thousand words in before my brain rebelled. They're really no different to any algorithm-driven content fed into a quality-ambivalent marketplace, just more bizarre because of the total lack of anything people expect from written texts. Unfortunately, Amazon will probably never corral LitRPGs to their own genre, so, virtually every Top 20 on Kindle or whatever is dominated by LitRPGs or GameLit. You have to use the word GameLit because Kong attempted, and maybe did, trademark the term LitRPG. But if you were aiming to break into the ridiculous market for the purpose of shamelessly making money, you wouldn't go for romance or whatever - you'd go straight for LitRPGs.
|
|
|
#
¿
Jul 24, 2019 06:34
|
|
|
this loving litrpg has a change log after the table of contents i'm going to lose my loving mind
|
|
|
#
¿
Aug 15, 2019 09:14
|
|
|
no no i mean literally "Update to Startum Ironwolf's Dagger: the amount of health leached has been changed to 20 points"
|
|
|
#
¿
Aug 15, 2019 09:24
|
|
|
I recently participated (and then led) a retrospective on the web serial Worm, and there was a lot of discussion about the oppressed-but-superior minority type of superpowered individual (and the moral high ground revenge fantasy, which is the closest thing it has to a narrative throughline.) I always find it interesting that it never seems like these 'superpower' stories sit in the head of the average person. Y'know, the guy who has to live in a world where any other person on the street could turn into the Hulk, could be hanging out invisibly in your apartment, or just go through your mind like a filing cabinet and empty out your bank account. They could do all these things at the speed of thought and the average joe would have no way of stopping them or, perhaps, even knowing it happened. It'd be terrifying! I feel like very few writers are interested in actually examining the way that would shift the world fundamentally. It wouldn't be 'equal rights' or 'gun control' or whatever metaphor they want to twist it into. It'd be a really scary issue. Like, I know they're not interested in examining it because it gets in the way of of the cool superpowers and the feel-good revenge against an unfair world kind of stuff. Even Peter Watts once made a comment about the inanity of it all by saying something like 'How long do we think gay bashing would be a thing if the victims could strike down the bigots with lightning blasts?' Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 07:18 on Oct 19, 2019 |
|
|
#
¿
Oct 19, 2019 07:13
|
|
|
I'm doing a Let's Read of The Expanse novels and I think it'd be neat if some of you lot came and joined the discussion. Whoever did Leviathan Wakes in here a while back was pretty interesting.
|
|
|
#
¿
Mar 27, 2020 01:00
|
|
|
Lindsay Ellis' novel is awful. Like, did even a single editor take a look at this before publishing it? MacMillan must've figured her fanbase was a shoe-in to buy it without concern for quality. It's like some weird fanfiction combination of Transformers (the first Michael Bay film) and Twilight. I had to say it somewhere and I figure this thread is the place for it. It didn't take years to get published because the industry was mean - it took years to get published because it's bad.
|
|
|
#
¿
Jul 30, 2020 15:11
|
|
Ccs posted:That’s too bad, I like Lindsays videos. What was wrong with it? It's the actual writing itself. The novel reads like an incredibly rough first draft. One of the first lines includes the phrase 'the car was a manual transmission with a stick shift' - as opposed to what, a manual car without one? The novel is set in 2007 America, but the incredibly rough phrasing leads to a line where the protagonist refers to members of the CIA and FBI like they're ancient stories. 'She'd always heard tales of the FBI and CIA but never met one.' There's mention of a meteor having a contrail which is incorrect, plus the incorrect understanding of them leading to Ellis repeatedly referring to a meteorite as a meteor. For a story that's said to be a combination of Transformers and Arrival, it takes eight chapters for the protagonist and the robot to meet. And I think comparing it to Arrival is in poor form when the human and the robot talk because the robot holds her down and injects her with a substance that allows them to communicate. Then, after interminable chapters where it feels like nothing happens beyond people spouting exposition at each other, the protagonist and the robot-chicken-lizard-Edward Cullen end up together. A friend of mine who read it said it feels like a 'passionless work,' that it feels like it was ghostwritten. I think Ellis claims to have been working on this book for ten years, but it doesn't feel like it because there are so many issues that even a baseline editor should clear up, or that you should fix if you spend so much time working on it. Beyond the issues that an editor should've really cleared up, it's just bland. It's Transformers without the Bayhem, Twilight without the genuine thirst for Edward. It wants to take on ideas like what would first contact mean for our world, the Great Filter, and the difficulties of communicating with an alien species that is nothing like us - and often disregards them as quickly as they come up. Also, there's a bit towards the middle of the book where Cora does some crazy head math to figure out the date the aliens arrived or whatever, and I'm pretty sure the math is dead wrong. Sham bam bamina! posted:I am shocked, shocked, that a novel by a Channel Awesome personality turned out to be bad. It went onto my radar after she put out that video about how difficult it was to get published. I was interested as to whether it might be a gem that was overlooked, but it's just a bad book.
|
|
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2020 00:35
|
|
|
I've been working on a novel for just under three years now, and I'm working on the rewrite and second draft, and I'm pretty much ready to move on. I can't imagine tinkering with a manuscript for ten years. Anyway, Axiom's End getting published heralds great things for my insanely stupid idea of Transformers: Greek Creed.
|
|
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2020 00:58
|
|
|
My guess for this one is that someone at MacMillan went 'hey, this Lindsay Ellis girl has written a novel, and she has x amount of followers, if even y% of them purchase it, we can turn a profit with very little work.' Giving it a solid line edit, much less a developmental edit, would escalate their costs. Here's another janky line: 'The monitor to the computer was on, a dull blank light emanating from it, but the computer itself seemed to have been dismantled. It was up and running, but its shell had been removed, and was now on the floor.' It doesn't seem very dismantled to me if it's up and running. But who refers to a computer case or tower as a shell?
|
|
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2020 04:19
|
|
|
Also, I always find 'seemed' to be a really lazy bit of descriptive writing. I feel like it's very 'telling' instead of showing. For example, how and why did it seem like the computer was dismantled? That's the sort of thing that, as a writer, it's your job to convey.
|
|
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2020 05:14
|
|
But, I guess description is really hard. Just tell!quote:Demi’s face contorted as though she were about to excoriate Cora or at least demand a better explanation, when the door started shaking. Cora backed away from it, wondering if that thing could be held back by a door and a dresser if it really wanted to get in. She turned and looked at the one small window in the room, wondering if there was a glimmer of hope of getting all four of them and the dog out through the window before that thing broke down the door, when she felt a high-frequency noise ringing inside her head. She tried to say something but fell to her knees. She sensed the dog stop barking, her sister stop crying. The noise was telling her to close her eyes, go to sleep. 'Excoriate.' She felt a noise? She sensed the dog stop barking? Is Cora a deaf telepath? In the chapter I pulled this excerpt from, there are sixteen bits of dialogue. There are four whispereds, two yelleds, one shrieked, one answered, one repeated, one managed, one demanded, one asked, two non-attributed, one 'she heard' and one said.
|
|
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2020 05:36
|
|
Lex Neville posted:What's so bad about that? It's two things that are bad, but I'm not sure that people picked up on the second part. So, there are sixteen lines of dialogue and fourteen of them are directly tagged. There are multiple exchanges where the dialogue goes: "Blah," said A "Blah," said B "Blah," said A "Blah," said B Honestly, skimming through some chapters, I think Ellis tags every single line of dialogue unless the voice is literally coming from somewhere unknown. It's bad writing. The reader can generally follow along if you go "Blah," said A "Blah," said B "Blah." "Blah." Overusing dialogue tags that aren't said is another sign of that. As a word, said is innocuous. No one notices it, unless you're using it every single line. So, you should, in almost every case, default to just using said when tagging dialogue. If not using said, maybe an action or a gesture that demonstrates some characterization. You don't want, said, said, said - but you really don't want yelled, shrieked, demanded, spoke, snarled, either. I think when writers go hard on words that aren't said, they're confusing good writing advice with exercises they did in an English classroom during Middle School. Words like demanded, bellowed, shrieked really only do two things: slow the pacing down and draw attention to themselves. Like a lot of writing issues new writers have, I think it stems from a lack of confidence in their writing and in the reader to follow it. If someone is demanding something, you should be able to make that clear without needing to write 'X demanded.' Additionally, using said forces the dialogue itself to do the heavy lifting. Unfortunately for Ellis, her dialogue is really bad (honestly, probably the part of the novel I'd say is the overall worst) and no one talks like a real person. So, you dress it up in words that make it sound exciting to trick the reader. But this makes the writing overwrought. I've heard that you should only use dialogue tags that aren't said when the dialogue and context of the dialogue don't match up. "That's awesome," Milky complained, for example. Sometimes you need to use not-said words to quickly clue the reader in to what's happening, too, but that's not what is happening in this case. This is something that an editor absolutely should've caught. 'You have sixteen lines of dialogue in this chapter and fourteen of them are directly tagged despite almost every exchange being between two people, and only one is using said.' It's really, really sloppy writing. I figure this manuscript had a quick pass for grammar and spelling and content, but nothing in the way of actual substantive feedback because these are the stupidly basic 'rules of good writing' that you find in any writing help book you pick up off any given shelf.
|
|
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2020 07:27
|
|
pseudanonymous posted:They're under pressure from Amazon as well. As far as I can tell some well-selling authors on amazon are actively terrible, but that still is cutting into sales that normally would've gone mid-tier authors who are decent writers. Some? Try almost all. Amazon is a marketplace for authors who can game algorithms and write Black Paw Rising Online: An Erotic Omegaverse Harem LitRPG Adventure (Book 1 of 27.) I'm not actually sure they're regarded as cutting into sales of other method of publishing, I've heard that Kindle stuff is basically regarded as its own separate, weird ecosystem. There's a reason why just about every well-selling author on Amazon's Kindle thing writes under an obvious pseudonym, y'know?
|
|
|
#
¿
Aug 2, 2020 01:46
|
|
|
Thanks for the write-up! I can't get over how generic the title is. It feels like a lot of books are doing that sort of 'It's the thing you like, but different - but not so different as to be scary!' It was a thought I had when reading Muir's Gideon the Ninth, which had an interesting beginning that abruptly turned into a fairly paint-by-numbers YA plot. It was also interesting because I thought of this thread when I read if, if only because I believe that Gormenghast - a book BotL held in high regard - was mentioned as an influence.
Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 13:08 on Oct 29, 2020 |
|
|
#
¿
Oct 29, 2020 12:51
|
|
|
Part of my third draft process for this manuscript has been making it more x-meets-y for the benefit of pitching and lazy people (It's The Boys meets The Expanse. We're talking high literature, people.)
|
|
|
#
¿
Oct 29, 2020 22:36
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2024 09:42 |
|
|
Well, I mean, that's basically what all of Sanderson's work is. It's precisely the experience that his readers are looking for - YA For Gamer Boys, and systems mastery is just one of the components. For some reason, the readership doesn't get that the author is just making it all up as they go along. The idea of a story based around exploiting loopholes in a system just strikes me as a waste of time when the author is also the one making up the system. It's like cheating at a game of make-believe.
|
|
|
#
¿
Nov 22, 2020 10:54
|
|