|
Wheely just want to sleep.
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2022 11:05
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 29, 2024 16:33 |
|
|
precision posted:i saw some youtube commercial that was just brandon sanderson talking, and you know, i gave the man time, but after 2 literal minutes he still hadn't got to the fuckin point so i clicked skip Fans of his are massive fans of his, and they’ll pay big bucks for whatever he puts out I am very uninterested in him personally thanks to his extremely thin characterization in the 1.25 books of his that I have read, and the pretty transphobic stuff he has said in the past, what with the Mormonism He has tried to be better since then and write lgbtq characters but he also isn’t willing to actually come out and say things like “gay people don’t deserve execution” or “trans people exist”, much less more radical things like “trans rights are human rights”. He tries to have his cake and eat it too, because reportedly he doesnt want to anger members of his family That all does not do it for me, personally
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2022 16:35
|
|
|
Does best selling author Brandy Sandy at any point justify why he needs a kickstarter to publish his new books?
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2022 16:51
|
|
|
Sisal Two-Step posted:Does best selling author Brandy Sandy at any point justify why he needs a kickstarter to publish his new books? Because amazon controls 85% of book sales (and through audible and kindle, an even bigger fraction of audiobook and ebook sales). In the past Amazon has played hardball in negotiations by shutting off all sales from a given publisher for a month. So having kickstarter as an alternative sales channel makes business sense (in addition to kickstarter taking 10% less of the gross price as fees compared to Amazon)
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2022 18:24
|
|
|
Comstar posted:I remember reading several Thieves' World anthologies back in the '80s. The ones I recall all involved a pretty generic fantasy city that was Fantasy-Beirut at the height of the civil war. And an ongoing joke that you could tell the mercenaries from everyone else because they were the ones sitting with their backs to the wall. Every time someone walked into a bar, this was the first comment. Thieve's World was an anthology series much like Wild Cards - hatched by a band of writers lead by a central figure, starting with some decent authors writing decent stories, but over time suffering bad power creep, and the series becoming dominated by a small set of hack authors. I recollect some of the original stories were done by award-wining authors. But I got tired of the books about 3-4 in, then some years later found something like volume 10 and read it, spending most of my time bewildered as to how they managed to get to the situation within from the stories I'd read.
|
|
#
?
Apr 3, 2022 21:57
|
|
|
Comstar posted:I remember reading several Thieves' World anthologies back in the '80s. nonathlon posted:Thieve's World was an anthology series much like Wild Cards - hatched by a band of writers lead by a central figure, starting with some decent authors writing decent stories, but over time suffering bad power creep, and the series becoming dominated by a small set of hack authors. I recollect some of the original stories were done by award-wining authors. But I got tired of the books about 3-4 in, then some years later found something like volume 10 and read it, spending most of my time bewildered as to how they managed to get to the situation within from the stories I'd read. Groke posted:Oooh, this sounds familiar. Except the way I remember it, it wasn't Earth but some colony planet (mainly colonized by Finnish people?) and I think the Space Nazis weren't OG Nazis but some kind of neo-Nazi revival movement. Your comment about Finns reminded me of another book that maybe belongs here. I tried to read the Draka Trilogy by S.M. Stirling when I was in my early 20's and I couldn't get through it. I think I made it to the first few chapters of Book 3 and had to put it down. It was too hopeless. Every hint of a good guy protagonist gets horribly murdered just as soon as you think they're going to accomplish some tiny thing against the utterly evil Domination (aka The Draka). The Finnish connection is a scene stuck in my memory where an American (free) secret agent encounters a leader of the Finnish resistance against the Draka that have recently conquered his country. The American asks what the still-free parts of the world could do to help. The answer is "invade". The resistance leader is captured and brutally executed - the Draka are fond of impaling - a few pages later, the American escapes back across the Atlantic but I didn't keep reading and find out what happened to him. I assume he was impaled, too, it happened a lot in the first two books.
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2022 02:57
|
|
|
Trimson Grondag 3 posted:Oh I'm so glad someone else has read this. Its such an oddity, sort of early take on urban fantasy plus combined with some weird sex stuff (I know they go hand in hand now but this seems like an early example?). Then portals into a non traditional fantasy world. Heavy on the FEMALE SPIRIT VS MALE SPIRIT stuff but with what is sort of a intersex character to mediate it. I essentially write off authors that go hard into magic and spirit being by gender as a universal truth in settings. I can see women and men falling into certain roles in a magic society, but only for similar reasons to why we take certain jobs. Culture can push you one way or another, regardless of what you could actually be good at, or your gender. I mean, trans woman tech pro is so common it's a joke. Why do you not see as many trans men in the field? We're actively discouraged from tech in childhood, unlike our counterparts. So dudes might be seen as better at fireballs or whatever not because they are, but because they have better access to that education, are encouraged to it, creating the self-fulfilling perception they're inclined to it by nature. But, you know, that's just an obvious, puddle-deep sort of nuance that isn't important when you're a big important writer that's getting deep into philosophy or something. I think I like the concept of books with dragons more than the reality, at times.
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2022 06:43
|
|
|
ExecuDork posted:Entirely possible! Yeah, I did finish those books and I think you made the right move. Way implausible misery porn/villain power fantasy. (There's a fourth book too, which is basically a Terminator riff, where a heavily genetically engineered Draka from the further future gets zapped into our present-day (as of the 1990s) reality.) Stirling was a guilty pleasure of mine for a while, he can string words together and tell a pretty good story, but his authorial tics and personal (and rather ugly) convictions tend to show through (sometimes just a little too much, sometimes entirely too much). The least-bad thing he wrote is IMHO the "Island in the Sea of Time" trilogy, which has the late 20th century island of Nantucket transported back in time to the Bronze Age and deals with poo poo from that point on. Survival first, then civilization-building... one thing he did do right was to portray the Bronze Age native humans as being just as smart and adaptable as modern humans. Also must confess to rather enjoying the way the main conflict in that gets resolved, when the main evil bad guy from our time, trying to build an evil industrial empire in Europe, makes the mistake of underestimating the cleverness and ruthlessness of this one Achaean petty king who happened to be the real-world inspiration for Odysseus. That got him and all of his nearest collaborators very very dead.
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2022 10:35
|
|
|
Tunicate posted:Because amazon controls 85% of book sales (and through audible and kindle, an even bigger fraction of audiobook and ebook sales). In the past Amazon has played hardball in negotiations by shutting off all sales from a given publisher for a month. Let me rephrase: why is extremely popular and well-established author Brandy Sandy self-publishing in the first place? Genuine question, btw. I just don't understand this at all, although I guess it raised $41m. Sisal Two-Step fucked around with this message at 13:33 on Apr 4, 2022 |
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2022 13:30
|
|
|
Sisal Two-Step posted:Let me rephrase: why is extremely popular and well-established author Brandy Sandy self-publishing in the first place? I think you answered your own question, $41m plus he gets a bigger slice of that pie
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2022 13:39
|
|
|
DicktheCat posted:I essentially write off authors that go hard into magic and spirit being by gender as a universal truth in settings. Is there some kind of cutoff date for that? Like, authors prior to 2000 or whenever get some kind of a begrudging pass? There was some scifi series I read ages ago with a parallel universe where Neanderthals didn't die out but instead became the only human species on that world. It was all idyllic until humans from our world showed up and caused chaos. Eventually the Neanderthal scientists dealt with this by engineering a virus that killed any human with a Y chromosome that crossed over into their world, since men were the source of the issues due to their natural aggression or whatever, which I thought was quite stupid even then.
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2022 13:41
|
|
|
HelloIAmYourHeart posted:Is there some kind of cutoff date for that? Like, authors prior to 2000 or whenever get some kind of a begrudging pass? yeah jeez, have they never met a teenage girl? Pure hatred and rage.
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2022 13:44
|
|
|
Sisal Two-Step posted:Genuine question, btw. I just don't understand this at all, although I guess it raised $41m. What the gently caress
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2022 14:18
|
|
|
HelloIAmYourHeart posted:Is there some kind of cutoff date for that? Like, authors prior to 2000 or whenever get some kind of a begrudging pass? Yeah, no, I don't really give things like that a pass, either. Context and time period is a thing, but it doesn't excuse it. That sounds pretty dire.
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2022 15:01
|
|
|
Sisal Two-Step posted:Let me rephrase: why is extremely popular and well-established author Brandy Sandy self-publishing in the first place? Sanderson has been public about how much he doesn't like the current way publishing works. This was just a test to see if it was realistically possible to crowdsource publishing. But all it really tested was that, "Yes, people will pay lots of money to famous authors they like to get bonus books." So it's not a bad thing, but I'm not sure it's going to actually help anyone other than Brandon Sanderson. But maybe it will inspire people to crowdsource publishing coops or something. Who knows?
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2022 16:21
|
|
|
sweet geek swag posted:Sanderson has been public about how much he doesn't like the current way publishing works. This was just a test to see if it was realistically possible to crowdsource publishing. But all it really tested was that, "Yes, people will pay lots of money to famous authors they like to get bonus books." The instant feedback that most authors got of “hey go kickstart your books” was supremely not helpful. If you’re at sanderson’s level, sure, you can do this and make bank, but there’s a lot of low level and mid list authors who don’t have the kind of built in cache of fans that a Sanderson or a Rowling does. While publishing is a hosed up industry, this might even cut out the supremely successful books that subsidize all the middling books that don’t get the publicity or the attention of top level books. If the big names all start taking the funding from crowdsourcing and don’t stay with publishers, that could cut out a lot of profit from the biz. That will likely wind up turning publishing into the movie industry, where only the big deals are fiscally lucrative for the publishers, and there isn’t enough spare money for smaller successes. The actual problem in publishing is the same problem as everything else in the world, billionaires squatting at the top of the food chain, siphoning off everything they can to pad their bottom lines, and not reinvesting in their own businesses. 
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2022 16:32
|
|
|
It certainly has emboldened people "So, I saw that Brandon Sanderson was able to raise millions for four new books that didn't even have known titles or basic premises, so I figured, if a super famous fantasy author with an enthusiastic, global following and his own publishing company can do it, then why can't a completely unknown non-fantasy non-author with a small home office and an inkjet printer do the same?! This is America after all. Of my four new books, know that none of them are written in the Cosmere. They are something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. I won't tell you anything else about them. No, absolutely nothing. Because that is somehow better. I don't understand it either."
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2022 17:15
|
|
|
NC Wyeth Death Cult posted:It certainly has emboldened people Why anyone thought this would help small authors immediately is beyond me. No one is going to give your unknown rear end money for something you won't even describe. Again, the only way kickstarter will ever be helpful to starting out authors is authors funding their books as part of groups. Like if Sanderson had funded his books, plus a bunch of unknowns he liked, that would have made a difference, and set a good precedent for the industry. As it is I don't think it's going to have a huge impact because no one smaller than Sanderson is going to raise anything like 41 mil.
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2022 17:22
|
|
|
Seems to me that kickstarting your book is just trying to get an advance when self-publishing. Though I gotta wonder why he'd need 41 million to write a dang book unless he's planning to set up his own printing and bookbinding business too.
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2022 18:06
|
|
|
Mooey Cow posted:Seems to me that kickstarting your book is just trying to get an advance when self-publishing. Though I gotta wonder why he'd need 41 million to write a dang book unless he's planning to set up his own printing and bookbinding business too. Excuse me it's four books.
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2022 18:08
|
|
|
HelloIAmYourHeart posted:Is there some kind of cutoff date for that? Like, authors prior to 2000 or whenever get some kind of a begrudging pass? This is Robert J Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax trilogy and it's vaguely different from what I remember. An evil human capitalist business villian is the one who comes up with the virus to kill all the Neanderthals in order to take over the parallel Earth which hasn't been hosed over by climate change and overpopulation like ours. The human scientist he's got working on the virus is the one who changes it to target all human males instead of all Neanderthals. Which is kinda hosed up because human scientist is actually doing this because he feels guilty for raping multiple women at the start of the trilogy because he thinks he's being passed over for promotions because he's a white man. And it's only after being castrated by a Neanderthal that his anger towards woman goes away and he decides men are the real problem in society. I don't think the book painted him as a hero in any way!
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2022 18:15
|
|
|
why do these stories always have to devolve into the most direct insights into the unrestrained psychosexual lunacy of the author
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2022 18:19
|
|
|
Black August posted:why do these stories always have to devolve into the most direct insights into the unrestrained psychosexual lunacy of the author Because most people think their sexual hangups are normal, and most people are wrong.
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2022 18:22
|
|
|
Look, I didn't even get into the fact that all the Neanderthals are enlightened bisexual atheists and only meet up with their opposite gender partners once a month for sex romps, or that all the women have synchronizated menstrual cycles and men stay completely out of the cities during that time, or that they really, really love practicing eugenics.
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2022 18:34
|
|
|
Considering the amount of kickstarter campaigns that never pan out and just burn the investors, I don’t know that I would ever kickstart a novel for someone who doesn’t have a proven track record I am waiting on at least four different sets of dice that look like they may never be made because of Kickstarter scams One person never posted a single picture, then started claiming she had a sudden cancer diagnosis, after she had already begged off from deadlines because of a death in the family and a different person in her family getting cancer. Book kickstarters are gonna be even worse
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2022 19:01
|
|
|
RaspberrySea posted:Look, I didn't even get into the fact that all the Neanderthals are enlightened bisexual atheists and only meet up with their opposite gender partners once a month for sex romps, or that all the women have synchronizated menstrual cycles and men stay completely out of the cities during that time, or that they really, really love practicing eugenics. 
|
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2022 00:16
|
|
|
If Terry Goodkind were alive today, he’d be praising the atrocities in Ukraine.
|
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2022 01:32
|
|
|
Sisal Two-Step posted:Let me rephrase: why is extremely popular and well-established author Brandy Sandy self-publishing in the first place? Because selling through kickstarter bypasses amazon's near-monopoly on book sales - no matter the publisher Amazon has an iron grip on the 'people actually paying for it' step.
|
|
#
?
Apr 6, 2022 05:59
|
|
|
I imagine that mailing list is also worth A Lot
|
|
#
?
Apr 6, 2022 08:10
|
|
|
Kinda off topic for being a visual novel but I played through this game two or three times “failing” at the relationships. When I basically game-over’d I never played again. Then again the protag being a high schooler put me off to begin with. I swear I posted about this in the past but somehow I managed to avoid the vast majority of bad fantasy of my time. “The Color of her Panties” felt wrong. I remember being around 13 and a classmate telling me in hushed tones there was a gay couple in a Pern book but I was too closeted then to pick it up. I tended toward sci-fi anyway (ie the 2001 series, a book of short stories that included giant birds hatching from planets and earth was next). When I was an edgy older teen I started Anthony’s Incarnation series but I have no memory of the second book and third I stopped a chapter or two in, I couldn’t take it anymore although I don’t remember why. However, I have exactly one memory from Pale Horse: the way the protag’s love interest was tortured near the end of the book, and how he was convinced it wasn’t really happening and was the bad guy’s tricking him into giving up. It disturbed me then, it disgusts me now, and I’m thankful I stopped reading the series. If anything it put me off fantasy almost altogether and to this day I won’t go into a book/series without researching for content warnings and/or checking if the author has done anything egregious.
|
|
#
?
Apr 6, 2022 14:59
|
|
|
i am a bad writer myself, so i have some insight into publishing like, there are reasons to dislike amazon's grasp on the market and yadda yadda, but Sanderson has enough money for that to not matter. he's either doing it because he's greedy (somewhat unlikely, i mean, he's successful enough to be popular) he's doing it because he couldn't find a publisher for his stuff (unlikely, since he's established. it is possible they didn't want to publish as quickly as he wanted or something i guess) or he's doing it because he just wants to and he thought it would be cool to let the fans just give him money directly. that's fine too
|
|
#
?
Apr 6, 2022 15:11
|
|
|
Sometimes I wonder if the preponderance of Trashy Fantasy Series Drek isn't entirely down to the growing marketplace dominance of chain bookstores like Waldenbooks back in the day. Unless you had a used bookstore with a robust SF/Fantasy section - which weren't all that common - and you were a kid who liked dragons, well, you got a Dragonlance book 'cause that's what was on the dang shelves.Caesar Saladin posted:I read Lord of Light and found it to be one of the most awesomely creative sci fi books I've read. What else of his is good? So Zelazny is my favorite author and I have every book the man ever published (even the two poetry collections) so I would have answered this closer to the time it was asked except I had to stop and read the thread first so I didn't become the seventeenth person to wander in and go "Has anyone mentioned Xanth yet?". But besides the previously-mentioned Eye of Cat, which is genius but also super experimental, I'd suggest Doorways In The Sand as a pretty entertaining romp, though it's more SF; Zelazny didn't do a ton of straight-up fantasy. He did some, though, so if you can find them I found the two books Dilvish, the Damned and The Changing Land to be pretty sweet. The former is called a "fix-up", it's a collection of short stories that were previously published and occasionally given framing sequences or slight reworks to make them flow as a single narrative; the latter is the novel he wrote to wrap up that character's story (and it has a fun approach to magical politics, honestly). There was also Changeling and Madwand, which were also published as a single volume under the title Wizard's World, which were cool and good but mostly get remembered today because Changeling was published with illustrations by an early-career Boris Vallejo. But for my money, the best stuff he ever wrote was his short stories. My personal favorites are both in The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth and Other Stories (a title he reportedly hated). "A Rose For Ecclesiastes" is one of the best things I've ever read. Anyway, sorry, back to lovely Fantasy ...fuckin' Xanth, man. Jesus
|
|
#
?
Apr 7, 2022 03:43
|
|
|
SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:a book of short stories that included giant birds hatching from planets and earth was next). quote:
You were right to stop. I've thankfully forgotten a lot about the earlier books, except that every few pages involved a female character getting her clothing damaged in some way. And the torture scene you remember involved nipple damage, all described in graphic detail. I do remember that the last published Incarnations book (And Eternity) involved blatant rape apologia (men can't help it!) and I think a pedophile literally becomes God/an angel because he's good at heart. Apparently there was meant to be a sequel that Anthony couldn't get published, which featured sibling incest and sex battles. The Mode tetralogy was another Anthony series I noped out of after two books because Anthony couldn't stop talking about female characters' underwear, and there was an alternate world were women wore diapers, and the differences in modesty standards between worlds comes up every three pages or so lest we forget it. If I recall correctly one of the later ones had horse bestiality.
|
|
#
?
Apr 7, 2022 04:14
|
|
|
Eye of Cat owns
|
|
#
?
Apr 7, 2022 04:32
|
|
|
precision posted:Eye of Cat owns It seriously does. In one of his collections (I want to say Frost and Fire but I'm not 100% certain) he includes an essay about his writing process for Eye of Cat with bits like "So I got the idea that these characters' sections should be freeform poetry; I've always considered poetry to be the closest thing you could find to exercise and stretch your writing ability, the way calisthenics does for your body" and why he chose the myth structures he did and that kind of thing. It's one of my very favorite books. Just, y'know, be aware going in that this isn't gonna be a straightforward no-thought-required beach read is all
|
|
#
?
Apr 7, 2022 04:47
|
|
|
DivineCoffeeBinge posted:It seriously does. In one of his collections (I want to say Frost and Fire but I'm not 100% certain) he includes an essay about his writing process for Eye of Cat with bits like "So I got the idea that these characters' sections should be freeform poetry; I've always considered poetry to be the closest thing you could find to exercise and stretch your writing ability, the way calisthenics does for your body" and why he chose the myth structures he did and that kind of thing. It's one of my very favorite books. He would do neat experimental stuff, like as I recall Damnation Alley was broken up with descriptive passages of the post-apocalyptic landscape that read almost as prose poetry. I've read pretty much all of Zelazny's stuff, too (but not the poetry), and one of my personal favorites has always been Jack of Shadows. It just seemed so narratively fresh and had such a weird world to work within it always felt fun. The man was just a great writer - I find it odd he isn't a bigger name than he is.
|
|
#
?
Apr 7, 2022 04:59
|
|
|
Read Zelazny for the prose (and the everything, tbh). Read China Mieville for the ideas and world. Read Mary Gentle for... well, for a couple of her books, because when she's good she's very good. Ash, for example.
|
|
#
?
Apr 7, 2022 05:00
|
|
|
CaptainSarcastic posted:The man was just a great writer - I find it odd he isn't a bigger name than he is. a lot of the New Wave authors struggled to get any sustained attention; they'd get Hugos and Nebulas because they were too good to be ignored, but the whole idea was to break up some of the rigid structures that had been built around genre lit. Problem is, in the 70s and 80s, the Internet wasn't a thing, so the fandom coalesced around conventions and fanzines - the very people who loved those rigid structures, as superfans are wont to do. Everyone loved the New Wave, but the kind of tastemakers (influencers, I guess, in a proto-form) who decided what was and wasn't a Classic Of The Genre would always be talking up the older authors they grew up with like Heinlein or Asimov or Tolkein for hours on end before anyone reminded them that there were good books published in the past decade. Then you get into the market's saturation by mass-market Trash Fantasy like D&D tie-in books and pun-filled farces like Piers Anthony or Robert Aspirin (all of which, for the record, I devoured at the time), and by the time the New Wave writers should have been experiencing the Established Successful Author phase of their career, no one was interested unless it was a trilogy about dragons, preferably with a multimedia tie-in of some sort. So while Zelazny was, to my mind, one of the three or four best writers of the New Wave... everyone forgets the New Wave.
|
|
#
?
Apr 7, 2022 05:23
|
|
|
The genre where it was like giant computers and Emperors and spaceships with unexplained science and flashing lasers should've lived past the 80's
|
|
#
?
Apr 7, 2022 05:59
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 29, 2024 16:33 |
|
|
Hey now the Culture went on well into 2000s
|
|
#
?
Apr 7, 2022 20:41
|
|
