Via nutella-icecreamMay 30th, 2023

unpretty:

cipheramnesia:

ms-demeanor:

unpretty:

a tumblr post titled "things books with 100,000 words or more are good for (generally)". the post lists, "kindling, the toilet paper shortage of 2020, paper mache." the tags read, "including the bible? yes. including lord of the rings? yes. including game of thrones? GOD yes. i was gonna say epically long flip books but you should be able to make a decent flipbook out of a decent novel. flip books too should be concise. it's called craft. it's called storytelling. it's called sticking to the plot. it's called killing your darlings. it's called having a brutal editor and kissing their feet for the vital work that they do. never have we needed them more."ALT

someone put this screenshot in my notes and i wasn’t gonna put the op on blast but i cannot stop thinking about it. this is up there as one of the funniest doubling downs i’ve ever seen. “it’s called craft. it’s called storytelling.” is going to enter my meme vernacular and no one is going to have any idea what i’m talking about. the count of monte cristo shows a clear lack of craft in its wordcount. if only ernest hemingway’s editor had killed more of his darlings while he wrote for whom the bell tolls. readers and editors alike are always complaining about how fucking long to kill a mockingbird is.

Valid Jane Austen Novels:

  • Northanger Abbey
  • Persuasion

Kindling:

  • Sense & Sensibility
  • Pride & Prejudice
  • Mansfield Park
  • Emma

Really starting to take this whole austerity shit too far huh.

a theory from @solitarelee in the groupchat last night:

username Words Gremlin said: this is what someone who learned to write from ALL tumblr writing post examples looks like. they believed every single "don't use this word" and they were left with like 30 wordsALT
Via xiranjayzhaoMar 26th, 2023

xiranjayzhao:

ruggaboo:

xiranjayzhao:

ashirisu:

xiranjayzhao:

Roasted this man for coming for me on TikTok for criticizing publishing’s exploitative payment structures but thought what I had to say was worth posting here as well

The discourse surrounding publication still seems to regard publishing houses as these all-knowing arbiters of what’s good and popular, and that it is a Privilege™️ if they choose your book to the point that you should be sobbing and grateful over whatever scraps of a deal they deign to offer you.

There’s also a severe misconception that most authors receive enough money from their advances and royalties that they can rest on their laurels and write new books at their leisure. This obviously isn’t true even of bestselling authors! Writing books takes time, effort, and MONEY. If a publishing house wants to benefit from an author’s work and have them continue writing new books to sell, they need to pay them enough money to do so.

Corporations can and will exploit artists in any way they can. Publishing companies profit from selling books way more than the authors themselves do, and it’s not entitled for authors to demand appropriate compensation for the commodities they’re creating. PAY AUTHORS.

We do not owe corporations gratitude when WE make their profits

My sister is publishing her first book. She was excited that she got picked up by a publisher. Less excited to find out she had to pay something like $4,000 herself just to get the book published. The publishing house has promised her a LOT and we haven’t really seen them follow through on it (finding cover art, finding a cartographer for the simple map for he front, and they promised to create and host a website for her books as they release). She was astounded when they told her the prices her books were going to be ($35 for a hardback novel and $25 for a softback, aimed at preteens), and moreover how little she’ll be getting back. She’s HOPING to make enough to cover the costs of the next book, and isn’t even pretending that she’ll make any money off this endeavor at all.

I’m stupidly proud of her. But I get anxious when she calls me worried about how the publisher isn’t helping her the way she needs to be helped.

@ruggaboo Oh NO, I am very sorry to say this but if she has to PAY her publisher to publish, it’s not a legit publishing house. It’s a scam.

Authors should NEVER have to pay their agent or publisher. That’s a glaring red flag. If she hasn’t paid anything yet I recommend cutting contact with that “publisher” immediately. At this point she’s better off self publishing.

Mar 1st, 2023

Anonymous asked:

Hey, longtime lurker here - I rediscovered your Cassandra Clare snarks during lockdown and they've been a comfort read ever since. If you do finish out Dark Artifices someday I'd read for sure.

i do want to finish them someday. or just skip over them and go straight for the malec books. wasn’t she also planning books centered on kit and ty? just give me some gays to be invested in while i bitch about everything else

…though i’d probably need to read TDA anyway for any of them to make sense, right

Oct 20th, 2022

Anonymous asked:

Hello, been a fan of yours for a while (no Tumblr account, though). I recently published a book of my own, and I'd like to say that you were an influence (at least, with respect to character agency). It's available on Amazon KDP (Wyatt Ewert's "Red Knight") in case it interests you in any way. Thanks for all that you've written (and don't feel the need to advertise on my account, by the way)

That is very sweet and also I am lowkey terrified that I’m now officially an influence on writers.

Good luck with all the publishing struggles!

Sep 20th, 2022

baeklouis asked:

I know the Shadowhunter books are old news by now, but I wanted to say that I had so much fun reading your snarks years ago that it inspired me to write actual reviews of the books on goodreads. Usually I have many thoughts that I forget to write down, but there's something so cathartic about putting into proper words all the things that bother me about those books. It also helps me deal with the frustration of finding so many interesting ideas in the story that never live up to their potential.

Aw, it’s heartwarming to hear I inspired someone! I agree it’s pretty cathartic. I should do it more.

(Also I don’t think Shadowhunter is really old news. I’m honestly curious to find out what’s been going on in those books.)

Jul 1st, 2022

Anonymous asked:

For the anon talking about mxtx books. The reason you've heard good this about the translation for svss and tcgf is probably bc the, at least for svss, ones who did the fan translations for them are the ones working on the official.

I can't can't vouch at all for mdzs but the ones for svss at least are the fantranslators themselves, I was even following one of them, that's one of the many reasons why a couple of them had to take their work down, it wasn't just that sevenseas had licensing for the stories now but also bc they'd supposedly be going against their contract if they left the translations up.

Well. There you go, then. Neat that they could get hired to do their work professionally, too.

Jul 1st, 2022

Anonymous asked:

oh I didn't mean to imply that the fantranslations are unreadable or something. plenty of folks have gotten into the fandom before the official seven seas translation so it stands to reason that they're at least decent. I just brought it up because I figured it's good to know.

most of the fantranslations have been taken down because of the seven seas licensing of the books but they're easy enough to find if you know where to look. or you could just use the seven seas translation I heard the SVSSS and TGCF ones are pretty good.

not to sound too pressure-y on this I don't have a horse in this race I just started reading them too

Oh I know I’m just not really interested in seeking out fan translations for a running series. The piracy part isn’t the problem for me, but vetting a translator and finding one that covers the whole series is just more effort than I’m willing to put in something I’m not particularly invested in when I already have a never-ending TBR pile of other more accessible queer stuff. Which is why I’m curious about the official translation.

Jun 30th, 2022

Anonymous asked:

not the mxtx anon but I'm starting to read her work a bit and yeah her characters are definitely canonically queer. I think the main issue would be translation? because I can just read them in Chinese but I don't think the official Seven Seas is complete (and has some controversy when it comes to the mdzs translations I think?) so you'll have to go with fantranslations, which for one are fantranslations and for two mostly have stopped after the licenced novels have been announced so.

well, has anyone read the translation then? because much as i’d like to learn the language i don’t think i could feasibly make enough time to get to the level where i can read a novel in chinese (or if i did, i’d have to have a lexicon next to me and pause every three second to look something up).

Via comicauroraJun 28th, 2022

kingdomheartsrewrite4ever asked:

What Are Your Opinions On Harry Potter's Magic System

comicaurora answered:

“system” is a strong word for that situation

comicaurora:

The Harry Potter universe screwed itself right out the gate by combining the softest of soft magic systems with setting the entire thing in a school for teaching the protagonist how magic worked, and rather than having to establish hard rules on a soft magic system so it could let the magic school do its job, it split the difference by making Harry such a terrible student that neither he nor the audience ever learns anything about how magic actually works. Hermione does his homework for him. He cheats off Snape’s old textbook. He starts and ends the series with the same spell because it’s poetic and also because to do anything else would’ve required letting him actually learn or grow.

We are given single disconnected data points that smack of hard magic systems - individual magic words with static, concrete consequences and limitations, Accio not working on living creatures, etc - and the implication that, elsewhere in the universe, smarter people than Harry are capable of developing new spells. This implies that there is a system of rules at play here. Mispronouncing a spell or changing the associated wand movement can cause it to have a different effect, meaning the words have power on their own. Is there a language of magic? Well, yes, and it’s Latin, but like - is there a reason these sounds produce these effects? In other systems magic is the language of dragons, or the true names of the souls of the elements and creatures of the world. No such explanation is given here. Spells misfire or are miscast by incompetent wizards or broken wands, resulting in intriguing consequences outside the typical spell parameters, implying an intriguing fluidity to magic that is belied by literally everything we’re officially shown or told. Before going to hogwarts, Harry causes inexplicable phenomena (vanishing glass, uncuttable hair, the world generally warping in small ways to help him out) that is heavily implied to be the result of his magic because what else could it be, but after going to Hogwarts we never see this sort of wild magic again, which is a shame, because it seems like it could’ve been useful.

The magic system of Harry Potter is “if the plot needs a spell, artifact, potion, creature or magical doohicky to exist, it does, and if the plot needs it to NOT exist, it does not.” This is not a magic system because its rules are entirely Doylist, and any possible Watsonian rule systems are purposefully obfuscated to avoid the dreaded Worldbuilding More Than The Surface. One book needs time travel, so now there’s time magic. Later books can’t have time travel, so all the time magic is destroyed. All of it. One book needs luck magic so Harry can waltz through five layers of plot difficulty at once, and this game-breaker is never brought up before or after. Potion-brewing is discussed, but how were all these spells and artifacts created in the first place? Who laid down these restrictive rules on what they can and can’t do? Why can’t our heroes or their teachers make new ones that are more useful? None of these questions can be answered because to do so would require worldbuilding any internal rules, which this story does only when the plot needs those rules to exist.

The magical worldbuilding in Harry Potter is almost literally paper thin. It exists only to produce a surface aesthetic. If you ask a single question about how and why it functions the way it does, you punch through that paper-thin layer and see the needs of the plot laid bare behind it. This is not inherently bad. There are plenty of soft-logic stories that fully commit to the bit. The problem is that Harry Potter is a soft magic system with pretensions of hard-system grandeur. Instead of just owning up to the fact that magic is fickle and does what the plot needs, it seems to say “there ARE rules, and everybody else in the world knows them, but you, the audience surrogate outsider to the system, will never be told what they are.” And Harry is such an incurious, agencyless lump in his own narrative that he never tries to learn or improve. He has no desire to learn how his own magic system works, treating homework as an obligation to fob off on his smart friend while he dicks around playing quidditch and coasting on his magical trust fund. This handily saves the story from ever having to build the hard magic system it insists exists, and instead lets it populate the world with magical creatures and artifacts and potions and an implied population of very interesting, very smart people dealing with how all that stuff actually works while we hang out in Harry’s back pocket watching him complain that his magical school has the audacity to try and make him learn magic.

Blue has also directed me to a relevant clip where Brennan Lee Mulligan and Matthew Mercer discuss this very question. The internal logic of the Harry Potter universe is nonexistant. That’s not inherently a bad thing for a magical setting, but in this case I’m willing to be mean about it. I’ll put up with a lot from a story as long as it commits to the bit, but when the story and author try and convince the audience that the hard complicated worldbuilding is totally actually there and even was there all along, despite all observable evidence, that just makes the whole thing seem insecure and embarrassing. I’m not mad that Harry Potter’s magic system makes no sense, I’m just mad it keeps lying to me about it.

Via xiranjayzhaoJun 4th, 2022

britcision:

So I was thinking about Iron Widow and the Hunger Games because superficially, they follow similar arcs; a teenaged girl from an oppressive system fights the government

They’ve both got commodified violence as entertainment, a powerful emphasis on glamorous photoshoots, and lots of sinister machinations for our leading ladies

But when you put them side to side, they’re extremely different, and not just in the themes they explore. I think it comes down to one thing: agency

Katniss is living a pretty rough life before her story starts, and her situation sucks, but she is almost entirely independent. She has people she loves and won’t lose, and can consider just vibing off into the woods, even if she never would

The community is on her side and show it periodically, but things go from bad to worse extremely fast for her

Her first enemies aren’t alien hordes or callous killers who’ve led a hundred girls to certain death; they’re just other kids, in the same shitty situation, and as much as she tries to hate them, she can’t

Katniss is reasonably and understandably traumatized by what she’s been through, and loses her agency at every step as she’s pulled around by other peoples’ plans. She doesn’t want the rebellion and she doesn’t want an army; she wants to go home and be safe

Oh, and her love triangle is missing a side

Zetian though? Zetian’s former life fucking sucks, and we meet her on page one ready and willing to die for what she wants because she has nothing left that is hers

She has tried to run away, enough times to have “yet another escape attempt”, and is completely dependent on the people around her. She’s told her life’s worthless until she believes it, but no one considered “what if she wants to go out with a bang”

Zetian does see the political picture immediately, even if her understanding is as vague as “stop killing girls”

And while the army does spend a time trying to torture her with starvation and neglect before she meets Shimin, it’s really not much worse than how she’s used to being treated

Getting on camera and into battle, into physical violence that she can strike back with rather than just receiving, is a liberation for Zetian, and gives her her first ever taste of agency and power

She’s the first Iron Widow to survive and bear the name in public because she’s the first who went live on camera after a battle and couldn’t just be swept under the rug

The army can’t afford to kill her, but she’s perfectly happy to die for what she wants and she pushes back immediately and constantly against anyone trying to control her. She capitulates only on her terms, only when she gains from it

She’s a happy bisexual with two proud bi boyfriends because fuck what anyone else in the universe says, she wants it and it’s hers. She’ll worry for a moment if she’s got to choose (and if she’ll accept the choice made for her) and promptly decides the whole thing can go fuck itself because only her (and the boys’) wants matter

Nobody wants Zetian to lead a movement and change their world; if she won’t die quietly in a chrysalis, they want her to stand quietly at Shimin’s side as an accessory to make him more powerful

Her life is immediately, materially better from the minute she survives a second battle, and arguably from the moment she enlists because it’s finally under her control

Tl;dr? Katniss’s story is about losing control of her life and everyone has something they want from her. Zetian’s story is about seizing control and doing the shit that absolutely nobody wants her to do because she can

Katniss doesn’t want to lead a revolution

Zetian’s not giving the world a choice because she’s a one woman army and is the revolution