(Untitled)

[apiphile]

Blog Posts

The New Chivalry: How To Date Without Being a DouchebagMaking a public hoo-ha about writing one book and then being forced to admit that you can't get a handle on it and are going to write a different one instead is a bit embarrassing, but as Lin very sensibly pointed out this is the Year Of Write Whatever The Fuck You Want, and what I

Comments

[coniferous_you]

Making a public hoo-ha about writing one book and then being forced to admit that you can't get a handle on it and are going to write a different one instead is a bit embarrassing

I miss the reference. Did you do this, or someone you know? I'm not sure it's that embarrassing. I do that all the time, except I don't post about it online because I just don't really do that a lot. I don't even know if one long work ever goes forever without mutating into an entirely different one (now that I could post about!).

Anyway, this comment is just an excuse to scorn a very public writer from my home province. She recently self-published a novel (of unacceptably low presentation quality; since self-publishing is kind of a legitimate thing back home and people sometimes make a living that way, it's kind of wrong that she can just crank out some bad CGI cover and call it a day-but that's beside the point) and did an interview for a local paper where she acted like writing a book (it was her first, Del, her first manuscript ever) was just the gosh darn most mystical thing ever. "I just barfed it out," says she.

Now that's embarrassing.

[apiphile]

I did this. You've been bust getting married and whatnot :P

HAh whoops.

[coniferous_you]

I guess you're right. It's been kind of a year so far! (Also our Internet company went comic-book levels of evil so we had to get rid of our Internet out of disgust; not so useful for staying in touch, I guess).

And this book is in the school curriculum back home. Out of the way Shakespeare, here's a book about fairies who quip!

[apiphile]

... dear god really? What's her name?

[coniferous_you]

C.S. Einfeld. The book is called Neverdark. I don't know. It's on display at all the coffee shops and bookstores back home and I flipped through it but I just don't understand how she's gotten recognition. It's so amateurish. It's like it was written by the guy in my last writing class who I always scorned because he loaded up his stories with stupid one-liners that were "quirky."

It bugs me because I know other self-published authors at home (fiction, as well as local history stuff) who have their works languish in a relative sense, while this gets into the schools.

[coniferous_you]

(And, again, there's just something to be said for showing respect for the craft. I'm happy she's able to sell her book because we all know how hard that can be, but to step up and say in an interview, "I just barfed it out" and "this is my first attempt at a book-I kind of thought it would be navel-gazing lit fic, but I guess not!" is kind of shameful).

[apiphile]

Alas I assume if one says anything vaguely critical about it, one is immediately labelled envious, so.

[coniferous_you]

I think so. I don't personally know anyone who's read it, but it seems kind of like that. Like, you're not even allowed to say "you're making self-published authors look bad."