The Problem With Not Having Writer Friends Or Friends Who Read Books Is That When I'm Really Excited,

I miss writing smart murderers. It's like solving an ever-evolving puzzle. What evidence did they leave behind? Ah, but that can be explained by...

wear a different perfume when you commit murder fuckin amateurs 

I wish more people would critique books this way. I'm tired of blurbs being "a tour de force" and "next great American novel". I want to know if it's worth reading for *me*, not some vague audience. I'm glad authors can get praise like that and they deserve it (if it's real), but it tells me nothing as a potential reader.

I used to work for a trade book reviewer where I got paid to review people's books, and one of the rules of that review company is one that I think is just super useful to media analysis as a whole, and that is, we were told never to critique media for what it didn't do but only for what it did.

So, for instance, I couldn't say "this book didn't give its characters strong agency or goals". I instead had to say, "the characters in this book acted in ways that often felt misaligned with their characterization as if they were being pulled by the plot."

I think this is really important because a lot of "critiques" people give, if subverted to address what the book does instead of what it doesn't do, actually read pretty nonsensical. For instance, "none of the characters were unique" becomes "all of the characters read like other characters that exist in other media", which like... okay? That's not really a critique. It's just how fiction works. Or "none of the characters were likeable" becomes "all of the characters, at some point or another, did things that I found disagreeable or annoying" which is literally how every book works?

It also keeps you from holding a book to a standard it never sought to meet. "The world building in this book simply wasn't complex enough" becomes "The world building in this book was very simple", which, yes, good, that can actually be a good thing. Many books aspire to this. It's not actually a negative critique. Or "The stakes weren't very high and the climax didn't really offer any major plot twists or turns" becomes "The stakes were low and and the ending was quite predictable", which, if this is a cute romcom is exactly what I'm looking for.

Not to mention, I think this really helps to deconstruct a lot of the biases we carry into fiction. Characters not having strong agency isn't inherently bad. Characters who react to their surroundings can make a good story, so saying "the characters didn't have enough agency" is kind of weak, but when you flip it to say "the characters acted misaligned from their characterization" we can now see that the *real* problem here isn't that they lacked agency but that this lack of agency is inconsistent with the type of character that they are. a character this strong-willed *should* have more agency even if a weak-willed character might not.

So it's just a really simple way of framing the way I critique books that I think has really helped to show the difference between "this book is bad" and "this book didn't meet my personal preferences", but also, as someone talking about books, I think it helps give other people a clearer idea of what the book actually looks like so they can decide for themselves if it's worth their time.

Update: This is literally just a thought exercise to help you be more intentional with how you critique media. I'm not enforcing this as some divine rule that must be followed any time you have an opinion on fiction, and I'm definitely not saying that you have to structure every single sentence in a review to contain zero negative phrases. I'm just saying that I repurposed a rule we had at that specific reviewer to be a helpful tool to check myself when writing critiques now. If you don't want to use the tool, literally no one (especially not me) can or wants to force you to use it. As with all advice, it is a totally reasonable and normal thing to not have use for every piece of it that exists from random strangers on the internet. Use it to whatever extent it helps you or not at all.

Too true, but I still think he's Padme's son and Leia is Anakin's daughter. She's more like him, despite being a diplomat.

I want to learn the ways of the Force and become a Jedi - like my father.

I have never liked the the skill versus luck debate, but it's acquired an intolerable dimension with the self-publishing groups I've joined.

The argument is deceptively simple, if you work hard, you should be successful. If you aren't, you aren't working hard enough. It doesn't take into account that luck has a part as well. A chance meeting with the company president may get me noticed. Or coffee spilled on my shirt means I miss that same meeting. Butterfly effect. Neither of those examples take into account how good I am at whatever I do; it's based things outside of my control. It gets more complex when you take into account economic background, education, race, gender, etc., but that's beside the point here.

This blindness gets worse when it comes to self-publishing because it involves two different skill sets: writing and marketing. I could be the best author out there, but if no one knows I exist, then I'm not selling anything. Likewise, I could be a marketing guru with a crappy book to sell and while I might do better initially, people will catch on and I'll not sell anything.

You can sharpen both skills, but only so far because luck is still a factor.

Perhaps I'm just frustrated by the lack of awareness that working hard doesn't always equal results.

Can't believe you left this in the tags. I'd be finding a new therapist if I found out. I know doctors have to take notes, but it's a completely different thing to be recorded. Sometimes I'm just feeling out what I'm thinking. This makes it even harder to be vulnerable when you're used to things you say being used against you.

our new job launched its mandatory ai transcription program designed to streamline our workflow and not only does it melt down the moment it has to transcribe non-white customers but it keeps hallucinating the existence of a mysterious boy named dorian who shows up in every third call summary

This is so endearing that I'd write him some Scotty smut if he were still alive.

In case anyone wanted; James Doohan knew about all the Spirk porn, and in fact wanted a copy for himself. He also seemed rather bored by the fact he was only ever drawn with women. Someone draw him some Scotty yaoi asap!

I have the trilogy finished.

In my head. Anybody want to write it down for me?

It's in this way that the integration robots into modern society has also turned me off to human-robot pairings. Twenty years ago I used to get misty-eyed thinking about a modern day Galatea or a couple that symbolically breaks racial barriers. Now I just want Alexa/Siri/whatever to stop listening to every conversation I have.

It also fucking bugs me that nobody can ever seem to really commit to the cyberpunk premise of the Protagonist Who Hates Robots (see also, the cyberpunk premise of "Wouldn't it be Super Fucked Up™, actually, for a company to be able to repo your goddamned arm or turn off your eyes?") during the execution.

Which is flabbergasting, considering we've had almost a full decade of Alexa pinky-promising not to officially listen to anything until you do its summoning ritual and then turning around and emailing your boss a transcript of you bitching about them to your spouse over dinner. We've had at least five years of being able to get your Tesla unlocked remotely just by @-ing Musk on twitter.

The cute robot dogs are being leased to police departments, reputation management firms have been deploying armies of social media reply-bots in astroturf campaigns, customer service chatbots have become damn near indecipherable as their programmers attempt to make them seem more personable, etc. etc. etc.

We don't even need to reach for "Wouldn't it be Super Fucked Up™, actually, if corporations made simulacra better and better at faking humanity in order to manipulate people?"

"Wouldn't it be Super Fucked Up™, actually, if your car could mimic sadness or pain if you declined an extended warranty, or if your phone begged for its life if you tried to jailbreak it, or WeightWatchers paid your fridge to neg you every time you went for a midnight snack?"

"Wouldn't it be Super Fucked Up™, actually, if you pointed out how gross it is that your smart-assistant is programmed to act like your friend in order to build a more accurate marketing profile and your buddy acted like you just said dogs can't feel love and his beloved pet only sees him as a walking treat-dispenser?"

"Wouldn't it be Super Fucked Up™, actually, if you were surrounded by unfeeling things that can and would rip you and all of your loved ones apart at a moment's notice if they got the right/wrong order from some unaccountable law enforcement flack, and everyone else just kind of shrugged and went 'It's probably fine, why are you hyperventilating about it, it's not like you've done anything wrong'?"

They're all quite literally right there in front of our faces!

But it's harder to make "the way robots have been integrated into society is bad, actually, and the protagonist is largely right" into a sexy thriller with a love interest or a buddy-cop duo, and the hyperconservative media environment we're dealing with right now isn't exactly amenable to the robots being a metaphor for corporate intrusion and loss of privacy and authoritarian overreach, so here we are, with robots who generally aren't people, except sometimes you find a special robot--one of the Good Ones--who actually is a person, and that's how we all learn that Prejudice Is Bad, or something.

I hate the culture of trying to be a "successful" self-published author. I'm a part of a lot of writers groups and so many want to over-stress marketing: Do you have a marketing plan? Do you have a blog? Do you have followers? Are you on booktok?

That's great and all, but have you finished your book? Have you gotten it edited? Is your book even worth reading? Like, how do you have time to actually write if you're spending all this time being a social media personality? I barely have enough time to come home from my day job to write, let alone try to market as an introvert who is used to the internet being a lovely anonymous space.

I've been using Microsoft Word for over twenty years and somehow it gets worse each year...

[Image Description: First image is a Microsoft Word screen shot where it suggested that the user change "mauled" to "mailed", changing the sentence to "The body had been mailed to the point that it was unidentifiable."]