I know I haven't posted in forever, and I'm hoping to rectify that soon. That said, Shepherd.com posted a description of Akeldama, as well as my take on the Best Books That Reveal Unexpected Conspiracies. Please check it out!
A longer post next time. I promise. 😉
Sorry, folks, but life has been a bit overwhelming recently. Not sure when I'll be able to get back to this consistently. If you want to encourage that, buy my books! 😃
Anyone who reads this blog consistently knows of my antipathy for agents. I believe they're little-more than wanna-be authors who agent as a way to try and either get their own stuff published, or to live out their fantasies through the publishing of their "clients." Many have MFAs, which is great if you want to write, but if you want to represent people in contract negotiations, you probably need a background in either intellectual property law or business.
I say this as I found yet another recently. An agent I found represents a fair number of successful authors, such as Tad Williams, but he also has written several books himself. Now this may sound like great stuff to some, but to me it demonstrates that his full attention is not on his clients, and were I one of his clients, I'd be wondering whether or not his side hobby/true field of desire is costing me money since he so obviously wants to do something besides be a bulldog for his clients.
This person isn't the only "agent" to be a wanna-be writer. It makes me wonder why they went into agenting in the first place. Was it just to establish ties to the traditional industry in hopes of seeing their own stuff eventually published? How do they represent themselves to their clients?
Again, I have little use for agents myself, and it's stuff like this that affirms such a stance. Don't get me wrong - knowing how to turn a phrase is wonderful in spotting talent, but shouldn't the guy or gal trying to get you paid know more about legal phrasing and squeezing out the right amount of money from a publisher than he does about plot design or the iambic pentameter?
Every writer I know wants to be able to earn his or her living writing. I don't know a single one who says, "Gee, if only I could still work at that warehouse or analytics job after I start selling books, that'd be great!" No, we all want to wake up hen the sun is warm and sit down to pound out our next masterpiece(which everyone will, of course, adore). That's just not reality, though.
Depending on your source, the average author earns either about $43,000 per year, about $10,000 per year, or about $6,000 per year. Much of the discrepancy comes from whether or not the author in question is traditionally or independently published. Most folks assume all writers, especially the ones they see in the bookstore, are James Patterson or JK Rowling rich, but just like not every basketball player is LeBron James, most writers don't find that kind of exceptional success. Doesn't mean they should stop trying, but the top 1% are the top 1% for a reason.
Beyond that, look at the ranges of those salaries. Even at the top end($43000 per year), you're lucky to live somewhere decent and eat more than bologna and water. The average US salary is a shade north of $60,000, which isn't swimming in money. Think of the average person you know. Do they have a Rolls? A Rolex? Go on cruises every year? And the average author makes well below that off of their books.
If you can accept that and try to grow, great! But it's the folks out there who think they deserve more just because they're writers that grate my groin. Success is almost universally tied to hard work, and even then it's iffy. So know your limits and what you need to do wacky things like eat or have a car. Otherwise, you'll stay stuck in your fantasies while your reality is one of poverty.
RL Stine is the author of the Goosebumps series, an introduction to horror for millions of children. Unfortunately, with all of today's PC wokeness, even Goosebumps isn't immune. The issue here, however, is that the author is still alive and never authorized his books to be edited ex post facto.
The publisher appears to have gone back to correct what it deems as offensive language or descriptions, such as "girl stuff" and references to a character's weight. Sorry, but not only are these descriptive, you don't edit after a book has been published so you can spare the imagined feelings of the readers. Books are products of their times, and changing them afterwards deprives us of historical reference in how books were once written. Perhaps today, depending on the author, one may not put in such language, but that has to be up to the author or publisher pre-publication.
It's this kind of nonsense that causes not only eye-rolling at the woke movement, but outright hostility. They aren't just trying to change standards going forward, but to engage in Orwellian revision to pretend such stuff didn't happen previously. This is on the level of Staling editing Trotsky out of his photos.
Some may stupidly celebrate such stuff, but remember that you will not always be in the favored class, and one day you may cringe at the beast you've created when it comes for you. After all, what is seen as civilized today will likely be seen as barbaric tomorrow, and your own work may not survive such "evolved" standards of decency.
I wonder how many writers put stuff in their novels that they wish had happened or wish would happen in their lives. JK Rowling has admitted that Harry probably should’ve ended up with Hermione instead of Ron but that the Hermione/Ron relationship was a form of wish fulfillment(likely someone from Rowling’s past who she had a crush on at some point).
It’s easy to do – since we’re creating new worlds out of
whole cloth, we can re-create our own lives(after all, who among us hasn’t
written the story’s hero to be a version of themselves?). In the past, I’ve written female characters
that were thinly veiled women I had crushes on myself(yes, long before I was
married or had even met my current wife).
I’ve also taken out grudges on people I disliked by making them a
particularly odious villain or a person getting the comeuppance I’d wished my
real-life antagonist would’ve gotten.
Fact is that our writing reflects a type of fantasy about
ourselves anyway. No, I don’t actually
hunt vampires or try to attack Heaven to trap and kill God, but so much of what
we write is how we imagine our reactions to these kinds of events. And if we’re already in said fantasy, why not
include some personally satisfying elements, even if they’re known only to us? There are tons of authors I’d like to
ask this, from Stephen King(“Why did Jack Torrance want to spend a bleak winter
writing a play?”) to Tad Williamson(“So who exactly was the demon Casamira, the
Countess of Cold Hands, based on?”).
However, I suspect that were I to even get a chance to ask, I doubt I’d
get a straight answer. After all, few of
us so willingly divulge our deepest fantasies to strangers. We may be willing to write them into a story,
but we aren’t going to cop to them or lay out their true meaning.
A few of you have asked me what I think the best thing a reader can provide back to an author is. Would it be an honest critique? A breakdown of the major plot points? Ideas for a sequel?
Nope.
Spread the word.
That’s really it. You see, while
many writers have talent, what they lack is exposure. The bigger writers – Rowling, King,
Patterson, etc – are easily known by the readership, but most authors labor in
obscurity. That obscurity may be warranted
if the writer lacks talent, but if you’ve read a book you feel is good, then
tell people about it. Do a review. Ask your local bookstore to stock the
writer’s novels, or even just one novel.
Tell a friend that you read a really great book, and you think they
should try it out. Most successful
writers need a viral moment to take off, assuming they have the talent. Even “small” dedicated audiences of
50,000(not a lot in a nation of 330 million) can provide stable readership and
a stream of income to keep on writing.
Of course I don’t mean become obsessed or shill the author
every chance you get, but mention that writer to a friend with similar tastes,
and/or spend ten minutes doing one Amazon review. The payoff for the writer to continue producing
work you like is tremendous.
One of the best parts of reading is when a plotline pays off, and you go back to re-read previous stories to find those little nuggets of foreshadowing that told you this was coming. Whether it’s Voldemort taking Harry’s blood(allowing Harry to survive the killing curse), or how the interaction between the Tugar and the Merki hordes in Rally Cry foretold of future wars with various sects of the alien hordes, finding the snippets of what you’ve previously read coming to fruition in current stories is what makes reading so satisfying. However, as I’ve written more and more myself, I’ve found myself wondering how much of the foreshadowing in books is intentional, and how much is after-the-fact retconning.
There are times I know exactly where a book or book series
is going. I intentionally plant small
lines in some passages that the sharp reader can extrapolate into greater
knowledge of what’s to come. That said,
I’m not always as creative or prophetic as I might like, so I’ll use previous
work as an entry point into a new plot and act like I was always going to do
that. It makes me look clever, and the
reader is none the wiser.
When you find those little nuggets of foreshadowing and slap
yourself in the forehead, exclaiming, “Why didn’t I see that coming?”, just
know that the writer didn’t always see it coming. Sometimes the idea forms afterward and it was
merely a useful blurb that he or she figured out how to play later.
The problem with writing stories that rely on science is that very few of us actually understand science, or at least the science we’re writing about. Sure, I enjoy watching HowThe Universe Works as much as the next man, but if you want me to explain the physics behind it, I’m going to stare at you like you’ve got a third arm growing out of the top of your forehead. My knowledge of chemistry stops where the periodic table ends, and my only insight into medicine are the Google searches I do late at night when I have stomach discomfort, and I always walk away convinced I have some rare disease only ever diagnosed in 100 people but which will now kill me.
Still, we have to try and sound credible in our work, and
most readers want some of the science explained, at least within the context of
the story. To our advantage, most
readers are as scientifically illiterate as we are, so making stuff sound good
is about all we need to do. Sure, we
can’t go wildly off base and talk about escaping a black hole by using pixie
dust in our conventional rocket, but making allowances for the universal speed
limit(the speed of light) in some novel way – maybe by using laser energy to
push tachyons against virtual particles in a vacuum, or slingshotting around a
black hole to propel ourselves at faster-than-light-speeds – is usually
accepted by the audience.
There will always be some expert in the crowd who will find
your “knowledge” useless. A real
geneticist knows you can’t create humans with telepathy by simply switching a
few base pairs in DNA. I have difficulty
reading or watching military fiction because I spent almost 25 years in the
Army, so most combat scenes or use of weaponry is absolutely ludicrous to
me. However, experts aren’t the intended
audience – fans are. And as long as it’s
plausible within the ignorance of the fans, they’ll accept it.
Of course, a little research helps. It lends an air of authority to the
author. Being able to talk lucidly about
covalent chemical bonds or the distortion effect caused by gravity waves gets
the reader to better buy into the story.
No, the reader doesn’t have to be an astrophysicist or chemical
engineer; they need only accept that the author knows what he or she is talking
about, which leads the rest of the story to believability. After all, if the author can give you a way
to believe that he or she understands quantum mechanics, doesn’t that mean that
he or she also puts out a story worth buying into?
Folks, 1984 was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not a how-to manual. We’ve alreadytalked about the attempt to rewrite Roald Dahl’s books because some people felt they were too mean, and now the wokesters are targeting their sites on Agatha Christie’s work for supposedly being offensive to modern audiences.
Agatha Christie is one of the most prolific writers in
history. She wrote 66 detective novels
and 14 short stories. That in itself is
an achievement, but being a woman in the first part of the 20th
century made it even tougher. During a
time where women were expected to write romance-fluff novels, if anything at
all, Christie broke all barriers and delved into murder mysteries that enthralled
fans. Unfortunately, she used the
language of her day, which means that snowflakes today are just too sensitive
to take it. Instead of telling folks to
grow the hell up and not read her work if they’re offended by it, some are now
actively trying to rewrite her books to make them more modern friendly in terms
of tone.
First off, we need books of whatever era to remain
unchanged so we can better understand those eras. Huckleberry Finn wouldn’t be
near as impactful if we changed its tone, and neither are Christie’s. One should be able to appreciate the story
and get that times have changed.
Understanding the writer’s prejudices and style add to the story so we
better get the overall scope and tone of the work.
Second, ask yourself where this changes. The standards and language of today is likely
to be seen very differently in 100 years, so are we to relegate all books to
eventual rewrite as history progresses?
Will no original work be left, lest it offend someone? Do we rewrite The Odyssey
because of how Homer portrayed war and the religions of the time? Do we update The Miller’s Tale
by Chaucer because of the medieval sauciness of the story?
Finally, and not to put too fine a point on it, we have to
say stop. Some ask me why this is such a
big deal, and why can’t I let this one tale go.
It’s because there is no appeasing the wokesters. They will not stop until all culture reflects
their worldview, and we’ll be left with nothing that gives us any insight into
the past because the past upsets them.
We have to draw a line and say “NO FURTHER!” Otherwise we resign ourselves to their
haughty gaze and submit to what they find reasonable instead of deciding for
ourselves…and that standard changes from person to person. In an attempt to be the most virtuous, the
wokesters work to out-compete each other in the Virtue Olympics, until all the
flavor and flare is take out of life and we’re left with a bland mush of words
that are something ChatGPT could’ve come up with given the right alghorithm.
