Let Them Eat Cake...or Buy an Editor

A couple of years ago when I was out of work I had to go to the dentist.  I went to Bright Side Dental and this one assistant kept haranguing me about getting work done on pretty much all my teeth.  Despite that I told her I don't have a job or much money, she just would not get it.  "Don't you want to save your teeth?!"  It's not a matter of WANTING, not unless you're going to do all the work pro bono.  Oh, wait, you're not?  Well then...

This is like some of these people on Critique Circle and other places who are always saying, "You HAVE to buy an editor for your book."  Don't you WANT your book to be the best it can be?  They just can't seem to understand that not everyone can afford $2000-$10,000 for an editor for one book.  Round and round we go and it just can't penetrate their brains that some people don't have thousands of dollars lying around to edit a book that most likely will make far less than that.

I've talked about this before in relation to that idiot Guy Kawasaki saying you should spend $15,000 MINIMUM on marketing your book.  When it comes to self-publishing, people seem to think we're all millionaires.  You need to pay $500 for your cover, $5000 for an editor, and $15,000 to market your book.  Criminy, my car cost less than that!  And I've gotten a lot more use out of it than I'd get for one book.

Oh, well, if you don't spend $25,000 on your book you just don't care!  You'll just slap together any old thing and post it on Amazon!  Um, no.  I'm just not a fucking moron who'd bankrupt himself for a book.  Don't you believe in your book?  Um, no.  Not that much.

Because, again, the average self-published book doesn't make anywhere close to $2000 let alone $20,000.  The average book in general doesn't make that much money.  Oh, sure, but I'll be the one who defies the odds, right?  Clearly you don't know me.

One guy said, "I worked with an editor and my book won an award.  Yay me!"  Which is great, except the editor was hired by his publisher and paid for out of his sales.  So he didn't have to front any cash to hire the editor.  So telling me that I NEED to shell out my own money to buy an editor is pretty lame.

Similarly another guy paid only $375 to someone to edit his novella.  Which is sort of ridiculous but not nearly as much money.  The novella made like $2000 supposedly so now he's going to spend that to have the same person edit his next book.  Well, hey, good for you.  That's like putting $375 on black in roulette and when you win letting it ride on another spin.  That's still not like me fronting $2000 of my own money.

Another guy was like, "I'm 80 and pretty well off so $2000 just means my kids will inherit a little less."  Well, hey, good for you too.  I mean if you've got money to burn then go nuts.  In his case though at 80 you can't really consider yourself embarking on a new career.  I mean for this guy publishing a book is pretty much a hobby so it's like an old duffer spending $2000 on golf clubs.

On a side note this dumb lady then tried to stir up popular support against me by saying, "Oh you think we're all hobbyists on that bottom rung of the ladder.  Well I'm a professional, blah blah blah."  And it's like, Um no, I quoted the old guy and said "you" so it should be obvious I was talking to him.  "Oh well anything you say here is PUBLIC."  So she apparently thinks everything in every thread is aimed at her personally even when you're quoting someone else and saying "you" it still means her.  I've been using message boards for 22 years and I know that not everything everyone says is directed at me personally.  Duh.

In the course of this thread I tried using a number of examples to get the point across.  First, think of it like a business:  if I spend $2000 on a book that's likely to make less than $500 that's pretty poor business sense, isn't it?  Well, no, you have to spend money to make money!  The old guy tried to debate the meaning of "investment" with me; he thinks an investment is only stuff like stocks or bonds that you hold and it might appreciate in value.  Well, no, an investment is also money an owner (or company) puts into the business.  Paying $2000 upfront of my own money is investing my personal capital.  I haven't forgotten everything from SVSU accounting classes.

I tried a similar tack.  If you ever watch those house flipping shows on HGTV or TLC or wherever (which I only do when I'm at the dentist or mechanic) they have a very specific budget in mind first when they bid on a house and then when they're renovating it.  If they think a house will only sell for $800,000 they can't pay $1.2 million at auction and in renovations.  I mean sure it'd really make the house spiffy if they put in mahogany hardwood floors, granite countertops, and a hot tub but then they'd probably go over budget.  Maybe they could find a sucker who would pay more than $1.2 million, but it's not likely so you stay as much under the budget as you can make the most profit. 

Oh, well, if you don't spend $2000 then you won't get 5-star reviews and people won't buy your book!  Um, yeah, you clearly don't know readers very well.  I have never paid a fucking editor and how many people do you think complain about editing?  About the only time is on the Rebirth series from the 90s that I was too lazy to fix all the grammatical problems.  Yet there are still people who gave them 5 stars because they didn't give a shit.  Writers care about typos; readers care more about story.

On another side note someone tried to make me look like an idiot by saying, "He doesn't know the difference between proofreading (which MS Word does for you) and developmental editing."  It's like, Dude, you think MS Word can proofread your book for you?  Word doesn't even know when you should use its or it's.  And it only flags typos that aren't real words.  I was trying to think of such a situation when I saw I had one in my post:  I typed "words" instead of "works."  MS Word wouldn't flag that because works is a real word.  So the dude trying to make me look stupid made himself look stupid instead.

Finally a couple of other people came forward to agree, which was nice.  One person put it nicely:  spend only what you can afford to lose.  Which really is like gambling.  If you go to the casino you should only spend what you can afford to lose.  Spending $2000 you don't have on an editor is like going to the casino and taking out a line of credit.  Maybe you'll turn it into a huge profit, but most likely you'll lose your shirt.

Someone made the counter-example of if you want to start a restaurant you have to spend like $275,000.  Yeah, well, guess what most restaurateurs do?  Take out a small business loan.  Which means they need a business plan.  If you go to a reputable bank and tell them your plan is to publish a book and be the next EL James or Hugh Howey or Amanda Hocking or whoever, do you think they'll give you the money?  I doubt it.  To get that kind of money you have to take out a personal loan or second mortgage.  Which means you could lose your house if your book goes bust.

Then someone else comes in to say, "Well I'm going to spend the money because I want to be successful."  To which I'm like, Hey you'd be a great general manager for the Yankees.  That's the kind of thinking sports teams like the Yankees, Cowboys, and Redskins have used:  if we spend enough money we'll win for sure!  None of those teams have won a championship since 2009.  Since 2001 small market teams like the Florida Marlins and Kansas City Royals have as many championships as the Yankees.  So does just throwing money into something mean it will succeed?  No.

Similarly I also mentioned the movies.  You have a lot of famous cases of movies that went horrendously overbudget:  Heaven's Gate, Waterworld, John Carter, and Justice League to name a few.  None of those made back their budget and except for Justice League they were all huge flops; in the case of Heaven's Gate I think it pretty much bankrupted the studio.  On the flip side you get movies like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity shot for a few thousand dollars and make millions.  So does how much money you spend dictate success?  No.

Still people just don't get it!  I finally figured out what these people remind me of:  those pyramid schemes like HerbaLife or Amway.  The kind where someone tells you to buy $50,000 of products because then you'll be able to sell them for a million.  What they don't tell you is the only money they make is from people like you buying to resell the products; they don't sell shit to anyone else.  Only at least those people have something to gain; people on these writing boards are hard selling editors and marketing and all that without even having anything at stake!  It's completely ridiculous.

And like Marie Antoinette they just can't seem to understand that some of us are poor and don't have $2000 sitting in the bank to fritter away on the whim of becoming a famous author.  Shit, that's more than I make a whole month (net) from my real job.  Maybe if I don't pay my rent, buy food/medicine/other supplies, or pay my utilities for two months I can afford a fucking editor.

I don't know what else I can say to get through to these people.  After all the arguing someone said:

we know where you stand. You think paying a professional to edit your manuscript to make it better is not worth the money. Others disagree. Let's leave it at that and stop twisting other people's words around to try to prove that your opinion is better than someone else's opinion.

OK, so you complain about me twisting people's words by...twisting my words.  And still somehow missing the fucking point.  I never said it's not worth the money; I said it's not worth going bankrupt to tilt at the windmill of fame and fortune.  It's not that difficult to understand is it?  But still you have these stubborn asshats saying, "Don't you WANT to fix your teeth?"  Let them eat cake with their new teeth!

Lordy, Lordy, you'd think writers could actually read and comprehend, right?  Not so much.

Rotten Easter Eggs

It was kind of funny on Critique Circle when someone wrote a post that was like a blog post I'd write.  It was trying to compare gags in Murphy Brown to the "darlings" writers are advised to kill.

So TV is a different medium than novels, but they're still storytelling and sometimes you learn things from watching TV with an eye to how they do things. In this instance, I've been watching Murphy Brown. Not the reboot. (I knew I wasn't going to like it because they weren't going to be able to resist making it political.) I'm talking about the original series. I just finished watching the first season and it reminded me how much I liked the little touches that can only be called "darlings."
 Specifically, the whole running gag with Murphy's secretaries. For those of you who don't remember the show, Murphy had a new secretary in almost every episode. Most of them were raging disasters. There are even YouTube compilations of her secretaries (It takes 4 compilations to cover them all.) These running gag most certainly qualifies as the kind of "darling" authors are told to kill. At least that would be my understanding because the secretary was never vital to the story line. As the YouTube compilations prove, they're completely capable of standing on their own.
 Another darling I personally loved was the back of Murphy's office door. There was always something new there, tacked to the dartboard. The characters never even acknowledged it. It just existed in the background, waiting for the audience to notice. It was always the thing I watched closely for.
 I often have things like this in my stories and I've always felt kind of self-indulgent for not cutting them, but watching the original Murphy Brown has convinced me that I should stop sweating it. I'm thinking instead that I need to use a different yardstick to measure whether they stay. It's not necessarily "Is it necessary to the story?" but "Is it entertaining enough to overcome the fact that it's not necessary?"
 What do y'all think?

Isn't that something like I'd do an entry on?  Except I think this thesis is incorrect.  First off, there was really nothing special about the stuff in Murphy Brown; shows have running gags like the secretary thing or the dartboard thing all the time.  Like remember in MASH how for a while Klinger would have a different female outfit every week?  And usually some new zany scheme to get a Section 8.  Or in Cheers every time Norm came into the bar they'd shout his name.  Or in Home Improvement they never showed the neighbor Wilson's face below the eyes.

Just about any show that was on for a little while probably has some running gag that really has nothing to do with the main plot.  Some of them, like the dartboard thing, are more like Easter Eggs hidden in the background so they don't really matter at all.

The other stuff are just running jokes to entertain the audience and the writers and actors.  It doesn't really affect the plot but there's probably enough slack time in the script that it's not a detriment either.  It is like a "darling" in that it's self-indulgent, though it's also fan service too.  These running gags if you do them long enough people come to expect it.  It was the same thing with Hitchcock's cameos in his movies and Stan Lee's cameos in Marvel movies.  It's not really important to the plot of the movie but it was something people came to look for.

But really the "darlings" they talk about for writers are things a writer thinks are really clever but don't add any value and may actually annoy the audience because they're dumb and self-indulgent.  Like there was one guy who insisted on calling his aliens "Kanooks."  Like Canucks, ie people from Canada.  Isn't that funny?  No.  Or a long time ago there was this guy who described a woman's hair as a "slow-motion riot."  Whatever that means.  Typically in critique groups people will refuse to kill those things they think are so funny and clever but really are just dumb.

Something recently from a story I was working on:  it's sort of like a zombie story and I thought it'd be fun if these soldiers were sheltering in Graceland until they could get picked up by a helicopter.  But then I looked at the map of Memphis and it didn't really make sense since the airport is just a couple of miles from Graceland.  Originally I was going to have them fight their way from Beale Street to Graceland but again on the map the Mississippi River is really close to Beale Street, so if you wanted to escape zombies, why not just go there?  Finally I had to kill this darling and find a different location instead of trying to force something to happen that wouldn't really make sense and in the scheme of things wasn't important to the story.

If you beta read a whole book then maybe you might notice something as minor as a turn of phrase or more significant like a whole character or subplot that just doesn't add anything and may actually distract from your enjoyment of the book.  Those are the real "darlings" that editors and such warn about.

So was the author of that post right?  Meh, not really.  See, you try to do blog posts like me and I'll do a blog post about you doing a blog post like me!  So meta.

Grumpy Bulldog's Ultimate Batman Trilogy

I'll give you a break from Critique Circle whines to give you one of my awesome fake movie ideas that I know people love so much.  Ha ha ha.

Anyway, this idea got started a couple of months ago when I watched Batman: Mask of the Phantasm.  This was a feature-length movie based on the popular animated series in the early 90s.  It came out in about 93 or 94.  The idea is that there's someone in a costume (sort of a gray Azrael costume) who's knocking off old gangsters.  Batman is accused of the crimes so he has to track down who it is and stop him...except he eventually realizes it's not a him, it's a her!  And worse yet it's an old flame of Bruce Wayne's who's recently shown up in town.

The neat thing is this serves as sort of an origin story as well because it flashes back to when Bruce is starting to war on crime.  That's when he meets this woman and falls madly in love with her.  He asks her to marry him and she accepts.  He's going to put the whole war on crime aside but then she has to leave suddenly with her father.  The backstory adopts a little of Frank Miller's Year One in that Bruce starts out just wearing a ski mask or something and gets his ass kicked.  Then he's sitting in the study when the whole bat thing comes to him.

Anyway, the woman is dressing like "the Phantasm" to get revenge on the gangsters who were responsible for her father's murder.  Which puts her at odds with Batman.  The last gangster turns to the Joker for help.  Before he became the Joker, he was the bodyguard of the gangster and was the one to kill the woman's father.  Long story short, Batman and the woman tangle with the Joker and stop him but then she has to go away and so Bruce continues his war on crime as Batman.

This seemed like it could actually work as a live action movie, especially since with the DC movie universe so fucked up they could use it as a sort of soft reboot.

As typically happens I got thinking about it and then the idea kept bigger and bigger as I started to incorporate bits and pieces from other Batman storylines I've read or seen.  And then I came up with a rough idea for not one but a trilogy of movies!

The first one would borrow heavily on Mask of the Phantasm in that there's a masked character killing people and Batman gets the blame and some woman shows up.  Only I thought:  what if the woman has a son--Bruce's son?  As in back in the flashbacks like 10 years ago or so Bruce and this woman were fooling around and after she had to leave with her father she found out she was pregnant but she never told him.

So as Batman tries to find out who this masked killer is, Bruce is getting to know his new son Damian and reacquainting himself with the woman who probably isn't Talia al-Guhl like in the comics but sort of along that same line.

Instead of the Joker I was thinking of using Deathstroke as the former bodyguard because they already cast someone for that and we can save the Joker for later on if we want.

In the end there's the big action scene with Batman/woman/Deathstroke and Deathstroke is stopped but the woman is killed.  And so it falls to Bruce to raise their son.

Then the second part would take place a few years later.  Unbeknownst to Bruce, Damian has been training and doing a little light crime fighting.  One night Batman runs into Damian and so Bruce decides to train him as Robin.

About that time the Joker shows up to terrorize Gotham.  Or it could be the Riddler or whoever.  What's the diff really?  The plot's pretty much the same no matter which villain you use; it's just the specific set pieces that would change.

Anyway, Batman has to deal with this threat and the hot-headed Damian.  Ultimately they track the Joker or whoever to a lair where he has a nuclear bomb or something stashed away.  While Batman disarms the bomb, Damian refuses to listen to Batman and takes on the Joker himself.  And gets his ass kicked.  Then he and the Joker are seemingly blown up in an explosion.  While Batman stops the bomb, he's crushed by the death of his son that he sees as his fault.  (Which it kinda is.)

The third movie would then be years later.  Batman is older and angrier, more like the Frank Miller Batman.  But that's not enough for him to actually kill the criminals--he just roughs them up more.  Then one night he sees a costumed figure who does actually kill some criminals.  (No one important, just some henchmen.)  Which reminds him of Damian's mother years ago.  But she's dead, so who could this new masked avenger be?

As Batman is trying to figure this out and the new masked avenger is killing minor villains, a new major player is moving in.  Bane, the Scarecrow, Ra's al Guhl...again, it doesn't really matter at this point.  The point is there's some bigger threat.

Batman and this new masked avenger are both working on tracking down this threat using the tools at their disposal.  Batman's a lot more subtle, obviously.  At some point they wind up meeting and there's a fight.  Eventually the mask comes off and Batman sees a scarred but familiar face:  Damian, his son!  He wasn't killed in the explosion, just injured.  But almost being blown up made him decide Bruce's way wasn't working, so he decided to go out and learn some skills and then eventually come back to do what his father wouldn't, ie kill the criminals.

Batman lets Damian go.  He eventually faces the bigger threat by himself but barely escapes and only then because of Damian's help.  They reluctantly decide they need to team up.  So they do and take down the bad guy.  Of course Damian has the chance to kill whoever it is but then pulls back.

Instead of a happy reunion, Damian decides while he might not kill people anymore (or as much), Gotham is too small for the two of them.  Batman agrees to let Damian go off to another city to find his own path.  And in a few years, when Bruce can no longer be Batman, maybe Damian will take over the legacy.

There you go.  Mostly it borrows from Mask of the Phantasm, A Death in the Family, and Under the Hood with a little Arkham Knight and Batman & Son.  I think the family drama is something they haven't really done in the previous movies so it would freshen it up a little.  You could probably make it work for Affleck or a new actor so no worries there.

Call me DC! 

Beggars Choosing to Look the Gift Horse in the Mouth

Another wonderful incident from Critique Circle.  It's great there are so many dipshits there to provide blogger fodder.  I mean, otherwise what would I talk about:  politics?  Movies?  Comic books?  How awful!

Anyway, here's another dipshit.  This time whining that the crits he's getting might not be up to snuff.

I’ve a bit of a bugaboo in assessing the worth of some crits on CC. I’ve been working for the past decade to mature a writer’s voice, a style I like and one I am comfortable with as I write and rewrite (and rewrite).

 My vexation flows from critiquers who crit as they go along and don’t seem to acknowledge the disadvantage this places on the writing and the writer. The problem I have is that my stories tend to wrap one meaningful large moment around many, at first sight, questionably mundane moments. I’ll give a poorly thought through example to attempt clarity. I’ll have a character put her groceries in her trunk after pushing her fire extinguisher aside. Comment: “Cut the fire extinguisher. It adds nothing.” Then when they reach the part that bursts aflame, comment: ‘Oh, never mind.” (The fact that I advised you to do something ruinous to your story)

 Question: How does one do that and still trust the critter’s other analyses?
 My reaction is this person should not continue offering this species of crit. For me, and I posit, for any logical writer, it lowers the worth of even their most brilliant comments because the writer can only conclude that by the time the critiquer gains familiarity with the story as written, they’ve already finished critting it.

I do not contend that no one should crit as they go. Some make that their best offering. I do contend that they should acknowledge for their own benefit the disadvantage this places on the writing and the writer and recognize times when a little sell-doubt may be in order.

It's proof that beggars can be choosy!  And look the gift horse in the mouth.  Geez, just the nerve of people critiquing my story for free for not putting enough effort into it.  Why don't they read the whole thing and give it a good long think before critiquing it?  Hell, why don't they read it three times and write a whole 5000-word essay on it?

You want to talk about entitled snowflakes, there you go.  The reality of a critique site is you get what you pay for.  You don't pay for these critiques so you can't realistically expect sage wisdom.  Most of the people you're dealing with are not professionals.  They're just amateurs giving their time in a vain attempt to help you and in return they get 1-3 points so they can load their own stories to be critiqued maybe not up to your standards.

I don't like saying "it is what it is" because that's so simplistic but in this case the system is what it is.  If you want better, get out your checkbook and pay for a professional edit.  Otherwise you have to take what you can get.

From a critiquer point of view, I often don't have lots of time to spend reading someone's story.  And to be honest so many of them are so awful I can't read them all the way through once let alone several times.  There are plenty where I just give up because it's so fucking terrible.  Then I just scribble enough to get my 3 points and move on.  You don't like it, well, maybe you shouldn't have written such a shitty story.

The idea of just disregarding a whole critique because of one comment is so stupid.  Look, even the best hitters in baseball couldn't get a hit more than 40% of the time.  You can't expect someone not to have one miss in an evaluation.  It doesn't mean you disregard everything else.  To use another cliche, it's throwing the baby out with bathwater.  In the end, though, it's no one's loss but your own.

And as I said to the people defending this:  I can't wait until you get something published for real and start getting "reviews" on Amazon and Goodreads.  You think the critiques here are poorly written?  Wait until you get your first one-star review saying only "ok."

You ain't seen nothing yet, snowflakes!

As a funny addendum, a couple days later someone started another thread complaining that he wrote a 2200-word critique and the author just said all the stuff he pointed out was intentional.  In case you need another reason why some people might not want to spend hours writing a critique.  Even funnier when I said that maybe it was the guy in the first thread who was that author I got slapped down by the admin for "personal attacks" and trying to "incite a flame war."  If you don't actually use someone's name and just suggest a link between two threads how is that a personal attack or inciting a flame war?  I just thought it was a neat coincidence.  Even the moderators are such whiny crybabies on that site!

Rules Don't Apply

So yeah this is another one of my war stories from Critique Circle.  Deal with it!  (Which you'll probably do by not reading this or most other entries.  Very clever strategy!)

This one person bought some program that's supposed to help with grammar and junk.  For fun he/she put in a chapter from a bestseller to see how it'd work.  Here are the results:

I am in the middle of a two-week trial of ProWritingAid and am really enjoying it. It is very helpful to see stats on things like pronouns, passive writing, number of adverbs, sticky words, dialogue, pacing, etc.
 Just for run, I typed in chapter 2 of The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah (runaway bestseller from a few years ago) and ran the review on it. The chapter was almost 2,400 words. Here's what stands out.
 For those of you who are not familiar with ProWritingAid, the software gives your writing a score on a scale of 1-100 in various categories (grammar, style, readability, etc.) It considers the target to be anything above 80. Anything at 80 or below is considered below the standard and needs work. The Nightingale got scores of 73 (style), 55 (grammar), 77 (readability - Flesch scale) and 67 (overall). Wow. Ms. Hannah needs a serious editor (just kidding).
 It also has other benchmarks, such as average sentence length (it consider 11 words or better as the goal) and sentence variety. Her average sentence was 13.2 words, and her variety got a score of 7.0 (anything above 3 is good).
 She used a whopping 15 adverbs!! Rap her knuckles with a ruler. She had nine sticky sentences (too many glue words; recommended target is 0) and a glue index of 45.1% (target is 40% or lower).
 The chapter was 7.8% dialogue, and 34.6% of it was considered "slow pacing" - i.e. scene setting, internals, etc. The software didn't set benchmarks for either of those categories.
 Her pronoun score was 8.8% (target range 4-15%) and her initial pronoun usage (i.e. sentences that start with a pronoun) was 26.7% (target less than 30%).

So for the most part this wonderful program said this book was mediocre at best.  Yet it was a bestseller!  Which to me means all those "rules" they tell you are full of crap.

For whatever reason this one moron who's been trying to sell a stupid book about living teddy bears or whatever (It's totally not like Toy Story or anything!) took personal offense at my comment.  I suspect the reason is she bought this program and probably thought it would make her into a bestselling author.

Well it turns out from this person's experiment that bestselling books don't follow the standards of this program.  So maybe this program isn't the best for deciding what's good writing.  Hence maybe the moron with the teddy bear book got cheated.  Like many people though she couldn't really fight with facts because the facts are right there in black and (whatever background color).  Sure the book passed some of the tests, but not most of them.  She said:

Considering you haven't tried the software to see what it does, it's more proof you prefer to judge stuff before, than proof of what it does or doesn't do.

Which whether I bought the program or not is irrelevant.  I wasn't judging the program; I was judging the results of the program.

So then we had a little back-and-forth:

HER:  And, it said, point-by-point, she nailed it.
ME:  Actually it said the opposite if you bothered to read the post.
HER:  No, it said that only if you're clueless about the program. Once in a while, learn what you're talking about before posting.

How dumb is this chick?  I mean do I have to draw it out for her?  According to her precious program this bestselling book was not great.  It failed to meet standard after standard.  But it sold anyway.  Meaning those standards are bullshit.  It's really not that hard to follow, is it?  You don't need a degree in accounting like me to figure it out, do you?

Like I said, I think she had too much personally invested in the program to admit it's really not that important.  Bottom line to me is that "rules" even when they're espoused by agents, editors, or bestselling authors like Stephen King, are bunk.  What matters is whether someone thinks he/she can sell your book.  And that is why you fail, not because of some stupid program.  While I'm using a Star Wars quote, Luke blew up the Death Star because he turned off the targeting computer and used the Force; he relied on himself and not the machine.  Think about it.

The Importance of Self-Reliance

The first time Bill Shatner appeared on The Twilight Zone was in this episode where he and his new bride are on the road in Ohio when their car breaks down.  While waiting for the car to be fixed, they go to this diner that has these little devil-shaped napkin dispensers that for a penny spit out a fortune.  After a couple of these fortunes seem to come true, Shatner's character becomes obsessed with the thing until his wife finally pulls him out of there to live their own lives again.  As soon as they leave, another couple comes in who have become completely enslaved to the fortune telling napkin dispenser.

In writing critique groups there are quite a few people who seem to be like the latter couple; they seem completely unable to make decisions on their own.  This post about "medieval research" is a good illustration:

1. What sort of surnames should I give them? C is a Princess and S is a Lady.

2. As C is a Princess and S a Lady, will they even be able to see each other? Usually princesses have duties to attend to and things like that (and the same goes for the Lady), so how will I fit this into the story?

3. At what age were women in those days supposed to marry at? I'm not planning to write a romance!

4. Were princesses and ladies even literate?

5. I'm making a fictional town in England. What sort of name should I give it?

6. Also, referencing back to question 2, what kind of duties do they have?

It seems so lazy.  You can't even go on Wikipedia for ten minutes to research some of this?  You can't Google medieval surnames?  Nah, random Internet people spoon feed me some answers.

Even better, here's another one:

I am trying to write a character who moved from Las Vegas to the mountains in western North Carolina. I'd like her to have some kind of experience with casinos, either as an employee or patron, or maybe just someone who knows general stuff about casinos but eschews patronizing them herself. Any information about casinos would be much appreciated. I've been to a Harrah's casino once with friends and we played the slots, but I don't feel that gives me enough experience and information to properly flesh out this character.

I can't look up casino stuff on the Internet or even turn on Ocean's 11 or the literally hundreds of other movies about casinos.  Nah, tell me...stuff about casinos.  What stuff?  I dunno, stuff.  Whatever.  I mean, come on, you should at least know whether your character worked at a casino or not.  Narrow it down a little for Pete's sake.  Throw me a fricking bone here!

Another one this person couldn't figure out how to interrupt a conversation.  Really?  There are literally dozens of ways you can break up a conversation on the street.  Here's a list I threw together in a couple of minutes.

They're outside so there's any number of things that can happen: Purse snatcher, someone's dog gets loose (or just a stray dog or other animal), a flasher, a drunk, some acquaintance shows up, reverend of their church walks by, soldiers march past, and so on.

It's the 18th Century but I think most of those can still work.  Instead of listening to me this moron gets blathering with some other newb who can only think of a medical thing, it rains, or a horse gets loose.  Well I can't do those because...so don't!  I just gave you a bunch of things that aren't that!  It's really not as hard as you're making it seem!

But more to the point, people like this seem like they can't make any decisions on their own.  What should I name them?  How can I fit stuff into my story?  What are casinos?  How can I interrupt a conversation?  Maybe you should try to figure it out for yourself.  It is supposed to be YOUR story.  If I'm making all the calls for you then it's MY story, not yours.  Or if you're crowd-sourcing everything then it's still not your story; it's everyone else's but yours.

One good thing about being over 40 is I didn't use the Internet until I was graduating high school.  So I'd already been writing stories for about five years.  They weren't good stories necessarily, but it still helped me gain some self-reliance.  If I wanted to ask people about what to name characters or whatever, I'd have needed to do it in person.  Nowadays with this new-fangled Internet it's so easy to ask people to make decisions that these newbies don't learn to rely on themselves.  And gods forbid you tell them to that because then you're a mean ol' bully.

But if you don't learn to rely on yourself for answers you're like that couple in the Twilight Zone who have to keep asking the fortune teller machine to tell them what to do.  In the end your story should be your story, not Bob's story or Fred's story or Grumpy Bulldog's or whoever else's.  Learn to sink or swim on your own and only use writing groups as a last resort.

And for fuck's sake, learn to Google!

Man in the High Castle Season 3 Features Slow Burns and Big Twists

Season 3 of Amazon's Man in the High Castle came out last September or so and I watched it last fall.  As a recap, the series takes place in the early 60s in an America where the Axis won WWII and split the USA between the Nazis and Japanese, with the Rockies as the dividing line basically.  In the first season a woman named Juliana Crane is given a film that shows our universe where the Allies won.  This is distributed by the "Man in the High Castle" and shortly after Juliana gets the film, her sister is killed by the Japanese.  Meanwhile a German double agent named Joe Blake joins up with her to find the source of these films.  In New York, Obergruppenfuhrer John Smith is trying to track down the Man in the High Castle.  In Japan the just as evil detective Kido is trying to find Juliana.

In season 2 Juliana found out that the Man in the High Castle was a guy named Hawthorne Abdensen (Stephen Root) who's being given these films by "travelers" from other dimensions.  Such a traveler is the Japanese trade minister, who goes to our universe where Juliana is married to his son, who hates him for being too old school.  Meanwhile, Adolf Hitler finally dies and Joe Blake is recruited by his father to help him take power.  But Smith is on the other side and helps stop Joe and his father and installs Heimrich Himmler into power.  But back in New York, his son surrenders to authorities because he has some genetic disorder (like MS or something) that means in the Nazi world he has to be put down.  At the end of the season, Juliana is visited by her sister while her former boyfriend blows up the Japanese police headquarters in San Francisco and is dead--so we think.

The first episode of season 3 helps to recap the prior season and it just kind of tells you where everyone is.  Juliana and her sister stay with the Man in the High Castle on a ranch in Colorado.  Joe Blake is in a Nazi prison, being "reeducated."  The only way he can get out is to kill his own father, which he does.  John Smith has a new job (with some other long German word for it) and a new Manhattan apartment, but his wife is not taking the death of their son well.  There's tension between the Germans and Japanese with the Nazis cutting off oil supplies to the Japanese.  The trade minister has to find some way to get the flow going again to avert war.

After killing his father, Joe Blake is assigned by Himmler to kill Nazi defectors in Japan who were part of a project to build a device to traverse the multiverse.  Juliana has some dreams about this multiverse and starts seeing memories of her lives in other dimensions.  In one she's taken to a mine by the Nazis, including Joe Blake, who shoots her.  When Nazi agents raid the ranch in Colorado, Juliana and her sister go into Japanese territory, where they're captured by Kido until the trade minister springs them and takes them to his house.  Juliana's sister soon goes back to the dimension she came from, one where Juliana was dead instead of her.

Joe kills a former Nazi scientist and retrieves the plans for the device, which has some German name.  Then he meets Juliana again and she finds the plans among his stuff and realizes what it's for from her visions.  And then comes one of the first big twists:  Juliana locks herself in a bathroom and when Joe bursts in after her, she slits his throat with a straight razor.  To which I shouted, Damn!  That was totally unexpected.  Down goes Joe!

Meanwhile, John Smith is facing a crisis.  His boss, the Reichsmarshal, is worried Smith will take his spot so he has J Edgar Hoover (who works for the Nazis) digging up dirt on Smith's attempts to get his son taken to South America so he wouldn't have to be killed.  The Reichsmarshal brings Smith in to see Himmler, planning to expose him but then another twist:  Smith has gotten to Hoover (presumably with pictures of Hoover's cross-dressing) and turned the tables on the Reichsmarshal.  And so Smith does get the guy's job.  In a Godfather-like twist, the former Reichsmarshal goes to Cuba where an assassin hired by Smith kills him.

Now that she has the plans for the machine, Juliana goes to Colorado again with a former resistance fighter named Wyatt Price to get some fake IDs to get into Nazi territory.  There she meets her boyfriend Frank's assistant Ed who's shacking up with some guy and she finds out that Frank is alive!  He's living in the mountains with some Jews hiding from the Nazis.  He's even had a bar mitzvah.  Part of his face was burned in the bombing the previous season so he looks kind of like Two-Face.  They spend a night or two before Juliana and Wyatt head east to the Poconos in Pennsylvania.

In Nazi territory, Himmler and company have declared it "Year Zero."  As part of this celebration they're destroying US landmarks like the Lincoln Memorial, the Liberty Bell, and even the Statue of Liberty.  There's a young German filmmaker directing the filming of all this and she hooks up with some reporter chick for a gratuitous lesbian plot that really doesn't add much.  Meanwhile, Smith's wife is still recovering from her son's death, which is made worse because her oldest daughter just had her period and is facing a blood test that could lead to her too having to be killed.  Smith has been spending time watching some of the Man in the High Castle's movies Hitler had that show other universes where Smith's son is still alive.  In one of them Smith and his son are chatting and then MLK comes on the screen, probably to give his "I Have a Dream" speech.

Smith gets a call from the trade minister, who wants to talk to him in secret.  They go to the Man in the High Castle's former ranch.  The trade minister turns over some of the documents Juliana left from Joe Blake and some other information so that Smith will get Himmler to turn on the oil spigots again.  While there, Smith finds a picture of the Man in the High Castle and his wife and has someone look up other ranches in the area.  They're able to then find the Man's wife and capture her, which leads to him being brought in as well.

About the same time, Kido goes undercover in Colorado and finds Frank.  He takes Frank to an old internment camp and chops his head off with a sword.  No coming back from the dead this time.

Smith and Himmler go to the Poconos to watch a testing of the machine down in a coal mine shaft.  Juliana, Wyatt, and a couple of resistance people are also there, sneaking in from a closed mine shaft.  They all watch as four volunteers are taken into the shaft and three of them are splattered.  The fourth, a young woman, just disappears and doesn't come back.

Juliana and company are discovered and she's captured while trying to escape.  Back in New York, there's a big celebration as the Statue of Liberty is blown off its moorings by Nazi jets.  In a scene that's eerily similar to Charlottesville, Nazi kids take to the streets with torches shouting "Blood and soil!"  Himmler is enjoying this until he's shot from a nearby building by a sniper with Wyatt as a spotter.

The assassination didn't come as a surprise really.  They had already said it was 1963 and shown the Buddhist monk immolating himself like what happened in South Vietnam in our universe.  So I wondered if Himmler might take a trip to Dallas, but it was just in New York.

John Smith goes home to find his wife has absconded with their two remaining kids.  He goes to a beach house where she was supposed to have gone, but she's not there either.

Smith visits the Man in the High Castle in his cell and he finally drops a big secret about the traveling:  the one who didn't die in the experiment most likely was dead in the universe she traveled to.  That's the only way someone can travel between dimensions--if they don't exist there anymore.  You can't have two of the same people in the same place.  But Juliana is the only one who can see between the dimensions.  So any hope for the Nazis to invade our world or others in force is pretty well dashed.

Then Smith goes to Juliana's cell where she's meditating like Yoda and shaking the walls.  He realizes she's about to travel and shoots her in the chest.  There's a bloody spot left on the wall before she disappears.  The season ends with Wyatt using connections with a smut movie producer to have one of the Man in the High Castle's films copied in mass to distribute all over the country.  To fuel hope or whatever.

And that's it!  Not even a hint of where Juliana went.  Kind of frustrating because I'd have to wait about a year to find out what's going to happen now.

My theory is that Juliana will go to the world her sister went to, the one where she doesn't exist.  That follows what Abdensen told Smith about traveling.  Meanwhile Himmler will probably die and John Smith will succeed him as the fuhrer, which will probably lead to him having his wife found and killed in an "accident."  And/or he'll find someone to kidnap his son from another world to bring back or maybe he'll find a way to go there himself.

Besides that the episodes often move at a glacial pace, the other major problem is there wasn't that much of interest happening on the Japanese side.  Ed, his boyfriend, and a business partner are going to spread some paintings Frank made around to stir up local angst, but there really isn't anything big going on there.  It seemed like there might be another World War between the two superpowers but like the Cuba Missile Crisis that fizzled.

It definitely will be interesting to see what happens on the Nazi front next year with their machine and potentially losing another fuhrer.  I'm not sure how many seasons they're planning to do but unlike Game of Thrones this surpassed the book a long time ago so it's all uncharted territory.

A couple of Fun Facts:  In the fourth Wingman book Thunder in the East the Soviets had a sort of "Year Zero" thing where they were taking not just American artifacts like the Constitution but also anything that might remind people of the good ol USA like baseball bats and footballs.

Juliana is kind of like Joanne in the Scarlet Knight series.  Joanne had a unique ability where she could see and talk to the other versions of herself in parallel universes.  She did eventually even travel to other universes.

Are We Addicted to Happy Endings?

I've often complained about readers writing bad reviews because a particular story didn't end Happily Ever After.  I even wrote a book as unhappily as I could to trap those morons.

But this isn't about that.  This is about something that happened on Critique Circle a few months ago.  I wrote a blurb for a story.  Here it is:

Advancing to its first Final Four should have the students of Bailey University in a hard-partying mood. Instead, the campus is shocked and horrified by a terrible crime committed against its most beloved resident. Red, the university's bulldog mascot, has been taken! If the university doesn't pay a million dollars in ransom by tip-off of the championship game, Red will be gone forever. But the crime is even worse than the student body thinks because it's an inside job.
 Mark Carmichael is Red's handler and social media coordinator—and also a rotten gambler. Into a local bookie for a hundred grand, Mark seizes upon a desperate plan to pay his debts and make a nice nest egg for himself: he'll give Red to a couple of stoner friends for a few days, stage the dognapping, and collect the ransom. Then there will be a tearful reunion on camera to make Mark and Red world famous. It's a foolproof plan.
 Except there's a stingy university president who doesn't want to pay for a dog, an overzealous campus policeman hot on Mark's trail, and an intrepid reporter—the girl Mark dreamed of having in high school—who's suddenly interested in him. Cleaning up after a bulldog and writing Twitter posts never prepared Mark for this!
 The Dognapping is a black comedy in the mold of Elmore Leonard's Get Shorty or the Coen Brothers' Fargo.

And someone replied:

And make it so the reader can pull for Mark and the intrepid reporter girl and Red to ride off happily into the sunset after Baily University—against mountainous odds—wins the tournament with a buzzer-beating three-pointer. That kind of story.

OK, so let me get this straight:  the guy who got deep in debt from gambling and stages a dognapping to get money from his employer to pay his gambling debts (plus extra for a nest egg) should get to live Happily Ever After with the reporter and the dog?  What the hell does Mark do to deserve a happy ending?  Nothing!  He's actually a pretty shitty person.  But he should totally get to run off Happily Ever After into the sunset.  No wonder there are people who still think the assholes in Superstore should get to live Happily Ever After no matter how shitty they are to other people.

This same person a month or so later whined about a story not seeming to end happy.  It was about a Mennonite woman whose husband goes to work in some other town and cheats on her--with another man!  And this person commented, why wouldn't she want him back?  Um, because he cheated on her.  With a dude.  Duh.  But no, she has to take him back!  We have to have an imaginary Happily Ever After!  Dude has some serious issues.

Much like respect, happy endings have to be earned, not just given.  Would Fargo (the basis for this story) have been better if William H Macy got the ransom and ran away with his mistress?  Or if the kidnappers had been killed and he and his wife reconciled?

Now if Mark needed money because his grandma had cancer and he needed to pay for treatments, then he might deserve a Happily Ever After, but not for paying gambling debts.  Which isn't to say that sometimes we don't root for the "bad guy."  I mean in heist movies like Ocean's Eleven we root for the crooks to get away, right?  But at least in that movie you have crooks robbing an asshole casino manager so that makes it OK!  Or in Hell or High Water two brothers rob a string of banks.  But...it's because their home is being foreclosed on and they only rob branches of that bank to pay the mortgage and keep the house, which has oil on the property.  So a happy ending is OK for them because they have a righteous cause.

So maybe if the college president is a real asshole and the bookie goes around kicking puppies or something then his caper might be justified.

But as I wrote it, Mark doesn't deserve a happy ending.  So, are some people just addicted to happy endings that they can't even recognize when a happy ending isn't justified?  I think so.

The Cold War

In the same vein as updates...

A few months ago on Critique Circle there was this person who posted a query where two sisters go back in time to 1692 Salem for basically the hell of it.  I wrote an entry about it.

Back in November this person posted a revised version.  I was busy and didn't really want to make a thing of this so all I said was "It's better than your last attempt but 175,000 is very unlikely to get published. You'd be better off breaking it in two if you can't cut 75,000 words.  Which is just the conventional wisdom.

Then this person says, "can I have some feedback on the query itself?"  Maybe I would have later but I didn't really appreciate being called out so I said No.  Just that:  No.

And this person just lost his/her shit.

This is a relatively small taste of your usual saltiness, but I am going to nip it in the bud. 

This is for all to read because I am not alone. I am sick of the way you interact on here. That was a rude and unnecessary response. I am 100% certain I've done nothing to offend you, and I don't deserve to be treated this way, even if this is merely an internet forum and you think you're somehow exempt from common decency. Don't be an obstructionist jerk. You're not cool, you're not funny, you're not helping.

Also, for everyone to read: Over the past year, I have reported Grumpybull on numerous occasions due to the way Grumpybull has interacted on my posts but more often for what I have seen on other people's posts. Grumpybull, I wish there was a way to block you fully, but there isn't. So, unfortunately, I, and everyone else on CC, are forced to put up with your counter-productive, worthless infringements on our progress to become better writers. Is it a literary rite of passage to be harassed, belittled, irritated by Grumpybull? I don't think so, and in that case, I'm not going to put up with it! If you want to be like this, GO AWAY! BE GONE!

This is a place for community and for sharing our work. I genuinely welcome feedback and want to make my query better (wouldn't have put it on here otherwise), but I do not want this kind of crapola on my post feed. If you don't want to interact, no one has a gun to your head. If you want to be a bully, rude, destructive, please - SERIOUSLY - stay away. You're not welcome.

To everyone else: PLEASE don't let this little side trip into Crazy Land stop you from commenting on the query. I appreciate the real feedback with my whole heart, and honestly, I am depending on it. Please do not let Grumpybull stop you from posting on this feed or any other.

It was pretty freaking ridiculous considering I didn't say anything about them and I didn't say anything negative about his/her story except it was too long.  Which any "expert" would tell you 175,000 words is too long, especially for a first-time author.  There was hardly any "harassment" or "belittling" except this person's treatment of me.

I still didn't feel like making a big deal about it so all I said was, "I spent more than enough time commenting on your last attempt. I said this was better than that last one. I don't owe you anything."

Which is true.  I did waste a lot of time on the first version of the query.  And I said this attempt was better.  So I don't know why you're accusing me of being negative and harassing you and whatever. 

And no, I don't owe you anything.  Just because I said no doesn't mean you can throw a temper tantrum and call me a bunch of names.  Spoiled, entitled brat.  Honestly, what did this person ever do for me?  Nothing.  You didn't critique my stories or queries and yet if I don't give you as much as you want on yours I'm the villain who needs run out of town. 

If there's one good thing, it's that no one joined Spartacus's calls to have me run out of town.  I'm sure he/she would have liked a slow clap turning into a standing ovation or an angry mob with pitchforks and torches.  Instead there was mass not giving a shit.  No support for me either, but you can't have everything--or anything.

Anyway, it's sad that sometimes you try not to start a thing and it starts in spite of it.

Updates

You might say, "Hey you said you weren't blogging!"  And I'd say, "Aaaaaaaaaactually, I said I wouldn't be blogging regularly."  So there, suck it imaginary confused reader!  In your non-existent face!

So anyway, for the first post of 2019 (though not the first post I wrote for 2019 or in 2019), I just wanted to do some updates I stuff I had previously talked about.

In the post Dear Readers:  It's a Trap I wrote about how I wrote a whole book as dark as possible and made it look as dark as possible because I knew some imbecile would complain that a book fully advertised as too dark was too dark.

It took a while, but someone finally fell for it!  I don't usually like 1-star reviews but that was one that made me happy.  It's good when your low expectations of people are met.  So anyway, this book with a scary font and unsmiling (sorta scary) person and called DARK Gender Swap, this idiot complained was a horror story.  Um, yeah, idiot, that's why it was called DARK Gender Swap and not Super Happy Funtime Gender Swap.

As Bill Simmons would say:  Yup, those are my readers.

In the post You're Branded, I mentioned Chuck Wendig's foul-mouthed, in-your-face attitude is his brand.  Apparently Marvel/Disney didn't realize that because last October they fired him from writing Star Wars books because he wasn't civil.  Um, really?  The guy who wrote The Kick-Ass Writer isn't Ned Flanders?

Disney seems to have a problem with that lately as they brought back Roseanne Barr and then fired her a couple episodes in for racist Tweets.  Which if they'd done any kind of homework they would have realized she was a fucking Trump-supporting racist beforehand.  They also had problems with John Carter and Solo because they hired directors who were eminently not qualified to direct big-budget live action sci-fi movies.  Both then went over budget and flopped.  And both cases could have been avoided if Disney actually acquainted themselves with the directors beforehand.  I mean just because someone (or someones) have success with animated movies or comedies doesn't mean they can direct a big live action movie.

By the same token, if someone from Marvel/Disney had read pretty much anything by Wendig, they would have realized that he wasn't really Disney material.  You can't blame a guy for sticking with his brand.  Your ignorance of the brand is on you.

In one post I noted how terrible Amazon's giveaway system was.  Then in another I noted how they'd added a Goodreads-like giveaway option that was more useful.  Guess what?  They backslid back to uselessness.  When I went to make a giveaway for my book Casting Change, the Goodreads-type option was no longer there.  All they had were two pretty useless options:  first come, first serve or every X number.  I mean the latter is great if I'm a huge company giving away 300 products but not great if I have one.  I set it for every 3 people I only get 3 entries; I set it for every 100 people I might not get enough entries.  The first come-first serve option is especially useless if I only have one or two books to give away because the first one or two people to enter would win and then it's over.  So there's no time to build up any interest.

Meanwhile Goodreads still wants $150-$600 for doing nothing more than hosting the giveaway.  Their platform is nice, but it's not worth that much money for a small operation like mine.

For Casting Change I wound up doing two giveaways that didn't accomplish much.  The first I did through my newsletter.  I offered whoever answered a 2-question survey the chance to win.  Only 22 of 215 or so newsletter recipients even answered.  And then I had to pull three names out of my hat to find someone who would answer my email to tell them they'd won.  Geez, talk about a gift horse in the mouth.

The second giveaway I ran on LibraryThing.  It's sort of like Goodreads but the problems are that people need to join a special LibraryThing group to enter.  And there's no direct link to your book being given away and even though it's free you know even the slightest effort is too much for some people.

Naturally neither person who got a free book has written a review or anything.  (Probably.)  And the sales weren't great either, so it wasn't really worthwhile.

I just wish Goodreads would be more reasonable.  I mean, $150?  Maybe if it were $20 or $30 it'd be worth it for me but $150 is outrageous for hosting the thing and sending a couple of auto-generated emails that'll be ignored.

I wrote a post about how annoying all these people saying Aaaactually [or just impying it] are.  There have been a few more of those.  Like one on Facebook about Trump not going to visit a graveyard in France on Veteran's Day because it was raining.  I commented that remember when Hillary had the flu and fainted and Fox "News" and its fans were saying that didn't make her qualified for the presidency?  Someone said [Aaaaactually] it was pneumonia not the flu.  Because the specific illness is what was important there, right?  I said yeah, yeah, whatever.  And she says, Ah, an asshole.  To which I said, Yes you are and blocked her.

Another time the Geek Twins linked to an article about Sony maybe hogging Spider-Man since Venom did pretty good.  I said, I guess Sony forgot how their last Spider-Man didn't exactly light the world on fire.  So this doofus replies, "[AAAAAACTUALLY], Sony has lots of other things not just Spider-Man.  You should read the article before commenting."  But the article was about Disney and Sony sharing Spider-Man, not Sony's other Spider-verse projects.  Duh.  So he was the one who should have read the article.  I just said I did read the article and then blocked him.  I don't know, who are these people who have to jump all over you when you don't even know them?  And for stuff that's so inconsequential.  Yeesh.  Get a life as Shatner would say.