Making the Existential Real

Yesterday I talked about launching an event series with all three of my author names.  Gender Swap Outbreak is about just that:  the outbreak of a gender swap virus.

The thing is, though, a gender swap plague on its own isn't really all that scary.  I mean OK it would shake people up if all the men and boys turned female, but it wouldn't exactly wipe out all life on Earth--for a little while.  And considering there's male sperm banked, there's a chance even if everyone did turn female they could still have babies, some of whom would probably be male.  Thus humanity would survive, though the popular would probably sharply decline over a few generations.

So the problem there is it's more of an existential threat.  It's a nebulous crisis like global warming.  Legendary (horrible) filmmaker James Nguyen knew this when he made Birdemic:  Shock and Terror.  Sure global warming is a threat, but you need something more personal and immediate.  Like, say, flocks of weird-looking CGI birds exploding like their bellies are full of nitro and clawing people's throats while they're taking a shit outside.  Other slightly less awful movies like Day of the Animals and The Day After Tomorrow similarly try to make a nebulous threat more immediate.  In one case the ozone layer depletes and so animals start going nuts--for a day and then they die.  In the latter it was a bunch of disasters or whatever; I never actually watched that movie.

Anyway, I wanted something that would actually make this plague dangerous for people.  One thing I got to wondering was:  what happens when kids get it?  They turn into girls and...what?  Nothing really.  The women turn into super-sluts fucking anything that moves but the kids wouldn't really do anything.

Then I had my James Nguyen moment and thought:  what if the diseases melts the kid's brain and turns him (now her) into a flesh-eating ghoul?  And if one of those kids bites an adult (male or female) they too turn into a flesh-eating little girl ghoul?

Which when I thought about it played into Ivana Johnson's wheelhouse because most of "her" books were age regression stories like Time & Space 1-3, Trick or Treat 1-3, and Naughty or Nice 2-3.  So then Eric Filler would do a fairly traditional gender swap story and Ivana Johnson would do a sort of traditional age regression story.  It made as much sense as any of this makes.

I set this up at the end of the first book when the sheriff who is first infected infects his young son.  The son wakes up as a little girl with a taste for flesh and bites a social worker.  Soon enough this new version of the plague--this Mutation--is spreading through town.

Also in book 1 I mentioned one of the town deputies, Joe Wallace, was out of town on his honeymoon.  So I decided to use him as my focal character.  Joe and his new wife Kate are on their honeymoon when their town literally disappears from maps and the phone lines are all dead.  So they head to town, circumventing a National Guard barricade, to find the town empty.

Except it's not!  They go to Kate's mother's house where one of the ghouls is feasting on her and then attacks Joe and Kate, turning them into little girls.  Joe soon finds he has a hankering for living flesh that he has to fight against.  And he starts to get younger, from eight-ish to sixish, and ultimately a toddler.  Meanwhile the government is trying to quarantine the plague and learn more about it, not for purely altruistic reasons.  But of course shit happens and Joe (now Jo) escapes to spread the plague with some minions she infects while an adult survivor spreads the other form.

Hence we set the stage for UPPING THE ANTE tomorrow!  It follows the idea of making it bigger with each book.  I think I said once that the problem with Alien 3 was they tried to go smaller instead of bigger.  Alien had one alien terrorizing the crew of a ship.  Then Aliens had a bunch of aliens terrorizing people on an outpost.  So logically Alien 3 should have gone even bigger with lots more aliens terrorizing lots more people.  Like, say, on Earth.  But I guess for budgetary reasons they tried going back to one alien and a small group of people and it's just so disappointing.  I mean the prior movie you had Ripley blowing up aliens with machine guns and grenade launchers and flame throwers and then fighting the queen with the robot forklift suit and then the third movie they go back to fighting the alien with sticks or some shit like that?  How lame.

So yes we go big and then even bigger!  That's how you do it, Fox!

Like yesterday here are Sims of Joe/Jo and Kate/Kate:

And also here are the covers from the traditional version to the final version:

With this last one the girl growling is definitely pretty freaky and kind of how someone with this virus would look, though with sharper teeth and more blood and gore on her face.

Come back tomorrow for the exciting conclusion!

A Momentous Event

In the history of comic books, the "event" comic has a pretty long history.  The first major crossover event was the Battle of Fire and Water between the Human Torch (the original android one not the Johnny Storm one) and Namor the Sub-Mariner.  Mostly "events" would just be an issue or two until the 80s with DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths and Marvel's Secret Wars.  Since then they're pretty common since it's an easy way to make money with the main series and spin-offs and then you can have a whole new line of #1 issues after you reboot your universe!  Marvel pretty much has had one a year for the last 15 years, some of which you've heard the titles of like Age of Ultron and Civil War.

TV shows have gotten into the act in the last decade with crossovers.  Like when the CW has a story across all of its superhero shows.  Or NBC has a story that's supposed to crossover all its "Chicago" shows.  Or sometimes CBS would have the CSI or NCIS shows crossover with each other.

Though I don't write comic books or TV shows, I had an idea to do an event of my own.  Since I have three main author names--Eric Filler, Ivana Johnson, and P.T. Dilloway--I thought:  why not have all three screen names write a series of connected stories?

The thing is, I had to come up with something that could actually span three books.  Something where I'd be able to ramp things up.  Gradually it dawned on me what would work:  an outbreak!  An outbreak of a disease that causes men to turn into women and boys to turn into girls.  There have been stories like that before, though maybe not three-part stories.

I kept this idea in the back of my mind, but last November I finally decided to do it.  I had already come up with a rough idea for each of the stories.  The first story would introduce the disease.  The second would have it spreading.  And by the third it would have become widespread and there's some desperate Hail Mary to try to stop it.

Since Eric Filler is the bestselling of my three author personas, I figured he should lead things off.  The story I came up with then is called Infection.

It sort of follows an old horror movie-type formula:  there's a small town in Alabama where one night the sheriff is out on patrol and sees a truck overturned.  The truck has a trailer that's like the kind you use for cattle or horses but inside are the remains of people!  The sheriff opens the cab and is assaulted by a gorgeous woman in scrubs.  She basically tries to rape him, but he manages to fend her off, though in the process she gives him a hickey.

The sheriff starts to feel bad and so decides to go home and sleep it off.  The next morning he wakes up as a woman!  This of course freaks him out and his wife.  They come up with the story that he's an aunt to fool their young son.

As the sheriff is trying to figure things out, the next day he wakes up and he's even girlier, going from sort of a tomboy to more of the model type.  He's changing inside too, getting hornier.  When his wife rejects his advances, he starts going out on the town, which of course means it starts to spread.

For the most part it's a fairly standard Eric Filler gender swap story.  The idea is to get people's feet wet with something familiar.  There are some twists at the end to set up the next part of the series.  Which I'll talk about MAKING THE EXISTENTIAL REAL tomorrow!  (See, three books and three blog entries.  Whoa.)

Here's some bonus content!  I hadn't made any Sims for a while but I finally decided to make some for this series.  Here are the various forms of Sheriff Bobby/Roberta/Bobbi Guin:

For the covers I wanted to do something a little different than the usual kind I do.  I went through a few different versions before I decided on the final one.  I'm sure you'll like one of the others better.

The first version is like the usual sort of cover:

Then for the other version I tried a couple of different heads before I settled on the one I liked.  And I changed the position of the biohazard sign:

For the third one, not only does it fit but also while the lady looks hot she has sort of an evil Joker grin:

Check in for tomorrow's entry regarding the second book!

Sometimes the Squirrel Finds a Nut

As much as I ragged on Critique Circle for being a bunch of hyper-sensitive morons, sometimes someone there could make a good point even while being a hyper-sensitive moron.

While I was exiled from the forums for "2 weeks" I wondered if I could still post stories and critique them.  I could and I had a bunch of points saved up so I posted the first couple of scenes from the story I was working on, which I'll be talking about a week from now.

The first scene has a squad of army guys in Oklahoma City after it's fallen to sorta zombie creatures.  The army guys have been sent in to see what's going on in the city because satellites and drones can only tell so much.

The scene begins after things have gone to shit and they're running from the zombies to the tallest building in town, which according to Google was the Devon Energy Center.  Then they have to climb the stairs all the way to the top so they can get a helicopter out of there.

The story is told first-person by the commander of the unit, Dashiell (or Dash).  I thought I'd experiment where I did a couple of paragraphs at the beginning like they were his after action report.  Then I switched to what was supposed to be his personal journal.  I wondered if that might be too confusing.  Guess what?  It was.  Who's narrating now?  I don't get it.  I mean it says "From the Journal of Dashiell Fairborn" at the beginning so who do you think is narrating? 

Anyway, I think this guy must have been one of those conservative Christian groups or Mormon or something like that because any time I mentioned anything sexual he got all pissy about it.  He told me he stopped reading at a part where after they escape the zombies Dash has a briefing with a female scientist and he thinks she's sexy in a hot librarian way.  The guy whined it was "wish fulfillment" and stopped critiquing.  So, yeah, another hyper-sensitive moron.

But he did make a sort of good point.  That was that we didn't really know much about the characters.  And first I'm thinking, well, yeah because the whole first scene is them running from zombies.  It's not the time for heart-to-heart discussions about their hopes and dreams.

I think part of what he said was Who are they?  What do they want?  Well obviously they're military guys.  What do they want?  To live!  I mean, duh.  But if you go deeper to the unasked question, WHY do they want to live?

For some it would be a wife or girlfriend and/or kids.  But Dash doesn't have any of those.  Why does he want to live?  Mostly because he's a really rah-rah gung-ho soldier guy and doesn't want to lose the battle or war.

By the time I was finishing the story, some 80,000 words later, I realized that I had some inconsistencies in the beginning with the characters.  I pretty much pantsed the characters so I hadn't really defined them before I started except for names, general appearance, and basic function.  It was later on when more personal details started coming out as a matter of course when there was time for talk of hopes and dreams.

I decided to rewrite the whole first scene and start it earlier.  Instead of starting when things went to shit, I started on the helicopter ride in.  I added an embedded reporter to the team who talks with some of the guys beforehand so we can get a little more background and more of an idea of their personalities.  And I could line things up better with what I wrote later on.

The new opening scene ballooned to like 30 pages from maybe 5.  The word count went from like 86,000 to 94,000!  I think it probably is stronger now.  And I might not have considered doing that if that critiquer, as misguided as he is about sexual stuff, hadn't said what he said.

So there you go, sometimes the squirrel finds a nut--even if it's not the nut it's looking for.

FOMO Is Real And A Powerful Force

Recently I watched the Hulu documentary "Fyre Fraud."  Maybe you remember in 2017 there was this "music festival" called the Fyre Festival created by some guy named Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule.  All these rich Millennials went to this island in the Bahamas where all these bands were supposed to play...only no bands and instead of expensive villas they had FEMA tents and instead of fancy meals there were cheese sandwiches.  The whole thing was a disaster and McFarland wound up in prison, though not so much for the festival itself but financial crimes stemming from fundraising for the festival.

Anyway, at one point it talks about FOMO--Fear Of Missing Out.  They did a lot of social media promotion for this festival including having one of the Kardashian/Jenner women post something about it.  They especially courted "influencers" on Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter etc.  Influencers are people with lots of followers because they're so hip and in fashion.  And so all these dipshits then got all excited and wanted to go to this thing because they were afraid of missing out.

For the other half of my thought process, recently I started watching Season 2 of The Orville on Hulu as well.  The first season aired in fall 2017 and basically ended by the new year.  Fox in its infinite wisdom decided not to start Season 2 until December 30th of 2018.  So pretty much a full year between seasons despite that it's on network TV not streaming.

Anyway, I got thinking that the problem with shows like that is I just don't care enough to watch them right away.  There's no FOMO for me.  In part because I don't really like the show all that much but also because none of my buddies really like it.  I know at least one of the Geek Twins reviled the first season and my brother wasn't really into it either despite being a huge Trek fan.  Obviously no one at work watches it either so there's no "talk at the water cooler" about it either--if we had a water cooler so I didn't have to bring my own filtered water.

I used to watch The Flash on CW in large part because it was fun speculating on things with Michael Offutt on Twitter and his blog.  When we stopped doing that there was no real reason to watch the show anymore because I didn't like it that much and there was again no fear I was missing out on anything.

Contrast that to say Game of Thrones which shamelessly decided to wait over a year for the final season despite that filming wrapped months ago.  I do want to watch that because I don't want to miss out on the end of the series.  And I'm sure a lot of people are the same way.  That's why so many people watched the last episode of M*A*S*H and Cheers and Seinfeld and of course why hundreds of millions of people watch the Super Bowl, though mostly because they don't want to miss out on the commercials.

Books and movies can be the same way.  People read the Harry Potter or Twilight or Hunger Games books because "everyone else" is.  Billions of people will watch Avengers 4 and Star Wars 9 this year because "everyone else" is.

So you have to admit FOMO is an important thing in entertainment.  You can also call it "peer pressure" though then I think of after-school specials with some bad actor trying to force another to take drugs.  Whether we like it or not, we all watch or read or do things because we don't want to be the only one who isn't.

If you're lucky you can be like GRR Martin not write your anticipated sequel for 10 years and still have millions of people salivating to read it because they don't want to miss out.  Most of us are not so lucky.  If Eric Filler didn't publish another book, how many people would care?  Between 0 and 1.

FOMO is definitely a big part of psychology if you want to understand why things are popular.  Unfortunately it can go horribly wrong like with the Fyre Festival.

Now if only people had FOMO about voting; maybe there would be more than 30% turnout for elections.

Life is Pain. Deal With It.

A favorite tactic of newbs on Critique Circle was to post some garbage that was clearly not proofread and claim the story was professionally proofread already so thanks but no thanks on actually learning the craft.

Take this example:

Maya is a modern-day teen, born of extraordinary Native American blood. Her mother, Autumn, discouraged her from learning about her extended family’s superstitious customs; legends, dances, dream catchers, and Kachina dolls? Forbidden!

Look at that second sentence.  Why the hell is that a question?  You're stating a fact:  her mother discouraged her from learning about her family's customs.  There's no question.  And why is there a semicolon and not a colon after customs?  A semicolon is primarily used in two instances:  to join complete, related sentences or sometimes in a list if that list has subsets of things using a comma.  The latter is sort of like using a bracket inside a parentheses.  But neither of those cases applies.

So I said:

Poorly written queries, especially when they're rife with grammatical errors, send up red flags to anyone reading them. They're not going to want to read a whole manuscript like that. Learn your craft first and then worry about querying.

Yeah, I guess it's harsh but it bugs me that these newbs send off queries when they clearly don't have the skills yet to write a decent book.  It wastes the time of agents or their minions who have to wade through that dreck.  And I like to imagine this scenario where you have one writer who's done their work and written a polished query and manuscript and then you have someone like that up there.  If the agent or minion reads the bad one first, it'll probably put him or her in a bad mood and so maybe he or she isn't very receptive for the more polished one.  Or maybe the bad one makes the good one look better.  I suppose it could go that way too.  Still, you're cheating yourself and the agents/minions by submitting before you're ready.

But as I said the newbs on Critique Circle love playing this bluff where they say their manuscript's already done and edited, so no problem.  But the above author really took it personal and private messaged me:

I paid an editor to edit this, and all of the grammar and punctuation is correct. Saying that I should "learn my craft first?" Actually, you should know the craft before making incorrect assumptions and incorrect corrections on my query. The sentence that you said was not a question is in fact a question

LOL.  Um, how is that "question" a question?  If it's a question, what's the answer:  42?  If there is a question there it's pretty poorly written.  It's missing a word like, "Did her mother...?" or "Would her mother...?" "Should her mother...?"  Any editor who says that sentence was right is obviously not one worth the money.  Like I told this author, you should ask for your money back.

At pretty much the same time you had another newb with the same shit:

Both are trying to keep a low profile from ruthless jewel thieves ring who have already murdered a man.
All are fourteen-years-old.

And again, maybe I'm being a little harsh:

Anyway, from some of the errors ("from ruthless jewel thieves ring" "All are fourteen-years-old") I doubt you're ready to submit anyway. Take some time and work on your craft.

 But clearly you can't think this is your best work.

First he/she tries to laugh it off:

The story is finished and been beta read so that's not a concern. It's just that I can't write a query worth a toot.

Well no, that's not the issue.  Not being able to write a query affects the overall content and structure, not the basic grammar.  That's independent of being able to write a query "worth a toot" or not.

Then this author does that old newbie thing of singling out some other person for thanks, slighting not just me but a couple of other people who weren't as harsh.  It's a passive-aggressive dick move and I said about as much.  (Not that it's a dick move, but it is.)

To which the author whined:

I don't mind what you say to my work - you haven't read what I wrote, you haven't seen the final manuscript (which has been grammar proofed by a professional, btw) - therefore you cannot comment on that. But you did.

First that sentence doesn't really make sense.  I don't mind what you say...therefore you cannot comment on that.  How does that make sense?  The two halves don't add up to a coherent thought.  What's meant is that I haven't read the whole thing so I can't say you need to work on your craft.

Which is complete bullshit.  Of course I can still comment on it!  First off, naturally I CAN comment on it; you can't stop me from doing that.  Only the lame ass den mother moderators can.  Also, first impressions count.  The example I made (twice) is that if you go to a job interview in a stained shirt and wrinkled pants, it's not going to matter how good your experience and references are; the interviewer is going to think you're a slob.  If you come in with a poorly-written query with basic grammar errors, I'm going to assume you don't know what you're doing.  The impression you cultivate is on you, not me.

At this point the moderator came stomping in, deleting my post saying the gist of the last paragraph.  No one tell the newbs they aren't very good at writing and need to work on it.  Let them make all the errors they want because telling them otherwise might hurt their feelings.  And that's what's important, right?  Not hurting their delicate feelings, not actually helping them get better at writing.

I suppose their argument would be that you can do it without hurting their feelings.  But I've already posted a couple of instances here where I barely said anything and got an earful.  An earful of personal insults when I didn't personally insult anyone, not even these pathetic newbs.  Just because you take something personally doesn't make it a personal attack.

I told them to delete my account but instead they suspended it for "two weeks" that was more like three weeks.  After that expired I should have just left but I'm lazy so I decided to stick around...for about 10 days it turned out.  Then of course trouble found me or I found trouble--or both.

Someone posted this long request for information about broken ribs.  Not just in general but someone's mannerisms and on and on.  It had been a few hours so since no one had said anything yet I said, "Have you tried Google or sites like WebMD?"

And of course fragile newb got all pissy about that.  Again I didn't really say anything personal but they took it as a personal attack.  Someone finally did have an answer about broken ribs but then couldn't help himself from saying in another post, "I'd never tell someone to 'piss off' and look somewhere else."  To which I said I never said for anyone to piss off and all the hostility was from the original poster.  And he's like, Well, I didn't say you did.  To which I said, well no you didn't LITERALLY say it but the implication was obvious.

Finally in comes the moderator again with a snide comment that people (they know who they are) shouldn't try to start arguments.  Which I didn't try to start an argument.  I just pointed out the obvious.  If you want to know about injuries maybe go to a medical site instead of a writing site.  Anyway, that morning I had to scrape 1/4 of ice off my car and drive through icy slush to work so I was not going to take Barney Fife's bullshit.  In no uncertain terms I told the mod to take his "they know who they are" and shove it up his ass--all up in his ass.

So then they finally banned me.  Probably should have done that weeks earlier.  Because I...stated the obvious, told people they should learn basic grammar, said people don't have to pay $2000 for an editor, didn't like someone's query...what a fiend!  It's pretty much me and Hitler.  SMH.  I guess no one will hurt their precious little feelings now.

It seems in these groups it's usually like in hockey.  A guy crosschecks or slashes another guy, who turns around and slashes or hits him back.  Guess who gets the penalty?  The guy retaliating.  These dumbass newbs overreact to something and lash out at me and I'm the one who gets in trouble for giving it back to them.  When am I ever going to learn?  Never, probably.

The saddest thing is now I can still play Hangman but it doesn't count it in the statistics.  Unless I use another email to set up a new account.  Bwahahahaha.

Anyway, where am I going to get fodder for blog entries from now?

Am I Crazy or Are They Crazy? The Conclusion

Previously on my blog...

I posted a query I thought was bad but other people thought was awesome:

Dear [agent name],
 [intro paragraph personalised to agent, saying why I'm querying them specifically – I might put the genre, wordcount, and comps here instead of in the paragraph towards the end]
 Ana D is good at getting what she wants. As a law student and only child of two diplomats, she couldn’t be otherwise. When a car crash on a deserted stretch of New Zealand highway leaves Ana lost in another world—a world of swords, magic, and very iffy legal systems—all she wants is to go home.
 To do so she must master her own magic, placing her faith in the aid of the moody and enigmatic Ciro—a magician with an origin as foreign as her own. Ciro tells her stories of prophecies, chosen ones, and Malac, an exiled prince of a dying race, who seeks multi-world domination. Tall tales, Ana thinks—until a nearby town falls victim to the widening cracks Malac is making between dimensions.
 Should Malac succeed, the worlds he deems worthless will be destroyed. The remainder will be linked with permanent portals, reducing the logistical challenges of pandimensional tyranny. Millions will die. Billions will be enslaved. But not yet. Total devastation is time-consuming, and Malac’s species long-lived. Several human generations will pass before dimensions low in magic, such as Ana’s, could face the effects.
 As the walls between worlds tear, Ana is torn between two lives. To go home to the family she loves, the world where her battles would be contained within a courtroom. Or to stay and stand by Ciro, and her lover, Elric, as they join a greater fight.
 [Fart] is a 119,000-word Science Fantasy story that traverses worlds of medieval magic and futuristic technology, blending epic fantasy and dystopian science fiction with a strong romance subplot—think Robert Jordan’s Eye of the World meets Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander, meets The Ghost in the Shell.
 I hold a PhD in psychology*. My research, focused on the development of empathy and social cognition, has given me a deep understanding of how experiences and social interactions shape people and relationships throughout life. I am a child of immigrants, and the initial draft of Fray was written while I was living temporarily in France, unable to speak the language and trapped in a tiny apartment by the Normandy weather. My experiences of emigration are reflected in Ana’s story.
 If [Fart] appeals to you, I would love to send you the full manuscript.
 Thank you for your time.

And I talked about a chicken story I thought was lame but other people loved.  And I wondered if it's just me or them.

Then Cindy Borgne commented:
I found the query interesting. The writer seems to have the world and characters defined well. I agree it is too long, but it did make me curious to know more. The chicken story sounds like a comedy. I'm not sure about it. If a bunch of boring stuff happens, then I wouldn't like it. Most of the stories on CC I don't like, and you will probably feel the same way.

And something clicked in my brain.  There are pictures where two people can look at them and see two different things.  Like one where you can see a vase or two people's faces depending on if you look at the white space or the black space.  I think something similar happens when different people read things.

When I read queries on these sites I read mostly for the plot.  So I read a query like above and the story seems bland and cliche.  But someone else might look at the world building stuff and think it's really interesting.

Or that chicken story I was reading it as a story and there didn't seem to be a point to it.  Other people might simply have found the narration charming and interesting.  Thus they liked it and I thought it was lame.

I imagine agents and editors are probably the same, though I can't attest for certain.  It is a deeply subjective business after all.

So am I crazy or are they crazy?  Maybe we're all crazy.

Insecurity: Am I Crazy or Are They Crazy?

One of those things that can really get annoying on critique groups is when you say something that's sane or reasonable and then you get a bunch of dumbasses who say something contrary and those are the ones who get listened to, mostly because they're telling the poster what he/she wants to hear.

Take this query from December:

Dear [agent name],
 [intro paragraph personalised to agent, saying why I'm querying them specifically – I might put the genre, wordcount, and comps here instead of in the paragraph towards the end]
 Ana D is good at getting what she wants. As a law student and only child of two diplomats, she couldn’t be otherwise. When a car crash on a deserted stretch of New Zealand highway leaves Ana lost in another world—a world of swords, magic, and very iffy legal systems—all she wants is to go home.
 To do so she must master her own magic, placing her faith in the aid of the moody and enigmatic Ciro—a magician with an origin as foreign as her own. Ciro tells her stories of prophecies, chosen ones, and Malac, an exiled prince of a dying race, who seeks multi-world domination. Tall tales, Ana thinks—until a nearby town falls victim to the widening cracks Malac is making between dimensions.
 Should Malac succeed, the worlds he deems worthless will be destroyed. The remainder will be linked with permanent portals, reducing the logistical challenges of pandimensional tyranny. Millions will die. Billions will be enslaved. But not yet. Total devastation is time-consuming, and Malac’s species long-lived. Several human generations will pass before dimensions low in magic, such as Ana’s, could face the effects.
 As the walls between worlds tear, Ana is torn between two lives. To go home to the family she loves, the world where her battles would be contained within a courtroom. Or to stay and stand by Ciro, and her lover, Elric, as they join a greater fight.
 [Fart] is a 119,000-word Science Fantasy story that traverses worlds of medieval magic and futuristic technology, blending epic fantasy and dystopian science fiction with a strong romance subplot—think Robert Jordan’s Eye of the World meets Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander, meets The Ghost in the Shell.
 I hold a PhD in psychology*. My research, focused on the development of empathy and social cognition, has given me a deep understanding of how experiences and social interactions shape people and relationships throughout life. I am a child of immigrants, and the initial draft of Fray was written while I was living temporarily in France, unable to speak the language and trapped in a tiny apartment by the Normandy weather. My experiences of emigration are reflected in Ana’s story.
 If [Fart] appeals to you, I would love to send you the full manuscript.
 Thank you for your time.

To me, this query pretty much sucks.  It's 413 words and that's without any personalization, so it could get to 450-500 words.  That's close to twice what you should really shoot for.  And after all those words, how much do we really know about the story?  This woman from our world gets sucked into a fantasy world (a total cliche by now) where she has magic of some sort and has to overthrow a bad guy...somehow.

This person had pretty much submitted the same query weeks earlier so to me this was a minimal improvement if anything.  But other people loved it!  It's great!  I loved it!  I'd ask for pages!

The latter is especially dumb to say.  I mean you can say you'd ask for pages but you're not an agent.  Or an agent's minion--presumably.  You don't see dozens if not hundreds of queries five or six days a week for 52 weeks a year.  So to you maybe this stands out but to an actual professional it probably wouldn't.

It was kind of annoying because then the author and a couple of these overly positive people were having their own little circle jerk about it while I'm just shaking my head.  It got especially frustrating because at the same time a couple of other threads were like that.  It seemed like I'd become Bruce Willis in the 6th Sense; I was a ghost there but didn't realize it.

Probably the most frustrating was this one person had emailed me and said how much they liked my crits...then ignored my advice to listen to that moron who's been flogging the stupid teddy bear story for the last 5 years.  And my advice was perfectly reasonable:  Is my story sci-fi or urban fantasy or what?  Don't worry about it.  If you can't decide don't mention a genre in your query and let the agent decide.  I mean most agents represent sci-fi and fantasy together so it's not really that important that you decide what exactly it is.  Or go on Amazon and look for a book like yours to see where it's classified.  Nah, I'd rather spend pages and pages commiserating with someone who's sold exactly 0 books.  Gah!  It's so annoying.

I posted a story for critique and someone critiqued it so I critiqued the story he had up.  It was about chickens who talk and teach this kid swear words.  Which is what it says in the beginning.  Then it rambles for 2,000 words about his father haranguing a professor about chickens, painting the chicken coop, and shooting animals in the balls with a pellet gun, and then finally gets back to the talking chickens to say...that the chickens talk.  For...reasons.  It just ends.  Wait, so what's the deal with the chickens?  Are they magic?  Is there some secret chicken language?  Are they from a parallel universe?  WTF?

But three other people reviewed it and they just loved it.  It was so awesome!  You should publish it!

It makes me wonder:  am I wrong about this?  Do I not know what I'm talking about?  Am I crazy and these other people are sane?  I don't know.  It doesn't make sense sometimes.  Maybe I am wrong and these stories and queries really are awesome and should be published.  Who knows?

The Proof is in the Reading

In the argument over paying editors I talked about yesterday there were people who said you can't proofread your own book.  You have to pay someone to do that!  Which I think is pure bullshit.  Look, if you want to think of yourself as a professional writer you should be able to proofread to the level of basic competence.

This is another "controversial" thing that really shouldn't be.  A writer who can't proofread is like a surgeon who's afraid of blood or a peanut farmer with a peanut allergy:  he's pretty well fucking useless.  I guess in our lazy entitled culture maybe you can just slop down words on a page and pay someone to proofread it and pay someone else to do the "developmental" editing.  Why not just pay someone else to write it for you too?  And pay someone else for an idea?  Why do anything at all?

In an episode of King of the Hill I watched a couple of months ago Hank Hill takes his son Bobby to work where he sells propane and propane accessories.  Before anyone can sell propane grills, Hank makes sure they know all about propane and how to wipe propane tanks.  His son is baffled by this.  Why can't I just sell the grills?  And the answer is that Hank wants his people to actually know what they're selling.  When Bobby ignores this he eventually gets in trouble because he doesn't have any idea what he's doing.  So for instance he tells one guy that a grill will work great for a huge thick steak...and then it doesn't.  And he sells someone 50-gallon tanks when they need 100-gallon tanks or whatever the exact numbers were.  He finally realizes that maybe his dad actually knows what he's talking about.

By the same token you should know at least the basics of how to proofread or else how do you know what you're doing?  Even if you still pay someone to do it for you, how will you know they've actually done something?  Or if you ever do get to be a rich, famous writer maybe your publisher would appreciate it if you didn't have manuscripts that look like a fourth-grader wrote them.

Some people though seem to think proofreading is something akin to magic.  I don't really understand that.  I'm not a grammar Nazi or anything but I think I have at least a basic competency.  Like I know which they're/there/their or your/you're I should use.  Stuff like that.  Some of the finer points not so much but then your average reader probably doesn't know that either.

I mentioned yesterday how someone trying to show me up said "He doesn't know the difference between proofreading (which MS Word does for you) and developmental editing" and how ludicrous that was because MS Word is a pretty shitty proofreader.  I think part of the problem though is people really do think the computer can find the stuff for you.  If not Word then some app like Grammarly or whatever.  But again those aren't guaranteed.  It's just better to use your own fucking eyes and brain.

Maybe a lot of it is just laziness.  To proofread something you have to actually read the whole thing at least once, if not more.  Most of my books are short so it's not that hard to do but I suppose if you wrote a 1000-page epic fantasy it might be a pain in the ass.  I can see where it'd be easier to just pay someone else to do it.  Easier, yes, but to me that seems like throwing money away.

I'm not a "car guy" by any stretch but there are things I can do myself like change the windshield wipers or a flat tire.  Sometimes I wash it with the hose instead of going through the automatic car wash.  The point being that I don't pay someone to do what I can do myself.  That just doesn't make sense to me.  But I guess all the people on writing message boards are independently wealthy playboys--and playgirls.

The only exception to this is if you have some learning disability so you can't really read through something all that effectively.  Otherwise it's better to do your own work as much as you can.  It'll save you money and you'll know that your product is really your product.