I came across this today and unfortunately, it’s not at all uncommon for amateur writers, especially young, immature amateur writers, but I thought it would make a good cautionary tale that people can learn from.
There was someone who popped up on Reddit with a rather silly idea for a major mechanic in a book and even when everyone pointed out just how unrealistic, unworkable and downright ridiculous it was, he kept demanding that he wanted to do it, no matter how badly it would all turn out.
These people need to grow up.
I ran into someone who was trying to decide if they should do NaNoWriMo in November and asked my opinion. Personally, I don’t because the only thing that it’s worthwhile for is getting yourself writing consistently. I already do that, so what’s the point? But sure, let’s talk about it.
I’m in the midst of writing another book. I started last Monday and I expect to be finished in 4 weeks. That’s nothing new. However, there is something that I’ve noticed as I’m writing, that there will be a point, hopefully toward the beginning of the book, where everything will just click and from that point on, the whole story just comes together. Today was that day. Here’s what happened.
There are some shows that I don’t even start watching until they finish their season so I can binge the whole thing. One of those, until very recently, was Prodigal Son. The first season was excellent, although certainly not perfect and most things with Michael Sheen, I tend to like.
I’ve come to a conclusion of late. It just isn’t fun collecting anymore. It isn’t just one thing, it’s everything. It’s completely lost it’s luster and that has nothing to do with what’s being collected.
Now most people know that, if you’re going to be selling books, no matter where you’re going to sell them, series do a lot better than single books. It’s because, every time you release a new book, new people will see it and go back and buy up your back catalog. It’s why I very rarely ever do single books, not because I’m just out for money but because I tend to write much larger, sweeping tales.
This has become a problem of late, or maybe I’ve just noticed it, but on a lot of video game subreddits that I follow, lots of people have decided that they’re just going to whine about things they don’t like and demand that the devs fix it to match their expectations.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, but I have a friend that I’ve known for close to 40 years now and he’s an author. Sort of. By that I mean he publishes a lot of books on Amazon. Sort of. But if there’s a way to do it wrong, I think he’s found it. And now, I just can’t say silent about it any more.
So I finally sat down and watched this thing, and honestly, we were all putting it off as long as we could. My daughters wanted to watch it and less than a third of the way through, both of them got up and left.