I’ve been watching some videos from Sci-Fi Odyssey over on YouTube recently, not really because I find them to be great, but because I’ve been bored. That’s not to say that they’re bad, because certainly, they’re not, I just find his take on things to be “interesting”. I say it like that because I simply do not agree with some of his overarching ideas. He seems to think, again, from my limited exposure, that science fiction must, by necessity, be hard, meaning it’s got to be scientifically plausible to be worthwhile.
That’s not how it works, though.
I’ve seen this too much lately and I just had to say something about it. Tons of people seem to think that writing for publication, it’s just something that you can do on a whim, that you don’t have to put in any effort or cost, everyone owes you automatic success, so there!
I ran into this today, although it isn’t at all uncommon, and I thought I’d write about it because it does come up so often. An author on Facebook decided to whine that “nobody likes my books!”
Today, I finished up another book. It was the third book in the third trilogy of a series that’s going to go fifteen by the end. It came in around 140k, which was completely fair and about as expected. Now, I set it aside to breathe while I start working on a new book, this time, another series where I’m on book four of a thirteen book series.
Right now, I’m kicking myself. I’m getting close to finishing the ninth book in a series that will ultimately be fifteen books long. It’s been going really well, everything is coming along as I’d hoped and, if nothing went wrong, I’d be done by the end of next week, somewhere between 130-135k words.
I’ve officially given up trying to help most people with writing because they don’t want any help. They just want comforting platitudes and I’m not going to blow smoke up anyone’s skirt.
I’ll never understand how people can try to get attention by riding on the coat tails of their well-known relatives, as though who you know or who you’re related to matters. Someone popped up on Reddit and said “my father was James P. Hogan, ask me stuff!”
You’ll notice that I haven’t written a lot about my writing this year. I’ve talked about the writing community and how disappointed I am in it, but my own work, not so much.
Here we go again. Someone showed up on Reddit, demanding, not asking but demanding help for their book. Well, the book they want to write since they haven’t actually put “pen to paper” to be anachronistic. They “want to write” but they haven’t actually done anything, but they sure want everyone else to help them to be successful, in the off-chance that someday, they actually accomplish something.
In my apparently ongoing attempt to explain why amateur writers get it all so terribly wrong, we take a look at why so many go so completely wrong because they don’t have the slightest clue what they’re writing or why.