Reading…

I decided to sit down and read actual books purely to get off social media and keep my hands full so I wasn’t passively scrolling. And I managed to plough through a bunch of stuff I took way too long to read as a kid. But I must’ve made more progress than I remember given I finished the main books available from both Anne Rice’s major chronicles, some of them coming out roughly the same time I was getting up to them. I knew of the first three books, but I saw copies of others on a shelf at my friends’ house, whose dad had filled the entire wall of their main hallway and other walls in their house with shelves of books and I saw Body Thief, and being devoid of internet from it not being popular yet, I really had to depend on seeing books in the wilderness to know they existed, I don’t think my copies had them listed in the “Also By” section. (I may have actually seen Queen of the Damned without knowing about it, my memory’s sketchy) I bothered to read Vittorio after decades of shunning it, so aside from the last two Lestat books, I’ve read all the original Vampire Chronicles now. Anyway, I read Witching Hour in maybe a week and a half, then got sick of Lasher’s waffling I scanned some chapters and now I’m trying to read Taltos, all of which took maybe a better part of a year after I got them. And this was after I said I was done with Vampires and my new shit was witchcraft. The books were all out by the end of 1994 and I don’t think I got on board with Anne’s stuff until 1996. I don’t remember if I asked for the Witching Hour if someone bought it for me, I am actually sketchy on my interest in it as opposed to the Vampire Chronicles which wasn’t even over. I could’ve fucked with her other series including the Jesus books but I wasn’t interested at all.

Either way, I realised I did not format my print books very well at all. I was obsessed with having chapter pages on the righthand side, so I’d left full blank pages in them, and I didn’t really double check this when I got them. I decided to fix them all but what I realised reading these books… they had mistakes in them. Minor, easily detectable errors early on in the text, when the editing process is fresher and your brain isn’t turning to mush trying to proofread everything. And I realised the stupidity of telling me to submit a “perfect” manuscript to publishers. Soon as you make them money, they’ll take your barely polished drafts (which I’m sure they did with Stephen King) just to get them on the market. So whenever I was rejected, I couldn’t tell if it was me being bad or just not proofreading properly. I have sent messy as fuck manuscripts but when I did think I’d sent something good, I figured it was bad because of errors and not because it was simply not good. I just kept thinking, won’t someone fix the minor shit or ask you to do it? I couldn’t even trust my last publisher to do it right. I did a very cursory review when I went to print copies on Amazon, I remember I accidentally nuked my laptop harddrive using find my iphone or something and told the iPad to erase my laptop remotely by accident when I was editing one book so I should’ve gone back over it again but didn’t. Even then, I’ve corrected them all multiple times from obsessing over misused vocab or some other unforgivable error. Seeing professionally edited books from major publishers with obvious errors now just drives me insane, I had them before I went to uni so I wish I’d seen it and shoved it in the faces of these authors and say, “How the fuck did this get to print like this? Really?” 

Anne requested her editor not do any structural work on her manuscripts, so she couldn’t get in fights I guess like she did with Interview, which was allegedly heavily edited, and Vampire Lestat was also edited by this person I believe, but after the third book, Anne had to finish and edit her own work, and I can see what went wrong. She made out she crafted so much of the books but they needed an editor, I’m sorry. They’re repetitive and annoying at points, they’re overly detailed, and the details repeat. It’s not like how in a symphony or a score you have theme and variation which builds and compliments every passage, and the variations come in based on the mood of the piece, or a chorus that reinforces itself each time. It’s just repetitive. Other people can appreciate the imperfections, and the lack of restraint, which I understand, but it’s like authors are kind of given carte blanche to really go off, and that’s how you get Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher. (That and pills, and It by way of coke binges) Someone also compared her to King and he also decided to “sack” an editor and people are way too fucking forgiving to their beloved authors over this, I’m sorry. Kill your darlings, 

Also, it’s worth pointing out both authors have been very detailed with literal pedophilia and aren’t banned or restricted or even critiqued with the same gusto new authors seem to face. I’ve heard more than one avid reader who has chosen to completely disregard reams of well written prose for being too waffly and boring, they want to get back to the story. Even the editor I met, who knew nothing of me, praised my ability to be concise with some descriptions so it wasn’t affecting the pacing. Even long passages of historical context can be ignored if your reader didn’t sign up for a fucking history lesson. And to be fair, Anne isn’t entirely guilty of this, she’ll pepper the history in with more restraint. I could stand to do more but I always lapse into dialogue and action when I write since I’m only doing it for me now and I already have the images in my head. I’m not providing enough in some cases. There is a middle ground if you can balance it. But most of the people I found on her Reddit about this issue were annoyed her ego got in the way of an editorial process, she just wanted the comfort of having creative control, but you’re also told to never avoid someone at least proofreading your work other than you. Don’t ask family or friends to do it, they won’t see certain things, best they can do is give vague feedback. I hired an editor for “insurance” thinking it would make me more relaxed about my final product going to print but I was just as bad with paranoia over mistakes, both times I used her. My attention to detail degrades the longer I’m looking for errors and trying to perfect so I do miss shit no matter what.

One author was strung up for publishing paedophilic content recently when it turned out her audience wanted her to suffer for being unChristian more than anything, and all I could think was, damn, they must’ve never read any other books in their life. There’s a severe amount of insanity in older books, not just Lolita, which you can excuse with an unreliable narrator excuse, these are worse. Anne genuinely thinks a fifteen year old main character can have repeated trysts with a middle aged character, and somehow, that older character is now just a pervert around younger girls, which is never established in the Witching Hour. Michael’s first encounter with Mona is her riding his shoulders, and the book calls her “little Mona”, inferring she’s barely seven. I think it was maybe a retcon of sorts on her part to introduce her in Lasher as a coquettishly dressed thirteen year old, which solves nothing, but she really leans into Mona being a precocious Lolita type wise beyond her years who’s also unashamedly sexually active and has already bedded other Mayfairs before Michael (and I have no idea if he ever learns his own lineage with the family via Julian Mayfair). I hate what Anne’s done to his character and maybe AMC decided it was better to exclude him because he effectively becomes an excused hebephile (who assumes Mona is much younger so her being thirteen means nothing). It’s all out there and since nobody read it they can’t get offended. I think AMC also just nixed Mona for the same reason, so much of her character is rooted in being sexually and mentally precocious, and they were so careful in casting the new version of Claudia as being far older and only sexually active with age appropriate characters. But again, they caved to what the audience assumed was going on in the text.

I could go on and on about Claudia being the epitome of weeb logic but she begins her journey as a vampire as a child. The way Kirsten Dunst manages to portray her mental development is incredible for someone of 12. I think the movie handled the aspect of her and Louis with a lot of grace and tact, it wasn’t like a Luc Besson scenario where he was just retelling his real life relationship with his very underaged girlfriend. (And I’ve been fine with some of his crap but see why others weren’t). Louis and Claudia are effectively Parisian it’s no excuse. But you can’t point to any genuine sexual abuse in the book, the emotional abuse comes from her adult mind being fixed in a child’s body. People referring to her as Louis’s lover is more putting an indictment on Louis’s relationship with her when it’s still couched in codependency. Claudia chooses a mother to protect her but still wants Louis as her father-figure. I wish people would actually read the fucking book properly and stop looking for shit that isn’t there. It’s in Lasher, it’s blatant, it’s not in Interview.

I’ve been reading proper books is what I came to discuss, I’m in tangent town. I could have spent more time formatting my stuff but it is a tedious process which is worth farming out to someone, I wanted a publisher purely for this shit, and the one I found was so bad at it she had no business doing it, and really she did bugger all since we had to send the documents to her left-aligned and with ten page or longer chapters, but the end result was awful. I’m sorry. People who did figure out how to do this did better jobs than her with this nonsense. I don’t have the patience, I lost a font from one of my documents, and tried to get fancy with decals and it made my editing process harder. I used to get screwed by minor margin changes but it was fine this time, and I tend to get so impatient with the process I wouldn’t do it for others. I looked into manuscript formatting and it was costly, but I’m pretty sure Fiverr people can do it much cheaper. I always grapple with my covers, I love them on one hand for being original, I hate them on the other hand for the same reason, they’re not typical enough, or professional enough and I can’t afford to redesign them, it’s why I decided if anyone ever took my shit over, I’d rather they do professional revisions and rerelease them rather than me give them new shit. Or if I did something new and they wanted the rest, they’d fix them. But we can’t trust publishers anymore. Soon as AI becomes part of this process it lurks in the background and you need to be so aware of hidden clauses on this in contracts.

Either way, now I know Anne was self-editing that has to be the reason for the absolute blatant errors I did pick up. Yes, they were few and far between but they were obvious, something a standard proofreader would’ve identified, but apparently these were just going out of style in general. Anne herself actually could’ve recognised these so now was it a case of she agreed to give them the final manuscript and the publisher absolved itself of any print errors because she signed off on that version? Because I’d have argued to the company, fuck, can we at least get a basic proofreader in so we don’t look like idiots? No, the writer has final say in this case so yeah, you’re going to print with a flawed final manuscript. You’ve chosen that option, and the name is selling the books so maybe you legitimately do not care anymore. The dumb Google AI is certain proofreaders still hold merit and value, but it’s not showing even in older books. It really is a case of rushing to capitalise on a trend rather than waiting to produce a polished product, but why are best-sellers not getting more shit for this egregious, embarrassing disregard, meanwhile I’m expected to submit polished manuscripts of a certain calibre to be recognised? Make it make fucking sense.

I tend to end up on Reddit where you can get a basic vox-pop idea of the public consensus on certain issues plus anyone who disagrees with the core post. It’s always been an industry issue to have errors in books so what makes me fucking mad is how I was badgered into producing word-perfect material in uni and basically told it would’ve been fine without the couple of spelling errors, but I genuinely don’t remember being properly critiqued on my actual stories. The last guy who was the local author told me to do one story well rather than three and graded me harshly compared to other units, I was so disappointed with his feedback, but on the whole, my creative work was graded pretty high. 

The amount of actual fiction work I did and handed in was minuscule. I don’t even remember handing in actual prose in second year, my screenwriting classes wound up being my creative outlets that year, I turned in poems for one assignment I wrote in hospital, I don’t remember if I did it out of laziness and not having a prose idea, but second semester I think my only creative shit was screenwriting and my treatments were longer than my short stories. So I wasn’t getting the feedback I needed until the very end. My first major fiction assignment also did really well even with certain mistakes, so again it was like, “this is great!” which is fine unless you need critical feedback. It was getting the low score in the one unit I was pissed I had to wait until third year to do that broke me and ruined the whole experience. I think the same author was assigned to mark my final project and another previous theory lecturer did instead and gave me a decent grade, and until then he would’ve only graded essays from me. (He also spent one class praising everyone for their work then handed my essay back with a low grade, which surprised me. Then everyone was trashed for the following essay and I got a better grade. I had a similar experience in high school English where the class was derided for an essay I personally struggled to do and even turned in a draft that was rubbished, but then my grade came back exceptionally high and one student protested this while I’d been sitting there plugging my ears in anxious agony of my result). 

I don’t know if I just failed to pick enough creative practical units but I wrote so little for school and nothing for myself, which is probably a big reason the whole thing depressed the shit out of me. I hated it realising I’d signed up for another three years of school and exams when I wasn’t recovered from high school, that summer between didn’t prepare me, I wanted to believe it would all be so amazing and freeing but I couldn’t even make it through first semester first year complaining I wanted to drop out and get a job at McDonalds. And now everyone knows the pressure you get in high school is redundant and cruel; your scores mean literally nothing to anyone outside that, even the fucking university lecturers won’t ask your scores knowing you can get into our colleges by other means which have made the ranking score just as redundant. Plus, they will tell you outright whatever got you an A in high school will not get you an equivalent in university. Just all the work I did do in high school and college meant next to nothing at the end when I had no job. And now my degree hinders the perception I receive from other people who don’t believe I’m autistic, I pulled off non-autistic people feats even they don’t always pull off, I achieved something considered significant but then the emphasis on the importance of college experience is so diminished even telling people you have a degree, they only vaguely think of it as a major accomplishment only very smart, educated and stable people achieve so they elevate you and act impressed when nowadays, schools have lowered the bar for graduation down to high school levels to avoid being seen as a bad institution and have the highest graduation rates. I’m rambling because I was taught to be absolutely perfect then saw so many imperfect, terrible books being published and do well purely from public hype and the infamy surrounding it. People buying a book to see what the fuss is about and hating it and deriding it means nothing to a publisher once your cash lands in their hands. They don’t care those same books wind up in secondhand stores. 

But I’m here, effectively traumatised and forced to be “perfect” reading books with glaring errors to the point I can’t cope with this hypocrisy anymore. Even professional proofreaders in that Reddit thread admitted mistakes can slip through multiple passes from multiple people, but I feel like that would be more a formatting mistake over a very blatant typo or misused punctuation. I even suffered for this in my day job with a letter that was rushed to print with a typo nobody picked up (and you have to understand some of those eyes belonged to people who did not give a fuck about their job) and our communications with our printing company were so antiquated we couldn’t just email the damn correction to them, we had to physically show up in the office of the printer and the system they used to upload documents was a needlessly complex FTP program that was secure but cumbersome. We were all chided by the manager but the process itself of simply correcting this one fucking spelling error was horrific and I had already been unravelling from the pressure of the secondment I was forced into because nobody accepted my refusal to do it. Now if I receive a poorly written email I’m just as triggered and angry, it’s only forcing me more and more into apathy I can’t afford to do work that needs to be perfect. The threat of imperfection drives me more insane from believing the consequences of it will be catastrophic and not simply embarrassing by way of appearing unprofessional. With creative stuff, it now feels like I was being told my biggest crime would be a typo, not a poorly written character or a weak plot line. The author did give me more constructive feedback but ultimately I was so discouraged by the experience, and this was all while being told getting traditionally published wouldn’t happen without an agent, but getting an agent was impossible without a trad pub under your belt already. And as I’ve said, the internet hadn’t even begun to impact on the industry, we were on the precipice of major changes in that realm, self-publishing on Amazon was less than a decade away, now if I went back to do the course, I’d be learning that as well instead of me being self-taught via trial and error. Amazon itself had (I don’t know if it is there now) its own spellchecking process but only found one supposed error in one book for me, it wouldn’t have seen misused vocab or anything grammatically wrong. The tragedy is rather than me let myself off for making a very common error or even having very well self-edited but imperfect work, I still hold myself and everyone else to a higher standard. Anyone even commenting on my work being “well-edited” affects me more than if they say it’s a good or bad story. You can trash my work based on anything else but tell me it’s badly edited and I want to curl up and die.

I had to go see when spell checkers were a thing and they’re older than I realised but not reliable when Anne was writing. I think her big thing in Lasher about Mona’s amazing computer was based on the machine she was using at the time. So refusing to even have someone run a pair of eyes over a bunch of glaring issues is so misguided. Spell checkers likely would’ve missed some things but a modern day one would pick up duplicate words at least, they’re still useless for certain words, I’ve had Grammarly specifically confuse a word they use as an example in their own online commercials. I’m not saying stuff still gets missed, I’m saying she needed someone to just fix the shit she missed, they could’ve kept their mouth shut about everything else, just weed out the obvious errors. I scanned the screenplay she wrote for Witching Hour which demonstrated she was good at getting shit on a page, mistakes be damned, and I do respect that but you don’t let that version go to print. I think her and King are notorious for this and even if  King claims he does six pages a day, something he admitted to poor George RR Martin, who just straight struggles with sitting down and getting shit done. Maybe if he’d been given time to finish the book series the show wouldn’t have been a mess.

I agonise over this shit and I have to work on dismantling my unrelenting standards now instead of strengthening them based on trying to do better as compensation for this fucking laziness. It’s all because I had it drilled into me but nobody said, don’t worry. Once you’re famous and can sell stuff on name alone, publishers will let you get away with it. Authors just flat out refusing to let anyone fix their work is absurd, they have access to these resources, they can afford to hire their own people but no, they get to submit whatever they like now. I don’t know if the transition between word processors and actual PCs made it so hard to proof printed copies since proofing on screen is a bad idea, if I’m serious I’ll sit with a document first but my editor was comfortable with her process. I’m also bad with change trackers. It’s the lack of concern that confounds me. I’m assuming she just never looked at her books once they went to print. Which I didn’t extensively to be fair and then I realised I’d left entire blank pages in the document. Stuff a professional publisher wouldn’t have done. I fuck up but I’m realising now I have kept my errors to a bare fucking minimum comparatively so if you insinuate my efforts are below parr I can demonstrate at least two books that did far worse.

Now I’m even more pissed I just lost my last paragraph. Anyway, I found one more egregious misused word and now I can’t even read the page I’m on in Taltos. I’m trying so hard to avoid going on her Reddit page and trashing anyone who said she is so wonderful she shouldn’t be tamed by editing and remind them, nobody wants to steal your words, just use the right fucking ones. That’s all I’m saying. It’s glaring and annoying, you don’t understand how infuriating this is for me, but I can say now, okay, my shit was just unmarketable, I can stop thinking it was my technical errors or mid proofreading and lazy editing. Like the process is hard to endure, I get it. I disagreed with some things but I also appreciate this person picked up where I’d used commonly wrong words, I was grateful for that. Be grateful for someone just fixing the little shit. I asked purely for that, most she did was reword some sentences to make it make sense, I’d rather that then get so fucking precious I don’t even care about the mistakes, all I wait on tenterhooks over is people finding those errors. Their opinion on the work itself matters but I can handle it better. I’m more amazed this shit wasn’t so obvious to me as a teenager but at the same time, I was unbidden and somewhat unhindered by a lack of a spell checker, or when I did have one, it wasn’t advanced enough to help me spell errant or mattress. I still cared enough, even now you see articles that don’t even bother to run a spellcheck at all. It’s barely a page, it’ll take five minutes at best. I don’t want to do this for a living. I’m fucking out. I’m done. This is as mad as I’ll ever get on this blog. I literally did the exact same mistake she did like a fucking hour ago but I fixed it. I think I take for granted having the digital era to fix this shit, back then there was a point you couldn’t take it back. Me having access to fix this shit gave me back my control.

Bad news that calmed me down

I need to send the Author’s Guild survey results to the last person who thought I could make bank (she thought $12000 was “fine”) off this. I would write a heavily worded, insulting email to go with it. By US standards, you’re not living above the poverty line, self-published romance does the best, so anyone churning that out on Kindle Unlimited is doing better than some established people. End of the day, the more you end up with in your pocket before everyone else gets theirs is how you survive. It’s less likely to be sustainable without related work or selling your IP to multiple companies. I was surprised people like Tolkien wanted a movie deal at that point, I feel that period is so divorced and distant from modern day when I think of these people in “modern” terms I see them as anti-adaptation, or it’s their estate full of relatives who have no talent needing a big deal to live off. It’s cynical, I know, but it’s how I see rich, famous authors who deserved to be rich and famous.

As a kid, I thought the gatekeepers decided who was worthy of being published. I later discovered Valley of the Dolls was practically forced upon the general public but did exceedingly well regardless for something supposedly “trashy”. And pulp novels were trash. L. Ron Hubbard also inflicted his nonsense onto the general public and got his followers to sell out his books. Even now, the New York Times has to annotate any best sellers who self-inflated their numbers by buying their own shit then selling it on. They monitor self-inflated sales, and are protected under free speech to avoid being accused of mathematical inaccuracy. When you actually do some research into this, which is what they tell any sensible person to do, the facade is wiped away and the ugly truth comes out. But when you present that to the general (naive) public, they still call you pessimistic and somehow can’t let go of this notion of the rich author in their mansion doing nothing but writing books. Oh, you didn’t see Neil Gaiman taking a Masterclass deal, who’s now likely using his money to settle sexual assault allegations out of court, and prior to supported Amanda Palmer financially (who allegedly was also in cahoots with him on trafficking). You’re much better off staying out of the public eye and being reclusive now, and being thankful for the relative anonymity and pittance.

So I can’t say I’d have done “better” with a better deal. I know I wouldn’t have. I knew when I got the original contract this would get me nothing, and it wouldn’t boost me despite people assuming it would, I knew the publisher was so misguided with her SEO plot to flood the internet with blog posts. And she failed to make a good product. I’m glad I got my rights back and did it alone, but realistically, I need to put in so much money and effort to redesign these to be less obvious. I kinda had fun on one hand making my own shit but if I really wanted to be smart about this, I’d be out thousands. Nothing I do stands out in a good way, however I’m owning what I have done in light of me doing something with my talent. I got to pull something off that I couldn’t without the internet, I got to do so much for free or close to free, I got out there and did something. So when I see sad little headlines online that make people sad, I feel a bit better knowing I’m not crazy, I’m not pessimistic, and I’m not wrong.

Playing with AI

I’m not into putting in prompts for text but I am into throwing my descriptive passages into an image generator to see what comes out:

Danyir stood, letting her hood slip from her head to reveal the fullness of her curls. The blue cloak, fastened at the neck, opened slightly for him to see her dressed in a short tunic and dark leather trousers. Her height nearly matched his, her bare hands dainty but obviously capable of some strength. Though her cheeks were soft, her jawline was sharp, the fire catching the blue in her eyes.

I didn’t keep the prompt for this and just adjusted the text to specify details. It’s an interesting experiment for me since I’ve never been truly able to see something from my own head this way.

I don’t really want to make a habit of this but it’s kind of fun. I’m really just trying to see characters I made but some inputs are not allowed, apparently you can’t ask for naked people, oh well. Another one came out more cartoonish than realistic. I guess it’s just a silly little game I’m playing at the moment. You also really have to specify young woman as opposed to girl or teenager, it seems to age down on those descriptors. You won’t get me submitting anything AI if I was so lazy I could theoretically force a draft out of it then punch it up, like the industry wants us to do so they can justify paying us less. I hate the theft aspect of it, as much as I hate people who support clearly made AI media while getting mad at it being used sparingly to streamline a process. They can’t see it in front of them they only ever respond to it being called out specifically. NaNo organisers got it in the neck for allowing it to be used, they didn’t want to disqualify disabled entrants but everyone else got mad they’d allow that level of laziness for something that’s supposed to encourage you to create. I couldn’t find anything to confirm if Amazon had snuck through any AI “rights” without our knowledge, they’ve already changed contracts illegally, all I could see is them not allowing material, I don’t know if existing books can be legally used to train AI. It would be grossly hypocritical of them to allow that shit, especially considering anyone in an exclusivity Select program that makes publishing elsewhere unallowable. I don’t know. I was just screwing around with some prompts, I don’t need to think about legal ramifications.

An addendum to this in October 2025 is I do acknowledge I have been stupid with putting images in of myself to make cartoon versions or just to play with the apps. Given ChatGPT alone relies on natural resources to us and we’re all using it now basically without our consent via Google search means I’d prefer to limit my usage to what I can’t avoid. Even Blogger has an obnoxious little icon in the text field trying to get you to add links to your post by detecting keywords. I could’ve done with that when I was doing blogs for the publisher but the links I was supposed to use weren’t common anyway, so it would’ve found a bunch of popular sites over the ones I was meant to link to.

I Started (Another) Joke

I was pushed by my therapist (whom I don’t particularly like) to start submitting and querying and going through the hell of being “noticed”. Since then, I’ve signed up for an article website whose AI refuses to publish my articles for being too “bloggy”, written a short for a possible children’s book and queried a mentor who might take my government mandated disability insurance to assist me, posted another article to a previous magazine who did accept my original article, and sent a bullshit piece of fiction I wrote over a decade ago to a random publication via Submittable that wound up asking for money which I reluctantly paid (it was 13 bucks and I was so deep in the process, I could’ve paid less but I wanted a quicker response) and that was the most jokey thing I did all over. All of this, just to shut one therapist up and prove to her I’ll never get paid or be a successful author. I was fuming when we discussed it, even begging her to stop talking to me about it so I felt compelled to agree to shut her face up. I genuinely do not like her or the company she works for. They have clearly neurodivergent therapists who talk too much and can’t be relied on for anything, and their neurotypical therapists have no concept of reality when it comes to being a creator.

Right now I’m theoretically “living the dream” as a “self-funded writer” who isn’t even trying to make money because it won’t work out long term. I turned down a request for feedback, they were willing to pay but I really don’t want to read other people’s shit and have to compare myself to their stuff. I always do it, like I’m relieved when it’s bad but I don’t want to help them make it better if they surpass me, and I’m sad when it’s good because I can’t meet up. All morning, I’ve looked for one thing I could just hurl at anything on Submittable and this one had a closing deadline of one hour. I remembered this piece of crap I wrote on the tail end of a psychotic break, so it’s got that crazy bitch vibe but it’s still coherent but might be offensive and will probably get rejected. Again, all to say “I tried, bitch, it’s too exhausting, and if you push me on it, I’ll walk out.” I even extended my next appointment deliberately to avoid her. I am also doing a “me thing” for the purpose of “joy” but she thinks I can turn that joy into a profession and that’s where I wanted to lash out at her for being so fundamentally naive. I know me doing it for a living will suck the joy out of it. She was telling me to keep trying something I’ve made peace with and given up, so of course all this “trying” has fostered resentment in me whether it’ll pan out or not, I almost don’t want to give her any smug satisfaction of being right or for her to say I should be proud. I don’t like being told how to think or feel, regardless of the thought or emotion, I don’t want to be encouraged, which is why I don’t want to work with her anymore. I AM writing, I’m NOT lying about it the way I want to, and I WON’T be forced into freelance work. Most I can do is work for a company punching up short things, I can’t edit manuscripts properly, but I’m also struggling with the thought of getting a normal job. I’ve had enough as a writer, it’s my talent to use and abuse at my discretion, if you think you can motivate me to do more than I have to make this my job, you have another thing coming. 

There was a Facebook group dedicated to self-publishers earn 50K off 20 books on Amazon. Like if you can get one of each sold per day for a year at 7.50 a pop that’s 54K average. That’s not taking into consideration taxes I have to pay if I don’t periodically pay, cost of marketing to get that level of income, or the fact that one person’s strat may not work for you. OR that you have to pull it off year after year which is impossible. People are acknowledging getting a traditional contract or even writing for a company isn’t going to get you recognition or even a lot of marketing, they live by the “for every X famous author, there’s 1000 still living hand to mouth”. This is the reality people on the outside don’t see, or refuse to. I think my therapist knows people who’ve “succeeded” by trying, she even asked how much self-publishing cost, (I said it’s dependent on how you do it, and my method is not the cheapest), so if she’s trying to get my advice because she wants to be published, she can go fuck right off. I really don’t like her and she’s infuriated me long enough, (for other reasons as well, she’s made flippant remarks and I’ve left my sessions in tears more than once). I’ve also vented about this on my other blog and the vitriol won’t stop.

I will legitimately laugh my ass off if they accept the flash piece, and I’m not good at short story writing, I don’t even know if it counts in terms of structure, it has a beginning, a middle and an ending. It’s abstract and weird. It fits the length, and again, I can’t submit shorts because I don’t write shorts, I’m sorry I’m so used to being rejected and my dream to have “anything” published by “anyone, anywhere, in any context” existed in the hope it’d appease my desire. I can’t see myself being successful at this, it’s too fucking hard, I don’t have an agent, I don’t have a posse of people to pay to make me big, I don’t even have a fanbase, some people love me on Literotica and I have a good Goodreads average. That’s it. Leave me alone.

I’m also an incredibly impatient person and having shit sitting in the “submitted” review phase always pisses me off. I went through this privately, people don’t realise I have struggled with the process more than I was willing to admit. I was never a person who said who I pitched to, I always waited for a bite before I spoke up.

I did get a response back from the mentor now I’m trying to do due diligence to make sure my plan manager won’t fuck me over given it’s a bit artsy fartsy. Either I email the OT and tell her to stop looking for shit or I say nothing and make her feel like crap if she gets nowhere. (I’ll shrug it off obnoxiously if she’s “happy” for me) I’ll pursue this, the terms seem reasonable and cheaper than a mentor but more than I’d spend personally, I’m going with this with nowhere to go and no expectations or anything outlandish, and sorry, I feel nervous and uncomfortable and weird about even running this by the government in terms of my personal employment goals that weren’t in that field but were vaguely hinted at with the LAC, and I got uptight, I just don’t want people to get happy for me for doing this, this is hard for me. It hurts and makes me uneasy. It won’t end where I want it to, I’m just doing this to see if it’s even worth the bother, I said I was considering it, it’s just such a personal problem for me. I was shitty seeing State Library listings on Submittable too, all for things I thought I could’ve been a part of or recognised for, I hated a girl who had a book already published through that kid’s writer’s club I joined, meanwhile my submissions were knocked back. It didn’t matter what everyone around me said, I wasn’t good enough by industry standards. (But there’s also nothing to say this girl wasn’t financially supported by parents or had connections at least who got her that far). She was like the girl from my My Little Pony club newsletter with the huge collection, when my personal collection now is crazy enviable. I don’t think I’m going to have a trad pub kids book at the end of this. I fucking don’t. I’m sorry. (Plus seeing one of my personal heroes get a damn kids book published, something fictional, not just a memoir, that’s still a kick in the pants. You’ve no idea how demoralising it is seeing celebrities get handed this shit for no effort whatsoever, especially when they can also put next to no effort in and still profit tremendously and unfairly).

I thought I added that the magazine picked up my piece but I must’ve not saved it. Anyway, they took it and it’s been three years and ten days since the last one. Like it really was a low effort to get it up there and I don’t care all that much. I think you get a buzz from the “accepted” tag and the email was in my junk folder, so your brain just needs to see it to feel validated momentarily. I’m hoping to get out of the other OT agreement, so if that person found something, I don’t think I really care all that much, it could’ve been the same thing I found and the last thing I need is her getting on my case for refusing to get involved in a scam.

Twincest is never Wincest

I don’t agree with what’s going on with the Menendez Bros so this current infantilisation and romanticisation of them is bizarre to me. I don’t agree with the Monsters series being made by the guy behind the American Horror Story franchise, if at all. I’m not a fan of that series, even the one series I did watch, it was needlessly tacky and exploitative, I didn’t need to see Zachary Quinto doing stuff to Clea DuVall’s frozen corpse. I do like Sarah Pulsen, I’ve loved her since American Gothic, I wish her rise led to more people seeing that show and reviving it online. That show deserves more recognition for being a Sam Raimi thing.

The level of ego the creator of these shows exhibits is astounding. Telling a whatever, incest/sexualised depiction to “raise awareness” to the Menendez Bros case years after the fact is the lowest this guy’s gone to get attention. I did like the OJ Simpson series but that was also exploitative and made Rob Kardashian look more sympathetic than I refuse to believe and I’m tired of people erasing that from the Kardashian history. Don’t get me drunk and started on that.

I’d rather talk about this odd fascination with fandoms shipping family members in their fanfic or general obsessions. Pandering to that need by way of implying two real life brothers were sexually involved by way of assault and abuse is disgusting and silly. I try to let people off for fictional characters, the brothers from Supernatural have been shipped by fanfic writers and I don’t get why. Wasn’t it enough to ship one of them with a guy then get mad at the queerbaiting? There were characters in Degrassi people got annoyed about, specifically a couple who became step-siblings who’d continued their relationship in secret, that doesn’t make me sick. I don’t understand why people get so put off by it, PornHub’s famous for providing that scenario, I felt sorry for people who this happened to in real life, it’s not really fair to put two people in a situation they didn’t choose and be mad if they developed or had existing romantic feelings towards each other. And the entire romance in Clueless is founded on them being ex step-siblings that the father is still supporting as his kids. So that didn’t gross people out that much??? Make it make sense. Degrassi also had two twins kiss for five seconds, (well one kissed the other because she was a trainwreck character and they were cashing in on the Gossip Girl scandal based storylines). That was the end of it. It was kinda icky and silly and attention grabby but it didn’t bother me that much.

When it’s a storyline where two characters who are related are tricked into a relationship by omission or manipulation, then I can’t stomach it. If I know it happens in a movie, I won’t watch it. There was a weird indie game that included to half-siblings accidentally procreating and that made me uncomfortable, it seemed like a cheap twist to an already messy story. Or Jeremy Irons insisting male relations being sexual isn’t incest because he’s using the literal term of two related people having offspring and anything outside of that isn’t that, sorry brah, it’s still gross.

Maybe the Menendez Bros were victims of sexual assault, I’m pretty sure they were still guilty of murder and probably deserved to do time regardless. These cases were around when I was younger and without the internet you couldn’t verify or speculate beyond what the media presented so I thought they killed their parents for money and not revenge. I didn’t hear the court denied men could be sexually assaulted. I didn’t know they were even abused at all. And with OJ, I didn’t have much context until I heard Bill Hicks speak on it. I hate he got away with it. I couldn’t argue with American Crime Story. I can argue against people getting hot and bothered over criminals and the possibility of them being inappropriately involved. We didn’t need another piece on Jeffrey Dahmer, I didn’t know people were posthumously calling him a thirst trap. I liked My Friend Dahmer for the fact it didn’t feature the victims and focused on the incidents prior to the murders, but it was kind of lacking. I think depicting killers killing is horrible. We don’t need to see it. The Ted Bundy Netflix movie was okay. But I don’t love true crime the way other people do. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t have a morbid fascination with it. I don’t like crime dramas, I don’t like the tension involved. I hated the way a particular one ended, it was so cringy. I just don’t care enough to get that invested. I was a Serial junkie but I’m not anymore. I hate that didn’t lead to an acquittal and it stirred up the pot for nothing despite knowing NPR had no intention of doing this, it was accidental.

I lost my point, I was going to do something about twincest in relation to something else, the Menendez Bros triggered this post. I’m only harping on about people having issues with the step sibling thing compared to actively supporting actual incest. I understand the law in most places considers marriage and adoption/fostering as being familial relationships and prevents incestuous relationships, but I feel like, surely, if you had a foster family of unrelated kids, stuff’s bound to happen and being grossed out by that is kinda weird. I don’t even find the idea of distant cousins hooking up as funny, the royals are guilty of this. I don’t know what else to say I just think if PornHub can only limit incest porn to step-relations they’re never going to go as taboo as some people seem to want, and if you are into it, yeah, that’s pretty weird. Shipping two brothers for the sake of making a scandalous show you know people will talk about then hiding behind the “raising awareness” excuse is beyond the pale. Are we done now? I’ll stop excusing the step-sibling shit if we agree to stop sexualising actual siblings.

What I envied of others.

Looking at books in a library while shelving them, I realised what I was so envious about. And it was so tragically minor you’d think it wasn’t so impossible as it seemed to be. I envy the professionalism these authors got. That’s it. I envy they had a company that cared enough about the physical product to present it in a manner fitting publication and perhaps wider distribution. I had to promote a substandard product in both instances when all this stupid woman had to do was make my book look good. You’ll never catch me on the “never judging books by their covers” train. I was embarrassed and infuriated by the end results. I was so upset and I had to cover it all up with shrugs and dismissive comments. Then when it came time to fix these errors, they didn’t come through, they shut down instead. To have demands placed on me to market an inferior product, knowing that it deserved better in terms of editing and presentation, it was a complete and utter insult to have to accept. Even me asking nicely to fix one thing was met with a no, I can’t. You can, you just don’t want to pull it off the shelf even though you fucked it up. I assumed I would get final say on the cover, had I known that was what was going to print, I’d have stopped it, and she robbed me of that opportunity. Even if she was later willing to edit and reprint these, something that meant I was willing to tough it out, I can’t be sure it would’ve been better. I waited and waited for new copies. I hoped she’d fix the issues she created with pure negligence. She didn’t. I didn’t hate the interior of the first, just the exterior, I could live with the exterior on the second if she hadn’t fucked up the interior. I never would’ve let them go to print without prior review and approval. She needed someone else to look over that final pdf, all she had to do was send me a copy and I’d have told her what to fix. She wasn’t willing. She was too busy using outdated marketing methods and trying to get a podcast up and running at the expense of production.

That’s all I wanted, just something that would look like a real book. I go back and forth on whether my books look “real” when I know they’d be rejected by a store. Some poor blind, gay author had their picture book returned after the store couldn’t alienate their homophobic customers. People seem to think it’s “every” author’s dream to see their book in a store, sincerely it wasn’t ever completely mine, I just knew my shit deserved to be there regardless. It deserved to be presented properly. I didn’t need an audiobook or full scale marketing or any promise of profits. Just something I could look at and not be so angry with when I finally held it in my hands. I wish I could afford to get them all reprinted properly but I can’t. I try to live with them as is. 

At least the last reviewer I spoke to has been really professional about the ad she was willing to post for me, and she’s stayed in touch. I know it won’t make much difference, I would like someone to market these for me. The fact I was so open to just being in a well presented anthology or even a series as a ghostwriter, that’s how low my expectations were, I could accept anonymity provided the book looked good and my words were presented properly. I wasn’t the only one who just wanted to say they’d had one thing published as a bucket list item, but maybe I was the only one who got mad enough when the results were subpar. This is why anyone who’s proud of their self-published books has my admiration. They weren’t sullied by college professors telling them traditional publications were the only way to be taken seriously.

I bothered to look at the copies I had left (which I’d ordered for myself and other people and paid far too much for in my impatience to get the copies I was promised directly) and there’s attempts at professionalism ruined by laziness: page numbers not removed for front and back matter, alignment issues, cheapest paper possible used. (I can probably pinpoint the exact dimensions and paper type she chose). The novel’s front cover looks good, and I can’t blame the spine/back being off, that’s the stupid risk you take with Amazon’s printing services *, but I know exactly what she did. She created a passable file to get it within the standard print margins (she asked me to modify the second cover with this in mind, so she fucking knew I could make amendments, and she did let me send another copy, again had she sent me the pdf I could’ve picked up the major issue) but she had no intention of figuring out how to hide page numbers, she did the bare minimum to pass the print requirements. I know she’d picked up other people’s errors, it was like if she felt like putting effort into looking for errors during the flaccid formatting process (the website promises basic editing services, which again, it’s all I wanted her to do) It felt like the end result really was subject to how she felt on the day editing the material. And when I saw her produce an anthology properly that would’ve worked on other devices, I had genuine hope she could republish my shit just as well. It looked good, she showed capability then shit the bed. The one thing people didn’t like was the poorly formatted epub and .mobi copies she again rushed to print likely to satisfy their being “a version” on Kindle not the best version possible. I think I was the only person she worked with who had any experience with KDP printing and knowing what was required, but there was no way in hell I’d offer to help her fix the others.

I know there are a bunch of rightwing publishers now who’ll let shit books go to print with errors but they still manage to put more effort into shit that doesn’t have any business being in print. People who aren’t even good writers and who need ghostwriters to help them finish (I don’t hold this against certain people, with others, it proves they hadn’t the talent to even write their own story. I know others have written theirs from scratch and it was arduous for them) The public accepts celebrities need assistance in producing a book. But they tend to give passes to stuff that’s terrible.

I’ll never get over this it’s something I have to accept and move on from. Right now, I’m only interested in getting back on a payroll of some description, I’m kind of squandering my personal time and freedom with a lot of angst over shit I can’t change.

I thought maybe if I included some kind of logo on the back covers of the print books it'd look a bit more interesting. As it's transpiring, this is going badly for some more than others. The two I had professionally made aren't behaving as normal. Two are also giving me formatting errors on the actual books, I'm not prepared to fuck about with any of this to make it work, so I'll go with the ones I can amend and leave those I can't. It's not that big of a deal, again nobody's buying these books, I don't even know if Amazon will load the new back covers since it's refused to on one already, so me doing this is actually utterly pointless. I liked what I did with them, it probably wouldn't print that well in reality either. I'm not prepared to fix margins to make it work, it'll give me a fucking headache, it was just me thinking I could make my shit look more marketable and real to a paying audience. Another one's just thrown up a bunch of errors I haven't the time to deal with. Sometimes fixing this shit is like upsetting a delicate ecosystem with a tiny alteration throwing the whole thing out the window, I do appreciate how much of a headache this thing can cause, but Amazon could've easily replaced this with something else, they took it off CreateSpace but made no massive efforts to improve it. I don't even know if I could finish the ones that are fine without it blocking me for trying to publish three books in a day.

It didn't stop me doing more than three and I managed to get the ones I made from scratch to work, I've completely lost the hardcover copy I had created, I know I only paid 5 bucks for it but I stupidly haven't backed it up anywhere, except it's on my fucking laptop of course, I could upload  it after all. Because fuck me, I suck at backing up shit. I'm currently stuck with one left on the board that won't go through and I've done to much correcting this bullshit so I'm out. I would really love to know what the fuck happened between it being approved to not being approved other than me fucking with the covers.

I also heard a certain person has started posting again on YouTube. I think the three book deal might be over now along with the hiatus I thought would never end. I felt very fucking sour to hear it and I really need to get past it, she didn’t get what she wanted out of it (I haven’t seen one YouTuber leave it forever to write, sorry), maybe she’s realised where the smart money is. I’m still not going to watch her new content, I don’t care whether she has to market a book or will never bring it up again (I could go back to Game Grumps but I feel like it’s been far too long and I don’t want to risk it with them or her). I’m not resubscribing. I’m done.

AI has arrived. And it’s fucked up everything

I wasn’t aware Amazon’s put a three book per day cap on self-publishers on KDP because they’ve allowed the AI to flood its marketplace. Other publishers have shut the doors on submissions from being assaulted by AI books. Self-publishers will probably be the ones losing this war.

And asshole me is in the corner not feeling that sorry for y’all. KDP made it too easy to do this, it’s therefore been exploited. Smashwords might be another victim, I don’t know. But allowing people do put anything anywhere and sell it, of course it’s been exploited. Amazon’s done nothing about the audiobook scam that came up, I saw someone trying to advertise this “service” after I assumed they’d cracked down. They don’t care because it’s still potential money in their pockets from duped consumers. That’s the shitty part.

But it’s affecting new authors, and I’m sorry if you’ve decided to join the party at this point since it’s objectively worse for you now. That’s shitty, but again, I’m an asshole so I feel like nobody deserves that much pity for being naive enough to try and find a publisher. And even if you did, they might still con you into giving them one book they can regurgitate with AI in perpetuity while you get nothing but the sale of your original book. You’re the bigger target for publishing scams because you don’t know things are supposed to work. I don’t know where the agents stand in this other than being caught in a crossfire where you’re not able to sign authors or get them deals to make sure you get paid. But you were all banding together to exploit artists as well. You can only extend so much sympathy as it is.

Am I paranoid my shit will be stolen by AI? Yeah, I have had work stolen and redistributed on other websites but I didn’t care. I do now because I could make money off this, it’s the fact I don’t that makes me too jaded. The one reviewer got back to me and offered a promo post in lieu of a review, and I accepted. That short story website is clearly dead and I’ve forgotten about it. I don’t want the headache of takedown notices etc. I hate contesting my rights to stuff. It sucks since I don’t have a lawyer to do it for me. Most I could do is network harder and try to get my stuff out there, but I’ve been through this, I made shitty business cards and ran a website and all I got was phone calls from people thinking I was a business they could contact to sell to or ask for space to promote a charity (I think, it was that long ago I barely remember but I stupidly left my phone contact). I don’t know who to talk to who could make this happen. I don’t want an agent, just a promoter, I guess. Someone who’d just get me some sales. It would suck for it to take off then have people beg for audiobooks which I’ll never produce, and shamefully I was willing to find an AI avenue for this to resolve it with my publisher because I was so desperate not to have to physically read my book out loud. You do not understand the physical pain this would cause me. If I could pay someone relatively cheaply that’s the other option, but the sad part is I would need to review for quality and even someone else doing this and me hearing it would hurt me. It hurts me so much I’ve run screaming at people to stop. I hate it. I’m not your average author, and I know my estate would not be doing deals with Amazon after my death to make a new show based on my work because Amazon can sell the original books easier than other streaming platforms. (I was surprised to hear Tolkien did want to option the books, I always think of him being a turn of the century guy not a mid-century guy who was born in 1892). These guys had connections and contemporaries and some level of confidence in their ability, none of which I possess. They didn’t have to fear artificial intelligence stealing their shit.