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.
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