if you are a parent, or may become one, or you are otherwise likely to arrive in the situation of caring for a child while they eat, promise me this: if a child doesn't like a certain food or food group, you will ask them WHY. and specifically, you will pay attention to either confirming or ruling out "it makes my mouth itch" or "it makes my stomach hurt," both of which are medically important info that children may not provide unprompted. which i know because this PSA has been brought to you by "i spent my entire childhood and much of my early teens eating peas and lentils while wondering why everyone else liked the Violently Itchy Mouth Sensation so much, like were they a bunch of legume masochists or something, before i finally realized that Violently Itchy Mouth Sensation was in fact a sinister demon appearing only to me, and her true demonic name was: Legume Allergy"
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lmfao I just saw zohran doing the inaugural swim in a full suit and tie, the schtick genuinely gets funnier the more he does it. My only complaint is should have worn swim trunks OVER the suit
ten years ago as part of my creative writing degree we had a class on professional development where we learned how the publishing process works for different mediums and how to choose an agent and what the role of a publishing house is and back then, the advice was "self-publishing has its advantages but a traditional publisher will provide editorial support and market your book and if your book sells well enough they want to invest in your future" and now basically none of that is true anymore. books make it to shelves with noticeable errors and structural issues that could be addressed with one or two more rounds of developmental editing, authors are expected to do more and more of the marketing themselves to the point that they are expected to be social media influencers in their own right, and publishers appear to be prioritising flashy debut novels with huge advances they don't outsell, which means the author is less likely to get a follow-up deal.
Obviously a publisher is a business and a business needs to make money, but the idea used to be that you'd have a couple of very successful authors who bring in so much cash that they subsidise the new kid who is building a back catalogue of books that sell okay until they get name recognition and pay for themselves. I was told back then that a couple thousand pounds was very reasonable for a debut novel because you want to get royalties for the sales exceeding your advance and that way the publisher sees you as a profitable investment. The last couple of years I keep hearing about six figure book deals for debut (!) literary fiction (!) novels, what on earth?
I'm not saying that the publishing industry is uniquely awful or that it's worse than it's ever been or whatever, but especially in a time when reading and talking about books is trendy and there is so much money in books, it feels very, I don't know, symbolic? Prioritising flashy one-time projects over sustained and sustainable growth. Investing only enough resources to make your product fit for sale but not enough to make it good because people will buy it anyway. It's frustrating to me as a reader and as an aspiring writer and as a person existing in a capitalist system.
One of the tags referred to people thanking their editorial teams in acknowledgments, and I want to point out the growing prevalence of people thanking beta-readers and writing groups, both of which usually rely on a pre-existing community or relationship and, just as importantly, are unpaid.
My day job is as a freelance editor for nonfiction books, and I can safely say that if the publishing industry were operating as intended, I would either not have a job at all or be working for a specific press. Authors pay me directly to do the work that a press editor used to do as part of publication contracts. This is because so many presses have started outsourcing all their editorial work to either third-party contractors or, even worse, to genAI.
In short, venture capital has broken the publication industry the same way it's broken the retail, restaurant, and travel industries.
I didn't go into this side of it in my original post but YES! Fuck! I know this is a huge issue for translators too because they're being asked to do more work in less time for less money and I've heard rumblings about human translators being brought in only to essentially proofread work done by AI, which is so disrespectful to the sheer skill and artistic abilities of (literary) translation...
Anyway, I love editing. I think I love editing almost more than writing, and I'm pretty sure that I'm better at it. Last year I edited an academic article from 11k to 9k words for my supervisor and I felt like a god when I finished it, but when my supervisor asked if I'd thought about doing this professionally, I had to tell her that there's just not a viable career in editing anymore. Publishers used to employ! editors! Several different kinds of editors for different stages of the process! That used to be my dream job!
Editing is so essential to making a text good. It doesn't matter how talented or dedicated you are as a writer, you cannot achieve the level of quality by yourself that you could achieve by working with a skilled editor. That's normal! The lone genius who comes out of the cave with the perfect novel does not exist! The manuscript that gets sold to a publisher is supposed to be handed off to an editor who tells you to tighten up that plotline and reminds you that every day can't be Tuesday and sharpens your prose so your voice really shines. Skimping out on that part of the publication process takes money out of the hands of skilled professionals, leads to consumers (ew) receiving subpar products (ew!), and is such an injustice to the writers whose work can't reach its full potential (and the writers who won't get published because they can't afford to pay an editor out of pocket!).
It drives me up the wall. I hate reading a mediocre book and knowing that a skilled editor could have easily raised it from 3 stars to 4. We should all be way angrier about it, frankly.
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It's probably inevitable (even necessary) that the people who devote their lives to becoming as good as possible at some particular art or trade or w/e also develop a horrible outsized and self-congratulatory conception of how important and vital and fundamentally human it is. Doesn't make listening to them wax poetic about it in an interview any less insufferable though.
Okay not to be a hater about a book I haven't read but like, this is the blurb for Goodreads' 'most popular new fantasy'
and I mean - this is not any sort of moral issue or anything. But I really struggle to conceive of a how this could be written in a way that doesn't make it transparently clear that its main goal is pandering to and flattering the egos of its imagined audience.
In pulling together the Kickstarter funding for the pilot episode of my paranormal rock musical audio drama Everyone Leaves Alive (out now!), one of my backers generously gave at a level where I agreed to write an original song for him. When asked what to write about, he said either municipal zoning or car dependency.
LYRICS
Well take a good damn look
At the ride you’ve got
A truck the size of Texas
in the CostCo parking lot
A hood high as a flag pole
and there’s just one catch:
your monumental Chevy
has a blind spot to match
All the cyclists are shaking
a disaster in the making
There’s a reason they think you’re a pig:
You don’t need a truck that big
And just from making car hoods
of a kickass larger size
In eight years, three thousand
more pedestrians have died
And people shrug and say that
it’s the land of the free
(Free to get pulped by an SUV)
Is it worth it, the lost lives?
Worth it, the gas price?
Worth it, just to own those libs?
You don’t need a truck that big
It’s not as if you’re moving
loads of two by fours
Your flatbed is as empty
as those words of yours
Yeah you live in the suburbs
you ain’t hauling hay
but we pay the blood tax
for your cosplay
All he punchlines are waiting
'bout overcompensating
are you prepared for that type of dig?
You don’t need a truck that big
Well, it’s a driver’s world,
carved into this land
Public transit swept away
by Big Oil’s mighty hand
They say “jaywalking”
if I just cross the street
The only question left is
how much dirt I’m gonna eat
Hear that El Dorado thunder
oh it’s mankind’s classic blunder
Hubris, final form: a giant rig
You don’t need a truck that big
You don’t need a truck that big
You don’t need a truck…
Heaven Will Be Mine is a really interesting game that also makes no sense. There's tons of in universe lore documents for you to read and it makes even less sense. You play througha couple endings with a couple characters and it makes even less sense. It only gets more incomprehensible has you experience more of it and I'm worried if I keep going it might all snap into focus at some point and my brain will break in response.
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It's crazy that social media broadly never adopted the queue, an iconically great Tumblr feature. I love the feeling of hurling posts into a void through which they will later emerge in an orderly fashion.
also I'm still just thinking about the clarified, what the fuck do you mean this book has empty spaces dolls in it
what the fuck do you mean they use he/him pronouns
me:
I cannot fucking wait for you to meet [REDACTED] (author's note I meant Iscend here)
her:
look I can only assume that if Baru encounters one (1) female clarified she's going to immediately [the entire plot of RESCUE HOUND]
me:
no comment
her:
she was already like "wow this is so hot I can almost overlook him being a man"
every now and then I see people passing screencaps of these posts around, and in the months after I made this post there were people checking in on me assuming I was going through grief or depression or something
to set the record straight, the context is that I had covid and was bleeding from my throat and lungs, but for some ungodly reason, I was feverishly driven to drink lemonade and kept screaming and writhing because I was pouring fizzy lemon juice on open throat wounds
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The Eye of the Leviathan, MA Carrick (14 July). In an alt Spanish Golden Age, a faerie changeling teams up with his replacement to defeat conquistadors.
The Intrigue, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (14 July). Historical fiction about a con artist who falls for his victim's niece—all while they in turn are scamming him.
The Dragon Has Some Complaints, John Wiswell (14 July). An argumentative wild three headed dragon infiltrates a dragon riding academy.
The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood, HG Parry (21 July). King Arthur threatens to rise in WWII era England.
*The Lord of the Wood, EM Anderson (21 July). A clockmaker stumbles into an enchanted forest and its cursed master.
*The Felicity Complex, August Clarke (21 July). A young woman is created to serve paranoid billionaires in an apocalypse shelter.
The Demon Star, Jesse Aragon (28 July). Dune-esque epic space opera about a futile battle against the gods.
A Trade of Blood, Robert Jackson Bennett (11 August). The latest Holmesian biofantasy mystery.
Daggerbound, T Kingfisher (25 August). The sequel guy trapped in sword romance, this time m/m.
Wickhills, Premee Mohamed (8 September). A rogue intelligence agent is on the run while trying to hunt down a scientist beneath the city.
A Snake Among Swans, Hannah Kaner (8 September). A young heir marries an old warlord to save her country—and destroy her new kingdom from within.
Bodies of Magic, Freya Marske (15 September). The evil magic medical school murder mystery.
Dead Beat, Leigh Bardugo (15 September). The latest Alex Stern novel, in which a door to hell opens on the campus of Yale.
Mazywood, Tananarive Due (22 September). Multigenerational thriller about a Black filmmaker discovering the story of his grandmother, an actress.
The Thief and the Traitor Bride, VL Bovalino (29 September). A spy is sent to infiltrate enemy territory to find a relic—with her estranged husband.
*The Unhaunting, Micaiah Johnson (29 September). Horror about a suspiciously unhaunted house.
The Scarlet Ball, Nghi Vo (6 October). A young Vietnamese woman assumes a debutante’s name and face to compete for a demon husband.
A Wall is Also a Road, Annalee Newitz (6 October). An alien grad student studies ancient Pompeii.
Horngard, Elizabeth Moon (6 October). Big epic fantasy over the struggle for the throne in a neglected kingdom without a ruler.
The Book of the Dead, ed. Jonathan Strahan (6 October). Anthology arranged around the theme of death with an impressive turnout of authors.
Milkteeth, Caitlin Starling (20 October). A vampire broodmother struggles to control three fledglings.
The Slantwise Histories and Other Stories, Alix Harrow (20 October). Collection of short stories by the author.
Call Me Traitor, Everina Maxwell (27 October). A woman forged into a magical weapon must ally with a rank and file soldier on her mission to track down traitors in the desert. f/f.
Code and Codex, Yoon Ha Lee (27 October). Ancient jail traitor 2!!! Space linguistics edition.
Chateau Reverie, Natasha Siegel (27 October). Attendees to the Auction of Secrets bid their deepest truths in hopes of winning a wish, set during the French Revolution.
Saved by the Spell, Tanya Huff (3 November). Magic school from the point of view of a very tired teacher dealing with a new hero.
*new to me or unvetted titles.
Part 1 is here. January and later new releases beneath the cut:
Kill Your Darling, Mariana Costa (12 January). The reluctant millennia-old avatar of evil tries to break free of his fate—and his counterpart, the avatar of good.
The Flower Court, Kate Elliott (12 January). Two women, a lowly servant and the empress' most sophisticated handmaiden, are co-opted into searching for a noble's sister.
Godburned, Foz Meadows (26 January). A man forced into being the tool of a god reluctantly teams up with an investigator to find three missing children.
Where Fire Reigns, Jared Pechacek (2 February). The unknowing messiah is stolen by a fugitive airship crew in a salt desert.
The Literary Remains of Cornelia Fayen, Johanna van Veen (2 February). A romance author fleeing the reveal of her sapphic affair gets caught up in her brother's cursebreaking scheme.
A Devil of a Crime, T Kingfisher (9 March). A retired devil and a retired angel team up to solve a murder mystery.
Tyrant in the Cracks, Hache Pueyo (16 March). A professor and his assistant travel though alternate realities on a tropical island country.
*The Fall of Elvenesse, Kai Ashante Wilson (23 March). As elves face the apocalypse due to their cruelty, the last saint must venture into Elvenesse to ensure the survival of the free peoples.
The Seventh Banisher, AK Larkwood (30 March). Gothic fantasy about two cousins struggling to survive on an island in order to win their great-aunt's fortune.
The Lady of Thorns, Tasha Suri (1 April). A condemned prisoner is sent a quest to kill the Lady of Thorns in her labyrinth to win her freedom.
The Animals We Became, Finn Longman (2027). Retelling of the Welsh story of the flower bride. Reportedly contains t4t shapeshifting.
“That’s actually fairly accurate,” Maryam mused.
It was a little endearing how Angharad lit up, like she’d been handed a second helping of honeycake or a respectable reason to stab someone.
Need to start an Angharad Tredegar has a praise kink evidence file
