I need to get fucking medicated why did I write 10 pages of this?
I honestly didn’t think that I was going to hear anything about Milo Winter’s for a hot minute until the 2nd edition released or didn’t release. But I am kinda happy that it did because I need something to bitch about that’s not super serious. Also this is not a safe place for transphobes, I shit on Milo Winter because he’s Milo Winter not because he’s trans. This is also not a safe place for any bigotry, I’m an ethical hater and if you don’t come with that same energy then leave.
So Milo Winter released an essay called High Disturbance. You can read it on his website. The title is enticing especially if you take into account his naturalist history. And in this essay he also comes out as a trans man. I have very few compliments for his “essay”. The language gets flowery to the point it feels out of place for an essay but then also sounds normal in other places. This is an informal essay so it's supposed to be like a conversation between author and reader; however, it's supposed to still teach you something. By the time you’re done reading the essay you should've learned something. Milo Winter accidentally proved that he still doesn’t know how to write. You’ll see later on that he claims to have been writing this since August. He shouldn’t have admitted that for two reasons, one of which I’ll get to later.
Milo doesn’t do any real reflection. Lets do a quick recap of what my first and last post about this white man was. He managed to get a shit ton of preorders on a debut book purely on vibes, aligned himself with professionals in the field to legitimize himself, was going around acting like he was a successful author, and then people gave him lukewarm criticisms on his objectively horrendous book and he flipped. He had a whole woe is me era, it was like watching a former gifted kid fail for the first time in their life. Remember his book didn’t make sense on a line level, fuck everything else the grammer was wrong. If he turned it in to his 5th grade English teacher he would've failed. But also ignoring the grammar there’s also his whiteness showing throughout the entire book that I talked about because he had a very white liberal view on what segregation was like. Not a lot of people actually talked about his shitty portrayal of segregation and how he’s obviously never read about it but I did. His white liberal viewpoint on things didn't go away either.
To cover my ass I’m not saying that he is racist or that he’s not. I’m saying that he’s clearly never deconstructed things like racism and his whiteness or how the world works.
This essay is as confused as the writing in his failed book.
He started off the essay by talking about his background in being a naturalist for 3 years and having a degree in ecological restoration. Good for him, I didn’t even know that was something you could get a degree in. This is an essay not an egregiously long tumblr post so I expected him to explain what either of those things are. He doesn’t, he never does. Anyways Merriam Webster has two definitions the first one doesn't sound like thats what he’s talking about so this is the second one: A student of natural history
Especially a field biologist
People with the ecological restoration degree usually study things like geology, ecology, plant science, soil science, and restoration principles. You can get away with a bachelor's degree but a master's will get you further (allegedly). He doesn't say which one he has. Maybe he has in one of his TikToks;however, this is supposed to be an essay. Not a random social media post. Anyways, time for his “woe is me” bit.
“After I published a shitty book and became the most hated author of the year…” Silver Elite came out this year, calm down. At least people acknowledge that a person wrote Age of Scorpius.
“...At that time, walking myself into a wildfire would’ve been no more than a spark in my burning life—I was already standing at death’s edge after barely surviving the week prior.” This is about the aftermath of the book, not something else. He doesn’t say shit about how unhealthy it was for him to be this attached to his book and how maybe it was a mistake to release a book that personal to him into the public. Or even say that he went to or is in therapy.
He then goes into how he’d tour people around in Colorado and people asking about the charred trunks from the 2020 Cameron Peak fire. From that he goes into how climate change is a factor into fires but it's more than that and older than that. He says its a,” Misunderstanding” italicized. Which is weird because colonizers did things like burn cities to the ground, killed and raped anyone human shaped, made reservation schools so they could be tortured on a institutional level, purposefully killed the bisions to starve out the local indigenous people etc. etc. What we have isn’t a misunderstanding because the indigenous are oh so wise and the westerners just didn’t know any better. You don’t do things like hunt bison almost to extinction just to starve people (which is a genocide tactitc), you dont commit genocide, and then get to say “oh we just didn’t understand the environment.” They quite literally did, it's why they did what they did.
He then gets to talking about how westerners tend to do a hand off approach and how in many indigenous cultures they didn’t do that shit they actually took care of the land. He also calls indigenous people in America,”The First People of the American West…” Which is weird. Like up in Canada they’re called First Nation, down in Mexico they’re called indígena, over in Australia they’re called aboriginals. Different places call the natives different things if they’re talking about them as a whole and in America it's either Native American or indigenous people when talking about them as a whole.
In that little tidbit he talks about land preservations in the same section about colonization. He doesn’t point out how land preservations both historically and presently hurt indigenous people. You can’t touch land preservations, it's the aforementioned hand off approach. So the nearby tribes can’t legally tend to their own fucking land even though the land was only as good as it was because they tended to the land—also its fucking theirs. He does talk about how you need to have controlled fires so that massive fires don't happen and how the local indigenous people knew/know this. Probably because he wants to make a shitty metaphor with purple prose. And I’m being so fucking forreal.
He started off this essay legitimizing himself with his 3 years of being a naturalist and his degree in ecological restoration. He chose to talk about colonization—it was not needed for his essay—but he only really talks about the part that will help his shitty metaphor. It's why the title of the essay is called High Disturbance.
And honestly I’m only pointing all that out because he’s a self-proclaimed child prodigy and tried to liken himself to a master in writing because he wrote for an arbitrary amount of hours. And he doesn’t denounce that shit in this essay so here I am. Being facetious but also not really. He really did not need to half-ass and pussyfoot around something like colonization.
Anyways he touches briefly on one of the aftermaths of colonization. And it's a nice starting point for people that don’t know anything as he also has resources to back up what he’s saying. And honestly I do think he’d be a better writer if he like wrote about the ecosystem and climate change. Like before Age of Scorpious took off he was making tiktoks he could have very easily talked about the thing he has a degree in. Maybe he did and no one talks about it, I dunno. I'm facetious and stringent, not blind so he can get his flowers when it's due. Anyways talking about how colonizers fucked up the ecosystem and put in place laws that would further fuck it up is pretty fucking heavy. Colonization is a pretty heavy subject, like it literally changed the ecosystem in the Atlantic ocean because they drowned so many black people like they were cargo. So what comes after this?
He looked at a tree and basically came to the conclusion that he’s either going to die or get better. And then he booked a ticket to Finland and moved in two weeks. Thats fucking crazy. I get that he’s a naturalist and this is probably the first time people told him his shit sucked ass but oh my god. But talking about the ecosystem and how colonizers fucked it up and then being like,”Well my mental health was in the gutter so I moved to Finland” is a choice. One that a PR manager would've said no to and honestly to this entire essay too.
“...my signs pointed to death, the sparks started by my own killed the last of my life.” Own what? Own hands? Own hubris? Just like his book this essay is seemingly unedited, he’s been writing it since August mind you.
“I am a survior…” Of what? He’s not referencing the doxxing, that was legitimately evil. Don’t dox people, unless they’re like ICE or the KKK. Ya know something really bad, all he did was write a shitty book. And it's the reaction to the shitty book that he’s referencing that he’s saying he’s a survivor of. Implying that he’s a fucking victim, I guess of his own hubris but he doesn’t say that. We should've figured out he was a man all along cause only a white man would have the audacity to say that he’s a survivor of people hating his book that he now admits to it being a shitty book. If you didn’t know the situation you’d think that people were running a hate campaign on this guy and it almost killed him, that he was undergoing some real persecution over here.
He goes on about death and rebirth and now he’s stronger than before blah blah blah. Very melancholic of him.
He then throws out, “We are not taking enough action for the climate; it must be done now.” And it's hyperlinked with the BGS’ Impacts of Climate Change. And then juxtaposes it with, as he calls it, “The Controversy”. In the first paragraph of his essay he explains that he’s a naturalist and has a degree in ecological restoration. Great for him but what the fuck does climate change have to do with him being a capitalist? This entire situation exists because he was so worried about being a CEO and running a company that he forgot to do his actual job: writing a decent book. It didn’t need to be the greatest thing ever, there just need to not be grammatical errors on page one. He couldn’t even successfully write the worst book of the year because Silver Elite came out, and that book had proper line editing.
“On July 28, my peaceful morning TikTok FYP scroll was abruptly interrupted as I scrolled upon a video from another independent author; he was talking about how he’d just finished the worst indie book he’d read in a long time. As any reasonably paranoid author would, I kept watching his video. Though the other author said he wasn’t saying names, he proceeded to talk about preorder numbers that I had accomplished. I felt my heart drop with each sentence he spoke. He lectured on the importance of hiring editors and quality control in independent publishing.”
He also talked about how debut trad authors don't publish their first book they've ever written meanwhile debut indie authors have a bad habit of doing exactly that. And how your first book ever is probably not a good book...I wonder why he left that part out.
“Horror rushed over me. He’d presented false information—that my book wasn’t edited—as a concrete fact.”
He released this essay like last week. So he’s had since July until last week to think about the whole situation and he still says that a random reviewer was the cause of the whole fiasco. Age of Scorpius didn't have ARCs, that was a paying customer talking about a book he read. And he didn’t lie about anything, not about how bad the book was or the lack of editing. Also the guy gave him anonymity, Milo exposed himself. This entire thing happened the way it did because Milo doesn’t know when to shut the fuck up. And the really fucked up part about this specifically is that that TikToker ( TL Lewis) received hate from Milo’s fans because Milo didn’t just ignore his video. Mind you it's been proven time and time again that there were negative reviews before this specific guy. But Milo doesn’t apologize for this at all or anything.
“...and in the haze of implementing my copy editor’s suggestions, I failed to notice that the edits themselves were insubstantial.” This was on the same fucking page mind you. In one paragraph he lies and says that it was edited and 2 paragraphs later he’s saying that he,”failed to notice the edits themselves were insubstantial.” So which is it? And why even bring up the random reviewer?TikTok has like what a 10 minute limit? Back then TL Lewis had only 200 followers. What was really damning book reviews were the YouTubers that broke that shit down chapter by chapter. And it's still not their fault, Milo just released a shitty book.
People could see from the first paragraph that the book clearly wasn’t edited. Like this white man really sat here and painted a picture with climate change and colonization for this. His own inadequacy. You’d think he was likening himself to colonizers since he ruined everything for nothing. And he will later go on to very briefly talk about the facism in America. Which that shit is hilarious to me, a Black American that casually studies black history. More on that later.
“...tried to give some artists a secure job…” Word on the street says he sought out struggling artists and paid them like 75 USD for commercial projects. He openly talked about how he’d have meetings at the beginning of the week every week to talk about revisions of his book with 6-8 people “across the arts”. So not all of them were editors which makes sense because most of his team weren't editors they were artists. One of them was an animator. But then on top of that every night for like 3 hours he’d have a meeting with Sauli specifically, an artist, about the damn book. Not only was none of that necessary Milo will later go on to talk about how he never put money in his savings account and his company stopped making money so are we supposed to believe that these artists got paid for work that they quite frankly should have never been doing in the first place? He openly talked about how he had his artists read the book, he never talks about paying them to read the book. He hired a shit ton more artists after people dissected his book more than he ever did in 10 years instead of scaling back and actually doing his job. To which he would later drop most of those artists cause yeah why the hell do you have like 18 people working on this book when most of them are artists and at the end of the day editing won’t change the fact that at its core the book is bad. But we are only halfway through.
He goes on to talk about his mental health decline manifesting into his physical health’s decline. He then goes on to say,” I tried to reassure myself by reading my own book… surely, it couldn’t be that bad.” Did he just admit to not reading his own book before he got editors let alone before he sold it? For real money? He didn't say,”With a new perspective on my book,” or,” Learning from the criticisms of my book.” He said,”I tried to reassure myself by reading my own book… surely, it couldn’t be that bad.” Milo needs to learn the art of shutting the fuck up, he is his own worse enemy. No one was asking Milo Winter for an essay.
“It was. It was that bad. I was overwhelmed with disgust and disappointment at my own writing. I couldn’t believe myself, the errors I’d made, the mistakes I’d passed right by. It wasn’t even close to what I knew I was capable of. Why did I release a debut so weak, compared to other writing I am so much prouder of? What in the world happened? What was I thinking? Was I thinking?” I keep emphasising that his book failed on a line level because he keeps acting like it was a copy edit issue and as you saw threw the copy editors under the bus and now he wants to act like he totally wasn’t aware that he was straight up using words incorrectly.
Copy editors are supposed to edit so that shit is consistent and accurate. You can’t do that if your lines are bad. Line editors do shit like fix grammar and make sure that the sentence makes sense in general. You cannot do a copy edit without a line edit; however, an editor can only do so much. They suggest edits but it's the job of the author to actually do something with it.
“No. No, I couldn’t have thought clearly when I was living in so much shock and overstimulation during the editing phases. My writing was confusing, my voice was fragmented, my characters weren’t shining through. I was furious at myself, swallowed by my own humiliation and enragement, sickened by my own audacity.”
Writing a book takes roughly a year if you’re not churning them out like fast fashion. But Milo’s whole schtick is that he’s been writing this book for like a decade, for a decade he didn’t figure out that that’s not what good writing looks like. Mind you he hasn’t renounced his wild claims of being a child prodigy or a master in writing. It took a section of the internet dog walking his writing in order to realize he released a book so horrid that people believed that they were scammed. Because they kinda were (again previous post). But he hasn’t renounced shit, shown any humility, nothing.
There’s a level of writing that people expect from a book that costs more than 10 bucks and that book didn’t meet that simple expectation. Also he now admits that the writing was confusing and the voice was fragmented but doesn't apologize for claiming it wasn’t when he made a response the first time around. Remember when he went so far as to say that the MCs voice was that of an autistic person’s inner dialogue, instead of saying he fucked up or saying nothing?
But don't worry guys he has thicker skin and has gone through rebirth.
“The fire has been extinguished, there is no more underbrush to fuel it, yet many of you who are reading this will try to take these same words and use them against me.” Yeah, because this essay sucks and says nothing substantial. Also he lays it on thick with this whole high disturbance fire metaphor. Like he thinks the audience might not understand the metaphor, this feels like when a DM is railroading a game. Also he’s had since July to do something like take a creative writing class, this metaphor tells me that he didn’t do that because the metaphor doesn’t work.
“You and I, we’re more similar than you realize.” That's a cliche line a middle grade villain says to the hero before losing…In this essay he tells you that you moved to Finland in 2 weeks because that's the deadline he gave himself. What he doesn't tell you is that he had a lease on that apartment and left furniture in there that easily amounted to 1,000 dollars and would let whoever would take over his lease get the furniture for free if they immediately took over the lease. Also the rent was like 2,000 a month. You and I are not the same as him, do you have cash laying around to relocate to Finland? Would you have the audacity to do any of the shit he did? Cause I don’t. Also remember this for later.
“There is a fundamental value we all share, as writers and artists—we are people who want to fight for creative representation in an era where it is so easy for each of us to catch fire with a spark.”
He underpaid and overworked artists and blamed his editors for the shitty book he created. In one of his Q&A’s one of his editors shit talked Rebecca Yarros and her book Fourth Wing, did the same shit to Lauren Roberts and her book Powerless just to make his book sound less shitty. Even went as far to say that Rebbecca Yarros hasn’t spent time reading books in the same genre and then giving props to Winter for reading in the same genre. Mind you Fourth Wing is romantasy and Age of Scorpius is a YA fantasy.
Then on top of that Fourth Wing and Powerless not only has a plot (not good ones but it's there) but the sentences grammatically make sense. I don’t like the books, they’re shitty books but you can’t do all of this and then say we all share the same values. Because as far as I’m aware there has been no apology for dragging Yarros and Roberts into this mess. And there’s no fucking way he had Q&A’s going on and didn’t read the post first before hitting post. Or maybe he did, that's not our problem tho.
He got a new editor and the new editor was basically the unofficial co-author, and the one that did the shit talking, and I bet you they weren't paid like one. And all of that about a book that wouldn’t get a passing grade in elementary school from the first page alone.
“This is not just my forest on fire. It is all of ours; as creative workers, we are acquainted with the burns of both rejection and exploitation.” And in his case being the capitalist that started the metaphorical fire. Just because he doesn’t use generative AI doesn't mean he doesn't exploit creative workers.
“...uplift each fellow life form in your communities…” He left the continent in 2 weeks. Also just say people, is he trying to hit a word count? “I’d like to think that my high-disturbance fire scars…” High-disturbance fires happen because of a lot of different reasons and climate change makes it inevitable. Milo Winter went through what he went through because he released a shitty book and people dragged the shitty book and in response to that he had a woe is me thing and people responded to that. The purple prose is bad and his metaphor is dead on arrival because he’s not a fucking victim. At least not the book part, the doxxing was pretty bad but that's not what he’s talking about. And honestly he’s so flippant about the doxxing that it makes me wonder why. Like was the book that important that people finding his address wasn’t as concerning as this bullshit?
We’re at the “more on that later” portion.
“This piece, which started in August, was written in Colorado, Washington, Alaska, Kansas, North Carolina, Finland, Sweden, and, at last, Norway.” Poor people can’t do shit like that. Like unless he took out a lot of debt there’s no fucking way he’s poor. Reloccating from Flordia to Georigia is expensive as fuck so bouncing around different states and then different countries and then relocating to Finland is definitely expensive. And it's fine if he’s not poor, I don’t want poor people to exist because this capitalistic system is evil and I want people to not stress about a fake resource. It's just strange that in this same essay he goes on about how he didn't put any money in his savings, that his company stopped making money, and basically tries to play the starving artist trope he goes on to say that.
And then in that same portion goes on about America being fascist and the fascists shit Trump is doing. And says how he needs to bring awareness to this and talk about it because he’s a public figure…from Finland I guess. Skin is thick but not thick enough to be in the streets with everyone else. Does he think that he can outrun fascism? That is something that I see a lot of white and white-passing people think. Cause like there is the belief that you can, especially if you’re white and/or a man. But that’s because they never actually educate themselves on these issues, probably because they never had to sincerely think about the system.
But once you learn about how America is in bed with a bunch of different countries spreading their personal brand of fascism and how fascism is on the rise globally you understand that you can’t outrun fascism. This includes Finland. A country that historically fought with the Nazis. For shiggles too, they didn’t need to do that. They have the NCP and Finns Party, it's not as bad as America’s MAGA. But they do want to get there.
Throughout everything Milo Winter’s has ever made there's always been these sprinklings of left leaning talking points; however, it's all very surface level. The book was supposed to have themes of environmentalism and be about anti-facism, where was it? He allegedly cares about diversity but the one character to be explicitly POC needed a white man to activate her powers, everyone else gets to just have them. Anti-facist but couldn’t write a world that wasn’t super white. Sounds like a terrible boss to have. Doesn’t apologize for shit. Uses serious things like colonization, climate change, and forest fires so he can set up a shitty metaphor for his inadequacy.
He had enough money to bounce around 5 states and 3 countries but not enough to find or make a community set on fighting back? This sounds like he’s virtue signaling so that what’s left of his audience doesn’t jump ship before spring but he’s also not taking into account he literally left the continent so he’s like the last person that should be talking about community.You can take this section out and you wouldn’t be missing anything, if anything it would improve the essay.
I’m not saying that moving out of America because of the facism is a bad reason or that you shouldn’t. I’m not saying that you have to be a founder of a chapter that fights against American facism. Not everyone can be like Huey P. Newton, Elbert Howard, and Bobby Seale.
I’m saying that Milo Winter’s is not in the position to talk about creating a community when he left the fucking continent. You can’t do that and expect people to just nod along and be like “yeah he’s like me frfr” fuck that. No one thinks of Milo Winter and thinks,”Yeah that's the guy that should talk about American fascism and in general serious subject matters.” We just think he released a shitty book, no one asked for this.
He’s not in the position to talk about his failed company when he didn’t put in the work to make a decent book. Throwing in shitty analogies and buzzwords doesn’t fix the fact that he fucked up in proportion plenty of starving artists would’ve loved to be able to fuck up. He had like 5,000 preorders on a book no one actually knew was about all he had to do was release a decent book. It didn’t even need to be a great book, it's TikTok. TikTok books are the new aged fast fashion books, all he had to do was have a decent plot and for the editing to make sense on a line level.
He’s had since July, it's now November. Nothing has changed, except Finland. He didn’t apologize for dragging his staff along, he didn't apologize for letting his fans down, he didn't apologize for being a capitalist first and a writer never, all he did was blame others. In an essay that he claims he’ll be vulnerable in. He left the continent but wants to preach to the choir about building community and volunteering to save your local ecosystem also something something American facism let me go to Finland that has a rising right-wing coalition issue. Which again isn't inherently a bad thing to talk about volunteering to save your local ecosystem or acknowledging that America is fucked up, just look at my most recent posts. He’s just the wrong messenger and no one asked for this. If he’d just learn to shut the fuck up he’d be in a much better situation.
There’s the illustrator’s section but I don't think it matters much except it sounds like Sauli thinks Milo’s brave and survived a “living nightmare” and then generic stuff about impacting the world. It's mostly fine and my beef isn't about the illustrator. The art does look good in this essay as it's the thing Milo’s not in charge of.
That’s the end of High Disturbance, a part 2 to his woe is me era. This essay throws around the ecosystem and has plenty of resources about these issues, this essay should've been about the ecosystem not a woe is me essay. We didn’t learn anything meaningful about what led him to his shitty book or why he acted the way he did or even if he took any steps to build himself back up. Unless you want me to believe that moving to Finland is building yourself back up. This essay tries to do too much so in the end it does nothing.
