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igenlodeA fanfiction writer I vaguely used to know has announced proudly that she has done a file-off-the-numbers job on one of her existing stories and it will now be published (in fact, she 'turned down a publishing house').
So I looked up the original story out of curiosity, and... ouch. I honestly can't tell any difference between the chapters where she said she had a beta-reader and the ones after she said she'd unfortunately lost her beta-reader. It's stiff with dangling participles, greengrocer's apostrophes, epithets in place of character names, malapropisms ("burdened with a heavy conscious") and sheer clumsy writing (the hero digs 'the pointy end' of an improvised weapon into a hostage's throat -- although the author refers to it as an "impromptu weapon"; I do not think that word means what you think it means).
All right, fair enough -- that was four years ago, and she may have done a *lot* of rewriting on it since then. In fact, she clearly has, since she's apparently turned a historical novel into a far-future SF military adventure -- thus ironing out the anachronisms, presumably. (Referring to the King and Queen as "the Royals", for instance, or having heroin around in an era that predates the existence even of morphine.)
But she is by no means a teenager, and her writing hadn't improved noticeably over the previous four years, after all. (And frankly the story doesn't particularly appeal to me; it's a classic case of wallowing in angst and character-torture to the degree that the only one of the characters I really recognise is the one who is allowed to retain his self-control. Perhaps I need to take a lesson from that over my own angst-filled tendencies ;-p)
But if someone like that can get something based on *that* published..!
Of course, instead of feeling bitter and jealous, what I ought to be doing is putting in some actual work on Arctic Raoul. It's very easy not to get published if you never even dare to try :-(
So I looked up the original story out of curiosity, and... ouch. I honestly can't tell any difference between the chapters where she said she had a beta-reader and the ones after she said she'd unfortunately lost her beta-reader. It's stiff with dangling participles, greengrocer's apostrophes, epithets in place of character names, malapropisms ("burdened with a heavy conscious") and sheer clumsy writing (the hero digs 'the pointy end' of an improvised weapon into a hostage's throat -- although the author refers to it as an "impromptu weapon"; I do not think that word means what you think it means).
All right, fair enough -- that was four years ago, and she may have done a *lot* of rewriting on it since then. In fact, she clearly has, since she's apparently turned a historical novel into a far-future SF military adventure -- thus ironing out the anachronisms, presumably. (Referring to the King and Queen as "the Royals", for instance, or having heroin around in an era that predates the existence even of morphine.)
But she is by no means a teenager, and her writing hadn't improved noticeably over the previous four years, after all. (And frankly the story doesn't particularly appeal to me; it's a classic case of wallowing in angst and character-torture to the degree that the only one of the characters I really recognise is the one who is allowed to retain his self-control. Perhaps I need to take a lesson from that over my own angst-filled tendencies ;-p)
But if someone like that can get something based on *that* published..!
Of course, instead of feeling bitter and jealous, what I ought to be doing is putting in some actual work on Arctic Raoul. It's very easy not to get published if you never even dare to try :-(
no subject
Date: 2020-08-12 03:37 am (UTC)What she has done that I have not is to have the guts to finish something and rewrite it and hawk it round publishing houses in the face of rejection. My instinctive inclination is just to sit here and keep my head below the parapet.
(I mean, I'm even holding back subconsciously on publishing this new Raoul one-shot on fanfiction.net now, and I could upload that tomorrow full of mistakes if I wanted, and no-one would care or even notice them. But the driving urgency is to get the thing *written*, not to get it published. Getting it published involves inviting almost inevitable disappointment. While it's left still in potentia, there is still all the feeling of achievement, and none of the risk or [any more] hard work involved.)