Earlier this year I shifted my CPU at work and completely killed my computer dead.  Late in the spring my laptop decided to die 1,000 deaths.  And last weekend, after my house got hit by lightning, my router died and subsequently my computer as it crashed trying to reconnect a new router.  Three PC deaths in the span of seven and a half months.  Mother’s ass.

So I say fuck it.  I’m getting a Mac.  But Macs are expensive.  The tower I wanted starts at $2500 new.  So I decided to go refurbished.  My dad does it all the time and it’s been a win every time.  So with his help I picked out a worthwhile Mac tower, buy it now off of eBay and it’s delivered 2 days later.

In the few days I’ve had it, it shuts down into sleep mode at random while I’m in the middle of using it.  Fun times working like that.  Can I or can I not get through doing something before it shuts down?  The ROM drive is jammed shut.  Considering the box it came in is spotless, I’m hazarding a guess it was like that out of it’s mother ship.  When I eject, I can hear it struggling to work, but no drive pops out.  Healthy.  And I can’t upgrade my software.  I tried.  It was a large download and took a while so I figured it would take a while to install so I left it overnight.  Did it install?  No.  It stalled out right where I left it the night before.  Tried it again and again.  Same thing.  Because I can’t upgrade the software, I can’t use certain programs, like iTunes.  Yeah.  I can’t use iTunes on my Mac.  WTF?

So I gave up and I’m returning it.  Their return policy is a little strange.  They do exchange returns but you know what?  If this is what I’m getting out the door, I don’t want anything else.  Just give me my money back.  But they offer regular returns if you just don’t want it.  You just have to pay a restocking fee.  I’d better get my money back or someone’s getting reported.  I genuinely don’t think they provide bad stuff.  They don’t have a bad rating at all.  It just figures I get the total lemon of the bunch.  I just want my money back.

So frustrated to the point of tears I just head right to the Apple Store at my local mall and end up buying a Mac Mini.  The thing’s about the size of a hot plate and had easy insert memory upgrade.  So far, it’s worked beautifully.  Aside from the fact that I’m working off of a router that’s about half my own age, I have no complaints.  The only downside is I had to go out and buy a new screen.  The one I was working off of before, while perfectly fine, was totally ancient.  Square.  Not widescreen.  Square.  They don’t make those anymore and Apple doesn’t make an adapter for them either.  So new screen it is.  I love honest sales people.  The Apple guy I worked with actually advised me to go across the street to Best Buy and buy a monitor since their’s started at $800, $100 more than the computer I’d just bought.  So once I get the money back from my eBay computer, the only difference on my card will be about $150 for the new monitor.

This is my luck with computers.  I’m so freaking jaded right now.  I can’t use my Photoshop anymore but my dad has the Mac version of a similar program so I’m going to nab that from him.  And it’s definitely taking some getting used to, just the overall set-up of the Mac itself.  But I like it so far.  Here’s hoping it lasts me a while.  It’s funny because the only computer I’ve ever had that hasn’t actually died was my Dell which just got too old to use.  And the laptop my mom’s using now.  Probably because it got away from my hands.

And on top of all of this, I’m suffering from a Borders fail.  Mockingjay came out on Tuesday.  I pre-ordered my copy back in April.  I still don’t have it.  Last I checked, it was hovering somewhere in between New Jersey and Connecticut.  Thankfully Suzanne Collins was signing (well, stamping, as it were) up at UCONN (on move-in weekend, thanks, Scholastic promotions) so I nabbed a special copy and I’m reading it now.

It’s kind of sad, though.  She’s a NYT best seller and I didn’t have to wait in line for a signed copy.  I think Scholastic was banking on it being move-in weekend so they didn’t have to promote because the business would come to them.  Wrong.  She didn’t get an ounce of promotion here and just from what I saw, her signing was lackluster on a college campus as it’s opening for the year.  I’m not sure whether that’s a commentary on bad advertising or the lack of reading youth in the state of Connecticut.  Or both.

The only real problem I’ve ever had with high fantasy was the detachment I felt to the world I was reading.  It’s hard to get engrossed in a story when your eyes are crossing because you’re trying to figure out context for new world things.  One book I read used a non-standard system of measurement but never gave any context to what the measurement actually was.  So when it was said, “it was X ‘measurements’ away,” it just ended and I spent the rest of the book trying to figure out how far away that something was.  I shouldn’t be spending a whole book doing that.

I understand the need to develop a high fantasy world and to make it feel like a high fantasy world but really, if you have roses, call them roses.  There’s no need to call them Budding Virla Blossoms when they look and smell exactly like roses, especially when you don’t give context for what the damn things are.  Reference the Turkey City Lexicon for more information on that and much, much more.

So when I first read The Demon King, I felt the world was a little jilting and it took me about a chapter and a half to get settled into it but once I did, I was floored.  You get the total feel of an entirely different world but at the same time it’s not so foreign or unreachable that you spend more time caring about what something is than what’s going on in the plot.  I’m reading through the first manuscript of Diamond Crier now just to get pieces of my world back and I’m so glad I’m scraping about 99% of the plot itself.  God, it sucked.  But I think my high fantasy world was just a little too familiar.  Chima struck an excellent balance between high fantasy and familiar reality.

When I get back to actually writing my manuscript, I so hope I can do it as good as her.

It’s funny because as I’m rereading this I’m looking at my writing and damn, I do write some good lines.  If you remember (which you probably don’t but that’s okay, I barely do) I ended up with a major voice shift about 5 chapters or so into the original first draft.  I felt that what I was writing originally was too showy, too uppity and not what I felt the story was about.

I’ve read through those those original original chapters already and I’ve just come upon the chapter where the shift happens and I have to say, it worked a hell of a lot better before the shift.  It looks like I tried to insert this almost slapstick type of humor that just killed the story.  Very strange.  And it’s funny because I expected to cringe a lot reading this.  I really wasn’t so much to start.  I kind of liked what I was writing, I like the history that I wrote although the execution wasn’t too great.  But it sure was a hell of a lot better than what it became and damn, am I cringing now.

Obviously I need a medium between the two.  DC isn’t going to be like Earth Shatterer in that kind of snarky type of humor.  While it’s not that I don’t like ES, I’m not in love with it.  DC, if I end up nailing it, I’m going to love and it’s going to show.  I’ve gotten nothing but form rejections with ES with no requests.  I’m going to try one more tier of agents and if I get the same thing, it’s getting trunked.  While I love me my snark, I don’t think sustaining it for a novel (or two) is really my strong suit.  It feels like I’m still trying to find my footing in my own writing and while I’m close, I’m still not there yet.  Hopefully I’ll find it with DC.

So does this make my third novel?  My first was completing the original DC albeit trunking it 3/4 of the way through the first edit.  But I finished it.  The second was ES that’s on sub now.  This DC I’m basically working on from scratch.  The only basis I have are a few elements from the original world I created.  Everything else is new.  Because if this is my third, the third tends to be a lucky number for many a debut author.  Pleasepleasepleaseplease.

98% of the authors on the shelves now got there via the slush pile.  They didn’t magically appear there.  They didn’t have the help of a fairy godmother.  They worked their asses off to be able to write worth a damn and queried like every other schlub out there.  So take the blinders off, will you?

When I see a writer talking about getting over 100 form rejections from agents and then they proceed to blame those agents for not giving these writers the time of day, I want to start throttling something.  Of course 100+ form rejections should say something but it’s not, “stop taking those anti-psychotics.”   Darling, you really need to stop projecting and start looking at what’s in front of your face in the form of a big steaming pile of shit.

Any GOOD writer would see that it’s them, their writing, that’s the problem.  Not those horrible meanie agents that are keeping them from their dreams.  I think Freud would call that delusional.  I just don’t understand the mentality of some people.  And the thing is, once that kind of writer receives those eleventy billion form rejections and piss and moan about how those agents can’t see their genius, they seek other means of publication.  They either self-publish or set the bar a hell of a lot lower, like PublishAmerica or some no-name publisher that’ll publish pretty much anything.

“You’re jealous!” they might scream at me.  “My name’s in print and yours isn’t!  You’re obviously not good enough!”  Aside from the fact that the “you’re jealous” (usually used with the wrong form of you are) defense is used by the unintelligent, they fail to realize that I actually do have standards of publication.  Yes, I want my name in print.  Bad.  But I’m not desperate.  I’m not willing to settle for any kind of print.  I want the good print.  The kind that will get me into Barnes and Noble across the country.  The kind where publicists will want to promote my book.  Where I’ll have signing tours.  You know, where people will actually read it.  I’m not willing to drop to the level of pond scum that some of these crazy ass writers are dropping to in order to get published.  For me it’s either do it right or not at all.

So can we cut the shit please?  Aside from the fact that you make the rest of us hard-working normal writers look bad, you’re going to end up in places like SlushPile Hell where you’ll end up in the stocks by the very people you’re querying and mocked by the rest of us.  You might think they’re mean but we think you’re a fucking moron.  So get your head out of your ass and do it right.  Stop feeding the likes of PublishAmerica with your dimwitted naivety.

Remember, just because you write a book doesn’t mean you DESERVE to be published.  Like wearing spandex, getting published it a privilege, not a right.  It is not owed to you.  You deserve nothing.  Just write the best damn book you can and maybe it’ll get you somewhere.  But for the love of god stop being an asshat about it.

Bad friend.  Bad.  What are you being judged on, then?  Font size?

A good friend will have the balls to tell you, “um, you think you should take the hint?”

Bad friends serve to stroke your ego.  Good in the second but definitely not in the long run.  You are doing a disservice to your friend when you tell them to keep trying after 100 form rejections.  Kill your darling, bitch.  That’s what you should be saying.

I found out extra information about the book I read and talked about in the previous post that led me to decide to go ahead and post the review.  When an author has people around them feeding them shit ass advice, they really need to be brought back to reality.  It’ll be like hitting a cement wall but it’s for their own good.

After all of the high praise and rather delusional interviews, I couldn’t let it go on.  I had to tamper it, for the good of everyone else reading or wanting to read the book.  It looked loaded and I wasn’t about to be a part of that.  So I said my piece.  And I kind of killed the curve of its star ratings on Goodreads.  Granted one of those ratings was from the author herself and it was a 5 star, of course.  I had to.  I really did.  I felt it was my duty.

I can’t stand when authors get bunk advice and I can’t stand when little bitty no-name e-publishers pander to the idea that all authors have a right to be heard.  No, they don’t.  I really don’t trust the integrity of this particular publisher’s other books, especially since this particular book is their headline.  If this is the standard to which the rest of them live up to, no thanks.  Really, do they hope to achieve any kind of acclaim publishing works like that?  I also had to turn down a book in a similar situation because it was the first book the publisher was putting out.  Um, no thanks.  I don’t want to be a guinea pig.  I have plenty of vouched-for books in my pile just waiting to be read.  Plus I’m not a gambler.

People keep saying eBook publishing is the next big thing, but is it?  I think it was Nathan Bransford that did a blog post about this.  That eBook publishing will basically be the place where the rest of the rejected writers desperate to get published will end up.  Fantastic.  Makes me want to run out and go buy some eBooks.  And after the experience I’ve just had, I believe it.  What credibility can eBook publishing possibly garner if they’re just going to publish the other 99% of the slush pile that probably had no business being published in the first place?

So, needless to say, I won’t be reviewing any other books where the only way they’re coming out is in eBook format because right now, my default setting for that sector is crap.  Sorry, but it only takes one bad experience.  Well, two but I won’t get into that.  My respect for this publisher is really very low and it’s sad to think that it’s going to be publishers like this, that dredge up the crap that should just let be, that’ll devalue the pending eBook revolution.  I can find better stuff on fanfiction.net and I don’t have to pay for it.