Literary Clusterfucks 2013

the rush to fast-track books by non-white people in the wake of george floyd was probably good not bad but it’s depressingly predictable that the “fast track” consisted of pressuring these authors to produce more quickly and with less oversight

As someone who published a book this year, there is no such thing as oversight in the publishing industry. The "editing" my book was subject to consisted of converting the quotation marks from US to UK style — there certainly was no fact-checking or any notes at all. They trusted what I gave them. It is like 99 percent on the author to have their shit together, and if the author doesn't have their shit together, it's extremely unlikely that anyone's gonna notice until it's too late. I mean, look at what happened with Naomi Wolf's last book, the one that hinged on a completely wrong reading of some statistical language. That book made it to print and into stores, and it wasn't until an interviewer said to her on live radio (or TV, I forget), "Hey, you know, your entire thesis is total bullshit, and here's why," that the publisher freaked out and yanked the thing.

my current basically freelance work is to be the underpaid oversight in the book-publishing industry -- so it does exist here and there, and some publishers do set side a small budget for it, especially when they're working with inexperienced authors -- tho it's a battle to get what i feel i deserve

(tbh my best customers are actually writers solidly earning in some other profession who sense that they need a beady eye over their work; from them i get a measure of professional solidarity -- i underquoted to one last year who insisted he pay me more when the project took longer than i expected)

i do usually give a manuscript the once-over with an inexpensive plagiarism app, and lightly fact-check stuff that strikes me as off

As someone who published a book this year, there is no such thing as oversight in the publishing industry.

this is an overgeneralization and is false with, at minimum, my copyeditors and editors at a major house. every last detail of my book gets gone over in copyedit multiple times ("on page 68 you say he drove from San Francisco to Milpitas but he left in the morning and when he gets there it's night; why did it take him all day to drive 49 minutes?") and the whole process is both fantastic and frustrating if you have a copy editor who's also doing this on details they don't actually know stuff about (restaurant work for example)

i'm reading the verge piece now, scattered thoughts:

who opens his novels with boring shit like the opening of this piece? jeffrey something? some shit british author.

"For example, ask GPT-3 to write Harry Potter in the style of Ernest Hemingway, as Branwen did, and it might produce profane reviews or a plot summary in Chinese or total nonsense."

sounds like gpt-3 understands rowling fairly well

"Branwen wrote that it’s a bit like trying to teach tricks to a superintelligent cat."

fairly insightful - who teaches tricks to cats?

the thing that strikes me about ai-generated writing is that it is quite literally meaningless - all style and no substance. there is a market for that. marketplaces like amazon privilege style over substance, and you know, this is not a new thing. i don't think it's that different from the penny-a-line pulps from the day. if we can get an ai to replace l. ron hubbard, i have a hard time seeing this as a bad thing.

the interest i have in this is in the theological implications. i'm aware, for instance, of the Urantia Book, which is said to be a "channeled text". why not skip the prophet and have ai write a holy book entirely?

every last detail of my book gets gone over in copyedit multiple times ("on page 68 you say he drove from San Francisco to Milpitas but he left in the morning and when he gets there it's night; why did it take him all day to drive 49 minutes?") and the whole process is both fantastic and frustrating if you have a copy editor who's also doing this on details they don't actually know stuff about (restaurant work for example)

I would have LOVED to go through a process like this. Turning in a manuscript and having it published basically as-is terrifies me, because there are ALWAYS fuckups in, for example, my Stereogum column; I credit an album to the wrong record label pretty much every month, or something similar. But as you said, you're going through a big house and I worked with a small UK indie. And it's entirely likely that there are internal deliberations as to how much work will go into a given title based on its prospects. Your stuff has a track record of good reviews in prestige publications, so you get A-level assistance up and down the chain. I'm (relatively speaking) nobody, so I don't.

my current basically freelance work is to be the underpaid oversight in the book-publishing industry -- so it does exist here and there, and some publishers do set side a small budget for it, especially when they're working with inexperienced authors -- tho it's a battle to get what i feel i deserve

I do something like this too, though earlier in the process — critiquing and/or editing manuscripts in order to help get them potentially salable. Which only kinda reinforces my belief that the publisher wants a ready-to-go project more often than not.

fairly insightful - who teaches tricks to cats?

Samantha Martin

The plagiarism piece is definitely humanising but there’s no way this person should be encouraged to keep writing. At every stage she ripped other writers off, and was allowed to fail upwards afterwards. And that shit about how she didn’t steal the plagiarism historians FEELINGS or HISTORY or whatever, is such bullshit. If you’re a writer who doesn’t understand the primacy of words, you shouldn’t be writing.

i don't think it's that different from the penny-a-line pulps from the day. if we can get an ai to replace l. ron hubbard, i have a hard time seeing this as a bad thing.

it's a bad thing because we'd also be replacing everyone else on the pulp circuit, some of whom turned out to be great writers, surely?

not that I know shit about what the 2022 equivalent of the pulps would be tbf

see rob’s link from yesterday at 15:05

or even the AI story in general. wattpad, those self-published amazon writers.. even slashfic

I don't see this as replacement. It seems like a place where substance and style sorta collapse onto one another. The authors can generate pages (physical substance), and AI is an assistant that can help.

The old pulp writers would have imaginative quirks of their own, if you like, that replaced a lack of writing style. The trade-off was more than enough. And maybe the AI assistants iron those out, maybe not.

Where we end up in a bad place is where the apps are acting as blockers for certain kinds of stories from being told, e.g. the Nigerian author in Rob's link. There is a "customer is king" bias at play here.

But they are platforms that can give someone a start.

mark twain lifted entire pages from published travel guides when he was trying to hit a deadline for life on the mississippi. it was all taken out by his editor… or was it? i seem to remember zola also lifting descriptions of consumer goods in toto from catalogs of the day when he was writing the ladies’ paradise. i can kind of get it.

mind you i’m somebody who presented an entire shel silverstein poem as his own when i was seven years old!

sites like this make millions in revenue

https://www.dreame.com

I started reading one of the stories on that site, may as well have been written by a fucking robot tbh

the more ai-written schlock the sooner the singularity, and i am eager to see what a skynet born of werewolf erotica can do for our species

it is incredible how that dreame site is literally 80% werewolf erotica. they've developed an entire vocabulary and schema for werewolf love that spans across authors and which at first glance makes me think i'm having a stroke when i'm reading the descriptions

I don’t think an AI is going to generate authentic werewolf sex scenes. What does a computer know about fucking werewolves?

“what is this thing you humans call… yiff?”

What does a computer know about fucking werewolves?

More than any actual human does, because real human beings know there's no such thing as a werewolf, but computers, trained on bodies of text, know no such thing

One can only fuck what one sincerely believes to exist

conor smedley to thread?

More than any actual human does, because real human beings know there's no such thing as a werewolf, but computers, trained on bodies of text, know no such thing

― Guayaquil (eephus!)

eephus what are you talking about, i'll have you know that some of my best friends write extremely explicit erotic stories about fucking werewolves. (And they're quite good, better than what an AI could write, though admittedly since I'm not personally a werewolf-fucker I'm more appreciative of their aesthetic properties.) Now, do you think they would do that if _there were no such thing as werewolves_? in addition, i would kindly refer you to the late 1960s propaganda flyer produced by the revolutionary group "Up Against The Wall Motherfucker" entitled "MOTHERFUCKER IS A WEREWOLF", which concludes:

"The worst fear is fear of the unknown, and we are the Unknown...THE UNKNOWN...WE ARE WEREWOLVES!!!"

No such thing as a werewolf? Sure, that's what J. Edgar Hoover would have you believe.

i've dipped into some of those werewolf stories and read a few of the "faqs" on the website and the large majority of these stories appear to be (surprisingly?) deeply, deeply conservative. werewolves `'mate for life", the "pack" has an "alpha" who is always male, whose mate is always female, and the female role is to support him and breed children etc

there's also a vast "bad boy billionaire" literature on these sites, vaguely patterned after 50 shades

it's all pretty gross tbh. i guess i would have imagined that these non-official distribution channels would foster non-conforming morality, more fringe stuff (as SF has often done) but not really

No werewolves living in communes? Blame the apps!

The (terrible) formula is the point with most erotica/romance, surely.

what if incels, but serene with it (bcz correct)

it's all pretty gross tbh. i guess i would have imagined that these non-official distribution channels would foster non-conforming morality, more fringe stuff (as SF has often done) but not really

― Tracer Hand

well there's your problem, you need to be reading _queer_ werewolf erotica

a lot of kink communities, like a lot of institutions in general, _have_ diverged pretty sharply - like, in bdsm, there's your Traditionalists who are _very_ cishet and patriarchal and, honestly, really systemically abusive and then you have the Queers, who, you know, we're not role models but god damn there's a reason we keep asking "Are the straights OK?" not that there's anything _wrong_ with being straight but these straight _fetish communities_ are the fucking _worst_.

lol yes

and i have come to understand that dreame really represents the straight, acceptable-to-china, even “mainstream” face of this sort of thing, which actually was brewed up in much queerer spaces

(h/t gyac)

erotica with deeply regressive power dynamics? shocked, absolutely shocked by this

lolll

surprised we've avoided this one:

the YA twitter/Lockheed Martin drama is really something. you don't expect a crossover between a toxic industry that destroys lives and a defense contractor.

— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) August 3, 2022

I would like to continue to avoid it tbh

Was reading about Isabel Fall yesterday..

That was the clusterfuck that drove me off social media once and for all! SFF writers are as bad as any others when it comes to piling in on things they know nothing about.

I usually tend to observe the madness.

The sentence "A nepotism gig at the war crimes factory?" has been pinballing around my head for the past week.

one of the more limping lines from "Tokyo Storm Warning"

This is the @TheBookerPrizes shortlist announcement, highlighting the apparent comedic novelty of a book club from Scunthorpe having members who are a steel worker & dinner lady.

It's embarrassing, condescending - and exactly how much of the industry sees the working class 🚮 pic.twitter.com/VDVt2W0xwR

— Kerry Wilkinson (@kerrywk) September 7, 2022

Joyce Carol Oates shouldn't have written Blonde. What could a literary non-hottie know about the exploitation of femme, highly sexualized women - women who look and act like Oates have no compassion or love for women like Marilyn. They're just as bad as men at writing them.

— Terese Marie (@TereseMarieM) September 28, 2022

This needs to stew a while before it ascends to the heights of a true clusterfuck. afaics, this is just twitter fooling around and having fun.

jeez I haven’t read that book or watched the movie but the detachment of writing, projecting your takes and the interpretation of that fiction, definitely come off differently in film and some things I’m seeing make me feel bad

Wild how this jumble of words now indicates that the speaker hates a specific group of marginalized people pic.twitter.com/t8JC9TrEFi

— Maris Kreizman (@mariskreizman) November 28, 2022

rly love how she, like her comrades, has declined multiple generous opportunities to simply shut up about trans people 🤔

that article & excerpt are deeply awful, you will be surprised to hear

Minus: read an extract

perhaps "extract" rather than "excerpt" was a warning

Is this the correct thread for this?

TW: suicide

an author unalived herself in 2020 "due to the bullying that she'd experienced in the bookish community" and ppl started to buy her books to support her family. last night she posted out of nowhere that she's back😭

— ray (@anoldcurse) January 4, 2023