factysatin

on an unrelated note:

[mumblingsage]

My timing IS uncannily perfect!

(Source: https://countercraft.substack.com/p/why-bookscan-is-different-from-book)

[mumblingsage]

Few follow-up thoughts after my original semi-sarcastic post:

I personally am definitely still writing fantasy romance. Because I enjoy it; it was never a marketing pivot.

After you've written a story, it makes sense to pitch it to the market, but 'writing to market' is usually a losing proposition; markets move faster than most people can write.

Romance is a huge, varied genre with voracious readers. Even as sales drop in one subgenre, the overall genre isn't going anywhere. (As Michel points out, adult nonfiction hasn't been doing well, but it's still around and we can expect it to continue to be published!)

I expect a core of romantasy fans (and romance fans, and fantasy fans, with various overlap) to continue reading and writing for years if not decades yet. They may even do better for having fewer people trying to cash in on their beloved genre.

Romantasy itself has a wide range, not least in tone, from cozy witch-falls-for-werewolf-in-the-neighboring-cottage to dark romance about forced marriage to an evil vampire lord. But the sheer scale of things makes it easy to believe publishers and booksellers feel flooded with hard-to-distinguish submissions at both ends of the scale.

Publishers grabbing anything that looks lucrative and pushing it out with limited editorial support or quality control has been reported by a number of authors in several genres including SF/F and romance (notably, unsurprisingly, and infuriatingly, marginalized writers seem especially likely to get a rushed release with insufficient support).

I'm not surprised it has consequences, though I'm skeptical the mass market for books is that attentive to quality (sneer the title of the bestseller of your choice here!)

Still, quality is one of the few things an author and publisher can control so it's worth paying attention to. Authors should self-edit and publishers should edit.

Even if every book was of incredible quality, the bubble would pop because trends change and the Next Big Thing would come along. (I think there was some great contemporary erotic romance released in the years after 50 Shades. The scale of that couldn't last forever either!)

But insofar as lackluster publisher support and cash-grabbing engagement popped this bubble early, that's quite upsetting! It didn't have to be this way! Or did it have to be this way? Is it inevitable now that a hot genre will get flooded by shallow and indistinguishable books? (Indeed, has it always been this way? But is it accelerating?)

[suiheisen]

[themoneylines]

@vaspider

[im-mender]

It's important to note that Chekhov's Gun was not originally about foreshadowing, but a piece of advice to playwrights about how every element in a play should have narrative relevance. The corollary to Chekhov's Gun is that if a gun mounted on the wall in act 1 is never used at all in the entirety of the play, then it should be omitted from the play entirely.

[im-mender]

also very true

[anarchautistic]

Very funny example of writing advice that is very specific to its medium getting overapplied outside its scope. Can you imagine how awful set design would be if people tried to apply this to movies. 60 minute post credits scene in the Matrix where Neo has to fire every gun that appears in the "lots of guns" scene

[3liza]

once you reach a certain level of Animal Knowing you become burdened with two absolutely true, completely contradictory facts:

animals are basically the same, a lion is a big kitty

a lion is absolutely not a big kitty, are you fucking stupid?

[hasufin]

Back when I was in high school, volunteering at the zoo, I had this encounter with one of our mountain lions.

Now, I had actually petted the older, calmer female. But this was one of the males - they'd never been even slightly interested in me. But today? He made eye contact with me. He hunkered down. He did the butt waggle like he was going to pounce. Again. And... POUNCE. That cat crossed a good 20 meters in about 3 seconds. He only turned away at the last moment because there was an electrified fence.

He made sure I knew he was there. He wasn't hunting: he was playing. This was exactly like a housecat playing with you.

But, just because he was playing, didn't mean I wouldn't have been dead if he'd actually pounced on me.

They are big kitties. It's just that housecats are small and can't seriously injure you.

[beginning-to-be-happy]

Thank you, that was terrifying

[natalieironside]

[sic-semper-hominibus]

deeply curious why NI is separate if england is imaginary

[natalieironside]

Tax evasion

[natalieironside]

Why does everybody have it out for poor little Kernow

[red-berin]

Kyle Gordon's back

[henk-heijmans]

Sinaloa, Mexico, 2025 - by Juan Carlos Beltrán (1991), Mexican

[thefablechronicler]

Am I the only one who thinks it's crazy that Disney declared a new canon when they bought Star Wars

Only to immediatley start pulling elements of the old canon into their stuff?

Han and Leia's son turning to the Dark Side.

A New Empire to cause trouble for the New Republic.

Palpatine returning from the dead.

The death of a beloved member of the original crew (Chewie in the old canon, Han, Luke and Leia in the new).

The Mandalorians having fought a war against the Jedi at one point in the past.

The symbol of Mandalore's right to rule being an object (Darksaber in new, The Helmet in the old).

Am I just being crazy/grumpy?

[rostekhorn]

Oh God, no. The lack of originality and the insistence on redoing old story beats in the sequel era is like the one unifying complaint of all of its critics. Most people only mention that in terms of them rehashing the original trilogy, but those who read the old expanded universe noticed that right away too.

I would add the superweapon-of-the-month thing from the Bantam era, where for a while writers couldn't stop thinking "hey, what can we come up with that's EVEN COOLER than a Death Star?"

[thefablechronicler]

See I never read much of old EU set during the New Republic.

But I was well aware of Jaina, Jacen, Ben and Anakin, the kids of the group and Mara Jade, Luke's wife.

So I knew what happened to Jacen and what not. But I did not know about the Super-Weapon-Of-The-Month thing.

[rostekhorn]

There was a Sun Crusher. Instead of planets, it blew up stars.

There was a Galaxy Gun. It blew up planets, but with shells fired through hyperspace.

There were World Devastators. They consumed the surface of planets and used the raw materials to create weapons.

There was a Centerpoint Station. It could move, or destroy, planets and stars across the entire galaxy.

There was a Darksaber. It was a discount Death Star ultimately done in by its builders' shitty subcontracting and refusal to perform adequate quality control and employee vetting... Okay you know what, that was a terrific concept. That one can stay.

There was the Pulsar Station. It was another sort of discount Death Star but it was mostly just a project on paper, planted by a third party to make the New Republic believe that a warlord was building his own superweapon... Okay, that one can stay too.

... but yeah, basically for a while people kept trying to recapture the ooo and aaa of the Death Star from the movies, by doing it one better. Things mostly calmed down by the end of the nineties and with the switch from Bantam to Del Rey. But that still leaves most of a decade's worth of superweapons. I would say the smarter New Republic era stories were the ones that didn't go that route (part of what makes the Thrawn Trilogy cool, for example, is that the main villain is making the best of much more limited resources while facing a much stronger enemy).

[reallyreallyreallytrying]

nip over to troy, bit of rough and tumble, big horse, bish bash bosh, back home to ithaca. simple as

[philcollinsenjoyer]

explained to an 8 year old that once a fruit is ripe you only have so much time until it rots so you have to eat it soon and she said so i'll never be able to keep it perfect like this forever? no and there are about a million pieces of art for you unrelatedly

[madeofklay]

What I learned not to do in art school

[victusinveritas]

From Creepy Catalog:

This clip comes from a raw, unedited Q&A Welles gave at USC in 1981, after a screening of The Trial. He'd originally meant to cut the footage into a full essay film about making that movie, the same treatment he'd already given Othello in 1978's Filming Othello. He never got around to finishing it. The reels sat in his estate until after his death, and this Q&A was assembled from them years later.

Most clips of this exchange cut off at "uh... no." Welles didn't stop there. Giving a young director too much money, he said, can spoil him, because it keeps him from learning "the ability to walk away from something when it is not perfect." No fine movie was ever made by a director chasing total perfection, he argued, any more than a great painting shows every leaf on every tree.

Then he got specific to his own experience making The Trial. Working without real money meant he couldn't lean on a studio's resources without question. But it also meant reaching into his own pocket every week to pay his actress, Madeleine Robinson, her salary directly, or she'd have walked off the picture.

Welles' actual answer wasn't a flat denial. It was a distinction: constraints can sharpen a director's instincts, but that isn't an argument for being broke.

[batrachised]

You are given an unlimited budget to adapt an L.M Montgomery book; BUT you must add in a dragon somewhere. It can be any kind of dragon, from "large animal" to "can explain the tax code", and it can be as shoehorned in as baking powder, or fully integrated into the narrative.

What book is it, and where does the dragon go?

i am absoFUCKINGlutely going with a real giant dragon, and my instant thought is that this is Mr. Harrison's true secret (in this version the cows are straight disappearing, not escaping), and the showdown between him, the dragon, and Mrs. Lynde is one for the ages

[batrachised]

@mzannthropy OBSESSED with this idea

[bewareofitalics]

As I read this I thought you meant Mr. Harrison's secret was that he was the dragon, so now I'm thinking about what characters could be dragon shifters. My first thought was Mrs. Lynde, but then I realized that the perfect option is, of course, Dr. Jekyll-and-Mr. Hyde.

[sun-lit-roses]

That was how I read it first, too - "Mr. Harrison is eating the cows, that checks out." 😂

Ah, Susan is the only one who realizes what Dr. Jekyll-and-Mr. Hyde is - but tragically no one believes her!

Also, with Jane - if the zoo lost a dragon, is their world one that just has dragons? That would be amazing. Jane would have a little kitchen dragon - he's the size of the Peters and lights her fires for her.

In honor of the end of The Blue Castle book club, maybe that could also be Barney's secret - he's a secret heir to Redfern's, a famous author, *and* a dragon. Ethel couldn't take the smell of brimstone clinging to him. Valanxy thinks he smells nice and smoky - must be a side effect of those chemical processes for forgery he's conducting in that room he goes in and locks behind him that occasionally emita strange noises. Definitely not dragon type noises.

[batrachised]

adding @volturialice's comments to this brilliance

[jasmancer]

really fascinated by how betazoid-vulcan diplomacy would work as two supremely different telepathic species. the touch telepaths with an intense culture of repression and secrecy vs the most free wheeling shameless least secretive species in the galaxy that has a tradition of nude weddings. if a vulcan accidentally made skin-to-skin contact with a betazoid it would be the psychic equivalent of a flash bang going off.

[jasmancer]

I want to see lwaxana troi and sarek in a room together. they're both diplomats I know it must have happened. can you fucking imagine the one sided beef.

[jasmancer]

he'd develop a spidey sense for her after one instance of her boundaryless (iconic) behavior she'd cross the threshold of whatever dumpy space convention center the latest conference is taking place at and his nose would start bleeding from 6 stories up

[whencartoonsruletheworld]

hearing anything about the nolan odyssey is so funny. it's like "they cut the extremely important and infamous nobody scene" "the cyclops is a giant puppet that they put in an actual historical cave + gave circe animatronics for her pig transformation instead of cgi" "they dumped plastic skeletons in an environmentally protected location they were not supposed to be in" "they recreated ancient greek instruments in order to have an accurate score" "all of odysseus's agency is basically gone" "anne hathaway actually learned how to weave ancient looms" "the women in this movie are treated like shit" "they actually buried actors alive to get those underworld shots" "did you see what the fuck zendaya was fucking wearing holy shit you can't DO THAT, MA'AM" "what do you mean there was a legitimate epic the musical reference" "NOT A SINGLE FUCKING GREEK WAS CAST IN THIS MOVIE"

like did nolan have two guys standing at his side at all times whispering ideas in his ear and one told the truth and the other told lies and they didnt tell him which was which until they wrapped production cause

[xxxxactly]

Brutalist maze, Seattle

[3liza]

its called Freeway Park and while it is one of the most interesting single examples of Brutalism in the united states and im proud of it, it is so poorly designed in terms of public safety that it has been renovated twice(?) but continues to be geographically troubling, as its design has facilitated a lot of murders over the years. it was the subject of a funny but gruesome article in the STranger in 2002 called Topography of Terror. the city doesnt keep official tally of how many murders or assaults have happened IN the park but two men in their 30s were stabbed nonfatally during a robbery there earlier this year, for example.

[commiemartyrshighschool]

Suspect that building mazes is perhaps not conducive to public safety, outside of minotaur isolation scenarios.

[aarzigogolato]