Lovely and Morbid @lovelyandmorbid - Tumblr Blog

Don't forget Step 4: Constrict access to knowledge. Use copyright claims to kill sharing of data. Put everything behing a paywall or a deluge of targeted ads. Bloat every other search/find tool with slop. And track everything.

siegecraft

i think frequent recurring serious self-reflection is important for a lot of reasons but one of them is that being aware of who you are + what you want & what you want to work on + how you are working on it, is that it makes you harder to influence and advertise to

sorrrowfull

suliqyre

The more you read, the more you can see in each text. Words that were once limited to a single idea can now express varied meanings. A text that once had only literal value can now supply you with multiple worlds.

As your awareness of metaphor and its possibilities expands, you begin to see how it operates throughout language. While you once limited metaphor to certain poetic forms of expression, you are now open to it in even the most dry and prosaic texts. You are open even to metaphors that might never have been intended by the author. You are always looking for ways that the words you read might mean more than they literally say.

By allowing for the possibility of more, you also allow each text to become a more meaningful experience. It is now capable of communicating a more diverse beauty to you, and this beauty allows it to reveal new truths — truths that would have remained hidden had your awareness been too narrow to notice the possibility of them.

partywithponies

My woke take, as someone who has worked in both a public library and a school library, is that we desperately need both more books that are at a higher reading level but a less mature subject matter, and more books that are at a lower reading level but a more mature subject matter, because 8 year olds who are advanced readers are still 8 year olds and don't want to read about graphic violence and torture, and teens and adults who have learning difficulties or who are just later readers for whatever reason are still teens and adults and don't want to read about Billy the Bunny going to school or whatever the hell.

partywithponies

Shoutout to people in the notes also mentioning people learning the language, I should've mentioned that really, given that I've been stuck reading German picture books myself while learning German.

segamascott

darkcomedies

evoking bertholt brecht’s “the way people cast a play!” quote as a spell against prescriptive, stereotypical, fatalistic typecasting

darkcomedies

idk what to tell you except go look at the fishwives

nonlynear

sorry about me. or youre welcome. depending

ilya-sweetheart

stonedeadforever

By Gerda Wegener, 1925

darlingofdots

ten years ago as part of my creative writing degree we had a class on professional development where we learned how the publishing process works for different mediums and how to choose an agent and what the role of a publishing house is and back then, the advice was "self-publishing has its advantages but a traditional publisher will provide editorial support and market your book and if your book sells well enough they want to invest in your future" and now basically none of that is true anymore. books make it to shelves with noticeable errors and structural issues that could be addressed with one or two more rounds of developmental editing, authors are expected to do more and more of the marketing themselves to the point that they are expected to be social media influencers in their own right, and publishers appear to be prioritising flashy debut novels with huge advances they don't outsell, which means the author is less likely to get a follow-up deal.

Obviously a publisher is a business and a business needs to make money, but the idea used to be that you'd have a couple of very successful authors who bring in so much cash that they subsidise the new kid who is building a back catalogue of books that sell okay until they get name recognition and pay for themselves. I was told back then that a couple thousand pounds was very reasonable for a debut novel because you want to get royalties for the sales exceeding your advance and that way the publisher sees you as a profitable investment. The last couple of years I keep hearing about six figure book deals for debut (!) literary fiction (!) novels, what on earth?

I'm not saying that the publishing industry is uniquely awful or that it's worse than it's ever been or whatever, but especially in a time when reading and talking about books is trendy and there is so much money in books, it feels very, I don't know, symbolic? Prioritising flashy one-time projects over sustained and sustainable growth. Investing only enough resources to make your product fit for sale but not enough to make it good because people will buy it anyway. It's frustrating to me as a reader and as an aspiring writer and as a person existing in a capitalist system.

poorshadowspaintedqueens

One of the tags referred to people thanking their editorial teams in acknowledgments, and I want to point out the growing prevalence of people thanking beta-readers and writing groups, both of which usually rely on a pre-existing community or relationship and, just as importantly, are unpaid.

My day job is as a freelance editor for nonfiction books, and I can safely say that if the publishing industry were operating as intended, I would either not have a job at all or be working for a specific press. Authors pay me directly to do the work that a press editor used to do as part of publication contracts. This is because so many presses have started outsourcing all their editorial work to either third-party contractors or, even worse, to genAI.

In short, venture capital has broken the publication industry the same way it's broken the retail, restaurant, and travel industries.

darlingofdots

I didn't go into this side of it in my original post but YES! Fuck! I know this is a huge issue for translators too because they're being asked to do more work in less time for less money and I've heard rumblings about human translators being brought in only to essentially proofread work done by AI, which is so disrespectful to the sheer skill and artistic abilities of (literary) translation...

Anyway, I love editing. I think I love editing almost more than writing, and I'm pretty sure that I'm better at it. Last year I edited an academic article from 11k to 9k words for my supervisor and I felt like a god when I finished it, but when my supervisor asked if I'd thought about doing this professionally, I had to tell her that there's just not a viable career in editing anymore. Publishers used to employ! editors! Several different kinds of editors for different stages of the process! That used to be my dream job!

Editing is so essential to making a text good. It doesn't matter how talented or dedicated you are as a writer, you cannot achieve the level of quality by yourself that you could achieve by working with a skilled editor. That's normal! The lone genius who comes out of the cave with the perfect novel does not exist! The manuscript that gets sold to a publisher is supposed to be handed off to an editor who tells you to tighten up that plotline and reminds you that every day can't be Tuesday and sharpens your prose so your voice really shines. Skimping out on that part of the publication process takes money out of the hands of skilled professionals, leads to consumers (ew) receiving subpar products (ew!), and is such an injustice to the writers whose work can't reach its full potential (and the writers who won't get published because they can't afford to pay an editor out of pocket!).

It drives me up the wall. I hate reading a mediocre book and knowing that a skilled editor could have easily raised it from 3 stars to 4. We should all be way angrier about it, frankly.

#editing #grim

artofmaquenda

Summer Harvest Happy Lughnasadh! :>

charl0ttan

just foud out from a wizard that its entirely unnecessary and often even harmful to form vocal opinions and convictions about topics which you have so far only read text posts about