halberdbooks

[halberdbooks]

If Hadestown has a moral, she says, then it’s “you have to try, you have to have hope, not because success is a given – it’s not. Orpheus fails. We heroicise” – here she breaks off to apologise that jet lag has led to her making up words – “we heroicise Orpheus not because he succeeds but because he tries, and that endeavour alone is worthwhile. How to live, and not merely survive, is to believe things could change.”

Anaïs Mitchell on her musical Hadestown: 'I worked on it so long I was afraid I'd never make another record'

[halberdbooks]

[halberdbooks]

i’m re-reading animorphs, a series i loved when i was a closeted young child, as a queer adult and feeling a little insane over it actually. like ok so. imagine you are just a normal regular kid until one day, a chance encounter with an adult unlike any adult you've ever met before abruptly changes who you are as a person, and suddenly you are not like other kids at all. and now you have to fight a secret battle for survival, but you cannot tell anyone around you about it, because many of the people around you harbor a secret violent hatred for who you are, and if you tell someone without realizing the person you're talking to is one of the people who hates you, that person will either put you through horrific harm to make you like them or just outright kill you. this is true of every single person around you—your parents, your siblings, your friends, your teachers—except for a few other kids who you know share your same secret.

and now you have to try to maintain close relationships with the people you love even though you cannot tell them who you really are, who you spend your time with, who you go to when you're not with them. when you see your secret companions in public, you have to try to pretend you barely know them, because being seen together too often could lead to suspicion. you are enduring consistent ongoing trauma that you cannot talk to anyone about because anyone whose job is to help people through trauma may also be one of the people who wants to kill you. also you're a shapeshifter. like yeah ok i wonder why so many people who were obsessed with animorphs as a kid turned out to be queer

[halberdbooks]

narratively I am a fan of romances that don’t ever actually become romances

I don’t mean in an aromantic life partner way, I mean romantic tension that is never resolved or acted upon for whatever reason but by the end it’s clear that both characters experienced the love of their lives without ever acknowledging it as such. but they know. they know.

[halberdbooks]

[halberdbooks]

So, there's a dirty little secret in indie publishing a lot of people won't tell you, and if you aren't aware of it, self-publishing feels even scarier than it actually is.

There's a subset of self-published indie authors who write a ludicrous number of books a year, we're talking double digit releases of full novels, and these folks make a lot of money telling you how you can do the same thing. A lot of them feature in breathless puff pieces about how "competitive" self-publishing is as an industry now.

A lot of these authors aren't being completely honest with you, though. They'll give you secrets for time management and plotting and outlining and marketing and what have you. But the way they're able to write, edit, and publish 10+ books a year, by and large, is that they're hiring ghostwriters.

They're using upwork or fiverr to find people to outline, draft, edit, and market their books. Most of them, presumably, do write some of their own stuff! But many "prolific" indie writers are absolutely using ghostwriters to speed up their process, get higher Amazon best-seller ratings, and, bluntly, make more money faster.

When you see some godawful puff piece floating around about how some indie writer is thinking about having to start using AI to "stay competitive in self-publishing", the part the journalist isn't telling you is that the 'indie writer' in question is planning to use AI instead of paying some guy on Upwork to do the drafting.

If you are writing your books the old fashioned way and are trying to build a readerbase who cares about your work, you don't need to use AI to 'stay competitive', because you're not competing with these people. You're playing an entirely different game.

[halberdbooks]

[halberdbooks]

[halberdbooks]

A shout out to all the writers out there who don’t make the rec lists or have all the buzz or get all the traffic and attention or kudos. Your work is still valuable and appreciated and loved, and without you and your fics, fandom would be so much poorer.

Keep on writing and creating and sharing your works. You have an audience who loves you.

[halberdbooks]

thinking more about authorial insecurity in fiction... it truly is frustrating to me when an author is clearly ashamed of their own premises, or is preemptively responding to imagined criticism. this is where you get a lot of unfunny humor about how stupid genre conventions are and how Unrealistic fantastical/speculative elements are. like ultimately the reason that authors undercut and overexplain their own works is because they're insecure about audience reaction and want to get ahead of the haters by proclaiming that they're Not Cringe. this will not work because I, the ultimate hater, will eventually find them and make one million posts about how much I despise irony poisoning

[halberdbooks]

[halberdbooks]

Vincent van Gogh, from a letter to his brother Theo

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[halberdbooks]

2319.

the world is greening again -- the moss the myrtle the budding leaves and regardless of anything else it will be so beautiful to see

[halberdbooks]

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

Robert Frost

[halberdbooks]

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

Robert Frost

[halberdbooks]

old sword and sorcery stories are always like, “he crushed her body to his” and i love that. was “crushed” really the most romantic word you could come up with, robert? look what you did to this poor maiden. you crushed her