Either Good News or Bad News

Wifetheif

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I enjoy the podcast 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back. The podcast evaluates bad books, sometimes self-published but not always. The podcast gets its name from the page count of Ernest Cline's "Ready Player One." A book heavily praised when it was released but now is viewed as problematical and dreadfully written. It is amazing how bad a supposedly professionally edited book can be. The podcast has done all of Cline's books and found them equally lacking. Currently the podcast is breaking down Cline's fourth book "Bridge to Bat City." This book, supposedly edited by an award winning professional editor, has the word "Suddenly" appear twice in a single sentence and THREE times in the span of three sentences! Stuff like that should be caught by the author in their first read through. That something so egregious can make it all the way to press through the proofreading and editing process is astounding. Reminder, this is not a self-published opus. It was churned out by Little Brown. I can only conclude that lots of us are better, or at least a lot more careful, than the professionals occupying prime spots in our local Barnes and Noble. That means there is hope for lots of us OR the current state of publishing is so woeful there is NO hope for us. I'm not sure which.
 
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The world of publishing is a crapshoot. Most publishers aren't necessarily interested in publishing works because they're good - they're interested in publishing works they think they can sell. I think there's some overlap there, and brilliant books are being published all the time. But a book like Ready Player One, for all its faults, made people a lot of money. So you can't really expect them not to jump at more of the same.

There's of course hope if you want to publish. But you have to hope for some luck, alongside the prodigious amount of work that goes into writing novels. It's not necessarily enough to write something good. Or even something you see as marketable. You also need the right person to read it and to decide they can sell it.

I'm personally not interested in chasing publishing with the writing process. I'll write the best I can, and once it's written then I'll see what I can do to get it picked up, if I so choose. But conforming my writing to what I think someone might buy feels like a fools' errand, and uninteresting to boot.
 
I enjoy the podcast 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back. The podcast evaluates bad books, sometimes self-published but not always. The podcast gets its name from the page count of Ernest Cline's "Ready Player One." A book heavily praised when it was released but now is viewed as problematical and dreadfully written. It is amazing how bad a supposedly professionally edited book can be. The podcast has done all of Cline's books and found them equally lacking. Currently the podcast is breaking down Cline's fourth book "Bridge to Bat City." This book, supposedly edited by an award winning professional editor, has the word "Suddenly" appear twice in a single sentence and THREE times in the span of three sentences! Stuff like that should be caught by the author in their first read through. That something so egregious can make it all the way to press through the proofreading and editing process is astounding. Reminder, this is not a self-published opus. It was churned out by Little Brown. I can only conclude that lots of us are better, or at least a lot more careful, than the professionals occupying prime spots in our local Barnes and Noble. That means there is hope for lots of us OR the current state of publishing is so woeful there is NO hope for us. I'm not sure which.
Egregious overuse of one word in book cleared by an award-winning editor makes me wonder if that might have been intentional. "Author's choice" can outweigh all your usual rules.
 
Egregious overuse of one word in book cleared by an award-winning editor makes me wonder if that might have been intentional. "Author's choice" can outweigh all your usual rules.
"Suddenly" appears 42 times in a 306 page novel! It is author intention because he is a hack who doesn't own a thesaurus.
 
"Suddenly" appears 42 times in a 306 page novel! It is author intention because he is a hack who doesn't own a thesaurus.
After the 10th one, I suspect no reader thinks any subsequent appearance of this word is sudden ;)
 
It's a word all the writing guides tell you to avoid or use extremely sparingly. It doesn't DO anything and is a definite "tell" don't "show."
 
"Ready Player One." A book heavily praised when it was released but now is viewed as problematical and dreadfully written.
It hit one hell of a nostalgiac note when it was released. I enjoyed it as I was reading it, but it would have been totally forgotten by me if it hadn't become the poster child for awful books. And it does kinda deserve it. The nostalgia was like a lot of the sex here on Lit, or even more so on pornhub. Arousing in the moment, but ultimately hollow and unsatisfying.
 
Sometimes, it's nice to read something that makes your own writing look good by comparison. Especially when it's a big seller. People are willing to shell out for something you know you can beat.

I'm not necessarily in it for money--in fact, not at all--but I like to know I can do good work.
 
I don't think anyone read Ready Player One for it's masterful prose. I haven't read it, just seen the movie, but it's a lighthearted, fun story. That might explain why they didn't bother putting too much effort into the editing, I guess. Pretty careless job, anyway, I agree, coming from a major publisher. Suddenly twice in a sentence shouldn't happen. The editor may have thought the readers won't care.

What's problematic about Ready Player One? I kind of assume someone will find something problematic in nearly everything, but I haven't seen what specifically is problematic about that one.
 
Unfortunately it's been common for a few decades now for publishing houses to let standards of editing slip. Orbit published the Scavenger series by KJ Parker (aka Tom Holt) in 2001-2003 and it was full of glaring typos and continuity errors.

And the stuff that's released for ebook is even worse.
 
I enjoyed Ready Player One when I read it, but it's like a lot of mystery stories: once you know how the mystery resolves, it loses a lot of its suspense and doesn't repay a re-read. I don't remember the prose being dreadful or especially badly-edited, though.

The sexy bits in it (or possibly Ready Player Two which I did not like) were absolutely dire, though. They stand out in my memory as very cringe-inducing.
 
Egregious overuse of one word in book cleared by an award-winning editor makes me wonder if that might have been intentional. "Author's choice" can outweigh all your usual rules.

Yup, one thing I've learned from both amateur and professional editing is that just because there's a problem in the published work doesn't mean the editor missed it. I can make recommendations for change, but the author can stet them and occasionally they do.

With things that aren't clear-cut errors, like repetitive word choices, there's also a question of how much an editor is willing to fiddle with the author's voice. I can look at a sentence and think "I would've written that differently" but that doesn't always mean I should be recommending the author change it. It's their story, not mine. If I red-pen every sentence for issues that aren't hugely important in the scheme of things, the author is probably going to tune out and ignore me on the stuff that's badly broken.

Even when repetition is unintended and reads badly, it's not necessarily easy to fix.

There's a well-known story written by an author who appears to have been told that he needed to mix up his word choices, and taken it to heart. So when he's describing something that's very black, he describes it as "a stygian cloud of charcoal ebony ... [a] shield of blackness" and rotates "stygian", "ebony" and "black" through the rest of the story. That rotation ends up being more obtrusive than just overusing "black" would have been.

The underlying issue there is an author who doesn't have confidence in his ability to evoke the atmosphere he's aiming for, and is leaning on vocabulary as the only thing he knows. Helping him get past that is more of a job for a writing coach than for an editor. If somebody has decided to publish that guy despite that flaw, the resulting tortured prose is their fault, not the editor's.

There's also the consideration that their target audience might not be bothered by something that some readers see as a problem. I haven't read RP1, I suspect I'd find it painful, but clearly it found an audience who were able to live with the "suddenly"s.
 
I loved RP1. My first attempt at a novel of sorts was RP1 fanfiction, and my readers said they enjoyed it more than the actual sequel.

That said, Cline is a one-hit wonder. Armada was basically 80s pop culture cotton candy, and like I said, I could write something better than RP2 and did so, and as far as I know, I didn’t use the word “suddenly” once.

Great; now I have to go back and edit my novel and see what words I overuse. I’ve edited it a thousand times and I’m constantly self-conscious.
 
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