Justified Snobbery...not a Brit thread.

[ABSTRUSE]

I'm currently reading a book that has some historical information that is relevent to a story I'm currently writing and would love to put in novel form one day.
The historical research is well written and very informative, however the author decided to make this a 'historical novel'. He wrapped the history around the lives of fictional characters that if were better written could be plausible, yet reading it is rather painful.
I find myself having to stop from editing it to actually read it. The dialogue is flat and there is no way in hell these people would talk like text book robots. It's like filmstrip dialogue.
He added an element of romance....big mistake here. Two characters who are friendly and admire one another but when together talk in historical reference...I would never ask my lover...."Tell me about the iron furnaces and how they work."

Okay, so these two meet again a few years later and in the course of a few hours realize they love one another despite all the differences in religion and heritage and age. They go through a bit of a trauma, escape and end up kissing. Would this make your heart strings go swoon?
"He took her in his arms and did the unthinkable at that time kissing her on _________street, ________city on______date."

Am I the only one that has read a book that made it to publication, sold various copies and is the worst written thing on earth, only to sit and ask myself, why the hell am I not rich and famous as an author?
I seriously want to find this man, who I believe lives locally and ask him how he managed to pull off this piece of shit novel without an editor?
Did he self publish?
Pay someone to not read it first?

Unfortunatly I'm compelled to finish it no matter how painful it is to read it because the historical references are fascinating. I shatll try to not rake my eyes out of my head.

Anyone else read anything that has made them feel superior, godlike, or just a really good writer?

Share your snobbery.

Abs.

 

[Guest]

I'm just a snobby Brit.

I'm a snob when it comes to sex, that's for sure. Only the best for me.

As for reading crap books... no, I'm smarter than that.



(On a more serious note, yes, I get you, completely. Some of the shite out there really does give me hope. A lot of hope.)

 

[rgraham666]

Every time Shrub II opens his mouth.

 

[ABSTRUSE]

So then we can say snobbery is acceptable??? good. Because some people suck.

 

[Guest]

This thread is not worth reading. Even for free.

 

[ABSTRUSE]

This thread is not worth reading. Even for free.

I wipe my bum with your replies and wave them like a victory flag.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I've read plenty of books I thought were terribly written. A lot of them were by people who weren't novelists, but historians or experts in some other field, and I would see certain lines and wonder how anyone could write such crap.

But then I go and look at some on the stuff I've written and I see the same kind of crap in there (well, maybe not the exact same kind of crap, but crap of a similar nature), and I don't have the excuse of being an expert in some other field who's trying his hand at writing. I'm supposed to be a writer first. I just delude myself into thinking that if it ever came time to get these things published, I would go through them and make everything perfect and absolutely brilliant.

Yeah. Right. Sure I would.

 

[ABSTRUSE]

From what I have read of your stuff Zoot, I would call it anything but crap.

 

[CharleyH]

Not fiction per se (yet), but plenty of theoretical papers.

At Christmas, my step-father told me of this really cool, well, cookbook sort of, I think. Anyhow, the concept (been a few months so it may be wrong) was a blend of recipes with the dramatic stuff that ACTUALLY occurs in a restaurant, unbeknownst to the rest of you. I will have to give him a buzz tonight and ask him what it was . . . sorry, way off topic, but it just popped into my head, and I felt the need to bump this thread.

 

[BlackShanglan]

Robert Heinlein. "Farnham's Freehold."

Proof that any God-awful piece of garbage in the world can get published.

Also proof that it might be wise to show your manuscript to a friend for comments before revealing your repulsive, racist, Oedipal/castration complex freaky little self to the world.

Shanglan

 

[Guest]

I wipe my bum with your replies and wave them like a victory flag.

No. Still not reading.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Odd that this is posted. I was considering posting something similar today.

Last night I decided to give one of my old favorites a read. It's a kinky non conscent piece set in pre revolution Russia. Has always been good to ge tthe juices flowing, so to peak. Last night i found myself so aggravated with it I almost tossed it in the garbage. The writing isn't that bad or that good, a little better than the norm. But the inconsistancies in time period drove me to distraction. Women in stockings with elastic tops, wearing five in ch stilletto pumps, corsets that come off by magic.

It was truley awful. I hope this is just me being frustarted at my inabbility to write and not something I won't get over. I still like that story

 

[LadyJeanne]

Robert Heinlein. "Farnham's Freehold."

Proof that any God-awful piece of garbage in the world can get published.

Also proof that it might be wise to show your manuscript to a friend for comments before revealing your repulsive, racist, Oedipal/castration complex freaky little self to the world.

Shanglan

I've read lots of drivel, today's new novels mostly. It's so hard going through the shelves at my favorite bookstore as they're so full of all that 'Bridget Jones Diary' genre or the 'contemplating my oh-so-profound navel' variety. The few I've read have nothing new or inspiring to say - a man saves them all from their dreary lives in the end or life is bleak and just gets bleaker. But there's so many of them it's hard to wade through to find any real gems.

 

[Alex De Kok]

The reason I started writing erotica was because I was convinced I could write something better than the crap I'd read until then. I don't know if that's snobbery or just an ego trip. That was before I discovered Lit and found there was good erotic writing around, gems hidden in the garbage.

Alex

and now I really must get on with my assignment . . .

 

[Weird Harold]

He added an element of romance....big mistake here. Two characters who are friendly and admire one another but when together talk in historical reference...I would never ask my lover...."Tell me about the iron furnaces and how they work."

Okay, so these two meet again a few years later and in the course of a few hours realize they love one another despite all the differences in religion and heritage and age. They go through a bit of a trauma, escape and end up kissing. Would this make your heart strings go swoon?
"He took her in his arms and did the unthinkable at that time kissing her on _________street, ________city on______date."

Sounds like you're reading something Civil War-ish by John Jakes.

He does a lot of reminding the reader that his characters are do anachronistic things -- like kiss on a public street in a big city.

He also uses character interctions -- even the love scenes -- to show of the research into how innovations in the steel industry shaped the course of the Civil War.

His newer works also show an over-dependence on MSWord's suggestions to correct spelling errors -- MS Word makes some consistent erroneous suggestions for common typos that are easily recogniseble.

Most books I've read that were published in the last five to ten years show an increasing reliance on computerized proofing tools insteadof human proofreaders.

The over-reliance on computrerized proofing is an old aggrevation that just keeps growing but the "flashing neon arrows" pointing out anachronistic behavior doesn't bother me all that much.

I read historical novels for the history and anything that highlights the differences in manners and mores is usefull to me -- no matter how crude or obvious the highlighting.

 

[rgraham666]

Anybody who depends on computers, or worse, computer programmers to check their spelling and grammar deserves what they get.

 

[yui]

Anybody who depends on computers, or worse, computer programmers to check their spelling and grammar deserves what they get.

I depend heavily on spell-check. http://www.addis-welt.de/smilie/smilie/diverse/redface.gif In English, I simply can't spell very well. Spoken words don't sound the same to my ear as they are written; I am stuck spelling phonetically and I work backwards, to the correct spelling, from there.

 

[minsue]

Any book that bad, Abs, and I could never make it through. I have stuck it out through books where the story was wonderful, but the text was full of little common errors that really should never have made it to print. I've little patience for a book that puts me off, though. There are far too many books on my To Read list to waste time on one that has me pulling my hair out.

I think the worst example that I've managed to read all the way through was one that used "of" in place of "have" after contractions every damned time - shouldn't of, couldn't of, etc. Drove me freakin' batty, but the story was good enough that I did my best to ignore it.

 

[AngeloMichael]

Many of you probably already heard about this in the news, but this really proves that any trash can be published, funny thing is it was done on purpose.

SF Authors Sting Publisher

A group of more than 30 SF and fantasy authors, upset at one online book publisher's marketing tactics and its derogatory comments about SF in general, perpetrated a hoax against the publisher, several members told SCI FI Wire.

PublishAmerica, based in Frederick, Md., purports to be a traditional publisher, not a so-called "vanity publisher," which charges authors a fee to print their books. But Jim McDonald decided to test that assertion by coming up with an intentionally awful bogus book, Atlanta Nights by Travis Tea, to be written by several SF&F authors and submitted to PublishAmerica to test the publisher's standards. When the publisher accepted the book for publication, the writers revealed the hoax, and the publisher withdrew its offer of publication. "The fact that they'd attacked science-fiction and fantasy writers [as] untalented hacks provided the motivation and the avenue of approach," McDonald said in an interview. On its Web site, PublishAmerica said, "[SF and fantasy writers] have no clue about what it is to write real-life stories, and how to find them a home."

Several young authors also have complained to Writer Beware, a Web site run by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, alleging that they were duped into signing with PublishAmerica, said Ann Crispin, a Washington, D.C.,-based author who volunteers running Writer Beware.

McDonald conceived Atlanta Nights in the spirit of Naked Came the Stranger, a 1969 hoax perpetrated by Newsday columnist Mike McGrady and several well-known writers and critics, in which everyone wrote a chapter that was sexually explicit and deliberately inconsistent with other chapters. It was a runaway hit.

For Atlanta Nights, McDonald asked several authors, including Sean P. Fodera and Victoria Strauss, to write the worst prose possible, using only sketchy details about characters and events to occur. The book was full of mistakes and inside jokes. There are two chapter 12s, no chapter 21 and a computer-generated chapter 34. Two authors wrote about a wedding of two characters, and there are many misplaced modifiers, malapropisms, spacing errors, incorrect descriptions and laughably bad writing (from Sherwood Smith's chapter 1: "Her [breasts] belonged to a beautiful face carved out of ice and whipped cream, with a pair of glowing emerald eyes"). Even the author's name was a joke when spoken fast.

As the group hoped and McDonald said he expected, PublishAmerica offered a contract. "We'd suspected that they offer contracts to essentially anything that's sent them, and that they don't read submissions before accepting them," McDonald said. After the group went public, PublishAmerica sent a letter of rejection. Asked to comment, a PublishAmerica spokeswoman asked that questions be e-mailed. As of press time, the publisher had not responded to SCI FI Wire's questions.

McDonald said this isn't the end of sting manuscripts heading PublishAmerica's way. "Kevin Yarbrough sent in a manuscript that consisted of the same 30 pages repeated 10 times, and had it accepted," McDonald said. "Dee Power has a sting manuscript that they've accepted. I'm sure that there are others in the works." Curious readers can buy Atlanta Nights, with proceeds going to the SFWA's Emergency Medical Fund.