This is what it sounds like

Do NOT ever attempt fiction if you are not a professional writer of it. Believe it or not, there is actually an amount of skill involved in creating a sense of verisimilitude in storytelling. And the first lesson is this: write what you know. Which means, if you are an individual from one identity group, do not attempt to invent details about other identity groups. You WILL get it wrong. In fact, you will not only get it wrong, you will get it LAUGHABLY wrong.

Michael Harriot dissects Joe Biden's tale of an encounter with a gang leader named Corn Pop that was the highlight of his 1962 Negro Summer Safari Adventure.

I'm always astounded by the imaginings of white people as it relates to race. Many of them have this fictionalized jigaboo version that is almost alien-like. And one of the greatest examples of this ever is Joe Biden's story about Corn Pop the gangsta.

Now it has already been demonstrably proven that Biden will make stuff up. But any black person who hears this story will automatically give you the side-eye and  says: "nigga please."

It begins when Biden was working as a lifeguard at a pool.

Now Biden is like, 176 years old, but he's still in pretty good shape. This supposedly happened in the summer of 1962. Biden says that, instead of hanging out all summer, he decided to take a job working as a lifeguard at a black pool.

So, that summer, Biden was the only white lifeguard at Prices Run swimming pool in Brown-Burton Winchester Park. He says he did it—y'all, I SWEAR this is true—"in hopes of learning more about the black community." Yes, that's an actual quote.

Biden says that he became popular at the pool because many of the black people in Wilmington, DE had never talked to a white person before. This raised by bullshit-o-meter, so I decided to look it up. In 1960, Wilmington was 73% white, according to census records

Anyway, during Biden's Negro Summer Safari Adventure, one day, all of the town gangsters came to the pool. Now I know what you're thinking, but don't stereotype. Gangbangers are NOT a monolith.

Why can't a real street nigga enjoy a nice refreshing dip? Sometimes a thug wants to play Marco Polo, too. Well, the gang that invaded Biden's pool was called the Romans, which sounds gangsta AF. And the leader of the Romans was a dude named Corn Pop.

Now if you're black, I know this shit sounds like some white kid tried to make a gang fairy tale for a sixth-grade play because you and I know there ain't no squad led by a nigga named Corn Pop going around terrorizing Delaware pools.

But, I guess, in white people minds, thugs get two weeks vacation and go on retreats at city pools. Anyway, Biden says he had no idea that Corn Pop was the duly elected leader of the hood niggas. So when Corn Pop began bouncing on the diving board, which was against the rules,

Biden told him:

"Esther Williams! Get off the board, man..."

Then Biden kicked Corn Pop out of the pool. (I know you're thinking "Who TF is Esther Williams?" She was a famous swimmer in the 50s. But I admit, I thought he was talking about the lady who played Florida Evans, too)

Anyway, after he kicked the probably fictitious Corn Pop out of the pool, everybody was like: They told Biden that Corn Pop carried a straight razor and was gonna be waiting for him when he got off work. Now you and I both know that, if this was true, Biden would've just called the cops to walk him to the car.

But this was in 1962, and before 911, you had to dial a whole seven numbers. Plus, Biden said that he knew that if he called the cops, he wouldn't be allowed back into the African American community

Nigga, what?

Anyway, Biden says, instead he wrapped a six-foot metal chain around his arm and wrapped that in a towel. Because everyone knows there are ample black chains just laying around the "African America community" but no police officers.

When he went out to the car, Corn Pop was indeed waiting for him. But Biden went Clint Eastwood on Corn and told OG Pop from the Romans:

"You might cut me, Corn Pop, but I’m going to wrap this chain around your head before you do."

Again, that is a direct quote.

And guess what happened?

Just like that, my nigga CP put down the straight razor and he and Biden became friends. From that day own, Biden was untouchable in the black community because Corn Pop vouched for him

Again, STOP LAUGHING!

Now I don't know how it works where you live, but in my hood, you don't actually get a laminated street credential card from the neighborhood thug council but, then again, I've never been on the mean streets of Wilmington. But this story is actually recounted in Joe Biden's 2007 autobiography AND is retold in the Washington Post, here.

But this is not about Biden.

This is a celebration of the life of a straight razor-carrying certified street thug who I'd bet my pinky toe never existed. But if you ask Biden, I bet he'd say Corn Pop has passed on.

RIP my nigga Corn Pop. This is how it sounds when thugs die.

Of course, back in the 1970s, when Joe Biden was still semi-coherent, white Boomers knew so little about blacks that a water-loving gang leader named Corn Pop who carried a knife might have actually sounded credible to them. I very much doubt there is a single member of the Gen-X generational cohort, be he red or yellow, black or white, who could have heard that story with laughing out loud and immediately calling BS on it.

And "the Romans"? He might as well have said Corn Pop was the leader of the Sharks and threatened him with a scary doo-wop number sung acapella.

Boomers are such cheeseballs. They believe everything they are told by anyone they recognize as an authority figure.

Ceterum, non enim ad lunam.

That which is not wanted

If you don't care about the subject of a post, that's fine. But if, for whatever reason, you choose to comment and explain a) that you don't care about the subject of a post, or, b) why you don't care about the subject of the post, you will be banned.

If we're discussing football, those who don't follow football are not welcome to join the discussion. If we're discussing Mongolian music, those who don't like it are not welcome to join the discussion. If we're discussing video games, those who don't play them are not welcome to join the discussion. And if you don't understand why people are interested in the subject of a post, keep your curiosity to yourself. It's not your concern, it's not your problem, and it's not your business.

No one is asking for your opinion.

In short, if you cannot control your male gammatude, your female solipsism, or your narcissism, you are not welcome to comment here. Read all you like. But don't comment. We don't want to hear it.

Darkstream: the Game of Thrones finale

My take on the finale of A Game of Thrones relied somewhat upon this article on Scientific American explaining the way in which the shift from George Martin's sociological storytelling to Hollywood's psychological storytelling all but ruined the HBO show, but allowed for a moderately satisfying end to the saga nevertheless.

It’s easy to miss this fundamental narrative lane change and blame the series’ downturn on plain old bad writing by Benioff and Weiss—partly because they are genuinely bad at it. They didn’t just switch the explanatory dynamics of the story, they did a terrible job in the new lane as well.

One could, for example, easily focus on the abundance of plot holes. The dragons, for example seem to switch between comic-book indestructible to vulnerable from one episode to another. And it was hard to keep a straight face when Jaime Lannister ended up on a tiny cove along a vast, vast shoreline at the exact moment the villain Euron Greyjoy swam to that very point from his sinking ship to confront him. How convenient!

Similarly, character arcs meticulously drawn over many seasons seem to have been abandoned on a whim, turning the players into caricatures instead of personalities. Brienne of Tarth seems to exist for no reason, for example; Tyrion Lannister is all of a sudden turned into a murderous snitch while also losing all his intellectual gifts (he hasn’t made a single correct decision the entire season). And who knows what on earth is up with Bran Stark, except that he seems to be kept on as some sort of extra Stark?

But all that is surface stuff. Even if the new season had managed to minimize plot holes and avoid clunky coincidences and a clumsy Arya ex machina as a storytelling device, they couldn’t persist in the narrative lane of the past seasons. For Benioff and Weiss, trying to continue what Game of Thrones had set out to do, tell a compelling sociological story, would be like trying to eat melting ice cream with a fork. Hollywood mostly knows how to tell psychological, individualized stories. They do not have the right tools for sociological stories, nor do they even seem to understand the job.

This is why it's going to be challenging to make A Throne of Bones properly. But we'll find a way to do it, and the success of A Game of Thrones is why we'll have the opportunity.

The joy of gammas

This is one of the reasons I needed to be heavily encouraged to move into video. I knew the average IQ of the video commenters was going to be at least a standard deviation below the blog commenters, but it's still painful to encounter and endure the retardery. I thought Gamma midwits were bad, but the average-IQ variants are arguably even worse:

EhudofGera3
This is the second video of you I have seen. I've watched all the IDW, Owen Benjamin pointed me here, your so longwinded and have a poor presentation. What you're saying may or may not be true, but the delivery needs work.

Darkstream
Your grammar and punctuation both require improvement.

Jakob Algeblad
Darkstream You seem too be a great man, responding to a respectful comment with insults...

Darkstream
Your spelling requires improvement.

Now that I better understand them, I really, truly, and sincerely hate gammas. If you're a gamma reading this, please understand that offering unsolicited advice and criticism is something that you should never, ever, do. That habit is one of the primary reasons that people not only don't like you, but actively avoid your company. If you want to be more popular, then excise the words "should", "need", and "seem" from your vocabulary. Never, ever, use them.

Lunchstream with Jon del Arroz

The founder of Castalia House publishing and Arkhaven comics, creator of Alt-Hero and of the extremely highly reviewed Arts of Dark and Light epic fantasy series stops by to talk about writing, editing and publishing. Starts at 4 PM EST.

Tune in here.

UPDATE: 4 PM EST, not 2 PM EST. Sorry about that.

Mediocre author denies authorial intent

One of the reasons John Scalzi has never been able to lift himself out of mediocrity except by coloring Robert Heinlein by the numbers is that he doesn't understand the first thing about understand and creating characters. Or, apparently, self-contradiction.

“I created Bert,” says Frank Oz. “I know what and who he is.” And no, he isn’t gay.

John Scalzi
Frank Oz says that Bert's not gay and he should know because he created him. I mean, Frank, a lot of parents feel the same, but then their kids come out anyway.

John Scalzi
To the folks who are asserting that fictional characters don't have genders, or orientations, or have physical sex: I think you may be doing fiction wrong.

Mark Kern
Okay Scalzi, all your characters in all your novels are Trump loving, cis, Republicans. I demand you acknowledge that. You too, JK Rowling. I don’t care if you created them.

McRapey is so dumb that he doesn't even understand the intrinsic self-contradiction of his expressed positions. First, Frank Oz is correct; the creator defines the character. If we can unilaterally declare, ex post facto, that Bert and Ernie are gay, then we can also declare that Darth Vader is not Luke's father, but rather, Luke's Sigma Chi fraternity brother, that Gimli is not a Dwarf, but a short, bearded Elf, and that Dumbledore is a pedophile who repeatedly abused Harry Potter.

Actually, it might not be long before JK Rowling, in her enthusiasm for all things LGBTP, self-righteously announces the latter. It would explain a lot about those tedious novels.

In any event, the idea that fictional characters have genders, orientations, and engage in sex, but that their characteristics and behaviors are not established by their creators is not only self-contradictory, it is as intrinsically nonsensical as claiming that a man is really a woman.

Of course, if Scalzi's monovocal dialogue is any guide, all of his characters, male and female, human and alien, are actually himself. Which may explain his incompetence with regards to these matters.

In which I vociferously disagree

While it gives me great pain to publicly take exception with the greatest living science fiction writer, I have no choice but to do so with regards to what these days is an unfortunately all-too-pertinent literary matter:

A reader named Bellomy had a comment of dazzling insight I wanted to reprint by way of applause and emphatic agreement.

I learned the secret to what makes a character a Mary Sue.

You see, being great everything doesn’t make one a Mary Sue. John Carter of Mars is that. Batman is that. Wonder Woman, for a female example, is that.

What makes one a Mary Sue is the fundamental dishonesty in how the character is treated.

No, no, no! A thousand times no! A Mary Sue may well be a fundamentally dishonest character. Certainly most of them are. But a Mary Sue may also be an entirely honest character. The reader named Bellomy is confusing the observable fact that most Mary Sues are fundamentally dishonest characters with the basic nature of the Mary Sue.

The correct definition of the Mary Sue is very straightforward: a Mary Sue is a literary character who is an idealized stand-in for the author.

For example, the commenter HMSLion is correct in identifying Owen Pitt, from the Monster Hunter International novels, as an exemplary Mary Sue. Owen Pitt, the oversized accountant highly skilled with guns, who successfully steals the tall, beautiful dark-haired girl from his wealthy, popular, better-educated and more handsome rival, is a wonderful character because Larry Correia is himself a wonderful character. But there can be no doubt that Owen Pitt began as an unmitigated Mary Sue.

Authors have a tendency to reveal more about themselves than they realize, and often, more than they would like, when they write themselves into their stories. Consider the subconscious confessions contained in the two following quotes:

ITEM #1: She was beautiful. In fact she was possibly the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She was tall, with dark black hair, light skin, and big brown eyes. Her face was beautiful, not fake beautiful like a model or an actress, because she was obviously a real person, but rather Helen of Troy, launch-a-thousand-ships kind of good-looking. She wore glasses, and I was a sucker for a girl in corrective eyewear. Since I was ugly it was probably some sort of subconscious reaction in the hope that I might have a chance with a cute girl who couldn't see very well. She was dressed in a conservative business suit, but unlike most women I knew, she made it look good. If I were to guess I would have said that she was in her mid-twenties.

"Mr. Pitt?" she asked. Even her voice was pretty. She was a goddess.

I tried to answer, but no words would come out. Talk, idiot! "Um… Hi." Smooth… So far so good, keep going, big guy.

"You can, um… my name is… Owen. My friends call me Z. Because of my middle name. It starts with a Z. Or whatever works for you. Come in. Please!"

Well, so much for smooth.

ITEM #2: I could not help but gloat a little as I smiled for my nemesis. Grant Jefferson. The smug bastard had only been able to do it in 2.5, which was still pretty respectable, but not even close to as fast as mine. And the best part was that he knew it. He was the one who said my first run had been a fluke. Grant was not used to being bested at anything. I enjoyed watching as he stomped off in frustration. He did not like me, and the feeling was mutual. I handed the shotgun over for the next shooter.

Grant was no Newbie. He was a full-fledged member of MHI, and also one of our instructors, though he was the junior man on Harbinger's team. He had only come out to shoot in the hopes of showing us poor folks how it was done. Grant was totally my opposite. Lean and handsome, witty, charming, a product of the finest schools, and descended from the oldest established (as in super wealthy) New England families. He even had nice hair. He was the type of person everybody liked, and everybody wanted to be liked by.

I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him. I thought he was a pompous ass from the moment I had met him, and I felt the primal and instinctual need to beat him up and take his lunch money.

But the real reason that I hated his guts was that he was Julie Shackleford's boyfriend.

Now, would you like to bet against the surmise that there are real-life analogues to Julie Shackleford and Grant Jefferson? I would not recommend it. The line about "fake beautiful like a model" is particularly informative. Of course, as Larry Correia has improved as a writer, he is no longer reliant upon his own experiences and emotions to create credible characters, which is why Owen Pitt has grown beyond his origins as a Mary Sue.

The reason that most Mary Sues are dishonest is because most authors are not interesting and accomplished individuals like Larry Correia. Therefore, in order to make their characters appear attractive, successful, and interesting, they have no choice but to present them in a dishonest fashion, winning every argument and succeeding in every challenge with the greatest of ease. But that does not make a dishonest character, like Rey from the latest Star Wars abominations, a Mary Sue. She is not a stand-in for the various authors, she is merely a dishonest feminist archetype.

Hapless heroes, pathetic bad guys

Jagi Lamplighter explains why the degenerate Left can't create memorable characters anymore, not even interesting villains like the bad guys of yore:

It is not enough to have an evil snow queen or rat king, the good little man who was kind and loving must be warped beyond recognition into something vile, lest the villain be anyone who we might accidentally admire.

The same thing happened in Disney’s Maleficent.

Disney cartoons feature many fine villains, but none stand out for their force and majesty as much as Malificent, the wicked fairy who is so angry that she has been slighted at a christening that she curses the family and tries to kill the child.

Malificent is impressive. She is funny. She curses an innocent child, just because she is miffed. When, sixteen years later, she leanrs that her minions, goblins and gargoyls,  are still looking in cradles for a missing baby– instead of a young lady who has grown up–Malificent utters her eerie, silvery, laugh. Then she blasts them with a lightning bolt from her magic wand and declares: “Oh, they’re hopeless. A disgrace to the forces of evil!”

But Malificent herself is no disgrace. When it comes time to fight the prince she turns into a gigantic dragon and calls up on the most infernal forces of all.

This gives her a majesty that fits with the evil magnificence of her name. She was spectacular in her villainy.

Too spectacular for the Degenerati, apparently.

In the original Sleeping Beauty – in some ways the most beautiful of all the Disney cartoons – the backdrops were done by a well-known painter. ( I used to sell his works when I worked at a gallery.) – Malificent curses king Stephan, a man who is both a kind king and a loving husband and father. His only crime is that he left the evil fairy off his guest list. He is good, and he is innocent. The horror that befalls his nation is appalling, and he is undeserving of this terrible fate.

In the recent movie about a being who happens to have a similar look and name to our magnificent villainess, the main character, Faux-Malificent, is not majestic.  She is weak and innocent. She falls in love with a man, and this dastardly individual betrays her sweet love and cuts off her wings, leaving her bereft, a victim.

How sad. How tragic. What a victim she is. No wonder she grew up to be such a…unpleasant fairy creature.

In the movie, that man is…the future King Stephan.

It is Geppetto all over again. Big-hearted Geppetto cannot be kindly, he has to be an evil mastermind. Good-hearted King Stephan cannot be innocent, he has to be the cad who screwed over the future villainess.

In modern stories, good men become cads and creeps so that the bad people, like Malificent and the Big Bad Wolf, can be misunderstood, pathetic.  What effect do these changes have on the story? They mitigate the wickedness. If the villain is now a victim, then the villainy is now justified.

This is why Arkhaven is eventually going to surpass Marvel and DC. They cannot bear to address either virtue or wickedness.

David Hogg, media star

Apparently the supply of young actors isn't what it once was. I blame #MeToo.



Now the media is desperately trying to explain away the California video. He was just visiting friends and family! It was just a super interesting encounter, which is why it was covered by the local news in Los Angeles!

“I witnessed this event, why are you guys doing this to me? I’m trying to be as well spoken as possible because these politicians won’t,” he tells Fujii. “I hate that people think I’m an actor, but I don’t have time to care about that. I have to keep going.”

Hogg’s father is former FBI, but he claims that despite some speculation, his dad has nothing to do with his views.

“I am not fed any lines. My father is a retired FBI agent,” said Hogg. “I’m not working with him or anybody else on this. I’m speaking from my heart.”

It's a philosophical conundrum. If the crisis actor denies he is a crisis actor, isn't he, by the very act of his denial, confirming precisely what he denies being? The thing is, it's quite easy to distinguish between scripted dialogue and normal human communication. There is a sort of aural uncanny valley that is hard for the average individual to articulate, but they pick it up nevertheless.

"I'm not working with him... I'm speaking from my heart." Those are the sorts of phrases that simply screams SCRIPT. And why doesn't he "have time"? He's a high school kid! He has nothing but time!

Keep in mind that a false flag doesn't mean that there were no real victims. When General L.L Lemnitzer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, signed off on Operation Northwoods on March 13, 1962, it was specifically planned for "the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or other U.S. government operatives" to "commit acts of terrorism against American civilians."

Back then, the Deep State wanted to drum up support for a war with Cuba. Now, it wants to drum up public support for gun control. But it's all fake and it has been for at least the last 56 years. Do you seriously want to argue that human nature has somehow evolved past that sort of thing in that time?

The ironic thing is that it never occurred to me to think that the high school kids might be plants until they started "speaking out". But after hearing them talk, it never occurred to me for a second that they might be genuine. People being held hostage by ISIS have recorded more convincing speeches on camera with a knife held to their throat.

Meanwhile, the Official Story continues to change.

Not one but four sheriff’s deputies hid behind cars instead of storming Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS in Parkland, Fla., during Wednesday’s school shooting, police claimed Friday — as newly released records revealed the Broward County Sheriff’s Office had received at least 18 calls about the troubled teen over the past decade.

Were they cowards? Or were they ordered to stand down? We certainly can't believe a single thing that the Broward County Sheriff's Office says either.

The great poets steal

I remember how disappointed I was when I learned that Harry Turtledove wasn't a wonderfully imaginative writer, but was simply rewriting Byzantine history. I'm a little more relaxed about the fact that Frank Herbert found a fair amount of inspiration from a historical novel about an Islamic jihad in Russia:

Even a casual political observer will recognize the parallels between the universe of Dune and the Middle East of the late 20th century. Islamic theology, mysticism, and the history of the Arab world clearly influenced Dune, but part of Herbert’s genius lay in his willingness to reach for more idiosyncratic sources of inspiration. The Sabres of Paradise (1960) served as one of those sources, a half-forgotten masterpiece of narrative history recounting a mid-19th century Islamic holy war against Russian imperialism in the Caucasus.

Lesley Blanch, the book’s author, has a memorable biography. A British travel writer of some renown, she is perhaps best known for On the Wilder Shores of Love (1954), an account of the romantic adventures of four British women in the Middle East. She was also a seasoned traveler, a keen observer of Middle Eastern politics and culture, and a passionate Russophile. She called The Sabres of Paradise “the book I was meant to do in my life,” and the novel offers the magnificent, overstuffed account of Imam Shamyl, “The Lion of Dagestan,” and his decades-long struggle against Russian encroachment.

Anyone who has obsessed over the mythology of Dune will immediately recognize the language Herbert borrowed from Blanch’s work. Chakobsa, a Caucasian hunting language, becomes the language of a galactic diaspora in Herbert’s universe. Kanly, from a word for blood feud among the Islamic tribes of the Caucasus, signifies a vendetta between Dune’s great spacefaring dynasties. Kindjal, the personal weapon of the region’s Islamic warriors, becomes a knife favored by Herbert’s techno-aristocrats. As Blanch writes, “No Caucasian man was properly dressed without his kindjal.”
Herbert is ecumenical with his borrowing, lifting terminology and rituals from both sides of this obscure Central Asian conflict. When Paul Atreides, Dune’s youthful protagonist, is adopted by a desert tribe whose rituals and feuds bear a marked resemblance to the warrior culture of the Islamic Caucasus, he lives at the exotically named Sietch Tabr. Sietch and tabr are both words for camp borrowed from the Cossacks, the Czarist warrior caste who would become the great Christian antagonists of Shamyl’s Islamic holy warriors.

Herbert also lifted two of Dune’s most memorable lines directly from Blanch. While describing the Caucasians’ fondness for swordplay, Blanch writes, “To kill with the point lacked artistry.” In Dune, this becomes “[k]illing with the tip lacks artistry,” advice given to a young Paul Atreides by a loquacious weapons instructor. A Caucasian proverb recorded by Blanch transforms into a common desert aphorism. “Polish comes from the city, wisdom from the hills,” an apt saying for a mountain people, becomes “Polish comes from the cities, wisdom from the desert” in Dune.

Dune’s narrative, however, owes more to The Sabres of Paradise than just terminology and customs. The story of a fiercely independent, religiously inspired people resisting an outside power is certainly not unique to the Caucasus, but Blanch’s influence can be found here, too. The name of Herbert’s major villain, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, is redolent of Russian imperialism. Meanwhile, Imam Shamyl, the charismatic leader of Islamic resistance in the Caucasus, describes the Russian Czar as “Padishah” and his provincial governor as “Siridar,” titles that Herbert would later borrow for Dune’s galactic emperor and his military underlings.

This sort of thing is why I saw absolutely no point in playing superficial "hide the obvious" games and calling elves "snerks" and orcs "grablings" as so many mediocre fantasy writers do. I mean, they're not fooling anyone, are they? Sure, we'd all like to be as wonderfully and comprehensively inventive as JRR Tolkien, but few of us have the depth of knowledge or the patience required to painstakingly construct an entire world from scratch.

The "Andrew Anglin" style guide

As I correctly observed from their various writing styles, there are multiple "Andrew Anglins" who are presently running from their scheduled debate with me tonight. This style guide was sent by a former ghostwriter for the Daily Stormer. It is quite long, complete with lists of acceptable slurs and swear words and unacceptable ones, so I've just posted some of the sections that I found to be particularly informative.

The funniest thing, at least for this GamerGater, was learning that the model for the Daily Stormer is Gawker. How very appropriate. This version was clearly written in 2016, sometime before Donald Trump's election but after he secured the Republican nomination.

To quote the email, "You are right that many people post under 'Andrew Anglin.'"

This is the Anglin's style guide,

Byline

The byline is entered manually. It should be entered thusly at the top of the page:

    Andrew Anglin
    Daily Stormer
    Month Day, Year

Article Body

There should always be a header image at the top of an article. A YouTube clip can also fill this spot.

The basic format should usually be:

    A bit of commentary
    Quote from mainstream news source
    A bit more commentary

You can also break up the quote from the mainstream source and interject commentary. You can use multiple sources.

Quote Method

There is almost never a need to completely rewrite a story. It is legal under fair use laws to quote large parts of an article, as long as you don't quote the whole thing, and you can use this to get the basic facts of the story stated, rather than just retyping them.

There are several reasons I have settled on this model. Initially, I tried rewriting stories, but found that this was time consuming and pointless. I've also realized that the quote system serves to break-up the text in a way that is appealing to the ADHD demographic we are targeting. Moreover, being able to see the mainstream source quoted allows us to co-opt the perceived authority of the mainstream media, and not look like one of these sites we are all probably familiar with where you are never certain if what they are saying has been confirmed.

The site is in many ways modeled of of successful liberal blogs such as Gawker. They have produced a successful method to appeal to the same age demographic we want to appeal to.

As a side, the contrast between the mainstream writing style and our own humorous, snarky style can be funny.

It's surprisingly well-structured, and in some ways, is more informative than the AP style manual. However, the nastiness, the shamelessness, and the intrinsic dishonesty that I find so contemptible about the Anglins shines through.

Prime Directive: Always Blame the Jews for Everything

As Hitler says in Mein Kampf, people will become confused and disheartened if they feel there are multiple enemies. As such, all enemies should be combined into one enemy, which is the Jews. This is pretty much objectively true anyway, but we want to leave out any and all nuance.

So no blaming Enlightenment though, pathological altruism, technology/urbanization, etc. - just blame Jews for everything.

This basically includes blaming Jews for the behavior of other non-Whites. Of course it should not be that they are innocent, but the message should always be that if we didn't have the Jews we could figure out how to deal with non-Whites very easily.

The same deal with women. Women should be attacked, but there should always be mention that if it wasn't for the Jews, they would be acting normally.

What should be completely avoided is the sometimes mentioned idea that "even if we got rid of the Jews we would still have all these other problems." The Jews should always be the beginning and the end of every problem, from poverty to poor family dynamics to war to the destruction of the rainforest....

The way they always talk about the Daily Stormer being "the biggest Alt-Right site" is not an accident. Also, it's almost certainly not true. These guys inflate their statistics and exaggerate their popularity and influence to an extent that almost rivals John Scalzi. If you notice, I have nearly three times more followers on Gab than Anglin, 19,209 compared to 7,517, probably because it is much harder to create fake accounts and buy followers on Gab than on Twitter.  I expect that they have been manipulating the Alexa rankings in the way I have demonstrated can be done with as few as 30 people. And the repetitive talk about "how much he's done" and how "super interesting he is" is just more of this constantly self-inflating, self-marketing puffery.

Positivity

We are covering very negative content, generally, but still as much effort as possible should be put into presenting a positive message. We should always claim we are winning, and should celebrate any wins with extreme exaggeration.

This does not mean we downplay the enemy, just that we play up ourselves. We overestimate our influence.

No wonder they cucked and ran; the lead Anglin belatedly realized there was no way he was going to be able to claim he'd won after a debate with me. This also explains why a few of his followers, who may be Anglin ghostwriters themselves, have been falsely claiming that I was the one who ran away, not the Anglins.

Tyler Bourbon @AureliuSS
I can't believe believr @voxday cucked out on the debate! Sad!

And lest you think that the Anglins are just performance art, as I pointed out, they are playing the Jon Stewart game of "kidding, not kidding... wait, I'm just a clown" in order to preemptively fend off merited criticism.

I will say that probably my greatest mistake with this site was condemning Dylan Roof. In my own defense, I was pretty pissed off. Because there were a lot of places where he could have shot young adult nigger males engaged in something other than prayer. Still, I should have simply suggested that (which I did do) without saying "I condemn."

Finally, notice that the Anglins merit zero sympathy for being kicked off Cloudflare, as their principle of celebrating people as secret Nazis is precisely what got them into trouble there.

No Criticism of Other White Activists

This goes without saying but I'll say it anyway: there should never be any criticism of other white activists, even faggots we all fucking hate.

There is nothing profitable which can come of this. And this is the biggest site, so by attacking others who are wrong all we would be doing is giving them attention they wouldn't otherwise have gotten.

Responding to the bullshit of RamZPaul was a mistake I made which I won't make again.

In general, other white activists should be praised as heroes or by mentioned at all. I think we all probably know who is who as far as all that goes.

Note that this doesn't necessarily apply to all mainstream right wing figures such as Marine Le Pen.

Attacking Mainstreaming Shills

Pro-Jew shills should be attacked. These include Alex Jones, Gavin McInnes and Milo. At the same time, they should also be accused/celebrated as secret Nazis whenever they post anything that lines up with our agenda.

Compression and decompression

The producers of A Game of Thrones learned the wrong lessons from George Martin's mistakes:

Too often over the last three seasons—particularly since “Hardhome” in season five, when the series began to chart its own course—the show’s secondary characters and plots have seemed lost. Game of Thrones just doesn’t have time for anyone who isn’t Jon, Daenerys, or the Night King anymore. The show has shed George R.R. Martin’s most frustrating tics, which ultimately weighed his story down: his insistence on meticulous world-building, on resisting deus ex machina resolutions, and on subverting fantasy tropes. But in racing toward the end—in giving fans the resolution they have demanded—Game of Thrones has over-learned from Martin’s mistakes, taking the story too far in the other direction.

Paradoxically, the show has also become grander, more ambitious than any television series before it. Season seven was cut to only seven episodes, as opposed to the ordinary ten, presumably to pay for all the action. Its showrunners needed money for its first naval battle, a dragon assault on the Lannister army, round two between Jon and the Night King, and, most spectacularly, an undead dragon taking down an 8,000-year-old magic wall made of ice. But for all of their scope and masterful aesthetic execution (particularly in the case of the horribly named “Loot Train Battle”), these scenes all lacked the punch of “Hardhome,” when Jon first confronts the Night King and the show’s stakes at long last come into view.

This is because they were in keeping with the show’s post-“Hardhome” modus operandi: moving pieces around to prepare for a final sprint to the finish. The naval battle at the beginning of season seven served to eliminate the Sand Snakes (who never worked anyway) and kick into gear Theon’s redemption arc (which was then ignored for the next several episodes). The assault on Casterly Rock came about for no other reason than to even the odds by taking the Unsullied out of the picture, though they reappeared in the finale with no explanation.

Most egregiously, the “Frozen Lake Battle” (also horribly named) was necessitated by a plan to capture a wight that made absolutely no sense at all. The reason for its existence was to neatly get things done, in this case to give the Night King a dragon and to provide an excuse for finally bringing all the show’s far-flung characters together. As well-executed as many of these plot developments were, they never arose naturally from the show’s characters—instead they were imposed by the show’s writers, who are suddenly very pressed for time....

The show’s other standouts have been largely abandoned or turned into secondary figures, including the Starks. The culmination of the Littlefinger plot was thrilling, but overall it was narrative thumb-twiddling, a way to take a character off the board while giving something for Arya and Sansa to do while Jon was away.

The sad truth is that this is probably where the novels are going as well. Martin has concocted many of his characters to buy time for his primary story. It is Martin’s great strength that so many of them—including a number who never made it into the show—are so rich and real, but they too are ultimately extraneous to the main plot revolving around Jon and Dany.

Although I am contemptuous of George Martin as an individual, and although I am increasingly confident that ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT will eventually be seen by most fans of epic fantasy to be considerably superior to A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE once both series are finished, I continue to look on the books and the HBO series alike as a tremendous learning experience, if not an irreplaceable one.

The truth is that I'm grateful to Martin for the various mistakes he has made. Without the tedious debacle that was A Dance with Dragons, I never would have even thought about daring to begin my own epic fantasy. And without his spiraling out of control thanks to the introduction of 13 new perspective characters, bringing him to a total of 22 in one book, I would never have learned the importance of keeping them under such tight discipline. Without his foolish decision to go back and untie the Mereen Knot, I would not have grasped the importance of allowing the greater story to flow naturally, and not getting caught up in always explaining exactly what happened to whom.

Here is what most readers, even most writers, simply don't realize. Writing epic fantasy is very difficult. I would estimate that it's about 5x more difficult than writing a novel of normal size, not counting the extra time required to account for the additional length. Not only that, but periodically publishing large books is the exact opposite of what a writer should do if he wants to maximize his book sales in the current environment. So, most writers simply cannot write epic fantasy, and even if they happen to possess the ability, they can't afford to do so.

Then factor in the fact that several of those who have actually written epic fantasy have done so in the form of cheap Tolkien knockoffs, which provide no useful lessons to the aspiring epic writer, and perhaps you'll understand why I appreciate the chance to learn from GRRM in real time. Here is how I rank the writers of epic fantasy:

1. JRR Tolkien
2. Stephen Donaldson (Covenant)
3. Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman (Dragonlance Legends)
4. David Eddings (Belgariad)
5. Glen Cook
6. Steven Erikson
7. Raymond Feist
8. George RR Martin
9. Joe Abercrombie
10. CS Friedman
11. Tad Williams
12. Daniel Abraham
13. Brandon Sanderson
14. R. Scott Bakker
15. Melanie Rawn
16. Terry Brooks
17. Peter Brett
18. Mark Lawrence
19. Robert Jordan
20. Terry Goodkind
21. Christopher Paolini

Obviously, your mileage may vary, as may what you consider to be "epic fantasy". I would have Susan Cooper, Lloyd Alexander, Tanith Lee, and Anne McCaffrey all ranked above Dragonlance, but their work is better categorized in other categories. It's rather amusing to see how many "best epic fantasy" lists feature works with descriptions that begin "okay, it's not actually epic fantasy, but [insert other sub-genre here]|.

I don't know where AODAL will end up once it is complete. Towards the top, I hope. But there is only one way to find out, and that is to finish Vols. II through V.

UPDATE: as you would expect, the clueless mediocrities at File 770 don't even understand what Epic Fantasy is and is not, nor do they realize that the Dragonlance Legends and the Belgariad merit recognition for their authors in themselves, even though the Dragonlance Chronicles, the DeathGate Cycle, and the Malloreon do not merit similar respect. It's about peak series achievement, not average.

If you're not an author of epic fantasy yourself, you may not realize what Weis & Hickman and Eddings accomplished and somehow managed to make look so easy. I tend to doubt it is a coincidence that they are some of the only epic fantasy authors who were actually able to put together legitimate second and third attempts, even though they were considerably less successful in doing so.

I would be willing to entertain the possibility that David Gemmell belongs on this list. I'd probably rank him somewhere between Glen Cook and Raymond Feist if he did. None of the other authors I saw mentioned there merit inclusion, with the possible exception of NK Jemisin, who would fit below Jordan and above Paolini.

Which is the true text order?

Here is an apt demonstration of what I meant when I said that postmodern literature is bad writing. Not only is it bad writing, but it isn't even meant to be properly read at all, only skimmed for the surface impressions made by the words. In fact, it's not even necessary for the words to be in any particular order from paragraph to paragraph.

The following three passages are the same string of words taken from the 1985 National Book Award winner. I divided the original passage into 15 strings based on the punctuation and randomized it twice. Now, without looking anything up on the Internet, see if you can tell which passage is in the correct order, Number 1, 2, or 3.

1. We simply walk toward the sliding doors ... This is not Tibet ... sealed off ... timeless. Code words and ceremonial phrases. It is just a question of deciphering ... Another reason why I think of Tibet. Dying is an art in Tibet ... Energy waves, incident radiation ... Look how well-lighted everything is ... Not that we would want to ... Chants, numerology, horoscopes, recitations. Here we don't die, we shop. But the difference is less marked than you think. Everything is concealed in symbolism... This simple truth is hard to fathom. But once we stop denying death, we can proceed calmly to die ... Tibetans try to see death for what it is. It is the end of attachment to things. The large doors slide open, they close unbidden. We don't have to cling to life artificially, or to death ...
2. Everything is concealed in symbolism ... The large doors slide open, they close unbidden. Energy waves, incident radiation ... code words and ceremonial phrases. It is just a question of deciphering ... Not that we would want to ... This is not Tibet ... Tibetans try to see death for what it is. It is the end of attachment to things. This simple truth is hard to fathom. But once we stop denying death, we can proceed calmly to die ... We don't have to cling to life artificially, or to death ... We simply walk toward the sliding doors ... Look how well-lighted everything is ... sealed off ... timeless. Another reason why I think of Tibet. Dying is an art in Tibet ... Chants, numerology, horoscopes, recitations. Here we don't die, we shop. But the difference is less marked than you think."
3. Energy waves, incident radiation ... This is not Tibet ...timeless. Chants, numerology, horoscopes, recitations. Here we don't die, we shop. But the difference is less marked than you think. We don't have to cling to life artificially, or to death ...Another reason why I think of Tibet. Dying is an art in Tibet ... Everything is concealed in symbolism... Look how well-lighted everything is ... code words and ceremonial phrases. It is just a question of deciphering ... We simply walk toward the sliding doors ... Not that we would want to ... Tibetans try to see death for what it is. It is the end of attachment to things. Sealed off ... This simple truth is hard to fathom. But once we stop denying death, we can proceed calmly to die ... The large doors slide open, they close unbidden. 

Mailvox: bad writing is cancer

This is an email from a Castalia House author who shall go unnamed, but obviously isn't John C. Wright.

Well, now you've done it.

One of your strongest points in your discussion with Stefan on Crime and Punishment was how Dostoyevsky focused on the moral decay caused by material naturalism and did not and likely could not possibly have seen its system-wide effects.

Now, today's post about bad writing makes a similar case that Modernism, and in particular its virulent Boomer strain - Postmodernism - is culture cancer.

Many people could see that Modernist literature was, at base and overall, simply not as deep or interesting as those books which had not gottenn caught up in Modernism's well-crafted, insubstantial mopefests.

The clue that Modernism was a dead-end can be found in its best products: As I Lay Dying, The Wasteland, Invisible Man, Heart of Darkness and The Aspern Papers are ALL, at heart, about how writing from a Modernist perspective is a pointless, disjointed exercise that renders a man insignificant. Wait for death, write or don't...in the end Material Man is a Hollow Man. If even Modernist novels don't like Modernist novels, you know you've chanced on a Very Bad Idea.

When the reactionary Post-Modernism came along, the self-defeating problem became clear. There were plenty of sane readers who said, "Okay, that way lies madness. Taken to its logical conclusion, PM could lead to the end of literature!"

It is no coincidence that the era of the blockbuster genre novel exploded in a major response to academic Post-Modernism. Everybody read Dr. Zhivago or Sidney Sheldon. No one read Alphabetical Africa.

BUT...Post-Modernism clearly was not contained to academic literature. Sidney Sheldon's soap operas were not merely pop-classic melodramas, but were materialist ones. The casting couch ultimately made starlets powerful, taboo relationships were taboo because of society's evil, not personal sin. Ursula Le Guin's adventure stories became feminist meditations. Stephen King's pulp adventure horror veered badly into religious ignorance. John Updike was...Updikian.

Now, these books and hundreds more were still, in form, traditional, popular novels. They just had some spots of odd, discolored PostModern crust on them.

The spots showed up in movies and television: Laugh-In, All in the Family, the Brady Bunch, Planet of the Apes, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Heck, the massive blockbuster Jaws opened up with a nude girl being bitten, dragged, mauled and eaten by the literary aquatic symbol for Death incarnate, a "Great White" no less. That's Post-modern action: no heroes, no villains, just young, bare, feminine annihilation.

But those spots are hardly noticed in the work by most people at the time, whether it is a bit of King's "tornado-faced" lady (bad writing) or the now iconic but originally "ironic" "Episode IV" scroll in Star Wars.

But they got everywhere, and, while it occasionally worked (the unvarnished, unapologetic racism in The Godfather I and II was possible under a sort of Post-Modern "honesty" at the time), most of the time, these spots show up as an anachronism, a 'breaking of the fourth wall' or just bad dialogue.

And today?

We don't even have personal pronouns anymore.

Our culture adopted a literature that had, at its core, an anti-communication ethic. The more obscure, the more personal, the more disconnected a "text" was from its meaning, the more "authentic" it was. The more "identity" it had.

Post-Modernism didn't just end literature. It ended communication.

I think that's why there are so many landmines of bad writing today. I think that's why you can emerge from a writing program or college less literate than when you came in, even if you were borderline literate to begin with!

Bad writing is cancer.

Modern literature is bad writing

Speaking of bad writing, this 2001 Atlantic essay on the form and purpose of modern literature is magnificent. The author, BR Myers, rightly crucifies several doyennes of modern literature, including one, Cormac McCarthy, whose popular appeal I have never understood in the slightest. Read the whole thing. It's long, but it's well worth it.

Parallelisms and pseudo-archaic formulations abound: "They caught up and set out each day in the dark before the day yet was and they ate cold meat and biscuit and made no fire"; "and they would always be so and never be otherwise"; "the captain wrote on nor did he look up"; "there rode no soul save he," and so forth.

The reader is meant to be carried along on the stream of language. In the New York Times review of The Crossing, Robert Hass praised the effect: "It is a matter of straight-on writing, a veering accumulation of compound sentences, stinginess with commas, and a witching repetition of words ... Once this style is established, firm, faintly hypnotic, the crispness and sinuousness of the sentences ... gather to a magic." The key word here is "accumulation." Like Proulx and so many others today, McCarthy relies more on barrages of hit-and-miss verbiage than on careful use of just the right words.

While inside the vaulting of the ribs between his knees the darkly meated heart pumped of who's will and the blood pulsed and the bowels shifted in their massive blue convolutions of who's will and the stout thighbones and knee and cannon and the tendons like flaxen hawsers that drew and flexed and drew and flexed at their articulations of who's will all sheathed and muffled in the flesh and the hooves that stove wells in the morning groundmist and the head turning side to side and the great slavering keyboard of his teeth and the hot globes of his eyes where the world burned. 
(All the Pretty Horses, 1992)

This may get Hass's darkly meated heart pumping, but it's really just bad poetry formatted to exploit the lenient standards of modern prose. The obscurity of who's will, which has an unfortunate Dr. Seussian ring to it, is meant to bully readers into thinking that the author's mind operates on a plane higher than their own—a plane where it isn't ridiculous to eulogize the shifts in a horse's bowels.

As a fan of movie westerns, I refuse to quibble with the myth that a wild landscape can bestow epic significance on the lives of its inhabitants. But novels tolerate epic language only in moderation. To record with the same somber majesty every aspect of a cowboy's life, from a knife fight to his lunchtime burrito, is to create what can only be described as kitsch. Here we learn that out west even a hangover is something special.

[They] walked off in separate directions through the chaparral to stand spraddlelegged clutching their knees and vomiting. The browsing horses jerked their heads up. It was no sound they'd ever heard before. In the gray twilight those retchings seemed to echo like the calls of some rude provisional species loosed upon that waste. Something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool. 
(All the Pretty Horses)

It is a rare passage that can make you look up, wherever you may be, and wonder if you are being subjected to a diabolically thorough Candid Camera prank. I can just go along with the idea that horses might mistake human retching for the call of wild animals. But "wild animals" isn't epic enough: McCarthy must blow smoke about some rude provisional species, as if your average quadruped had impeccable table manners and a pension plan. Then he switches from the horses' perspective to the narrator's, though just what something imperfect and malformed refers to is unclear. The last half sentence only deepens the confusion. Is the thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace the same thing that is lodged in the heart of being? And what is a gorgon doing in a pool? Or is it peering into it? And why an autumn pool? I doubt if McCarthy can explain any of this; he probably just likes the way it sounds.

No novelist with a sense of the ridiculous would write such nonsense. Although his characters sometimes rib one another, McCarthy is among the most humorless writers in American history. In this excerpt the subject is horses.

He said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war. Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold ... Lastly he said that he had seen the souls of horses and that it was a terrible thing to see. He said that it could be seen under certain circumstances attending the death of a horse because the horse shares a common soul and its separate life only forms it out of all horses and makes it mortal ... Finally John Grady asked him if it were not true that should all horses vanish from the face of the earth the soul of the horse would not also perish for there would be nothing out of which to replenish it but the old man only said that it was pointless to speak of there being no horses in the world for God would not permit such a thing.
(All the Pretty Horses)

The further we get from our cowboy past, the loonier becomes the hippophilia we attribute to it. More to the point, especially considering The New York Times's praise of All the Pretty Horses for its "realistic dialogue," is the stiltedness with which the conversation is reproduced. The cowboys are supposed to be talking to a Mexican in Spanish, which is a stretch to begin with, but from the tone in which the conversation is set down you'd think it was ancient Hebrew. And shouldn't Grady satisfy our curiosity by finding out what a horse's soul looks like, instead of pursuing a hypothetical point of equine theology? You half expect him to ask how many horses' souls can fit on the head of a pin.

All the Pretty Horses received the National Book Award in 1992. "Not until now," the judges wrote in their fatuous citation, "has the unhuman world been given its own holy canon." What a difference a pseudo-biblical style makes; this so-called canon has little more to offer than the conventional belief that horses, like dogs, serve us well enough to merit exemption from an otherwise sweeping disregard for animal life. (No one ever sees a cow's soul.) McCarthy's fiction may be less fun than the "genre" western, but its world view is much the same. So is the cast of characters: the quiet cowboys, the women who "like to see a man eat," the howling savages. (In fairness to the western: McCarthy's depiction of Native Americans in Blood Meridian [1985] is far more offensive than anything in Louis L' Amour.) The critics, however, are too much impressed by the muscles of his prose to care about the heart underneath. Even The Village Voice has called McCarthy "a master stylist, perhaps without equal in American letters." Robert Hass wrote much of his review of The Crossing in an earnest imitation of McCarthy's style:

The boys travel through this world, tipping their hats, saying "yessir" and "nosir" and "si" and "es verdad" and "claro" to all its potential malice, its half-mad philosophers, as the world washes over and around them, and the brothers themselves come to be as much arrested by the gesture of the quest as the old are by their stores of bitter wisdom and the other travelers, in the middle of life, in various stages of the arc between innocence and experience, by whatever impulses have placed them on the road.

The vagueness of that encomium must annoy McCarthy, who prides himself on the way he tackles "issues of life and death" head on. In interviews he presents himself as a man's man with no time for pansified intellectuals—a literary version, if you will, of Dave Thomas, the smugly parochial old-timer in the Wendy's commercials. It would be both unfair and a little too charitable to suggest that this is just a pose. When McCarthy says of Marcel Proust and Henry James, "I don't understand them. To me, that's not literature," I have a sinking feeling he's telling the truth.

The essay finally made it clear to me what these modern literaturists - one hesitates to call them actual writers - are doing, and it's not dissimilar to what the gammas are doing with their terrible, narcissistic metaphors. Their words are not meant to be read as words as such, but are meant to be lightly scanned, so that an impression is formed by that superficial contact.

That's why there is so often no meaning to be found in their works, that there is neither action nor character to be found in the texts. No one actually reads these books! They are, instead, scanned, with no more comprehension of the empty contents surveyed than the whole language reader grasps the phonetics of the words he is reading.

On bad writing

I was talking to one of our authors today, trying to understand why authors so often make a certain style of mistake that has puzzled me for years. He actually managed to articulate it, and I found the explanation to be rather fascinating as well as potentially useful to those who are trying to improve their literary style. I think it is something that separates bad writing from competent writing.

What we were discussing is the nonsensical metaphor or simile. Now, I have used a nonsensical simile at least once myself, although I did so knowingly, as it was an inside joke. Some old-school Ilk might remember the phrase "then it hit him, like a cheetah" from Rebel Moon. That was something my best friend's brother used to say, because my best friend's brother is a complete goofball who gloried in saying nonsensical things like that. The point is that I knew it was a silly simile and horrifically bad writing, although I suppose it is not a nonsensical simile from a technical perspective, since being hit by a cheetah at 60+ MPH would presumably be the sort of thing that would bowl one over.

However, as the writer explained, the mediocre writer doesn't know that the metaphor or the simile is nonsensical. To him, it is an emotionally true connection, and therefore it makes sense, even when it objectively doesn't. For the purposes of reference, here are the four examples from the rough draft to which the author, Johan Kalsi, is referring, a bizarre metaphor that completely mystified me, and not only because the author utilized it FOUR FREAKING TIMES in a single scene.

Jeckell's broad, sleepy face held his lips in a strange smile, as if he had just caught a mouse between his teeth. 

Jeckell continued to chew on his mouse, doing nothing to wipe his face clean of its aura of smug supremacy.

Jeckell stopped gnawing the imaginary mouse for a moment.

Everyone gasped. Jeckell stood up and punched the table in front of him, his jaw clenched back down on the mouse.

I like to think that my editorial comments were polite, professional and helpful: "What the fuck is going on with this guy chewing on a nonexistent mouse? What does that even look like? Lose the fucking mouse!"

I mean, this was, by any measure, bad writing. Fine, everyone commits their clunkers from time to time. But this is a weird mistake, and one I see far too often these days, with authors using words they apparently don't understand and images that simply don't make any kind of sense. Fortunately, Mr. Kalsi was able to put this particular example into perspective that at least make a modicum of sense, and should help people avoid making this particular mistake.

• I was trying to emulate Asimov's long Q&A scene from Foundation, which I don't like, and I was being lazy - I hadn't figured out good words to make the bureaucrat both human and annoying, so I just wrote that mouse thing in, because I had an image in my head of this fat old barn cat I came across when I was a kid. I opened a bag of feed, and this cat was in there, chewing on a wriggling mouse. It was a disturbing, vivid, shocking thing, and I still remember that cat's dead eyes looking at me like, "What, asshole? Just watch it wriggle."
• Emotionally, I thought of the bureaucrat like that - this perfectly harmless guy that the First Technocrat had known for decades, who suddenly held his life in his hands, and didn't care a bit.
• Of course, some random personal memory means nothing to you or any other reader, and that's why it is such an annoying dig at the reader.
• A bad writer or a lazy writer won't see when he does this (I think it got mentioned 3 times in a page or something, and I didn't even remember I had written it at all when you pointed it out to me.)
• A gamma will cling to this personal image as a secret king thing - "Oh, the peasant reader doesn't get me - I'm a genius!" and as an excuse thing when the criticism comes. - Delusional
• The old big writers I can think of who did it a lot were Stephen King (the lady in Misery has "a face like a tornado" twice in two pages, for example - memorable for the wrong reasons) Piers Anthony and Philip Jose Farmer.

Kalsi is right. A face like a tornado makes no more sense than a man gnawing on a mouse. Remember, writing is communication. So, off-hand implied references to personal memories or associations that are not accessible to your readers is not going to make you look brilliant, it's just going to make you a bad writer.

Why boys don't read books

It's a deep mystery the publishing industry has simply been unable to unravel. The tweet was: A look at how YA fans are connecting with and inspiring today's authors.

As a general rule, boys don't read books written by women. Girls prefer books written by women, but they are more willing to read books written by men. It's not really that hard to figure out why. Girls like both story and romance. Boys like story. Women like writing romance. Men like writing story.

On a tangential note, there was an unexpectedly strong response to the excerpt I posted from NO GODS, ONLY DEMONS the other day. Now, perhaps that was because people are less familiar with Cheah's writing than mine or John Wright's but I also realized that I seldom post excerpts from Castalia House books here. So, I'm wondering if that is the sort of end-of-day post you'd like to see here more often or if that would be an annoyance.

Excerpt posts are very easy, so I wouldn't need to do it in lieu of other posting. Anyhow, let me know if you'd rather see a) more excerpts or b) no excerpts, and, if a), how often you'd like to see them. Our catalog is now at the point that even if we posted a daily excerpt, it would take us more than two months to get back to the first book, so anything from once a week to once a day is possible.

Strong female characters

It's always interesting, and amusing, to listen to science fiction writers debate the topic of "strong female characters", particularly in the modern context of Princess Kung-Fu. That, of course, is the unstoppable martial art practiced solely on film, by every kick-ass female character who appears on screen.

And everyone - everyone - does it. Even those who correctly criticize the Buffies and Emma Peels do it in their own way. Consider Declan Finn describing what he presumably considers to be more realistic versions of female fighters:

Five-feet tall (really 4’11”) Goldberg is a computer nerd. She used to work for the NSA, but went over to the Secret Service to audit security, since she’s not tall enough to jump in front of Presidents. Her fights included: punching someone in the balls, and dropping low and cutting their Achilles tendons.

This reveals the fundamental problem with science fiction writers: they don't get into fights. Oh, they are more inclined than most to get into word spats and verbal scrums, and even to engage in the proverbial handbags at dawn, but virtually none of them, of either sex, have ever punched anyone in the face, or been punched in the face.

For example, any time anyone mentions "punching someone in the balls" as an effective fighting technique, you know they have never actually seen anyone get struck in that manner in a combat situation. You see, there is this useful little substance called adrenaline that tends to fire up when people are engaged in combat of one form or another. It is why someone who is shot five times in the chest can nevertheless stagger forward and bury a machete in a policeman's head. It is why someone can have a black belt's sidekick ride up his extended leg, crush his balls between the heel and the pubic bone, and nevertheless continue fighting at full speed for 90 seconds without even slowing down.

And then, after the round was over, grimace, sink to his knees, and ask those who'd been watching, "did he hit me below the belt or something?" I once got my nose broken in a ring fight and didn't even notice it. You can't write about potentially lethal combat and ignore the effects of adrenaline. Actual conversation from my fighting days:

Vox: Why'd they stop the fight?
Alex: It's the rule. Have to stop the bleeding.
Vox: Who's bleeding?
Alex: You are. Like a stuck pig.

As for "dropping low" to attack someone's Achilles tendons - plural, no less - that sounds like a wonderful way to get kicked in the face. There is a good reason wrestlers go for the waist, not directly for the legs, after all.

Seriously, no writer should even think about writing a hand-to-hand scene until he - or she - has been punched full-force in the face by a strong man and by a weak woman. Nor should he do it until he has punched both a strong man and a weak woman in the face. Better yet, exchange blows with a strong woman and a weak man too. The experience will absolutely prove educational and should suffice to illustrate how utterly absurd 99 percent of all hand-to-hand combat in film and fiction is. I mean, one might more reasonably, more convincingly, just give the woman wings and a devil's tail, with which combination she defeats bigger, faster, stronger men by flying out of their reach, wrapping her tail around their neck, and strangling them.

Of course, even then, a sufficiently strong and alert man would simply grab her tail and bounce her face off the ground. All right, strike that, all the succubi don't know kung fu.

Anyhow, if you would like to read a much more realistic depiction of how hand-to-hand combat in science fiction would work in any universe where F still equals MA, I suggest reading "The Amazon Gambit" from Forbidden Thoughts, set in the Quantum Mortis universe. I wrote it, in part, to illustrate the one way the women can be effectively used in combat.

However, comic readers need not worry. Alt-Hero will certainly contain female superheroines such as Dynamique, Kosmik Girl, Vespra, and La Fille Furie. And they will be lethal superhumans who kick prodigious ass, they simply will not necessarily be able to match fists with the likes of Capitán Europa, the head of the European Commission's Global Justice Initiative, or Michael Martel, better known as Hammer.

A shameless scalzification

Jake Kerr shamelessly scalzies G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday.

So, my new novel is about a future Earth where the population escapes the polluted and dying planet by logging into linked virtual reality servers. They take on roles as fantasy characters, live in former time periods, cruise the Tinder server—all in an effort to get away from the sad world where they live. A mysterious group wants to destroy the virtual reality network to force the citizens to wake up and force the corporations and governments to clean up environment. Their belief is that the planet was purposefully polluted to move people to the corporation-controlled virtual reality operating system. Our hero infiltrates the supreme council of this group and finds that her life is constantly in danger as she moves from secret meetings to administration buildings and virtual reality fantasy servers where she is a level 73 mage. Along the way, everyone betrays everyone else and nothing is what it seems.

That is the description of Thursday, and based solely on that you would never know that it is an adaptation of G. K. Chesterton’s classic The Man Who Was Thursday. And therein lies the following tale.

I first read The Man Who Was Thursday in college, and it immediately became one of my favorite novels. The humor. The plot twists. The intrigue. I was entirely enthralled. Michael Moorcock called it one of the top 100 fantasies of all time, and it’s a seminal novel in the thriller genre, with its series of chases and pursuits. It’s an amazing book with one significant problem—it’s very dated.

The humor references have little cultural meaning to many readers today. The surrealist/spiritual metaphors and allegories are highly specific and jarring for many. And the expositional and philosophical prose is far out of fashion. To make matters worse, the frightening bad guys are anarchists, a group that provides little sense of dread today.

It always struck me that this extraordinary novel deserved to be updated in some form or fashion so that a new generation of readers could enjoy Chesterton’s genius. The more I thought of it over the years, the more I considered doing it myself. Chesterton wrote the plot, the scenes, and the characters. How hard could it be? I thought. Well, I found out when I took on the project last year....

Chesterton’s background was decidedly religious and based on the secular, frightening, and chaotic anarchist forces in 1908. My background was of a modern world dying from neglect, with virtual reality the way the population escaped this dismal reality. The world is even described as “IRL” and the IRL spaces where people live are delineated as “inside” and “outside.” Making all this work required me to add some scenes and change some of the ways that the characters interacted. For example, the opening scene in my book doesn’t exist in The Man Who Was Thursday.

At its heart, The Man Who Was Thursday is steeped in Catholic symbols and Christian messages, and this is where I am most curious about how the book will be received. I’m an atheist and removed all of those pieces from the novel. Yet I’m convinced that I’ve kept the spirit of the novel enough that if you are religious or a Chesterton fan, you will still see those things there, just not as overtly as Chesterton made them. Christian speaker and author Matt Mikalatos addresses this in the book’s afterword.

Now, there is nothing wrong with retelling an old tale. The Brothers Grimm did a bang-up job of it, as did Shakespeare and Tanith Lee. I've done it myself, as QUANTUM MORTIS: A Mind Programmed is a rework of Jeff and Jean Sutton's The Programmed Man, a childhood favorite of mine that I must have re-read at least six or seven times.

The first big difference is that even the biggest fans of the Sutton work like QM:AMP even better than TPM. That is simply not true of Scalzi's various ripoffs; literally no one likes any of his books better than the original sources from which he borrowed and/or stole. Why do TPM fans like QM-AMP? Because I removed absolutely nothing that was significant or essential from the original novel. I started with the utmost respect for what was there, excised as little as I felt that I possibly could, and focused on expanding from the original. Of course, it probably doesn't hurt that I am a better writer than Sutton.

Scalzi is not better than Heinlein, Dick, Piper, or Asimov. Dan Brown is not better than Umberto Eco. Terry Brooks is not better than JRR Tolkien. I haven't read Jake Kerr, but there is virtually no chance he is a better writer, or a better observer of the human condition, than G.K. Chesterton. Their imitations, homages, or ripoffs, as you prefer, are almost guaranteed to suffer by comparison with the original.

Writer's Lesson #1: follow Shakespeare's lead, not Scalzi's. Use lesser writers as source material, not those who are markedly better than you are. It's rather like a band releasing a cover song. If you try to record and release a Beatles' song, or a Metallica song, you're most likely just going to look stupid while pissing off their fans.

The second difference is that you absolutely should not make any changes the core structure or the philosophical heart of the story. Subversion is not homage. To polish some clunky prose, add additional detail or story, or breathe life into previously cardboard characters is one thing, to rework everything to suit your personal prejudices is something altogether different. This scalzification of a classic is not only unbelievably stupid, but tone-deaf, and tends to demonstrate how it is that moral-blind atheists so reliably create ugly mediocrities, even when they begin with solid source material.

You shouldn't record and release a cover of "Sweet Home Alabama". But if you insist on doing so anyhow, you definitely shouldn't change the state of reference to Massachusetts or San Francisco.

In the meantime, WE. ARE. AMUSED. You see, this is a screenshot of the Also Viewed list for The Collapsing Empire. Tor and McRapey are desperately trying to ignore it, so it will be interesting to see how long their self-discipline lasts. If you haven't preordered THE CORRODING EMPIRE yet, you really should join in the fun. Let's face it, you'll want to be able to say that no only were you there, but you made it happen.

What Men Read

A best-selling author explains.

What Men Read

I was doing an interview a few weeks ago for Women of Bad Assery when I started to wonder if it was actually true that men - and young boys - refuse to read books written by women or starring women.  It wasn't actually hard to disprove it - JK Rowling may have used her initials to hide her gender, or so I have been told, but I read quite a few other books by women when I was a child.  The gender of the writer alone had no influence on me.  Nor too did I automatically dismiss a book starring a girl.

What did have an influence was school.  The vast majority of the books I was forced to read at school were boring.  Teachers - both male and female - would select books that bored me to tears.  Thankfully, by then I already had the reading bug.  Boys who didn't, who only knew reading as a chore, didn't read when they didn't have to read.  They found it a tedious process - and preferred watching television instead.

So ... what did all the books I liked have in common?

Most of them featured adventure.  The characters would be pitted against a remorseless enemy or given a task to do.  It didn't really matter if the task was large or small, a thinking enemy or a force of nature; all that mattered was the challenge, the urge to overcome and triumph over one’s circumstances.  The characters didn't simply exist, the characters had something to do.

Harry Potter works, at least for the first five books, because it fits neatly into this pattern.  Harry escapes the mundane world and flies straight into a world of magic, but gets pitted against a string of deadly foes.  All of his books feature Harry being challenged - Goblet of Fire being the most dramatic example - and overcoming his challenges.  Everyone who wants to argue that Dumbledore is a poor headmaster because Harry has to deal with the problem-of-the-book is missing the point.  The series works because Harry is the one who deals with the problem.

This is true for a lot of my childhood favourites.  The Famous Five and The Secret Seven all feature mysteries that have to be solved.  Hood’s Army and The Demon Headmaster all feature battles against deadly enemies.  And all of them are exciting reflections of the way young boys think.  They want adventure.

Good children’s books also avoid gender politics.  Both Danny the Champion of the World and Matilda are popular with children of both genders, even though one features a male hero and the other a female.  Both books work for male readers because they fit into the pattern I detailed above - Matilda is pitted against her family, who try their hardest to drag her down, and her sadistic headmistress.  Danny is pitted against his schoolteacher and the aristocratic moron who owns the nearby woods.  To add to this, Danny and his father are effectively rebelling against unwanted restraints.

Matilda is, in some cases, an interesting example.  Although Matilda herself is very definitely a young girl, women are not portrayed any more or less positively than men.  There is no sense that Matilda is waging war on the patriarchy, but on people who want to crush her soul (her parents) or physically harm her (the headmistress).  Indeed, the first person we are shown to get the better of the headmistress is a young boy.  And, as gross as that scene is to an adult, it is precisely the sort of thing a young boy would find hilarious.

The closest thing Matilda comes to any form of sexism is Matilda’s mother remarking to her that men are rarely as clever as they think they are.  But it’s hard to argue the point when she’s talking about her immensely stupid and crooked husband.

Good children’s books are also free of romance and sex.  You’d think this was obvious, but still ... Most young boys are significantly put off by any hint of romance - they don’t understand the facts of life, let alone how they relate to their own life.  They certainly don’t want to consider the differences between males and females.  Romance was never a big part of Harry Potter because young boys don’t want to read about it.

Successful female characters - characters who appeal to young boys - are often very similar to men.  They take on challenges and overcome them; they have problems, but they overcome them on their own.  Even when they are not tomboys - George of The Famous Five, for example - they are rarely completely feminine.  They balance their strengths with weaknesses.  Dinah Glass of The Demon Headmaster is incredibly intelligent, but she’s also the only one of the good guys vulnerable to the Headmaster’s power.  That doesn't stop her from playing a major role in his defeats.

This leads to another problem.  It is much easier for a young boy to imagine being Harry Potter than it is to imagine being Hermione Granger.

These patterns do not change as young boys turn into men.  The lust for adventure, for a meaningful life, is still there.  Romance - even as readers become more aware of gender and sex - is still a secondary concern.  Successful books always have the main character taking on a challenge and solving it.  If there is a love interest in the book, the romance is still secondary to the overall story.

Books that do feature romance heavily tend to do poorly with young men.  Twilight, for example, isn't particularly popular with male readers, if only because they find it hard to identify with Bella and loathe Edward.  Books that focus on the main character worrying over stereotypical feminine concerns are rarely interesting to young men.  Indeed, books that concentrate on feminine issues often make men uncomfortable. Marketing them to young men is a waste of time.

Indeed, I’ve noticed a pattern in books written for teenagers and young adults.  The majority of male writers concentrate on adventure, the majority of female writers concentrate on romance.  Obviously, there are exceptions, but I think it’s largely true.

I think the most successful books - at least, the ones that attract young male readers - are the books that speak to our imaginations.  We want to be free and independent, we want to pit ourselves against the world, we want to do great deeds and soar high.  And we want to solve our own problems, to pick ourselves up after getting knocked down and carry on.  In a sense, we all want to be ‘special snowflakes’ - but we want to earn it, not have it handed to us on a plate.

Books that are not successful tend to focus on characters who do not appeal to young male readers.  A main character who is an idle layabout, a bully, a sneak, a coward, a whiner ... they rarely appeal.  And even if they do, what lessons are they teaching?  Books that put men down, that make us out to be stupid or animals or just plain obnoxious ... they appeal to us about as much as misogynist books appeal to women.

If you happen to be a teacher, or a parent, remember the golden rule.  Reading should never be a chore.  Indeed, reading is a learned skill.  And the more young boys enjoy reading, the more they will read.