Crap Writing
I had my attention called this morning to egregiously bad writing, a book called Eternity of Blood. After a few mercifully short excerpts, I could never bring myself to read the original, but I am satisfied that I have learned all I really need to from this savage critique. It’s easy to pigeon-hole the writing because it reads like a laundry list of the sins of bad fanfic: over-the-top power fantasies, pornographic episodes, schizophrenically short attention span, and some crazy, mixed-up vampire revisionism that makes Anne Rice look like William Shakespeare’s more talented sister.
Surprisingly, Eileene was not the one to call it to my attention, at least not directly. (She has browbeaten me into regularly reading the site where I found the link.) I say surprisingly because she makes a habit of alerting me to book deals, either written by someone familiar or by someone who got that book deal through maintaining a web page, preferably both. Most especially, she likes to tell me about book deals for lousy writers.
She means to be encouraging: “If these losers can get a book contract, so can you.” I suppose so. Unfortunately, citing examples like this tends very strongly to be discouraging: if these losers have book contracts and I don’t (yet), it either makes me suspect that my writing is crap (and, like the author of Eternity of Blood, I’m just too incompetent to realize it) or makes me suspect that writing skill and having something to say are immaterial to the process, that it’s just a big lottery.
Or rather—ha ha—a crap shoot.
Neither is the complete and accurate truth, of course. A lot of the luck in getting published is the luck we make ourselves, through persistent and aggressive selling of ourselves and our material. I’m dreadful at both, so it’s hardly surprising that a large body of dubious work has made it to Barnes & Noble’s shelves before Fairyland—A Survivor’s Guide. I’m certain that Fairyland will find a home sooner or later, if I just keep at it. That doesn’t prevent me from peeking back at my writing in fear of finding errors sufficiently glaring to turn off any editor, but when I peek, the book is basically solid. Or so I tell myself in the despair that comes in the wee hours of the morning. If I keep at it, I’ll make it.
But please, please, God, let Eternity of Blood be self-published. If an actual, paying editor decided this was a great way to sell print, I may have no choice but to hurl myself onto the railroad tracks.