It seems half the people I meet are “working on a book.” I met one at the supermarket this week. He wanted to tell me about struggling with his opus—at great length. I tried to be polite, but as my bourbon-caramel gelato began to melt, I suggested he join the Nightwriters in San Luis Obispo—an excellent group for writers at all levels. (And you still have time to enter their annual writing contest, The Golden Quill Awards. More info in Opportunity Alerts.)
“Oh no,” supermarket man said. “I’ll never show my book to anybody. They might steal my ideas. They can read it when it’s published.”
And I got a couple of messages this week from writers who had the same reason for not sharing work. They’ve been told to blog, but fear people will, yup, “steal their ideas.”
These are people writing in a vacuum. They don’t realize that ideas are everywhere, and most writers have more than they can use in a lifetime. These wannabes also don’t know creative writing needs to be read by dozens of critiquers, beta readers, and editors before it’s ready for publication. […]
At least in the genres I read, one of the more common appearances of buckets is in places characters are being held prisoner – e.g. ‘the cell contained only a pile of straw and a bucket’, that sort of thing. The purpose of this bucket is a toilet stand-in, but often the narrative does not come out and SAY that, the reader is assumed to understand.
Imagine the hapless troll reader.
#every dungeon is a sex dungeon#then the bucket is never mentioned again#and they’re like#I’m not saying I was looking forward to it but they didn’t do anything#that violates Troll Chekhov’s… Bucket#or WORSE#a casual mention that the character ‘made use of the bucket’
Hey remember in the very early 2000s when ppl would like put *brick’d* or *shot* at the ends of their own sentences, like, they’d cut themselves off preemptively by roleplaying a third party who was preventing them from finishing their sentence… by physically harming them… ???? ?
that was some next level shit tbh
its just the 2000s version of ending a text post in the middle of a sentence and waiting for someone to reblog it w “they fucking killed him”
Right but you take th e fucking initiative yourself instead of lazing about expecting some other guy to come along and do the work FOR you like people do nowadays…. smh where is this generations work ethic…. in my day we had to walk up implying someone had killed you mid-sentence both ways
just moving along like everyone else 