citizen-zero:

alexseanchai:

sirswooshnoodles:

findingfeather:

seananmcguire:

ms-demeanor:

unpretty:

ALT

someone put this screenshot in my notes and i wasn’t gonna put the op on blast but i cannot stop thinking about it. this is up there as one of the funniest doubling downs i’ve ever seen. “it’s called craft. it’s called storytelling.” is going to enter my meme vernacular and no one is going to have any idea what i’m talking about. the count of monte cristo shows a clear lack of craft in its wordcount. if only ernest hemingway’s editor had killed more of his darlings while he wrote for whom the bell tolls. readers and editors alike are always complaining about how fucking long to kill a mockingbird is.

Valid Jane Austen Novels:

• Northanger Abbey
• Persuasion

Kindling:

• Sense & Sensibility
• Pride & Prejudice
• Mansfield Park
• Emma

I sometimes think that people who have never had to do this for a living think of 100,000 words the way I thought of $20 when I was twelve (and sometimes do, when I’m broke and hungry). That is So Many Words! Sooooo many words!

It is not that many words.

A short urban fantasy is going to be somewhere between 100,000 and 110,000 words–and that’s about the minimum. Any shorter and people start getting mad at the cover price. A meaty thriller or modern fantasy will be closer to 150,000-175,000.

You want books under 100k? Young adult tends to run around 80,000, and there are always novellas.

“it’s called having a brutal editor and kissing their feet for the vital work that they do”

Look bud your kink is emphatically not my kink, and you need to respect that.

Disliking “long” books is valid, you don’t have to read them.

Saying that long books are kindling, bad writing, lack of a good editor, etc, is just, NO. Stop it. *sprays you with a water bottle* bad. Things are not inherently bad because you don’t like them. I never got into LoTR, but does that make it bad? No! Get over yourself. Read novelas instead and stfu. Sit down.

Hilariously, the Lord of the Rings trilogy is a single narrative that got split in thirds, for reasons that become immediately apparent when comparing the size of the omnibus to the size of the trio of mass market paperbacks. And the shortest of the three volumes is still like 135K.

I said this before, but looking at foundational works in the western literary canon and saying “it’s called craft” “it’s called storytelling” and suggesting that they’re poorly written purely for being over 100k words feels like the kind of thing that would get you struck down for hubris in a Greek myth.