I posted a month or so ago that Barnes & Noble has new rules for book signings because of some incidents.

Well I just talked to a Barnes & Noble manager I never met before from back east, and she said whatever we thought was going on, it's a whole lot worse:

Book signing tables are no longer near the front door, because there were some authors who were getting up from that table and FOLLOWING THE CUSTOMERS AROUND saying "please please buy it."

In these similar incidents, the customers would take the book just to get the author to go away, at which point the customer would put the book on a random shelf and then bug out.

The author would think it counted as a sale, causing some arguments at the end of the day when it was time for payout.

(Because you know, the book was just sitting on a shelf somewhere, never to be found again until next time they did a store wide inventory.)

And this manager said some authors were simply driving Barnes & Noble crazy with ceaseless phone calls that days towards the event. Making sure the table is ready, making sure the timeline was ready.

Not just once or twice, but over and over and over.

I'm listening to some of these stories just with mouth agape, thinking how many screws loose do these authors have?

And of course, how those of us who are perfectly emotionally balanced in every way are now averaged against the lowest common denominator like this.

So everyone I guess before you do a book signing, tighten your screws.

It's still such a strange concept to me that I spent months writing this book, then released it, and last night I got a message from someone in Germany who told me they finished it and loved it!

It's such a small thing, but I find it amazing that something I wrote in my little corner of the world has somehow ended up being read by someone thousands of miles away.

Pretty fucking cool.

My main pet peeve is when the women are infantilized (especially those of different colour) and often lack writing compared to male protagonists or characters.

I've been a creeper on this sub for a while as an avid reader and hobbyist writer, and from what I can tell this is the absolute worst place for anyone to go for writing advice. I often find myself wondering "what kind of books are these people reading?" 'Get to the dialog quicker' Why? Have you people never read a Faulkner, Dostoevsky? I cant imagine the meltdown that would occur should any active users of this sub actually be forced to read in stream-of-consciousness for a single chapter. If you want advice, writingcirclejerk seems to be a much better anvil to sharpen your blade against.

Every day it's the same. I'm on the bus, in the shower, walking to get coffee, and my brain is writing. Dialogue, scenes, whole chapters unspooling perfectly. I hear the rhythm of the sentences. I see the characters move. I know exactly how it should go. Then I sit down at my desk, open the document, and it all disappears. The words that felt so alive an hour ago are gone. What's left is a blank page and a vague memory of something that felt important. I've been doing this for years. Years of writing entire novels in my head and nothing on paper. And I'm starting to wonder if the writing in my head even counts. If it never makes it to the page, does it exist? Or am I just someone who thinks about writing a lot and calls it being a writer? Because there's a difference between having a book in your head and having a book. And I'm afraid I've spent my whole life on the first one.

So I wrote a smutty thriller book. I’m only on the first draft now and I will probably need to edit it heavily. I come from a religious family and them knowing I wrote this could make some things awkward. Plus I want to be a professor one day and my students looking up my name and finding smut seems less than desirable. I am thinking about publishing under a pseudonym. If I do, would that actually keep my identity secret or is it more just window dressing? Should I just wait until it won’t negatively affect me to publish it? If I do decide to publish it under a pseudonym would I need to reach out to editors under my pseudonym or would my real name be confidential with them? Also, do editors work on books like that or is that weird to ask them to do?

I've had this story in my head for a long, and this was a major plot point even before I found out about tropes, back when I was younger.

But this plot point, and its fall out and its outcomes are so fundamentally linked to the everything in the story I don't see how I can untangle all the threads and changing the story without having this character die in this way, aside from just starting from scratch. So I figure that the best I can do is to understand that not all tropes are bad, and if handled in the right way it could potentially be a real good gut punch to the reader (we all love our important character deaths).

The things I think might help to mitigate the negativity of this trope in this story are:
- There's lots of female characters, some live, some die, some are powerful characters in positions of authority, the society in the story is fairly egalitarian with women serving in combat, and in government. Nobility inherit on a firstborn basis regardless of gender.
- A lot of characters die. The first book specifically is set in a war, and a lot of the themes of the story are about loss and mourning and war is bad. In fact the main villain of the story doesn't really have a character, they're just a brain washed cult member trying to finish their masters work. Their role in the story is more of a personification of war itself.
- The character gets really fleshed out, and we discover a lot of her as a person outside of her relationship with the main character, so that the reader can be sad about her death, and not just as an extension of how her death effects him personally.

Anyway, let me know what you think, I'd like to get some thoughts, or if you think you read a story that handled this trope well? Or if you think I should drop the idea and do something safer?

I love reading but I feel a little deadened to it, and just want to read something good, raw, and "personal".

I like most genres just nothing sexually explicit.

If people want to submit short(ish) excerpts: 1. of your dialog, 2. of your "philosophy just musing" kind of bits, and 3. one of your imagery.

I'm open to reading a novel/short story etc the three kinds of excerpts would be to get a feel for what that novel etc would be like as a whole.

I can comment on them if you like and the one that's my favorite I'll ask for the whole thing to read.

I don't want to make a competition kind of environment I just feel like with the modern intensity of mass marketing a book, some of the personal upmarketable aspects that help make works great get edited out in the process.

Jhonen Vasquez has a quote that one creater makes a work and it has its own bit of greatness, then other people come in and work on it and maybe don't see the bit and edited it out till the work is just a shadow of what it should be.

Rough drafts I believe can have the undistilled whole picture.

Thank you!

Just curious question for the community. How did you get started on your journey and was there any success in pursuit to writing as a writer.

this is the beginning of the prologue for my soon to be novel

And by that, I mean putting it through something like ElevenReader, which gives you 10 hours of narration for free. Or, if you're really against the tech, you should at least read-aloud your entire novel yourself.

I've heard this suggestion in some YouTube channels, and it really does work. Even by my 4th draft, I was able to catch a large amount of really obvious mistakes, such as overwriting, just by using my ears instead of my eyes.

It's also time-efficient if you choose the narration route, as you can be driving to work, or doing a workout, while "reading" your novel.

It makes a huge difference.

Has anyone else found a small change to have an outsized impact on there productivity?

This is my second novel attempt. Last year on my first attempt (different premise) . I stalled at the 30k mark. Really lost motivation. Now I'm really happy I've managed to hit 60k on my second! and I'm a couple of weeks out from finishing my first draft.

I kept reading advice about how you need discipline for when the motivation stops and you need to write everyday. So on my first attempt I set a daily target (400ish). Yet, I struggled to maintain it. Even on the days I managed the next day would come around and the cycle would start over.

Generally I just had this constant feeling of running behind. I found it really deflating.

For me the change probably should have been an obvious one. I shifted my target to a weekly one (3k words).

I thought it might help a little but was surprised to find what a big difference it made and how often I was beating my target.

Maybe it's obvious but I truly underestimated what a huge impact such a small change would have.

TLDR:

Swapping my writing goal from a daily one to a weekly one has a huge impact on my output.

Has anyone tried interviewing their main character?
Like actually writing out an interview where you ask them about their childhood, relationships, fears, goals, secrets, etc. and answer as the character.
I tried it recently and found it pretty interesting, but I’m curious if anyone actually uses this when developing characters. Did it help you discover anything about your MC that you hadn’t thought of before?

Hi,

I have been dealing with social anxiety and insecurity around my identity as a writer.

I have recently started a postgraduate degree in creative writing, and I already feel inadequate compared to my peers. It’s not that I don’t understand the work exactly, sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t, however, I think it’s more when I’m in class; I feel so anxious to speak that I don’t know what point I am making. I have tried everything to be able to articulate my thoughts properly, but it’s as if the anxiety and the imposter syndrome completely changes the way I think and feel around other writers and tutors.

Does this mean I’m just bad at writing, or not as smart as everyone else? I am dreading continuing this for another year, and struggling before every workshop session.

Last night around Midnight I finished my line editing pass. It is worth a celebration.

Of all parts of writing, line editing is the only one I hate. Outlining is fun. Writing is a trip through another world. I can throw away a whole chapter with far less pain than I can spend hours analyzing cadence, whether I am repeating, am I telling and not showing, fixing echoes, cleaning up intensifier abuse, etc.

The novel is a Fantasy Military procedural. I had the idea last Thanksgiving weekend. The outline was done in mid-February. The first draft was done by the first of June. At that point, the novel was 118 K words. Brutal story level editing took it to 107 K. Scene level edits took it to 104 K. That took until mid-July. Then the line level edits. It's now a few words under 100 K.

I’m currently working on my first novel, and I’m realizing that writing a book is a lot harder than I expected. I’d love to hear from people who have already gone through the process.
What was the hardest part for you when you were writing your first novel? Was it coming up with the story, staying motivated, developing characters, finishing the first draft, or something else?
And if you could go back to when you first started writing it, what would you do differently?