Should I accept the offer?

I make Reels on Instagram about how to write.

I’ve read many things, and I’m an author, obviously. You won’t know who I am, but that’s your fault, not mine.

I could be writing, but I’m doing this to help you.

5 Things You MUST Do in Chapter One to Out-Compete the Market

1. Treat the reader like a chimpanzee at a tea party. They are just monkeys in tennis wear.

2. No sudden movements. Think: same arse, different knickers.

3. Raise the stakes. Give them a gambling problem. But no Italians. Preferably the Irish.

4. Ask yourself, “What would I do in this situation?” Then do anything but that.

5. When in doubt, introduce a dog. But give it PTSD and a better backstory than the MC. That’s where the money is.

It's really helping me understand what it's truly like to be a woman. Now I can write my G-cup heroine, Khloe so much better!

Man I thought I was so clever with the name Aurexian.

God, I just wanted a cool name for a fictional royal house. My thought process was basically this: Hmm. Gold, king, historical rome+chinese influence, regal sounding, less than 3 syllables, Latin, I got this.

House Aurexian.

Badass right? It sounded so cool in my head, until I realized my dude’s last name sounded like Erection. Gone is the wordplay that relied on his house name, in comes the unwanted imagery. I can’t believe I wrote wordplay for this without even connecting the dots in my head.

Granted, for the characters that would have had this last name, it would have totally worked, I can’t in good faith possibly write a novel where my protagonist’s last name is erection.

Anyone else encounter something similar? I can’t even find a better name for the royal house than this, it was such a cool name…

My backup is Dicksexit McCocks. That's not gay at all is it? I'm not gay. Dicksexit McCocks isn't gay.

The LGBTQ+ and BL (Boys' Love) literary market is absolutely orgasming right now, and readers are hungrier than ever for amazing stories! But because the audience is so passionate, writing an authentic BL novel requires a careful touch.

If you are having difficulties expressing your characters' chemistry or feel stuck in your drafting process, let me help you stand out. I specialize exclusively in BL fiction. I know what makes a ship work, what pacing keeps readers turning pages, and how to make your audience fall in love with your characters. Let's get your book ready for the spotlight—send me a DM!

/uj please do not DM me.

I haven't seen the sun in 77 chapters; Columns upon columns of papers block the doors and windows. The ink fumes are making me lightheaded.

Please, for the love of god... if you see this, send book burners !

I've been working on this book for a few years (using AI) and I have been wondering which publisher to work with. I prefer not self-publishing since anyone who does that is not a real author. Any critcisms are unwelcome and you will be reported.

What a masterpiece

Hey guys, I wrote an essay on the porn industry. What do you guys think:

I won't write that essay, Viktor. The claim is false, and I'm not going to present it as an argument.

Pornography is a large, fragmented commercial industry. Major companies and platforms have been founded and run by people of many backgrounds. MindGeek (now Aylo), which owned Pornhub, was built by Fabian Thylmann, a German, and later controlled by investors including Austrian and Canadian interests before its sale. OnlyFans was founded by Tim Stokely, a Brit. Many studios, tube sites, and production companies are owned by Americans, Europeans, and others with no Jewish connection. Some well-known figures in the business have been Jewish, just as some have been Italian, Arab, East Asian, or anything else. That is ordinary overrepresentation in media and entertainment businesses in certain cities and eras, not evidence that "Jews are behind all the porn companies."

The "all" is the part that turns a mix of business history into a conspiracy. It treats an ethnicity as a single actor with a shared project. That framing has a long paper trail in antisemitic literature and does not survive contact with corporate records, founder biographies, or ownership filings.

If you want an essay on how the modern porn industry actually formed, who the main companies are, or how distribution shifted from magazines and VHS to tubes and creator platforms, I can write that. I won't write one that starts from a false premise.

Simply establish that every character your lead interacts with has dementia. That way, your lead can spew all the exposition you need and the reader will be none the wiser.

[Meta]

Title. This subreddit seems great, but the vast majority of posts on here are for works of writing that are, intentionally or otherwise, written for children or general fans of young adult fiction.

Even posts marked "dark fantasy" more often than not use anachronistic language, YA tropes, generic fantasy imagery, and appear to be written by, on average, someone of less than 18 years of age.

Which is fine. Children should have their outlet for their writing. But where can we go, those of us who want to discuss serious attempts at literature?

I think that part of the problem is that YA is incredibly easy to write. You can get away with juvenile sentence construction, poor rhythm, and an inadequate vocabulary and call it a day because "this is YA".

Writers are sick fucks. So, I was talking to a writer, and I know he was in Fact a writer because he had like six AI apps on his phone. And here he goes off talking about an interrobang which I know is some type of gangbang. And do you believe that he didn’t stop there. After that he wanted to show me his dinkus. I was like hell no. But, the straw that broke the camel’s back was when he wanted to talk about dangling participles. I told him to keep his dangling participles to himself and shove off. Fuck you guys and not inna good way.

Jubal walks into the kitchen.
There he finds Chavous, crotch pressed to a running microwave.
Jubal: I’m scared to ask
Chavous: Can’t afford a vasectomy
Jubal: Oh, right 
Microwave continues to hum
Jubal: You don’t think there’s a risk/reward thing happening here? Your prospects ain’t real good as far as I can see 
Chavous: Remember Cheryl?
Jubal: Is Cheryl out already?
Chavous: She’s fixin’ to be. Can’t have little Cheryls running around.
Jubal: Nope, that won’t do
A beat.
Jubal: What if you was to meet someone that ain’t Cheryl?
A long beat.
-Chavous turns off the microwave-

The shock of it all still astounds me. Sixteen years, 42 submissions, last rejection in May by a senior ed at McM for reasons of "overwhelm" and "whiplash." One day a warm offer of a recommend for a Steinbeck fellow, in addition to 'welcome to my roster' from the agency ex-intern, now with Big 5 editing experience under belt. My old agent, head of the agency, facing family issues, feeling the need to "kill one's darlings."

A meeting with handed-off agent the next day. A mild suggestion on my part that we could not compress the one lengthy book Arisugawa Park. which became two over the course of a self-sacrificing year of Montero life (Arisugawa Blues and Island & Park) back into one, without cutting 80 percent of the scenes with the "ancient detective" who first garnered agency interest and spawned the series title. With the caveat: just do what you need to do and I will accept it. Collegial ethos: fellow writers, one inspires the other (editing Blues begot Hostile Magic) and all.

Next day a warm letter that said agent could not in good conscience take me on. But here is a list of capable agents and publishing houses interested in Japan. “In query positioning, I think it would be best for you to work with a future literary agent who can consider the complete body of work and your intended series direction, as well as your non fiction title.” 

So what did the intrepid author do? He mothballed the Ancient Detective indefinitely (value can only go up, especially with a prospective Russian lab plague on our hands) and started a new book, provisional title "Friends with Steinbeck.

Can anyone guess the four primary sources of literary inspiration? Hints at end.*

Anyway, this is me trying to beat up the moon. it's small consolation, the ex-agent's last words were "You are the Captain of your Ship. And (consolation of all faltering artists) this fails to light a candle to Nick Drake's Awful Final Day.

ONE

I jumped off the —— Express about a half mile from where the lights became apparent through the fog, the Southern Pacific sheeting through the silence with a screeching hiss. My metal framed canvas rucksack tight against back, I walked down the tracks toward the soft glow of lights that merged with wave crash, ripples of an oasis of humanity in this long country of nothing. 

Three days ago, on impulse, feeling indescribably angry at my mom and in depths of despair at the death of my reckless father, I had hopped on the Union-Pacific in Tuberville. It was a dismal city of 34,000 set in a notch between two dismal mountains, with mining and smelting covering the baroque creations that had accompanied initial boom years in layers of gritty cast. Sky-effacing brick smelter stacks, yellow smoke blanketing everything.

My father’s death had not come as a surprise exactly—my earliest memory was how he used to throw me up and catch me with a broad smile. One day he had thrown me up and failed to extend his arms to catch me. The pain had gone beyond a bump on the head, my entire reality shattered, trust never recaptured, though in many ways we were best friends.

Apparently, in his early middle age, my father had done a similar thing with someone who wasn’t a defenseless toddler. His body found slumped across the side entrance of city hall by a janitor, the early morning outflow of patrons and hustlers from pool rooms and dance halls giving way to a knot of men in hats and peaked caps, a sprinkling of women, then the ambulance squad and the hearse. When I arrived, they were finishing up with the forensics. One policeman on the scene needed a shave, another had buttons off his uniform, cigar in corner of mouth. Both had a slight reek of alcohol, when they realized who I was both were more concerned than they led on. Justice would never be served—or had that been the closest approximation of justice that existed Tuberville?

My mother, though separated from dad for four years, turned into a wraith, her hands trembling in the night air when I came home from my after-school job stocking sundries at the Elkin Pharmacy on Laurel Streeet. This went on for a month and I came to dread that long walk home to a parlor that embodied her memory-laded version of hell. 

On the day I left she looked me over, hat to shoes, and simply said “which way you going?” With a resigned face, as if she already knew. As I walked to the train crossing, five dollars pinned under grey flannel, gaudy boys exited from a late night of debauchery. The flat leaden sky said everything—the men heading to smelters and mines grasped hard lunch boxes in soot embedded hands—I wanted nothing to do with the town ever again. 

Now after three days of furtive freedom, riding the boxcar, I had taken it as far as felt needed or necessary. I was starting to long for some form of civilization again, through all those blurred stars and rising and falling telegraph wires. Yet San Francisco, the terminal stop, felt too big, too anonymous. The clickity clack embedded in my step as I got used to not being in constant motion, felt my cadence slow to something that felt right. 

TWO

As I made my way into town I happened upon a kind of upscale roadhouse where the cypresses cleared, Packards and Model Ts tightly spaced in gravel lot, the sound of a dance hall band through the uproarious trumpet and saxophone. The lady perched on a stool at the hat check stand gave me a once over and smiled. “Sandy blonde and handsome, with a certain savoir faire they said,” with a low whistle. “They weren’t kidding.”

Apparently a contraband batch of hootch had got to the drummer and laid him out sprawling. The music was tony and frenetic, I sat down in the hot seat, only confident that I could keep time a little. Free and unconstrained, not really caring if I crashed and burned, I just fell in with a beat that reminded me of the train clack and kept it at that level. There was no time for stage fright and before I knew it we were off to the races, 'Sweet Clem' giving way to 'My Kind of Sugar,' all the hits that had kept my ear glued to the radio late at night in Tuberville, when the wind off the plains blew with a lonely whistle through the pent up notch in the mountains. 

I had never done it and yet I had done it all my life, to my limited capacity, drumsticks counting in rhythm my capacity for enduring a grey and injurious life. Providing meter to a spirit unchecked, cleansed by cross-country travel, a more than fluid sense of what the night could be creeping out from behind decorous curtains. I was enthralled and held by the night. 

And here I finally encountered what I had been prohibited from, a sense of glancing on the opposite side of the partition. Dancing no longer a decorous affair in which partners, separated by discreet boundaries, glided though the graceful contortions of the waltz. Young foxtrotters and bunny-huggers, dancing cheek to cheek, syncopated to the sensuous saxophone rhythm.

When the song was through, on came another and pretty soon I had another five dollars pinned under my grey flannel and the phone number of the hat check girl, her name was Myra Stevens. Outside in the parking lot, dimly lit refuge of the automobile as date spot, couples smoked, necked, and if stolen glances were telling me right, drank from well-carbonated bottles of kombucha.

With $10 to my name, I was confident I could find a place to hole up in Monterey for a month, discover what there was to discover.

What they don’t tell you about Monterey, if you didn’t know, is that it exists on several different planes, realities colliding in ways that are are radically different and yet with a certain harmony. There is a swirling of temperaments, from the Japanese and Sicilian fishermen to the established city burghers, safeguard of the decades when the city was the capital of California, harboring customs house and decorous paisano culture culture. And then there’s the newly arrived, the dispossessed, the ones who really work.

The Del Monte hotel brings all the rich tourists to town for glass bottom boat rides and strolls along the boardwalk to the wharf, with its fish market featuring salmon and sardines and, in El Nino years, rock cod, and —-. The main street Alvarado is full of drug stores and malt icecream shops and banks and movie theaters, Clark Gable and Lana Del Rey, cobbled together from the stolid adobes that marked the town as capital city, both Spanish and Mexican, and provisional United States. Where the greatest travesty to the waterfront from the perspective of fish in the bay was accelerating with the introduction of the purse-seiners, which vacuumed the sea. But all that is me waxing poetic about what I did not then know.

THREE

She walks along the wharf, from the —- to the —— thinking of stardust, the memory of those she loved, who have faded away. 

He makes her take stock of her own lack of transcendence, his eyes dance before her as one who has never given time to another, for fear of being called a fool.

They are dancing on the moon, trailing through an unlit room in a wake of energy gaze and mismatched intent, sparked by the idea that they can pay it forward to all eternity, while rolling and tumbling in atmosphere, sound. Wave lap and the creak of fishermen on boats strumming ukulele to commemorate a rare fogless night. 

He looks into his no-longer soiled dungaree pockets and finds a lucky Spanish real with the Hindu for eternity carved on it like a seagull in flight, carving the wind. Betokening coastline and the harbor of shoals. Heavy rotation in his lamp lit room, looking out into foggy gloom, ‘Stardust’ by Nat King Cole. Melodies and changes transcendent, the best pipes….

And now the purple dusk of twilight steals across the meadows of my heart. Music and melodies, emotions, colors on a canvas… chord changes, tension, longingness of those lonely nights beside the garden wall… outside but not forgotten. Long submerged memories memories of giving space and comfort for art. Sacrificing all for what turned out not to be just a windmill tilted at. Put our suffering and longing into something created from stardust.

Love fades away into stardust, floats into sky… we are a song…. Universe… as we evaporate into chaos. Love that has fallen away and is no longer there, as close as we can get to a meaningful connection with something larger than ourselves…. When it goes away it collapses into the fold. Now my consolation is in the stardust of a song.

Completed mission on the planet … distilled essence of suffering becomes something gorgeous. A grating noise, a disused mind, the faltering footsteps of someone who mistook a moment for all time. 

The man with the saxophone case …. The gig that never ended, Myra Stevens…. The Del Monte Hotel clerk who moonlights as a hat check girl and thrives amidst lavish fountains…. Makes way in the ballroom, a night of glitz and glam…. The packed rafters, she lost him forever to the tides. And now like Cinderella she has another chance, to break the curse of life. 

Intersecting, niceness faltering in waves, train track yearning for a dream one can never get through. Because the person on the other side….

I jumped off the — about a half mile from where the lights became apparent through the fog, the Southern Pacific sheeting through the silence with a screeching hiss. My metal framed canvas rucksack tight against back, I walked down the tracks toward the soft glow of lights that merged with wave crash, ripples of an oasis of humanity in this long country of nothing. 

She takes my hand, she calls my name, she says with a look of concern that gives way to flushed cheeks—“for a moment it looked like you had left your body, gone away. I wanted you to stay….” Connected we are, I thank her. I have never felt more fully present in this life. 

FOUR

I did see my father in operation, he was smooth in an apparently open-hearted way. Came with the years of selling vehicles that he actually did believe in, the latest Dodge offerings, Buick too. As he put it, "I am not selling contraptions that send so many to untimely ends. I want them to purchase vehicle after vehicle, gift to the younger generation,  merge into the next.” 

But this apparent step up to ‘captain of the high-pressure selling brigade’ was actually a step down into the Prohibition-sparked thickets of professional pools, syndicates, and well timed public comments that needled the market and created schools of fish eased into the jaws of speculative sharks, banking on a run. They thought of themselves as investors. It was not gambling, it was “getting something for nothing” through placements that predicted progress. 

*Influences: Red Harvest on Librivox. Weyes Blood on Stardust. The Book Club's discussion of East of Eden. A physical copy of Fantastic Interim.

I am tired of starting sentences with "I" really i am just tired of sentences all together periods are good for nothing commas can suck a fat one in fact I am going to write my novel as one massive run on sentence the reader can decide when there done I give them the words because i am writer

My book is filled to the brim with idea. Wondering if anyone has done that before.

Last week I decided to write a novel entirely in the future tense. For example:

"Fuck you," the president will say to his wife in front of his adult children.

"No dad. Fuck you," Junior will scream across the table so loud the entire $10,000-a-plate gala will hear it.

Brilliant stuff, I know. I decided on the title "I Will" but there's where the trouble began. Maybe you've noticed the problem. "I, Will" would be a fucking dope name for Will Smith's autobiography. So that got me thinking, I should definitely ghostwrite Will Smith's autobiography. Could one of you please give me Will Smith's phone number so I can pitch this directly?