…because we wonder if we’re good enough–take heart.
This got published.
(the link goes to a Livejournal page, but on it is a scan of two pages from a published novel). Read it and weep. Or laugh. Or join the author and do something entirely inexplicable.
Oh, lordy.
I couldn’t get past the third paragraph. What happens?
No, it doesn’t. But the author provides a list of things to which you should never compare various body parts of your lover, like tongue = a ferret, or thighs = geese, pythons, or schooners.
Or in another way I guess it’s like the old SAT analogies section gone bad:
a) Feet :: driftwood
b) Nipples :: morels
c) Sex :: scarab
d) Neck :: alfalfa
e) Breasts :: cheese
I couldn’t get past the description of her tongue as “a fox caught in the teeth of a tiger”, which made me slightly ill. So I skipped to the bottom of the second page, where the dude says to Bronwyn, “You are quite beautiful, Princess Bronwyn.” Which kind of surprised me. She sounds grotesque.
It actually reminds me, just a bit, of “The Eye of Argon” all grown up.
I’m actually trying to get non-fiction published, so every one of these or theseis like a punch in the groin.
Dear gods…
At least I’m in the right genre to take advantage of these [del]idiots[/del] [del]suckers[/del] publishers.
My first thought was someone has read too much Tolkein…though JRR is just boring to read, unlike this which is also painful.
My fingers type the cherries of absinthe, caress the plastic molding that drips in the autumn light of butterflies, of plankton, of the hum of Hermes’ forge and Cassandra’s forgetfulness; the sans-serif lettering that keens the sirens and omits the kerns; the invertebrate osmosis of the chesterfield, puce and cerise under triple suns of banter and woodwinds. I hit Submit Reply. I hear the sound of yellow and the taste of freedom.
“Her pubes were a field of wheat after the harvest…”? Her “pubes?” Her frickin’ pubes?!?
I don’t find that encouraging at all, because it proves that it’s not how good you are, it’s who you know and the connections you have.
Dear God.
This is much better than the exerpt. It has a rhythm. I could dance to this.
Reassuringly, according to the LiveJournal post, it’s not published, it’s vanity published. Whole different thing. Everyone in the universe, including house pets, is good enough to be vanity published.
It has nothing at all to do with ‘who you know and the connections you have’. Assuming you can Google ‘publisher’ and pick one from the selection of vanity houses that pop up ready to take your dough, you’ve got all the necessary connections.
The current release may be from a vanity publisher, but the original release was not. From the link…
Maybe they meant her furrow was fallow.
So go to New York and fuck somebody, already. And remember, it’s just as easy to love a big publisher as it is to love a small publisher.
You just roll them around in flour and look for the wet spot?
As far as I can tell, that’s simply wrong. The reprinter, Timberwolf Press, is (or was, I don’t see an active link for it) a small press that did a lot of sf, fantasy, audiobooks and other things for a variety of authors.
I can’t find any reason to insult Timberwolf with the name vanity press. The book may be awful but Ron Miller, as an artist, is a huge name in the sf world. Reprinting a legitimately published book by an author guaranteed to sell books is not a bad deal for any small press.