Oni-goroshi book, blackcloak

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Today I read this thread on the PoE forum and smiled. A rare thing these days :)

I really shouldn't have googled to find what the OP was talking about re: my book and the PoE subreddit. Sent me into a pretty bad spiral for a day. Well, you know me. Glutton for punishment and all. Hoped against hope someone on there might not have publicly jumped on the bandwagon. I do get the occasional PM there from someone who dug deeper, but it's virtually unheard that any such folks dare stand against the tide of hatred openly.

Ah well. Reminds me of an anecdote I heard once, a pre-internet legend of sorts: a certain author would not only just read the good reviews, he would put the bad ones in the freezer. I remember thinking at the time how weak that sounded, how he should have embraced all forms of criticism, but now I know better -- a bad review isn't necessarily a negative one, and a good review isn't necessarily a positive one. But this much surely is true: a bad review is one by someone who hasn't even read enough to form an opinion that can be applied honestly to the work entire.

Of course, another anecdote comes to mind here: do judge a book by its cover. If it's got a silhouette of a moon (?) and a weird religious symbol drawn in blood and a name like 'Blackcloak: A Man of His Sword', it's probably not going to be a romance novel set in the French Riviera...but that's just the 'what'. You can glean that much at a glance. The 'how' is what you need to commit to grasping, and most books that position themselves as fantasy don't really have a particularly challenging or convoluted 'how'. My bad.

Third anecdote: publishers rejected the at-the-time unthinkably dense Lord of the Rings, demanded Tolkien write something more market-friendly (first). So we got The Hobbit, one of the most famous back-door pilot episodes in the history of publication. Oh, the clever little hobbit found a magical ring that can turn him invisible? Oh, isn't that just splendid, boys and girls?

Thanks dude. Its nice not to feel like I am just the target of people trying to catch me out or throw past foibles in my face. That shit gets real tiring.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Third anecdote: publishers rejected the at-the-time unthinkably dense Lord of the Rings, demanded Tolkien write something more market-friendly (first). So we got The Hobbit, one of the most famous back-door pilot episodes in the history of publication. Oh, the clever little hobbit found a magical ring that can turn him invisible? Oh, isn't that just splendid, boys and girls?

Do you have a source for that? Everything I've ever read about Tolkien say that he wrote the Hobbit before he started writing Lord of the Rings.

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LennyLen wrote:

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Third anecdote: publishers rejected the at-the-time unthinkably dense Lord of the Rings, demanded Tolkien write something more market-friendly (first). So we got The Hobbit, one of the most famous back-door pilot episodes in the history of publication. Oh, the clever little hobbit found a magical ring that can turn him invisible? Oh, isn't that just splendid, boys and girls?

Do you have a source for that? Everything I've ever read about Tolkien say that he wrote the Hobbit before he started writing Lord of the Rings.

If it were actually true I wouldn't have called it an anecdote...

Oh. And I will check a few texts later but my gut tells me he probably started writing Silmarillion before either of them, even though it was his first proposal as a follow-up to hobbit.

Edit 2: JRR claims in at least one letter (to WH Auden) that he didnt know much of lotr when he wrote hobbit. I sort of want to believe him but writers are not always reliable narrators of their own lives. Soo...maybe he really was that spontaneous. Maybe he wanted people to believe he was. Maybe maybe maybe.

Anyway I think the base point stands that lotr would have been much harder to publish first. Again, we shall never know.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

If it were actually true I wouldn't have called it an anecdote...

Last I checked, anecdotes were supposed to be based on true events. :P

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Oh. And I will check a few texts later but my gut tells me he probably started writing Silmarillion before either of them, even though it was his first proposal as a follow-up to hobbit.

That's what I've read as well. And also on the pieces that later became published as Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-Earth.

Moving slightly away from pure Tolkien, I find it interesting that both he and Frank Herbert, author of the equally epic 'Dune' series, have spectacularly...utilitarian sons. Both have done their utmost to 'carry on' their father's legacy, which may have been an earnest desire to carry the torch but to my cynical eyes looks a wee bit like riding coattails. I mean, I'd never accuse either of them of being as exploitative as Nietzsche's sister, but Herbert's son in particular seems to really want to bleed every grain of sand of Arrakis dry.

At the other end of the scale we have the very capable Joe Hill, who wrote some real humdingers like Horns, The Fireman, and Locke and Key. For me the only tell that he might be Stephen King's son is the fact that both Horns and The Fireman had withered, meandering endings -- something of a King special move. That aside, he's got his own style, his own stories to tell, and his own name. Naturally we can suspect that he cracked the publication shell with a little help from his friends (and family), but I think he's more than got the chops to be known purely as Joe Hill.

These are, to my knowledge and in my experience, somewhat rare cases. An ability to write might run in the family, but a true writer typically only emerges once every couple of generations (or three true writers in one generation, in the Bronte case). Writers rarely make for the best or most supportive of parents (or partners, to be honest) and so rarely produce children who want to follow in their footsteps. And writing as a kid is often an act of rebellion, of finding an outlet that is both effusive and secretive, voluminous and yet unobtrusive. It's there if you want to, you know, have a look, but if not, no worries. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's always angsty, but there's a reason 'angsty teen poetry' is a cliché. ;)

Sometimes I do wonder what sort of writers we're producing now, in this (ongoing?) golden age of TV show creation and its uppity younger sibling, streaming. I do know that a lot of so-called YA is written by people who were raised on and in a way didn't transcend the first wave of YA, which has resulted in a whole bunch of derivative works that, to an outside eye, is largely indistinguishable one series to the next. The same could probably be said of fantasy, as those who grew up on TSR and LOTR, or even Jordan and GRRM, are coming into their own -- although I have noticed a rise of more literary fantasy/sci-fi as non-White authors like NK Jemisin and Liu Cixin show the neckbeards how it's done. As with the Oscars, an 'outsider' has to present something truly amazing just to be nominated for a token 'best foreign' category, while there remains a slew of accolades for locally-produced works that might not be quite so outstanding...

Yet one more anecdote (which is indeed based on some kernel of truth or reality but is often unreliable in source or flat-out untrue, but amusing and true in the Coen Brothers' sense): only 1 out of 10 books published is fiction. Or, as it was drilled into us in literature undergrad, 9 out of 10 books published are the type we'd never write. That really puts into perspective how small the world of fiction writing really is. Then divide that into genres (if you must), into age groups (if you must), and you start to see why 'Romance Novel Cruises' are a thing. I don't imagine there are 'Elementary School Math Textbook Author Cruises', but there are probably some poor drudges out there who wish there were.

But let's bring this full circle with less of an anecdote, more of a cynical 'meh': would Lord of the Rings be published today in its current form? And if not -- what might be lost in the process of transforming it into a series designed to sell at least an acceptable number of units? Tom Bombadil, nooooo!

(Fine, fine, one last anecdote, this one 100% real: long ago, I chatted with a senior editor at a big publishing firm here in Australia [if that isn't an oxymoron], and inevitably the notion of the classics came up. Of Ulysses and Iliad. Bovary and Karenina. Of why they endure despite not being what we consider best-sellers, now or really ever. And she, with memorable precision, just said something like, 'it's like cricket. You probably couldn't create a new sport today anything like cricket, it's just too boring and weird, but can you imagine the sporting world without it?' Well, I could, but I also know how fucking ga-ga certain Commonwealth nations go over the sport for months on end. Point very well made.)

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Exile009 wrote:

Charan is still around here. Goes by the name Foreverhappychan now. Used to be quite prolific, but he's much more subdued these days. Partly cos he's not too fond of the direction the game went, and partly cos he recently himself experienced the mod whip on these forums.

Did he has two accounts? Since the avatar was



source: https://web.archive.org/web/20160703100024/http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/504429