!bookworms I wanted initially to post this thread next week, but decided to go ahead now, so the first voting Thread will be next week. I'll pick every single suggestion posted until Tomorrow 20:00 E.T and post them for voting, then select the 5 most upmarseyd choices.

Faust reading went poorly unlike Master and Margarita, so chose wisely this time dramatards. We'll have several threads eliminating every single nominated until we reach a winner and start the next reading sometime in October.

https://old.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/16h9ul8/i_finish_my_manuscript_and_no_one_cared?context=8

Why does a neighbor expect praise for accomplishing a goal

Your writing is just words till it affects someone, either makes them reflect, cry, sneed, enraged, fricking something. Only people getting praise for simple finishing a work are writers with a history of delivering

https://old.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics/comments/16hnbtu/empty_shelves_with_absolutely_no_books_students/?context=8

https://old.reddit.com/r/toronto/comments/16hknam/empty_shelves_with_absolutely_no_books_students/?context=8

https://old.reddit.com/r/ontario/comments/16hlz7v/empty_shelves_with_absolutely_no_books_students/?context=8

1984 is now Trudeau's instruction manual

idk seems like an interesting topic, especially for boomers who've had years to find stuff.

The most expensive one I own is a hardcover of The Killing Star that sells for like $300 on amazon.

I got it for $30 last year

The horror writer talks Holly and why he chose not to erase Covid from the detective's world

!bookworms

Today is the final Thread of Faust (I'll post a second final thread next Sunday for those who are behind). I believe it would be better to wait a couple of weeks after that to start a new nomination thread for the next bookclub, that one could start in October. Hope you guys have enjoyed Faust!

I was thinking about this earlier and how much I kind of like these stories, especially for fantasy and sci-fi settings. (Though I'm interested in other genres too if you guys have examples.)

At the risk of sounding tier I haven't heard of any book like this outside of Wheel of Time or something I have seen what I'm talking about in a few video games though.

Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War — The game follows two generations. The first main character is a heroic knight named Sigurd who launches military expeditions against neighboring countries to defend his own home from attack. Unfortunately he fails to root out an evil dragon cult hiding in the continent and they prey on the ambitions of his ally Arvis.

Arvis eventually kills Sigurd and the player switches to Sigurd's son Seliph and the other children born to his army. At this point the continent has been taken over by Sigurd's country because less than heroic nobles took advantage of how we weakened other kingdoms, so you have to overthrow the empire you inadvertently helped build and confront Arvis and his son Julius, who is the perfect host for the dragon cult.

Fall from Heaven: Age of Ice — This may sound strange but Fall from Heaven is a high fantasy mod for the 4X game Civilization IV. I think it's pretty well written and there's a grand plot told through in game scenarios. Of course the plot and gameplay are normally forbidden from speaking to each other on pain of death, as each scenario seems to take place over a few weeks even though the player may take hundreds of in game years to win each scenario plus main characters can die in the game.

One scenario that actually makes use of Civilization's setting however is Age of Ice. You play as an immortal wizard from a previous era who is trying to defeat a god of winter, whose mere presence in the world has caused societal collapse and an unending ice age. You start the game with a handful of tribals who have to rediscover things like arrows and agriculture while fighting other barbarians and mammoths. With the passing of generations you eventually manage a medieval level of technology all the while fighting more intense wars as the winter god's followers also develop their own civilization. There's also a nonlinear story to follow about reassembling a divine sword, which requires specific advancements like defeating this tribe or capturing that city or building a sailing ship to reach an island. There are named characters to control (though you have to pretend like they aren't inexplicably immortal). Funnily enough the wizard's children can also become hero units and you can get an unending supply of them.

The paradoxical storytelling applies here too since every character besides the wizard shouldn't actually be an unaging hero unit and your military units should also die instead of sticking around forever. These limitations aside though it's an interesting example of a high fantasy story over a very long period, since the wizard has to rebuild the Middle Ages from Neolithic tribals before he can even think of confronting the antagonist.

King of Dragon Pass - I haven't played this one but it was recommended to me and it sounds like what I'm talking about. You play as clan elders across several generations. Your people fled their homeland because it was taken over by Egyptians and you're trying to build a new home in a previously civilized area left deserted after something like a Bronze Age collapse.

Much of the game involves making decisions about random day to day problems, but there is a questline given by a prophet that allows you to restore civilization by completing hero quests. You can also see the setting change over time since scattered clans form into tribes, you start building towns after awhile, and marrying the leader of some horse raiders eventually assimilates them into your culture. You win the game by building an actual kingdom.

Video games are an obvious medium for long term storytelling but I'm wondering if any novels have something like this !bookworms? I'm specifically looking for a real plot mind you, just one that can't be solved by a single protagonist/generation. Not just random fluff about the history of a kingdom or something.

To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks and papers.

!bookworms

I haven't read a page this week

While I was googling for images of the Reddit admin Chtorrr, I came across a Wikipedia article for "The War Against the Chtorr."

This totally-not-Alien book series started off planned as a trilogy, but it was so good and compelling that the author dragged it out much further.

Here are the highlights from the first book in the series:

• Humanity has nearly been wiped out by a virus

• "Narrator and protagonist Jim McCarthy and his friend/colleague/occasional s*x partner Ted Jackson are a young half-trained researchers attached to a squad of soldiers tasked with clearing the Colorado wilderness of nests of large and predatory "worms," one of the relatively better-known species of Chtorrans.

plot?

• Jim (protagonist) brings back alien eggs and some hatchlings from the Chtorr species

• He goes back to Denver, now the US Capitol. I guess he wants to research the eggs and bugs there?

• He gets recruited by a group called "Uncle Ida" who kill Chtorr and kill anyone who is against killing Chtorr

• Jim shows off his dumb bugs to international dignitaries

• A bug gets loose and kills lots of important people and wounds Jim

• Jim goes to the hospital

• He realizes that the Uncle Ira group plotted this to happen so further their anti-Chtorr agenda

I don't know why anyone would need to be an extremist like this when humanity is already on the brink of extinction after a virus and is under invasion by bug monsters from outer space.

• Ted -- Jim's friend who he sometimes fricks -- joins the Telepath Corps

• Jim fully joins the Uncle Ira group so he can continue to study and eliminate Chtorr nests

I can't wait till my next work break to read the rest!

"Star-Spangled Men" in Mencken's Chrestomathy

To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks and papers. !bookworms

I still haven't finish “The Grass is Singing”, summary is unhappy mid-thirties white woman in Rhodesia marries poor and lonely farmer because she's afraid of ending up as a spinster. She hates her new life and starts mistreating the servants which leads to her being killed.

My favorite short story. I posted this a couple times on the og /r/drama. I think I found it 4chan forever ago.

From this thread.

https://archived.moe/lit/thread/22430087#p22431734

First i want to apologize if a make gramar errors, i am not a native english speaker. I'm an college student and i want to beging to have a writing routine to gain experience as a amateur writer (my dream is to publish my own fantasy novel). Because college and work i don't have much time, so i ask you "is 100 words minimum a good amount to have like a daily routine? It is low?" Every answer is welcome. Thank you.

Sometimes I wonder if every word goal post is just the same guy trolling, seeing how low you can go before they finally call you out.

Sure. Especially if you're trying to build a consistency habit. Some days 100 words will feel like bending over to pick up a feather and sometimes it will feel like pushing a boulder up a hill. Everyone's journey is different and every day is different.

I always wondered what George R R Martin was doing these days

It's better than 0. Keep up the good work my friend!

There are 130 comments, most variants of this, from all the other writoids who don't actually write anything.

The most effective days of writing, you often type zero words. I tend to write in my head a ton, then type it all, then write in my head a ton and repeat. Progress is progress is progress.

Heh. Write it out? Not necessary. I calculated the story in my head. Hmm... Another draft, perhaps?

Some of the most effective days involve removing 100 words.

So true!

My manuscript is -47,000 words and shrinking every day.

Fantasy writer (and college professor) here... I'll say this. Any amount of writing daily is good to establish a routine and to simply practice, but on average, fantasy novels run at about 170,000 words (varies depending on subgenre, but this is average in most cases) so it might take you forever if you're sticking to 100 words a day

Agents love getting 170k word debut fantasy manuscripts. That's like the bare minimum these days!

It's great!

Any consistent writing is greater than anything else. It won't get you go published fast, but it's waaaaay faster than "waiting until I have the time" writing. Also some people's 100 words are better than others 1,000 words.

And by "some people's" I mean mine.

it is a great amount per day! i do even less if i am being honest, so you are doing great. (your english is very good by the way)

Keep it up and you'll be 1% done with your novel in no time!

People here will say any writing is a good amount of writing. I'll be honest, one hundred a day is not very good. It's basically your post twice. It takes no effort.

What the frick? What are you doing in here? Guards!

This post contains 149 original words, not counting Marseys and file names. Soooo, that's my writing goal for today. Later, virgins!

!bookworms, next week will be about (scenes XIII to XXII)

Okay book nerds

I've been thinking about this for a while Is Tolkien an unreliable narrator in The Hobbit? Or is the narrator reliable and the world fantastic?

In the beginning Tolkien tells us that hobbits are completely ordinary and unremarkable, but we learn they have resistance to dragon magic, can walk completely silently and have excellent vision, all of which set Bilbo apart from other characters in the book.

The narrator is reliable in all other aspects, imo he's just relaying facts from a fantasy world and not trying to deceive the reader but also it's not implausible he's lying.

I've just come to a part of my book where one of my characters is sexually abused. I did not describe the scene in great detail, but I wrote it in such a way that the reader understands very well what happened. The thing is, while I was doing it, I felt bad, almost like I had gotten sick, and I began to wonder if it would be okay if I had written that scene in the first place. Has something similar happened to you? How do you get over it?

This isn't a bad OP, but it's kind of pointless. Maybe they told a good story that needed to be disturbing. Maybe they're just an edgelord realizing their story has no literary merit. As usual on /r/writing, the OP tells us they wrote something and how they feel about it, but we can't actually read it. So of course everyone just waxes poetic about their own bullshit.

I wrote a short-story many years ago about a young man racing home to his girlfriend after a long trip, only to just see her falling out of their highrise window when he opens the apartment door.

Chills and palpitations swept over me as I wrote the final paragraphs, with him breathlessly running up the stairs, expectantly going over scenarios of reconciliation and reconnection in his mind, all the while knowing, as the writer, that he would be devastated in just a few short lines. I found myself gasping, literally gasping, as I wrote his reaction to her disappearing beyond the ledge, how their eyes lock for brief second, his in confusion, hers in despair. He froze, momentarily, reacting too late, too slow, dropping the flowers he had purchased at a gas station on the way, rushing forward as if the world suddenly was enveloped in some viscous ether, hands outstretched. I leaned back in my chair, tears carving streams down my cheeks and chin.

This is a guy writing ABOUT a scene he wrote. I've read 19th century sentimental novels with more restraint.

I know that feeling. I gave it to myself when the concept of my protagonist being mind controlled by a supervillain came up in my synopsis, because I understand what that actually means too well after surviving a 'special needs' school in LA.

If you don't cry while writing a synopsis of a prose superhero story, you have no soul.

You are empathetic. You must be a good writer. I cried for days when my protagonist related the heart breaking abuse he suffered as a child to his therapist. It began after his loving grandmother died when he was four years old. When his mother was at work, his father would strip him naked and lock him in the cold dark cellar for hours with no blanket, food, water or potty. I'm not certain, but I suspect there may have been SA as well. He grows up to be a brilliant criminal defense attorney who successfully defends a 14 year old pregnant girl after she kills her male feminist. Trauma is part of life. Terrible things happen to the innocent everyday. Writing about it is a healthy way of coping.

Men will literally write a novel instead of going to therapy.

Congrats, you have empathy.

(in fairness the comment was a little longer)

My book has a similar scene, where I talk about how I was r*ped. I spend a long time thinking about how to tell that story. It was tough, because I don't even remember it happening. They got me drunk and roofied me. I woke up and had to deal with the brutal aftermath, including how they shared the pics of it all over the school.

That's terrible. I admire the bravery it takes to come forward and--wait, what's that flair?

This is "her" only book and her account has an AI pfp. The book (700 pages btw) is pretty obviously erotic fiction and every page screams moid. The Goodreads review confirms a r*pe scene exists (the preview doesn't go that far). So is this person on /r/writing RPing as their porn character pretending to share a traumatic r*pe experience?

Yes lol.

Scroll through their history and you can also find a bunch of confident advice about how to be a good writer, plus getting their story removed from /r/erotica for underage s*x, plus sneeding about how second drafts are for losers. Tbh I fully support sending this person to a mental institution, but not a sexy one.

Thank you for joining me on another trip into the worst hobby sub in the universe. And may God have mercy on your soul.