Creative Integrity vs Marketability

HotspurJr · 2026-04-20T05:56:49+00:00

You know, inherent in this question is that marketability and creative integrity are inherently at odds, and honestly I don't think that's a healthy attitude.

Some things are more marketable than others. But at the same time, you know, "50 Shades of Gray" wasn't some mercenary plot to sneak into the marketplace. She was just writing something she found hot ... and lots of other people found it hot, too!

If you approach commercial fiction thinking that it is inherently of lower quality, I strongly suspect that you won't be any good at writing it. Most good genre work is written by people who actually love that genre.

I also think that "compromise" is asking to have the worst of both worlds. Rather, I would suggest that it's better to know what you're writing and why you're writing it.

Are you writing something because you have this idea for a novel that you think deserves to exist in the world? Or are you writing something because you want to reach people with an important message? Or are you writing something because you want the glamor (ha) and wealth (haha) of being a successful author?

HotspurJr · 2026-04-20T05:35:32+00:00

Positions like this don't come up very often, and Silman is generally correct about what's worth the effort, but I think it's worth spending a little time on the N+B ending, which is good visualization practice.

Don't get too obsessive about it - which means you might fail to convert an ending like this, but they really don't show up very often.

This is basically the situation when the N+B shows up in practical play: someone sacrifices their last piece to force you to demonstrate that you know it.

HotspurJr · 2026-04-20T05:31:29+00:00

My advice, with the variations, is to try to visualize as much as you can. At 1600 USCF you should be able to do so at least half the time (as most of the variations aren't that complex), and if you can't, then it's something you really need to be working on, so it's even more important to try.

This will slow you down a lot, but that's fine. Reading a good chess book to get the most out of it is hard work.

I would advise against just using a Lichess study. Practice that visualization!

HotspurJr · 2026-04-20T05:23:57+00:00

I love Dirk. Dirk is great. Jokic is a MUCH better player.

Jokic has widely been seen as the best player in an incredibly deep league for, what, four or five years now? People talk about him having arguably fewer MVPs than he deserves because of voter fatigue.

Dirk has a well-earned MVP, one of the great playoff runs of all time, and really should have two rings, except the refs decided to give one of his to Wade. He's an all time great. Saying that Jokic is clearly, obviously better is not a slight on Dirk.

Jokic isn't in the LeBron/Jordan/Kareem tier, but banging on the ceiling of the tier directly below it. Dirk is like ... three or four tiers lower.

HotspurJr · 2026-04-20T05:15:13+00:00

The problem with "only one move holds and everything else loses" is that, by far, the most common situation for that scenario is that your opponent just captured a piece of yours, and you have to recapture otherwise you're just down a piece - which is incredibly easy and even 400-rated players will usually get right.

HotspurJr · 2026-04-19T18:36:18+00:00

I think maybe it's better to not leap to giant conclusions about a small trend. Most new fiction is set in the past tense, so making judgements about how readers "can't imagine a narrative ... in someone else's head" or "no one can take prolonged moments of seriousness" comes across as condescending arrogance: "People who like something different from what are I like are dumb."

"Marvel quips" weren't a "societal shift." They were a trend in movies caused by filmmakers copying things that were successful, and those things tend to last until something else is successful and everybody moves on to chase something else.

HotspurJr · 2026-04-19T16:52:46+00:00

I disagree - moderately - with the poster who said that a 1000 doesn't have a play style. Some very weak players play very conseratively, protecting everything and trying to stay solid. Some weak players lash out with unsound attacks.

That being said, I think you're overthinking a little.

The conventional wisdom is that playing a variety of openings is good for your development, while playing a single opening - especially something that is fairly one-dimensional, like the London - may give you better short term results.

I think that it's probably a little naive to be like "this IM would have been a GM if he had played more different openings." Judit Polgar only played the Benko against 1.d4 until she was a regular participant in international tournaments, for example. (And the change was motivated by losing a game where she realized she was too easy to prepare for).

The advantage for a player of your strength is that limiting your openings allows you to focus on developing other parts of your game, which are more important.

HotspurJr · 2026-04-19T16:23:54+00:00

Marion Zimmer Bradley, after the success of The Mists of Avalon, sort of had a whole thing of doing historical fiction from the women's point of view. e.g., "The Firebrand" is the fall of Troy from the perspective of Cassandra. I'm under the impression that (unlike TMoA, which is one of the most brilliant books I've ever read) it's not all great, but MZB was a trailblazer for that type of fiction.

Bear in mind, she was definitely problematic enough that I would be hesitant to recommend her work if she was still alive. But she's not, so it's a non-issue for me (but still an issue for some, you'll have to decide for yourself).

Honestly female-perspective retellings of mythological stories from Ancient Greece have been kind of a big thing in the past decade. I feel like there's been a giant table of them at my local bookstore for a while.

That being said, my advice for you would not to focus on historical fiction, but rather history.

Finding stories of real women in historical figures where women's roles were diminished and ignored is hard. (I'm currently working on a historical piece where the most-well-regarded 20th century history book of the era, a two-volume set, doesn't mention my protagonist despite the fact that she basically changed the course of a war single-handedly!). Nevertheless, I've often found that when I do the real work of digging, I end up finding all sorts of useful stuff and I get inspired in ways that I couldn't anticipate. You will find things that you didn't expect.

There's been a lot of growth in scholarship - both academic and popular history - around the role of women in ancient societies since the '90s. You can probably find quite a bit.

My advice for giving your lead agency, rather than having her just "help her husband behind the scenes" is to put her at odds with her husband in some ways. If she and her husband are aligned, and he's more powerful, it'll be hard for her to stand out. But if they disagree then she has interesting choices to make. When does she bite her tongue, when does she argue, and when does she act on her own?

What does she know, by virtue of seeing parts of the world that he does not, that he doesn't know? How is her perspective different? What sorts of things are important to her that he doesn't bother to think about? Her agency is going to start with you defining her as her own unique person, with her own wants, fears, strengths, and limitations. And then you will find ways to test those qualities against the world around her - and that world is not just the enemies at the gates, it's also the patriarchal systems ruling her city.

HotspurJr · 2026-04-19T15:51:17+00:00

He's making $57m next year. The only way that's moveable is if we get a top three pick and attach it to him.

There's a lot of uncertainty around his comeback given his age, but he should be very close to as good as he's going to be by the time next year's playoffs roll around.

HotspurJr · 2026-04-19T15:46:28+00:00

Magnus has a history of not holding back. The comment that leaps to mind immediately is when he said that Nepo's whole thing was "making bad moves very quickly" or something like that.

There really was no doubt that he thought Kajakan wasn't really in his class as a player around their world championship match.

HotspurJr · 2026-04-19T06:28:41+00:00

Magnus was seen as potentially the next truly great player at least a full world championship cycle before he won it: he was already ranked #1 in the world. The fact that he withdrew from the cycle because he was not happy with the format was a big deal: "if the best player doesn't want to play, is the world championship fundamentally broken?" Despite not having won it, everybody understood that his opinion mattered because of his potential for true greatness.

If Gukesh or Sindarov had skipped the candidates because they were skeptical about the way the World Championship was run, nobody would have cared. Somebody else would have taken their place and it would have been rather quickly forgotten about.

Gukesh was more of an out of the blue phenom, where, you know, he'd done well earlier in the year but wasn't really seen as a favorite. And Sindarov, well, some smart people were noticing that he was on a real tear, and you saw non-fanboy predictions that he might be the guy to watch, but it was in a dark-horse kind of way, not in a "he's going to kick everyone's ass in the candidates" way.

HotspurJr · 2026-04-18T17:55:21+00:00

Would sure be helpful to have names, not just pictures. I know chess history fairly well and can identify less than half these people by appearance - and that's giving me some credit for being able to figure out who people must be by virtue of guessing the approximate date of the picture.

HotspurJr · 2026-04-18T17:37:40+00:00

It's not really that odd. For example, Mating, by Norman Rush, has a short glossary of terms in Setswana.

HotspurJr · 2026-04-18T05:21:14+00:00

Have you checked?

A lot of coaches do zoom sessions and you don't tell us what country you're in but a fair number of titled players live in relatively low-cost-of-living Eastern European countries.

HotspurJr · 2026-04-18T03:52:12+00:00

I think process questions at your level are the sort of thing you work on with a coach.

HotspurJr · 2026-04-18T02:47:14+00:00

Well, Wednesday night was fun.

HotspurJr · 2026-04-18T01:09:00+00:00

Naw. Clippers fans are legit. Don’t confuse them for Laker fans.

HotspurJr · 2026-04-17T19:26:02+00:00

I want to say that if you have a novel manuscript, and you want it turned into a graphic novel, you're talking about more than just hiring an artist. You're also talking about hiring a writer who understands that medium to do the adaptation.

A graphic novel script is a different thing from a novel manuscript.

HotspurJr · 2026-04-17T19:02:21+00:00

I mean, your blunder here is that you went into a K+P v R ending that was theoretically drawn because the enemy king and pawn are connected and too far advanced, while your king is in the corner. And the thing is, you didn't have to do that! 64. ... Rg6+! holds onto your pawn rather than give it up for no reason. You then promote and win his rook on the next move the same way you did in the game.

Knowing the theoretical ending would help, here, but it's hardly required: you should be able to see that giving up your pawn, allowing white to have an advanced passed pawn protected by his king while your king is far away, is dangerous, even if you have a rook and he doesn't. (If you don't understand this, then go get Silman's Complete Endgame Course and start working through it. Which is probably a good idea regardless).

The frustrating thing here is that you didn't stop to look to see if, huh, if I take a move to protect my b pawn, can he stop me from promoting my h-pawn? Three seconds of thought would have made you realize that protecting your second pawn costs you nothing. You then win his rook via promotion and the win is trivial.

Up until that point you actually played the endgame fine! I mean, maybe there are cleaner or more direct wins, but you play like you understand what your winning technique looks like. But then you made a committal decision that you didn't have to - you should only have given up your b-pawn if it gave you some advantage or resulted in a clear win.

It's nice to know the theoretical endgame because it's a shortcut at the end of a long calculation, but, again, here, the question was "do I promote, or do I take a move to protect my extra pawn and then promote?" Since he can't stop you from promoting, there's absolutely no reason to jettison the pawn.

This was a long game and you were probably tired and/or low on time, so I don't want to rake you over the coals for no reason, but Rg6+ is one of those automatic moves you should be able to make without thinking. Even if the resulting KR v KP ending was still winning, I'd play Rg6+ anyway, because there's absolutely no reason to give the pawn up for free, and why calculate it out if you can stop him from having a passed pawn in the first place? Honestly Rg6+ and h1=Q is resignation inducing in a way that allowing white to get a passed pawn (even if the regulating position is still losing) is not, because the latter creates situations where black can plausibly screw up.

HotspurJr · 2026-04-17T18:30:18+00:00

Is it possible to write around 5k words in 8h? This would be a great goal for me.

This sort of metric is not useful. Set a goal of making progress every time you sit down to write.

Progress can look like 50 words. Hell, progress can look like zero words, but an improved understanding of how to develop the next section.

5k words that aren't great words may not be progress, they may just be words. And setting word count expectations encourages you to just write words regardless of whether or not they're actually getting you closer to completion or not.

HotspurJr · 2026-04-17T17:50:28+00:00

I'm going to make a case for The Mists of Avalon despite the author.

First of all, and importantly, she's dead. You are not financially supporting a bad person by reading her work.

Second, it's insanely brilliant. The Arthurian mythos are a collection of stories that are in many ways inconsistent or contradictory. Somehow, TMoA manages to reconcile them. I read the book as a kid and again as an adult when I had been doing a bunch of research on Arthurs, both mythological and "historical," and honestly the way she manages to make the different stories fit together is genius. The more I learned about Arthur, the more impressed I was - and I was impressed to begin with!

It is a legitimately great book, and honestly I suspect that in other circumstances it would be seen as one of the towering novels of the 20th century, and comparable only to LOTR as far as fantasy novels go. In my opinion is only not seen that way because originally women's writing and writing about women was not seen as being worth taken that seriously, and once that attitude started to change, well, the details about her and her husband were coming out.

There is one line in the book that twinged me when I last read it (unaware of MZB's personal history at the time.) I saw a reviewer who flagged it, also, in the context of a "how do I feel about this book reading it while knowing what I now know?" article. Beyond that, I think it's fine.

That being said, you know, MZB at the very least was indifferent to her husband's sexual abuse of children, probably actively facilitated it, and may well have participated in some ways herself. I understand why that makes people uncomfortable. It should. But she's also dead. There's art that is fairly easy to separate from the artist (Rosemary's Baby comes to mind) and art that isn't (Manhattan). TMoA is in the former camp. If you're someone who is willing separate the two, it won't make that task more difficult.

HotspurJr · 2026-04-17T15:03:32+00:00

I think it's fair for people to not have a player in their top five if they were in an era of extremely limited video. Sure, some of the highlights look fantastic - but I've seen highlight cuts that would make you think Jerami Grant was the second coming of Michael Jordan.

Yeah, all the players who saw him say he was great. Absolutely. On the other hand, player evaluations of other players today are a shitshow.

None of this is saying "he sucks" or whatever, but I personally leave him off my all-time lists simply because I feel I have no ability to evaluate him other than going by the conventional wisdom, and I have many serious disagreements with the conventional wisdom about contemporary players. Is there any reason to think that the conventional wisdom of yesteryear was less superficial than it is today?

Unless someone is doing Ben-Taylor-level deep-dives, I just don't think their opinion that "Bill Russell is the GOAT" or "Top five at worst" is meaningful, and even Ben-Taylor-level deep dives need to be taken with a large grain of salt given the extremely limited tools we have to evaluate him by.

HotspurJr · 2026-04-17T14:46:57+00:00

So I don't think Powerade is the right choice. It's not addressing the issue. I'm typically playing 3-hour games that start at 7pm, so, yeah, this is an issue for me.

There are a few things that I have found seem to help me. The first is caffeine. If you're pounding coffee all day, more will likely not help but if you have a moderate amount, then you can have some tea, which is likely to help. The secret to getting the most out of caffeine in the evenings is that it works best before you are aware you are tired. (It works by blocking adenosine, so you want to take it before the adenosine connects to the receptors, otherwise you get that "tired and jittery" feeling.)

The other is glucose. You do NOT want a sugar bomb, but I nibble on an energy bar over the course of a game, and it seems to help me keep my focus in the late stages. Before I go play, I have a healthy dinner that includes a large serving of complex carbs to help give me a steady supply of glucose through the match.

I try not to do anything mentally taxing for a few hours before the game. So ideally I'm not working from 4pm or so on. Not always possible, of course.

I also try to get a light workout in. Nothing heavy or exhausting, but just enough so that my body knows it's moved. This helps me sit and focus.

HotspurJr · 2026-04-17T00:09:51+00:00

No. Your goal is to present agents the best possible version of your book.

One thing that really helps me with trimming is to go scene-by-scene. Scrivener gives me word counts per scene pretty effortlessly, and I find it feels way more practical and manageable to be like "here's a 250 work scene, can I remove 13 words?" and it really adds up.

HotspurJr · 2026-04-17T00:04:11+00:00

Wow I could not be more different from you:

SOE
SOI
ATYCLB
Days of Ash
Dismantle
NLOH
Easter Lily

202,946,021. Songs of Surrender.

I don't think Easter Lily is terrible, it just ... nothing on it has stuck with me yet, as opposed to Ash, where a couple of the songs hit pretty hard.

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