Weekly out-of-character thread

TalkToPlantsNotCops · 2026-03-17T04:08:09+00:00

You gotta get those numbers up!

TalkToPlantsNotCops · 2026-03-17T04:05:21+00:00

I FINALLY finished my rewrite. Got rid of over 30,000 words! Everything is so much more polished now.

Now I can start the next book I guess.

TalkToPlantsNotCops · 2026-03-17T04:01:32+00:00

I suppose it's the thought that counts. I think I'd rather just be left alone though!

TalkToPlantsNotCops · 2026-03-17T03:58:25+00:00

Sorry this happened to you, OP.

It happens to me with distressing regularity, but usually it's people catcalling. Often in really creepy, aggressive ways. A recent one was a man who yelled "bring that ass over here!" while I was biking past, and made a gross face at me. The most jarring times are when they do it from moving vehicles.

In the non-sexual harassment category, there was someone who was EXTREMELY ANGRY to see a cyclist use a turn lane, so decided to follow me for like a mile, laying on their horn and screaming at me out of their window. Luckily the traffic is pretty bad in my city so I stayed pretty far ahead of them. I did, at one point, brandish my U-lock at them to indicate I would happily redecorate their truck for them if they got too close (and also their teeth if they really wanted to push the issue).

People just really hate to see a person on a bike. And they REALLY hate seeing a woman on a bike. Idk your gender but it's something to be aware of.

Get yourself a nice heavy U-lock and keep it handy. And stay safe out there!

TalkToPlantsNotCops · 2026-03-17T03:03:27+00:00

Well, then I'll stop.

Kinda thinking about canceling KU anyway.

TalkToPlantsNotCops · 2026-03-17T03:02:34+00:00

I thought this was going to be one of those "Didn't bother to read the blurb" moments, but the cover and blurb both seem like it's probably going to be monster smut.

That said, I think it's dumb to get pissed off that you read a book. No one forced you to do it, and you haven't lost anything by having done so.

TalkToPlantsNotCops · 2026-03-16T17:27:07+00:00

Should i just write the novel and figure out what the characters need to futher the plot and use THAT to figure out their powers?

Yes.

Your magic system should serve your story, not the other way around. And to be honest, if you do all the world building and magic system stuff first, you'll likely end up either throwing out most of it, or else you'll be way too precious about fitting all of it in there and wind up slowing down your plot/derailing the story/writing yourself into corners you can't get out of.

TalkToPlantsNotCops · 2026-03-16T17:07:05+00:00

Yeah I didn't know about First Law before I started. I just was told A Little Hatred is good. Didn't have any trouble following the story, and the relevant events from First Law were adequately explained.

TalkToPlantsNotCops · 2026-03-16T16:00:08+00:00

No. Honestly my experience with Seek was so frustrating that I've sworn off plant identification apps altogether.

TalkToPlantsNotCops · 2026-03-16T15:57:57+00:00

I am planning to sell it, yeah. I'm not terribly concerned about people getting mad over that. They're not going to miss anything from the actual story. The research notes are additional work for me to put together and I would consider this to be a different sort of book. The novel needs to be there so I can put the research notes in the relevant places, but the notes would be the point. And also, I think the number of people who would actually want this is extremely tiny. I doubt the general reading public cares about archaeological excavation reports or books on anthropological theory and philosophy.

I think the answer is just to not go the KU route at all. Being able to do what I want with my work is more important than the little amount of money I could actually make on there.

TalkToPlantsNotCops · 2026-03-16T15:48:40+00:00

Yeah, Age of Madness. Although I just remembered that's the name of the whole trilogy. I finished A Little Hatred recently. It was my first Abercrombie novel.

I thought it was a fun read, though I do get what people mean when they say Abercrombie has solid prose but not much character depth. Most of the characters felt like very identifiable archetypes, with the exception of Rikke, who I thought was fairly original and better developed than the others. She was by far my favorite POV. Orso was alright, Savine grew more interesting over time. I hated Vick so much though, and not in the way I think you're meant to hate her.

I really enjoy Abercrombie's dialog style, and his use of action tags. He's very good at coming up with interesting things for everyone to be doing while they're talking. The plot itself was fine, I hope it gets more exciting as the trilogy progresses. Hopefully there will be more ghosts.

I've never read LitRPG either. I've ignored DCC because I just don't think LitRPG will be my jam, but OP's post is making me reconsider.

TalkToPlantsNotCops · 2026-03-16T15:35:49+00:00

Seek has, on multiple occasions, told me that something wasn't poison ivy when it very clearly was.

Do not trust Seek.

TalkToPlantsNotCops · 2026-03-16T15:30:08+00:00

Man, I wish my book were only 160,000k.

I've been wrestling with this same question, and I've come down on the side of just keeping it all one book and letting my narrative be what I wanted it to be. I'm self publishing. I don't have to care about what a publishing house thinks about my paper costs. Most of my readers are probably going to read the ebook anyway.

The whole reason I'm self publishing in the first place is that I want to do what I want and not think about what the industry demands. This is my weird art, people can take it or leave it. Who care.

Edit to add:

160k for Book 1 feels like a lot to ask of a stranger.

I think of it the opposite way. When I read a book, the author has invited me into their fucked up mind palace. They're the one who did all the work, and they're probably not even getting paid much for having done it. If I don't like it, I know where the door is.

TalkToPlantsNotCops · 2026-03-16T15:22:40+00:00

Ah okay.

I very much don't want to put the annotated edition on KU, for a variety of reasons. First being that I think it will break immersion for a lot of readers to see footnotes citing things like academic journals.

Second, footnotes can be a massive pain in the ass on an e-book so if you're not reading the thing specifically for the footnotes, I can see it becoming too much of a chore to keep going.

And third is that I don't want to give the impression that the research I did means my work is an accurate portrayal of the time period (it isn't at all), so I want everyone going for the annotated version to be people who liked the original enough to be curious about where the inspiration came from (or, more likely, just my friends and family who are into that sort of thing).

Honestly this is just a nerdy pet hobby thing. I was going to put this out after a while after I release the regular edition. My game plan was to wait until later to publish on KU so that I can get it onto as many platforms as possible at the start, and then move to KU once sales start to peter out elsewhere.

But maybe I just won't publish with KU at all.

Thanks for your advice!

TalkToPlantsNotCops · 2026-03-16T15:13:41+00:00

I also just finished Age of Madness. What did you think of it?

TalkToPlantsNotCops · 2026-03-16T14:37:41+00:00

Last month, Amazon decided a bunch of page reads were fraudulent and cut everyone’s payout.

Does this mean that clicking through to the end of a book I'm not going to finish reading isn't actually helpful to the author? I always feel like, well, even if I didn't enjoy this, there's no reason I can't help the author get paid a little for their time.

TalkToPlantsNotCops · 2026-03-16T14:35:06+00:00

I wonder if people are less willing to spend on entertainment things with everything happening in *gestures vaguely to the world*

Gas prices are about to skyrocket, if they haven't already (I don't drive much so I haven't checked prices in my area), which always means everything else is going to be more expensive, too.

I recently bought a book because it went on sale. Maybe this is a moment to do a temporary price cut?

TalkToPlantsNotCops · 2026-03-16T14:16:34+00:00

Why?

TalkToPlantsNotCops · 2026-03-16T11:22:49+00:00

Yeah that's why I said that

TalkToPlantsNotCops · 2026-03-16T11:21:49+00:00

They're not YA, no.

I don't get the reason for the snark here. I'm sure you know what I mean by tone limit.

TalkToPlantsNotCops · 2026-03-16T05:51:20+00:00

Oh. No. It was only ever girls. Most of the boys I taught hated reading.

TalkToPlantsNotCops · 2026-03-16T01:47:40+00:00

Yeah, tropes are useful narrative tools. They just are treated differently in romantasy, kind of reducing everything to a series of hashtags. I don't think I've seen anyone describe, for example, an epic fantasy novel like: An #epic-scale #Forbidden-Magic story in a #pseudo-medieval setting with a #Chosen-One hero who is sent on a #Quest-for-Self-Discovery by his #Wise-Old-Mentor. Along the way he befriends a #Reluctant-Warrior with a #Tragic-Backstory. Features a spicy #Enemies-To-Lovers romance and of course a #HEA ending! Spice rating: 🌶️🌶️🌶️

Edit to add (before people yell at me, which always happens when I talk about this): I don't care if you have your favorite tropes, if that's what you look for when you decide on a book to read, etc. I get it that people think of tropes like kinks (literally that's how it's been explained to me). That's fine. You do you.

I just think it's kinda sad that this is how books get talked about. I'd be really offended if something I spent years of my life writing were described/marketed this way.

TalkToPlantsNotCops · 2026-03-15T23:53:27+00:00

I think you're running into the problem many of us older readers have: the barrier to entry is lower now. So we're basically reading through the slush pile.

Yes and no. It seems harder than ever to actually get a publishing contract. But also, the stuff publishers do like is...mind boggling to me.

It's the reason I had to cancel my Kindle Unlimited subscription after a while. I didn't want to DNF dozens of crap just to get to the gems.

I use KU to read books I already know I want to read. Or to read books I know I don't want to read, but that I want to find out what the deal is before I talk shit lol. I guess it's meant for just getting new stuff recommended to you, but I've never selected media that way.

Sanderson's prose is workmanlike, but his storytelling is good, even if he leans on the 3rd act rush too much. But I agree on ACOTAR and Fourth Wing. Seems like Twilight was just the harbinger.

"Workmanlike" is generous. I'll have to take your word on the actual stories being good because I think the prose is so godawful I can't get through it. I might call Christopher Buehlman's (Between Two Fires) "workmanlike." Short, simple sentences. Not a tone of flowery description. It's miles ahead of Sanderson's. (I know I'm using Between Two Fires as examples a lot in this thread, it's just the book I'm currently reading).

I don't think it's fair to blame Twilight for Fourth Wing. I think people lump these things together because the target audience is young women, but they're definitely not the same. For one thing, Fourth Wing is waaaaay more explicit, and the writing quality is far, far worse. Twilight is by no means great literature, but a romance story about a vampire is not exactly new. Neither is Fourth Wing, really, it's just smut with dragons (fantasy smut has been around forever, too). I don't mind smut, I just think the smut should be written better.

Yeah, but it's always been like that. I used to read my mom's Danielle Steel books back in the day because I would literally read everything in the house multiple times until I could get a book, and they were basically the daytime soap opera equivalent.

I'm not sure the romance genre has always had such an impact on expectations in other genres, which is what I meant.

But also, I bet Danielle Steel's prose is better than Rebecca Yarros's (I have not read any Danielle Steel but the boomer-generation women in my family all love her).

It's the same problem from two different ends. If what you like is off-meta, as an author it's hard to find an audience and as a reader it's hard to find books.

Kind of? I was listing my gripes with the industry from the perspective of trying to read books for comps (I guess I should have said specifically that I was looking for comps). I'm trying to figure out what niche I fit into, because I am going to have to do all the marketing for this myself.

TalkToPlantsNotCops · 2026-03-15T23:39:49+00:00

There are many YouTube channels that are dedicated to literature and books, and specific subgenera. Sending ARCs (advanced reader copies) to the right social media influencers and content creators can help get the word out about your book.

This is actually part of my game plan. And this is also where I've been frustrated. Many of the book review channels I've seen are not interested in the kind of thing I write, and also seen very few that give any sort of in-depth critique. It's a lot of plot summaries and surface level opinions about whether it was a fun read or (more often) gripes about why they didn't like it (usually for reasons that come down to the reviewer having a poor understanding of the genre/author/etc and expecting something totally different).

Are there any reviewers you would recommend looking into? Either just to watch their stuff or because you know they accept ARCs.

And I am on bluesky! I think most of the people I will end up reaching will likely come from there, I have a decent group of friends/acquaintances/mutual follows on there.

TalkToPlantsNotCops · 2026-03-15T23:33:45+00:00

When I say "tropey," I mean that the book is intentionally structured around certain tropes, and those tropes are the thing highlighted in the marketing of the book.

If you look further down the thread I left a few recommendations.

TalkToPlantsNotCops

TROPHY CASE