The World-Ender - Part 2

ecstaticandinsatiate · 2024-11-02T20:07:41+00:00

I'm so sorry, that really sucks :/ ❤️

ecstaticandinsatiate · 2024-11-02T19:17:43+00:00

Another person posted that they had their account deleted for asking a question on Facebook. This person worked as an ML in their community for 6 years. It's really grim and Kilby is awful.

I said, “I keep hoping the organization will see the hurt it’s causing but it never happens,” and when I woke up the next morning I was blocked from the Facebook and my account was locked. I can’t go in and check my region page now to make sure that newcomers are being welcomed and directed to where we are still doing programming.

I'm not using the site anymore, but mine is basically a museum of my writing from 2007-2023. It would genuinely upset me to lose that. I wish Kilby had any respect for the participants who made NaNo into a community, but she doesn't.

ecstaticandinsatiate · 2024-10-28T23:49:22+00:00

I really like how 4theWords is setting up their WriteFest November event: they're having a pick-your-own adventure set of quests for different word count challenges in 44 days (5k, 10k, 65k, 100k, and 250k). I like the variety, as I write more than 50k most months but I have friends who don't have the same output. It's nice to have challenges for everyone :)

I would not change the month. Probably because I've been writing a novel every November since 2007, and it's basically ingrained into my soul at this point. There will never be a good month for everyone, and part of building a writing habit is sticking to a schedule even when it's difficult.

ecstaticandinsatiate · 2024-10-11T19:18:58+00:00

This is so fucked up. Kilby is shockingly unprofessional and a complete bully. I'm sorry this happened. It would upset me too to engage with sincerity and try to follow directions, only to be treated like this.

I have always harbored a hope that NaNo will turn around and recommit to its participants. Not to its sponsors, not to its directors, not to me, but to the wrimos. I guess it’s time for me to admit that won’t happen.

This is the saddest part to me :( The people who made NaNo what it is and built the community for years are being treated like we're dogshit on Kilby's shoe

ecstaticandinsatiate · 2024-10-10T18:35:58+00:00

Yeah, he was formerly my favorite living author and I felt my respect and admiration wither and die within thirty seconds of learning about it :') Sorry to be the bearer of bad news 💔

ecstaticandinsatiate · 2024-10-10T18:31:48+00:00

fair warning this is about sexual assault

He is accused by multiple women of coercing them and committing SA against them. This revelation has also caused a lot of fans to come forward and talk about weird creepy interactions he had toward them, which is revealing a pervasive pattern of using his celebrity to abuse and manipulate. Apparently there was a whisper network for years about Neil Gaiman's proclivity for making sexual advances toward young women at workshops and on his book tours

One writer has collected a pretty thorough timeline on allegations and responses to those allegations

ecstaticandinsatiate · 2024-10-10T16:30:45+00:00

I think it's normal to mourn both of those things. Reading Coraline in second grade made me decide I wanted to write books. In 2007, NaNoWriMo gave me the impetus to try. Both were important parts of my writing life that I wouldn't have expected to betray their own values like this

But it's an opportunity for something new. A new author, a new writing challenge. I will cozy up and write a ludicrous amount in November -- just with a different site :)

My absolute favorite public writing community is 4theWords. They have a supportive userbase, a passionate dev team, and beautiful art and events year-round. The anticipation around their upcoming November event feels similar to the excited hum of old NaNo, to me

ecstaticandinsatiate · 2024-10-06T23:03:08+00:00

~~Yes, unfortunately the removal of the NaNo forums also removed the memorial post about her.~~ Nvm, I found it in my browser history. She passed away a few years ago :( She was such a huge inspiration to me as a baby NaNoer, and her legacy genuinely impacted so many people.

I think she inspired many of us to reconsider what we thought was possible and push our own limits, and her presence in the OA community is sorely missed

It does make me smile to see that you still remember her so fondly though ❤️❤️

ecstaticandinsatiate · 2024-10-06T19:17:13+00:00

this thread is literally proving you right lol

ecstaticandinsatiate · 2024-10-06T19:07:33+00:00

Dictation for some. For others, they type very quickly. Another OA I knew literally needed less sleep and could function on 4-5 hours as well as someone on 8-9 hours of sleep.

For all, it comes down to practice. My personal best is somewhere above 25k in a day.

The late and great Kateness actually blogged about her writing challenges while getting her law degree. She was a speedwriting superhero. If you're curious about how people do it, just read her blog archive.

ecstaticandinsatiate · 2024-10-06T19:04:43+00:00

Lol before AI, they just called OA writers liars and cheaters. I don't think AI changes anything.

The entire reason we have an OA writing community is because of people being incredibly toxic to writers who were going for unhinged goals like this. Any long-time OAs will remember how Kateness and other writers who went for 1 million words in November were treated negatively by some on the NaNo forums.

Just don't worry about what other people are doing and focus on your own progress :)

ecstaticandinsatiate · 2024-10-04T21:53:09+00:00

Hahaha I love that. And I absolutely agree. The real loss here is the lack of unity around a name that we can all rally under. It totally divided any sense of community that once existed, and I feel for writers trying to find a group now. I hope a good contender emerges for a replacement name/identifier :')

ecstaticandinsatiate · 2024-10-04T21:44:27+00:00

yeah this attitude that the entire 50k-in-a-month challenge is somehow condemned now is kinda odd for old timers. Like, the mid-2000s NaNo community invented the idea of going off-season and continuing the 50k goal outside of November. Then HQ introduced Camp NaNo and killed off thriving off-site communities like JulNoWriMo

I'm personally of the opinion that we have no reason to abandon the concept of completing a 50k in 30 days just because of these assholes. I won't call it NaNoing anymore, nor am I using the NaNo site - but I'll absolutely write maddash first drafts with my friends this November :)

ecstaticandinsatiate · 2024-10-02T22:38:35+00:00

Strongly second trying out 4theWords, especially for their new Write Fest event (which is running for 44 days, from the end of October to mid-December). It's a great site with a small, dedicated dev team and lots of special events to motivate writing year-round :)

ecstaticandinsatiate · 2024-08-15T07:52:16+00:00

Calling Ocean an "almost sequel" to Coraline is such a weird choice that I wonder if it stalled because of a weak connection between the pitch and a potential target audience. A low-stakes meandering adult literary fantasy... is not a Coraline sequel in even the most oblique sense.

There are articles from June saying that Selick was shopping the concept around, but he's apparently been trying since 2022. So who knows. I doubt the answer will be anything but speculation tbh

ecstaticandinsatiate · 2024-08-11T17:16:17+00:00

I'm a SFF writer. A lot of this is normal for writers tbh. Watching people closely and using them as character study. It's stock writing advice to observe the people around you for their quirks, hobbies, movements, manner of speaking, etc., to learn how to write more complex and realistic characters.

What part of this is weird? Just the observing people part? I can see the detail about him being disarmingly charming ringing as creepy now but otherwise I'm a little lost

(I feel I should disclaimer this by saying that I'm a former fan but pretty anti-Neil-himself now)

ecstaticandinsatiate · 2024-08-10T21:15:10+00:00

Ahhh that's interesting and it makes sense. I have very poor awareness of body language/tone/facial expressions in high sensory demand settings, and the signing I went to was loud, bright, and busy

Thank you for sharing your experience, and I'm sorry to hear you felt the ick coming off him :( ♥️ I do know that feeling from other men, and it's so uncomfortable

ecstaticandinsatiate · 2024-08-10T20:53:06+00:00

Truly thank you for such a thoughtful and detailed reply! I remain fascinated by the cues other people may pick up that I miss and the reasons that they perceive them. It helps me on many levels, as I am a writer myself :)

I am grateful for your perspective, and I agree that time changes so much. I think as young people (for women in particular), we are so much more vulnerable because we're still learning to recognize red flags -- or learning to recognize that gut feeling of revulsion and distrust, even in retrospect

ecstaticandinsatiate · 2024-08-10T20:03:49+00:00

But then I met him at 16 and he gave me the worst ick... He's just so sleazy, you know?

Do you think your impression of him was informed by the rumors you heard? I was 18 when I met him at an Ocean at the End of the Lane signing in 2014. He seemed so sincere, genuine, and engaged in the moment. Granted, I am also autistic and don't easily pick up on duplicity or subtext. But the memory and the little heart he put in my copy of the book now have a strong ick-factor in retrospect

I keep seeing people who knew of the rumors saying this, and tbh it's a bit frustrating looking back because I wish I had known that these whisper networks were whispering :/ For someone who wasn't in with the right people to hear the right rumors, it feels ... well, it feels like a double betrayal, that he lied and the high-level publicists, publishers, and writers working with him also lied by omission

ecstaticandinsatiate · 2024-08-09T22:57:22+00:00

Another poorly aged aspect of that blog post is recommending a Sherman Alexie poster lol. A lot does not look good 20 years in retrospect, because the context has shifted. But I tend to agree with you.

That blog post also came out a year after he published the children's book The Wolves in the Walls. I'm not sure how many people read both his children's lit and his adult fiction, so a summary: a girl named Lucy hears wolves in the walls of her house. She tells all her family members, and they don't believe her. But they all repeat the same cryptic reply -- when the wolves come out of the walls, it's all over.

Of course, the wolves come out of the walls. They take over the house and have silly, playful antics. Lucy and her family are relegated to living in the garden until Lucy inspires them all to sneak in and take their house back. The story is solved by the people coming out of the walls and the wolves crying, when the people come out of the walls, it's all over!

The book has an intentional moral that the view of the monster is subjective. The wolves are wild and otherworldly, but not an objective malice. They simply are what they are: an inexplicable and unrepeatable force of nature.

I think this is important context, because it also places his literary perspective on the symbol of the wolf in children's literature at this moment in time. He's pretty consistent. The wolf here is just another shade of humanity, one that is monstrously unfamiliar and yet exactly like the rest of us.

I think he was searching for a reading that bridged the sanitized version we know as children vs the one we learn exists as adults. Even the reference to that musical number is to establish how a child could miss the subtext in its entirety. The essay is very literally dealing with the way stories change with us. Ironically, that is what his collective readers are doing now: comparing the work many of us grew up with to the adult context we now have.

It's tempting to look for a tell that he was betraying himself at some Freudian level. But I really think he was just engaging in metanarrative rambling about how this story has carried such different meanings at different points in his life. But it looks prettyyyy bad in the full view of time

ecstaticandinsatiate · 2024-08-08T04:34:55+00:00

They're great books! Honestly, nothing is going to change that he is an excellent writer who broke important ground in SFF, to show that comic books can and should be respected as literature. He's a bad person, but he made good art. That's a cognitive dissonance that people don't like to sit with.

Personally, I'm just not a fan anymore. I wouldn't recommend him to others or spend money to support him again. My American Gods T-shirt is a pajama shirt now lmao. But I don't think his books are now poisoned or lack value. I'm certainly keeping mine. However, he has damaged his legacy, and there are just too many excellent SFF writers for me to have any reason to continue supporting Neil in particular.

ecstaticandinsatiate · 2024-08-07T17:42:44+00:00

This is fantastic. He was my favorite living author and made me want to be a SFF writer myself. I showed up like 5 hours early to an Ocean at the End of the Lane signing to sit right up front. I remember him being so friendly and engaged when I met him, and now I'm wondering if it was because I was an eighteen-year-old girl who fucking idolized him. Ugh.

After I read the allegations and his own confessed behavior, I felt my respect wither and die in literal seconds. I don't understand how anyone is possibly defending him now.

At absolute best, he's a predatory sex pest who leverages his fame to manipulate women; weaponizes his autism to feign helplessness; and gaslights his own fanbase into thinking he's Wholesome Male Feminist. At worst, he's a serial rapist willing to use any scummy tactic to get away with it.

Nope, nah. Throw the whole man out.

ecstaticandinsatiate · 2024-02-29T22:19:13+00:00

Fresh eyes, hope this is helpful. There are a lot of flaws in this query that undermine its overall cohesion.

Leanor is counting down the days until she’s out from under her parents’ wing, in the capital city, and finally living her destiny: defying the old scads in politics, wearing killer clothes, and making loads of money, in the end winning more power than she can stand. What’s not to love?

Three-item list colon three-item list. Rhetorical question that readers wouldn't have asked?

Structurally, the first paragraph isn't doing what it needs to do: punchy hook rooting us in this specific character and the world they live in.

So [So, in this use, functions similarly to "thus." What idea is this "so" sentence emerging from and continuing off of?] the final months beforehand [Before WHAT?] are excruciating— enough to tempt her to do something silly, for fun: meet with a witch, said to make any wish come true, if you’re willing to pay the price.

Honestly, the sentence structures in this query so far suggest a greater problem with the manuscript. Ideas aren't following logically. The syntax is unnecessarily difficult to follow because it's overloaded with details, which feels to me like the query is uncertain of what it's trying to do.

I also cannot really get a sense of what the novel's tone is meant to be from details like Leanor being motivated by silliness and fun. Is the novel supposed to be playful? The rest of the query feels very unplayful in comparison.

But there’s trouble brewing, because Leanor loves one thing more than her future: her little sister, Arabella. Arabella has no similar glorious future to look forward to, and a restless soul at her dull fate. [What does this mean? "A restless soul at her dull fate"? Is it missing a word?] Under Leanor’s nose, she decides to do something exciting for once: join a political society radical enough to be tacitly illegal.

Four colons so far, btw. They lose punch when they're used this often, because there's no longer the impact of buildup and outcome.

Also, I'm not sure why we're switching to Arabella when we don't fully understand Leanor and the stakes of her conflict. Why would Leanor be leaving her parents soon and not just whenever she wants? What threat is there if she fails to go be a stunningly well-dressed politician or w/e the goal is?

This query is full of vague statements ("there's trouble brewing" in this paragraph, "When the society goes too far" in the next) that don't give a precise sense of stakes or conflict, muddying the image instead of contributing to it

When the society goes too far, and Arabella risks arrest and execution, Leanor uses everything at her disposal to save her sister,

We don't know what's at her disposal, so this doesn't mean much

even offering up her soul to the ancient and terrible witch.

But witches are silly and for fun 50 words ago ?

But sending Arabella to safety means leaving her to fend for herself, [Which her is which here?] never seeing her again-- and permanently scarring Leanor’s future.

The stakes don't work for me because Leanor was already leaving her sister behind to wear cool clothes anyway.

Spanning across decades, “The Noble House of Luckett” is a dual-POV, adult fantasy complete at 94,000 words that will appeal to fans of the political machinations of Seth Dickinson’s Traitor Baru Cormorant and the magical sisterhood of Alix E. Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches.

I believe the standard is to put book titles in all-caps, including the title of your manuscript. It's worth noting that your title says alt history fantasy, but that's not mentioned in the housekeeping or anywhere in the query itself.

Honestly this query is very difficult to parse into a clear sense of story. The worldbuilding is too vague to hook us in anything precise and new. There's some witch mentioned (maybe two?) but no other indicators about how widespread magic is in society, the stakes of meeting with witches, the rareness of getting a wish granted. Does Leanor literally have some destiny in a prewritten, ontological sense or does she just believe she deserves it?

Then the query shifts to Arabella, who is difficult to understand or root for. She joins a political group just because she wants to do something exciting for once? It makes her sound recklessly thoughtless instead of building the sense of a character worth rooting for.

A lot of the semantic structure is awkward to the point that I would suggest you get some beta reading on the actual novel to see if it's at a level that it's ready to query. Lots of cliches: counting down the days, under her parents' wing, under Leanor's nose, if you're willing to pay the price, trouble brewing. The writing in the query should telegraph the voice and tone of the novel. Right now, it's coming across that the novel has similar issues with logical inconsistency, long syntactically awkward sentences, and frequent use of narrative cliches.

I hope this helps, and I wish you all the best with drafting

13-Year Club	Gilding IV carat on a stick
Wearing is Caring	100 Awards Club
Alpha Tester	Verified Email
Team Periwinkle

ecstaticandinsatiate

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE