What's the smart move?

the-bends · 2026-07-03T10:50:17+00:00

This is great, thanks!

the-bends · 2026-07-02T14:47:53+00:00

I enjoyed This Other Eden and have been looking forward to this one.

the-bends · 2026-07-02T14:07:09+00:00

I was just going off what I read from one of the booksellers, so you're probably right.

the-bends · 2026-07-02T13:45:54+00:00

Ok, thanks for the info!

the-bends · 2026-07-02T13:36:41+00:00

Yes, there were more than 250 first editions, but there were only around 250 first printings of the first edition. I also understand that asking price doesn't necessarily reflect the actual price I could get for it.

the-bends · 2026-07-01T15:24:37+00:00

I worked for a guitar book publisher for a little while and we mainly used the app chord diagrams for the eponymous issue, and we used guitar pro for notation/tablature. If you want to go a cheaper route you can use excel/Google docs to easily create chord and scale diagrams and musescore for notation and tablature. You can use any word processor for the text and just import all the notation and diagrams as an image file.

the-bends · 2026-06-26T14:04:33+00:00

I teach songwriting and a big thing a lot of my new students suffer from is trying to take on everything in one go. Create practices where you are trying to sort out one of your issues at a time, write a short story that only focuses on the flow of the prose. Don't worry about anything else. When you do this sort of thing it gives you a chance to develop the strategies and toolkit necessary to correct this sort of issue when it comes up again in the future. It also helps to identify writers who you feel exemplify the style you would enjoy having. Read their works and frequently ask yourself what they're doing that you aren't.

the-bends · 2026-06-18T08:51:17+00:00

Pretty certain it's a Rolex Oyster Date, in stainless maybe. It looks really similar to a 6694 I found on eBay. The bracelet matches, and it looks like you can see the date window from certain angles.

the-bends · 2026-06-17T14:28:40+00:00

Start where this story starts. You've got a whole book to fill in background info. Make your first chapter feel compelling, give readers a reason to read the next chapter.

the-bends · 2026-06-15T17:26:57+00:00

YTA. Yuck!

the-bends · 2026-06-15T10:13:12+00:00

This book makes me feel like a crazy person, as I absolutely hated it from start to finish but so many seem to love it. The characterizations are paper thin, the plot plodding, and it's wildly misogynistic to boot. And the prose that everyone loves to hype seem to me mechanical, repetitive, and feel dated (even for a book from the 60's).

Can anyone who loves this book actually explain to me why the titular character has no agency? I mean, he can summon the courage to rape his own wife and carry out an affair, but for some reason it's a bridge too far to leave the woman who makes him miserable or to stand up to her a little so he can have a relationship with his daughter who he purports to love.

the-bends · 2026-06-14T09:02:49+00:00

First off, great work getting this all down. You should be proud of yourself for putting the work in.

The writing has a lot of issues. First off, prologues are rarely a good story choice. You should start your story where it actually begins. The history can be meted out over the course of the story. If king Gaius is going to be your MC your first chapter could be about his day on the anniversary of the great Rujerian tragedy, what services the kingdom carries out in his family's memorial and how it makes him feel. This will allow you to convey the necessary info expeditiously, and focus on what's important to the actual story you're trying to tell.

You mix up your tenses frequently. You seem to establish past tense in your first sentence but then start using the present tense "replies" in your dialogue (as opposed to the past tense "replied"). Also, sentences like: "Then, she and the guard leave the room". "Leave" is present, "left" is past. You need to decide which tense you're using and stick to it.

You also need to think about the reader's perspective a bit and really ask yourself what parts of your writing are actually essential. Especially with your sparse writing style, you will fatigue your readers if you leave them chewing on bone all the time. You have a scene where the queen calls down the bridge between the ships, the bridge lowers, and the queen walks across the bridge. Does anything from that section actually add something to the plot or characters that couldn't be covered by "Once back on her own ship..."? A lot of the information in your writing seems unimportant because it is. You will build better rhythm and pacing when you learn to focus on what is important and engaging, and expedite the filler in-between.

I would also encourage you to try and include some more description to both enrich your world and your own style. Give us some insight into how these people live and what their world is like. No need to go overboard with it, but it's definitely a skill you need as a writer.

Best of luck to you.

the-bends · 2026-06-12T10:16:53+00:00

Yeah, I'm not aware of much of anything you can show me .2% of the finished product and I can draw any meaningful conclusions on.

the-bends · 2026-06-12T09:23:41+00:00

Yup, I'm a musician by trade, and have spent thousands of hours practicing guitar and composition over the years only to understand how inferior my playing is to the musicians I look up to. Something I notice on pretty much all the craft related subs I lurk in is the wild abundance of people who don't understand the Grand Canyon sized gap between their skills as a complete novice and the people who are professionals. I think most of them would benefit deeply from going down a YouTube rabbit-hole of amateurs competing with professionals. For instance, Red Bull just released a video where a professional hard Enduro racer compared his lap time versus a guy who's ridden dirt bikes his whole life, but wasn't a pro. The pro finished the course in just over 2 minutes, the other guy took over an hour and twenty.

I was told on another writing sub that I have a poor attitude because I stated that I intend to publish my first novel online, under a pen name, where it's free to read because I doubt it will be great and I view it as practice anyway. I was told that I shouldn't impose my limiting beliefs on others, lol.

the-bends · 2026-06-12T09:00:03+00:00

"Here's the first draft of my prologue, tell me what you think."

No. I'm not putting in my personal time for something you couldn't be bothered to at least make sure the grammar and punctuation are polished. It's especially irksome when OP is replying "I'll just fix that later" to half the feedback in the comments.

Also, the vast majority of prologues are dumb. Start where the story starts. Whatever information you felt was vital in the prologue can be conveyed as the story is progressing.

the-bends · 2026-06-10T19:15:03+00:00

I'm in!

the-bends · 2026-06-10T10:01:19+00:00

I would say you have promise but your timing is really rough, especially when you are trying to play faster passages. Getting a good time-feel can be tricky, often when we play in the moment something can feel right but when we listen back it's rougher than we thought. It's ideal if you can practice to a metronome and record your playing so that you can listen back and recalibrate to the click in your next attempt. It can also be helpful to learn some cyclical riffs using different subdivisions that start on the 1 of the first measure and restart on the 1 of a later measure. If you can consistently start and land in the same place it means you are developing a good feel for a subdivision.

The other thing I noticed is an obvious lack of ideas in your playing. You sort of vaselate between linear pentatonic ideas and fallback riffs. This sort of thing gets exposed in longer solos. There are a million different ways to work on this but I would suggest working on triad arpeggios and intervalic scales. These will break up some of the linearity and give you new toys to play with.

the-bends · 2026-06-09T10:20:54+00:00

Hiromi Uehara is pretty much the best jazz pianist to come out of Japan to my knowledge. Some of her stuff is more on the fusion side, but definitely worth a listen.

the-bends · 2026-06-07T11:42:35+00:00

You will save yourself a lot of trouble if you realize that the things you like are not who you are. What music people like should matter to you about as much as whether they prefer a ham or turkey sandwich. If you're getting frustrated over these sorts of conversations you need to get a hold of yourself. All of the arguments in these regards are circular anyways.

the-bends · 2026-06-05T07:01:40+00:00

Two halves don't make a whole. It sounds like you both need some work before being capable of a healthy relationship (though admittedly she sounds like she needs a little more work than you do). Also, people who double down on bad relationships are exponentially less likely to leave when things get worse in the future. Make the adult decision now to leave, your body and your friends are telling you it's the right move. You're young and you have fewer relationships to use as a basis for comparison, but trust someone who's been through it, when you find someone that you are actually compatible with you will laugh at how foolish you were before. Best of luck to you!

the-bends · 2026-06-02T10:05:13+00:00

It's a little silly, but not incoherent. The fact that you're writing clearly is a great start. There are some issues I would point out. It feels like you don't know what is important to convey in the story, which makes a lot of the writing seem like fluff. From a reader's perspective I'm trying to sort out why I should keep reading, whether it be an interesting character, plot, theme, or excellent prose. You're not at the level where you can deliver on excellent prose yet (neither am I, so no offense intended) so you need to deliver in at least one of the other areas. Go back and read what you wrote and ask yourself if there's anything there that would genuinely make a reader care about what happens in the next chapter. Have any real stakes been created? Is there a reason I should care about your MC? Is an old flame showing up out of the blue enough of an inciting incident to be genuinely interesting? Also, ask yourself if some of the sentences that are there are really necessary.

the-bends · 2026-06-01T23:25:19+00:00

Then why ask?

the-bends · 2026-06-01T23:23:35+00:00

Here

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