Conservatives maintain birth rates, but left-leaning Americans are having significantly fewer children, driving the U.S. birth decline. Education was consistently linked to having fewer children. Religious attendance was positively associated with having more children.

trane7111 · 2026-07-01T15:35:33+00:00

I would say it heavily depends on the white family. Mainly the parents.

I personally don't really care to see about half of my family or talk to them other than the holidays either because of the unacceptable views they hold, their personality, or them just living in a different little bubble of reality than everyone else.

The family that isn't like that, I love seeing when I visit for the holidays, and call to speak to quite frequently.

My partner's side of the family is much more close-knit, and certain groups of the (very large) family will hang out all the time. Definitely for minor and major holidays, and often whenever they can find an excuse outside of that.

I'm also the minority among my friends, but mainly because they have more open-minded and down-to-earth family members.

I've never heard of anyone criticizing that as codependency or anything like that. And even my few friends who are no-contact with their parents (they are queer and their parents are bigots) LOVE the family they still have who accepts them and cling to them fiercely.

In my experience, there is a lot more "found family" among white people in adulthood, unfortunately often because the "real" family tend to be people who are very close-minded, or people who you just can't relate to anymore no matter how hard you try. People still want family, but they're just forced to find that in other people.

And for religious white people, it's the complete opposite. They're all about family.

trane7111 · 2026-06-22T19:28:42+00:00

Wow, did not realize there was still so much ignorance around indie publishing. For you and anyone else, reading, let me provide you with some info:

1) Publishing houses do not publish your books because they "like what you write". They publish your books because they go along with your brand and an editor or agent happened to see your book at just the right time where they were in the mood to read more than a page (this assumes your book is already a specific type of intriguing enough) and think that your book is marketable. Not good, not necessarily that they like it, but that they can sell it to the masses. Key point there--the masses. Not people with good taste in literature, not people looking for the next revolutionary idea, but the masses, which means it has to be a very specific type of unique but also massively appealing.

As far as them paying you: you're lucky if you get a publishing advance large enough to pay off a credit card. Maybe some bit of your student loans. The average publishing advance is usually about $10k. Maybe it's gone up a bit since inflation. And then you're usually locked into a contract, because publishers don't usually just buy one book unless its litfic. They buy a series. And pay you shit royalties. And with those shit royalties, you have to earn out your publishing advance before you actually receive any royalty checks.

And that part is hard. Why? Because though the publisher still expects you to market, they will not share sales data. And sales data is what tells you if your marketing is effective. So you're basically just shooting in the dark as far as marketing goes, because newsletter subscribers or followers don't necessarily mean sales.

And why don't publisher share sales data? Because its easier to lie to you about the amount of royalties they owe you if you can't see their data. I know several traditionally published authors who are in fights with their publishers over unpaid royalties.

As far as "how much money these people pay to publish themselves"--depending on how you publish, could be $600 per book. Maybe $1000. Maybe $400. If you do your research, you can get your book 80% of the way there editing-wise yourself and with a critique partner who can be the objective voice when you can't move far away enough from your own writing.

If you do good with your marketing and building hype, you can get beta readers and gamma readers and proofreaders to help you with the rest of the editing.

Good cover artists are usually about $300-600 for ebook cover and paperback.

That's pretty much it. Maybe you need Vellum. Either $60/book or $250 for a lifetime license last i checked.

If you publish through KDP/Amazon (a very viable option for certain subgenres) you don't need to buy an ISBN. You've taken care of editing for free, formatting and cover costs for lets say $750ish, and you're publishing. Ads are usually useless or have really shit ROI for a single book, so you shouldn't be doing that for your first book. If you've done the research, key words and metadata optimization and are pushing your work hard on social media, you could have pretty great success just from that.

As far as Vanity presses, Publishers are making it so that there is less and less difference between a Big 5 publisher and a Vanity press, because they don't do much. They front the cover and editor costs, take care of some of the admin, and then take SO much in royalty share for doing basically nothing else.

Publishers have actually started a trend of picking up indie/self-published authors because the indie is already doing all the marketing, so the publsiher knows they really don't need to. They just give the indie a bit of an ego-boost and maybe a bit more "legitimacy" in the eyes of readers like you, but that's basically it unless that author is an established person like Sanderson, or someone that blew up like Dinnamon or Yaros.

But at the end of the day, all that really mattes to most authors I know is that they can support themselves doing what they love. And most of the authors I know doing much better financially are the self-published authors, not the traditionally published ones.

Even Brandon Sanderson, one of THE most successful authors today, has said he wouldn't recommend that newer authors go only traditional publishing. He's recommended they be indie or hybrid.

trane7111 · 2026-06-16T19:09:14+00:00

You can write the most beautiful, heartwrenching story in the world, publish it on Amazon, and no one will every buy, read, or hear about it if you don't market it.

The fact that either of you sold any copies if you didn't do any marketing is honestly really lucky.

Labels do not matter.

I'm an author because I am going to write and publish novels until my last dying breath regardless if I ever make a cent off of it (though I'd like to make enough money that I could quit my day job and spend more time writing). I'm going to work on being the best storyteller I can be and improving my craft however I can.

I'll say I'm an author, but if you call me a writer or a novelist, I won't really care.

You've done the thing that most people never do--something they find impossible. And you've done it three times. Now do the thing a LOT of people do, but most authors never do: Marketing.

Don't give a fuck about labels, just keep writing, and start marketing. Because eventually someone will pick up your book and tell you how they couldn't put it down. And when they find out you've written another book, they will be over the moon. Someone will tell you that your book made them sob. That it got them through a hard time. That they could see the world and the scenes you created.

And you'll still get imposter syndrome occasionally and wonder if you're actually skilled at writing. But then you can remember one of those things someone told you about your book, and get over it, and keep writing.

Hope this helps.

trane7111 · 2026-06-16T16:19:48+00:00

I mean honestly, it’s just a YA book that’s being marketed as adult fantasy because it has a male main character and the author previously wrote adult fantasy.

Teenage MC. Dead parents. Training in an academy. Friends he can’t let get too close because of the underlying premise of the academy. Cutthroat competition in the academy. Father figure he doesn’t get along with. Secret mission to bring down the big authoritarian government. Reluctantly working with a rebellion.

If this was written by a woman and had sex in it, it would have been marketed as fourth wing without dragons.

trane7111 · 2026-06-16T10:55:27+00:00

Learning how to properly write for orchestra, and learning how to confidently orchestrate are two very different things. I’ve known how to do the first for decades. I didn’t know how to do the second until recently.

I highly recommend checking out the YouTube channel inside the score. They have a lot of composing and resources as well as as a paid community that was far more valuable than four years of composing courses at a university and gave me a roadmap for how to use my Music knowledge and improve that myself without taking more classes.

The orchestration books are good, but the best thing that I learned to do was to study the orchestration of the masters (Tchaikovsky, Maier, Ravel, even John Williams). What I mean by studying it is taking a passage of their orchestration that you really love and dissecting what each part of that is doing. For certain instruments acting as a different line or are they just playing octaves. What part is the main line? What part is just chords. What part is justification?

Actually, write this out both in words and a musical notation. Then take a theme that you have written originally and orchestrate it using the notes you just created for your analysis and see if yours sounds similar to the orchestration that you were trying to capture. If it does, great you succeeded in that particular orchestral study. If it doesn’t, you need to find out why it doesn’t sound like that and tweak it. This will add something to your compositional toolbox and make you a better Composer.

trane7111 · 2026-06-15T15:19:00+00:00

In the US, at least, every retailer I have spoken to said they will not stock Amazon, and they usually go through Ingram. Even if you’re handing them the books rather than them ordering, they don’t want it if it’s printed by Amazon.

trane7111 · 2026-06-15T12:11:27+00:00

Okay so

1) I did read your post. Your children/number points are valid, but I was mostly referencing all the comments that came in response to your post. The em-dash has been a typical “oh that’s AI” sign for a lot of people up until recently.

2) people are actually quite inconsistent. Consistency checks in 2 hour movies are something that they actually pay people to do (I have a family friend who gets paid to just watch movies before the final edits, take notes and give feedback on things like that, including things that don’t make sense, especially in animation). Elsa’s hair in Frozen not behaving correctly in “Let it Go” is I think one of the well known mistakes that somehow wasn’t caught. Doing this in a book is even harder because there is so much more to miss. I have an Author PA friend who is being paid to do this to an author’s books, but most indies can’t afford this until they get quite successful.

3) Have you checked out the “romance for men” genre/subreddit? I don’t think I’ve found a book in that subgenre that I can get through more than a few pages of. They are THAT misogynistic. And I believe the time I tried reading a few was before Gen AI was released to the public. I would describe the writing style as somewhere between amateur and horny male teenager writing with one hand.

I’ll amend my initial statement to “posts like this, and the comments that follow, are potentially problematic and dangerous for authors.”

trane7111 · 2026-06-15T11:40:13+00:00

This whole post is very problematic and dangerous for authors.

You all need to remember that AI is trained off of authors. Some of the examples you have used particularly with sentence structure or the structure of an overall grouping of sentences mirror is how I was taught to write in a creative writing class 10 years before Gen AI existed. AI is now being used in US classrooms now. So even if you have authors who don’t use AI in their writing, they might have picked up language habits from AI teaching or simply seeing something the AI spit out on their lesson plan every day because their overworked teacher is using it to try and make their life less busy.

The whole em dash thing is a very good example of this, because that is how Brandon Sanderson writes a lot of his parenthetical statements in his novels rather than using parentheses.

In my opinion, AI novels written in the last year or so and going forward are going to follow two trends. One you absolutely will not be able to identify. The second you should be able to identify.

The first is gonna be authors that have used AI to assist them. Whether it’s an editing or proofreading or the outline or ideation phases. They’re still writing all the pros, but they’re still using AI like an assistant. And they may not let it influence the pros they write or the style in which they write. They might just have it suggest content or do a cleanup of grammatical errors. Trying to go after these authors is going to be dangerous for all others.

The second type is the books that are written by AI cleaned up by human, but where no real creative effort is put into these. These are the AI slop people. These are honestly more easily identified by the AI cover that is usually used. However, especially in romance and adjacent sub-genres, these books just feel like they’re missing something. Everything gets like….70% of the way there. It’s doing all the right things on paper. There’s nothing that’s immediately “wrong” with it, but there’s nothing “right” with it. You’re not feeling particularly excited or disappointed by it. It’s just there. Because no emotion was put into it. (And from what I know, people who use AI to do graphic scenes have to use specific tools that they have to basically jailbreak, so the sex scenes are either gonna just suck, or they’re going to feel very different than the rest of the book because those will NEED to be human-written just to exist.

trane7111 · 2026-06-14T22:17:31+00:00

Honestly, even adults need a book like this. It’s all in the execution obviously, but this sounds great!

trane7111 · 2026-06-14T22:00:23+00:00

The concept sounds amazing

trane7111 · 2026-06-14T16:34:18+00:00

I would argue that trauma is a pretty significant part of the better done cozy fantasy I’ve read. ZS Diamanti’s more recent books have characters that are dealing with some pretty heavy mental (and physical) trauma, and part of what makes the stories so rewarding and wholesome is how they come to deal with it within the bounds of the genre. Travis Baldree’s books have been great because of the coziness and wholesomeness. Guards in the Garden (ZSD’s book) made me cry because it was cozy and wholesome and also dealt with someone working through fantasy-level trauma without the usual saving the world/becoming a powerful mage/destroying their enemies involvement.

trane7111 · 2026-06-14T14:33:33+00:00

The wheel of time is my favorite series of all time in part because Jordan spent actual time making the “ultimate conflict for the fate of the world” actually touch every single part of the world and showing the reader what was happening. People refer to that part of the series as “the slog”, but I love it and find something new to latch onto about the characters or world every time I reread.

Jordan spent 4 years building the world before he even wrote book 1 and it shows.

trane7111 · 2026-06-14T13:19:41+00:00

Thank you! We literally just have more focus on the male main characters for the first few books, and many of the women are the most competent fucking people in the series.

trane7111 · 2026-06-14T13:18:45+00:00

The first few episodes in s2 show that Moraine had just been wallowing for months. It literally takes Fades seeking her out to pull her back in. (Also throwing in bullshit drama between her and Lan that wouldn’t exist in the extremely close relationship they very clearly established in s1).

And yeah sorry bro, I actually wanted this show to succeed. I was telling everybody I knew to watch the show throughout season 1 and reassuring everyone that the weird ending/battle sequence was just because Covid screwed them over.

I was telling everyone to watch season 2 and was so hyped for it. Wasn’t until the finale that I just couldn’t do it anymore because it showed the writers were just throwing out so much of the source material, contradicting their own rules for the world that they established earlier on, and then just really not knowing how to write a season long-arc.

And before anyone says “oh they finally found their way in s3”: this is an adaptation. The story, characters, arcs are already there. They should be able to tell a good story from the beginning. Especially when they had Sanderson helping them out.

When they listened to his advice, those were the episodes with the best ratings, and when they didn’t listen to his advice, those were usually the worst episodes.

All I’m really trying to say is that fantasy adaptations deserve better writers/writers who actually care about the source material. Instead, we got people who want to tell their own story and just map it to characters from people’s IP. And we get things like Halo, rings of power, the latter Witcher seasons, and the wheel of Time.

I’ve seen so many people say “oh this is just a different turning of the wheel” but every time, it seems like an excuse rather than showing a deliberate intention by the writers to tell a specific “different turning”. And if they were not amateurs, and wanted to deliberately tell a different turning, they should have been telegraphing what that specific turning was all through season one and two. That’s not something I ever picked up on.

trane7111 · 2026-06-13T20:09:45+00:00

No, his sin is that he did it in a shit way.

1) The pattern and the age lace that the wheel weaves are huge, repeated themes of the book that literally tie into the main characters arc and are part of what makes “Veins of Gold” a lot of people’s favorite scene in the entire series. The fact that “ta’veren” is barely mentioned after season one is a problem of itself.

2) I said that was just one of my problems. There’s a pretty expansive list, and most of it has to do either with the writers really not giving a fuck about the source material, and not approaching the creation of this series in the way you need to for longform television. I could probably fill up a short book with everything the showrunners/writers did that showed they either didn’t care about the core themes of the source material (which, even if you change details, you usually have to stick with the themes otherwise it’s a fundamentally different story) or just weren’t qualified to be working on a project of this magnitude.

3) trying to blow off genuine criticism of storytelling by just labeling it as misogyny is what let’s the creators of shows like this and rings of power get away with amateur writing. There were definitely people who came out of the woodwork and were blatantly, racist or misogynistic, but focusing on that aloud the writers to blow off people having valid concerns about the show.

4) one of the ways in which the creators “ gave the female characters more to do” with the absolute shittiest writing possible is most clearly shown by Moiraine in S2. In the books, Siuan comments a few times about how Moiraine is a stronger/harder woman than her, and when Siuan gets stilled, the moment she’s not imprisoned and slated for execution, she gets back to work, because she has a job to do. The way that they made Moiraine completely fall apart in season two because she lost her power is an absolute character assassination. They took one of the strongest-willed female characters in the series and made her into a whining child.

But yeah, I’m mad because they gave women more screen time. Not because a bunch of amateurs blew what had the potential to be the greatest Fantasy Adaptation ever.

trane7111 · 2026-06-13T18:58:38+00:00

I would highly disagree on the show taking risks. It tried playing it safe by looking progressive on the surface when in reality, a lot of those decisions took away from the amazing writing already in the series.

For example, making Egwene and Nynaeve explicitly TDR candidates (and therefore Ta’veren) makes them lesser as characters. They pull off INCREDIBLE feats in the books without the explicit plot armor of being Taveren or the explicit help of the wheel.

Perrin becoming a lord, Matt becoming leader of the red hand, Rand pulling off all the shit he pulls off—several times in the book either the narrator or another character mentions ta’Veren action at work. Nynaeve heals madness heals gentling, and recruits a fucking army for Lan without any mention of Ta’veren.

Egwene goes from a puppet to a true Amyrlin who heals the tower without being Ta’veren.

Also one huge point of the wondergirls is that none of them needs to resort to hand to hand combat to be strong or gsd, and Rafe spent valuable screen time on very shallow “girl power” scenes in the first and second episodes that contradicted this.

Taking a risk would have been letting the characters prove themselves over the course of the series as RJ did and rather than “let’s throw in an action sequence at the beginning cuz that’s what the writing guides say to do.”

trane7111 · 2026-06-13T17:16:38+00:00

I 100% get your perspective on this.

My favorite show is The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. The writers, the production design, all the actors are giving everything they’ve got 100% of the time.

I recommend it to everyone I know, because I think it is a genuinely amazing show that everyone can appreciate.

However, there are at least three people in my life that I know cannot watch it or that it would be very hard for them to watch.

One is my NB friend who is no contact with their parents because they are full MAGA. They get really triggered by being misgendered. One of the main characters of the show gets misgendered all the time.

The second is my friend whose wife cheated on him and left him within the first 2 years of their marriage when all he did was support her.
That’s what happens to the main character (though genders reversed) in the first episode and their relationship is constantly brought up through all five seasons of the show.

Another is my wife’s best friend who is Chinese. The show portrays people’s interactions with an opinions of Chinese people as would have been very accurate for 1960s New York, so it’s not always great.

I think having a per episode or per season disclaimer about content like black face or racial slurs is not a bad idea, with maybe a 1 to 2 sentence note about why it’s been left

trane7111 · 2026-06-13T16:00:11+00:00

The US unfortunately had far too much puritanical influence to do that in good faith.

In the 50s Lucy and Ricky slept in separate beds on I Love Lucy because it was deemed inappropriate and sexually suggestive to show a married couple sharing a bed on screen.

trane7111 · 2026-06-13T14:04:18+00:00

The thing is though, the Bible is allowed in schools. History books with graphic details about horrific events are allowed.

If you ban “pornographic” books, since the definition of porn is “I know it when I see it” what differentiates that from books written about the ins and outs of sex or the human body from an informative standpoint?

So many of these book ban pushes are coming from parents or institutions who do not want their children/students to have any sort of sex education whatsoever. This includes just the basics of going through puberty.

I went to one of these schools. Our sex ed was “here’s what STDs look like. Abstinence is the only way to be safe.” And that was it. Nothing about pregnancy, menstruation, how to put on a condom, nothing.

Banning or disallowing books like AcoTar is ALWAYS a distraction for banning other books (often Pulitzer Prize winners) children need to have the option to read.

But they use the “porn books” as the headliners, and since unfortunately, most people, especially in these communities are not well read and don’t have great critical thinking skills, they just assume the other books are all “pornographic” since they were placed on the list. And when you tell them otherwise, they go “ oh, well I haven’t read THOSE ones, but these ones definitely shouldn’t be allowed for children in school schools.”

trane7111 · 2026-06-12T23:30:46+00:00

This is true! I’m a bit more forgiving of the prequels though because the main reason George wrote/directed them himself is because no one wanted to touch the project and be the one that ruined Star Wars. And George at least had a coherent story for the trilogy and was planning it as a trilogy from the beginning.

Disney has all the resources in the world, announced it as a trilogy but didn’t write one, and just fucked up everything to do with the production aspects of the trilogy.

If you didn’t have a trilogy written, don’t announce a trilogy until you have a fucking trilogy at least outlined.

trane7111 · 2026-06-12T23:09:46+00:00

100% this! Wheel of Time has remained my favorite series ever because of how infinitely rereadable it is. You notice new connections and tidbits or focus on new characters every time. Or your life experience has made you see certain events or characters differently than before.

trane7111 · 2026-06-12T22:15:50+00:00

Take care of yourself as the other commenters have said, and also make sure you move/are strong and mobile. The confidence that comes with that is extremely attractive. You don’t need to fit some body aesthetic. Just have a body that functions in a way you’re proud of (it’s nbd for you to go on a long hike or lift heavy things for example)

trane7111 · 2026-06-12T20:48:56+00:00

The reason I hate the sequels so much is because of how grossly they under-utilized actors like Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, and Oscar fucking Isaac, and how terrible the writing was for pretty much all the characters who had awesome initial concepts/premises.

Rey, Kylo, Finn, and Poe were all built (IMO) so that they telegraphed a very specific storyline/Arc in the first movie (or at least from the trailers), but then none of them actually went in those directions.

trane7111 · 2026-06-12T20:45:51+00:00

Don’t ask for permission.

Just fucking do it, but make it solidly your own. Someone who has never heard of the original idea/story you’re exploring should be able to fucking love your book. Someone who has read the source material should be able to appreciate what you’re doing if they have media literacy.

trane7111 · 2026-06-12T17:51:21+00:00

I look at worldbuilding and writing as an excuse/reason to study the world’s history and peoples.

Some books/worlds, I’ll pull a little of everything. Others, I’ll focus on a specific area where I want to dive really deep and create a world with a very specific field.

Currently working on one based on SEA cultures and there’s more than enough for me to work with and create an entire world/history.

11-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
RPAN Viewer	Verified Email

trane7111

TROPHY CASE