Still not a *Real* writer!

Because the ultra reliable Guardian newspaper has repeatedly predicted that Larry Correia has “irreparably damaged” his career as a hack writer of pulp trash, this is a screen shot from last night’s Amazon top 100 ranking of all authors in books sales across all genres. Larry Correia can’t even beat a guy who has been dead for 400 years! What’s your excuse, Correia? It isn’t like Shakespeare has any new releases!

William

And to further demonstrate the complete and utter ruination of Larry Correia’s career, he can’t even get to the top of his genre. Sure, he’s lumped in the same ultra competitive, mega selling genre as Sexy Mummies/Scottish Time Travel romance, but the new MHI spin off novel released the same day as a new Harry Potter book. You can guess how that shook out.

Curse you, Rowling! CURSE YOU! (shakes fist at sky)*

10 Harry Potter

*(for the record, because I made a joke on Facebook yesterday about JK Rowling booting me from the top again–Robert Galbraith was revealed as her pen name the same week as Warbound came out, so I ended up at #2 on Audible that week–some humorless mopes assumed I don’t like JK Rowling. On the contrary. I think she is awesome, makes her fans happy, GETS PAID, and got millions of kids to read. Also, the sorting hat put me in Slytherin and my patronus is a manatee).

BOOK BOMB! Bob Defendi's Death By Cliche
BOOK BOMB tomorrow. Bob Defendi's Death By Cliche

122 thoughts on “Still not a *Real* writer!”

    1. (swarms of SJW Dementors attack)

      “Expecto patronum!”

      (Flash of silver light, Wendall appears)

      “HOOOOOOOONNN!”

  1. “Successful” =/= “good. Rowling has a very easy to read and engaging style, yes, but her plot logic is terrible, she pulls crap all the time out of her ass that causes plotholes, and the wizarding world as she presents it is a horribly racist and corrupt place that frankly doesn’t deserve saving.

    1. Successful is the definition of good. If you do a good job, you make lots of money and buy a mountain or two. The Wizarding world she created has massive issues, but that’s not a great reason to say she’s not good. I mean, she basically presented us with the UK, except with wizards. Corruption and fantastic racism? Say it ain’t so!

      1. I’m sorry, but that’s nonsense. Leaving in-universe morality aside, her writing has major issues. Here’s a few of them:

        She creates three different things that exist in that universe that would have made it impossible for Sirius to have been imprisoned for over 13 years (veritaserum, pensives, and Unbreakable Vows). She makes those things up to serve the plot needs of the moment without considering how they tear great big HUGE holes in her already-constructed plot.

        During almost all of Book 7 the Trio wanders around haplessly while the world burns around them. They can’t even destroy the Hoarcrux they have until Rowling delivers them the Sword of Griffindor via Snape ex machina. The majority of the book follows that pattern: meander about not accomplishing anything until she feeds them some measured bit of information that lets them advance.

        Speaking of Hoarcruxes, basilisk venom kills them. Why then does the one in Harry survive for YEARS after he’s was bitten by the one in the Chamber?

        Don’t even get me started on Ron/Hermione and Harry/Ginny. At least Rowling fessed up the R/H was a huge mistake.

        Her biggest f-up in the entire series is a fundamental one: how the H does a Madman and a relative hadful of fanatics gain so much power in a universally armed society? Every witch and wizard over the age of 11 is armed with a deadly weapon and trained how to use it. Even a first year can kill with as something as simple as Wingardium Leviosa. That’s not a society that is easily conquered, yet (esp the 2nd time) Voldie and the DEs basically take the Ministry unscathed and unopposed.

        Sorry for the wall o text, but that’s just some of the serious flaws in the HP series. Rowling is nowhere near as good a writer as she says she is.

        1. “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”
          Oscar Wilde

          Just kidding.

          As far as Voldemort being able to terrorize an armed society. It’s simple when that society won’t even admit there is a danger (Ministry of Magic denying that he was back for instance)>

        2. TL/DR version: “I didn’t like it, therefore it is objectively BAD.”

          Nope. You just didn’t like it.

          Nit-picking supposed “flaws” and “holes” in a work that is nothing more than an attempt to rationalize your personal subjective response. It is an attempt to pretend that your personal taste somehow aligns with an objective judgment of quality. Sorry, no, it doesn’t — not for you, not for me, not for anyone.

        3. Do you really think a body as bass ackwards as the Wizengamot made up of useless purebloods would allow something as effective as veritaserum to be used in court cases except where explicitly authorized by them? As for pensieves, Dumbledore has one. It makes no mention of how rare they are or whether they can distinguish between memories implanted by Obliviation and normal ones. Unbreakable vows require three people and take a toll on the magic of the bonder. Moreover, the penalty for breaking it is death, it does not stop you from doing so, which means not reliable under sufficiently advanced torture, and presumably they only apply to future actions.

          This is not to say that the amount of fridge horror in HP is not copious(Obliviation alone is absolutely vile) or that her treatment of NA wizarding culture was not a complete bullshit cop out, but the plot holes you expound upon are in fact not nearly as large as you make them out to be.

        1. Successful = good.

          No one really knows what is considered “literature” until the author is long dead.

          1. Yes. In fact, the artist is irrelevant when it comes to judging the worth of the artist’s work. Or it’s meaning. The AUDIENCE is the ultimate judge. Once the art leaves the artist’s pen/paintbrush/piano etc……. too bad, sucka. You don’t get a say in the matter.

            That’s not to say that audiences are infallible. Catcher in the Rye, for example. 😉

          2. So MIcheal Bay deserves to be considered in the same category as Hollywood’s top directors for making dumb, lowbrow films that make a lot of money.

            Shall we abandon voting for the Oscars and just compare box office totals to pick who gets the statues?

          3. Yeah. Actually. Why not.

            Good is subjective.For creators, our job is to make people happy. Michael Bay or JK Rowling might not be your thing. They still make lots of people happy. (money follows the market’s happiness, go figure)

            The Oscars are subjective. They go to whatever makes the judges happy.

            If you blunder down that path that there is an objective “good” in entertainment and things that don’t meet your arbitrary standards are “bad”, down that path lies obnoxious pedantry and File 770. Those things are good or bad FOR YOU, but the rest of the world doesn’t give a shit what you think.

          1. Have to agree on that one. Was too young to see it when it came out but everybody in the biz was raving about it. It even got a Playboy spread (I knew where my older brother’s stash was).I finally broke down and rented it (a looong time later). Total snoozefest!

    2. Rowling has a very easy to read and engaging style, yes, but her plot logic is terrible, she pulls crap all the time out of her ass that causes plotholes…

      Maybe, but she also lampshades it throughout the series by pointing out the many, many ways Wizarding logic differs from Muggle logic. You’re supposed to just let it go and chalk any ongoing strangeness up to “That’s how the Wizarding world works, I guess.”

      As for the racism (specism?) and corruption, don’t Rowling’s protagonists spend not-insignificant time making sure lesser-accommodated creatures — centaurs, house elves, and giants particularly come to mind — get their fair shake?

      1. “That’s just how the wizard world works” is like saying (sorry for the pun in advance) “the wizard did it”. That’s a cop out for lazy/neglectful/incompetent writing.

        As for the other claim: Rowling’s characters SAY one thing and do another entirely. There is no in text evidence that anyone’s lot is improved in general. By the end of the book house elves are still bound servants. Giants are all but gone, Centaurs are ignored.

        Even the one piece of arguable pro-active good in changing the status quo (Mr Weasley’s Muggle Protection Act) is, when you stop and think about it, a backhanded insult to the non-magical community, treating them as if they are a seperate, lesser class of being that need the benevolent protection of the mighty wizards. The MPA is, in essence, the WW equivalent of an anti-animal cruelty law.

        In fact it is the bigotry against non-magicals (I think the term Muggle is in and of itself degrading) that is the most pervasive element throughout the series. Most non-magicals are faceless cyphers or barely-named props for wizards to act on the Robterts family at the World Cup, who get abused by DEs after Mr Roberts gets Memory Charmed so many times to protect partying wizards that he shows signs of having lasting mental damage, Hermione’s parents who get Memory Charmed and sent away “for their own good”, the PM of Britain who is basically told “we’ll handle it” by the Ministry, etc). The only non-magicals who get considerable “face time” are the Dursleys and they’re universally portrayed as villains.

        There’s a lot more, but it would be a work equivalent to writing one of the books themselves to cover it all.

        The WW is nowhere near being even an OK society, let a lone a decent one.

        1. I agree that the society has major problems, but what does that have to do with the merits of the books? Are all good books to be set in Utopia? Or be a tale of societal revolution? That’s an awfully narrow range, if so.

          1. It is just ONE of the issues with the books, along with various technical issues that I have enumerated elsewhere.

        2. Sorry, I should clarify, I am not a bog fan of the books, and never finished them. I always meant to until I read the fanfic Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality which is so good it ruined the source material for me.
          I was just commenting on your apparent concern over a flawed society in these books.

          1. I haven’t read that one, but there are some exceptionally good HP fanfics out there. One of my fave authors wrote alternate POV fics which did a good job at sticking to canon while trying to resolve some of the plot holes/inconsistencies. The problem with JKR’s newer additions to the HP-verse is that now we have all this amazing fanfic (some of it’s amazing; admittedly a great deal of it is crap) to compare it to, and to a lot of us JKR’s new stuff (and, IMO, even Deathly Hallows) comes up short.

          2. Since we’re on the subject now of fanfic, two of the best out there are Old Crow and Robst over at Fanfic.net.

    3. In my opinion, easy to read and engaging is a decent definition of good when it comes to authors. I’ve read plenty of “literature” spanning from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms through Shakespeare, Shelley, Dickens, and Tolkien. Give me an engaging Rowling, Sanderson, Correia, Weber, Ringo, Flint, et cetera over any of them.

      1. So it’s “good” when the authors make no sense? When the characters are just wandering around aimlessly from place to place between author enables (Book 7)?

        1. Yes. It didn’t seem like aimless wandering when I read Book 7. If it’s so awful, write something better.

        2. It’s good when an author can keep you entertained. If the books don’t entertain you (and I’m not a fan) by all means find something else to read. Or better yet, write something better so the rest of us can enjoy it and see the true greatness that is within you.

        3. Aimless wandering, nonsensical world building, freeway sized plot holes, c/f the entire Shannara series. It’s so bad Netflix turned it into a TV show. 😉

        4. Greg, let it go. You didn’t like it, no worries.
          But arguing (on Larry’s page!) about how it was bad, and how people shouldn’t like it? That’s the Way of Clamps, and you don’t want to follow the Way of Clamps.

          1. That is a touch harsh; Greg at least gives completely understandable criticisms as to why he doesn’t like the Potter books (I personally agree with his criticism of the Wizarding World and was very much unhappy with what they did with that poor nonmagical family ‘to stay safe’ while simultaneously sympathizing with what Hermione had to do to her parents’ memories of her as a tragic hard decision.)

            Clamps’ ‘reason’ boils down to ‘you suck and nobody should like you or anything you do as having any value no matter what reality says, and you should be erased from existence because I say so.’

          2. I would say that “I don’t like it, here’s why” is okay.
            Saying “You shouldn’t like it, here’s why” is a bit much.
            While not the full Clamps (with all the psychosis), or even a fraction of him, obsessively explaining to people why they weren’t supposed to like something they liked does remind me of the guy. Faintly.

  2. Doing my best to put you up a few places. Just bought your latest two. Unfortunately, I will be adding to J.K’s giant king sized bed of $100 bills as well ’cause my 11 year old insists……

  3. Plainly you should just chuck it all and go write Captain-America-is-a-Nazi comic books for Marvel.

    1. I’d love to see Larry unleashed on a major comic book . . . minus editorial micromanaging. But that’s not likely to happen. Maybe at one of the smaller companies . . .

      1. I predict is Larry -did- try to write a comic for Marvel or DC, the SJW would try to blacklist him, like they did with OSC and his Superman story.

        But while DC has recently shown vague signs of growing a spine, Marvel is hellbent on going full SJW even as the films just try and be entertaining. So I don’t think he’d fare better there either.

        Possibly he could do a project with one of the indies, yeah…

    1. Actually, I’m pretty sure Colleen Houck’s current series is a YA romance about a sexy mummy. (Haven’t read it, but I think that’s right. Her previous series was about tiger shapeshifters, and I did read most of that.)

  4. If you could get on the high school assigned reading list, you could probably beat that Shakespeare guy. It would be interesting to see how Shakespeare’s ranking fluctuates during the school year.

  5. LOL, Sometimes all one can do is laugh at the ‘Guardian’… So you are in the top .00004% of all authors, but THAT isn’t good enough??? And how many years headstart does old Willie have on you??? 🙂

  6. So, does Rowling make you kiss the ring when you meet her at cons? 😉
    Maybe you need to publish on the day of her daughter’s wedding, then you can ask for #1 🙂

  7. You know, Larry, if you’d only listened to your betters, you might have gotten past John Fletcher, too.

  8. You’re now down to 86*. Must be a day-to-day thing?

    *Technically, you’re at 84, because for some reason Gary Trudeau and some other guy were both listed twice for some reason.

  9. Note that you are just ahead of somebody named Dugoni, which looks a little like Dugong, which is a marine mammal closely related to the Manatee. A coincidence? I think not.

    1. The dark secret of Larry’s extra dimensional amphibious ghost writer revealed! Adam Baldwin heartbroken!

  10. Scene: The Elevator Descends from the lair of the International Lord of Hate. The Door Opens, and out steps Dr. Pup-N-Furter, wearing a camo-pattern cloak.

    Sar-net faints and swoons into Dan’s arms.

    The ILOH breaks into song. . .

    “Not Real Author”
    (to the obvious tune. . .)

    How d’you do, I
    See you’ve read my,
    Series, M – H – I. . .
    I’m just a little depressed, because
    When you knocked
    I thought you were the. . ammo man.
    Don’t get freaked out, by the, way I write.
    Don’t judge a gun, by its’ caliber
    I don’t get many sales from the, Hugo Gang.
    But real life, I just bought me a mou-ou-tain.

    (Flips cape open, revealing a Green Regency Gown and crossed ammo belts and gunbelt)

    But I’m not A Real Writer (A Real Writer)
    Proud Ammosexual, from, Yard Moose Utah. . . . ah ah. . .

      1. I rather thought you’d be quivering with an-tic-i ( 1. . . .2. . . 3. . .SAY IT!) – pation . . . .

        And I haven’t mentioned some of the other characters. . . like Ring-raff. . .

      1. I can imagine Owen would take the online test, end up with Hufflepuff, and get pissed off at it. 😀

          1. Yep. He was all of that. But I’m reminded of E.E. Doc Smith’s statement regarding the Third Stage Lensmen: “No lesser mind could penetrate her screen, nor having failed, recognise the fact of failure.” It’s one thing to shut Voldemort out; it’s quite another to be able to fool him into thinking you aren’t even trying. The man was a genius, a hero and a master wizard who could have been greater than Dumbledore if he had lived; it’s just a pity he was also an issue-laden arsehole bully.

  11. and your wand is made from steel instead of that silly wood, and has tritium night sights instead of a feather.

  12. *makes Slytherin power fist*

    Seriously, though, as an HP fan, I’m totally uninterested in the new “book”. Sounds terrible. Fortunately, I can just ignore it and not read it. The power to do that is like magic.

    1. You have to admire the marketing ploy though. It’s a *manuscript* and relatively short, so JKR is making $30+ a pop on what is essentially a novella.

      1. It’s a stage play, so a lot of it falls flat, without performers to bring the lines to life or what seems to be the most massive theatrical FX budget ever.

    2. I read it and enjoyed it greatly; I thought Rowling and her collaborators did a really good job of coming up with a “generational” story that combined new characters and older ones, and included clever call-backs to many things from the original books.
      The format (text of a stage play) didn’t bother me, but then, I grew up reading and enjoying plays, both classic and modern.

  13. I read Grunge in about 5 hours. The hook for MHI was Owen going one on one with a Werewolf. This was just John’s vision of a hunter from the past, great books.

  14. Read it, liked it, and look forward to the rest.
    Of course, I’d love to see a MHI novel in the late 40’s/early 50’s era.

      1. Apparently according to his introduction Larry edited a few of Ringo’s choices. We’ll never know if those were Earl’s wartime reminiscences or “Oh, Earl Harbinger, no!”

  15. I guess it’s good that you are not a real writer, cos I certainly am not a real fan . But I love your stuff. WB

  16. I love Shakespeare and even took a Shakespeare class in college. And yet, how much cooler would it have been to be able to take a Correia class in college! When my kids and grandkids are being “forced” to find the symbolism and themes of Monster Hunters: Nemesis instead of the Great Gatsby or Grapes of Wrath, then you’ll be able to consistently pass up that Shakespeare guy.

  17. I will admit, I am fairly new to this blog, but when did the “Larry is not a real writer” thing start? Also, has anyone who actually matters said this?

    1. All of these things get repeated a lot, because my haters don’t have a lot of imagination. So I just take their stupid crap and turn it into running jokes.

      That particular running gag started about four or five years ago thanks to a really dimwitted critic.
      The irreparably damaged career came from the Guardian probably three years ago.
      The 500 person mandatory minimum for book signings was from last year’s book tour.

      So on and so forth.

      1. Ah, I see.

        Dear, God, I just googled your name and the Guardian. That was a horrible mistake. I knew they were thin-skinned and arrogant, but, wow. “Science fiction needs to reflect that the future is queer”, that author sounds like he is in a bubble of his own stupidity.

          1. To be completely honest, your responses to some of those articles are what first made me buy your books, because I thought ‘if this guy could entertain me this much writing a counter to a stupid progressive op-ed, his actual writing may be worth a look.’ So I endorse all the fisking you can stand!

        1. He’s (you are talking about Damien, right?) been trying (lamely) to troll the #gamergate hashtag on Twitter. Usually impotently wishing death upon them, Sad Puppies, “MRAs” and whomever else Damien deems to be Icky.

        2. Well he had to take that shot, didn’t he, seeing as so many of MHI’s major characters are of both genders and just about every human race under the sun (plus some inhuman ones, of course).

    1. Yep. I’m sure they will simultaneously explain, and believe, that Larry isn’t well off, and that it doesn’t count that he is well off because his books aren’t high brow or promoting any “important” messages.

      1. Larry’s books promote all kinds of important messages. Buy guns, big government sucks, don’t be a sheep, and don’t be a jerk without good reason. Those are the most important values.

      2. It’s that tin shack he’s building in the back of nowhere, that’ll fool ’em. Oh, I know! He could paint Important Messages on the roof! That’d be highbrow enough, right??

        Lessee… “GET OFF MY LAWN.” Yeah, let’s go with that one. 😉

        1. If he puts solar panels on the roof and maybe a windmill or two (I’d say do eggbeaters ’cause I like them better than the propeller types) he could play the environmentalist card a bit.

          Or just shoot them with the tank cannon once he gets that set up.

          1. Put a solar panel on the tank and confuse the Shi’ite out of the Grrens .

  18. I enjoyed Grunge and could not put it down. Finished it at 3:00am.

    Wrote a lengthy review for Amazon today.

  19. Currently the UK Guardian newspaper is suffering large losses. Thus it might be assumed it needs an investor. Perhaps CorreiaTech might be a suitable white knight?

  20. Accidentally bought Grunge in both hardcover and Kindle – so I gave the book to my older son who’s temporarily in residence. While he’s read your blog and various short stories, he’d never read any of your books. I’ve hardly seen him for 3 days now. He went and bought all of your Monster Hunter books for his own Kindle and will be reading them during the next few weeks at AT for the Guard. You have a new fan.

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