I saw this on twitter and automatically read it in my Bad Twitter Writing Advice Voice. But then I got to expounding on why this is such a bad idea.
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Writing Community
@writingoutlook Oct 11
The aim is not to make money, the aim is not to be a best-seller, the aim is to change people’s lives. What do you think?
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Nope.
You ain’t changing shit if nobody reads your stuff.
If people read your stuff you make money.
We are entertainers, not preachers. Get over yourself.
I’ve got an incredible fan base. They have helped each other a lot. Tons of positive change. We’ve paid for surgeries. We’ve done massive charity drives. My fans once raised twenty grand for one woman’s breast cancer surgery in an afternoon. My fans have come together and paid for spinal surgeries and kidney dialysis. I have people who met on my fan page and gotten married. There are kids named after my characters. I’ve got a couple hundred people with the logo or characters from my books tattooed on their bodies. I’ve heard from many people where my books helped keep them happy through tough miserable times. I was the bestselling author in Baghdad and Bagram and helped distract dudes with fun stories while they were in the suck. My fans have become friends and consoled and boosted each other through all sorts of terrible life events. They’ve helped the out of work ones find jobs. They dominate the charity auction at conventions. They’ve shared knowledge and art. They’ve boosted the careers of dozens of other authors I’ve exposed them to so the cycle can continue. The amount of cool shit they’ve accomplished is way disproportionate to their numbers.
Over the last 15 years I’ve seen some pretty damned amazing things from them. I’m not the best writer, but I’ve got the best fans. By far. Wouldn’t trade them for anyone else’s.
Yet none of that positive stuff would have happened if my goal was to “change peoples lives”. They came together organically because I entertained them and provided them a product that they shared an interest in.
You goal should be to write good books that people will like, and get paid. As a side benefit of that you might make the world a better place for somebody. If your goal is to change people, you’re probably gonna fail as a writer, be annoying in the process, and die poor.
An eARC is the Electronic Advanced Reader Copy. These are the versions of books that get sent out to reviewers before the actual book comes out. Baen realizes that some of you don’t like to wait so they make these early versions available for sale. eARCs aren’t the final edited version, but we got these in so early they should be fairly close.
Fever is on shelves now. eBook and audio are available for download HERE.
We are currently sitting at the #1 spot in Urban Fantasy on Audible. Because you guys are awesome. 🙂 Seriously, my fans rock.
Thanks for spreading the word, and when you get a chance after you’ve read or listened to it, please take a minute to leave an honest review. Jason and I appreciate it.
Now back to work on Graveyard of Demons.
EDIT: Currently #1 in multiple categories, #4 in scifi and fantasy, and #38 on ALL of Audible.
The memoirs novels are spin offs with other main characters, set in different eras, and I do them as collaborations. The last memoirs were the Chad novels with John Ringo, set in Seattle and New Orleans in the 1980s. This time I’ve teamed up with Jason Cordova, and it is California in the 1970s. The main character is Chloe Mendoza, who you’ve not met before, but stuff she did has effected the main series (and it’ll be fun when you guys catch those parts) 🙂
Somebody asked how much of this was me and how much was Jason, because people always suspect on collaborations that the senior author phones it in. Oh hell no. I’m way too nitpicky and meddlesome for that. I’ve talked about this a lot on WriterDojo before with Steve (another co-author) but my goal by the end of a collab is for neither of us to really be sure who actually wrote what bits. Ideally collabs are books that turn out unique from what either author would create on their own, but still be as enjoyable or better than what either author would come up with on their own.
Jason Cordova is a really talented author, and if you guys check this out and enjoy it I’d encourage you to go check out the rest of his books. The other big benefit of a collaboration between a more and less well known author is that the fans of the first guy go check out the works of the second guy so he picks up new readers.
And we finally got the audiobook preorder up! It’ll be available for download tomorrow. For the FAQs, Ollie is still the regular series narrator, but not the narrator on this one because Fever has a female PoV character. We went with a new narrator named Annika Chavez. Jason and I listened to a bunch of auditions, which were all good, but as soon as we listened to Annika we both went “Yeah, that’s Chloe.
Larry posted this on the Book of Faces about a week ago and hoo boy has he heard about it. Brought here to archive . It all started with a meme someone made about how Qui Gon and Ashoka getting stabbed with lightsabers were like, totally different. -Jack
People are ignorant and need to quit making excuses for shitty writing.
A bunch of dumb people are saying crap like “it just cauterized the wound!” or “You don’t know how light sabers work so shut up your hater face!” or “you don’t even know if she’s human and maybe they are built different!”
Let’s break this down for the stupid people who will gargle crap on demand because they’ve learned to not expect any internal logical consistency in their world building. Thanks, Disney.
What do we know about light sabers? As in established cannon for the universe. They can cut through damn near anything in a flash. Like not just lopping limbs off humanoids, but cutting through steel beams, or chopping the wings off space ships. And we know they do this cutting action through heat, like Qui-Gon plasma torching his way through blast doors that appear to be battleship armor plate level thick, and turning them into sparks and molten metal.
So light sabers fuck shit up. That’s established.
For people who don’t grasp basic physics, units of measurements, or who’ve never used a branding iron, cauterizer, cutting torch, or plasma cutter (used all of those, and apparently nobody who writes for Disney has never worked on a farm) we are talking wildly different amounts of energy.
These numbers aren’t exact. I’m going off memory.
-To cauterize a wound, that’s around 400 degrees.
-A cutting torch is like 3000-6000 degrees, depending one what kind and what you’re cutting.
-A plasma torch is something truly batshit insane, like up to 40,000 degrees if I recall correctly. It’s truly fucking nuts. AND it cuts through stuff at a fraction of the power of a light saber.
As you can see, these are very different things.
So besides apparently being magic and having some kind of containment field to not roast the wielder, in order to slice open space ships like that you are using some sort of energy like on the upper end of things.
If you heat an object to 400 degrees and shove it into a human torso, they’re basically fucked, because congratulations, everything you know about cauterizing is stupid and wrong too. We used to burn the stump holes when we dehorned cattle. It’s good for searing shut little blood vessels in a small area (and burning hair, horn, and blood is the WORST SMELL EVER). Big blood vessels, it don’t do shit. And if you shove it THROUGH a human, great, you seared shut some little blood vessels, and ROASTED ALL THEIR ORGANS. Which is BAD.
Rambo pouring gun powder into his bullet wounds isn’t how that works. Rambo would still be bleeding out, only with the added agony of a third degree burn hole through him.
And that’s a candy ass blow torch temp, which doesn’t cut through steel beams. It gets worse from there.
Heat an object up to cutting torch energy levels and shove it through a human torso, and they’re going to die horribly and screaming, because humans are bags of water and that just turned rapidly into steam, and every cell anywhere near that 3000 degree shaft of death just exploded. And I’m talking like literal cooking off and detonating level of steam pressure. Ask anybody who has ever taken a welding class what happens when you then take the piece of metal and shove it into the water barrel. Now imagine that inside your lung and intestines. Realistically people standing five feet away are going to get splattered with a hot red mist.
And that right there is why all the mewling about “but you don’t know if she’s human like us” is stupid. Is she sorta mammal like? Does she have liquid and organs inside? Well, she’s fucked. Even if there was nothing but a decorative fat deposit there, she’s still fucked, because that’s gonna blow out the side, probably on fire.
Now, let’s move it up to plasma power, like chopping the wings off space ships and cutting armored metal robots in half with one swing, and shove that ridiculous bit of molecular fuckery through a human body. Like you’re done. As in done, done. And the fragmentation of your flaming bones will endanger bystanders.
So the only possible explanation here is that blonde sith chick has a variable power light saber, and she had it on low battery mode, and unless that was actually said somewhere in the show (don’t know, I gave up entirely on Disney Star Wars part way through Boba Fett and never looked back) then their writing sucks.
Or maybe that same containment field around the actual energy beam that keeps the user from cooking themselves, somehow also protects the organs on a puncture wound by containing the heat to the middle? But the containment field cuts through everything else, so only the death beam inside actually cuts, and Qui Gon just shut that off when he needed to melt through a space ship. Sure, that’s a way better explanation than the stupid “but muh cauterizing” bullshit, and it’s still a crappy handwavium excuse.
Quit making excuses for stupid lazy writing. It just encourages more stupid lazy writing. They can do better.
Update:
People are still making excuses about the light saber post.
Apparently if I’d consulted with medical professionals I’d know that the thermodynamic characteristics of fat make it resistant to heat!
My entire response to this point is this hour long loop of Qui-Gon near instantly turning several feet of armored plate into lava. 😀
Now I didn’t go to medical school, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that thing don’t give a fuck about your thermodynamic properties. 😀
