Sakka, the storyteller

Shameless self-promotion pt.2: the return of Jedi

2010-10-06T09:41:00.000-07:00

Recently I posted my original light novel on baka-tsuki so people can read it for free and surprisingly, there were fewer grammar mistakes than I supposed. What a pleasant surprise.

Read it here.

Let's have some Ryuno...

2010-10-05T10:34:00.000-07:00

because ranting about industries every day is tiring; instead, today I'm posting a little bit of nintendocore / chiptune. I'll leave the rant about Stephenie Meyer for tomorrow or after.

12,220 views on YouTube and only 2 comments. One of them from a troll.

http://ryuno.bandcamp.com/

And now for something completely different

2010-10-04T04:59:00.000-07:00

I'm going to talk about fashion and stuff.

What is the point of stylists giving their best and running against time to make a dress that will blow minds when it's only going to be used once, on the catwalk? What's up with these people who label themselves as "indie models"? Why the name of a brand matters more than the quality of a garment? Am I the only one that sees Cole Mohr has awful eyebrows and most of the time a stupid haircut?

Honestly, most of the time I don't understand that industry. In the small time I do, I compare it to the music business (which I know quite well for my age): not about what you know, but who you know. Don't get me wrong, most Design schools have high standards (considerably higher than they did ten or twenty years ago, anyway) but they are still not enough to take someone who just graduated from high school and turn that kid into a phoenix-like professional whose creation must die and reborn four times a year.

Just to clarify, the phoenix myth started because of a translation error. The same word for bird also meant "palm tree" and that tree has deep roots and will eventually regenerate if, despite being almost all consumed by flames, its roots remain intact. A bad translator such as those we see making a fine amount of money out of poor jobs mixed the tree and the bird up, and the myth was born. Not such a huge mistake, since there are plenty of people who lead their lives and ruin others based on fragments of bad translation found in religious books.

I think something like that happened to the word "designer", because "to design" no longer means "to create".

The best ideas a fashion designer has end up being seen only once or never being shown to public; instead, the ones that are just mere adaptations from what is already on the street are the ones that will be constantly remade at factories and released to the public. All of those outfits the designer and the assistants worked so hard to "make it work" were but an ephemeral dream of its developers. In the end, what reaches the stores is just more of the same only slightly rehashed, just like pop punk and similar stuff.

Unfortunately, the same curse applies to virtually all of "creative arts". Nothing new under the sun indeed.

REPOST

2010-09-29T07:15:00.000-07:00

Since it’s Friday and we’re all on twitter, let’s talk about authors, querying, publishers and agents. Right, just like every other day.

I, for one, believe authors should query as many lit. agencies/publishers as they can. It’s not like they’re only going to read your query. No one should expect exclusivity in the literary business because in the end it’s about numbers just like any other a business. Publishing is about demographics and demand, not about writing and telling stories. Funny thing is, it wouldn’t make any money otherwise. Those who still believe publishing is anything more than that are digging their own graves. It’s a business, people.

That said, we can move on to a slightly different area of the same topic: that’s right, I’m going to talk about rejection. I understand this whole rejection thing a tad too well for my age. Or Terry Pratchett’s.

Most of the times the reason why a publisher or an agent reject your work is because they think you suck. They are usually right.

If you’re aiming for making a novel the next mainstream hit but cannot convince a single person who spends his day reading, you do suck. Heck, how can you possibly expect people to get to the end of your book craving for a sequel if editors can’t stand your query?

The thing is simple: there are various degrees of sucking. You can suck as an author because you haven’t read enough books to know what is a book per se. You can suck because you’ve read just enough books to make a simple story, but worship all the wrong ones. You can also suck because you read too much and tries too hard on making something that sounds original to you but meaningless to the world.

So, you suck. Now that we know what the problem is, we can solve it.

Stop sucking. Read more, read better, don’t be a whiny pretentious kid. I don’t care if you’re better than Stephenie Meyer: she is selling and you’re not. Learn from your mistakes, from the mistakes of others and most importantly: always deliver what people want. Writing the most complex saga ever means nothing if no one reads it. Bonus points if you starve yourself to death. If you have time to complain about not having found the right agent to the job, spend it on convincing a wrong one you’re the right author.