The Celebrate Literary Offenses of David Weber

This isn't a post about him. He is a good enough craftsman, and he is popular (both of which could also be said of Twain's target). There is a hilarious little pastiche called "David Weber Orders a Pizza," but it is really more about how SF can and does handle an info-dump badly.

I did just read a book-length review which was both a bit of a fannish appreciation of Weber's work, and a calm but intense rant about how things went wrong. But this isn't really about that, either.

No, the problem is that when I'm reading or watching criticisms of an author, my reaction to half of it is, "That doesn't seem that bad!"

Now, it is larger-scale issues I tend to think most about. I glaze over, over most sentence-level errors. It takes something rather sparkling like "Celebrated author Dan Brown began his book with the title of a walk-on character." (He's famous for this.)

But it leaves me thinking that I may be writing horrid, horrid prose on a sentence level, stuff beyond even the best editor to fix. And I have little enough confidence in the first place. Because if I barely understand what the thing that a BookTuber or a NYT Review of Books writer is talking about, much less why it is such a bad thing...

And it is all part of a pattern. I tried for so many years to become an author. Finally went the self-publishing route. The series didn't take off. It hit pretty much where you'd expect a self-published series by someone of basic competence would hit; a smattering of sales outside of friends and family and nothing.

That is making it hard to keep going. And confidence is part of it. And imposter syndrome, in various flavors. And I've realized that far too many days, I come home from work tired with just an hour or two of creative work left in me.

And I walk in the door and my first thought isn't desire to write, but embarrassment. What am I doing? Who do I think I am fooling? I can't face the book, any book. Any creative work. So I watch YouTube or read something or catch up on the news, and by the time that dread and self-loathing has faded and I'm willing to be the Boob again and do more of my Nowhere work for Nobody...it is bed time.

***

That all said, I've pretty much hit the golden spike and joined the new rail to the old rail. I'm still grinding down the joint, but I am finally moving forward in the novel again.