Blog Watch: Defining Aesthetics, Blatant Hatred, the Dead-Egg Division, and Midlist Diaspora

Realism Isn’t (Ben Cheah) Going Bright — “In the name of realism, many artists today chase the darkness. Every vice is elevated, every taboo broken, every blasphemy committed. Nothing is sacred, everything is false. There are no heroes, only degrees of evil. No saviours, only monsters wearing the masks of men. No virtue, only the will to power. The intelligentsia claim this is ‘dark’, ‘gritty’, ‘realistic’. It is the defining aesthetic of our times, a relentless march towards deeper depths of degradation and desecration.”

Game Over (Wasteland and Sky) End of the ’10s — “But things have change a lot in such a short time. I can’t imagine going back twenty, or even ten, years and telling myself that just about every piece of art worth engaging in would be independent while corporations cratered due to outright, and blatant, hatred of their audience. This is how they’re dealing with the death of the old paradigm. It’s a glorified temper tantrum.”

Women Ruin Everything (Kairos) Fempub — “At first blush, it’s not unreasonable to look at these numbers and conclude that oldpub’s catering to female readers is just a common sense reaction to market forces. After all, if most of your customers are women, your products should target them. With all respect to Ben, this explanation puts the cart before the horse. It’s not that men don’t like to read. We know they love to read. Male-targeted fiction dominated pop culture during the reign of the pulps. It took frustrated lit fic authors-turned-editors at NYC houses to suppress men’s adventure fiction and usher in the pink revolt.”

There’s Always a Woman (DMR Books) Sword & Planet: A Genre of Mashups — “Speaking of natives, the protagonist encounters a lovely female who has a big problem. Whether it be an unwanted marriage arrangement, a hostile city about to declare war, or simply being lost / stranded in the wilderness, this problem is serious enough that she could use some help. The protagonist, being usually an honorable sort (or at least wanting to impress the lady), volunteers to give assistance. There is almost always a woman involved in a pulp Western story, even if only as a background element. Whether a good woman or a bad one, she offers obvious motivations and complications to the protagonist’s life.”

Something Happened (Walker’s Retreat) My Life As A Writer: Brian & David Talk Mecha On “NewPub Talk” — “In short, the Dead Egg Division of frustrated Bitch Lit authors turned their pity positions in OldPub into power positions by 1980. During this time the malaise of misery porn in the West that polluted popular science fiction got stymied only due to Star Trek and Star Wars, with some off-brand examples getting some traction because of this (e.g. The Black Hole, released to theaters in 1979). ‘Respectable’ opinion shat on them and the tradition of the Pulps they–Star Wars in particular– represented.”

Bro, Do You Even Regress? (Breitbart) 11 Ways Kathleen Kennedy Killed the Star Wars Golden Goose — “Hey, I’m someone who believes Hollywood should make movies for everyone, including the alphabet people. But just like people don’t want to be told Jesus Is Lord in a Star Wars movie,  they don’t want to see a lesbian kiss. That’s why Christian movies are their own genre, and that’s why gay should be its own genre…”

Wind is Changing! (Jon Mollison) Stopped Clocks and the Midlist Midwit Diaspora — “We’re talking about guys who are very online and very dialed into the culture of the SJWs. They have contacts and ‘ins’ and rumor-mills at their disposal that we plucky underdogs do not. So their change in attitude from as recently as a few months ago means something big is in the wind.”

Get with It, Y’all (Effective Nerd) An Interview with P. Alexander of Cirsova Publishing — “There are more tools and resources for authors and publishers than ever before. What’s out there may not be perfect, and sometimes changes (like Amazon folding Createspace into KDP) aren’t always for the better, there has still never been a better time to get into publishing. Anyone with a finished book waiting for a golden ticket from tradpub is wasting valuable time that they could be spending getting their work out there and in front of readers.”