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Yeah, so. I’m trying to add a few new faces to my beta-reading pool (in addition to the people who have been test-reading my stuff for years). But we’re in a new age of scammy types, and a large number of people who contacted me pretending they wanted to beta read for me simultaneously agreed they understood this was a volunteer opportunity AND asked me for money in the same breath (well, they usually either said it would be a “trial period of free chapters before we discuss how we can collaborate moving forward” or tried to sidestep the volunteer requirement by insisting that they were only asking for a review on their professional Fiverr page, which necessarily costs money to do). Some of them straight up agreed to the terms (including their understanding that I’m only looking for volunteers) while quoting their per-page rate. Are you literally incapable of understanding that I’m not looking to hire a professional at this stage? I mean, yeah, you are incapable of understanding that. Because your responses are automated.

But the worst ones were the ones I backed into a corner and made them agree in writing “yes I understand this is volunteer and I will not use AI to generate comments or use AI in any way” who STILL ASKED ME FOR MONEY AND USED AI. AND IT WAS SUPER FRIGGING OBVIOUS.

I was trying to be nice at first, kinda making excuses in my head–okay these comments are kinda cringe but maybe they’re just a young person trying to get started, they think this sounds professional and smart, they think they’re being epic with their awful rephrasing suggestions. But damn, a couple of them made me seasick with their “It’s not X. It’s Y.” “It’s not X. It’s Y.” “It’s not X! It’s Y!” The comparisons usually weren’t even particularly appropriate. It was all weird, hollow, and markedly different from how they communicated in e-mails. One of them literally sounded like broken English unless she also used AI to generate the e-mails (which she did a couple times).

Finally when it just felt too itchy and the comments made one too many comparisons that didn’t make sense–for instance, suggesting a character should discuss the “taste” of water she was STANDING IN, not drinking–I tested her output in an AI detector and it said it was nearly 90% sure this was entirely AI generated with no human involvement. And I tried some of my own beta-reading content that I’d done for other people–for free, many times, because I love authors and I love reading and sometimes we were critiquing each other–it came back with an assessment of human-written content. It doesn’t just automatically think this type of content is AI. It was noticing the tells. Surprise!

I gotta say. I can respect the hustle! Go on out there and sell your services, girl! Small creators have it hard and I have no problem with you trying to get that bag!

But say that. Don’t misrepresent yourself as volunteering and then turn around and tee hee suggest you should be paid despite signing an agreement. And you better frigging not pretend you’re offering a human opinion and then get a robot to do it. I am not out here wanting to pay for an auto-generated book report. I want to know what audiences think of my damn book and help me make it better before I move on to submission. It’s so dishonest and gross.

But even though a small part of my naïve little heart wants to say “but they agreed they weren’t using AI! could that be . . . A LIE???” . . . these are the people who have been turning in unoriginal work for assignments for years. Today, they’re using AI to do their homework. In my generation, they were buying essays from online hubs, stealing them from websites, and cribbing details from Cliff’s Notes as if they were their own observations. In previous generations, they were bribing or threatening the smart kids to write it for them. Jackasses have been using super underhanded techniques for their own gain forever. This is just the latest manifestation of it.

It sucks. Go away, liars.

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No, I do not in fact claim anywhere that asexual people aren’t queer and can only belong in queer spaces as allies. Literally the opposite of what I said, but if you need to read imaginary positions into my work to feel like you said something, you do you /send tweet

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I think the issue here is that a lot of people truly believe their book is simply so amazing and so inherently viral that the marketing will take care of itself. Rave reviews and spontaneous hype will drive the sales because of the quality of the story itself, surely! Why wouldn’t it?

Because that just isn’t what happens in real life. There are people whose debut work happens to get noticed by someone more well connected and that can kickstart an indie author’s career, but that’s not generally something you can arrange. Marketing and promotion are skills and there’s a reason there are college degrees based around them: it’s not easy to get people to buy stuff they weren’t aware of until your campaign! And while there are also self-taught people who are amazing at it, they are using skills not everyone has, and it’s unusual to be able to both write a good book and sell it effectively. At the very least, self-publishing a book and depending on its success without a backup plan for how you’re going to live is a recipe for disaster.

There’s no reason NOT to go for it if you think you have these skills or are willing to develop them! Nobody’s saying “you’re obviously going to fail if you try.” What we are saying is that most people do not make anywhere near enough money to keep their head above water, and you should not put yourself in a position where succeeding at this is your only plan. Folks who are thinking of doing something like this should think about the last five books they bought and why, and about whether they’ve personally ever just taken a chance to buy a book they’ve never heard of by an unknown author with 34 followers.

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With apologies to a very similar earlier comic, #4, Just Like Me: I present a slightly different take on “you can only write about your own experience but you’re obsessed with your own perspective if you write about your own experience.”

So apparently it’s super weird for me to write about people who aren’t me, but if I do write about people who are like me in a specific way, that’s super weird too.

Let’s get something straight (no pun intended): Aromantic people might have several good reasons for writing aromantic characters. They’re the most likely to write an authentic aromantic experience, and they may want more aromantic stories to exist in the world since we don’t have many, and they may just find it easier to borrow that aspect of their own lives (even though we aren’t writing about ourselves unless it’s an autobiography). But! Being aromantic and asexual doesn’t mean I can’t write characters who feel differently about romantic and sexual attraction. It’s only natural that our characters would sometimes be quite different from us, sometimes in fundamental ways. And it would certainly be odd if every single character I wrote was the same orientation as I am (though I’m assuming straight people do this all the time and have never thought it was odd).

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Said it before and I’ll say it again: publishing-industry professionals intentionally diversifying what they represent or publish is NOT an expression of anyone’s intent to suppress majority perspectives. But by default, if only majority perspectives are chosen, marginalized perspectives are buried. Attempts to uplift historically and currently suppressed populations to get just a tenth of what’s already out there by mainstream authors is NOT going to interfere with any opportunities for the mainstream. But the way they’re always wailing about other people getting opportunities certainly does betray how unrepentant they are about believing those positions automatically belong to them.

Government officials making exclusionary and bigoted laws and policies is nothing new. As usual, people who gloated about it and made up stories about their own superiority will be self-righteously explaining how it was “just a different time” when they end up on the wrong side of history. We, who are sharing this time with you, know it’s wrong and never considered not fighting it.

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Flesh out the world! Give the scenery some love! Put some meat on those worldbuilding bones! Build in some complex history, not just the plot-relevant stuff! Hey, why is your book so long?

Welcome to my hell! SF/F gets a little bit of leeway when it comes to higher word count caps, but even with that, I’m definitely struggling to balance natural storytelling, two major plots, dialogue that has room to breathe, and an entirely invented alien culture with layered mythology and complex history.

Comic features my mother, who used to always say this useless crap about why she thought my word counts were high. (I do not have an overdescription problem. The opposite, really.)

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Seriously. Once is enough. If you’ve got a properly edited document, don’t drive yourself up the wall rereading it before every submission. Read your query letters and cover letters carefully, sure, but don’t do it tensely and obsessively. And yes, if it’s been a while since you read the submission guidelines, you might wanna make sure they haven’t changed in the meantime, but you can read them once and maybe make a little list of bullet points for anything that’s relevant. You can overdo it on “making sure” and end up forever feeling like you’re not ready yet, and you might even waste energy obsessing over it after you send it out, hoping you didn’t make a mistake.

Relax. Take it seriously, but relax.

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I guess I’m not that surprised to see people spreading the (incorrect) belief that properly used punctuation is a sign of automation. When I was much younger, I would sometimes have online conversations with strangers or acquaintances who would suddenly accuse me of trying to talk smart and using a thesaurus. People aren’t used to communication that follows writing standards appropriate for a published article. They literally think humans don’t write like this unless they are forced to, and that casual communication won’t ever look like this unless it’s cheating.

And here’s the thing. AI writing DOES sound robotic and soulless! It usually has this weird repetitiveness; doesn’t make a whole lot of sense under examination; purports to be by the same author throughout but changes tone part of the way through; references to events, people, or articles that don’t exist; and doesn’t contain any personal perspectives. Looking for a “telltale” punctuation mark as a cheat sheet–and insisting that no one uses em dashes in real life–is, frankly, just as lazy as using AI to avoid writing your own work in the first place.

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You get a little leeway for worldbuilding if you write science fiction and fantasy–and I do–but even in the genre most tolerant of long works, a debut fiction manuscript can’t come busting down the door at twice the expected length. (And it’s kinda frustrating that sometimes when I talk about this, people bring up the existence of successful long books, without acknowledging that they are generally penned by much more established authors. Yes, even Stephen King’s first published book was short!)

Marketability is the issue here. If you’re trying to partner with a publisher, you’re ASKING them to bring their knowhow and resources to the table to sell your book. So yes, they get to call the shots, and one of the things they believe is that young adult SFF books are ideally around 90k. It’s intimidating as hell to think I have to UN-WRITE about HALF of the book I wrote to get it to fit in those pants, but I’m gonna try to at least get close.

Some of it will be making hard choices about entire aspects that will have to be chopped. I might lose a plot line. I will definitely lose some big scenes. Then I’ll need to make smaller choices: what does each part of this book that I devoted words to DO for the story, and are there redundancies according to that? Cut ’em. Moving on from there, it’ll be reducing scenes to offscreen references or cutting them, toning up bulky language, and eventually the nitty-gritty of knocking individual words out of sentences to make them tighter.

But all that writing that gets cut still served a purpose. Some of it helped me figure out aspects of the worldbuilding that I can then be more subtle about (or not include at all). Some of it helped me figure out characters’ voices and relationships. Some of it was done as loosely as it was in the spirit of not editing myself to death while I was trying to get the story down. Some of it just turned out to not be needed, and I found that out by putting it there to be judged. But none of it is wasted, even if it does end up on the cutting room floor.

I’ll never write short first drafts. My life would be so much easier if I did, but I just don’t. And while my books can sometimes lose enough words to come out tight and smooth and presentable to the publishing industry’s expectations, I’m not going to strangle them while they’re coming out to have them start out that way. It’s like a recipe I’ve got to taste as I cook it. I think I’ll get there.

But dang, it sucks. (Readers, let me know if you want to join the test reader list for an upcoming Sapphic science fiction romance/coming-of-age novel.)

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In honor of my other webcomic, Negative One, hitting 20 years as a webcomic this month, you get a So You Write comic based on a real thing that happened. Heh.

Obviously it’s simplified and doesn’t capture the actual nuance of the conversation I had with this person, but yeah, I once got an e-mail like this, explaining to me with Utmost Seriousness that a story featuring a missing child where she isn’t found safe and sound and returned to her parents “didn’t make sense” and that my stubbornness in writing a story with this sad plot was driving my readers away. This reader was quite polite and sincere, but they were adamant: I was making a HUGE mistake writing what I was writing; that I must be “married to” a plan I’d written for the story that I felt compelled to miserably carry out even though it was obvious the story should go a different way, and that the reader was certain my other readers would all feel the same way.

Furthermore, I was not adhering to the correct way to write stories, was refusing to listen to feedback from readers (which responsible authors really should take into account), and should provide some way of disclosing to readers ahead of time that they’re not going to get what they’re all going to want. (This reader explained to me that they truly felt I should post spoilers of the future story so no one would be harmed by not getting the ending they wanted in the story. They would certainly all be reading to get the plot point they wanted, and I had a responsibility to reveal that it wasn’t going to go that way.)

Obviously I was baffled by this weird entitlement–no, readers don’t get to tell me what I have a responsibility to write!–and I was pretty confused by the suggestion that I owed people full disclosure of future events, not to mention the reader’s belief that I was knowingly writing the story in a way everyone would hate. I’m pretty sure that if I’ve written it to be devastating when characters experience tragedy, I’m doing something right! But on top of that . . . you’re welcome to stop reading any story you’re not enjoying, for any reason!

I sometimes have strong feelings about stories–we all do, right? That’s why we write!–but I’d never dream of e-mailing the author of an ongoing story and telling them what they should be doing with their plot. I’m good at offering feedback when it’s solicited, and I love posting book reviews when I read completed books (some of my reviews are negative), but I can’t say I’ve ever felt entitled to explain to another author that they should be writing a different story than the one they chose to write.

(And if you think an author wrote an awesome story up to one point and then ruined it, or corrupted the story with an element they should have left out, or just wish they would have written it how you would have . . . yeah, that’s what fanfiction is for!)