originaldetectivesheep

[originaldetectivesheep]

Year in Review: The (lol) Fewer Things I Read in 2021

In 2021, I read about 150 fewer books than in 2020, despite spending about the same amount of time, honestly, under a heavy pandemic regime.  What the hell gives?

I don't have comparable information from 2020 any more, but I do still have a breakdown of books by month for this past year.  Volumes looked like: January - 68 February - 94 March - 111 April - 102 May - 92 June - 43 July - 52 August - 24 September - 33 October - 31 November - 38 December - 61

There are explanations for most of the lower-than-average months (to get 750 on the year, you need to read about 62.5 bpm), but what sticks out is August: what the hell happened there?  Less than a book a day, and the only month where (not shown) Gutenberg texts formed less than 50% of the mass read.  What gives?

There are principally three reasons for this big a hole.  The first is that I briefly resubbed to Workrate this summer before getting heartily sick of it, again, even before the revelations about corporate-culture bullshit pushed it permanently off the list.  If I was grinding quests between customer calls, I wasn't reading old bad books in that frame.  I was pushing particularly hard on an achievement hack for all of August and about half of September, which is part of the effect there.

The second reason August was slow is that I picked up that Clive Cussler bucket at the end of July.  Fairly little of this got into the lists, but I was reading each book in it until I gave up on it, at least, between and around library pulls.  Reading half a book and giving up because it got dumb does not get it logged in the list; this was a less significant factor in the shortfall, but it's one that's affecting August most strongly, September to November a little less so.  I've mostly been able to choose replacements in the G2 of my LFL bucket, so fewer of those are ending up unread now.

The third reason August was especially Gutenberg-slow has to do with Hanns Heinz Ewers and Damon Runyon.  I had two of Ewers' big, blodgy, occult novels in the original German in August.  German necessarily goes somewhat slower than English, and I'd liked Der Zauberlehrling, despite its faults, so I wanted to give them a close eye.  This was a mistake, because both Alraune and Vampir kind of suck and are not worth the attention.  The end of the month, also, was eaten by a giant Runyon omnibus that I had a hard time not going to sleep in: Runyon's good, but his range in which he is good is not enormous, and story after story after story of the same mooks with the same diction doing the same gambits gets real old.  The more large, slow, massy books you read, the fewer quick ones you can get through in the same time.

June was low mostly because I was on the road; July caught some of that "gaming instead" from August and September.  September picked up a little because of time spent not driving in Maine; October and November were slack because I was putting almost every spare minute into grinding Spanish, and when that weight was off, December came back up like normal.  That's about how it comes out.

More broadly, 2020 was especially fast, faster than normal, due to specifics of the Gutenberg pile not present in 2021.  In January '20 I re-loaded the pile, which had gotten down to like 750 titles, with less of a focus on genre fiction.  The result was a large number of very short pieces that got cleaned up, mostly, that same year: in 2020 I have nearly a hundred titles marked "self-recollection" or "b/w", for comp albums or split singles, respectively, and only about 20 under these captions in 2021.  Large collections of short pieces don't always read faster than unitary books, but two shorts stapled to each other definitely do.  For similar reasons, the average book not from a major author is probably significantly shorter in 2020 than 2021: I cleaned up all the easy ones with small catalogs at the start, and now I'm getting those with long books or a bunch of them.

Another reason not to be neglected is the authors that happened to sit in the "large major" slot for the year.  In 2020, in addition to H.G. Wells, I had to deal with William Le Queux (bad), Fergus Hume (nightmarishly bad), Albert Dorrington (bad, racist, mostly unconnected shorts), and Emile Tepperman (short, quick pulps).  If you're reading a disproportionate amount of a given author, on this kind of completionist hack, bad books that your eyes glaze over while you press the Page Down key go much faster than good ones where you want to dial in to every line.  In 2021, I had Marjorie Bowen and Zane Grey in this slot, and while Gray especially is not always good, he at least always holds interest, and both of these authors are almost certain to match a title, in their count, to a fully worked-up novel of ~400 KB.  There's no slip or skimping, and for real I would rather read better, more full-up books rather than bad sketches, even if it makes Internet Number less Big.

The one area where 2021 lapped 2020 big time was in non-Gutenbergs, ahead by almost a hundred mostly due to people working out how to keep libraries open.  It wasn't just that, though: on one month fewer of library time I read about 15% more books than in 2019, when I started doing this mindfully.  That's the energy I want to bring forward into the new year: continuing to read more good works from more diverse, more current authors, and let the Gutenberg pulp-mill part of the process look after itself.  It will: the pile is down to 1330 things now, after processing 657 or so last year, even despite being this "kind of slow".

[originaldetectivesheep]

Hell Year In Review - Stuff I Mostly Didn't Write In 2020

Like for, probably, a lot of people who have survived at least long enough to read this, 2020 was for me a year of significant personal and professional stagnation.  I did not lose my job, or even any hours or income, let alone any people close to me, to the virus, and I didn't have long-distance plans made for it to put a hole in, but the past ten months inside, mostly, the same walls, doing the same things without variation, leads to a definite feeling that nothing is happening, and nothing can go anywhere.  Writing is not in any way a job for me, but this was still affected too.

In 2020 I wrote 35 new pieces, a down year by recent standards, with a breakout like:

flash fiction: 6 short story: 13 poetry: 15 essay: 1

Some of this is 2020.  But looking back at my words-per-month numbers, this was coming long in advance, and the stress of 2020 deepened and prevented recovery from burnout that had been going continuously since the end of 2019:

2020 monthly wordcounts: January - 2318 February - 4690 March - 6461 April -  230 May -   41 June - 1067 July - 8826 August - 5970 September - 11589 October - 5998 November - 15208 December - 9652

This is going to continue to be a problem in 2021.  I'm committed to a serial project that starts running on 4 January, so I have to force myself to continue turning the crank on the four stories remaining in it to finish by their respective deadlines.  But after that (hopefully by the end of February), I can take a deep breath, recenter, and write less.

It sounds backwards, but looking at what I managed to do this year, it's the right course.  Not everything is a gem, or even submissible, but I am really unreasonably amped about getting some of last year's material out in front of editors, or publishing certain ones in the Monsters of the Week II run (yes, spoilers for the 4th).  I can operationally plug out fiction: that's not the problem any more.  This is now a get-better cycle, and maybe this time next year I'll be looking at getting faster again.

I did actually submit some stuff to markets this year: 7 out, 10 back, resulting in 2 personal rejections vs 8 form, 9 immediate and 1 held for comment.  This is technically better than 2019, but probably an artifact of the small sample size.  This is, as kinda noted, something I want to get back to - but after almost a year on the bench, I have to rebuild my submission queues/habits/ideas again completely from scratch.

In addition to pestering editors again, and successfully finishing MotW II on deadline after already pushing it back from Q4 2019, in 2021 I'd like to finish a novel-length work picking up what I've gained reading this year (more about that in the other post), finish a couple of my older drafts not completely obsoleted by the pandemic, and plot out a shorter self-pub collection presenting this year's reaction poetry.  And yes, continue to not die of COVID.  Small steps - but pointing towards the right direction.

[originaldetectivesheep]

Hell Year In Review - Stuff I Mostly Read With The Page Down Key In 2020

Last year, I rejoiced about positive change that came from reading less churny Gutenbergs and more modern authors, more women, and more authors of color from the library.  Then the library closed for most of 6 months starting on 11 March.

I read a monstrous 907 book-shaped things this year, in exceptionally great proportion out of the Gutenberg bucket.  There was a LOT of churn there: I started the year with 2666 items after the reload alluded to in last year's post and finished with 1761 after processing 1290.  There was a lot of pap.  There was a lot of extremely bad pap.  But it wasn't all pap, and it wasn't all bad.

By way of illustration: those 907 books broke out into 59 modern/physical books, 13 issues of Strange Horizons (no real need to dissect these), and 835 off the Gutenberg pile.  Among moderns, women wrote/contributed to 32/59 (54%), authors of color wrote/contributed to 6/59 (10%), and authors in translation furnished 4/59 (7%).  Favorites in this small sample looked like:

Catherine Chung - Forgotten Country Elizabeth J. Church - The Atomic Weight of Love Hal Clement - Iceworld Susanna Clarke - Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell J. M. Coetzee - Waiting For the Barbarians Claire G. Coleman - Terra Nullius Pat Conroy - The Lords of Discipline Anne Corlett - The Space Between the Stars Jennine Capo Crucet - Make Your Home Among Strangers Ivan E. Coyote - One In Every Crowd N. K. Jemisin - The City We Became

This was not a bad batch of books to read this year.  But, it's about a third the size of the similar haul from 2019, and the Gutenberg haul was so large and so comprehensive as to get a lot of quality material in with the junk.  Of 823 limited-authorship titles from Gutenberg, women wrote or contributed to 111 (13%), a better rate than 2019 overall (despite 10 months of library there vs 0), and though authors of color only contributed 7 books (<1%), the 33 translations and non-English-language books represented 4% of the total, again an advance on last year despite 2019's numbers counting the library.  The highlights of the Gutenberg side looked like:

Henri Barbusse - The Inferno Aphra Behn - Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave Lord Byron - Don Juan Willa Cather - The Professor's House Mary Cholmondeley - Red Pottage Kate Chopin - The Awakening Joseph Conrad - Lord Jim Stephen Crane - Wounds in the Rain Ford Madox Ford - No More Parades John Galsworthy - The Forsyte Saga [The Man of Property / In Chancery / To Let] Mary Gaunt - Kirkham's Find Maxim Gorky - Mother Thea Von Harbou - Metropolis Alexander Harris - Settlers and Convicts E. T. A. Hoffman - The Golden Flower Pot Sarah Orne Jewett - The Country of the Pointed Firs Rudyard Kipling - Kim Sinclair Lewis - Kingsblood Royal David Lindsay - The Haunted Woman Edward Lording - There And Back Kálmán Mikszáth - St. Peter's Umbrella L M Montgomery - Anne of Green Gables Frederick Niven - The Flying Years O. E. Rölvaag - Giants in the Earth May Sinclair - Mary Olivier: A Life Olaf Stapledon - Odd John: A Story Between Jest and Earnest Robert Louis Stevenson - The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Theodor Storm - The Rider on the White Horse H.G. Wells - In The Days Of The Comet H.G. Wells - Mr. Britling Sees It Through H.G. Wells - The War in the Air Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray

There are three Nobel laureates (Kipling, Lewis, Galsworthy) in this list, and two more nominees (Wells, Gorky) who didn't make it to the top, versus only one (Coetzee) in the other.  This is also not a bad batch of books to read this year; the rebuild last January to get more non-genre stuff made the highs a lot higher.  Sturgeon's Law remains true at all scales and throughout history, but when you read 800 fucking Gutenbooks in a year, you’re going to get a bunch of good in with all of the bad.

This does turn kind of into "comfort in sadness", because many of the other 792 limited-authorship Gutenbooks I read in 2020 were utter trash.  I read thirteen things from Albert Dorrington stitching like a hundred uncollected short stories into coherent wholes, and all of them were bad.  I had ten books from Edward Dyson, and they were all full of bad dialect.  I'm almost thirty volumes deep in various pulps from Emile C. Tepperman that are a lot more entertaining than good.  Many of Miles Franklin's twelve books on the list were a pain, as were practically all of Stewart Edward White's twelve mixing spiritualism and old California.  Virtually all of Warwick Deeping's thirteen very large gurn piles sucked, and the only use of most of the 30 volumes I had to grind up from William Le Queux was to laugh at them.  And finally, I suffered through 80 books by Fergus Hume this year, and got so mad that I wrote a Twitter thread to call him out as the worst possible author in the history of the English language.

However, Hume is over.  I'm never going to read/need to read him again.  And even if I continue not getting over my feud with the library (I really ought to), the routine that I've established allows me to project good things for the next year.  I've got eight more from L M Montgomery, Marjorie Bowen is up next in the "large major" slot after Tepperman, and later in the year I should get to Eugene O'Neill, George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, and Zane Grey.  I'm reading from a limited selection of Dostoevsky on my Kindle right now, and sooner or later should also get to Jonathan Swift, Jules Verne, Mary Shelley (I missed Frankenstein in 2016), Anne Bronte, Herman Melville, Havelock Ellis, George Gissing, and maybe Damon Runyon by this time next year.  There are going to be other discoveries like Gaunt, Cholmondeley, and Rölvaag.  And yes, I will need to grind through a lot of bad garbage to get to them: but there's still enough good, in all of this, to keep on going.

[originaldetectivesheep]

Year in Review - Stuff I Read In 2019

Last year, I had a problem where I couldn't say anything coherent about what I read in 2018 because there was too much of it.  This year, I read 30% more than last year, so the problem has gotten even bigger and even harder. :\

Of the 889 books I read in 2019, the vast majority was Gutenberg churn; I can do that at work or at the laundry or on a plane or while waiting for a bus on the roadside in Central America, and there's always more of it.  My current Gutenberg pile is down to an even 750 books from 1357 last January, after reading about 958 items over the course of the year -- some of these were consolidated.  But what's important is the 149 books I read this year that weren't.

If you read a lot of Gutenbergs, you find yourself with a context that is very male, extremely white, overwhelmingly Anglophone, and almost totally dead.  This is a bad picture of the world and leads to a lot of bad, pap-chewing fiction as well, so in 2019 I made a point of going to the damn library to read more-current fiction, picking whatever looked faintly interesting while giving special weight to women authors, authors of color, and works in translation, as much as I could carry at a time.  Not all of the books I pulled were winners, but you can readily see the effects in what I called out as monthly highlights over there.

I noted 74 books as 'highlights' this year; modern books were 17% of the total and 61% of picks, an increase by a factor about 3.5.  Women wrote about 34% of picks versus 11% of the total, an increase by a factor of three.  Authors of color wrote 24% of picks versus 4% of the total, an increase by a factor of SIX.  And books in translation were 11% of picks versus 3% of the total, for again, a gain of about three and a half.

The 'women' caption is a little sticky; women not B.M. Bower wrote 7% of total books and 31% of picks (factor of 4.5), but honestly, reading Bower's catalogue was still a good time.  It's in the other areas that you can very clearly see that going out and reading people in these captions who have, remember, already made it past the publishing industry's rather significant filters, is likely to get you a quality reading experience, and it's a habit worth continuing.  I'm almost done with the last pile of stuff I checked out in 2019, and when that goes back, I'm going to pull another bunch on exactly the same strat -- and keep going until I run out of library and have to start from the A's shelf again.

Despite that note, I'm also filling up my Gutenberg pile again: I selected it too heavily for genre stuff the last time, and now, with a wider focus, maybe I can pick up more women, more literary stuff, maybe more authors of color in this new tranche -- and if not, it's not like it could be worse than a year in which I read like a hundred twenty things from Fred M. Friggin White. :\

oh ok fine the best of the best: Isabel Allende - The House of the Spirits Paolo Bacigalupi - The Water Knife David Bajo - Panopticon Tahar Ben Jelloun - A Palace In The Old Village [Au Pays] Aimee Bender - The Color Master Sarah Bird - The Yokota Officers' Club Lucy Jane Bledsoe - The Big Bang Symphony Joseph Boyden - Three Day Road Iain M. Banks - The Wasp Factory Ray Bradbury - The Stories of Ray Bradbury Kalisha Buckhanon - Upstate Charles W. Chesnutt - The House Behind the Cedars Lois McMaster Bujold - Falling Free Ocatvia Butler - Fledgling James M. Cain - Double Indemnity Monica Byrne - The Girl In The Road May-Lee Chai - Useful Phrases For Immigrants Patrick Chamoiseau - Slave Old Man Amit Chaudhuri - Freedom Song Ted Chiang - Stories of Your Life

[originaldetectivesheep]

Year in Review - Stuff I Wrote In 2019

So it's another new year and the world is not incinerated for the moment, so how about a writing deep dive:

In 2019 I wrote 53 new pieces, which is bad for statistics but good for not being nearly as burned out, with a breakout like:

flash fiction: 11 short story: 32 novella: 1 novelette-length collection: 1 poetry: 8

I also put up 53k into a NaNo that is not done, as it's supposed to be a submissible draft, but this is one for the future.  What I finished was slightly longer, mod poetry, than last year, maybe a little better-finished, and resoundingly less successful at getting picked up anywhere.  Every single sub sent out in 2019 (less three still pending) came back rejected, maybe one got HFCed, and one of the acceptances from 2018 flipped over to 'cancelled'.  And I think I'm getting better?  Like, what?

To a certain degree, I still can't tell my own quality; this is an inherent problem.  But on 93 subs, I got 12 non-form rejections for 13%, a hair's improvement on last year, and the market dynamics kind of shifted under me: the semi-pro segment where I've had my only relative success is withering away under increased expenses, and the field is concentrating on a smaller number of publications locked into an (unrealistic IMO) escalation of 'pro' rates that looks to stress and winnow the field further, without much immediate benefit to authors.  72% of subs in 2019 went to 'pro' outlets as opposed to 66% in 2018; a little of the delta is writing less, and not writing specifically for theme anthologies, but some of it is that those outlets don't exist any more.

What remains is to continue to work, continue trying to improve, and to do my own self-publishing; I don't need """exposure""" bad enough to submit to free/low-token/vanity outlets and let other people gainer off my work for nothing when I can directly get it out there in front of next to nobody.  This year Old Lumber published most of the rest of what I wrote in 2018, Border Lands ran out 13 new 2019 stories, and #SHIT@SOPSAYS did a month's worth of blastbeats nearly live; if not a lot of people saw them, yeah, that's my problem - but they're there.

For this year, the idea's to keep on going: finish the draft, do about 30 shorter works that I'm happy with, maybe another series, maybe another NaNo, maybe find something to do with the poetry.  No goals out of my control: it's not a kick against publishing qua publishing, just the truth that getting bound up with it is to become a crab in a shrinking and more crowded bucket.  There are other ways to do this.

[originaldetectivesheep]

Domestic na Kanojo - keeping at T1

Sintering most of the extraneous crap out of it (there is half a glass left in the bottle of malbec and the time for subtlety is long gone), this is a mashup of Kuzu no Honkai and a more grounded Marmalade Boy, so of course, directly up my alley.  Everything else is scene dressing.

when we all have come

The Marmalade Boy bits come in because I'm an old, and got jumped into the hobby with that series, which remains or ought to as the benchmark for "high school romcom assembled in the same house by remarriage".  The corny, lovey-dovey parents, though, are well in that tradition, and make a sharp contrast to the complicated rest of the cast, which is picking up thoroughly from the sexual realism of Kuzu no Honkai.  Not since that show, in fact, have I run across anything willing to confront that reality -- that sometimes teenagers have sex, and when they do it is awkward, and confusing, and a weird ball of emotions -- and hopefully this is a sign of better things, that the PTA dam is finally breaking and anime that wants to do realism can do realism.

DAkedo ki NI naru - son’NO kimochi wo naze

The one cautionary note in all of this is that DomeKano is not a shoujo title, even to the extent that KuzuHon was pretending to be a shoujo title, and thus its commitment to that emotional realism has to be suspect.  As a dude writer I don't necessarily like it having to be this way, but the brutal fact is that comics targeted at girls and women have been, historically, significantly better at handling realistic relationships, especially of any complexity, and are almost immune to getting sidetracked, as has too often happened in post-Love-Hina pretend-shoujo male-targeted titles, and collapsing into a stew of service shots and cheap sex.  That's the caveat -- that's the warning blazed across the skyline here.  But because the staff are taking these steps, and are doing solid enough realism to start, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt.  I'm keeping Domestic na Kanojo at T1, almost certain to continue to the end of the series -- and if it's starting as it means to go on, it'll be in legit discussion for show of the season.

[originaldetectivesheep]

Doukyonin wa Hiza, Tokidoki, Atama no Ue. - keeping at T2

A straight-pitch cute story that might have been executive-produced by like Mitch Albom or somebody, My Roommate Is A Cat is resolutely staying in its lane to the point where the only remaining questions about it are implementational: if you're not down to watch a misanthrope adjust to society through the love of a pet, you're already out.

if this is you, go to the store.  go directly to the store.  do not pass go, but maybe get some $$ on the way if you're skint

That being the case, let's explode onto the real issue in the first episode: being so bad at taking care of yourself, as an alleged adult, that you run down into the kamaboko supply in terms of things to eat.  The determined wilderness survivalist or person so desperately poor it's doubtful how they're reading this or just plain committed eater of absolute garbage will readily identify the particular brand in that above cut as the orange plastic and pink sludge of, jan jaka jan, WINNER, which is a pun in Japanese and glop in any language at all.

That pic is from Hong Kong this past time, where I ate this sausage product on several occasions, few of them absolutely willingly, round about some probably more intense than advisable situations.  Japan, an island country prone to natural disasters, has long been a master source of emergency rations, and while I did this trip without kanpan/hardtack -- the sensation of eating a balsa plank that had reincarnated as a cracker several lifetimes ago -- or Calorie Mate, the original survival bar as long as you count things that taste like a brick of mulchy sawdust held together by cooking oil, I could not have done it without the reliable edibility of kamaboko, the ultimate in pink-slime fish byproducts and a critical source of easily-carried bioavailable nutrients.

Fish sausage like this was born to solve two problems: first, there is a lot of nutritive value in the parts of a fish that even the Japanese won't eat, and second, even the parts they do eat tend to go bad quickly.  The resulting gluten-bindered slurry aggregates all the otherwise-uneatable scraps of any fish fed through the grinder, and keeps it stable for world without end, but does then create its own problem "how do we convince people to eat fish sausage" that is not completely solved yet, but everyone has for the moment come to a kind of modus vivendi: people will put fish sausage in their stews and soups, and occasionally directly into their guts, when literally no other form of protein is available or affordable, and the manufacturers will lean into this by putting in colorful additives or dumb puns and dispensing with the idea that it's any way natural or tastes remotely good.

I'd had fish sausage as a kid in Japan, and was aware of how much it sucked, but still laid it in as a survival protein source for hiking on Lantau.  And it did its job: I didn't run out, and when I needed food and/or protein for muscle repair, I could chop up a stick or two, bolt it down, and get back in the game.  The general uckiness and marginality of kamaboko guaranteed that any sausage I ate, I ate because I had to, dead broke and/or out of range of a restaurant or a 7-11: nothing casually snacked on out of boredom here.

To conclude, some rejected slogans: Winner Kamaboko - It's Got Nutrients ; Winner Kamaboko - Marginally Better Than Autocannibalism ; and my favorite, Winner Kamaboko - In A Bad Enough Emergency, You'll Consider This Food

That's the level of running out of shit Subaru's on in this episode.  Cat food is a goddamn upgrade.

it haz a smol mad

Anyway, this show, while saccharine and kind of on rails, is also an upgrade over the worst potential fish-sausage implementation of the concept, and worth following at least for the moment, especially for the sharp contrasts between roommate perspectives.  HizaUe is kept at T2, likely to continue to the end of the season.

[originaldetectivesheep]

3D Kanojo: Real Girl 2nd Season - keeping at T1

Picking up kind of where the first cour left off, 3D Kanojo is resolutely determined to keep moving -- even setting aside the ways where it seems like it's running in place.

still here, still managing

Probably the most infuriating thing about the first cour was how dumbad Tsutsui could be about, literally, the dumbest little things that you should be picking up from romcom anime, even, about relationships and human beings; in a way, maybe, this is not too far out for a teenage boy with significant alienation issues, but it didn't make the end of the first season any less grindingly dumb to watch.  He and Igarashi are still doing as little work on their relationship as practical for the story to allow them to continue dating, but fortunately for everyone's blood pressure, Tsutsui is now failing in the attempt, not flailing aimlessly.  The realization, widespread across the variously-damaged cast, that they have to change as people to get where they want to be, and that this change has to come, consciously, from within, is smart and welcome, and hanging this season on the various successes, failures, and interactions of those resolutions to growth is a lot more promising than getting on the Overdone Shoujo Manga Trope Bus.

a tiger's never gonna change his stripes i guess / i guess but jesus what a mess

Another neat thing that is pretty cool to watch in the setup process is the introduction of the theme that other people's lives are not here for your convenience.  From the sharp edges around Ito's confession to the way Igarashi ends up getting dragooned into the beauty contest, the differential awareness that it's kind of shitty to load up other people with unwanted or unnecessary emotional labor so that you can feel better about yourself is definitely a developing thread; the central pairing in this show being what it is, it's going to be quite interesting to see if and how this unfolds down the line -- following that on, I'll be doing the work to keep up with 3D Kanojo at T1, almost certain to go on to the finish.

[originaldetectivesheep]

Bringing this back for 2019 because only the names and faces have changed; Kakegurui XX is doing the same episodic high-stakes set pieces fitted lightly into a transparent frame that it dealt out in the first hand.  If you liked JKs chewing the scenery and doing fully-clothed service poses, there will be more to like; if you didn’t like the way each game was squeezed to absolute death to make screen time or the way they swapped a commentary episode into the broadcast run, there will probably be more to scowl at.  For me, for the moment, deal me in at T2, again, likely to continue to the end of the season.

Kakegurui - keeping at T2

You want your comparables for this, you get Prison School: from the basics of the artstyle to the conscious absurdity of a school setting where classes are an afterthought to the actual motive of having strong-willed JKs chew scenery and splash the fanservice around, Kakegurui is on the same departure track from reality, heading out to the same destination.

the urge to dominate and occupy

High-stakes gambling, as long as you can sell the urgency, is a great source of tension and attention-holding, and there’s also the benefit, in a show with a lot of emphasis on intimate detail and struck poses, that bluffs and staredowns can mostly be done in pan without having to move the characters.  Kakegurui does a good job of looking better produced than it is, concentrating the budget into the critical points and letting the writing and voice actors carry the weight; it works, but these set pieces are going to have to hold up a larger story, and how well that’s going to work is less certain.

i don’t give a fuck if this is your card

Within certain degrees, though, that’s less than necessary.  There’s not a lot like this show running this season, certainly not in my pile, and while it’s probably not going to come out quite as over-the-top as Prison School, a couple high-stakes hands a week won’t hurt; Kakegurui is staying at T2, likely to continue to the end of the season.

[originaldetectivesheep]

Mob Psycho 100 II - keeping at T2

Sometimes, when a show gets a second season reasonably close to its first one, you can just go "next verse, same as the first", and go on under the same presets.  That's not the case with Mob, and that's both good and bad going into the new season.

yes, it's sort of a church.  yes, it's also kind of a denny's.  this is mob again, remember

The bad, which can be overcome, is off the stack first: the animation here, while long strides ahead of nearly anything else airing, is not as all-crushing as the first cour.  That was probably unsustainable, and Mob II is more fluid and more closely drawn and less CGed than average, but that insane unsustainable art did some heavy lifting last time out, patching over the bits where Mob sagged into just being a supers show.

can't get through this with super powers

The good part is that it looks a lot less likely that the animation budget is going to have to save the writing.  Mob got smarter and realer as the first season went on, and is taking another step up on the restart, with a pretty explicit announcement, more than any just 'introduction', of themes of personal growth, change, and evolution.  Mob works and has crossover appeal because it is not exclusively a superhero story; the school bildungsroman parts may, in broad strokes, be as old as the hills, but the implementation continues to kill it and looks to be continuing to step on forward.  I'll be sticking around for that progression, keeping Mob II at T2, likely to continue through to the end.

[originaldetectivesheep]

Boogiepop wa Warawanai - keeping at T3

Oddly for something that's getting revived again after, seriously, the long part of 20 years, new people approaching this will probably react better to this than old hands.

no, i'm not looking for the light music club, this is about a girl in a jamiroquai hat

Where this starts is that the 2001-vintage Boogiepop was heavily styled, even if the actual operational decision, at production time, behind browning the visuals out was probably more about smoothing out differences between traditionally-painted and digitally-colored pieces.  An anthology horror series with a strong and consistent aesthetic, Boogiepop was visually as well as conceptually different from most of what was on TV or available, internationally, as anime at the time, and that difference made it notable.

also, people really did dress like this in the 1990s

The 2019 edition is....not that.  Some of the music and sound-production bits are novel, but in the conceptual outline and in the visuals of what's on the screen, the current Boogiepop is a standard late-'10s TV anime, not separating itself from a multitude of other-similar things about schools and secret organizations and teenage superhumans.  This, too, is of its time: you cannot, almost, turn around in a modern TV schedule without knocking over three chuunibyou light-novel-sourced things about secret superheroes in school uniforms.  Per expectations, maybe, but whether this is a good or bad thing is going to come down to individual perspective.

the gore is okay, but frustratingly cramped by broadcast standards.  at least it's not blackout-censored

Early signs so far are not promising.  It's quite possible that the writing will be able to step up and carry the nondistinctive animation, but the flow of the start in exposition-dumping a whole bunch of very average plot with only a couple sharp points is not encouraging, to say nothing of the way these first two episodes had to come out at once to, one, set an intellectual hook at all, and two, do even this much nonlinearity without setting people off who might not be expecting it.  There's definitely something here, but there's also a pronounced tendency towards, like, trying to do Tokyo Ghoul and Boku dake ga Inai Machi in the same footprint, which has the potential to turn out just as messy as that sounds.

the question: what to do from here and how will we go on

Living in hope and because the first pass was so good, I'm keeping the current Boogiepop -- but at T3, likely to be dropped if it doesn't sort itself out and start setting itself apart from the pack.

[originaldetectivesheep]

Year In Review - Books I Read in 2018

Last year, I thought I was at the limits by reading 300ish books, mostly old Gutenberg stuff.  This year...kind of left that for dead, with 689 books or book-like things scratched off.  This is not merely 'way', but 'way, way' too many, and may have contributed to stagnation as an author in the middle of the year: what we read inevitably ends up setting the context for what we write, and the amount of Edgar Wallace and E. P. Oppenheim I read this year can't have been good.

To try and make sense out of these way too many books, I'm not going to post review snippets for each of them, or even the 50ish (less than 15%) that I unreservedly liked; instead, I'm going to go through and find something to say about every author I read at least three books from this year.  This is still going to be huge, but hopefully, it'll be more coherent huge, and less bad-huge.

A. Hyatt Verrill was an immense chore to read, astonishingly racist almost everywhere and completely up his own ass about branches of science he knew literally nothing about, but fighting through it, I managed to get a lot of close description of the Caribbean as it was in the early 20th century.  This isn't a recommendation of, really, any of his work, but more of a warning about how to be sure you know what you know -- that, and maybe establishing a full-privilege-people shoveling bureau to help recover any diamonds from similar shitpiles of the past for general use.  :\

Alfred J. Church never, as far as I read this year, put out a good book -- he was fatally tripped up by, to some degree, the expectations of his time and markets, and in another way, by not really understanding what fiction is and how it works.  I didn't have to read his crap to find this out, but it was faster than doing another lit class and I could do it while waiting for airplanes, so again :\

I read the first 30 of Arthur Leo Zagat's Doc Turner stories this year; in addition to being critical two-fisted pulps, they're also an object lesson in self-examination: Turner's whole deal is being the protector of the downtrodden new-Americans of Morris Street, but at such an angle that you can't help but notice who gets to be human and worthy under their hokey dialect and who doesn't.  This series was trying to be woke and progressive in its day, and where and how it fails at that should be a critical pointer for people trying, also, to lead the moment and hopefully not look grimy and problematic in another fifteen years.

I'd obviously read some Arthur Machen before, but doing a deep dive over his whole corpus this year was still a revelation.  A lot of his stuff is kind of far-corner weird, and it was really interesting to come back later in life and see the threads of just how it ended up that weird.

Arthur Morrison put up a real mixed bag: a lot of good humor and some solid detective bits, but with real problems with dialect; this is something you kind of get with nineteenth-century humor, but that doesn't make it not suck.  There's always going to be a use, as a writer, to faithfully representing  non-classroom-standard pronunciation and usage, but reading stuff with major dialect should be a bucket of cold water to rethink about how you actually put that on paper.

C. Dudley Lampen's shit-bad books, exactly enough to qualify, show how a sufficiently-motivated author, regardless of ability above a certain and very low minimum standard, can always find a publisher.  Lampen got there with Christianity; there are other paths for other bads, but taking them rather than taking your rejections will not get you where you actually want to be.

I had a bunch of D. W. O'Brien short stories this year that added up to about a qualifying extent; he's one of those writers who for the most part does make it up in volume, but there was a lot of breadth there this year, and more good material than before.  I can't understand why he isn't better known among general audiences, in the context of pulp writers before the end of the Second World War.

I notched 126 books or book-equivalents from E. Phillips Oppenheim this year, and nearly all of them were a dreadful waste of time.  Craft-wise, I liked seeing how he put together serial collections as dismembered novels, unlike Wallace's barely-attached piles of independent stories, and the way he, in mid-life, read one of his early books, threw it into the sea because it was so bad, and then got somewhat better is heartening, but that is a lot of material for very little result.  Oppenheim always wants to be literary and do well, but he never got any good at it, and "churn out a lot of barely-qualifying crap" is no longer a valid market strategy with so many other entertainment options.

I read all of E. W. Hornung, including all of the Raffles stuff, this year, mostly sitting in one place in London waiting for a plane to Jo'burg.  The cricket interplay was pretty good, and there was a lot more to think about, in a social-history dimension, than I thought there would be, but there also was a lot less material than I thought this guy had put up.

Earl Derr Biggers (including all the original Charlie Chan books) was a lot less racist than I was dreading going in, and a lot better at all kinds of stuff about place and human relationships than you really expect a detective writer to be.  Biggers is another one where you really see the contrasts between 'trying' and 'succeeding' at including marginalized people as truly human, and how you take that lesson forward is important.

This year accounted for 111 Edgar Wallace things, which were less of a waste of time than the Oppenheim if immensely more aggravating.  Wallace is a better and snappier technical writer, but he has dialect problems, he's intensely racist, he ran out so many failed experiments and slabbed together so many reprint collections, and his organization of anything novel-length is frequently a disaster.  It's more informative, maybe, to read Wallace writing about writing than it is to read his own stuff; he's thoroughly, professionally artless, but he has a distinct vision for what can sell where, and a grounded approach to writing as craft.  But for general audiences, god, no, stoppit.

Edward Lucas White had a minimum-qualifying extent this year, all read in Zambia, which was good in places and eh in others.  I liked his shorter stories better than his full-length novels, but they really go to show how a racist and orientalist fear of the unknown underlies a lot of that great early-20th-century boom in weird fiction -- as someone who likes reading and writing that sort of weird, it's another spur to re-examine what I'm doing and how I do it.

I covered all of Elizabeth McKintosh this year as well, and as much as I liked the Inspector Grant material, her non-Grant mysteries were maybe better.  It was also cool to get her full spread, and see her doing things other than mysteries; too often you see authors only through a lens of what stays in print, what the library buys, etc, and you miss these parts of their development or personality.

I finished up most of the Ernest Bramah I'd missed five years ago in Russia while I was in Zambia, and enjoyed the more Max Carrados stuff I hadn't found before.  I did not enjoy another volume of Kai Lung shittiness, but will keep it as a memento mori for doing characters so significantly outside oneself.  :\

This year also saw all of Ethel Lina White's thrillers, and while I was reading them, it was ceaselessly awesome.  If there's anything in this year that's going to qualify for re-reads in some distant future, these are going to be it.

I ground through all of Felix Dahn while I was in France, and hated about every single page of it.  The transition from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages is interesting, but maybe don't send a moustache-twirling kleindeutsch racist to tell the tales of Germans taking over from Rome.  :\

Intensely stupid and so significantly, broad-spectrum racist that I frequently wondered whether I was unexpectedly drunk rather than the book being just that bad, I somehow made it through most of Francis H. Atkins' material this year, and the most significant thing I gained out of it was never having to read those atrocious crap piles ever again.  There are a very few interesting or novel points in this guy's fiction, and none of them are worth putting up with the writing to dig out.

If you need a sleeping pill, you could do worse than Frederic W. Farrar -- unless you break out into uncontrollable laughter when confronted with mid-Victorian pietisms.  His school stories are picture-primer trash; his Romanica is ahistorical sermonizing trash.  Again, do not.

Georg Ebers can't draw characters, compose a plot, or hold reader interest, but he does a hell of a job re-writing research on Roman-era Alexandria over into thick piles of sequential words.  Dude sucks, but if you can skip around, he's done all of the work on this little corner of Egyptian history and it just remains for moderns to take that work and re-cast it.

George A. Henty made the minimum qualification, and I wish he hadn't -- his three bad to very bad novels made the worst of the flight out to Hong Kong, and should not be given the chance to spoil anyone else's time, ever again.

George Griffith had a fuck of an arc -- some of his early material was just blindingly awful, both stupid and poorly composed, but he recovered and improved in later books to put up some stuff that's borderline worth seeking out.  That this kind of metamorphosis is possible is a great encouragement to keep going: no matter how bad you are, you will not necessarily *stay that bad forever.

I've still got a couple left before I finish George J. Whyte-Melville, but from what I did read of him this year, it's pretty clear that sometimes authors have fields they're good at and fields they suck at.  His Victorian stuff is not that bad -- and his riding manual is an unintentional treasure -- but his sword-and-sandal stuff sucks major balls.  If you need to stay in your lane, that's something to learn as soon as possible.

H. Bedford-Jones is a weird one; not real good, but he takes on these gigantic imaginative ideas and does them almost correctly, almost completely.  I obviously want to avoid that sort of missed-it-by-that-much outcome, but to a certain degree you need to take on big challenges to even have a chance at that.

I read most of J. U. Giesy's work (with Junius Smith on Semi Dual) last year, and the minimum-qualifying stuff that slopped over into this year was mostly very bad, but there was a WWI novella in the bunch that was so good I wondered if it had been misattributed.  Again, what's good, what you like, and what will sell are all completely disconnected propositions.

James Hilton provided the requisite Mid-Century Popular Intentional Literature ration this year, some of which was good, some of which was confusingly-accumulated, and some of which ended up lapped by Richard Rhodes.  Hilton is another re-read candidate, but not all of his stuff; in bulk, this is a lesson about the advantages and disadvantages of throwing yourself so wholly into your works.

The John Buchan I had left for this year, after reading him in the main, much younger, was a picked-over bunch to be sure, and as usual to be grappled with rather than just taken up entire.  It's not something I'd go and recommend to others, but A Lodge In the Wilderness was maybe the most important and impactful book I read, personally, this whole year.

The one good thing I, or anyone else, can take from John W. Duffield's shitty corpus, is the expression "what is this Bomba-the-Jungle-Boy horseshit?", which means exactly what it looks like it means.  Duffield has some imaginative ideas, but has zero capacity to actually execute on them, ever, and put up some of the most virulently stupid racism I had to grind through this year.  Bad even among his contemporaries, the likes of Duffield are why informed people are reluctant to make major hay out of Lovecraft's racism -- not because he isn't still problematic, but because a lot of stuff in the contemporary popular press was that much even worse.

I technically had a qualifying amount of Ladbroke Black this year, but you blink at this dude -- who ghosted a lot of the high-speed, instantly-disposable Sexton Blake as well -- and his entire corpus is gone.  As much as I can remember, the stuff I read this year was similarly functional but not noteworthy, and fortunately not real influential.

I probably read enough Leroy Yerxa to qualify, between various short repacks; he's a middling pulp author, but going through, all of his stuff is still publishable, which is important.  He turned in acceptable work in the right trip lengths, over diverse subjects, to place out; there's a place for this kind of workmanship, even if it doesn't ever get to great heights.

I didn't expect I'd like the Lloyd C. Douglas stuff that I liked as much as I ended up liking it: there's bits of clunk through his whole corpus, but he almost never gets preachy, and where his stuff works, it hits just absolutely ceaselessly, and is very cool.  (But yes, some of it does suck, very important to note.)

M. P. Shiel was responsible for the book that I got maybe the maddest at this year, and definitely the one I wrote the longest negative review blurb for.  He had a couple good parts, but there was too much that was just over-ornamented where it didn't straight up suck.  Honestly, all of this material was back last January and a pain to think about even then.

For Golden-Age space-opera, it doesn't get much better than Malcolm Jameson, who I mostly cleaned up this year and who barely got over the qualifying line.  This took in a little more of his range than I had before, which was really good: he always comes up with neat outer angles on stuff, and almost always with correct science, at least of his time.

Max Brand is my current 'major' campaign, and reading the next hundred-ish things from him in the pile will take most of 2019.  I've already chewed a decently big chunk, though, and it's interesting to see more of his warts and weak points as a writer, where what I'd seen from him before lacked a lot of that.  I'm also seeing, for the first time, some of his non-cowboy fiction, and for the most part that's another 'stay in your lane' incentive; we'll see what of this changes next year.

I finally got around to reading most of Otis A. Kline's corpus, and it...was not really worth the wait.  Kline is another idea factory, and while he's generally more able to execute on them than Duffield and less racist in doing so, neither comes out perfect and he's substantially in the shadow of Abraham Merritt on Earth and E. Rice Burroughs when he's off on a planetary romance.  Functional and imaginative, yes, but you really really want that extra push to make it through to 'good'.

The one thing you really want to take out of S. S. Van Dine is his 20 rules for detective fiction; I got that this year, in amid the Philo Vance stuff, which takes a bit of an effort.  Van Dine's career arc is a hell of weird one, and it must have hurt, from the cleaned-up later books, to look at the over-artifacted mess of the first couple and regret not doing them better.  This sort of view is why I want to read less of these in the future -- I can't keep having my mental context dictated by works that are a hundred years and more out of date.

Sabine Baring-Gould is approached a lot better as an antiquarian and a writer of sourcebooks than of fiction.  His fictional works are okay, if you excuse some major structural problems, but for all of their unstoppable thickness, his collections of legends and historical tales are just mighty.  Maybe not an author to read, but definitely one to keep around.

I'm also kind of in the middle on Sapper, who's showing some okay range, but in many parts really exemplifying how perspective and market demands can put blinders on you.  His wartime stuff recalls Tim O'Brien or Joseph Heller in places -- mechanized warfare tends to have similar effects at whatever distance -- but there as in his thriller serials he's also the staunchest guy since Wallace, and he does a really poor job of not Drudge-siren hyperventilating about threats to the class system.  Again, we'll see next year how the rest of this goes.

I read all of Tacitus' Annals and Histories this year, and damned if I can remember a whole lot about them that deterministically wasn't in Suetonius or Julius Caesar last year.  Roman writers are definitely more primary-source than pleasure-reading at this point, but it does help to have that text as a reference for reading bads out of the Bibliotheca Romanica.

The Talbot Mundy I had on the stack this year was very much for cleanup, and doesn't change last year's impressions: a still-problematic dude who is less racist, less colonialist, and less bad than a lot of people are willing to extend him credit.  If a book has Chullunder Ghose in it, it's probably worth reading, even if I still would like to see a South Asian writer pick up and grapple with the character.

Thomas C. Bridges did probably the best boys'-own adventures I read this year, which is kind of like "least stinky garbage dump" or "best-tasting light beer".  He does good stuff and some absolute horseshit, but his pacing and action flow is just magic, even when his characters are being intolerable racist fucks; another one to scrape the gunk off maybe.

I got to see Valentine Williams turn, over the course of a lot of books this year, from a John Buchan disciple so close to almost be clone into an independent if not always original thrillerist; in 2018, we'd read the Clubfoot series out for ableism -- von Grundt is kind of defined in his villainy and power by his grotesque body -- but Clubfoot himself is one of the classic spy villains and an absolute monster of a character.  There are ways to get to that level without punching down, but this is the mark, right here.

Wilkie Collins was mostly accounted for in 2017, but the three books finished this year -- The Moonstone, The Queen of Hearts, and The Woman In White -- would be a sufficient reading for a whole year for a lot of people.  Every single one of these is plain and pure magic, and if you haven't read them, there's your '19 project.

Somehow, I made it through all of William H. Ainsworth's wild and degenerate gothicisms; I'm just not always sure how, or completely why.  Ainsworth is another author to be handled with the fireplace tongs, not because he's bad or problematic, but because he's just so weird and relentlessly extra, and I'm not really sure you want to get that on you.

* * * What stands out in the above, or what should, is how unbalanced it is: I read a couple other women authors this year who fell below the threshold, and McKintosh and White put up some of the best total results of anyone I read this year, but the volume problem is exactly as bad as it looks.  This is something I really need to make a point of fixing, but it's something that ought to also come naturally in making the other change I'm targeting for 2019.

That other change, of course, is to read more contemporary material.  There's stuff to be gleaned from the past, sure, but what I got from chewing through that much Oppenheim is of seriously debatable value.  To some extent, pulping Gutenbooks is what I do because I can do it easily at work or on the road, but I really need to set aside time to read newer, better, smarter, more diverse material if I actually want to improve as an author -- and it'll probably be less teeth-grinding, too.

[originaldetectivesheep]

Year In Review - Stuff I Wrote In 2018

I've been tweeting these on a monthly basis this year, but for this much material and this deep a dive, a Twitter thread, which is kind of the antithesis of coherence, is not the right environment.  Let's start off with the raw statistics.

In 2018 I wrote, or revived out of forgotten archives, 100 individual pieces of creative work.  This is a nice round number for percentages, but otherwise is way too many and has contributed to burnout late in the year.  These 100 things roughly split up 346,929 new words, but with a heavy tail; this is how they came out by individual size:

flash fiction: 40 short story: 57 novel: 1 poetry: 1 freeform: 1

From prior history, this is counter tendencies; I did only a couple of the large, involved type of story that fills up most of my older collections, and almost nothing in that 8k to 12k range previously identified as a best trip.  And yet I still think I'm improving: some of the trip change is me hammering myself into a publication jig (the number of outlets that will do anything with a submission over 7.5k besides deleting it unread is tiny), but some of it is also editing myself, pulling back to do less word stew, less unnecessary exposition, and get to the point quicker, harder.  I did write one thing in the novella/novelette range (I have Major Beef with industry definitions of these buckets, but for this one it doesn't really matter) this year, a semi-dieselpunk thing called "The Impossible Flight of the SMS Lammergeier", but that needs conceptual and compositional work beyond the 14k I was able to put into it on a bench in Livingstone, and so it's not finished; weird corners like this are an artifact of tracking by year that I can't really get around.

Of those hundred things, 59 were submitted to publishers at least once.  Of the remaining 41, 26 went to publication directly with Tales of the Missing, two were published as/with Infinite Dance, and one more went on Wattpad as a test of the platform's functions.  One further story was finished too late in the year to qualify for submission anywhere yet, as it's being lagered for rewrites till Thursday.  This leaves eleven stories that might have gone somewhere, but didn't.

The particulars of these get strange: there's quite a few that are 'stopped behind other things in the flash queue', a couple 'does not really fit any existing market', and some 'a lot more finished than good', but there are other reasons for a few: 'would expose me to Secret Service action', 'is not fiction', 'reserved as a bonus for a collection that doesn't exist'.  Because the best way to not send out trunk stories is to regularly grout the bottom of your trunk out into self-publication venues, some of these may emerge there -- some, though, may stay too problematic for a while.

The 59 things I sent to publishers have turned into, so far, 122 rejections, 3 acceptances, and 14 subs still pending rejection.  This turns into a Sturgeon Number of 40.7, which looks frightening but is about what you can expect, trying to brute-force publication with an ancient mental context. Two of the rejections were held for comment (first cut passed), and two of the acceptances have been paid as well as published.  Twelve rejections came with non-form comments, of varying utility; some markets are better at this than others, but just the bare fact of 10% non-form reply rate should convince people that if you want criticism, join a writer's group: when you send stuff to publications, you will, at the large scale, consistently just get a polite "sorry, but no".

Thirteen of the 59 things sent out either are still waiting on their first rejection or got accepted at the first market; let's look at the other 46 for trends.  Fifteen of those, about 1 in three, were rejected once, with two of these either currently submitted somewhere else or considered as eligible for submission.  This is basically where the filter happens: I will seldom pull a story unsubmitted, but after the first rejection, there is a bit of self-searching about how good it actually is, and if it's worth bothering further editors with it.  Seven pieces were rejected twice; one of them got accepted at the third market and another is still eligible for selection.  Ten pieces were rejected three times, and nine picked up four rejections, with one of these last still out at another market.  This about conforms to the queue; I maintain a priority list of publications, and stories will tend to follow one or another consistent path through it depending on length and genre.  Two stories, one of which is still out somewhere, have been rejected five times, and three picked up six.  That's as far as it goes; I try to stay up at as many markets as I can, most of the time, but I want to do this by sending new, quality, appropriate work -- there's no value, for me or for them, in pestering editors with old work or stuff that's not relevant to their publication just for the pure sake of it.

Speaking of editor-pestering, those 139 total submissions went to 58 different markets, of which 34 saw only one sub mostly because I'm aggressive about writing new material for anthologies.  No market got more than 12 subs, so as much as I fret about "constantly pestering editors", none of them saw much more than 20% of this year's submitted content, for an actual average of one submission per month.  We are almost always less consequential even than we think we are; it's good to take a step back, sometimes, and see just how that breaks down.

On the other side of the coin ("editors *not pestered"), I have 13 markets in my target list that didn't see a single submission this year.  Most of these got missed due to genre mismatches or queue-logistics problems (there is one that got added mostly as an ideal slot for something that's been stopped at another market since May), but there are a couple that have gotten regularly passed over because submitting to them takes too much effort for too little potential reward.  Yes, with a Sturgeon Number in the 40s, any effort may be too much, but the truth is that if you hammer one Word doc into Shunn-qualifying shape, you can use that as a template for any amount of copied-over text with some minor tweaks -- having that framework lets you anonymize as needed, change the fonts as requested, without really too much effort.  I'd prefer ODT for philosophical/ideological reasons, but the existence of a baseline template is more important than the particulars of it: the farther your submission requirements get from "a filled-in digital copy of the same framework everyone uses", the fewer subs you'll see.  Is there value in that, to keep out people who believe less strongly in their work?  Maybe, but on the other side, it looks like a perverse incentive: if you put this much elbow grease into the stupid-ass submission requirements, your work will be in a more restricted submission space and face less competition.  I would rather work at getting better at writing to stand out among 300 monthly subs rather than work on presentation to merely be among 30.

So is it working?  Am I actually getting better at anything?  I'm the wrong person to ask.  I still haven't made a pro debut, but I've gotten relatively more personal rejections towards the end of the year than at the start, though this could still be an observational artifact.  If anything really helped me this year, it was doing Tales of the Missing, where I for the most part got out of the genre box and had to put in work on making characters believable human beings, in the absence of other stage dressing.  And even with the lessons I did or didn't take out of that project, I still haven't done anything for publication that I like as much as, say, "I and My Armor and I" from 2016.

That leads up to plans for next year.  I want to do another self-pub series -- likely a horror series in the spring season, but I haven't started writing any of the pieces yet, so don't quote me -- and I want to cut down on piece yield, because 98 new pieces in a year is too many and contributes to stuff flaming out after exactly one rejection because it's underweight.  I would like to end up, a year from now, looking back on a year of 50 to 60 pieces for about 250,000 words, with ideally a couple more publications and additional progress towards a pro debut; I'm pretty much at my physical limits in terms of composition speed, so the next turn of Sugie's virtuous cycle should be streamlining that 'more' towards 'better'.  Some of that improvement, also, should come from changes in my mental diet, which come in on the next post.

On the self-publication side, I sold one copy of Three Pretenders, and one of "The Masters of the North-West Frontier" (no longer available, here it is on Wattpad) on Amazon, and made $0.07 on Kindle Unlimited reads.  I got a brief pulse of interest on Wattpad after initially posting up those old collections, but if I want to drive readership there, I need to be more active and work the system better; another one for next year, probably.

[originaldetectivesheep]

Now Is The Winter Anime of Our Discount Tent

Nobody's here to see this, but the bare fact that this website continues to stagger on for the moment means I get/have to keep being Wrong About Anime for another season; here's where the mistakes will be happening for Q1 of 2019:

Boogiepop wa Warawanai Fukigen na Mononokean: Tsuzuki Ueno-san wa Bukiyou Dororo Mob Psycho 100 II Rinshi!! Ekoda-chan 3D Kanojo: Real Girl 2nd Season Kakegurui XX Doukyonin wa Hiza, Tokidoki, Atama no Ue. Domestic na Kanojo Kaguya-sama wa Kokurasetai: Tensai-tachi no Renai Zunousen Kouya no Kotobuki Hikoutai Piano no Mori 2nd Season

There are six sequels or continuations in these 13 new starts, frequently to things that themselves finished well off the pace or came out 20 years ago, and I am not really hopeful for many of the new titles.  This is overall dire and you can try and talk to me about the spring schedule, but that's more jam tomorrow; fortunately, low expectations mean any surprise is likely to be a good surprise, and if a large number of these do end up clanging, it's not like I don't have other priorities competing for my time.

[originaldetectivesheep]

Fall Anime the Everything After, T3

Nearly everything that's supposed to finish this season is done, so no time like the present to unburden out a whole bunch of opinions that even fewer people will read, as this website no longer exists.  Finishing up, with the few last that didn't get dropped:

KusuAni did, in all, a little better than the last time out in keeping its focus and keeping the lols going; the longer distance made for a couple subplots that didn't work, but a couple that did, as well, and if this comes back around again, I'll be back in for it.

Jingai-san did pick it up a little, and despite some bits of formula and its inherent limitations as a short, did draw a good and sweet and cute picture of life in committed relationships.  The format, though, and the single cour combine to make the ending feel significantly cut off: this has been referenced in Honda-san as a hot property, so there's clearly more and better here, but probably just not when it was getting pitched as a project and then produced.  It would be unsurprising to see this back again in the future; hopefully, any revival will not be rushed out and then rushed through, the way this cour felt in too many points.

The fire's going to keep burning for Hinomaru next season; hopefully, this'll include smoother, smarter subplots and fewer animation deficiencies.

[originaldetectivesheep]

Fall Anime the Everything After, T2

Nearly everything that's supposed to finish this season is done, so no time like the present to unburden out a whole bunch of opinions that even fewer people will read, as this website no longer exists.  Continuing on, with the broad middle:

Gurazeni more or less turned the crank all the way through, and if there were parts that got stuck -- a bunch of subplots this season that Bonda was mostly a spectator to -- the whole of the show still worked, and still covered what needed to be covered in relation to the realities of this specific pro sports world.  It's not quite as sharp an adaptation as Giant Killing, but that's a damn high mark, to be sure.

Honda-san never completely solved its issues with otakudom, but this is maybe to be expected from something that gets picked up, even, as animation -- as something dealing, honestly, with the modern book trade.  Fortunately, though, this was a theme of the series and not the theme of a show that took in all kinds of angles on its subject matter and made them real, relevant, and interesting.  It's difficult to see what more might be put in, in the case of any revival, but whatever other material's out there would definitely be appreciated.

YagaKimi did end up putting together a nice and non-exploitative story that gained in reality as it went on, but suffered due to not completing its main plot arc, actually, and by a persistent feeling that the story and production were kind of assembled upside down and backwards.  Whatever external reasons there might have been, this one turned out as the kind of grossly metafictional-expectations-divergent series that has not been made, much, this century, and the bare fact of its strangeness is likely to overshadow anything that happened on-screen.  For a conclusion, I guess it's the comics. :| real talk the teacher/cafe-owner couple were the most new and interesting characters here and they should have their nichijou show where they have daily-life hijinks and counsel small gays more

Tsurune still has a couple shots left, either due to plotting or the weird circumstances around the broadcast start, and it does appear to be climbing in towards the target.

[originaldetectivesheep]

Fall Anime the Everything After, T1

Nearly everything that's supposed to finish this season is done, so no time like the present to unburden out a whole bunch of opinions that even fewer people will read, as this website no longer exists.  From the top, with the best of the bunch:

Golden Kamuy smashed down to an appropriately explosive conclusion that wrapped up everything that's been broadcast this year, while still wedging the door open for more to come further down the line.  The crazy network of shifting alliances is getting a little confusing, with the characters killed off tending to complicate rather than simplify the picture, but everything that has been good about this show from the beginning remained good all the way to the end -- and will continue to be so whenever the TV animation arrives on the shores of Sakhalin.

Banana Fish hit a few hitches of averageness or obviousness getting there, but in the end completed a monumental work that should have fulfilled about every possible expectation, and handled its serious subjects with appropriate weight and grace.  The few fit-and-finish issues coming mostly out of the time skip in this adaptation persisted almost all the way though, but shouldn't bar even the uptightest of history nerds from putting this in the conversation for show of the season both here and for the summer past.

There's definitely an argument to be made about flipping these two, but probably don't make it to the kind of death metal weirdo who thinks of that cut in the next-to-last Golden Kamuy episode where Sugimoto has a bayonet driven through his face as awesome, inspirational cinema.

Chuukan Kanriroku Tonegawa had some issues navigating its second cour, but if the focus slipped a little on relatable business travails, the adventures of the underground workers on their days off almost always hit for hilarious comedy and no lack of good social comment.  Some of the best individual episodes happened this season, even if the whole was less unified, and the series in its entirety was well up to the level of the first class.

SonoKano, as anticipated, successfully negotiated the difficulties of its format and production style with ceaseless and critical reality; there is not a lot of it, in absolute terms, and the style does put up barriers to access, but for those who were willing to take a second and just breathe, these were usually about the best three continuous minutes per week, all through the season.

That wind's gonna keep rising behind TsuyoKaze, on and on into the new year.