So you’ve told him then? You sent him this thread so he knows about it?
In the ending notes.
Yes, I guess it’s just suspicious to me with all the trans hate I’ve seen online lately that someone is picking out a trans story specifically.
You picked out a random, not super popular short story that a man wrote and posted just for fun and brought it to a public writing forum to be torn apart for critique probably behind his back. I do not understand how that doesn’t register as wrong to you. If it was actually the author you had a problem with, you should have lead with that. Like ‘here is why this guy is terrible, and here is why this work is an example of that’.
It just rubs me the wrong way with all the trans hate I’ve seen lately that you’d pick out a story where the author notes ‘hey I wrote this story because I’m trans, and it helped explore my feelings about being trans’ to do this to.
They should have lead with that and I would have never said anything then, because if it’s a personal exploration, it’s not really fiction. But they started it with ‘I wanna a story about a gay vampire’ which doesn’t indicate any meaningful personal journey for an author. The post asked if you connected with it, so I said no and explained why. I can give you the same yes/no answer on any story you put in front of me, where and why I stopped reading.
Alright, I’m not sure if everybody’s missing my point or I’m just making it badly. Yeah, I can be pretty bad at explaining things. The quality of the work is not my point here. If I put a story in front of you, it’d be my own, as an aspiring author going out looking for beta readers. This vampire story is in front of you because NARB wanted others to laugh with them behind the author’s back about a work they think is bad.
Also,
What??? How do you figure that???
Who are you to decide what qualifies as a personal journey for the author?
I agree with you that it’s bad form to criticize someone behind their back. Just because something’s posted on the internet doesn’t mean it’s a public work, so to speak. I wouldn’t want strangers linking to my book on Wattpad to laugh at it in other forums. I only posted it on Wattpad for Wattpad users to read. If they want to laugh at it individually, fine. But hopefully not en masse. ˓(ᑊᘩᑊ⋆)
Alright, I have to admit, I’m not socially tactful enough to know how to argue your constant attempts to turn this around on me. You’re clearly not gonna listen, so fine, I’m done. If you wanna pick on writers you don’t like, have at it, kiddo.
The problem I find is that there isn’t really a way for an author to know this is happening unless they are obsessively searching for any and all mentions of their book. In theory I would be upset but more likely, I would never know about it.
Mostly I wanted to see other’s impressions of the work, see if they agreed or disagreed with me.
You may be right, but I’m not familiar with how A03 works and what the dashboard shows you. It’s possible that the author can see who’s linking to their books and what addresses are clicking on it, and thus trace it back to this forum. Dunno!
As for the story itself, I’m afraid I can’t give you my impression since I’m not into vampires, so I didn’t read it. But like they say, there are readers for every book if only they can find it. ¯\_(ﭢ)_/¯
Internal exploration is not facing audience or seeks to try to relate own experiences to others, make them universal. It’s hard to read such stories, and, moreover, critique them. I try to never pair up with anyone who is too close to their fiction for critique.
Actually, it’s not me who decided that, but if the guy stated in the beginning what he said at the end of his novella, I wouldn’t have critiqued his opening.
But, yes, if someone, anyone, put this novella in front of me saying, hey, check out my vampire story, I would have said exactly the same thing: opening with an info-dump instead of a character–when word count more than permits exploration–resembles COVID so much it sounds like it capitalizes on current hot topic and no, I don’t find the premise any more plausible than Hunger Games.
If the author asked for praise, received critique, and then got upset and said you just didn’t get his story, I would agree with this. But like… he didn’t ask to pair up with you. You’re not a critique partner trying to help this author improve his work for publication as a paid product.
I don’t know how to describe what this conversation is like… It’s-… Like, you’re bypassing my main point, and making valid and reasoned points about something beyond it that I would agree with if that were about what I was talking about?
