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At times I've cited Stephen King's creative writing book during reviews I've offered, and I also mentioned his tone comes across as kind of a jerk.

It seems he's gone and confirmed this with his political tweet ---
"A trainload of Republicans on their way to a pricey retreat hit a garbage truck. My friend Russ calls that karma."

He then later tweets an attempt to walk it back ---
"A rather thoughtless tweet from me concerning the train-truck crash, for which I apologize (if one is necessary). It should be pointed out, too, that those Republican politicians, who can be heartless when they vote, immediately got out to help."

My final conclusion of Stephen King after reading his creative writing book and some chapter samples of his writing was that he saw himself as greater than he really was. To this end, he stated in his book he was a "great" writer and a "good" writer could never elevate themselves to become a great writer, though a mediocre writer could improve to become a good writer. Well, his sentence construction and plot construction aren't things good writers can't equal or exceed on their own, so like a good narcissist, he's overestimated himself.

This callous tweet of his based on politics (You aren't worth my sympathy from a car collision because you don't have the same political beliefs) pole vaults my opinion of him into the most likely to be reincarnated as a dung beetle category. Oh, this coming from a guy who himself was hit by a van, so does this mean that since King doesn't share the same political beliefs as me, I can tell him the van plowing into him was Karma at work if I ever run into him? What's good for the goose is good for the gander?

There’s no such thing as writer’s block. That was invented by people in California who couldn’t write.
– Terry Pratchett

Bump:

Okay, I've transferred my prologue chapter to the premium section where its worth points to review.

If any of you can stop by and give me an opinion on it, I'd appreciate that. You can simply enter the minimum edits needed for the points since I'm interested in your overall opinion.

The problem -- I recently got another mention about how the reviewer was confused on the beginning of the prologue and so I need to see if others see it that way as well. I've made some changes already to it and I think it's clear as day, but maybe that's just me?

Can I get some help in the form of an opinion?

I created a more thorough (or so I think) prologue after getting more than a few reviews over time indicating the current prologue is confusing since it feels like it begins in the middle of things and skips the beginning.

Can some of you let me know if the new prologue seems better / worse / same as the original one attached the chapter 1?

I know the general recommendation of how-to authors is to skip using a prologue, but I'd like to use one if I can make it stick. The new one did increase my word count by around 1k extra words, but it may be worth it if it's better in providing a more informative framework for the story.

The new prologue to view is under this review group as a separate book item. Because it's only posted to this group there are no points, and so I would not need any actual reviewing done just a read through and opinion if you can.

Thank you,

In the heroic fantasy genre, there is an accomplished author I've mentioned before--Brandon Sanderson--TOR publishing's top ace.

He's certainly somewhat arrogant and that comes through, most successful authors are to varying degrees, but on the jackass meter--with author Jim Butcher planted firmly at the tail end of the jack ass--Brandon Sanderson would be opposite of him on the helpful side.

He has in the past been an invited guest professor for creative writing courses at Brigham Young University. All of his lectures were taped and loaded on YouTube. If you have the time, you should seriously consider watching some of them as it will be like enrolling in a class with a NYT best selling author as the instructor. How does it get better than that? Maybe only by having him co-write your book, standing at your side, I suppose.

The amount of creative writing know how he has, along with personal knowledge of other famous authors and their habits, is well worth exploring from him.

You only need to bring up YouTube and enter in the search field - Brandon Sanderson lectures. It doesn't matter that you don't read and write heroic fantasy, his writing knowledge and instructions can only benefit your own writing greatly.

I haven't seen all or even likely half the writing sites out there. The few I do know of have highlighting text options like we use here for premium reviewing.

I was wondering if any of you thought it was worth asking Sol if he can have at least a few different colors optioned for highlighting text? The sites I referred to all have that option. I'd rather if it became available red was not an option. We've seen enough red marks from children through adulthood to be sick of them.

I'm not thinking of having a whole color wheel of options. Even one more color aside from our current blue would be helpful to indicate a different level of look-here for the highlight.

Opinions? Do you think it's not worth mentioning? It is worth mentioning?

Good suggestion and I hadn't considered changing up the tags much myself. I'll have to fix that in the future.

I found it strange how there's a lot of edits that advise to show rather than state it and then I notice the published books are using hardly any showing on tags. Maybe it's because they have to work within a tight word count limitation from their publishers (not sure why).

That's what I was thinking in that the tags are best used as situational to decide between telling and showing. I'll need to look at changing tags on my revisions and use situational thinking to decide between the versions.

I'm running behind on getting back on review replies so my apologies if I haven't responded yet. I've lately been engrossed in reading over several Chinese translated to English light novels (fantasy genre, of course!).

I think I can learn a thing of two from how they manage to evoke some strong emotional scenes, though they do quite a bit wrong (repeat back story info, information dumping in large quantities, breaking into action scenes with information dumps, etc.)

You know you've done something right when your readers are commenting, "I hate that guy! Please kill him off he's so awful!".

Just to let you all know, I removed Cobber from this review group today. I'm certain he won't be surprised at this since he continued a pattern of disappearing for his review contributions once his book was completed to this day.

He was months behind some, if not all members, and his profile showed he has been doing reviews--just not on any of you. Yes, it was the reviews he continued to do on those outside this group that made it clear this was not simply procrastination on his part.

This review group, and probably most of the others on this site, was created mainly with the idea of mutual benefit in mind. When someone takes in all the combined review efforts and returns that kindness with a kick to the shins, it becomes noticeable at some point.

Even if there are failures to launch on extraneous proposed projects, like the NRP, the core mutual benefit of "I review you and in return you review me" (quid pro quo) should never be tossed out. As we all know, that guiding principle is the currency used and traded on this site regardless if one is in a review group or not.

I feel bad for those of you who baked a cake after he requested our help for a final push on his book, only to get back Happy Meal slices in return. I wish it was otherwise, and you could've recouped more of your efforts in return.

Suin wrote:
As a community, we should welcome new starters and give them confidence rather than criticise them publicly. Reviewing isn’t easy for beginners who have never done it before so we should offer our support, especially if we want people to stick around. Personally, I know my first reviews were worthless, but because of the kindness of some patient members, I have learned a lot about reviewing as well as writing and (I hope) my reviews aren't worthless anymore. Perhaps we could have a template of sample questions for new reviewers to help them become comfortable with reviewing.
    Simple things like;
    What did you like about the chapter?
    What could be improved?
    Etc.

CJ Driftwood:
I don't think this is what Gacela is talking about. You can tell the difference between someone's review who is only grabbing points and someone struggling to give an honest review.
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Since you are both in this group, I felt like tossing in my 2 cents here because the forum has quite a few agitators that like to latch on to passing commenters like a lamprey.

I find myself agreeing with both your points and not out of any desire to be politically correct or such. It seemed apparent from the almost copied/pasted responses the reviewer in question was avoiding putting in the work of an actual review.

But on the other hand, it seemed apparent (yes, I doubled up on the same phrase, but I can't be blue highlighted here for it ) Garcela's goal, which was as politely referenced by Suin as anyone could make it, is Garcela wanted to embarrass and sensationalize the affront in the largest way possible on this site.

Rather than adding to the "honesty" and "karma" factor one more *respectfulness*, she chose not to use what I and many others would have done and post it on their quickee instead (maybe she did - I didn't look at the reviews to see who it is). As further evidence, I noticed she completely (yes, I used an *ly* adverb after dogging everyone about it on reviews) avoided one of Suin's main points in her response about blasting them publicly.

So I ask do two wrongs make a right?

I realize you are both in Garcela's review group as well as this one, and I hope you are not offended on her behalf by my opinion here. I just think she wasted far more time on putting this out on forum blast than simply posting a quickee to them, or blocking them, or ignoring them and providing no review in return (completely justified).

Hmm, I think I did keep this post of mine under 1k words? I wonder how long it would've taken Abraham Lincoln to read the Gettysburg Address if I had written it for him.

Oops! I forgot to add I saw this interesting catch phrase someone had on their email. It goes like this - I like minding other people's business! I'm thinking of a similar one modeled from this if I ever get business cards printed up - I like holding others to a higher standard I can't aspire to myself. Okay ... okay you're going to tell me the other works better because it's shorter, but I can't see a way to shorten mine any further without losing cohesion.