Writing Blog

20231028 A Problem (Badly) Solved

October 28, 2023, 12:30pm

The Discord person issue has been solved, and I had nothing to do with it.

Two days ago, they posted a link to a Medium piece they had written, which they said was a sort of prelude to the NaNo story.

One of the longer-term NaNo writers said that it was a good outline.

The person said, no, that was their story. It was edited and finished.

We all went and had a look. It was terrible. Grammar was optional, some of it didn't make sense and it was all tell, not show. I DM'ed the site's "boss" and indicated that this person needed some help that we, as a server, could not give them. Her response was I was one of maybe 8 people who had said exactly the same thing.

There then followed a DM exchange between the boss and said person... which the person screenshot sections of and posted on the server. They demanded to know how dare we judge their writing. After all, the only published authors amongst us were self-published and that's "not real."

It was then pointed out that quite a few of us are trad published, and I was brought up, as Invasive Species is in the top 100 creature horror books on Kindle Unlimited, so I'm not exactly falling down in the sales and critical response department. Sure, most aim for self-publishing, but a few of us are trad. They didn't realise that.

They next went off on us gatekeeping, and a few defended them in this regard, saying it's their writing journey.

(She - boss; they - person; I hate pronouning people...)

The boss then put up the screenshots that the person left out, which indicated she had told them just that, but she had indicated that their attitude is off-putting, and there is no way work like their Medium work is going to be trad published, no matter what they think.

Cue expletives, pouting and abuse.

They pulled the work from Medium and left the server and everyone local they were "buddies" with on the NaNo site was dumped.

Problem solved. I just wish it could have been solved better.