Dachet Grival

Happy New Year's, all! I am with a group of people who are going to be doing resolutions, as well as challenges and bucket list items. I am placing the list here first, as they are time-sensitive. The list will be expanded as new ideas emerge.

@JoeBerne1 One of my good friends only reads romances. She says she can't stand anything that does not have that element, but she loved my story (unpublished, no spice). I have people reading my works that say they hate the genre or MC, but still enjoy the book. I take such pride in that.

Writers: do readers from any demographic bring you extra joy? I love all my readers, but I'm extra happy when South Asians or young female readers love my books. The former you'd understand if you read them; the latter b/c it means I'm reaching people who aren't like me.

@JoeBerne1 I have heard that argument and understand. Star Wars is a broad tale of knights and grand themes that small children can understand. Andor cannot be appreciated by most adults nowadays. Star Wars should be family friendly; Andor absolutely is not. In many aspects, it is art.

@DachetGrival As much as I loved Andor I thought it suffered for being attached to Star Wars and was, in fact, a bad Star Wars story.

My hot take for today: Prequels. If a prequel adds anything to the story, the main series wasn't good. If they don't, the prequel isn't good. You should be able to figure out the backstory, more or less, from what happens in the main series.

@JoeBerne1 Andor explained the structure and financing for the resistance. As I got older, I wondered how the resistance had their own brand of ships if they were just a loose group of rebels. Who designed and built them? With what money? The same for rebuilding the Death Star so fast.

@JoeBerne1 Under the same logic, the same could be said for sequels. A second book ij a series is a sequel; the first, being a prequel to that. If a story preceding another doesn't add anything to the latter, then I feel it failed. Andor is a perfect example.

@Siennafrst @MatthewZorich Well, to be fair, if they are a good writer, they acknowledged you are as well. Also, that work may have been polished, but not as polished as Obsidian. Finally, you post a lot about how you still grow as a writer. Maybe you were not as good back then, but are far better today.

10 years ago a big name in fandom read my viral fan fiction and said “you’re good, but idk if you’re good enough to go pro.” I’m having fun + being paid plenty. Who gaf if anyone thinks I’m a real writer? “Professional” sounds like a constipated 2nd job I want to quit actually🤣

@Siennafrst Congrats to her!

First pocket money of the season. #thailpga mini color tour. Go Annie. I’ve decided I’m not gonna be an Asian mom who breeds doctors. I’m going to breed winners.☝️😁

@Siennafrst If it is in your own home or your business, why can't it be a message for all. For your family, each day, welcome home. For your customers in your business, it is like welcoming them to a family.

So I put this up for my daughter when she came home from the US last summer. I kept wondering if I bring it down it might imply that she’s no longer welcomed and now I don’t know what to do with it…

@JamesAllenMaxey I feel most of the works would not do well as films, but could be done as a tv series. I would add most of Gene Wolfe's works and Song of Solomon.

Ten unfilmable novels: (Note: There may, in fact, be films with these names, but they seldom capture the essence of the novel.) Blood Meridian Slaughterhouse Five Ulysses Look Homeward Angel The Master and Margarita One Hundred Years of Solitude Moby Dick Don Quixote If on a Winter's Night a Traveler The Brother's Karamazov

@LJEinhorn @JamesAllenMaxey I believe they have been working on it. I heard of a production company in the process.

@JamesAllenMaxey Especially 100 Years hoo boy. Thank God no one has tried as of yet.

@JamesAllenMaxey All my best to you. Hopefully, it is just something like exhaustion or stress from all your running around to cons, something that is temporary.

I've been having a near total collapse of my short-term memory. Fortunately, a PET scan today ruled out the plaques associated with Alzheimer's, though genetic testing puts me in a high-risk group for the disease. It's a relief, but leaves me even more in the dark as to what's going on.

@KT_Carlisle Or, perhaps your sister liked the plot and characters and breezed by the grammar and prose issues. I hear a lot of college students and younger basically skim when reading to get the "idea" of what is expressed without seeing nuance or inconsistencies.

My sister called me up last week to rave about this book, claiming it “sounded like something I might write,” so naturally, I bought it. I started it today, so ready to fall in love with it, only to be met with… 💀 Filtering 💀 Consecutive sentences starting with the same word 💀 Expo dumps for days 💀 Narrative inconsistencies and obvious plot holes 💀 Misspelled words And now I’m wondering if I’m even good at writing if this is what I’m associated with. 🫠

@JamesAllenMaxey Is this for the year so far, or at one convention?

I released Angels of Sodom and Map of the Drowned City last Summer and they've been neck and neck with revenue, and I wasn't certain which would hit $3k first. Angels took the win today! I've now sold 100 copies at $30. It was close! Map is at $2950.

@JasonWMizer @JamesAllenMaxey Right. Now people are taking beloved IPs and characters and changing them into worse versions as a cash grab. That is another argument against allowing others to do whatever vision they have for it. I personally dislike the time limits on copyright laws and feel they are wrong.

@JamesAllenMaxey I definitely agree Copyright laws needs to be changed, but I don't want to see the same stories done worse. Hollywood needs to work on new stories. They used to take chances. They no longer do.

You will not surpass the original LOTR. In other words, just don't because we won't watch it.

@JamesAllenMaxey @JasonWMizer Second, look what has happened recently. Mickey Mouse is being used in accident attorney commercials and Winnie the Pooh was just turned into a gory horror film. I feel the family should reap the rewards as long as possible, just like if they had inherited a business.

@JamesAllenMaxey @JasonWMizer I have an issue with that. First, if an author writes a book that is popular, why shouldn't their grandchildren reap the benefits for years to come as a legacy? It's like saying a person's house should be up for eminent domain in seventy-five years.

@JamesAllenMaxey That was a heck of a post. Although I feel you believe it helped you grow as an author, I am sorry for what you had gone through.

Over the weekend, I talked to a fifteen year old who said he wanted to be a writer and I told him what he should focus on at his age to become a good writer was making a lot of friends. His mom said, "He has good friends!" I immediately said, "You need to find some bad ones. By the time you're 25, a few of your friends should have been in jail a time or two." His mom said, "Let's hope not," but the kid was like, "Wait, Tommy got arrested!" He sounded excited! And he should have been! I told him friends should be inconvenient. Now and then, you should get a phone call at three in the morning from a buddy who's car has broken down 200 miles away and they need you to drop everything and come pick them up. Great books don't come from mimicking better books. They come from actual life experience. They come from your real life encounters with angels and devils, from triumphs, and from utter and complete defeats. All my favorite artists are broken. They crashed into heartbreak and addiction. The still can't get over that the person they couldn't live without died, or walked away with everything they held dear. I've slept in my car. I've held the hand of a lover as she took her last breath. I've come home to a house to find that my wife had packed up and moved out to go live with someone she'd met through work. She'd taken the dogs. She'd left the cats. And I all I could do about it was sit on the deck of my lonely house, surrounded by citronella tiki torches long past midnight, typing out another novel. If you want to make art in the age of AI, you need to play to your strengths. And, for a human, your strengths are your weaknesses. Your hungers. Your lusts. Your pettiness and jealousies. Your crimes and your sins. All your darkness. Because only in a dark sky can you see the full glory of the stars.

@JamesAllenMaxey Those are wonderful stories. That is great. You should feel so proud.

One thing about doing shows for a long enough time frame is you eventually meet people who are more than "fans." I had two conversations in Richmond with people that felt like a confirmation that I hadn't wasted the last thirty years of my life. I met a mother and son who read my books together. I didn't ask his age, but either late teens, early 20s. He'd struggled with reading in school, never voluntarily read books. She was an avid reader who'd bought Bitterwood from me a few years ago and had the idea to use her book-hating son as an audiobook on a long drive. He'd started reading Bitterwood to her, struggling with the names and challenging vocabulary, but she kept saying he was doing great, keep going. He wound up loving the book because of all the tension, twists, and turns, and is now someone who reads constantly. He could discuss deep dive details of my books, pulling up characters I barely recalled. Then, I met a woman who bought Map of the Drowned City, even though she'd already read my other collections and I told her a lot of the material was going to be duplicated. She said she didn't mind, because, while she routinely bought books from authors at these shows, my books were her favorite. She then pinpointed what she liked: Everything I wrote felt meaningful. Every story felt like I was grappling with some big question. She compared me to another author I won't name and said his work was always entertaining, but it was also a little empty. We both delivered strong plots and interesting characters, but my books were the ones that left her seeing the world a little differently. Writing is lonely work. It's not just Twitter that leaves you feeling like you're shouting into a void. Even if you get a thousand reviews, the reviews are usually boil down to "Great book 👍," and it's a little sugar high, but you can never be certain if they just enjoyed your book, or genuinely engaged with it. Did you have an impact? Did your book matter? Did it mean anything at all? So, when you do get to meet readers face to face, and one of them tells you that, yes, your book mattered, it's better than winning an award or seeing your checking account balance jump forward four grand after a busy weekend of selling books. As I head into my fourth straight weekend of events, with my body and mind on the verge of total collapse, encounters like this make the slog worth it. Slog on, James. Slog on.

@JamesAllenMaxey If only more sales organizations operated that way.

Closers get khachapuri.

@JamesAllenMaxey Congratulations on that achievement!

I did more in sales today than I've done at any con for a total weekend since November. It was nice finding out I can still sell books after a long run of middling shows. Fingers crossed I can stick the landing tomorrow.

@DNicholsAuthor My shelves are irregularly spaces, so I place all of an author or the same size together. I have three or four different shelves with Gene Wolfe on it because of paperbacks, hardcovers, larger volumes, etc.

Hey, fellow writers & readers...I'm feeling nosy. How do you arrange the books on your bookshelf? #WritingCommunity #writers #writingq #reading