Fiction

I am a short story writer who has stories in literary magazines, two in an anthology, and am working on my first collection right now. Writing has always been a huge part of my life. I joined a MFA program, but had to leave due to finances.

One of my coworkers is also a writer. We talk about how hard writing can be, the fun parts, stories and sentences and ideas strewn on papers around our homes. Lately she’s opened up to me about trying to snag a literary agent. This coworker writes young adult fantasy, so it’s a very different experience and scene.

She asked me if I would read her manuscript and give notes. I told her that there is a big difference in what we write, and while I’m sure her manuscript is great, it’s YA genre fiction, which is not my thing. She said “Are you saying it’s beneath you to read YA or something?”

I said no, the craft of writing genre fiction and literary fiction is different. Add to that the age category layer. I said it would be the same if she’d asked me to read and give notes about an adult romance. She said I sounded stuck up and she could “smell the MFA” on me.

And then I saw her Twitter where she went into this whole rant about how literary fiction authors have huge egos, how YA fiction is derided because it’s such a female/woman-heavy industry and especially since its biggest readers are young women. She kept referring to me as “asshole coworker” and had a bunch of people ripping apart pieces of my writing based on a short story that I wrote back in college.

I saw all this because she sent me a link, telling me that I’m the “twitter main character” and should probably apologize to her for insulting her book when it’s obvious no one cares about mine. I told her that what she did was ridiculously childish bullying, so it’s no wonder she’s writing young adult fantasy, she probably feels right at home with its main audience. This pissed her off even more, so she blocked me on Twitter.

I don’t think what I did was bad. I don't really read a lot of YA, so I wouldn't be able to help her. But AITA?

Not sure how relevant this is, but I'm a woman. Not a man.

I’m just searching for a solid voice of strength, with a lot of distracting fiction in the background. Something that will keep me entertained and wanting to keep reading (action/war/magic/twists and turns) but also contains calming reason and emotionally settling words. I hope that makes sense. Thank you.

Edit: I type this with golden tears in my eyes. I am filled with gratitude from all of your recommendations. The days since I lost my best friend have been cloudy and long but I have been embraced by so many internet strangers that the hurt has subsided a little. Thank you all so very much.

Light really fast, it's so fast that if you moved at light speed you could travel around the Earth 7.5 times in one second.

Characters who move at light speed should be able to get to literally any place on Earth in less than a second, that barely even counts as movement, it's more simmilar to teleportation.

If X regularly flies around the universe from planet to planet in seconds then yeah they're FTL.

However there are some characters who fight on Earth or other restricted areas (diffrent planets, arenas) and they haven't shown anything that comes close to going 7.5 times around the Earth in 1 second but people keep saying that they're thousands of times faster than light which is just false (there are exceptions such as Star Platinum not being able to go more than 2 meters away from Jotaro but I don't think that it's FTL either).

A great example of this is Dragon Ball, Goku is quintilions of times faster than light by now according to some fan calcs but in Dragon Ball Super Vegeta boasts that he can fly to Herculopolis in 5 seconds, Moro didn't get all of the Dragon Balls in 3 days even though he can sense them so if he's that fast it should take less than a second ect...

Sometimes the author will say that their character is FTL to make them sound cooler without thinking about it too hard and that creates plot holes.

I've also seen a a guy argue that Phantom Blood Dio Brando is several times faster than light... just wtf.

Your existence is protected from timeline changes. You can undo an effect at any time.

Erase the Third Reich, and Hitler will have failed to take power, books on it being instead takes on a popular dark alternate history story.

Write something down, and turn it into reality, effectively giving you wishes of any length.

You should still be somewhat careful to what you do with this power, even if you can reverse it.

I've been thinking lately that of the many shows I watch, The Expanse is one of the shows that consistently write women the best. Of course, there has been other current shows written by female writers that do it amazingly, but The Expanse is not necessarily a show were I would have expected such amazingly written female characters.

What I love about it, is that the show doesn't need to lampshade it like "Look we've kicking ass women, we are WOKE". It just happens naturally by simply giving its female characters ... agency. Avasarala, Drummer, Bobbie and Naomi all have their own way of dealing with situations and move the plot foward on their own way. They are actively doing stuff and not everything gets done just because Holden saved the day (well, Holden still gets most of the credit, but we know that Holden alone wouldn't get much done lol).

I am not completely pleased with Naomis current plot, but I do love the fact that girl was just like "Look darling, I've got personal shit to deal with and I need you to be supportive and deal with whatever problem arise while I am gone" without putting her relationship with Holden first.

Again, all it takes to write "complex" female characters is giving them their own set of skills, worldviews, ambitions and goals. Letting them act accordinly to who they are and not just blindly on behalf of default heroic male character...

Who would have thought that to write excellent female characters all you need to do is write women like real people?

• Tau Zero - Poul Anderson

• Windup Girl - Paolo Bacigalupi

• In the Ocean of Night - Gregory Benford

• Heart of the Comet - David Brin

• Jurassic Park - Michael Crichton

• The Songs of Distant Earth - Arthur C. Clarke

• Triton - Samuel R. Delany

• Permutation City - Greg Egan

• Rocheworld - Robert L. Forward

• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - Robert Heinlein

• The Children of Men - P. D. James

• Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski

• Beggars in Spain - Nancy Kress

• His Master's Voice - Stanislaw Lem

• InterstellarNet: Origins - Edward M. Lerner

• The Three-Body Problem - Cixin Liu

• Learning the World - Ken MacLeod

• The Collapsium - Wil McCarthy

• The Speed of Dark - Elizabeth Moon

• A World Out of Time - Larry Niven

• Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel - George Orwell

• The Quantum Thief - Hannu Rajaniemi

• 2312 - Kim Stanley Robinson

• Cold as Ice - Charles Sheffield

• The Compleat McAndrew - Charles Sheffield

• The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson

• Saturn's Children - Charles Stross

• Sayonara, Gangsters - Genichiro Takahashi

• Rainbows End - Vernor Vinge

• Blindsight - Peter Watts

• The Martian - Andy Weir

I put out this list for fu

I don't mean to paint current historical/period fiction with a broad brush but I think we are at peak WW2 romance novel.

I'm looking for something in the vein of Joseph Conrad, Jack London or lesser known BWS who wrote Terribilita. I'd like to get into something gritty and authentic, something with a little more adrenaline.

Just for kicks and QED:

The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The Ballerina of Auschwitz, the Mistress of Auschwitz, The Violinist of Auschwitz, The Librarian of Auschwitz, The Thief of Auschwitz, the Child of Auschwitz, The Brothers of Auschwitz, the Magician of Auschwitz

Or...

The Clockmaker's Wife, The Paris Wife, The Lost Wife, The Winemaker's Wife, The Zookeeper's Wife, the Prisoner's Wife, The Dutch Wife, The German Midwife (curveball)

I graduated from my master’s in Literature several years ago. I was going to do my PhD, but realised that job prospects as a professor would require being open to relocation, something I wasn’t willing to do. My academic interests lay in post-WWII sci-fi, slave narratives and representations of deviancy in literature.

Since then, I’ve realised that people not only expect you to have read everything ever written, if you have a Literature degree, but also expect you to be only engaged with ‘high-brow’ books that are in the literary canon. In pub quizzes people turn to me on questions about Grisham or Hemingway and don’t believe me when I mention I’ve never read them. There’s this weird assumption that I must adore Austin and all of Shakespeare’s works just because I studied literature. Most bizarrely, some people seem weirdly offended when I haven’t heard of their favourite author.

It seems rather silly that people expect literature graduates to have read every famous book ever, there’s a bloody awful amount of books in the literary canon. It seems even more ridiculous that people assume that we only ever read ‘high-brow’ works which haven’t been written in the past hundred years. There seems to be this bizarre expectation that popular/contemporary fiction is antithetical to the study of literature. I just wish more people knew that occasionally I want to bosh through trashy romance novels, whilst other times I fancy hitting up some cheesy crime fiction with a bottle of wine. Most of the works I researched as a postgraduate would appeal more to the average person than the caricature of the elitist scholar! Where does this notion of literary elitism even come from?! The vast majority of people I know working in literary academia are exceptionally laid back!

This has been a Christmas Day TED talk brought to you by cheap lager and family interaction.

EDIT: RIP inbox! This blew up whilst I was celebrating.

Im going to respond to a few of the frequent comments I’ve seen. I’m well aware it’s Jane Austen*, but fell victim to autocorrect, so I’m sorry for that! There’s not a great deal of careers linked to getting an MA in Lit outside of academia, and most of my peers who didn’t do PhDs went into marketing. I’m not saying (or bragging) that I don’t enjoy any work in the literary canon, there’s plenty of classics I enjoy! I just haven’t read/enjoyed every classic ever and that’s okay! I made this post as a silly vent about something which has proved a mino

This is a pet peeve of mine, but I can’t stand fantasy books. Anything with wizards and mages and quests and singing swords and the like drives me up a wall.

I have recently read two books which were recommended as science fiction which turned out to be fantasy: “Lord Valentine’s Castle” by Robert Silverberg, and “The Eye of the World” by Robert Jordan. I didn’t finish the first but forced myself to finish the latter.

It’s my fault, because I know if I had done any basic research into either title I would have known what they were before reading them.

My purpose here is not to bash those books. I know they are highly regarded, but they are not my cup of tea.

I’m just wondering why science fiction gets lumped together with fantasy when, at least to my way of thinking, they are two completely different genres.

It’s probably just me, isn’t it?

Any era is fine and it doesn’t matter if you saw it at the theater or not ( not everyone is old as dirt :)

Mine in no particular order are

-The one the only original Planet of The Apes

-Aliens

-Terminator

-Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan

-John Carpenter’s The Thing

-Total Recall

-Lifeforce

-The Empire Strikes Back

-Predator

-Ghost in The Shell

I don't remember where I saw this or if it was a movie or a book. In this dystopian world, there is a secret short word which subconsciously causes people to feel certain emotions (consumerism? desire? anger?) and it's secretly embedded in all the advertising, books and media. The conscious mind skips over it and doesn't realize it's there. I think the plot was that someone in the story started being able to see this word and was trying to convince everyone it was there.

Can someone give me a good recommendation? I love fiction books that carry a lot of wisdom or have great dialogue on a deeper level. The books don’t have to be overtly spiritual like Siddhartha or the Alchemist although I did enjoy those. Some books I’ve enjoyed previously along these lines were Anna Karenina, Easte of Eden, John Green’s books and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I also don’t tend to click with books that explicitly try to do this like Tuesdays with Morrie or zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. Thank you!

I'm into sci-fi, survival and horror. Also something that's not confusing.