FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
12hr ago
Ahhh. Yes, I'm Irish.
For example, we were discussing her vegetable garden at home, and I asked her what her favorite vegetable from it was. Answer: I don't know. What she wanted to study: I don't know. What she liked to do for fun. Many things.
Ugh, I'm feeling vicariously frustrated just reading about it. Some people have like negative conversational skills.
FtttG
13hr ago
I want to get a LOT of broccoli this time. Eating it without oil or cheese, just salted and microwaved is just fine for me and it's very filling.
One method of preparing broccoli I'm very fond of: boil it in salted water for five minutes, take it out, then pour a little vinegar and soy sauce (also sesame oil if you like) over it. Delicious and fairly lo-cal.
I now intend to read that book FtttG linked about attachment theory.
I hope you find it useful! I'd offer to send you my copy, but I already lent it to my uncle who's complained about some of the same issues you have.
It's literally Tennis Replacement Theory, and tennis players on the internet are not happy about it.
bahahaha
Relationships are all about compromise, and give and take. You demonstrate your affection for your partner by doing things that she wants to do and you don't: after all, if they were things you enjoyed doing, you'd do them anyway. It's the fact that you're willing to sacrifice your time and resources to do something for her that demonstrates how important she is to you. The important thing is that it cuts both ways: if you're doing things for her that you don't enjoy, there's a reasonable expectation that she return the favour. But try not to think about this too much, or you run the risk of making your relationship seem cheap and transactional, a ledger that requires constant balancing. If you want her to watch a dumb action movie with you, when she asks you to come for dinner with her parents, just smile and say "of course, dear". Or buy her flowers or something. It's not rocket science. If it's weak-willed or "beta" to do things for your partner that you don't really want to do, well, that just sounds kind of exploitative to me. Good luck finding a girlfriend who's completely happy for you to walk all over her and never do anything for her in return.
I don't think this ordinary fact about romantic relationships should discourage you from getting into one. If you were to ask me to list the things about my girlfriend that most get on my nerves, the fact that she occasionally drags me along to go window-shopping with her would not crack the top ten, the top twenty, probably not even the top fifty.
If I do have a line in the sand, it's preference falsification. If my girlfriend wants me to come to some boring museum exhibition with her, I'll go along happily. If she wants me to attend a protest for some political cause I emphatically don't support (say, a "Free Palestine" rally), that's a hard no. Even the idea of a single man going to a protest he doesn't believe in just to meet girls makes me feel gross. And yes, it does strike me as a bit lame to performatively attend a protest you wouldn't attend otherwise just because your wife wants you to.
- Posted my third blog post of the year on Monday, listing all the books I read last year and which of those I most enjoyed (expanded from a comment I posted here).
- Went to the gym three times last week, then again on Monday evening. Planning to go at lunchtime today. Can deadlift 1.75x my bodyweight for 5 reps, squat .9x for 13 reps and bench press .72x for 9 reps.
- Have not consumed any alcohol, fast food, fizzy drinks or pornography since waking up on January 1st. When it comes to snacking between meals, I have failed absolutely.
- Have completed 7/11 modules in the SQL course.
- Have practised guitar for roughly one hour every day since January 1st.
The hot Argentinian women just wouldn't even engage with me over text (like was just giving complete non-answers to my questions, and we were talking in Spanish!) so I lost interest.
No point pursuing it if she's not putting in the effort. It's funny though: some people are very good at expressing themselves, but hopeless when it comes to texting. The fact that she's responding in monosyllables doesn't necessarily mean she's not interested. But yeah, don't waste your time.
Also – is it "Argentinian", or "Argentine"?
Most literary agencies accepting unsolicited submissions request a query letter, a synopsis (of three to five hundred words) and an excerpt. The excerpt is typically the first three chapters, first 5,000 words, first 10,000 words or similar. I have little doubt that many agents reject a work without even looking at the excerpt, because the query letter and synopsis don't strike them as compelling.
Hence, there are several filters a prospective author must pass through:
- The query letter. If the query letter doesn't make the book sound compelling, or doesn't make a persuasive business case that the book will be a commercial success, or makes it sound like it would be difficult to sell to a publisher (e.g. too long, too short, uncertain genre and audience), it's an automatic reject.
- The synopsis. If the agent is intrigued by the query letter, but the synopsis is confusing and disorganised without a clear sense of narrative progression or story structure, it's a reject.
- The excerpt. If the query letter tickles the agent's fancy and the synopsis sounds logical and engaging, but the first three chapters are poorly written, it's a reject.
- The full manuscript. If the query letter, synopsis and first three chapters are solid, the agent will request the full manuscript. But having read the full thing, they might decide it's not up to standard and pass on it.
So it's not the case that an agent has to read hundreds of full manuscripts every year, adding up to several million words. If an agent receives 500 submissions, he might only bother reading the excerpts of 50 of them (5,000 words x 50 = 250,000 words), with the rest getting rejected on the basis of a weak query or synopsis. Of the 50 excerpts he reads, he might only request 10 full manuscripts (10 x 75,000 = 750,000 words). So at most he's only reading a million words of prose a year (and he might well decide to pass halfway through the excerpt or the full manuscript). A million words of prose in one year is very doable: assuming 261 business days in a year, that's 3,831 words a day, or roughly 15 pages. Last year I read at least 9,164 pages: assuming ~250 words a page, that's 2.3 million words, and that was for pleasure, not my day job.
FtttG
1d ago
I'm not much of a fantasy head, but are you looking for a beta reader? Or have you given up this particular project?
FtttG
1d ago
I can't imagine I'll be done with my fourth draft for at least another fortnight.
The one serious effort I made, I got zero agent interest, but I did make it all the way to Baen's final editorial board.
How long was it, if you don't mind my asking?
FtttG
1d ago
These look really professional. I particularly like the one on the Great Wall.
Since November, I've been sending out query letters for my novel (which originated as a project for NaNoWriMo 2024), and have yet to receive any requests from agents to see the full manuscript. Therefore, it sucks and I quit.
/s No way am I going to give up that easily. However, I do think my query letter is letting me down, and needs to be heavily reworked. Additionally, the feedback I've been getting over on /r/PubTips is that it's practically unheard of for a literary agent to take a chance on a debut novel significantly in excess of 100k words, and in my query letter I mention up front that my novel is 112k (rounding down).
This is not quite as precious and self-indulgent as it sounds: the first draft was 133k, and removing over 15% of that was no mean feat. But I'm coming round to the idea that if I want to get this thing published, I'll have to meet the agents halfway. To that end, I've commenced work on a fourth draft with the explicit goal of cutting ~12k words (more, if possible), or 11.4%. Having edited the first four chapters, I've reduced their word count by 10.6% without, I think, losing anything significant, so I think I'm on the right track. Hope I won't have to kill too many darlings.
I have made no progress on mastering "Phobophile" on the guitar. The last few days I've just been practising two-octave scales (major, harmonic minor, natural minor, Mixolydian).
FtttG
1d ago
The latter. Personally, I don't think the standard gripes about a shortage of accommodation, unreliable public transport and an imperfect public health service a failed state make.
A lot of my friends are non-natives, and I often joke that, in Ireland, there are no issues, problems or inconveniences. There are only crises.
FtttG
1d ago
FtttG
1d ago
Yeah, he has these melodramatic writing tics that undermine the gravity and solemnity he's trying to project:
Tennis players would sheepishly wait for the crowd to clear so they could drive in and park. My sympathies were with them, these were their lives and happiness, after all.
Like, what? Playing tennis is your "life" and "happiness"? I don't even know what you're trying to convey here.
FtttG
2d ago
Sure, but that also describes many people who voted for Trump. Should we deport every working-age able-bodied adult who falls below a given productivity threshold?
FtttG
2d ago
"Really, you were fleeing from the dystopian failed state of... Ireland?"
I've encountered my fair share of Irish people unironically describing it as such. They lack perspective.
Years ago I talked about a movie called Wild which depicts a woman hiking the Pacific Crest Trail solo. (Don't watch it, it's trash.) One of the pieces of advice she receives from a fellow hiker is to burn her books after she's done reading them. When you're actually hiking a long distance, I imagine every pound counts; not so much when travelling by plane.
That being said, a lot of people have this odd reverence for physical books in general, wholly independent of their monetary or intellectual value, and a concomitant aversion to destroying them for any reason. It's an anachronistic holdover from a time when books were enormously expensive to produce and consequently to buy. When you've finished reading a disposable thriller novel (e.g. Dan Brown, Lee Child), the appropriate thing to do is to recycle it, the same way you would a newspaper. You are not "doing the right thing" by donating it to a charity/thrift shop: that just kicks the problem down the road when they inevitably recycle it three to six months later. (I used to volunteer in a charity shop: we never wanted for Dan Brown novels. We could have used copies of The Da Vinci Code for insulation.)
In spite of how insightful and relevant I'm finding it (and how short it is), my progress on The True Believer has been slow.
FtttG
4d ago
Sure. But bear in mind: this whole Amelia started a couple of weeks ago, and there are already videos of her quoting poetry at length that users of this board are calling moving. I'm sure the first draft of Columbia looked a little rough around the edges (and not a little racist against Native Americans) too.
Do it! I love doing surveys.
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