CML eBooks

[CML]

hey guyz. so i turned in a characteristic CML performance at the SCG opens, starting 5-1 and dropping at 5-4 in standard and playing excellent magic at legacy for four rounds before fucking up in a fashion that brought about much self-loathing. it was very "me in 2011" and I'll try to do better next time (though the one-time member "SmugAsianMan" t8'ed Legacy with Zoo, which fills me with joy and hatred).

i'm digging the site's new header, boldly and correctly classifying OKCupid as a video game. a similar insight is articulated by one of my characters in my massively-updated novella, which is about people fucking up in their early twenties and is therefore not thematically distant from what we do all up in here.

who wants to read a copy? i'm tryna send it out to solicit as much feedback as possible. PM or post your e-mail and i'll send it along.

 

[Lucre]

Email me if you want some pizza rolls?
(Anyone else here seen any of the red letter media reviews?)

Sorry to hear about your unsatisfying performance. You may not have beaten them all but you can still feel better than most people!

Tracy is an amazing name for a dog.
I will PM CML about a copy when I am less entrenched in smutty historical fantasy and less beleaguered with class.

 

[Dom Harvey]

CML: dominicjharvey at gmail dot com

Went on reddit just now and somebody posted on the Cookie Clicker subreddit mournfully asking 'Have Cookie Chains become pointless?'. They never had a point. Nothing has a point.

 

[Jason Waddell]

So CML, approximately what percentage of your book is fictional?

 

[Jason Waddell]

Have any of you other nerds read CML's book?

 

[James Stevenson]

Yeah I am a little way into it, but some friends are staying with me now and I haven't had a chance to read this week.

 

[CML]

about 20 percent didn't actually happen, but bear in mind that not only is the narrator unreliable, but i too am an unreliable narrator.

 

[Dom Harvey]

I find that hard to believe!

 

[CML]

it's just a bid for readerly sympathy. the narrator is otherwise too unlikeable.

can someone confirm that this is in fact the worst article ever written and i am not going insane?
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/w...um=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+tpm-news+(TPMNews)

 

[Dom Harvey]

Yeah, it's awful. There's a kernel of truth there, but the author is taking it waaaay too far.

 

[CML]

"poor people buying luxury goods" seems like an appropriate topic for a magic forum

edit: usually i don't have enough bad things to say about wotc coverage and EDH but the vintage champs are a pleasure right now and at least the esper EDH deck is stacked with fantastic cards.very tasteful

 

[Jason Waddell]

Okay, I read it all while sick in bed over the weekend. Talked with CML a bit over the weekend, interested in hearing other opinions.

 

[CML]

skrap weighed in via PM, hoping that can make its way over here

actively soliciting feedback along these lines:

-so how to make it translate better into the lives of people who have no foreknowledge of me? jason says it'd be better if it were more explicitly in 2011, "garfield" was my HS, and the unattributed dialogue was cleaned up a little, but these are simple things. a thread i've been hearing in criticism lately is that the narrator needs to be both a loser and an admirable loser, and the best way to do this would be to give him more of a backstory, more stuff he wants to happen, more of an arc (even as he's totally myopic). maybe he wanted to move into a poker house but can't any more! maybe his plans at college were frustrated. maybe he is skeptical of long-term plans. on the other hand, i dunno how to do this without being self-indulgent so PLEASE HELP ME. (this will be good practice for dates)

-on an opposite and therefore similar note, we've gotta cut down on overwrought character descriptions and eliminate out of place CML rants, but, i don't know which ones.

-other stuff, the more specific the better. in books i like to start with an example and work my way up, kind of the opposite of how i conceptualize the universe with stereotypes yielding to individual exceptions.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Chapter 22: Is this supposed to be Leonard's grandmother's house? Can you state that explicitly somewhere?

 

[Jason Waddell]

I think it was the Jennifer intro that really struck me as excessively long without giving me enough insight into who she actually was as a character. There are a lot of random facts there that my brain just doesn't know what to do with.

 

[Jason Waddell]

I know you have rants on here about it, but one of the things we touched on was having the protagonist make progress while not making progress, how people don't really change. One piece of media that I thought handled this well was Season 1 of Lena Dunham's Girls. Lots of stuff happens, but you can't really say that the characters matured in a measurable way. There was an arc to the plot, things learned, cycles of repetition.

In the same way, Lena plays the protagonist in her own show, and one of the strengths of doing so is that she is able to capture her "character's" weaknesses so well. It's fine to have it be about a stalled-out twenty-something, but there is still the weight of expectation that the reader take something about it. I'd be interested in seeing you write out what the central thesis of the book is, and to focus on how to weave that into the text properly.

My first thought upon finishing it was that it was a 200-page diatribe on "bros before hos". I'm sure there are other ideas there but maybe they need to be framed a little more strongly.

 

[Aoret]

Copy pasted from PM:

I read through it over the weekend. It was a really interesting and enjoyable read. Kinda timely for me as I'm going through my own weird little life crisis (it seems like a lot of Riptide Lab is?)

As far as criticism goes, I found it a little bit difficult to follow at parts, mostly because of the way you've written the conversations. Most of it is manageable (two people talking to one another, alternating lines), but when more people are involved or there is a break in quotes followed by the same character speaking again on the next line, it can be easy to get lost. I found the jumps in timeline and locale a lot easier to keep track of, but there were still a couple where I was left wondering whether or not I was in the present. The jumps to memories of elementary school and middle school were easy to follow, but it seemed like there were a couple jumps to high school / immediately post high school that were a bit ambiguous since the same characters are involved, and they're basically doing the same things. The solution might be as simple as introducing the flashback as a flashback "It made me think of high school..." or whatever. The same could be said for stuff like Jason's point about the locale in chapter 22; I was actually able to pick that one up easily, and I think for a lot of these things, different readers will drop different pieces. Although it definitely breaks from your writing style (and your conversational style) to call this stuff out directly and explicitly, I think it makes the story more understandable overall. I think it is worth sacrificing a little bit of style for function here.

On the other hand, I really liked the feel I got from both of the aforementioned in certain situations. In one of the first bar scenes, where drinks are being ordered and introductions made, I really liked the pace you created by not wrapping every statement in "he said" or "I intoned" or whatever. To me, it evoked the feel of actually being there in that situation, catching bits and pieces of the many conversational threads. Similarly, the timeline jumps as you get drunker and drunker with Leo were funny and representative of the way you remember those sorts of nights.

 

[CML]

i wrote this in reply to mr skrap:

ah, wonderful stuff. thank you mr. skrap (if that really is your name).

jason also pointed out the conversation following thing. i'll try and fix it. (i stole the unattributed dialogue idea from waugh.) glad it works well when it's not just completely confusing. if you don't feel like you're right in the present i've certainly blown it, the narrator's tunnel vision and lack of control should create a certain anxiety for the reader (dread, too, later on). i was gonna ask if that was the case and if not then how to make more?!

a friend of mine said the book might need a little more "explicitness" to translate well into the world of people who had no foreknowledge of me. an example would be the above, another would be that jason didn't get the narrator was up to skeezy things with ada early on.

anything specific? specific helps.

---

wadds, girls is of great interest and kinda inspirational from at least a commercial perspective here. i remember reading on Lena's twitter (in response to the girls porno) that "girls is at its core a feminist action," but i am kinda uncomfortable molding what i do around single ideas like that, Nabokov called it "topical trash" and i agree, as good literature is more of a questions than an answers thing. at some point "thesis" begins to bleed into "themes" though, and thinking thematically is pretty important to me. you're right that "bros before hos" is the biggest central idea, though i want to ironize it a bunch and so i do.

i typed some themes out on skype the other day but will throw some more out there right now:

-bros before hos
-Borderline Personality Disorder is bad mmkay
-when people see the world in black and white, it is their own complexity they destroy
-there is no objective truth -- or, a reliable narrator is the trivial case of narrators
-to really hurt someone, try to kill their memories and context
-it's hard to romanticize doing nothing (thanks wadds)
-everyone should stop pretending to be independent
-privacy is for perverts, but surveillance is for creeps
-life can get worse; people can change, often for the worse, but usually don't change because they believe they won't
-if you are happy, you will be good
-americans work too much
-people lose sight of themselves in their twenties
-"new york" exists everywhere
-innocence cannot be regained
-everybody lies
-yolo

again, the major difficulty is writing (as 2013 CML) with these in mind the entire time, even as 2011 CML has forgotten how to think in these terms, at least until the epilogue.

 

[CML]

addendum: in case anyone missed it

https://twitter.com/CML_ebooks

 

[Jason Waddell]

I'll say that, perhaps those are things are ideas that CML 2011 had, but they don't really come through in the book. I don't see anything that points to saying that Americans work too much. Privacy and surveillance? I'm not really sure where there's a loss of innocence either.

 

[Aoret]

I'll say that, perhaps those are things are ideas that CML 2011 had, but they don't really come through in the book. I don't see anything that points to saying that Americans work too much. Privacy and surveillance? I'm not really sure where there's a loss of innocence either.

Agree with parts of this, but disagree that overwork isn't a theme. Many of the arguments between characters in the novella are about CML's complete lack of motivation to do anything that isn't poker (or whatever else he feels like doing at the moment). He argues that he's enlightened, they argue that he's wasting his potential, etc.

 

[CML]

nahh wadds it's much worse than that. these are ideas i'm having now and failing to communicate as explicitly as i ought to.

e.g.
work too much -- one of the main ideas is that CML cannot have a 9-5 because of sleep difficulties, also, his friends gradually splinter due to lack of time and lack of interest in themselves (pierce and will especially). skrap is right on but i do think i should bitch about it some more.
privacy and surveillance -- everyone's worried about gossip because everyone's lying, which is something else that fractures the community (compartmentalization + work go well together too) and then the internet is eternal, you know, except when it isn't.
loss of innocence -- though i'd been violently depressed in new york and hated many people there i'd never considered the possibility that i could be depressed in seattle and that my friends could submit to that same new york lunacy.

maybe some more one-liners like "new york is a mental illness" are warranted, but, i am wary of including too many as they can get kinda mouth-piecey and the characters should be pretty oblivious about what's going on all around them

 

[Aoret]

This is really OT and lowbrow given the current conversation, but I laughed my ass off at this line: "You do you man... and I'll do Jennifer"

Still thinking about it days after and I still chuckle a little bit.

 

[CML]

a stylistic feature of the Will Newton character is that he struggles to articulate truths without at least one of "i mean" "you know" etc. but slithers over falsehoods with nary a nervous tic. subtle literary genius, self-indulgent stupidity, or both?

 

[Aoret]

I think the line between subtle literary genius and self-indulgence is something people argue a lot. My philosophy on stuff like that is to do what the fuck you want. I didn't actually pick up on this during my read-through, but that doesn't necessarily mean it didn't do something cool to my brain on a subconscious level.