Writers and Their Day Jobs

For some reason these archive.something websites through me into an endless captcha loop on all of my devices. Doesn't happen with any other website.

Those people pay for our web.

I think it's okay to complain about the design and presentation of the ads even on a free service. It's unreasonable to expect sites not to have some form of monetization of users that are not going to pay for the content, but that monetization should be reasonable and thoughtful. Of course, we can simply avoid that site altogether.

It is always fair game to complain about shit web design on sites you others are expected to use or read. The ads presented are part of that.

Compared to the postal workers, accountants and insurance agents named in this article they can count as exceptions too, save for the creative writing teachers.

I think Don DeLillo quit his job before his first book and never looked back.

If you read John Fante’s Ask the Dust, he has a number of dollar amounts in there for short story sales. Those numbers are better than pretty much every contemporary opportunity without adjusting for inflation. I would say that the 20s and 30s were the ideal time. Right now, it’s pretty grim for nearly all writers. Substack and other venues tend to be kind of peanut money and there are few writers who make a living from them, especially compared to the long tail of those who make nearly nothing. And most of those who earn significant money had big reputations before Substack.

His book Suttree is effectively biographical, down to his impoverished 1950s Knoxville streetslang.

I haven't read anything else, but the film No Country for Old Men is incredible storytelling (and I only started Suttree after a /hn/article from a few months ago described the polymathic dismantling of his impressive library).

His short article The Kekulé Problem sheds serious insights (to me, at least) on whether or not LLMs can, alone with language, ever become truly conscious (are words, alone, enough?). Not the main point of the article (rather: about lucid thinking/states leading to wordless solutions presenting themselves to "discoverers," dreaming).

Well, if only writing survives then it'll be writers paying other writers to read their writing.

Nah, that's the one to read first.

In a similar vein I prefer Stephenson's Anathem

I don't know what you like, but in addition to the Book of the New Sun I really enjoyed his three-volume "Soldier" series, about a mercenary in ancient Greece who suffers from Memento-style amnesia (although this series far predates Memento).

The "Wizard Knight" series (two books) I also really enjoyed if you like something with a bit more fantasy bent.

Can't recommend Wolfe enough!

Wolfe is one of my favourite writers, and I highly recommend New Sun.

That said, it is a challenge for a lot of readers. It's a single, very long novel that introduces a complicated and mysterious cosmology that is rarely fully understood until the second or even third reading. A common saying among fans is that you don't read Wolfe, you re-read him. It requires a certain amount of patience.

An easier intro is The Fifth Head of Cerberus, which is also one of my favourite novels. It's very short, but its puzzle box structure is no less satisfying or challenging than New Sun. Parts of the fun is figuring exact out who is narrating the three different stories that make up the book — it's probably not who they claim to be — and exactly what happened.

Thinking about the article's reference to Herman Melville, Ursula LeGuin actually called Wolfe "our Melville", "our" meaning science fiction writers as a group.