WHAT'S THIS???

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pilot27407

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You know, he thought, as he threw the book on the table with disgust, this wasn’t what he had bargained for. He used to love reading, but lately seldom bought books any more, as with this job, he just didn’t had the time for it.
This particular one he had picked in a small bookstore at the airport. The title sounded promising enough, the reviews, on its back cover, were dynamite and he recalled seeing the author on some late night TV show, advertising his works.
But now, after about ten pages, he had no interest whatsoever to go on.
It was too ‘heavy’, too damn sophisticated and too profound, for what it was supposed to be, a relaxing historical novel. He wondered who’ll have the patience to read such stuff.
He considered himself a fairly educated person, but in those pages he had found countless words, which he just didn’t know exactly what they meant, at least not in the context they were used in.
He remembered reading an article in the paper, just the other day, about the slump that the publishing industry was in, ‘People just didn’t buy books any longer’, was its title.
He thought he knew the answer, partially at least. At the beginning of the 21st century, life was moving at a much faster pace than ever before and the continuous challenges, demands, and curved balls it threw at them, mad the twenty-four hours in a day insufficient. Well, they’ll need to ad a few more, he decided and smiled.
He also knew of other reasons why people had given up on buying fiction books; the movies, hundreds of TV stations, with vast variety of programs, computers and the internet, electronic and CD books, were but a few. And then, there was an ever increasing range of none-fiction materials; memoirs, ‘how to’, gourmet cooking, getting in shape and any other subject you could think of. Walking now-days into a mega bookstore you just got dizzy from the amalgam of thousands of topics and titles. Gone were the good old days, he decided, when you just entered the small, family owned, bookshop and the owner suggested something, which most likely he had read himself. Now, in those days, granted, they were fewer choices, but they were great books, something you sat and read till the wee hours of the morning.
For a moment he just run trough his mind the mega writers of the past, the so called classics. The ancient; Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Swift, Dickens and Cervantes. The old; Twain, London, Verne, Defoe, Dumas and Tolstoy. The newer; Milton, Wide, Frost, Fitzgerald and Hemingway. And he knew that he had omitted a bunch. Now, those were writers, people with a story to tell and the uncanny talent to say it in plain, so easy to understand, language. Their work had soul.
By comparison, the contemporary authors, were, with some noted exceptions, cyber writers, of disputable quality and depth, which pounded the keyboards to generate an endless stream of words of dubious meaning and no substance. Disregarding the basic principles of writing, they didn’t create, they plagiarized and embellished ideas, and indiscriminately using thesaurus, changed the very meaning of the written word.
For, most of these new ones didn’t write for the people. Instead, they wrote for the agents, editors and publishers, and the more ‘sophisticated’ they sounded the better chance they stood to see their works in print.
The today’s publishing industry obviously needed some major overhaul. Some of the older voices have grown boring and most of emerging ones lacked strong expression and innovative points of view. The trends of success seemed to favor and promote social insignificance, stereotype formulas and self-indulgence crap.
Men and women, young and old, people with a taste for experiencing and exploring realistic fictional dimensions, those who looked outward their own back yards and would had liked to travel the world, through the pages of books, had few places to turn to.
He bent over and picked the book from the table. He gave it a one last look and dumped it in the trash can. Now, he decided, he could get back to his work.
 

Soccer Mom

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And make the font a bit bigger. Some of us are old farts.


And a little spacing is a nice idea too.
 

IceCreamEmpress

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Can you stop posting the same thing in numerous different threads? It's kind of annoying.

If this is an essay you wrote, it should go in the "Share Your Work" forum.
 

pilot27407

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It’s not an excerpt, but now, that you’ve mentioned it, I’ll save and use it sometime, maybe… LOL..
 

CaroGirl

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How about a really annoying repeat post that keeps turning up like a bad penny? What do I win if I'm right?
 

CaroGirl

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Okay, so I actually read it. Apart from being very poorly written - with typos and tense shifts, among other basic problems - I don't get its point. On the one hand, the piece says there are too many books written with a thesaurus in one hand, full of words our poor little Buddy doesn't understand. Yet he feels that the books (these same books?) are full of fluff, hackneyed language and trite ideas.

Therefore, I don't think this guy knows what he wants. He wants some kind of hybrid novel, simultaneously written in plain language but full of "deep meaning" and new ideas. This phantom book must also be entertaining, oh and uplifting. Get grip, buddy.

And, not only have I publicly been offered the "BOOK", but I've privately been offered a case of SPAM. Is this my lucky day or what!
 

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He read the internet posting with knitted eyebrows and ejaculated to himself perplexedly, "How can one really judge an entire book by the first ten pages and decide that it is so horrible? Isn't that like taking a corner of a painting in isolation and saying the entire painting sucks because you didn't like that particular shade of green in that particular corner? Is it not ironic that so many would-be writers moan about not being given a chance by agents who auto-reject on the first paragraph also will not give another author the courtesy of reading the entire piece before passing judgment? And, somehow every time I go to the book store there are always people there buying books. Do I live in some exclusive community where everyone reads, while the rest of the world is possessed by some curse that prevents them from entering the shops and picking up a book?"
 

Pike

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Okay, so I actually read it. Apart from being very poorly written - with typos and tense shifts, among other basic problems - I don't get its point. On the one hand, the piece says there are too many books written with a thesaurus in one hand, full of words our poor little Buddy doesn't understand. Yet he feels that the books (these same books?) are full of fluff, hackneyed language and trite ideas.

Therefore, I don't think this guy knows what he wants. He wants some kind of hybrid novel, simultaneously written in plain language but full of "deep meaning" and new ideas. This phantom book must also be entertaining, oh and uplifting. Get grip, buddy.

And, not only have I publicly been offered the "BOOK", but I've privately been offered a case of SPAM. Is this my lucky day or what!

*playing REM's Stand in the background*

"Spam's a mystery meat in a can, Spam's a mystery meat in a can."

Pike
 

Jersey Chick

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Pilot -

Welcome to AW - but I think you need to go back and read the newbie guide. It's a little irritating to see the same three posts in three different forums, two of the same posts in two different forums. And yes, I counted - I'm weird that way. It was bugging me.
 

pilot27407

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You’ve missed ‘By comparison, the contemporary authors, were, with some noted exceptions,’… but, do me a favor (just for my ignoramus culture),.. name please three living writers (that’ll take care of Michener), that you can read (and understand) without the use of the dictionary.
 

CaroGirl

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I have an English degree, a journalism diploma and huge vocabulary. I'd challenge you to find three contemporary authors that I'd require a dictionary to understand.

And I really find it difficult to take anyone seriously who writes as poorly as this dude.
 

Stacia Kane

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You’ve missed ‘By comparison, the contemporary authors, were, with some noted exceptions,’… but, do me a favor (just for my ignoramus culture),.. name please three living writers (that’ll take care of Michener), that you can read (and understand) without the use of the dictionary.

Hmmm...gee, that's a tough one. Just from my bookshelves:

Stephen King
Elizabeth George
Christopher Moore
Neil Gaiman
Barbara Michaels
Marian Keyes
Jim Butcher
Mark Henry
Richelle Mead
Caitlin Kittredge
Janet Finch
Jane Smiley
Maeve Binchy
Anna Maxted
Sharon Kay Penman
Patricia Cornwell
Donna Tartt
Mary Higgins Clark
Stephen Dobyns
Anton Strout
Jackie Kessler

...and I'm too lazy to go upstairs and check the shelves for more.


ETA: I agree with CaroGirl. I never went to college, but I would also like to see three contemporary writers I'm incapable of understanding. This is a forum for writers; I think most of us have large vocabularies.
 
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Dawno

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Locking - this has already been posted in another forum. Pilot27407 please don't put the same post in multiple forums. I would also recommend you read the Newbies Guide where it says:

POSTING THE SAME MESSAGE ON MORE THAN ONE BOARD: Bad. Bad, bad, bad. Pick ONE board, and post it. If you think it just plain NEEDS to be cross-posted somewhere else, send a PM to a supermod and ask. This one can get you banned for spamming. People really do read all the boards here, and it's extremely rare for there to be any solid reason something needs to be posted twice.
 
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