I posted an earlier draft of the cover and /lit was very helpful. Here's the new one from the publisher. What do you think?
Is this better?
I posted an earlier draft of the cover and /lit was very helpful. Here's the new one from the publisher. What do you think?
Antlers still look pasted on his head bro
Nice
The novel is 'about' cutting & pasting 20th century literature into new places.
The protag. of the novel is a writer, and plagiarises existing works
Elements from the existing works begin to integrate themselves to the reality of the novel - it's a haunted house book, but instead of ghosts, it's entities from fiction. Kind of like how early OPN sounds haunted by the works it is sampling.
So the more naturalistic-looking antler variants lost some of what's funny about the design
You can't replicate the classic!
Maybe I should've provided that context in the first place, or maybe it's too cute a visual joke to use
here antlers are well known analogy to cuckoldry
Sounds absolutely dogshit
it's certainly not for everyone
Doesn’t sound like it is for anyone considering how terrible the premise of the novel is. Some moron reads House of Leaves once, then comes up with this.
I haven't read House of Leaves
That's not all that happens in it though. His skin also peels off (like a reptile/snake)
This is done with AI right? why is the quality so inconsistent? the teeth and odd shapes, the rendering. I like the energy of it but looking at it close it looks bad.
I don't know, I hope so - that would suit the novel very well
Yes, this is an intentional image (time cucks all men in the end)
seems to be, too many inhuman mistakes
>from the publisher.
What kind of publisher? Small, mid, major? Something else?
Harper Perennial
Congrats. What was it like trying to get signed? How has the overall process been?
Majors in the US and UK markets, this is the UK cover
It's not Harper Perennial (it's Penguin & Scribner respectively)
>“Brat is a work of electrifying originality and bravura virtuosity; at once a dark and disquieting ghost story, a unique and brilliant meditation on grief, and a profoundly funny Bildungsroman in which the protagonist’s education is anything but sentimental,” the publisher said
Completely opposite of what the publisher says lol
> Smith is 27 and from London. His fiction has appeared in the Drift, New York Tyrant Magazine and the Moth. He was mentored by the late Giancarlo DiTrapano of Tyrant Books, who edited and was to publish Smith’s début novel on his own imprint
Look another nepo babby who has read fewer than 15 books in his life but lands publishing deals
Imagine working on your resume before publishing.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA
He looks like a typical young modern intellectual.
Quite dreadful
What magazine was this story in? I've forgotten and can't find it
Is this for real? It's terrible
kind of fun to read in an autistic way. im also london, and writing (but as hobby)
also cover works
thank you!
I agree it has its moments
god this is such inane millennial sense of "slice of life" since it's generic, relatable stuff but it's just tedious nothingness, reeks of depersonalized experience. I hate when things try to force mandane-ity and frame it as refreshing...only the most boring people with soulless lives lived a thousand times already point at that and say "so true"
>Elements from the existing works begin to integrate themselves to the reality of the novel - it's a haunted house book, but instead of ghosts, it's entities from fiction. Kind of like how early OPN sounds haunted by the works it is sampling.
Naisu
>haroldbloom.exe
A fine entry to the Dark L'Academia canon
Quite amazing that literal charlatans and hacks get publisher
>https://magazine.nytyrant.com/some-cliffs-which-overlooked-some-sea-gabriel-smith/
>https://barelysouthreview.com/transubstantiation/
>https://www.thedriftmag.com/the-stare/
>https://www.thedriftmag.com/the-complete/
I am actually quite surprised to find writing worse than Tales of the Unreal
Thank you!
The first two are five years old now. But I think there's some good jokes in them
Not for everyone as I said
You've been writing like this since you were 18? Damn I'm so behind. Were you the anon talking about finishing your first novel on /wg/ a few days ago?
no, i'm 28 now, i was 23 when those first two links posted by
came out, five years ago
I don't post in /wg/, I only post about real books usually
Are you not interested in any of the self-published novels by IQfy's anons? I understand if you don't consider serialized stuff on RR a real book.
Also could you elaborate on the publishing process, I assume you had to get an agent?
What is RR?
I only meant 'real books' as in not my own. I read self-published stuff all the time
I'm just scared of talking about work of my own that's in progress because someone told me you get the same dopamine rush from 'talking about work' as you would if you actually did the work. So when I am actively working on something I don't go anywhere that I might end up talking about it
But I find self-published work generally more compelling than work from major publishers, I have read most of F Gardner's books, for example
In terms of the publishing process, once I finished Brat (in 2019) I cold-emailed it to Gian, who ran Tyrant Books, because Tyrant Magazine had published the story it was based on
When Gian passed I didn't want to do anything with the novel because we'd worked on it together, and I was really sad, so I just kind of ignored it for a long time and worked on a second novel/short stories
One of the stories ('The Complete', in The Drift) did quite well on Twitter and I signed with an agent who got in touch based on that, then they sold the novel I had already written to the publishers who are putting it out now
I definitely needed an agent for that to happen, for the majors to look at the novel
I'm not sure how typical a process this is, typing it out feels a bit surreal, I basically just cold-emailed work to people who I thought would like it until now
>I'm not sure how typical a process this is
It is pretty much the standard way and essentially how I went about it but I stuck to the literary journals and avoided social media, got published in some journals and an agent contacted me.
By RR I meant Royal Road, which is where people do serialized stories. Usually fantasy but other stuff. Lots of anons do things like that instead of novels or short stories.
Yeah, I get that about not sharing your work until it's done. I'm pretty mum about my own stuff myself. Finishing a book in 2019 and only beginning the publication process years later has got to feel bad but I hear it happens all the time. Glad you got it picked up.
How do you even begin to get fiction noticed on Twitter of all places?
the magazines themselves tweet it out, then if people like it, they follow you
eventually you have, by attrition, a following
I also do silly things, like when gawker existed I just announced I was their fiction editor, and told people to send them fiction. The gawker editor had to tweet saying it wasn't true lol
like 1/4 of my followers are from just that one joke, but they stick around, and then I guess a % of them read your stories when you tweet them
I see, that's interesting. Thanks for the reply, and good luck with the book. Oh, and if you have friends who like hetero suspense smut, make their day for them and recommend Freddie Puck's Turn Up The Night
thank you!
I was a scholarship boy, it's not the same
in the book he's writing his second novel, not his debut. This represents a clever twist on a classic formula
thank you
well this is like my fourth story i ever wrote, so I agree with much of what you are saying about it! I didn't even know how you were meant to punctuate speech
I hadn't re-read it in years, but what I was trying to do when I was learning 'the craft' was strip short stories down to the bare essentials
Like I was extremely aware that everything I wrote was going to be bad, I was new to it - at the very least it could be de-personalised and mundane
I didn't want to try to make a personal, innovative, refreshing piece of work when I didn't even understand how to write a story properly, like structural mechanics, etc
That said, reading it back, I think there are some quite funny jokes in it, like the pic, and characters repeatedly not knowing who Ottessa Moshfegh is and calling her 'Otis'. Both cracked me up
But yes I agree! It's objectively a bad story. I think it takes a lot of attempts to learn how to write a good one
what I will say in its defence is that what I was trying there was to develop a female-perspective voice that had enough 'silence' in it to create mystery
Like I wanted a voice and structure that would give the reader room to hear their own thoughts, but also be compelled to read on
I remember being obsessed with a few Japanese writers, and Chekhov, where you feel like the wind could blow right through a story. Hard to describe exactly what I mean. But maybe you get the idea
Then I used the same (but developed) voice for the attached story, 18 months later, and I was really proud of it. I still think it's a really good story
It came second in a big short story prize and Mark Haddon said some really nice things about it
second page. it only came out in print so sorry for posting annoying screenshots
How did you get those mag pubs? Not saying you aren’t talented enough but those are some competitive pools, did you do an MFA?
I don't have an MFA, I really did just choose magazines I liked and then email them, often repeatedly
>IQfy sees white male (homosexual like them) published, thus harming their delusion that their lack of success is because of their race and sex
>recklessly pivots to calling him a nepo baby based on very little
>not even israeli
Pathetic
IQfy is sour grapes
what changed? it looks exactly like the last one
his teeth look weird, low res
>Penguin is so lazy they are making AI covers
It's truly over.
another nepo baby gets a publishing deal because of daddy's connections
very sad to see
wish someone had beat the shit out of you at Exeter or whatever aristocrat knob-school you went to
Life is nepotism. Everyone looks out for their own
Plot Synopsis
>Escaping the spectre of the girlfriend who has left him and the literary agent chasing him for the novel he has not even started, he returns to his family home to prepare it to be sold. Alone in the house, his skin shedding in ever-increasing frequency and quantity, with nothing but benzos, booze and memories for company, things take an uncanny turn: a manuscript for a novel written by his mother keeps changing, an old home video is similarly unstable and may reveal unsettling secrets, the house is becoming encased in Russian vines and a man dressed as a deer keeps appearing in the back garden.
Y I K E S
Another book about a """writer"""" writing his debut novel...hmmmm where have I read this novel before???? Perhaps it was The Nix by Nathan Hill, or The Novelist by Jordan Castor, or was it Normal People by Sally Rooney?