Rf Online Quotes

Reputations in publishing are built and destroyed, constantly, online.

Offline, writers are all faceless, hypothetical creatures pounding out words in isolation from one another. You can't peek over anyone's shoulder. You can't tell if everyone else is really doing as dandy as they pretend they are. But online, you can tune into all the hot gossip, even if you're not nearly important enough to have a seat in the room where it happens. Online, you can tell Stephen King to go fuck himself. Online, you can discover that the current literary star of the moment is actually so problematic that all of her works should be canceled forever. Reputations in publishing are built and destroyed constantly online.

Twitter is real life; it’s realer than real life, because that is the realm that the social economy of publishing exists on, because the industry has no alternative. Offline, writers are all faceless, hypothetical creatures pounding out words in isolation from one another. You can’t peek over anyone’s shoulder. You can’t tell if everyone else is really doing as dandy as they pretend they are. But online, you can tune into all the hot gossip, even if you’re not nearly important enough to have a seat in the room where it happens. Online, you can tell Stephen King to go fuck himself. Online, you can discover that the current literary star of the moment is actually so problematic that all of her works should be canceled, forever. Reputations in publishing are built and destroyed, constantly, online.

Honestly, I'm relieved. Finally someone's calling Athena out on her bullshit, on her deliberately confusing sentence structures and cultural allusions. Athena likes to make her audience "work for it." On the topic of cultural exposition, she's written that she doesn't "see the need to move the text closer to the reader, when the reader has Google, and is perfectly capable of moving closer to the text." She drops in entire phrases in Chinese without adding any translations—her typewriter doesn't have Chinese characters, so she left spaces and wrote them out by hand. It took me hours of fiddling with an OCR to search them online, and even then I had to strike out about half of them. She refers to family members in Chinese terms instead of English, so you're left wondering if a given character is an uncle or a second cousin. (I've read dozens of guides to the Chinese kinship nomenclature system by now. It makes no goddamn sense.) She's done this in all her other novels. Her fans praise such tactics as brilliant and authentic—a diaspora writer's necessary intervention against the whiteness of English. But it's not good craft. It makes the prose frustrating and inaccessible. I am convinced it is all in service of making Athena, and her readers, feel smarter than they are. "Quirky, aloof, and erudite" is Athena's brand. "Commercial and compulsively readable yet still exquisitely literary," I've decided, will be mine.

You, not your writing becomes the product - your looks, your wit, your quippy clapbacks and factional alignments with online beefs that no one in the real world gives a shit about.