A young woman screwed up on the Internet. She’s 22 and just published her first novel—published it herself and it’s a deluxe package. Original illustrations, apparently well-executed, praised by customers. An original cover illustration, praised again. But the novel itself, no. It’s lousy, it stinks, but she sold it anyway. Years of telling Tik-Tok about her journey, the realization of her childhood dream, etc. Then this turd in a fancy dish.
The girl’s penname is Audra Winter, and her book’s entitled Year of Scorpius. I’ll never read it or see a copy, but the praised cover’s on view at Goodreads and looks like a competent rendition of a typical fighting-gals kind of scene. Now for the turd. Stilted dialogue, shaky grammar and usage, goody-two-shoes cast, wodges of background material—these are the accusations. Plus, typos, even in words that were invented for the book’s fantasy world. Plotting and story didn’t get much criticism, maybe because all hope had died in the first few pages.
The 6000 people who pre-ordered copies (a girl said on TikTok she paid $35) made themselves heard with complaints and unasked advice posted online. Then commentary videos on YouTube rehashed the business. How badly had readers been burned? the videos demanded. How well had the author reacted? What could she do to make her novel worthwhile? Why did she make this mess happen—what was it about her that caused everything? Answers: pretty badly but forget refunds, they should’ve looked out; not well at all; heavy reediting or rewriting, listen to feedback from reliable people; and finally, that girl’s… oh boy.
Impatient commentary has been inspired by the author’s wailing and bemoaning of a life overturned by a subpar public response, and by her competing tendency to sound like a corporation handling the public. This corporation’s an upbeat entity, one that hears you and responds but with nothing that’s any good. The changes she talks up are off point: specialized page borders, more illustrations, editors hired from the audience. And what is it with the speak? Onboarding, she says, and brainstorming. “My team.” A commenter says playing executive, not writing a good book, is really the girl’s big thrill.
The same commenter asks the key question everyone should’ve been shouting. Where does the money come from? How can the author afford such a lavish production, let alone the payroll she claims of 15 or more people? Parents, was the commenter’s theory. The commenter made no big deal about it, and I haven’t seen anyone saying the girl had an unfair leg-up besides her looks, which I think some of the women overestimate. (The author’s resourceful about facial presentation: sunrise eye makeup in one videotaped appeal, clean features and big glasses in another.)
Much talk of the girl being 22; apparently there’s the thing that caused all the trouble. Should her age get her off the hook altogether? No one says so. Should her age matter at all? No one says it shouldn’t. But there’s still a range of opinion. Some clips bring up her age in a “Yes, all right” way and then make for their preferred topic, the girl’s poor choices. A couple of others speak up for youth and its assorted malfunctions as factors deserving more attention. Those two clips feature pop-up mentions, come and gone, of the prefrontal something or other. Lobe, cortex. There prevails an unnerdish acceptance that one’s terminology isn’t always exact. But the idea is that kids lack development somewhere in the front part of the brain. A large young woman take this line in her clip; so does a large white man, about 50, in his. He was the first commenter I saw, she came along a bit later. Each talks about the goofiness and poor judgment of their prior days. For the 50-year-old, the far past. For her, something more recent but still gone—maybe she’s in her late-20s, early-30s.
A third commenter adds to the string. He’s an elfin British kid whose face is pinned to one corner of a little monolith of film clip. I mean the film clip that’s playing appears in a tall rectangular space; above this rectangle, and to its left and right, there’s blank whiteness. Meanwhile, the British kid has his own rectangle of film clip, a little one positioned far down the big rectangle’s left side. His heavy-framed glasses looms, and his forehead swells above his brow, possibly because of some digital warping.
Foreheads often hang about in YouTube videos, lowering at you while the speaker emits his or her sentence streams. I mean normal-size foreheads; over the minutes they can seem like visual surplus of an oppressive kind. But I also mean large foreheads, the ones that challenge you from the start. The clip with the British kid effects a clever maneuver: take a big forehead, make it bigger, then shrink it all down. Now the miniaturized Big Head chatters and opines as an easily visible cartoon tag; this is attached to the main visual, which is accented by the white space. Clever stuff. I don’t say the designers are British; I don’t know. But it would be just like the Brits to pull this off.
But I was talking about the prefrontal pop-ups. The repeated thought advances each time, age group by age group; no barrier can stop it. From Gen X dad-type, to Millennial post-girl, to the chattering British kid, who says he can appreciate the prefrontal problem because he’s early-20s himself. The hardworking mouths keep saying the same thing, and all I know is that girl won’t get my $35.