I can’t tell whether this is funny or pathetic, but I’m leaning toward pathetic. (hat tip to Andrew).
This applies to sending your 80 page story to magazine slush piles, too.
Esquire’s fiction makeover.
Many books are manipulative, of course, and a great many are trash, and a very sorry many of these become best sellers. And yet only a precious few reach the level of bad faith attained by Thirteen Moons.
Thematically similar to the previous link: Conversational Reading decides “reviewers should not bother making any good/bad pronouncements at all. If your book review is such that by the end of it readers can’t tell whether you endorse the book, don’t, or stand somewhere in between, then you probably wrote a bad review and need to try again.” I disagree, but this is largely because I have a place in my cold, cold heart for scathing reviews.
I wince whenever I see a writer advertise him or her self or selves as having: graduated with a Master’s Degree in Creative and Episodic Emptiness from the Iowa Workshop School of Supreme Thinking Where Bubba was Mentored by Noah Webster before winning the Annual Pot Cheese Award for Truly Obscure Fiction and was Short-listed (what IS short-listed) for a new Men in Undershorts Catalogue published by Pontifical Publications University Press.