It doesn't matter what you hate.
Notes from a re-read
Unrelated dinosaur.
Most of the people reading this have found my Substack through my commentary on critics from last November. The main thesis was that indie authors had a narrow window of a few years where they could gain an audience by being critical of popular properties, then steering their readers to their own books.
This model has collapsed largely because very few indie authors can write novels well enough to retain readers (I have been guilty of this), and also because many mainstream/large-studio productions have improved in quality. My analogy was akin to a spectator jumping into the arena, getting his butt kicked, then climbing injured back into the stands and continuing to heckle the gladiators. Nobody would want to hear him after that.
For this reason (among others) I have abstained from making a whole lot of critical commentary of books and movies in the negative; it’s easy if you want engagement, but I’m not here to make money off my Substack, any more than I plan to get rich off YouTube. (They’re not interested in letting that happen much these days anyway.) If I make money off what I do online, I want it to be book sales.
Even so, there are books I dislike, even books I hate, and I go back and forth whether I should write up my reasons or do a video in the car. Longtime readers know that I love the Red Rising trilogy, but I hate the Red Rising series, especially the fifth book. The sixth was an improvement of sorts but it accomplished nothing other than a few character deaths and a slight change in the status quo (this after 600 pages, or 30 hours of audio).
Pierce Brown is an almost prodigious talent when it comes to writing. I re-read RED RISING in Spanish this week and I was reminded of why I love it so much. It’s just about a perfect novel by all metrics, and it led into two of the best sequels I’ve ever read. Perhaps that level of greatness has so much to do with why books 4-6 pissed me off to no end; I know that he can do better, so the fact the he has chosen not to is grating.
I did a video about this in 2023, I got a lot of annoying blowback from teenagers, etc, I’ve covered this in the past. Swatting low-IQ commentary out of my notifications is a waste of my time, so I took it down. It doesn’t accomplish anything, and it’s not part of my mission here. Still, I’ve taken a few runs at those sequels and I keep coming to the same conclusion: they’re bad, and he doesn’t know what he’s doing with them. Or rather, he knows where he wants to go, and he doesn’t know how to get there.
Much like the Golds following Darrow in the first book, they don’t know where they are going, and he does, which makes his leadership effective. Pierce Brown needs his own Darrow. His challenge is that he’s the one writing him.
The thing is…I could farm engagement by making a bunch of videos and swatting his fans with my takes, but I have to follow my own rules here: if I can’t do what he does, my criticism of what he’s doing is worthless. I have yet to write anything as incredible as RED RISING, and until I do, it doesn’t matter if what I write is better than DARK AGE. You can get all kinds of awards for writing, but you keep score by sales and readers. He’s winning. I’m not. I need to keep my head down and work.
In the end, it doesn’t matter what you hate. It doesn’t even matter why you hate it. Hating is easy and anyone can do it. It’s loose change. It’s fast food. Gordon Ramsey telling me he hates a Big Mac is probably valid on some level, but if I enjoy Big Macs, I’m just going to shrug when Gordon Ramsey says it. He might instead exalt some unpronounceable dish from NotAmericaStan and if I don’t want to eat it, I won’t care that he likes it.
Maybe someday I’ll sit down and write up all of my criticisms of the series that I started out loving and ended up hating, but even then, what would be the point? That’s time I could spend working on my next book, and I have so many ideas that I’ll never get them all out before I die.
That’s the kind of stuff I need to think about when I’m at the computer. Write the thing that’ll get me more readers.
FOSSIL FORCE 2 is currently in production, this is my series for young boys. I have some background production going on with other books but that’s getting my focus this year until it’s done.
Read the first book here or buy it for the young male reader in your life.
Check out my other books, my YouTube channel, and UpstreamReviews where I’m a contributor.
And make sure you’re subscribed here, I’m doing a lot of historical posts for America’s 250th birthday.