The Eye of Argon is a legendary work of bad fiction (you don’t have to trust me, just read a page or two), but we have to be fair: its author did not try to publish it, didn’t try to tell the world that it was the greatest work of fantasy ever, and didn’t brag about his book and movie deals.
That modesty is not a property of Gloria Tesch, author of the Maradonia Saga, a series I was introduced to just this past weekend. It may not be as badly written as Eye of Argon (although it comes close), but the ego of the author is astonishing.
The book has a trailer. A very badly acted and unbelievably staged trailer.
Note that this is an entirely self-published, vanity project. I can’t imagine that any publisher would want to be associated with it. But hey, how about Hollywood? They’ll buy the rights to the grandest crapola.
Nope. However, the Tesch family is making a movie, directed by her father, Gerry Tesch, who has no film making credentials at all, as you can tell just by watching a bit of it.
So they’ve got a movie in the works, a 3400 page fantasy series, and, most importantly, lawyers who will avidly go after anyone who criticizes their delusion. They’ve tried to shut down some, but the hilarious dismantlings go on.
It’s kind of sad, actually. She seems to have ambition and persistence, which is good, but it’s all coupled to a major inability to accept criticism…so her writing will never improve.
So this is basically the literary equivalent of FATAL?
3400 pages???
How many books is that?
microraptor @1, it appears to be the literary equivalent of Rebecca Black and “Friday”.
I watched the embedded video, and now I mostly feel bad for this girl, whoever she is. Her parents aren’t doing her any favors.
Do read The Eye of Argon, available in full at the link PZ gave. It has been a tradition for decades, sadly gone out of fashion, to host late-night readings of the story at science fiction conventions. Typically, a panel of volunteers would take turns reading, and the audience would engage in some combination of A) giving it the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment, B) act out the scenes a la Rocky Horror Picture Show, and/or C) bid to stop reading the chapter using a price that decreases with each paragraph, with the money going to charity.
Yes, it really is that bad.
Gregory @ 4. I recall hearing second-hand that a party game at SF cons was to see how long you can read Eye of Argon aloud without laughing, making comments, or otherwise breaking up. Of course, that works better for new readers: I’m sure old hands can steel themselves.
There is a lot of bad self-published fiction out there for sure. I bought one at random just to judge the quality. My favorite passage from it is, “The asteroid was a chunk of a star’s core. An ounce of it weighed a ton.” (No, an ounce of it weighed an ounce.)
On the other hand, I think the publishing and media industry has hit rock-bottom in terms of intellectual bankruptcy. Of all the big summer films this year, all but one (“Inside Out”) is a sequel. Too many new “authors” are merely celebrities exploiting their existing name-recognition. The only way many new authors can get their stuff read is to self-publish; so there is good stuff out there also.
The challenge is to separate the wheat from the chaff, especially when there’s such a high chaff-to-wheat ratio.
I highly suggest this version.
rq @2: Morbid curiosity made me look, According to their website, there are six books, but the page counts given there don’t add up to 3,400. The counts on Amazon come closer, but only five of the six are available. Their cover art alone should warn you what to expect. Interestingly enough, the covers on the site list both Gloria and Gerry Tesch, so I can’t help wondering just whose ego is being stroked with this.
“Ounce” is also a measure of volume.
By following some of the links, inlcuding the new trailor, you, as a fan, can support the making of this great movie.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/maradonia-and-the-seven-bridges#/story
#9 Its also a Snow Leopard.
I don’t care for the language (use of the word ‘retarded’ as a pejorative) used over at Vivisector’s Writ. It is, however, abundantly clear that the Teschs are, well, awful …at least as bad as the 6 books written by the younger of them.
Wait, it’s worse than Eragon?
@Knight in Sour Armor #13 – “Wait, it’s worse than Eragon?”
You mean that thinly disguised re-telling of Lord of Rings where Smaug was a hero? Yeah, worse even than that.
Tesch is my dear grandmother’s maiden name. I hope this isn’t a shirt-tail cousin x-times removed . . .
#9: Yes. Fluid ounce. Measures liquids.
Azkyroth — But a fluid ounce of a “star core”, whatever that means, would be a lot more than a ton…right? If it’s an average star like the Sun, a bit of the core could be millions of tons. If it’s a neutron star, it’s trillions.
#6 – The publishing industry sucks for people trying to get their first work published, but there’s self publishing, and there’s self publishing.
Self-publishing, done right, involves hiring an editor who will tell you what parts of your work are shit and why, and give you advice about how to improve either your overall writing, or how to tweak the sections you need to work on.
If you want something in between, there are a number of small publishers out there that will take care of the business aspects of publishing, provide editing and proofreading services, and help with marketing.
There are a variety of fee structures, and you could argue that they count as self-publishing, but they provide the same kind of outside input as a big publisher, plus a couple advantages. They’re more likely to look at whether a book is well crafted, than whether it fits into the “this is what people are buying right now” categories. They’re also more likely to give better royalty structures, which is nice if someone’s trying to actually make money, since advances from the big publishers are rarely enough to make up for 3-5% royalties.
Self publishing is fine, but only if you’re sincerely trying to create the best book you can. You have to go about it right, and Tesch clearly is not. From what I can tell, she (and her family) are a brilliant example of why self-published books have such a terrible reputation.
I work with a startup that does ebook enhancements (epub is just HTML/CSS/JS, so there’s a lot you can do to make ebooks pretty cool).
It’s astounding the number of authors who show up at the door with content that is flat out unreadable. The revenue model relies on a small license/royalty fee, so it’s impossible to justify any time and effort on something that’s not going to sell beyond the writer’s immediate family (if that).
Makes sense.
Okay, I’ve made it to part 5 of the spork at Conjugal Felicity. I should either be terrified of ever writing anything ever again or I should be emboldened, because I probably can’t write anything as awful as Tesch.
I’m angry because I can’t get back the time I’ve spent reading anything about Maradonia and also because I want to keep reading the spork (it’s so amusing). I’m confused and scared.
I’m a little behind you Tomathy, but I share your feelings.
This feels like walking down a road lined with the mounted skins of unwary travelers before them. I don’t think I’m unwary, but presumably they felt the same way.
robro @17:
In the case of the sun, it would only weigh a few kilograms. For a neutron star, about 10^13 kg. In either case, if you had a way of removing it from a star’s core, it wouldn’t stay at a fluid ounce for long. And you wouldn’t want to be in the vicinity.
It’s not the self published material that concerns me – there are lots of self published authors (and musicians come to that) that are fantastic – I think it’s the ego on display, the lack of self awareness. If people want to put average writing out and are well aware that it might just be for fun and family and understand they aren’t changing the world – all power to your creative muscle – I release songs fully understanding that I am not going to have a hit or be anybody’s favourite musician – it’s the occasional person who turns to lawyers to defend their world altering project from all criticism (even the well meant gentle stuff).
Alteredstory @18:
–>These are common misconceptions. What I am about to say applies to adult trade fiction, which Eye of Argon and these Maradonia books would be categorized under.
Companies that provide editorial services for a fee are publishing services houses or packaging houses (there are differences, but they do similar things). They are NOT publishers. (In fact, regular publishers also hire them from time to time.) If the author has to pay for services, the author is the publisher. (For fiction or general non-fiction. Academic publishing is a different beast, for reasons I can go into in a separate post if folks want. NB: I have extensive experience working at both a Big Five publisher and an academic press.)
“but they provide the same kind of outside input as a big publisher, plus a couple advantages. They’re more likely to look at whether a book is well crafted, than whether it fits into the “this is what people are buying right now” categories. ”
–>No, with caveats. There are a few publishing partners (the correct term) where the company is selective about what books it chooses to accept, but these are rare and getting rarer. They have little incentive to be very selective if the author is paying for the services. Keeping such a business running is dependent on the owners of the business not succumbing to the normal human tendency to hedge a little here, compromise a bit there, until they migrate to a publishing-services business which limits its clientele only by the capacity of their staff.
“They’re also more likely to give better royalty structures, which is nice if someone’s trying to actually make money, since advances from the big publishers are rarely enough to make up for 3-5% royalties. ”
–>Who’s giving 3-5% royalties? That is LOW, except in some areas of children’s publishing. Typical royalties for adult paperbacks at the Big Five are 6-10%, and 25% on ebooks, even for first time authors. I suppose a respectable small press might offer only 3-5%, but they will also pay the editors, cover designer, etc., themselves.
There is a lot of misinformation promulgated through self-publishing circles. There are good reasons to self-publish and good ways to do it, but do I wish self-publishers would quit talking about how regular publishers do things when they actually have no idea how regular publishers do things. No one is helped by fairy stories and imaginary bugaboos on either side.
Fair enough. My own experience is fairly limited. I’m using a small publisher or whatever your call it because I got frustrated with the incredibly slow response time (over a year for an answer of any kind). That frustration probably have made me more inclined to believe the horror stories about regular publishers, agents, and so on that I’ve heard from other writers (including ones who published through regular publishers).
If it ends up not working out, I’m OK with that too. I’m not writing just the one book, and I’m not committed to rejecting the conventional publishing system. Mainly I just got pissed off that it took so bloody long.
Oh – and higher royalties, though obviously those don’t count for much if I’m not getting honest input on the quality of the writing/edits, or if the marketing isn’t well done.
Alteredstory: The time factor is indeed frustrating. But I’m surprised you didn’t hear back from agents (at least) in short order. They’re generally good about answering queries in a couple months.
Like any business, it certainly has its horror stories. But as a general rule, the business of publishing is finding books that someone (editor, marketing department) think can sell, and then applying experienced professionals to the packaging to increase the chances of it finding the audience. But yeah, not every book gets A-list treatment, and sometimes a book falls afoul of internal processes (e.g. the acquiring editor leaves, the publisher is bought by another publisher).
The trade off is: self-publisher has a lot of control, but they don’t have a large sales and marketing force, nor bookstore distribution.
Azkyroth @7
I love the MST3K version of “Eye of Argon.”
I don’t have an agent. I didn’t/don’t know how to go about getting one, or how to go about figuring out whether or not a given agent is actually going to do right by me (that’s part of the horror stories I encountered). The more conventional publisher I went with ended up going out of business a couple of months after they said “we’ll get back to you very soon” in response to a one-year query. I finally heard from them that they WOULD have taken the book, but whether or not that was true was irrelevant.
I’m taking shortcuts that may well be dangerous, but like I said, I’m not even ABLE to stop writing with one book, and I’m not expecting to support myself with my first novel (or any one novel), so I figured I could take a chance on it.
Agreed on the marketing aspect. I’ll be getting help on that, but either way, I’ve expected that to be a fair amount of work on my part. Not looking forward to it, but it comes with the territory.
If nothing else, the cover art is great, so it’ll be pleasant to look at.
Alteredstory: Also, the quality of the writing/edits can be honest, but there’s only so much that can be done with any given book. Let’s say a book is on a scale from 1-10 where 1 = barely literate and 10 = literary genius. An editor can help an author move the book up the scale maybe one or two slots.
Most people think they’re writing at about an 8, but really they’re writing at about a 3 or 4. There is probably no greater pool of Dunning-Kruger failure than the thousands and thousands of people writing books who just aren’t very good but somehow think they’re brilliant. (The Tesch family of the OP here may be an extreme example, but they are not sui generis.)
Which isn’t to suggest that bad writing cannot sell–there exist many bestsellers that suggest otherwise. But even a “beach book” disposable novel will typically be around a 6 or 7 on this scale. If the language is cliche-ridden, it at least is clear what’s happening; if the characters are stock characters, they’re at least written in a way that connects with the reader.
Books succeed not because they’re perfectly written, but because they do a preponderance of things well enough to overcome the things they don’t do well. But recognizing one’s strengths and weaknesses as a writer is very, very difficult.
Agreed on both counts. I’ve always felt that in order to be a writer, I need to have a big enough ego to think people want to read what I’ve got to write, plus a deep enough pool of insecurities that I can whole-heartedly believe that I’ve written terribly.
I’ve been fortunate in having people to critique my work who would rather hurt my feelings than see me make a fool out of myself (something they’ve proven in the past). Beyond that, I had no trouble telling that my first draft was something I would never be willing to show to someone else, and that I needed the years of practice, reading, and writing groups that followed to get me to the point where I have had some short fiction published, and I’m comfortable attaching my name to my writing.
I guess that’s as much time as I was willing to spend guarding against self-deception prior to going through the editing and publishing process to see what other people think.
Thus far, my assessment of when my writing has been good has been pretty close to that of other people, including some who care about the kind of stuff I write, and care about the quality of what they read.
This is why stuff like Maradonia and the Conjugal Felicity sporking are kind of like watching my own nightmares play out in someone else’s life. Shitty behavior and shady marketing practices aside, while I think I’m a pretty decent writer, I’m sure Tesch and others like her think the same about themselves.
I think the fact that I’ve actively sought out criticism, rather than attacking anybody who didn’t offer praise is a good sign. If nothing else, I can feel morally superior.
What I do need to do – and thank you for this reminder, frog, is avoid letting insecurities about my chosen publishing route lead me to unfair attacks on the more widely respected paths, and/or to avoiding those paths in the future.
Alteredstory: Best of luck with your endeavors. Proper self-publishing is no cakewalk, and I respect any author who goes into it with understanding of what they need to do to make their book worth putting their name on it.
There’s room in the publishing ecosystem for all sorts of writers and publishers, and the success of one only adds to, not diminishes, the success of another. :)
Thanks.
I won’t know how good of an understanding I have of what I’m doing till I come out the other side, but that’s why I’m doing it :P
I guess I’m still unclear about the boundary between self-publishing with hired editors, marketers, etc., and using a small publisher/indie publisher. I suppose business model can draw a clear line, but that seems to weigh rather heavily in favor of those companies that already have a lot of capital available.
It’s not a question I have a need to resolve, I just have a reflexive suspicion of insistence on word usages that favor large corporations and/or powerful people.
This is weird. I review science fiction and fantasy at a semi-pro level and close to full time, and I’ve never heard of Tesch or her little opus. Then again, I deal primarily with the Big 5 publishers and very little that is self-published catches my notice. Someone like Tesch fills me with both sympathy and amusement: a person with a great sense of need and lack of personal fulfillment pursuing a dream they aren’t able to realize isn’t in the cards for them, being enabled by people who are a little to close to her to give her guidance that’s ground in reality. But then, sometimes even people who “break in” in the traditional sense never manage to let go of the kinds of insecurities that paradoxically make them grossly overestimate both their talent and importance. Look at the Sad Puppies.
I’ll testify to that. Getting The Happy Atheist edited was an eye-opening experience — every page was a sea of red in the first draft.
I just had to check Gloria’s home page and it seems she’s also multitalented in addition to being a child prodigy author: she’s an actress (in her own movie?), a model (the few pics were rather porn-ish) and a musician (a rapper to me more precise it seems).
All of it screams to me about a spoiled girl with no sense of self-evaluation. She does seem sympathetic though and it’s sad to see good self-esteem mixed with illusions of fame.
Ah, I knew I’d heard of Maradonia somewhere before…it’s listed on TV Tropes’ So Bad It’s Horrible page, right between The Legend of Rah and the Muggles and Mass Effect: Deception. Fits right in, too. Although I think Save the Pearls is worse: not only is it a vanity-published ego trip, it’s also a whiny persecution fantasy for white racists and the promotional video has a woman appearing in blackface.
reaven #37
I don’t know whether Gloria is actually a model or a rapper, but someone who models “porn-ish”, or naked, is still a model, and a rapper is still a fucking musician.
Something about your qualification in these two instances bothers me.
tkreacher #39
You have a point there so I’d like to add that those additions shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Both the music and the pics on the pages seemed very unprofessional to me, though. The point was that they enhance the image of a person who thinks really high of herself and is unable to comprehend criticism.
I admit, the comment about her being a rapper was uncalled for. Just a slip of personal distaste for the particular genre.
Meh, at least she had the excuse of being a child. Here’s an adult asking “what’s wrong with this beginning?” for his novel; he started with
“As a detriment that was from odium, it was felt by almost all of the denizens, who lived in this morbid world, that there was disquietment for being in these poor, continual conditions, that, for years, have been distending into everything, are now done at encompassment, and so are currently impenetrating till permanence after their sudden and widespread placement into the land, working deeper until the things on the ground shall be still and reformed to a complete state that’s as the portrayal of an arduous beginning of an end to their progress.”
and, after 5 months of dozens of people telling him in over 300 replies that it was unreadable, it had evolved into:
“By the expansion of endurance and the propagation of central failures, it was made to be a nearly indomitable, subsidiary entity that rested on the frames of everything that withstood deterioration. That this was done so well, the elimination – done by calm and almost non-violent reverting- had sufficiently ended for the emptiness of the vast results, like the degrading buildings slowly underlying the reappearing wilds, to easily seem as the housing of an intangible, behemothic occupier—anything like a physical law or entity that could have the predilection and, even then, the entire needed omnipresence, to do permanent and debilitating effects across all of the lands, to work past the abiding scope for the odds that something so systematic could exist against being an incidental repercussion of an unknown accident. Working like it was a builder of subjection for the purpose of obtaining encampment, it was willed to seem like it was nestled upon and merging with what started to become the ruins of advanced structures —to exactly lie with all of them— and, reveling in the environment that it modified, invisibly living with victims of the central establishments and, during the interim, occupying some of the empty plains and jungles that had regrown when industry deactivated, it grew and changed until it became an unreckonable force that was large enough for even the partially formulate perception of its simple existence to become the odium of a detriment that was felt by nearly every denizen that lived in a morbid world. Because the final results seemed so impossible to happen without intention, a grand spirit came from the considerations of the masses: it was something that’s incapable of recognition as it hid behind unmoving metals and the certain shadows of newer trees, outlined for -if instead of actual cause- at least being the universal pusher that was connected every economic feature and inclined to reduce nearly everything.”
If you’re wondering, it’s meant to describe a bloated bureaucracy, for the start of a libertarian science fiction novel.
Things like this and the novel I read last weekend make me more confident about self-publishing, honestly. I know I’m better than this dreck. Mostly I’m afraid of the work involved in self-publishing successfully – most of the advice I’ve seen says it’s basically a full-time job to actually get people to notice your work and read it, since the one really big advantage of a proper publisher is they (supposedly) handle the marketing and promotion stuff while self-published authors have to do that all themselves.
From the indigogo link supplied by Donnie (#10):
“Purpose of the Film
– To enlighten children as well as young adults (8-18) to the supernatural and spiritual realities of today’s world”
“There is a story behind the story which honors the Christian Belief and propels the Saga through a ‘World between the Worlds’.”
So it’s not just bad fiction. It’s delusional Christian bad fiction.
ethicsgradient@41: Ah, a prime example of someone who has mistaken basic literacy for the ability to write.
I always wonder what reading feels like to those people. I admit to being a lazy reader: I want the sentences to parse cleanly. I don’t mind lengthy sentences with multiple dependent clauses (or even parenthetical asides), but too many writers mistake long sentences for a sign of erudition, rather than a means of laying out a continuous, complex idea.
The other place literate people frequently fail to be writers is they don’t know how to organize paragraphs. The concept of “tl;dr” is more related to poor paragraphing than total length of the work. People will keep reading if the writer leads them along a well-paved path.
Joey Maloney: I watched the embedded video, and now I mostly feel bad for this girl, whoever she is. Her parents aren’t doing her any favors.
I have the impression that Maradonia is the sword-and-sorcery equivalent of the book about the kid who saw heaven, a book apparently written mostly by his father. I could be wrong about that.
The video is pretty bad. Even the titles are bad. At the end, I read “Maradonia and the Bridges.” I immediately thought, “Beau and Jeff are in it? Wow, that’s pretty impressive!” (Yes, I know that’s absurd.) I had to go back and look closely to pick up the red “7”.
“The asteroid was a chunk of a star’s core. An ounce of it weighed a ton.”
To restate the obvious, this author missed the fact that matter in a star’s core is so dense because it is in the core of a star. When it no longer is part of the core, it doesn’t retain that high density.
This is the kind of shallow knowledge of science that gives us feature films like 2003’s The Core, and it’s the reason the Science and Entertainment Exchange exists. Most such goofs can easily be corrected. Sadly, they often aren’t.
Ethicsgradient: Meh, at least she had the excuse of being a child. Here’s an adult asking “what’s wrong with this beginning?” for his novel; he started with…
[beginning paragraph deleted]
I read through some of the discussion at that link, and I think this guy “Michaeluj” is trolling. In his initial query, he mentions that his beginning paragraph looks all right in Microsoft Word. I took that to mean he saw no misspelled words. But there are misspelled words there. I don’t have Word handy, but OpenOffice flags three. Therefore, unless he has spell-checking turned off, he’s not being straightforward.
And what are we to make of this sentence from him, farther down the discussion: “The commas are tricky: depending on what else is written around them, the quality of removing or not removing them changes. It’s a matter of choosing which is easier.”
He’s playing some kind of game, is my guess.
ethicsgradient wrote:
Both are a hideous mess of terrible writing.
Oh… then it’s perfect! It’s certain to appeal to the people who have nothing but accolades for Ayn Rand, with the added irony that it was basically written by committee.
Good lord. The woman turns 21 this year and she’s still trying to sell an embarrassing book she wrote at 13.
The book isn’t worth mocking. It’s the average writing of an average child (i.e. … c’mon … it *is* the writing of a child… let’s leave it at that). Her inability to take criticism isn’t really interesting either. What I’m astounded by is her delusional actions of pretending she is a best-selling author. She goes into Barnes and Nobles with copies of her book, places them on the #1 best seller shelf and takes photos. She *hires* people to act in the trailer video and to pretend they are waiting in line, dressed in costume, to a book signing. She releases press releases of speculation of building a theme park, and interview clips, and movie deals. I don’t know if she thinks she’s going to delude people into thinking she is a best-seller author and all these things are real, whether she is playing make-believe (in much the same way I pretend in the shower that I’m being interviewed on the radio– c’mon we all do that!), or whether she honestly doesn’t know the difference. In any event she is *weird*. And at 21, kind of scary.
@caseloweraz
It’s been claimed that The Core was actually a parody of action disaster movies. However, this wasn’t something that was said about the film until after it started receiving flak for how stupid it was.
@caseloweraz :
Yes, that was always a possibility, but if he was trolling, he kept it up over several months, and did a really good job, both in that thread and others, of looking like someone who wanted to write about things from a libertarian standpoint, but who was blind to how convoluted his prose was when he went into ‘novel mode’. And I can’t remember similar trolling by him in other situations.
@ck, the Irate Lump :
It wasn’t written so much by committee as despite a committee – everyone was telling him to simplify it, to stop using words in the wrong ways just because he liked the sound of them, and so on, and he’d react by adding more. Which did increase our suspicions that caseloweraz is right to suspect it was an elaborate act.
@ ethicsgradient #41
Good Lord, that’s horrible. The first edit was fucking terrible, and then he ignored advice and, instead of making it better, just made it longer. I couldn’t bring myself to read all of the second paragraph.
@ woozy #49
Spot on. I kind of have a problem with people taking the piss out of a twelve-year-old’s writing… she is, after all, twelve, and no one writes well at that age. What’s worth mocking is that she is now twenty one and still thinks it’s good. By age sixteen I was looking back on school essays I wrote at twelve years old and wondering what the fuck I was thinking, never mind twenty one; and I’m not an author of any kind. And the effort she puts in to fooling people that it is a best-seller does indeed indicate a terrifying level of delusion.
Tesch isn’t 12 now, though. She’s 21 and still promoting the books – and herself – in the same way.
It reminds me of how Grover Norquist supposedly came up with his no-tax pledge at around 14 years of age.
Mocking a 14 year old for something like that, rather than trying to explain the problems with it, would be the wrong thing to do.
Mocking an adult for building a career on an absurdly simplistic notion that he came up with at 14 is entirely the RIGHT thing to do.
Alteredstory;
Um, well, yeah.
Neither Thumper nor I are saying we shouldn’t mock Tesch. I’m just saying that her book being terrible (it’s like something a 13-year old would write!) isn’t really the thing we should be mocking her about. (In fact, for a 13-year old it’s … average. If your or my child wrote it we’d put it on the refrigerator. Or print out a copy and staple it together. “See, honey, it’s just like a real book!”) The point is that this weird delusion of pretending that one is a successful author, with book-signings and conventions, and movie deals and theme parks is … bizarre. In a way it’s like taking photos of a stuffed animal along a hiking trail (“Look! It looks like Ponko Puffin is hiking the Appalachian Trail!”) Except she really seems to think putting her book on a library shelf *is* the same thing as a library ordering a copy. And staging a book signing and *hiring* actors to say “we can’t keep them on the shelves!” is … beyond comprehension.
Heh, heh. I just remembered when I was twelve. I would scribble a comic strip and scotch tape it in our paper over “Rex Morgan”. I didn’t delude myself into thinking my comic strip actually did run in the local paper, but it was a way of getting my family to read it and … well, it was make-believe, right?
What do her parents do that they can afford all the vanity press stuff?
Not merely, vanity press but vanity movie production. From http://conjugalfelicity.com/a-trip-inside-the-mind-of-team-tesch/:
Silly me. It never occurred to me that there would be desperate freelance directors and cinematographers for hire but I suppose in any highly competitive field few superstars and millions of starry-eyed would-bes there always are.
Which makes me wonder, why didn’t her parents simply hire a professional author? The plot of the story isn’t awful (just mediocre and unoriginal, but not awful) and had some hack capable of stringing words together had had a hand at it, it might have sold a few hundred copies.
Anyway as to what her parents do… No-one seems to know. It’s assumed they are simply rich and indulgent. It would be truly tragic if they are simply deluded and have taken out multiple mortgages on their home. Actually, that seems pretty likely, doesn’t it?
It’d be sad if they are buying land and hiring contractors to build the theme park.
reaven #40
Super late on this, but thanks for elaborating.