Things I Hate
1. When people don't tip. Don't be cheap, don't be a jerk. Tip your waitress, waiter, bartender, cab driver, whatever. They rely on it. People that don't tip drive me crazy, and I haven't even ever had a job that gets tipped.
2. Getting sick over and over again. One of the downsides of being surrounded by awesome kids is their germs are less awesome.
3. Anybody who talks down to my kids or, God forbid, lays a hand on them. More on this later.
4. Genre fiction. Yeah, I know I wrote something that's pretty genre-y (revising it now), but that stuff is so bad. Sci-fi, fantasy, romance, all of it. Whenever someone sits down and thinks of a genre they want to write before they actually think of a story or start writing or whatever, you're just adding to this big pile of crap literature. I know I'm a nerd and I'm supposed to love this shit but I can't stand it.
posted by Mr. Rice @ 7:14 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
1. tipping - amen and bless you. people who tip less than %20 are hellbound. i waited tables for years and developed an intricate system of categorizing and judging people based on their food and drink orders and their tipping.
4. genre. what if someone offered to pay you a decent amount to write in a genre? someone just asked me to write a murder mystery play to be produced in this little kentucky theater. do i want to see something i wrote acted out on stage? yes. do i now or have i ever wanted to write a murder mystery play? HELL no. still.
i forgot to say under point 1 that you should visit www.bitterwaitress.com - wonderful, delightful hatred of the masses.
Genre is only an issue when the writers don't bother to do anything beyond the genre conventions. Everything Shakespeare wrote was one genre or another (and often lifted whole pieces of plot from other stories), but they're classics because he went beyond the genre basics.
I later refined my views and hates at CBR. It turns out what I really hate is work with bad form. Content? I don't care either way. It can be "interesting" content or a shopping list, but if it is well-written, I want to read it. And I find when writers tend to concentrate on content, their form often goes by the wayside. This, I think, is why I hate 99.99999999% of all genre material. I love Chandler not for his plots (they're stupid) but for his style and his diction.
After that long discussion, some folks recommended Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson as an example of genre work that is actually well-written. So far, I do, in fact, like it.
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