Schizophrenic’s Guide: Hope…

I, Daniel Trump, am at present a terrible writer. I write dreck, absolute dreck, the worst kind of juvenile woke nonsense. Nerdrotic and the internet police should call out my stories as terrible and liberal and trying to say something about life, society, and goodness. What can I say? Everyone hated my last half-dozen books.

Hope doesn’t sell copies.

I hope — desperately beyond belief — that I have hit rock-bottom. I sold zero copies of my most recent novel. 1500 people downloaded it for free, everyone who read it hated it, and no one bought it.

That’s bad, right? I think that’s bad. It was called Space Paladins: The Supernova Conflict, and it was about a huge spaceship battle in which some teenagers pilot giant mechas against a space emperor.

That should sell, right?

I’d buy that.

Only I wouldn’t. It’s stupid, knockoff drivel — like a third-party attempt at a Transformers or Voltron type story. It’s not high art, and it doesn’t sound good. It has lots of red flags.

I should have respected the audience more and written a more personal, intimate type of story.

I need to write a more intelligent story now.

I don’t know how. I’m sorry. I try and try to write an intelligent, literate quality of novel, and I fail utterly. It pisses me off. I write for months and the result is drivel, pure drivel. Why? I don’t know. I don’t understand why my books aren’t good. I can’t read them and think, why is this bad?

What happened? I don’t know. I wrote about characters that I loved and cared about. They mattered to me. Axl and Camila were a wonderful, love-hate couple who fought and cared for each other. They should have been fan favorites, but no one noticed or cared. I don’t know why. It’s agonizing to write for months and have no one notice. I wrote for two months — more — on this book. I prepared it by working with my friend Finnegan on a storytelling game and preparing a game and a story for me to write.

No one cared. No one noticed.

I wrote for two months, several hours a day, working most days, and when I was finished someone gave me one star and told me how terrible a novel I had written.

Thanks. Thanks for that. I worked really, really hard on that. I loved that book. I gave my everything to that book, and you hated it. Thanks.

Working on this novel was great.

I sat in Finnegan’s basement and he sipped some liquor. We sat there, playing a storytelling game in which we played out a story and created the lore for a reality. We created the rules for a game in which the players would play mecha pilots who flew around and fought enemy spaceships with their mechas. It sounded like so much fun — like something that everyone would enjoy. It sounded like a hit.

These were the central complaints from the negative review:

1. Too jumpy — I am schizophrenic and cannot always write a story that tracks from chapter to chapter. I do my best. I understand this complaint and agree with it.
2. Passive woke teens — agreed. I needed more aggressive characters who were less liberal and sounded more like real teens.
3. Not many fights — this is a simple one. I am writing fun stories to entertain. There should be some fights.
4. Too juvenile — this one is embarrassing. I should write with more dignity and intelligence than this.

Those were the general complaints. That’s what I have to clean up for next time. I hope to write the greatest novel ever next time. I also want to add research to the list of problems for the last novel. I didn’t do any, and that hurt the story. Research is essential for effective writing, and I want to do research every time I write a book now.

In summary, I suck at writing, I’m very sorry, it’s a work in progress, and I’m doing everything I can to fix it. Let’s see what happens in the future with the next book. Maybe — just maybe — it will be a little better. Maybe someone will like it.

Thanks, and take care, friends.