What to do when you’re unable to sleep due to pressure change and damp aggravating old injuries? Lie there and read a book.
Except, reading a book on 2 hours sleep means that if it turns out to be a book I should have thrown across the room in disgust, I’ll instead keep reading it. (Sleep deprivation is a lot like being drunk; it does affect your judgement. You know something’s bad, but your judgement and attention span are bad, so you keep doing the thing/watching the thing/reading the thing, and it keeps not getting better.)
I will not start a WIP to rewrite this book as it should have been; I have too many WIPs hanging fire to start another one. But I may use the spite to power me through tackling the WIP, muttering, “I can write better than that!”
Spite books are a thing. I have written things solely to spite a bad story I had endured. Who hasn’t?
I’ll throw it out to you. What stories have you written out of spite? Without naming titles or authors, describe how a story motivated you to be better than that?
(I’m serious about not naming titles or authors. Because this isn’t about tearing down a specific person, this is about using even the basest motivation to be better.)
image by Cedar Sanderson, all copyright reserved to her. Because spite can warm the cockles of your cold black heart… but a salamander named spite is just as dangerous as the emotion, and can warm your tea, too.
Mad Genius Club 
32 responses to “In Praise of Spite”
Once upon a time, I “created” a story universe based on “What Star Trek Did Wrong”.
A few things that I remember about it.
The landing party were not members of the Command Team but a group of crewmen that were trained for studying a planet along with a security team to ensure the safety of landing party.
They didn’t “beam down” but used a landing craft that contained supplies (for a longer stay), tools that might be necessary, quarters for the landing team and was able to fly the team to a different area of planet.
In addition, the landing craft could travel FTL and reach the nearest “Starbase” if something happened to the main starship. (Might not be comfortable but the team could get back to civilization.)
Note, the main starship would likely drop off several landing parties on several different planets, not stay in orbit of a single planet.
And what did you learn from that?
Ideas are easy.
Creating a story (with real people) is hard.
…most of my stories are motivated by a mixture of spite and anger/frustration about people that seem to have the brainpower of a turnip somehow getting lots and lots of money for stories that I’d be embarrassed to write in junior high, let alone today.
The Last Solist was my frustration about urban fantasy, magical girls, and a lot of the deconstructionist stories that I had been seeing. (Mind you, I’ve also fallen in love with Gushing Over Magical Girls, which TVTropes has cut because it’s “loli bait porn,” despite it being more hilarious farce and almost all of the “sexuality” points are shown with as much respect and slight cringe as you can get.) But I’m trying to write a story that is more Sailor Moon and Lyrical Nanoha with a bit of Dresden Files, than Puella Magi Madoka Magica, warts and all. Which in this day and age is apparently Bad Wrong Think.
An Ethical Succubus is the question of “at what point does someone become a monster, and where do you draw the line?” stories that far too many authors lately think that one act will screw you up…if it’s the wrong act against the wrong person (doing the wrong act against the right person is utterly forgivable, of course!). The MC has to decide how they’re going to live with a condition that requires them to kill at least one person every other month to keep their sanity. In a way that can be nothing more than a violation of trust or outright rape. And they have to live with it, because they’ve tried most of the practical ways of suicide.
(Yes, they did try throwing themselves in a woodchipper and a hydraulic car crusher and setting themselves on fire. Didn’t take.)
The (currently) untitled “porn with a plot” novel that I’m writing is…migrating away from some of the porn and more into what it means to have your world upended and changed. Nothing supernatural, nothing beyond one single technology that has rules…and what those rules mean to your main character.
Two Isekai stories that talk about what happens when you get hit by Truck-kun and the consequences of that. Including two main characters who are not standard protagonists by any means.
And so many other stories that take a base concept and flip it on its head as hard as possible to see what happens. Mostly out of frustration.
The entire Elect series (all three, to date), because I hit bad-ish writing and bad tropes in the same paragraph in a very popular book and bounced, hard. Then tried other books in that same series and bounced harder. “I could take the same basic idea and write a better story!”
There’s a fair amount of academic writing that got started as either “I don’t think that’s what the sources really say. I’m going to dig deeper,” or “Oh [very rude words]. He/she/it is so wrong it’s not funny. This is really what was going on!” One book in particular written about slavery in the United States so incensed historians that at least five magnificent books and five more pretty good ones were written to prove the first author wrong. (No, I’m not naming names.)
And your recent Familiar Generations included an idiot summoning a certain “dark god”.
Fortunately for the idiot, Jude was in the area. 😉
Oh, all the Evil AIs. So I wrote a perky little AI whose holographic self wore pink dresses and white aprons and ran a cooking show.
I am reminded of the scene in a Person of Interest we watched recently, where Root (a smug, annoying human who talks to AIs) borrows the team dog and mascot, and the computer whiz who created the AI is fretting about Root feeding the dog chocolate, and all of us watching were like, “Naw, Harold, right now the Machine is telling Root: ‘Chocolate is poisonous to canis familiaris and it would be wrong to poison the canid called BEAR, and poisoning BEAR would also cause additional stress and hardship to ADMIN. Therefore do not feed chocolate to BEAR.”
Oooo! I need to rewatch those. Really wish they didn’t kill almost everyone off at the end. Would have liked more.
Yeah, I read up on the finale and although I’m happy for the characters who made it out, it sounds pretty sad for the ones who don’t.
Person Of Interest was one of those series that when it worked, it worked and when it failed, it failed hard.
Example, the Samaritan/Control arc. Had I been Control and realized that Samaritan and the people in charge of it were becoming a problem, I would have gone low-tech, old-school, and ready to take people out ASAP. Or developed and built an alliance with Team Machine as a counterweight. After all, if they’re outside of the system, they have the oversight view that is needed in this day of AI-driven systems.
We’re only just starting the Samaritan arc (Artie from Warehouse 13 just showed up a couple eps ago and we got the backstory on his initial design of Samaritan), so I don’t think we’re up to that point. I have read that the producers were expecting a longer final season than what they got, and Control was one of the threads that got dropped as a result.
I can definitely tell that, in retrospect. Especially how many plot points got wrapped up badly near the end.
My Fullmetal Alchemist fanfic, because I got tired of the fanfic writers writing Mustang’s men like grade school kids doing worksheets, and Hawkeye like a school marm. To be fair, while the manga doesn’t do that at all, and is really awesome in the way they’re portrayed, the first anime tends somewhat that way, so I get where the fanfic writers get it.
That’s often one of the biggest issues with fanfiction-usually they’re written based on the anime, not the original manga.
And the original FMA anime had to have a new ending attached because the manga series hadn’t ended by the time it was made.
Am being tempted by an isekai that did not make full use of the location she landed in. Also, jerked between very low stakes and very high ones.
I didn’t react that vehemently to the Star Wars prequels or sequels; maybe because I was never that emotionally invested in anything beyond the 1977 movie, but my Star Master duology kind of draws on a lot of “hmm, would have done that differently” moments brought to me by TESB, ROTJ, the prequels and the sequels.
From a certain point of view, everything I write is spite, in the sense that I’m writing because I’m annoyed that I can’t find what I’m looking for. From another point of view, very little is spite, because books or films that annoy me that badly tend to get a). dropped quickly, because attention span of a gnat; and b). forgotten quickly, because attention span of a gnat.
I’ve told this story before, but it wasn’t a book that got me started in writing. I was in a discussion about current events a couple of years ago when I started wondering what if Texas had never joined the U. S.
Before I knew it, the plot bunnies were running wild and a muse who had trained under Tom Clancy and David Weber had moved in. 😂🤓
It wasn’t a single story that ever incensed me into writing, but a collection of them from several years ago by a small press. It involved humans co-existing with nonhuman races based on Earth animals in past historical periods. I loved the idea when I heard of it but when I saw the stories?
Everything seemed to have been based on a mixture of ‘common knowledge’ and History Channel documentaries (back when the History Channel covered history, that is). All evil in human history came from European Christians and every non-Christian and European civilization was a pacifist utopia where wickedness and selfishness were unknown.
And the worst part was that the addition of intelligent nonhuman races changed absolutely nothing about history, save for one or two passing references. Same religions, same cultures, same empires. everything the same. Oh, and all the viewpoint characters had the social attitudes of upper middle class European and American sorta-leftists. It made me briefly try something with the Aztecs and beast-folk who actually behaved as members of their culture would have pre-Columbian contact.
So much wasted potential.
The Edgar Rice Burroughs school has a long history in writing. “I can write better trash than that.” Because it’s trash can, not trash can’t.
My Fantasy detective, Erik Rugar, was largely created as a reaction against the overused Loose Cannon trope in Mystery fiction. Erik follows the rules and obeys his superiors and in general takes his job seriously as a job. He’s effective as an investigator precisely because he follows the procedures. He has a good relationship with the head of his department and is known as a reliable agent.
Despite all this, the Rugar stories are among the most popular ones I’ve written.
Related to this is the assumption that the loose cannon is a slob who doesn’t look after his hardware (Han Solo being a prime example). After reading up on Audie Murphy, I concluded that the kind of loose cannon who is actually good at dangerous situations is probably somewhat (or a lot finicky) about maintaining his gear and finding and exploiting any little situational factor that might work in his favor.
Which describes my other character in that universe, Magus Leonid Vetch. I deliberately made him the antithesis of the sloppy, absent minded wizard stereotype.
Han Solo had astromechs like R2/D2and Chewbacca for those things.
Possibly the ultimate example was in Kelley’s Heroes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhOjsaLwLpg
“Oh, man…. I only ride ’em, I don’t know what makes them work.”
😎
Yeah, Oddball’s a fair example, although nobody really thinks of him as a bada$$.
As for Han, if he cares so much about “this one goes here, that one goes there” he’d be doing it himself and not outsourcing to the Wookiee who’s apparently not 100% reliable about it. R2, who *can* consistently fix the Falcon when it is broke, is not his droid, and the later canon embellishments (starting arguably in ROTJ but continuing through the prequels and sequels) portray R2 as an overengineered, nigh-indestructible and highly versatile piece of hardware left over from a golden age. (Kind of like a midcentury refrigerator).
Think about Han’s background: he’s an ex- Imperial fighter pilot. He came up through a system that basically teaches pilots “fixing things is what crew chiefs are for.”
In that sense, it fits, although you’d think he’d have lost that idea as a freighter captain.
Legends and Lattes. If you haven’t read it, a female orc retires from her job as mercenary, moves to town and opens a coffee shop.
That’s basically it.
It is advertised as “cozy fantasy,” an idea I like very much – not every story has to involve saving a princess in a castle – but there is a difference between low stakes and no stakes. Every plot complication was essentially handwaved away. It definitely gave me a case of “I could write that better.” Now I’m wondering how to do it…
Oh good. I’m not the only one who had that problem with the story.
Please do, I like the idea but bounced hard off of the execution.
The idyll is a legitimate form of literature.
But they do have plots, however low-key
There was a trad pub SF novel back in the 80s with many science errors. The most egregious was a drowning character gasping for a “few cubic liters” of air. Made me determined to get the facts right.
Romance world building.
I can see why a bunch make the choices they do, but… my inner biologist starts to shudder. And I don’t mean from things like, “all the species can interbreed.” That is weird, but it works, and you can choose to make a universe were that’s how it is and we don’t know why, and they might even laugh at you for not knowing that.
I mean things like family sizes. If 90% of your couples are wiped out, the surviving couples are going to have more than one or two offspring! I can math!
On a secondary route, some of the Orc stories end up keeping the worst, flat execution of old D&D orcs… they just call them “humans.” Generally male only, there. >.> Then we have the wise, enlightened “orcs” and their human girlfriends.
<.<
Yes, I’m taking notes, figuring out what buttons they’re hitting, and I want to do that *and* make a good story, dang it!