 Well shakin, my name's Cam, welcome back to another video. You are not going to believe this, but since the last episode of Writer Badlands, writers and authors are still out there making complete fools of themselves. I know it's like my sole video, my one video should have solved all writer drama in the entire world, but somehow it didn't. Thanks for all the love on the last episode, by the way guys, these videos are really not easy to put together. I know they probably seem like they are, but they're not, they take quite a bit of time. So I really do appreciate all of the support. By the way, if you're a word putter down or are like myself, then you should stick around. I have lots of videos on writing and I do make other videos on here aside from Writer Badlands where I talk about writing and the journey of trying to be a professional writer slash author, etc. There are lots of super interesting stories today guys, including the big one, I'm sure you know the one I'm talking about if you're at least slightly plugged into the social zeitgeist. There's a lot to cover, so I'll quickly get the house keeping out of the way. All links and sources for the stories I talk about today will be in the description below, including in particular a few Twitter accounts and threads that were a huge help in me getting all of the receipts and the screenshots for some of this stuff because as I'm sure you know, usually when an author or a writer fucks up, they go and delete all of the proof. I obviously can't cover everything with every story from A to B because this video is not five hours long, so if you would like to look into each of these stories as we go, you can scroll down and have a look for yourself. I want to stress as well that these videos are not to throw shade or stir the tea, share drama, however you want to put it. The purpose of these videos is to take a closer look into the writing related topics that everyone on the internet is talking about and seeing if there's any nuance to it, anything we can learn from it. It's not just about saying, here's some gossip, it's about trying to have at least a little bit of an extra discussion about it. That is all the boring stuff out of the way so without further ado, let's jump straight into Episode 2 of Writer. As you probably remember from Episode 1, I want to start each of these videos with at least something positive so today I have, I thought I would make it an author tube shout out. I recently watched a video from a channel called Rachel Writes called I'm a Published Author and it was one of the most inspiring videos that I've seen on here for a fair while. There are very few people I've seen on here that have published and submitted as many stories in such a short space of time and that video really hit a chord with me because I've been thinking a lot this year about submitting short stories to various magazines and lit websites. It's something I've never done but something I've always wanted to do and this year I was hoping would be the year that I would start doing that. So this video was a huge push for me in starting to get that ball rolling. If you're interested in getting some information on how to submit stories and what it's like when you do, I highly recommend this video and Rachel's channel as a whole is just pretty damn great. I will leave a link in the description below. Coway-y mere mortals because Lauren Hof has returned. If you don't know who Lauren Hof is, boy are you in for a treat. Let me give you the crash course and get you up to date. It's going to seem like I'm making this stuff up but I promise you I'm not. Lauren Hof is the author of Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing. Currently at 3 stars on Goodreads, it was previously at 2 stars last time I looked but curiously it's been bumped up a little bit due to a recent influx of 5 star reviews kind of over the last few days in fact and for once the book itself isn't actually at the center of the hellstorm here but rather some stuff she said after the fact her very controversial opinions on 4 star reviews. You as a writer would probably imagine that getting a 4 star review on any book you put out would be amazing, it would be magnificent, that is a great review that is literally higher than average. However, Lauren's view was that anyone not brave enough to give her a 5 star review instead of a 4 star review, anyone not brave enough to give her glimmering masterpiece of modern literature a rock hard 5 stars is a nerd. Even when on an enormous twitter tirade throwing insults at pretty much anyone who reviewed her book any less than 5 stars and then in a bizarre twist of events turned around and blamed the whole thing on being high because people at Smokeweed are very well known for going around and calling everyone nerds scooby-doo levels of wacky bullshitery, I know. There is truly a whole lot more to that situation, again links below but we fast forward to now. Lauren makes a post lamenting over how her book will not win a lambda prize, passive aggressively hinting that it's because of twitter cancel culture and not because she started throwing insults at the majority of her fan base. She also said that her book likely wouldn't win a prize because her friend Sandra had recently published a fantastic book, a book called The Men which has a whole controversy in itself and yes we will come back to that. I want to quickly read out a bit from Lauren's post. My book won't win a prize because my friend Sandra Newman wrote a book. The premise of her book is, what if all the men disappeared? When she announced the book on twitter, YA twitter saw it. This is the single most terrifying thing that can happen to a writer on twitter. YA twitter presumably fans of young adult fiction are somehow unfamiliar with the concept of fiction. YA twitter doesn't do nuance, they don't understand metaphor or thought experiment, they expect fictional characters to be good and moral and just, whether antagonist or protagonist. They expect characters and plot to be free of conflict. They require fiction to portray a world without racism, bigotry and bullies. And when YA twitter gets wind of a book that doesn't meet their demands, they respond with a beatdown so unrelenting and vicious it would shock William Golden. They call it call out culture because bullying is wrong, unless your target is someone you don't like, for social justice reasons of course. Now while I do get second hand embarrassment from her pretty much straight out generalizing the entire YA book twitter group as a whole, the crazy thing is I kind of agree with a lot of what she's saying here. Twitter does have a habit of irrationally equating authors with the fictional circumstances and happenstances of the stories that they write. If the character within a story, especially one posed as a hero, is not the paragon of moral virtue without any character flaws or any hint of malicious intent, if the author has gone out of their way to make them morally questionable, it can land them in hot water and it has before. I see a lot of hot takes on book twitter that I think are just mind bogglingly stupid so normally when reading a post like this I would probably be going, if it wasn't written by Lauren Hoff. She wasn't cancelled because her fictional characters were morally questionable. I don't think I saw the content of her book being brought into the discussion once. She was cancelled because again she roasted nearly everyone that had reviewed her book like she was a bully in an early 2000s Disney show. Let's jump back a bit, let's jump back to Sandra Newman if only for a moment. I'm going to read out the hook to her book or a little bit of a paragraph that she's using for publicity sake, for the book The Men. And before I even give my opinion after I read it out for you, I just want you to sit with it, sit with what I've read out and truly ask yourself how you feel about it. Do you think it's an acceptable or appropriate premise for a story? Think about that before I give you my opinion. Everyone with a Y chromosome suddenly mysteriously disappears. In the months that follow, the world gets better, safer, kinder, more egalitarian but the book is about women who can't let go of the men they've lost and devote their lives to getting them back. Okay, so this is part of a sub-genre that I was completely unaware of called gender side and now for my opinion. I truly believe that I'm one of the last people that will do any pearl clutching when it comes to art, including writing. Unless the writing itself is explicitly endorsing harmful rhetoric, I think it has a right to exist just as everyone else has the right to call it out as I'm about to. How the fuck is a sub-genre called gender side just okay? First of all, it has been pointed out that the plot of this book with the specific focus of targeting and removing the Y chromosome is potentially transphobic and feeds into ideologies and attitudes that actively harm the trans community. I would go even further and say that maybe don't write a book where the plot of the story is that the world would be a better, safer, kinder place if an entire group of people didn't exist. Look, no, I'm not going to give you some bullshit red-pilled, anti-feminist, pro-meninist spiel about how oppressed the modern man is. I've used TikTok before I'm well aware of how fucking horrible dudes are to women just because I've been out clubbing in Fortitude Valley on a weekend. I know how terrifyingly creepy some fucking guys can be when it comes to women out just having a good time, especially drunk women. I'll always call bullshit on guys who try to pretend like that stuff doesn't exist. But come on, I just kind of hate that some people who advocate for or say they advocate for positive mental health will cheer on stories like this because fuck men. They'll go online and say the most horrible shit they possibly can about males because it's quirky and it's funny. You don't need to kill all men. They're already killing themselves at a pretty fucking alarming rate. And I am genuinely terrified for how this now socially acceptable standard of telling men that the world would be a better place if they didn't exist or if they just sat down, shut up and had nothing to do with anything that ever happens in the world. I'm terrified for how that's going to affect people in the future. How do you think that is going to affect young boys growing up when they see all this kind of bullshit online? They are going to grow up feeling like the world is inherently a worst place simply because they exist, because of the way they were born. This is rhetoric that's probably starting to sound very familiar, rhetoric that we know objectively is harmful and wrong. I know that men are by far not the worst off in the world. I know that until recent history, it was young women being blasted with this kind of horribly sexist bullshit. I'm just editing right now and I wanted to add really quickly that when I say until recent history, I'm referring specifically to the super overt sexist propaganda of like the 50s and 60s, etc. I am well aware that the world is still extremely sexist and damaging to young women. Again, I've been on TikTok in most part, maybe even due to apps like TikTok and Instagram, but that's a whole other conversation. The point I wanted to make was just that I know that sexism against young women is not gone. I know it's not in the past. I was just referring specifically here to the, you know, 50s, 60s fedora tipping black and white style of sexism. That's the point. We have seen how harmful this kind of shit can be for children and for emotionally vulnerable people that are already asking the world if it would be better if they just removed themselves from it. Is it too fucking much to ask that we strive for compassion and inequality without completely dragging down other groups of people? Gender side is fucking stupid. And it's incredibly disappointing that it would even be considered for an award. Just be nice to people. Fucking shit, man. It's not that hard. I ran over. I'm sorry, this is just a topic that I do take pretty seriously. If you've been around on my channel during Movember, you'll know why. On a lighter note, depending on how you look at it, GK Rowling is back in the news for a reason that I still can't believe I'm going to say it. J.K. was endorsed by Putin. Putin compared his sanctions to being canceled online like J.K. Rowling, which is just wild. I mean, I know that so little of this is actually funny, but I mean what world are we living in? You know, now don't get me wrong. I'm not J.K.'s biggest fan by a long stretch, but I'm not sure how I feel about people using this as proof that she's a bad person. I just don't really put these two people in the same boat when it comes to being bad people. One has made herself the leader of an anti-trans movement that I agree is made up almost entirely of people saying incredibly stupid and horrible shit. And the other is in the midst of carrying out a full scale genocide. I just I mean, the scales, I just don't know how I feel about those two people being in the same conversation when we're referring to the worst of the worst. You know, do you get what I mean? With that said, I do find it painfully ironic how self-described radical feminists will back J.K. on everything she says, but then completely discredit the entire career of another woman just because she said she supports trans people. Didn't even say anything about J.K. specifically just said that she supports trans people. This tweet about Emma Watson seems pretty damn anti-feminist to me. Emma has carved out an objectively positive and selfless career for herself outside of acting and suggesting that she would be living in a trailer. If not for J.K. is just fucking nonsense, man. I'm not trying to go full simp, but Emma Watson is definitely a lot smarter than pretty much anyone who logs on the Twitter, including myself. So the idea that she would be working in a fast food restaurant. If not for J.K. is just it's stupid. Stop. And also, how's that any different to saying that J.K. would still be a dirt poor single mother, if not for the person at the publishing company that decided to give her a chance? If you're going to start saying that every successful person owes their success 100 percent to the person that gave them their first opportunity, you could take that line all the way back to the first caveman. Just be better. Literary agents have been taking a bit of a beating online recently. In particular, these two, you can pause it and have a read for yourself if you'd like. Yeah, the passive aggressive attitude of these tweets is not a good look. It's extremely unprofessional. However, for the most part, I actually do find myself agreeing with what they're saying. I've seen authors, especially new ones, treat literary agents like their own personal wait stuff simply because they see it entirely as the literary agent is working for them, which, depending on how you look at it, is maybe technically true. But I would think you would want to treat it as more of a partnership or at the very least, you should take into account that the literary agent very likely has other clients as well. There are a lot of very dodgy lit agents out there, no doubt, no doubt. But I do kind of detest the idea that just because an author poured their heart and soul into this manuscript, the agent owes them every second of their time. Like I said, most agents have multiple clients. Most agents have personal lives. This is also an incredibly taxing and competitive industry, especially now book sales and aspiring authors have absolutely skyrocketed in the last couple of years, which is good, but it does put a significantly larger workload on the lit agents themselves, especially when a lot of these new aspiring authors are going their own way and just doing self-publishing without the middleman. I think Liana summed it up pretty well in this tweet. So an author named Emily Everett wrote a romance story called Heartland. And I'm just going to go ahead and read the synopsis out for you again after I finish reading before I even give you my opinion. I just want you to sit with it for a bit, see how you feel. A story set on American soil during World War Two about the secret relationship between a young woman and a German POW assigned to work on her family's Iowa farm that causes each to question who they are, what they desire and their complicity in an unforgiving war, shining a light on the little known history of POW camps in the expansive American Midwest. So I'm going to try to tread very carefully here. In fact, before I even say anything else, I just want to make one thing extremely clear if you are a willful participant in Nazi ideologies, activities and ideals in general, you suck. Calling yourself a patriot and then waving the Nazi flag next to the flag that the veterans flew against the Nazis, it's just a level of stupidity that I can't even begin to comprehend. I want you to keep in mind that I said that before I start playing Devil's Advocate here, because I know by law of statistics there's probably going to be at least one person that hears what I'm about to say and says, he likes Nazis. I don't. I am literally telling you that I do not. So obviously the explosion primarily on Twitter, of course, was that this is a story involving or a romance story involving a Nazi. I think the conclusion that a lot of people were trying to come to was that this story would in some way try to make us sympathetic for the Nazi cause itself, which I just don't think is the case. Even reading the like the synopsis that I just read out for you, it literally says that this story will force the characters to question who they are and their complicity in an unforgiving war. Look, if the story Heartland is just a romance involving a shameless Nazi doing Nazi things, then yeah, what the fuck? But we should keep in mind that no small number of soldiers, Nazi soldiers during World War Two were forced into that role under threat of death, not only to them, but to their families. I mean, just look at the notorious children soldier units that the Nazis used to gear up and send out. It wasn't just as simple as the good guys and the bad guys. That's all I'm trying to say. And it seems, I don't know for sure, but it seems like that's what this story is going to be getting at. If this story Heartland explores a Nazi coming to terms with the truly evil nature of their party, I still don't. I still don't know. It still seems a bit inappropriate of a setting or a backdrop for a romance story, if I'm being honest. I just don't think that in twenty twenty two, we need any more stories exploring the moral duality of a Nazi. So where do I stand? I don't think this story was a great idea, but at the same time, I'm also I feel a bit sorry for the author, Emily, because she says in her post herself that writing a book was her dream. And she's obviously very, very like happy that her dreams come true. And I feel like it's just being shit on all over like the online sphere to the point of her being addressed as a Nazi sympathizer, which feels like a lot feels pretty unfair. And it can also be the kind of thing that can completely destroy someone's aspirations as an author, which, again, as we know, is her dream. I don't think there was any malicious intent here. I think she just had a bit of a goofy idea. But at the end of the day, I haven't read the book. I don't know this story. Maybe it does completely sympathize with Nazis. That's I don't I don't even want to say that and word anymore. Nazis, I don't want to say that word anymore. So I'll leave it with you. What do you think? On the topic of she wrote, what we have a TikTok author, our favorite, not just a TikTok author. Oh, no. No, no, no, no, but a woman writing male male romance. Oh, shit. Here we go again. Naila Kaye wrote a story that I'm just going to read this synopsis for you. You know the drill. What's an honest man to do? Isn't that always the question we find ourselves wondering when we get swept up in something bad, something overpowering and tangibly wrong with the ability to corrupt our morals down to the core? These boys, they're not mine, but they might as well be. I'm responsible for them, in a sense, and they couldn't be more different. Identical and looks alone. One I've noticed. The other has noticed me. One needs me. The other needs him. Sometimes a hero will fall on his own sword. But in my case, I've fallen on too. Double edged is a full length taboo MMM standalone novel that is intended for mature readers only. Some of the themes in this book could make readers uncomfortable. Please proceed with caution. People are very critical of the idea of a romance story in this case, based on this author's previous books. I'm guessing a very sexual or smart, if you want to use that word, a romance story involving two twin brothers and a stepdad because of incest. Look, on the surface, I'm like, whatever, it's fiction. I don't want to kink shame. Technically, no one's getting hurt. God knows there's more than enough popular romance about equally illegal. And I would argue much more questionable sexual content. However, the one element of this story that I didn't see anyone talking about was that the twin brothers in this story are 17. There's something about a woman writing a story about two 17 year old boys having a sexual relationship with their stepfather, assuming that's what happens. That's just kind of anyway. Of course, I would love to hear what you think about it. Where where do you stand? Now, the biggest story of the day of the video is one for the horror community. Jean O'Neill is a reasonably prolific author coming out with a new book called The White Plague Chronicles. I will, of course, read the synopsis for you. And some of this may bring back memories of Sandra's The Men book that we discussed earlier. Time is running out. An unknown terrorist organization has their hands on a previously unidentified virus that is far deadlier than Ebola and even more sinister as this horrific disease is genetically targeted to kill only the members of the Caucasian race. Two retired Black Ops specialists named Ryan Tull and Joey Hotzko are thrust into the unfortunate position of being humanity's last hope. These ageing combat vets have been recruited into a secret international organization known only as The Association. Their mission to do whatever it takes to stop the virus from being released. Together, they must travel from the backwater rivers and jungles of Borneo to the scorching desert outback of Tasmania to the politically and religiously charged hotbed of the streets and back alleys of Israel. But will they succeed in stopping the madmen responsible for this atrocity before it's too late? Sadly, the answer will be no. The plague will be released and the effects of the deadly virus will be even worse than feared, mutating and evolving into a worst case scenario that will change the world as we know it forever. Economies will fail, governments will fall, countries will crumble, billions of innocent men, women and children will die and a new world order will rise that will ultimately become known as the collapse. So I would hope that it's not too hard to see why this book, the idea for this story upset quite a few people. The rescue of the quickly vanishing white race is a pretty thinly veiled tale of white erasure, which has been a calling card for almost all far right movements, the belief that we are being replaced. And the publisher at the forefront of this is Silver Shamrock Publishing, which until this incident was actually a very well known horror press. I've actually come across them in the past. I've even considered submitting to them quite a few times in a long string of now deleted tweets. They staunchly defended the book and the author and clapped back against criticism with such whammies as censorship or content warnings being one step away from SWAT stickers and jackboots. I don't think anyone is being censored here, though. Silver Shamrock is literally the publisher. They can publish it. Like I said before, though, just as they have the freedom to do that, people also have the freedom to criticize them for it and call them out on it. And also content warnings just aren't censorship. They're just they're just not like they're just emphatically not that thing. Content warnings are literally just a way for readers who choose to to check for anything that will make the reading experience worse or even dangerous for them. If you're worried about spoilers, don't read the content warning. Anyway, like these defensive tweets aren't unprofessional enough. Shamrock apparently also asked the author Jean to direct his entire Facebook fan base to one person's specific Twitter thread, a Twitter thread that was highlighting that person's concerns with the book and the story. As I understand it, Silver Shamrock may now actually be shutting down and removing themselves from the publishing and online sphere entirely, which unfortunately has left a lot of horror authors displaced in an industry that already shows little to no love for that genre. The story of White Plague itself actually kind of reminds me of that Jenny Nicholson video about the book Trigger Warning. It's basically a very obvious self-insert fantasy of an old white dude making himself a young muscular action hero so he can fight the young multicultural lives to save his outdated views. In the story, the hero is described every page as being big and jacked and also having very old sensibilities, sensibilities almost identical. To the author. Holy hell, there it is. Big month for writers. I hope you enjoyed. Please do let me know what you think about any and all of the stories we've spoken about today in the comments below. I appreciate it and I appreciate your support. Like I said, I make other videos aside from these ones about writing as well. So if you are a fellow writer, I would encourage you to stick around. Thanks for watching. Hopefully I'll see you in my next writing video. Otherwise, I guess I'll see you in episode three of Writer Badlands. Catch it.