#like. that absolutely colored the rest of the book preceding it bc the entire thing was stuff i had literally just learned | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

j-esbian · 8 months ago

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frustrating how so many craft books have a section about "how to sell what you've made"

like on one hand i get it because the person writing the book has obviously made their craft a full-time job. and they might have some tips and tricks that might be useful, and there are people out there who might be trying to start a small business out of it

but on the other hand it's just exhausting and feels like another voice saying "what's the point of having a hobby if you're not going to monetize it"

#the one of those that rly boils my blood. that i still think about all the time. almost ten years later #the art of language invention by david peterson lmao. fuck that. it is NOT actually a helpful resource if youre trying to get into conlang #in the intro he pretty explicitly was like 'yeah i'm only writing this bc the publishing house approached me bc #i made up some languages for the game of thrones show and that's popular so they thought it would sell'#the meat of the book itself is pretty rudimentary stuff iirc. 'here's the ipa chart. this is what a morpheme is.'#some cool stuff in there about how to build your own font and mess with the kerning to make cursive but it was a program i dont have so #and at the end. hoooooo boy. this is where u can tell they told him to put in this kind of section bc he basically straight up said #'if you're reading this because you want to learn how to build a fantasy conlang dont bother :)#if you weren't on this specific forum in 2002 youll never get it. just hire a Real Conlanger instead'#like. that absolutely colored the rest of the book preceding it bc the entire thing was stuff i had literally just learned #in the intro to linguistics class that inspired me to want to learn how to make a language. so it was nothing new #and the added antagonism of basically saying 'if you dont already know how to do this IM not gonna help bc you'd be competition'#again i understand why he had that attitude bc that's probably how the publisher pitched it in the first place #'this is going to be a book for the average joe who knows nothing about language mechanics and might have aspirations #of writing a story with its own language (because obviously gameofthrones was the first to do that /s) and is wondering how to do it'#but just a very weird attitude to have #mine

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