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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2238 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 30, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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So, what are you reading?

I finished al-Ghazali's Banes of the Tongue, which was well worth the read. I can dimly see some aspects of Islam, and in particular the hadith "Beware of the believer's intuition because he sees by the light of God" has caught my eye. There is a sense of leaving uncovered what God has covered and not speaking about what doesn't concern you; in particular, if one is gossiped to, the gossip says more about the gossiper than the one who is spoken about. It has kindled an interest in ways of knowing which might arise from an Islamic mindset.

What is forbidden is supposition [about another's alleged evil ways], and supposition is an expression of what the soul believes is reliable, and the heart inclines toward. God says, O you who have believed, avoid much negative assumption. Indeed, some assumption is sin [Q. 49:12]. The reason for its unlawfulness is because the secrets of the hearts are known only to the Knower of the unseen, so it is not for you to believe in another’s wickedness unless it is disclosed to you by observation and cannot be explained away.

The book is quite comprehensive, talking about things like arguments, joking, praising or being praised, and I'm sure to be revisiting this often.

I decided to see what web serials were all about and picked up A Practical Guide to Evil. I've read the first two books (which is like one sixth of the whole story) and I'm done with it. I ain't reading a series that is more than five times longer than War and Peace unless it is at least twice as good. And this book is not.

At its heart, PG2E is a YA novel with obvious influences: you can see when the author channelled GRRM, Yudkowsky, Rosenfelder. And it could've been a good YA novel if it had a good editor that was willing to do two things:

  • get rid of sixty percent of the text
  • bring the quality of the prose of the first chapters to the level of the latter ones

I understand that both goals are really hard if not impossible to achieve when you are self-publishing your work chapter by chapter, but I am not satisfied with the quality of the final result at all. I'll give Mother of Learning an honest try next to see if the genre is salvageable.

Are web serials for people that read a lot and like reading the same thing?

Oh, and I got through How Not to Write a Novel. The authors spent too much effort on writing excruciatingly bad examples. I would prefer if they actually used fragments from real novels as examples and spend their effort on explaining less obvious problems than "don't make your characters too perfect or completely pitiful".

If you're looking for a shorter (aka 'get to the good part before I've read a whole novel') web serial work, some options:

  • Kitty Cat Kill Sat. Writing and pacing is a little flaky, but the overarcing plot and core idea are pretty good. Check out the first two chapters; if they don't stick with you, the full story won't do any better.
  • Forge of Destiny is a more conventional giant super-arc. The first book stands alone pretty well and basically feels like a Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone-level book for its setting. You do miss out on some of the writing high-notes -- a later character is Ragyo Kiryuin as something approximating a good guy, and despite that paradox the text does it well enough that I could hear Ragyo's theme song -- but you can easily set it down there and feel like you've got a good outcome.
  • Beware of Chicken's in a similar boat, except I'd honestly recommend setting the series down after the first big bad evil guy gets splattered. Plot and theme quality drops pretty dramatically.

Are web serials for people that read a lot and like reading the same thing?

That's part of it. A lot of the big web serials are huge, update faster than all but the most productive conventional writers, and leave the author space to test ideas that you'd have trouble publishing or having recognized anywhere.

It's also just a broader option. The approach has a lot more space than even Kindle Unlimited-focused sales, and vastly more than conventional publishing. Worm's starter 'novel'-worth, or Edge Cases might have been able to get a conventional publisher, but if so only for the same reason that A Long Way To A Small Angry Planet would, and probably only after loading up thirty or forty heavy-handed hints for the main twist; something like Blue Core (cw: don't recommend) or Contention just wouldn't happen.

That said, there's also something interesting specific ritual of the long-form story with a scheduled release and regular in-progress discussion that's become far more available to this genre at the same time that its conventional media competitors dropped it. Reading With This Ring every morning or Ar'Kendrythist every weekend lets you think about what's coming up or what the deeper meaning of a plot point is in a way that fixed stories don't really do anymore, between normalized binge-watching for television or an emphasis on closed novels in written media. I don't think I'd have examined Jinyu's arc in FLCL Progressive without someone else asking and having a week to think on it, for example.

It's also just a lot more monetizable. That's a mixed blessing, of course. Some authors definitely get brain-cored by the internet or be driven nuts by the pressure and immediate stochastic feedback, but some people do thrive in that environment. For readers, you can end up a whale just trying to follow three or four series, be stuck knowing there's a hundred-plus chapters of a story that'll get in normal publication sometime, or find that a series you loved got dropped close to a major climax.

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