slatestarscratchpad:

Reading Worm is depressing, because I feel like I’ll never be as good as Wildbow at most facets of writing.

I console myself by remembering my comparative advantages. For example, I wouldn’t write about a team of mass murderers called the Slaughterhouse Nine without at least considering taking away four members and calling them the Slaughterhouse Five.

I can’t speak to what Wildbow is good at because I’ve only read [checks Kindle] 3% of Worm, but you definitely have the advantage of “not using an absurdly large number of words for everything.”

I’ve read and enjoyed some long novels, but usually they have something interesting going on on every page.  Worm just feels like Wildbow took an ordinary novel and then multiplied the length of every scene by ~10 without changing the effect.  By my Kindle’s standard page accounting, I’ve read “185 pages” of Worm, and a lot of authors would do a whole lot more in 185 pages.  You certainly would, given how much stuff Unsong has done so far.

A lot of people seem to be OK with the kind of long-windedness Worm has, but for me it makes Worm basically unreadable.  So not doing that is pretty important to me.