💥 Trainwreck Gloria Tesch / Sofia Nova - Author of the Maradonia series turned Republithot

[Saney]

Tesch apparently does all the formatting tricks in her hard-copy books to make them look longer -- big font, lots of leading, you name it -- but at least she doesn't have entire months of story time represented by blank pages. I realize we're meant to understand that Bella's brain is a complete blank without Edward, but in a published author who is selling zillions of these stupid doorstops, that just makes me rage.

I can empathize with Tesch. Or I could if she were maybe ten, and had just discovered fantasy. I get it, talking bedazzled snake is bad, talking grasshopper (who becomes Joey's BFF, then vanishes from the narrative) is good; everyone likes unicorns, and griffins, and dwarves, and mermaids, so let's have them all. And fairies! Only fairies are evil because... something. And one of the unicorns is called Mighty Bronco. And of course the unicorns talk, and gossip about their crushes on each other. Also, it's notable every time a person walks onstage and is black. And one of the fairies isn't the most beautiful person on the island; she's merely the most beautiful black person on the island (not difficult, because there aren't many at all). And Tesch... just isn't ten anymore.

Well, to be fair to the little moron, fairies were sometimes thought of as malevolent, possibly demonic creatures. But she probably didn't know that and made them evil...because.

 

[cubesandcubes]

I would like to think of CWCville and marandonia sharing a border with eachother. Perhaps there is a whole region FULL of mary-suetopias and other dysfunctional, derivitive, inane and otherwise banal imaginary worlds as a counterpoint to good ones such as Middle Earth, etc.

 

[NobleGreyHorse]

Oh, a link would help. http://conjugalfelicity.com/maradonia/

xlk, I can't really guesstimate because I read faster than most people (which is necessary for my job) -- but the Conjugal Felicity blog breaks down ("sporks") all of the published Maradonia stuff the blogger could lay his hands on. With another writer in there, stopping the pages of dreck to point out exactly what makes a given line of dialogue or whatever terrible, it actually goes faster -- and is certainly more bearable.

 

[CalmMyTits]

As a writer, I know how valuable the editing process is. That said, I wouldn't want to be a Maradonia editor, that garbage would take far too much work to fix.

 

[TheIncredibleLioness]

As a writer, I know how valuable the editing process is. That said, I wouldn't want to be a Maradonia editor, that garbage would take far too much work to fix.

I'm not even sure if the books are edited. Sure, if you look at Tesch's sockpuppets (Conjugal Felicity lays them out somewhere), there's someone who claims she edits them, but the actual evidence is pretty dubious, seeing how bad the books are, both plot and grammar-wise. I actually wonder if Gloria reads a lot? They say reading can help stimulate imagination or something like that -- compare her to Chris, who we know grew up on a diet of television and had his fantasy worlds be very derivative because of it. Makes me wonder if Gloria just watches a lot of TV. After all, look at the excerpt - "Bravo, Bravo, Bravissimo," while possibly a legitimate term (though why it's being used here is nonsensical), strikes me as coming from the Phantom of the Opera; the "make you an offer you cannot refuse," is straight out of The Godfather. I think Conjugal Felicity pointed out a lot more than that, but all I know is what they post.

Though I shouldn't say that Gloria doesn't read -- a lot of her stuff is plagiarized from the Bible, like a shitty Narnia ripoff, so it's obvious she's read parts of that!

 

[CalmMyTits]

In the author's note of the later books (I read the free Amazon samples of books 1-5 and am going to read the one for book 6) she mentions her father as an co-author and editor.

 

[bradsternum]

In the author's note of the later books (I read the free Amazon samples of books 1-5 and am going to read the one for book 6) she mentions her father as an co-author and editor.

Yeah. Gerry Tesch is actually responsible for the rewrites, and the more heavy-handed Christian "allegory."

 

[CalmMyTits]

^lol, really? So these books (and her life in general) do not just reflect her failure as an author, they also reflect Gerry and Maria's failure in parenting. Another parallel to our lolcow!

 

[WWWWolf]

I'm not even sure if the books are edited. Sure, if you look at Tesch's sockpuppets (Conjugal Felicity lays them out somewhere), there's someone who claims she edits them, but the actual evidence is pretty dubious, seeing how bad the books are, both plot and grammar-wise.

I don't think Tesch really understands what the editors even do.

The way things work in publishing is that you hand a basically done manuscript to a publisher. They make a decision whether it's publishable or not - if the story has many flaws in the first few pages, they'll just toss it aside right away. The editor takes on the text after that, and they won't make huge crucial changes, just fix small errors and point out things that are clearly wrong (e.g. the author had a brainfart and made a wrong character do things) or that don't really contribute anything to the book.

Tesch's approach: The author decides that the book is already golden and ready to be published. The publisher has no say in this (obviously not, since it's a vanity press run by her parents). The editor's job is to fix everything that is wrong.

It's the author's job to produce a readable second draft, not the editor's. The editors don't normally do this. No wonder they're doing less than adequate job. And if it's just her father and whatever bargain freelancers they could find, then they probably don't do a very good job.

 

[captkrisma]

I think we should all contribute to a huge project...fix the Maradonia books into something that could be publishable. We could each take a chapter and present our finished project somewhere!

 

[cubesandcubes]

I think we should all contribute to a huge project...fix the Maradonia books into something that could be publishable. We could each take a chapter and present our finished project somewhere!

Sort of like with the competently executed reboot/remake of sonichu #1.

I think it would be funnier to go the other way, with a Half-life: Full Life Concequences style reading (which emphasizes the flaws and errors in the text), possibly with machinamia or other illustrations.

 

[TheIncredibleLioness]

I think we should all contribute to a huge project...fix the Maradonia books into something that could be publishable. We could each take a chapter and present our finished project somewhere!

That's an interesting idea. It'd be hard to keep the continuity straight though, since there's so little of it to begin with in the books. To be honest, the superbly bad quality of the Maradonia 'saga' reminds me a lot of Atlanta Nights, which was made to test whether or not PublishAmerica would take any old manuscript, no matter how bad. But I always love the idea of taking something bad, finding the good in it, and making something awesome (Twilight seems to provoke this the most, since I've seen people take the few genuinely good ideas Meyer had and expand on them to make a really compelling idea!

Though cubesandcubes idea would be just as good, though I don't want to imagine how long that reading would take.

 

[cubesandcubes]

I think we should all contribute to a huge project...fix the Maradonia books into something that could be publishable. We could each take a chapter and present our finished project somewhere!

That's an interesting idea. It'd be hard to keep the continuity straight though, since there's so little of it to begin with in the books. To be honest, the superbly bad quality of the Maradonia 'saga' reminds me a lot of Atlanta Nights, which was made to test whether or not PublishAmerica would take any old manuscript, no matter how bad. But I always love the idea of taking something bad, finding the good in it, and making something awesome (Twilight seems to provoke this the most, since I've seen people take the few genuinely good ideas Meyer had and expand on them to make a really compelling idea!

Though cubesandcubes idea would be just as good, though I don't want to imagine how long that reading would take.

I think that the marandonia saga would not be the marandonia cycle without the plotholes, grammatical irregularities, and ego of the "author". It would just be another generic ya fantasy novel. one can no more seperate those elements than one can spereate Kinbote's footnotes from John Shade's poem.

 

[captkrisma]

It's so bad...we could change proper names of things, re-write it, and make a mint off of it. Her book is so awful that a plagiarism claim would never hold up in court.

 

[cubesandcubes]

the plot is not very original. even if all of the grammatical errors wewlre fixed, the plot is still pretty derivitive. I suppose, if you wanted to go full blown Blade Runner and just harvest a couple of key names and very general concepts there might be something adequate --only adequate, there. A mediocre fantasy novel as a work of metafiction with various textual incursions such as footnotes, fanfictions, editors notes, galley copies, articles, reviews etc might be interesting.

The banal relegious allegory introduced at the behest of Tech's father could be one theme.

 

[Henry Bemis]

'Bravo, Bravo, Bravissimo…' interrupted Gertrude...

She left her Phantom of the Opera running.

(And I shudder to think it was the 2004 film soundtrack and not the original London cast recording.)

 

[José Mourinho]

I wonder how her books sell like hotcakes in the first place.

 

[captkrisma]

I wonder how her books sell like hotcakes in the first place.

free blowjobs can only get you so far...

 

[Rio]

I wonder how her books sell like hotcakes in the first place.

What are the sales like? Surely they can't be that fantastic, since I've never seen a translation or even seen it sold in the UK. I thought they just kept publishing more because it's self-publishing and her parents are rich and don't care that there's no return profit.

 

[Saney]

I wonder how her books sell like hotcakes in the first place.

What are the sales like? Surely they can't be that fantastic, since I've never seen a translation or even seen it sold in the UK. I thought they just kept publishing more because it's self-publishing and her parents are rich and don't care that there's no return profit.

I think I read on ConjugalFelicity that they actually sold pretty poorly. Like, only a few hundred copies, if that.