Someone Thought I Needed a Mentor?

Someone Thought I Needed a Mentor? · Someone thought I needed to learn "How to Draft A Book"

Be the Best Mentee! | A Guide to Mentorship
Alexa Donne | 7.II.2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCOMq5vGrKc

First half only.

I

15:04 No, neither having a mentor nor an editor is part of the process of being a writer.

It is perhaps part of the process of being a writer at such and such a publisher, but it is not part of the process of being a writer per se. Editing and mentoring are being overvalued, since it gives people sth to do in a somewhat flooded market.

And markets (all, not just all creative ones, but all) are being flooded by applicants from the fact that the majority are no longer working with farming due to more trade and more tractors. Even farmers' boys wanting to keep their farms is flooding as long as mechanisation and other rationalisations continue.

Markets are also flooded due to the fact of wages and other incomes generally not being adapted for man and wife.

Editing and mentoring are also being overvalued as ways in which old people can be of value to younger people. With an age pyramid looking like a top hat, less young people are required to valorise the experience each of more old people than before.

While I respect your experience that traditional (since when?) publishers do have this value, and intend to apply it, publishing can definitely be done different from that.

And it can be added that Chesterton and C. S. Lewis and Tolkien (JRR, if not even Christopher too) all profited from the fact of having publishers not applying this to them, in Chesterton's case perhaps achieved only after he started his own publications, like Chesterton's weekly.

II

dialogue

Hans-Georg Lundahl

17:10 For my part I want people to give time to my work insofar as they intend to consume it (even for free on internet) or earn money from it (from consumers who like a paper, thread, ink, perhaps also glue object called "book").

Not people who intend to "give me" their time to give me ten thousand tips about things I did not ask for advise on.

Piecing together an essay collection is in a sense their freedom with my work, I give some hints on essays belonging together in a series, but most of my series are too short to stand alone as a book, even more so for single essays.

My responsibility is to write good essays, and to mark where I am really doing a new essay not as a fresh start but as a nearly immediate follow up.

Kitty Hamilton

Bruh, if you've sought out a mentor, you are asking for their time to help you. You obviously don't want one, so why are you dreaming up a hypothetical scenario in which one is forcing their critique upon you? No one is holding a gun to your head and demanding you be mentored.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Holding a gun? No, not quite literally.

But I get a hint here of having slep to little to be accountable for what I write and for my decision anyone is free to republish, and just kind of "providentially" I get to see a video about how to be a good mentee.

I have not sought out a mentor, but probably lots of people would prefer I do and some of them are adept at gatekeeping so I don't get through (or so far haven't get through) as long as I'm not admitting any need to remodel myself. I think that's their intention.

I am in France. Look how that lags behind Russia and Ukraine and even States on two of my blogs:

New blog on the kid : Dominance russe dans le lectorat?
https://nov9blogg9.blogspot.com/2020/01/dominance-russe-dans-le-lectorat.html

How I explain it? Some guys over elsewhere telling their friends in France "don't let them read his blogs, or let as few and as old people as possible do that".

III

19:12 "are your CPs [critique partners] published"

A fairly blatant admission, that the mentor teaches not to get into the readers' hearts but past the publishers' sense of the "decorum" of the moment.

Again, a fairly good admission that the book market has some too big portion of streamlining.