Home For Fiction – Blog

for thinking people

New post every MondayHow not to miss one

Literature

Why I Hate Victorian Literature

September 11, 2023

Literature, Society

capitalism, criticism, literature, social masses, society

12 comments

I hate Victorian Literature. Actually, allow me to rephrase this: I hate Victorian literature with a passion. This isn’t very useful to you, but why I hate it can be. And the connection between why I think Victorian literature sucks and our present time, even more so.

I’ve been exposed to enough Victorian literature during my university years to have developed a pretty solid opinion of it. In other words, I’ve read enough abandoned enough texts of such authors as Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, to know I hate them and the rest of their lot.

This is a subjective opinion, to be sure, but I think Victorian literature was a disaster for art. The repercussions are still with us ever since, and they boil down to one critical element: making money.

hate Victorian literature
I hate Victorian literature, but I also recognize it’s responsible for much of our contemporary culture – from aesthetics such as steampunk (notice the pink Gothic element) to much deeper theoretical frameworks in areas such as the economy or temporality
(more…)

How a Writer Can Be Immune to Criticism

August 28, 2023

Literature, Writing

criticism, literature, society, writing

4 comments

Reading negative criticism – worse still: mere ratings – about something you made isn’t easy. Few people want to hear they’ve failed (though failure is an intriguing concept), and writers are no exception. An author who has spent endless hours and effort writing a book understandably feels dejected reading “I didn’t like it”. Is there a way for a writer to be immune to criticism?

The answer is yes, otherwise (self-evidently) this post wouldn’t exist. However, there are a couple of caveats we need to get out of the way:

  • A writer can be immune to criticism, but this does nothing for the criticism itself. In other words, what an author has control over is their own reaction. What others feel reading that piece of criticism, or whether any shortcomings the criticism describes are valid or not is beyond the scope of the post.
  • As a term, immunity might connote total defense. However, since we’re dealing with psychological reactions and strategies, immunity is very subjective and also not quantifiable. In other words, to become, as a writer, immune to criticism doesn’t necessarily mean you will be 100% carefree and not care about it.

And so, with this in mind, in this post I’ll share with you some strategies so you, as a writer, can become immune to criticism. As I said, these strategies are psychological and describe your own reaction toward any criticism.

writer immune criticism
Do it like cats! They aren’t deterred by criticism, and they even pretend whatever it is they’re criticized for was part of the plan anyway
(more…)

Literary Genre Detector: a Simple AI model in Python

July 17, 2023

Literature, Programming

genre, literature, programming

2 comments

My knowledge in Python is scant compared to JavaScript, though some years ago I did play with it a bit. Still, lately I’ve been interested in AI models, so I decided to give Python another go. As it turns out, it’s trivial to train some simple AI models with it. In today’s post, I’ll show you how I made a very simple literary genre detector.

AI models of this kind work in a very simple manner, conceptually speaking. They simply take as input a list of data the programmer has supplied in the form of [("love","positive"), ("care","positive"), ("hate","negative"), ("rage", "negative")] and then return guesses for a supplied string. For example, a sentence like “love, care, and blah blah” (in this extremely simple example) would be classified as positive.

As you can appreciate, it all boils down to the quality of the data – garbage in, garbage out, and all that. So, with this important caveat in mind, let’s see what a literary genre detector looks like!

Literary Genre Detector
A literary genre detector doesn’t have much to do with cookies and cat-shaped mugs, but reading does 😉
(more…)