Every romance story is just the joever/barack dichotomy of Entourage, except much worse

My strawmen believe they can best me in the marketplace of ideas.

They would think that.

Editing for redundancy takes skill. Reducing a paragraph to a few words because the whole thing amounts to "Character felt Emotion" might be economical, but are you sure those "unnecessary" phrases and clauses didn't add something to the prose?

No, you're not sure, because you're a strawman. I win.

People just be saying stuff. "Taking that shortcut is min-maxing."

What do you think that word means? Who told you it was the same as meta or powergaming? A goose in a top hat?

Unless you're lowering your Strength to 3 so that you can pump up your INT, min-maxing is not an evocative descriptor

You are just one devastating political cartoon away from your enemies admitting that they were wrong and owned and stupid.

Any day now.

It'll be just like when everyone in Washington DC was like, "Damn, Doonesbury got my ass. I guess I'll have to fix the system now."

Writing high fantasy without using the words "gods" or "kings" makes me a hero. A godking, even.

Russian Doll was so much better than Poker Face.

Read a snippet of a book that was like "now let's stop for a second and let me explain this magic thing real quick."

Even in a 1st person inner comedy monologue in a fourth wall breaking satire, this is actually still against the Geneva Convention

I fed the virtual text to a flock of geese

Don't know why anyone thinks writing used to be glamorous. Every pre-1900s author biography is like "6 of his total 7 works were published posthumously after being found under a pile of tear-stained sweaters soaked with typhoid and jaundice. He was too frail for dancing and his father was whiskey."

Every chapter must be written such that it could end with Linkin Park's "What I've Done" blasting over the finish like Transformers (2007).

There are no exceptions.

Explaining a character's powers is a waste of time. I could fight them regardless because I'm built different

If a character is droning on about prophecies and sea wizards instead of riffing with the boys, it better be because they're about get arrested by the "What's All This Then?" police

Soft magic system this, hard magic system that, the real hotness is reruns of Seinfeld.

Think to yourself, is this expository nonsense better than the Summer of George? If not, cut it.

When editing a novel, you should aim to cut everything that isn't a bit. The moment something isn't self-aware, you are going in the universe's cringe compilation.

Realizing every character I've written is just dunkey's impression of Dutch from Red Dead Redemption in a different hat. All derive so much agency from their Looney Tunes motivations that they get bafflingly close to success

"No, we can still beat this game, fellas- and then we go to TAHITI!"

we are so back