so imagine you’re making ratatouille and you don’t like tomatoes. you don’t like the taste, the texture, the putting them in the water and the peeling them - eugh! so you say to yourself “lookit, this whole dish is nothing but vegetables, so what does it matter if i leave the tomatoes out?” a seemingly innocuous decision on the surface, but 2 hours or whatever later when you’re done cooking, you open the oven to find a complete mess! just a pot full of baked vegetables, none of them congealed or somehow unified. what happened to your beloved ratatouille? so you take to google and find that actually the tomatoes are an essential ingredient of ratatouille, as they form a “sauce” of a certain kind that makes the whole thing work. and so a seemingly innocent decision has destroyed the very foundation of the established order with disturbing ramifications towards the whole. in this essay i will examine how martin luther’s 95 theses lead to protestants being more boring than catholics
Sure! I wasn’t expecting this to get traction so I didn’t go into detail.
‘Ghostwriter sweatshop’ isn’t a perfect term - I believe the term typically used is co-writers, although I’m not sure that’s fair either. What happens is that Patterson gives writers an outline and a plot, and they write the books. He’ll read and sometimes revise what they produce. Here’s one of several articles on it. Some people have used text analysis tools to confirm that his books tend to read far more like the co-writers than him - ‘author’ may not be the best word for his role. He’s more like the director.
That being said, many librarians don’t resent him for that. We resent him because, if you work in a public library, he has probably taken over an entire library shelf by now, maybe two. Shelf space is valuable, but when it’s a bestseller you have to buy copies, even if there’s better stuff you could be purchasing.
I work in a library and literally we all dislike Patterson to varying degrees.
Just the other day I was shifting all the books (because we had just weeded) and I was desperately trying to fit the Pattersons on the shelves and there were no patrons in the library so I yelled “PATTERSON NEEDS TO STOP WRITING ALREADY” and my coworker—not missing a beat or even looking up from what she’s doing—just deadpans back, “He already did.”
So yeah librarians and library employees generally tend to hate Patterson.
I work at a library and recently an email was sent out to all staff with this as the subject line
