Jim C. Hines is the author of nine published books and many, many short stories. He’s also the author of one previously unpublished novel, Rise of the Spider Goddess. Rise was never published because it’s awful. Really, really awful. Hines says, “I wrote this one during my sophomore year in college, based on my then-favorite Dungeons and Dragons character, Nakor the Purple. A D&D character I had created based on Raymond Feist’s Riftwar books, making it doubly original.”

Eventually Hines decided to publish his book because he hoped to help other writers learn “what not to do”, and because “I thought giving my own book the Mystery Science Theater treatment sounded like a lot of fun!”

The book includes annotations from the author talking about what’s going on (and usually, what’s going wrong) in the book. For example, when Nakor is introduced, the book reads:

The wind blew his long, blond hair away from his face, revealing pointed elvish ears. Clear, pure blue eyes watched contently as the sun continued to sink behind the horizon.

And Hines notes:

We hope those eyes are, in fact, Nakor’s, but you never know. This is fantasy, after all.

Hines describes Rise of the Spider Goddess as a book, which is “bad”, and this is not false modesty. The book is absolutely terrible. It’s sloppy. It’s cliché. It’s confusing. The characters are stock characters and frankly most of them are pretty jerky. The hero, Nakor, is a pompous, amoral ass. The book is derivative and boring. It’s also exactly the kind of thing I would have written as a sophomore in college if I had managed to squeeze in novel writing into my busy schedule of broken hearted and pretentious poetry writing.

What makes this worth your time is the annotations. Not only are they very funny, they serve as a master class in writing. Here’s a few things to watch for in the notes:

• A running tally of eyebrow raises (hint – there’s a lot).
• Angsty moments and tragic backstories, highlighted for your convenience (“Even the bird has a tragic backstory”).
• Ethical problems (“And they all shared a hearty chuckle as their enemies were mauled and mutilated by an angry bear.”)
• Completely original names, such as ‘Galadrion’. (“Galadrion’s name was totally not stolen from Lord of the Rings. Really! It’s completely original, just like the rest of this book!”)

I laughed my head off at the annotations, but I learned from them too. I would expect this book to be a great tool to a fiction writer. It certainly helped me be a better reviewer, since I so often look at a work of fiction and think, “Something is wrong…but what? Must be specific! What, exactly, is so awful about this book?”

As an example of how this works, I give you Hines’ thoughts on world building. If you think about J.R.R. Tolkien’s book, The Hobbit, you can picture a world beyond the places where the characters go. Other characters that we never see are clearly leading busy lives. There’s politics and history and all sorts of things going on behind the scenes. Even though The Hobbit is the simplest of Tolkien’s Middle Earth books, there’s still a map beyond the trails the characters walk on. Of his world building efforts (or lack of), Hines says this:

Of course these random travellers on the road just happen to be connected to Nakor’s quest. The way the world building is going, nothing outside Nakor’s quest exists at all. If you drew a map of the world, it would literally be the routes his companions took and the places they stopped. The rest of the page would be blank.

This is a book that will appeal to people who love humor and to people who are interested in the nuts and bolts of writing. Trust me, you won’t really read Rise. You’ll skim, looking for the annotations. I had so much fun yelling new numbers to my husband as the eyebrow count went up. After a certain point he informed me that he had the gist, but that did not stop me from yelling, “Nine!” or whatever at irregular intervals.  I also found the annotations to be truly helpful in showing me where a story can go wrong.

Above all, I found this book to be encouraging. Yes, it’s awful, but you can tell that the guy who wrote it loved fantasy and really wanted to tell a story, even though he didn’t know how. That guy kept at it. He read and read and wrote and wrote and honed his craft and became Jim C. Hines. It made me believe that writing is a learned skill. Want to write? Practice and practice and practice, and don’t hide your first (terrible) book in shame. It was a start, which is farther than most people get.  Just to be clear, the grade is for the annotations, not for the original novel itself.