But no “thanks for your feedback” comment from Shrek. Just us non actor folk he claps back to
Carrie Hope Fletcher #39 On the 12th day of Joelmas my true love gave to me… a lifetime of co-dependency
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But no “thanks for your feedback” comment from Shrek. Just us non actor folk he claps back to
LiveLaughLube_outloud
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Yeah, to me it read like a first draft had been published by accident and completely unedited. I liked a lot of the premise but the execution of her ideas fell so flat (imo).
Carrie was one of the few YouTubers at the time that I could remember actually talking about wanting to write before they all suddenly got book deals. So I was hopeful, but so disappointed by the results. Again, I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt by passing it off as just not my thing, or the publisher's fault for rushing it out in case her internet fame went away. So I didn't pick up another one. Interesting to know it's downhill from there!
salatblader
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And presumably Joel won't block any those people. As someone said on the last thread, Joel and Carrie would definitely have argued with/blocked the person posting that
comment (and the people liking it), if it hadn't come from someone in the industry/their friend.
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LiveLaughLube_outloud
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Maybe he's been suspended for posting his asscrack on his professional social media accounts and he's just pretending he's off with the flu.
Cd1313
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Note to self: Don't eat while reading these threadsIf the Rituals bag is 'smellies' I wonder if her card will say something about him getting his you know what nice and clean for her return
Okgolightly
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I laughed at this but then immediately felt nauseous so thank youIf the Rituals bag is 'smellies' I wonder if her card will say something about him getting his you know what nice and clean for her return
Mark81
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Their whole behaviour both apart and together is just very odd and I've never seen grown adults act like this on social media.
Whether they are trolling their followers and 'haters', or are sincere, neither motive looks good....its just all bizarre behaviour for supposedly two grown adults. Even more so a man fast approaching 40.
Whether they are trolling their followers and 'haters', or are sincere, neither motive looks good....its just all bizarre behaviour for supposedly two grown adults. Even more so a man fast approaching 40.
THIS. I mean maybe early 20s but even then I’d be like “grow up”. I’m totally a gift giver so I actually can see leaving cards or gifts while I’m away. BUT for personal opening, not using thank you cards, personalized to the … person, etc.
I think they missed a really good marketing opportunity not to do 12 Days of #Joelmas during CHRISTMAS when she does panto.
So, here are my thoughts on her first three books. I read On The Other Side, All That She Can See and When The Curtain Falls. After that I decided I was done. I think When The Curtain Falls is gonna be the most interesting one in terms of this thread.
On The Other Side wasn’t a great book. There are large plot holes and it relies a lot on tropes, but I found some elements quite charming. I wouldn’t recommend it though. There are many books that do what she did a lot better. I agree with a lot of the criticism, it just didn’t bother me as much. The main character and her love interest are described to look exactly like her and Pete which is... odd.
All That She Can See is where she lost me. I cannot begin to explain how unhinged that book is. Explaining the plot alone makes it sound completely ridiculous and made up. Of all three, this is the only one where I don’t see anyone being a self-insert of her or any of her partners. Basically, the first 2/3 of the book are about a sweet baker who bakes feelings into sweet confidence-muffins or happiness-cupcakes. Then she meets a guy who spits into the drinks he serves at a bar to infuse them with feelings but he’s bitter and of course he’s not doing it right and gives people too many feelings or not the right ones, idk. There are way too many people spitting into food in this book, it’s gross. She’s going for some kind of enemies to lovers thing with this book, which doesn’t work, but that’s not surprising, because nothing in this book works. Then after 2/3 of a quirky and sugary sweet romance full of magical realism and all, the book switches genres, when a secret society is introduced and the characters enter a secret lab. I’d explain more of the plot but even then it wouldn’t make any more sense than it does now so I won’t. Just know that suddenly the genre of the book switches to SciFi-thriller-splatter-horror. There is blood. There is gore. People are dying. Bodies are hurt. I won’t go into much detail but there are bad thigs happening to people’s bodies that are described in a very graphic way. Reading this book is like watching an episode of the Teletubbies and then suddenly you’re watching Saw.
I think it’s great that Carrie tries to write a diverse cast of characters. Nothing she did in those three books in terms of representation is super-duper-problematic, but it also isn’t good representation in my opinion. I think one of the reasons for that is that nothing is ever subtle in her books. Yes, she introduced queer characters with cringey definitions of what their lables mean, but that’s really just due to her writing style and pretty much anything, really anything, in her books is introduced that way. Her queer characters fall flat because all her characters fall flat. This aspect is really just handled as badly as everything else is.
It also seems performative, because her books seem to get less and less diverse. She has several queer characters in On The Other Side who are pretty important to the main character and the plot. All That She Can See has a main character of colour (great to add diversity to the cast, but as a white person I don’t wanna comment too much on the execution, at least it’s not blatantly racist?), but the only queer character is a very minor character and I didn’t like how she used the trope of “married man is secretly gay and his forced coming out is all about his marriage”. When The Curtain Falls has... well, the main character has a gay best friend, who is in like one scene or maybe two and that is it in terms of representation. I think if she really cared about representation, she would include it in all her books. It feels like she’s only doing it so she can brag about it and use it for marketing, not because it’s actually important to her.
Her writing style seems like her children’s novels are a much better fit for her, because they read like a children’s novel. For really small children, like 8-10 maybe. She’s not subtle about anything. Everything is just so... shallow. Everything is overexplained and nothing is ever shown. It’s very clear she didn’t spend enough time practicing her craft. I don’t want to speculate, but if these books are the result of several rounds of editing with a qualified and capable editor, then I don’t wanna know what her first draft looked like. There are no nuances to anything, no complexities. Sometimes the character’s actions make them feel like every exaggerated cartoon characters.
Then When The Curtain Falls. I mean at least it doesn’t switch genre in the middle of the book, but that’s the only nice thing I can say about it. It’s by far the worst of the three and after All That She Can See that’s... an achievement. All That She Can See was just really bad and honestly one of the worst books I’ve ever read (and I have read a lot of terrible books), but When The Curtain Falls has so many problematic messages, oh my god. It goes from graphic rape scenes (and not dealing with that topic properly) to a very toxic relationship dynamic that’s meant to be romantic to endorsement of suicide.
The love interest is a TV or film actor (idk anymore) who is now doing a theatre play for some reason (luckily I forgot). He’s quite popular, very handsome and everyone wants him. I don’t know enough about Oliver to say how much of him she put into him, but it kinda fits the type. The main character is a theatre actress who’s basically Carrie herself. The way the main character talks about the apartment she bought is exactly the way Carrie talked about her own apartment, also she addresses the only hate she got for being able to afford an apartment at such a young age. Also at some point they’re kissing and it’s described that they have their tongues in each other’s mouths and one bits the other’s lip while doing that and I still don’t know how that’s possible, and then the chapter ends with “and they kept exploring all night long” or something while they’re making out and that had me cringe so hard.
The conflict between the two is that they get together during rehearsals, they decide to keep it a secret for now and then the main character suddenly doesn’t want to keep it a secret anymore for some reason. Basically, she’s very unreasonably angry at him for absolute no good reason, some very toxic jealousy-issues and of course it’s all his fault for sticking to their original agreement of keeping the relationship a secret. Even ghosts are mad at him for it. The whole thing was a mess and I don’t remember all the details. It ends with him getting his tit together and doing what the main character wants, what he wants doesn’t matter and in the end he finally realises that. It’s really, really toxic.
The theatre stuff is when it gets really interesting. I know that a character having a certain opinion doesn’t automatically mean that the author has that opinion too. But the main character is supposed to know a lot about theatre and Carrie marketed this book as the one she put all her theatre knowledge into, so... I don’t know how else to read this. When the main character explains stuff about theatre and no one contests these facts I assume Carrie herself thinks it’s true.
So Carrie often replied to criticism of her acting choices that she’s just doing what the directors and producers tell her to do, that most choices aren’t her own to make. And that’s true. That’s what being a professional actor is like. In her book, the main character is pretty frustrated with the director at some point (he wants her character to cry or something and she says it makes no sense for the character). When her love interest comforts her, she says it doesn’t matter, most plays have one version for when the director is present where they follow their lead and one where they just do what they want to do without telling them. And that just... seems so unprofessional? Is this really a thing? But it’s the complete opposite of how Carrie talks about her own acting.
Another detail is that Carrie usually says that she gets along with everyone in her cast, but in the book, there are two female co-stars in minor roles who are the typical mean-girl-villains. Funnily enough those are the only women in the book that I remember who are not the main character or the ghost who basically is the main character of her own timeline. And I get that doesn’t have to mean much, but there is nothing of that team spirit among the rest of the cast she always talks about. It’s also implied that they hate the main character because they are jealous of her role and mad that they only got to play minor roles and Carrie also said a lot of times that this doesn’t happen in musical theatre.
There’s also a very cringey scene where one of the mean girls goes to grab a cup of coffee from the coffee shop with the main character and her love interest, but doesn’t bring her wallet, so the main character gets her girlboss-gotcha moment, when she calls her out for not bringing her wallet so someone else pays for her and that she can pay for her coffee herself. Probably to show how the main character stands up for herself but she comes across as very mean throughout the whole book.
What makes me angry about this is that it can’t be denied that All That She Can See only got published because she’s famous. There no bleeping way any publisher would pick up this mess of a book otherwise. With how publishing works, she probably sold it before she had written it based of an exposé and maybe the first chapters, so maybe the publisher didn’t know what a mess it would be before buying it and then it was too late to back out, but it’s just such a bad book and it never should have been published. And I get that publishing is complex. I get that if her book sells a lot of copies, it might also finance other books by authors without such a large following. So maybe she did steal a spot from a more talented author, maybe she didn’t. But without a doubt this process of quickly publishing celebrity and influencer books is burning out authors who might have become good at their craft and who are being published to soon in their career. It’s very clear to me that Carrie didn’t put enough time into developing her skills as a writer as her writing hasn’t improved at all over three books but only gotten worse.
Maybe I will pick up one of her other books to feel better about my own writing one day, but only if I don’t have to pay for it because I don’t want to support this bullshit. But these are my two cents on her books and her writing.
On The Other Side wasn’t a great book. There are large plot holes and it relies a lot on tropes, but I found some elements quite charming. I wouldn’t recommend it though. There are many books that do what she did a lot better. I agree with a lot of the criticism, it just didn’t bother me as much. The main character and her love interest are described to look exactly like her and Pete which is... odd.
All That She Can See is where she lost me. I cannot begin to explain how unhinged that book is. Explaining the plot alone makes it sound completely ridiculous and made up. Of all three, this is the only one where I don’t see anyone being a self-insert of her or any of her partners. Basically, the first 2/3 of the book are about a sweet baker who bakes feelings into sweet confidence-muffins or happiness-cupcakes. Then she meets a guy who spits into the drinks he serves at a bar to infuse them with feelings but he’s bitter and of course he’s not doing it right and gives people too many feelings or not the right ones, idk. There are way too many people spitting into food in this book, it’s gross. She’s going for some kind of enemies to lovers thing with this book, which doesn’t work, but that’s not surprising, because nothing in this book works. Then after 2/3 of a quirky and sugary sweet romance full of magical realism and all, the book switches genres, when a secret society is introduced and the characters enter a secret lab. I’d explain more of the plot but even then it wouldn’t make any more sense than it does now so I won’t. Just know that suddenly the genre of the book switches to SciFi-thriller-splatter-horror. There is blood. There is gore. People are dying. Bodies are hurt. I won’t go into much detail but there are bad thigs happening to people’s bodies that are described in a very graphic way. Reading this book is like watching an episode of the Teletubbies and then suddenly you’re watching Saw.
I think it’s great that Carrie tries to write a diverse cast of characters. Nothing she did in those three books in terms of representation is super-duper-problematic, but it also isn’t good representation in my opinion. I think one of the reasons for that is that nothing is ever subtle in her books. Yes, she introduced queer characters with cringey definitions of what their lables mean, but that’s really just due to her writing style and pretty much anything, really anything, in her books is introduced that way. Her queer characters fall flat because all her characters fall flat. This aspect is really just handled as badly as everything else is.
It also seems performative, because her books seem to get less and less diverse. She has several queer characters in On The Other Side who are pretty important to the main character and the plot. All That She Can See has a main character of colour (great to add diversity to the cast, but as a white person I don’t wanna comment too much on the execution, at least it’s not blatantly racist?), but the only queer character is a very minor character and I didn’t like how she used the trope of “married man is secretly gay and his forced coming out is all about his marriage”. When The Curtain Falls has... well, the main character has a gay best friend, who is in like one scene or maybe two and that is it in terms of representation. I think if she really cared about representation, she would include it in all her books. It feels like she’s only doing it so she can brag about it and use it for marketing, not because it’s actually important to her.
Her writing style seems like her children’s novels are a much better fit for her, because they read like a children’s novel. For really small children, like 8-10 maybe. She’s not subtle about anything. Everything is just so... shallow. Everything is overexplained and nothing is ever shown. It’s very clear she didn’t spend enough time practicing her craft. I don’t want to speculate, but if these books are the result of several rounds of editing with a qualified and capable editor, then I don’t wanna know what her first draft looked like. There are no nuances to anything, no complexities. Sometimes the character’s actions make them feel like every exaggerated cartoon characters.
Then When The Curtain Falls. I mean at least it doesn’t switch genre in the middle of the book, but that’s the only nice thing I can say about it. It’s by far the worst of the three and after All That She Can See that’s... an achievement. All That She Can See was just really bad and honestly one of the worst books I’ve ever read (and I have read a lot of terrible books), but When The Curtain Falls has so many problematic messages, oh my god. It goes from graphic rape scenes (and not dealing with that topic properly) to a very toxic relationship dynamic that’s meant to be romantic to endorsement of suicide.
The love interest is a TV or film actor (idk anymore) who is now doing a theatre play for some reason (luckily I forgot). He’s quite popular, very handsome and everyone wants him. I don’t know enough about Oliver to say how much of him she put into him, but it kinda fits the type. The main character is a theatre actress who’s basically Carrie herself. The way the main character talks about the apartment she bought is exactly the way Carrie talked about her own apartment, also she addresses the only hate she got for being able to afford an apartment at such a young age. Also at some point they’re kissing and it’s described that they have their tongues in each other’s mouths and one bits the other’s lip while doing that and I still don’t know how that’s possible, and then the chapter ends with “and they kept exploring all night long” or something while they’re making out and that had me cringe so hard.
The conflict between the two is that they get together during rehearsals, they decide to keep it a secret for now and then the main character suddenly doesn’t want to keep it a secret anymore for some reason. Basically, she’s very unreasonably angry at him for absolute no good reason, some very toxic jealousy-issues and of course it’s all his fault for sticking to their original agreement of keeping the relationship a secret. Even ghosts are mad at him for it. The whole thing was a mess and I don’t remember all the details. It ends with him getting his tit together and doing what the main character wants, what he wants doesn’t matter and in the end he finally realises that. It’s really, really toxic.
The theatre stuff is when it gets really interesting. I know that a character having a certain opinion doesn’t automatically mean that the author has that opinion too. But the main character is supposed to know a lot about theatre and Carrie marketed this book as the one she put all her theatre knowledge into, so... I don’t know how else to read this. When the main character explains stuff about theatre and no one contests these facts I assume Carrie herself thinks it’s true.
So Carrie often replied to criticism of her acting choices that she’s just doing what the directors and producers tell her to do, that most choices aren’t her own to make. And that’s true. That’s what being a professional actor is like. In her book, the main character is pretty frustrated with the director at some point (he wants her character to cry or something and she says it makes no sense for the character). When her love interest comforts her, she says it doesn’t matter, most plays have one version for when the director is present where they follow their lead and one where they just do what they want to do without telling them. And that just... seems so unprofessional? Is this really a thing? But it’s the complete opposite of how Carrie talks about her own acting.
Another detail is that Carrie usually says that she gets along with everyone in her cast, but in the book, there are two female co-stars in minor roles who are the typical mean-girl-villains. Funnily enough those are the only women in the book that I remember who are not the main character or the ghost who basically is the main character of her own timeline. And I get that doesn’t have to mean much, but there is nothing of that team spirit among the rest of the cast she always talks about. It’s also implied that they hate the main character because they are jealous of her role and mad that they only got to play minor roles and Carrie also said a lot of times that this doesn’t happen in musical theatre.
There’s also a very cringey scene where one of the mean girls goes to grab a cup of coffee from the coffee shop with the main character and her love interest, but doesn’t bring her wallet, so the main character gets her girlboss-gotcha moment, when she calls her out for not bringing her wallet so someone else pays for her and that she can pay for her coffee herself. Probably to show how the main character stands up for herself but she comes across as very mean throughout the whole book.
What makes me angry about this is that it can’t be denied that All That She Can See only got published because she’s famous. There no bleeping way any publisher would pick up this mess of a book otherwise. With how publishing works, she probably sold it before she had written it based of an exposé and maybe the first chapters, so maybe the publisher didn’t know what a mess it would be before buying it and then it was too late to back out, but it’s just such a bad book and it never should have been published. And I get that publishing is complex. I get that if her book sells a lot of copies, it might also finance other books by authors without such a large following. So maybe she did steal a spot from a more talented author, maybe she didn’t. But without a doubt this process of quickly publishing celebrity and influencer books is burning out authors who might have become good at their craft and who are being published to soon in their career. It’s very clear to me that Carrie didn’t put enough time into developing her skills as a writer as her writing hasn’t improved at all over three books but only gotten worse.
Maybe I will pick up one of her other books to feel better about my own writing one day, but only if I don’t have to pay for it because I don’t want to support this bullshit. But these are my two cents on her books and her writing.
GrilledCheese
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Too sick for Hamilton but well enough for Cameo
Sanctified
VIP Member
I'm still baffled as to why he's on cameo. It's not like people are kicking his door down for an autograph, let alone a personalised video? He's literally a nobody.
It's blatant that he only signed up cos it's easy money. Not many places will let you sit in your rank, flu ridden hoodies and record a 20 second video while getting paid for it.
Did some maths on day length of threads to see how much quicker these are getting 
excluding thread 1 (704 days) and this one, there's 37 different threads counted with an average of 23.5 days per thread! I'll give you one guess who drops the average thread time down each time/where Joel appears/the engagement!
If anyone knows what happened in thread 28 please add info
After Joel appears there's 17 threads with an average of 11.6 days per thread
excluding thread 1 (704 days) and this one, there's 37 different threads counted with an average of 23.5 days per thread! I'll give you one guess who drops the average thread time down each time/where Joel appears/the engagement! If anyone knows what happened in thread 28 please add info
After Joel appears there's 17 threads with an average of 11.6 days per thread
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Sanctified
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I know we talked about it recently, but the fact that he added 'loves Disney and theme parks' to his bio while Carrie is away at WDW without him makes it seem like he's going to try and guilt trip her for not inviting him?
I was only paying attention to the disney bit before, I didn't realise he put theme parks in there too
I was only paying attention to the disney bit before, I didn't realise he put theme parks in there too
Cd1313
Well-known member
I agree, I'm certain he wanted to go. My personal opinion based on literally nothing but my gut is that Scott only tolerates Joel, that Carrie actually might have considered inviting Joel, and that Scott said nope, not happening.I know we talked about it recently, but the fact that he added 'loves Disney and theme parks' to his bio while Carrie is away at WDW without him makes it seem like he's going to try and guilt trip her for not inviting him?
I was only paying attention to the disney bit before, I didn't realise he put theme parks in there too
Sanctified
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What if Joel played the line 'I must be the only member of your family not going'
I could totally see him saying that
dull-board1243
VIP Member
I bet anything he won't be blocked.But no “thanks for your feedback” comment from Shrek. Just us non actor folk he claps back to
Oh you know Joel's gonna 100% guilt her once she comes back.
If anyone knows what happened in thread 28 please add info
From a quick check, looks like that’s when the infamous asscrack pics made a appearance?
Hahah I'd never thought of it like that before. But fair enough, suddenly her representation seems a little less problematic.
This is something I think too. My own writing would probably be much worse today, if I'd gotten as much blind validation as Carrie has. If I'd been allowed to publish whatever novels I wanted from 21 on they'd also not be very good. Still not quite as terrible, I'd like to think, but still. Actually having to work and improve in order to get my stories published, and having to take classes and learn from other writers has been invaluable. If Carrie actually enjoys writing, I don't think she was done any favours by being offered the opportunity to publish so easily.
I remember ages ago, actually, she posted a video about how she was considering getting a degree in English from the Open University, because she was getting so much backlash for publishing books when she was just a Youtuber. Or something like that. And the conclusion of the video was that in the end, she decided not to, because she decided art was subjective and she was still allowed to write even without a degree in literature. Which was so telling, imo. That she considered getting a degree only to shut the "haters" up, and not because she was actually interested in working on her craft. People don't get an education just to be able to say they have a degree and so that they don't get criticized for not having one, sometimes it can actually be to pick up a skill or learn things. But it was like that didn't occur to her.
hereforthetea698
Active member
Quite late but I saw Adam Hattan popped up in the last thread, I watch his videos sometimes (his tattle thread is good fun if you find him hella pretentious too) but Gary C said on their most recent video that he bought some treats for his friend Pete. Guessing that’s Carrie’s ex and is why Adam, Gary and Carrie aren’t friends now? But also, Adam only uses people for his own personal gain and Carrie does the same so I guess that’s why their ‘friendship’ didn’t work out lol
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