Tattlers, I’ve cracked the mystery! The mystery of why Roobarb did an actual charity drive for once. The answer is obvious. She misread and thought she was raising money for herself… for the dissertation emergency
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It all makes sense! And she naturally thought "committee" was just a long-term commitment for people to send her tea.
I have to wonder what her book will be like. I'm speaking as a writer myself (not published, but I've always loved doing it for fun), and when I saw Ruby's "writing routines" they always felt kind of strange to me. She'd sit down and bang out a certain number of words a day. I'm not trying to be mean here - I bet a lot of published writers do that to meet deadlines, and I myself have set alarms and told myself to write until the timer goes off... But her method seems weirdly clinical. I write when inspiration strikes me, and there's a million times a day when I get ideas and have to hastily write them down somewhere so I don't forget. I'm not saying Ruby can't be doing that, but to me she always seems to view writing as a task to tick off her list. Write x amount of words in a day, spend y amount of hours writing. At the risk of sounding like Anne of Green Gables, it never seems to have any whimsy or joy to it. I don't know if anyone feels the same but I thought it was interesting and I haven't seen anyone bring it up. I can see her making lots of "write with me" vlogs during her gap year.
It's definitely a box-ticking task for her (like everything), and like her essays, her writing seems reverse engineered from other works.
Erimentha was ripped off from all the middle-grade bullying books she read at the time. People have surmised that she's writing a book called 'Counting Backwards', which may or may not be an ED book that rips off all the other ED books she's read. She's shown that she was writing something called "Wandering Willows" or something similar (I forget the exact title, but it was alliterative and nature-y) which was clearly her Secret Garden/Anne of Green Gables, 'young girls in nature' rip-off. She was writing a dark macademia book at one point.
Nothing wrong with taking inspiration from other works, but we've seen that Ruby doesn't stop at just taking inspiration, she goes all-out when cannibalising other works for ideas, and she approaches her writing projects just as superficially and fickly as her other fad interests. She also clearly doesn't enjoy reading, so it's all a bit daft.
We'll either get another self-insert "autobiographical" contemporary book that borrows heavily from other books she's "read", or a rip-off of the Victorian-era children's books she's read about rich girls frolicking in fields, and possibly something fantastical happens.
One of the dead giveaways that she doesn't have any real interest in writing is that she says she's always dreamed of being an author as though it's still a future goal, even though she's already written and published a novel. It's a
tit one, granted, but she did it nonetheless, and one of the few things I'll hand to Ruby is that judging by the final product, she definitely didn't have any help from editors or ghostwriters (although she owes a debt to all the books she read and ripped off).
She's already in a position where she can afford to write full-time, has a large platform to market and publicise her books and can easily self-publish them to a wide audience. If she genuinely wanted to be a full-time author, she'd already be doing it. But she doesn't actually care about writing or having people read her work. She views being an author as not the act of writing, not even the final product itself, but having a traditional publisher give her money for it. She wants accolades and riches (because she has no real understanding of how little most authors made and expects she'll be the next J.K. Rowling, earning millions), she doesn't care about writing.
But it'll definitely be what she uses to replace "studying" once she graduates as something to fill a busywork schedule.
Her 'write with me' vlogs will be identical to her 'study with me' vlogs: It'll be Ruby staring at an unseen screen as a clock ticks away, while she "writes" for exactly one hour or less. There'll be lots of nebulous off-screen "research" (i.e. skimming other books/synopses for stuff to rip off, reading instructional books on writing) and lots of trips to Waterstones café to take up a table all day and buy nothing. Occasionally she'll film herself grinning and grimacing through a timelapse video call to her agent instead of her tutors. There'll be shoehorned, undeclared ads. There'll be no insight into her writing or her writing process, such as it is.
And in her case, academia and writing are interchangeable - both fake components of a manufactured personality, and she approaches them both the same way, cramming them into a slot on a schedule of mindless busywork, without joy or passion or any interest in improving or being remotely creative or original.