The Folly of Milo Winters - A Brief Look at the World of Gardian

So this drama is all over YouTube and TikTok, but I haven’t seen much of it anywhere else so we’re going to take a little peek at it since it deals with a couple of my absolute favorite things. The first of those is book drama, and the second is failed projects—god, I love that shit; shoot it straight into my veins. Anywho, let’s meet our main character: Milo Winters. A young writer who made a name for himself on TikTok as a burgeoning author, claiming to have many years experience in writing (At age twenty-something? Press “x” to doubt), Winters introduced his considerable following there to his fantasy world—that is, the “World of Gardian” in which his first novel, The Age of Scorpius takes place.

Published under his now outdated deadname, this debut novel was sold as a TikTok preorder—something that is technically not allowed by the TikTok shop’s terms of service, but was masked with the purchase of a bookmark “gift” as a sort of placeholder product to get around the rules. In terms of marketing, Winters was fabulous, translating his passion for this project into tens of thousands of followers and preorders, raking in a substantial amount of liquid capital. Without even a single word published, Winters had managed to build a huge “reader” base absolutely enthralled by the concepts behind the “World of Gardian” and strung along by Winters’ utter devotion to the project and the kinds of world building aspects he described in his short-form videos chatting about it. Before the first book even came out, the potential series had a fanbase and boy did they prove it by spending money on…nothing. At least, it was nothing at first.

So what did Winters do with all the preorder cash he’d collected from the TikTok shop? Did he put it into a savings or investment account to hold onto it in the “just in case”? Absolutely not. The hubris of man knows no bounds, naturally. He reinvested the cash into the project, spending thousands of dollars on artists for a dazzling amount of gorgeous artwork ultimately wasted…but I’m getting ahead of myself here. This might be the first book I’ve ever seen on GoodReads with a single author and no less than four credited illustrators who, I hope, were all paid some wild amount of money for their trouble, as the art is fantastic even if the overall project kinda…sucks. Winters founded a “creative studio” LLC and began creating a company with the money he’d collected from his preorder sales and just when everyone was starting to think they might have gotten swindled due to the book’s allegedly incomplete state…it dropped.

It dropped like a fucking brick to the windshield of our writer’s career.

After having worked on or written this novel or world continuously since the age of 12, Winters’ writing style apparently just…never evolved. According to several GoodReads reviews, the characters, prose, and editing are all akin to those you might see from a preteen starting to get their writer’s legs under them...a pretty sad state of affairs for a 20-something author who’d built up expectations for an incredibly popular fantasy concept. Unfortunately, the internet isn’t all that great at managing their expectations. Despite that Winters was personable, enthusiastic, and charming in his videos, that doesn’t necessarily translate into talent or skill and the online mob who ended up with what almost appeared to be a half-baked book was…not so happy about it. One GoodReads reviewer called the writing “juvenile” and the book “sloppy” while another went on a huge spoiler-ridden critique detailing the bizarre world-building (or attempt thereof) and exactly how and why aspects of the narrative fell short. Point is: people had opinions. YouTubers like Reads with Rachel (oh god, do not perceive me) and VangelinaSkov along with my personal favorite, Laura Rae Says, have followed along with this particular drama and added in their own two cents here and there, detailing all the events as they unfolded and providing not just a timeline but also critique and feedback—most of which has been ignored.

The extent to how far Winters will go to ignore this embarrassing book debut has been interesting with some claiming (erroneously and rather offensively, in my opinion) that even the alteration of his name and gender identity was a way of distancing himself from the scandal. Aside from that awful thought, Winters has been curiously absent from the fallout, letting his social media managers (if that’s what they are) handle most of the public-facing duties like making announcements, writing updates, etc. He did manage to put out another book, a beautifully-illustrated book of poetry, but this wasn’t what the followers were looking for, hoping instead for a (free?) second-edition of a more polished Age of Scorpius. This, it seems, is beyond the capabilities of Milo Winters, who put out a pity-party essay initially blaming his editors for most of the issues with the book’s contents rather than taking accountability for his over-all bad execution of an otherwise intriguing concept. To be fair, accountability does come later on but is wrapped in a winding and almost nonsensical piece that seems to try to make five points at the same time, none of them relevant to each other. Maybe that’s the ADHD.

There was, nevertheless, a part of Winters’ essay that is undoubtedly true and resonates among those of us who live like rats out here on the edges of things. Those of us who have found our own communities to be suddenly malicious, disgusted with us, or eager to believe in lies or half-truths. Though Winters might as well be an imperfect person, he can also be an imperfect victim, just like the rest of us.

I’d been as genuine and honest as I could in my content, people were assuming the truth behind words I’d never even said. I was being attacked, harassed by repeat individuals, and told some of the cruelest things I’d ever heard in my life. Even when I tried to speak about how much it was hurting me, I was told I was being too dramatic.

Be emotional, and I'm an attention-seeker. Be casual, and I'm too informal. Be formal, and I'm too corporate. Be genuine, and I'm too immature. Be confident, and I'm narcissistic. Be authentic, and I'm pity marketing. Be hurt, and I’m too sensitive. Be proud of myself, and I’m too cocky. Redo the book, and I’m money-obsessed.

Nothing I could say was the right thing to say.

- Excerpt from “High Disturbance” — Essay by Milo Winters

In all reality, Winters is right. Not only is he right here in his essay about being utterly unable to surface from drowning for the swarm of bees above, he’s right to abandon this project entirely. The first book you want to write isn’t going to be the book you eventually get success with. I know this for a fact. I wrote a crime thriller series back when I was 16 that I had been dreaming up since age 11 and you know what? It was shit. It was so fucking bad. It was self-insert trash that had characters who were too much of this and too little of that, with convenient plot holes and gratuitous violence (as was my favorite thing back in the day). You know what I write now that gets the most readers and sparks the most joy? Dumb little Original Victorian Omegaverse stories I write for free on Ao3. They’re fun, they’re free, and they bring people joy—what’s not to love? Winters is, eventually, going to find the project that comes easy, that isn’t a mess of concepts half-rendered and janky prose cobbled together. He’s going to read that one writing book about the cat or whatever (I didn’t read it, to be fair), and it’s gonna change his life and inspire him to start making again. Hopefully.

Being “canceled” is no walk in the park. Especially when you’re going through transitioning and grappling with neurodivergence while absolutely flooded with a faceless mass of people’s expectations of you. Opinions floating around about you can sting—badly—and it can all seem like the world is falling apart, absolutely crumbling and in shambles, but life moves forward. My own cancelations were never so public, thank god, but I’m also not charming or enthusiastic or anywhere near brave enough to put my whole ass face on TikTok for people to judge my voice (like Fran Drescher and Jane Lynch had a baby) or my eyebrows (I like ‘em fluffy). Still, I sometimes get comments on my stories that are out of pocket, messages on various platforms that I’m an awful human being and should kill myself in varying creative ways…it’s not unheard of to receive these and I tend to believe that people are at least getting one or two when they mention them even if they don’t provide screen grabs of them.

Winters goes on to explain the specifics of how his cancelation affected him and his health and while it might seem a little overboard to fantasize death, as he puts it, there’s far less that people have ended it all over and it’s not something that I doubt in the slightest. What Winters went through was horrific and due primarily to the fact that his fanbase was so large that it, statistically, had to have a couple unstable folks lying in wait. I, myself, had followers on Twitter back in the day who seemed to leap at the chance to claim I was allied with secret neo-nazis or that my friends were actually sockpuppets so I could pretend to be Black (untrue but considering the amount of Fréydis Moon type shenanigans happening out there, ultimately understandable) and there seemed no end to people who would simply believe whatever was said without a single shred of evidence. Winters faced similar issues, fighting against words he never said and allegations without any merit that seemed to make the rounds like wildfire (haha, iykyk). In this, I can understand him and empathize.

The good thing is that Winters has learned. A lot, presumably. He’s going to rebuild things, do an audit of his life as one does after a particularly harrowing adventure, and discover something that sparks joy. That or rediscover the joy of writing…hopefully something wildly different from Gardian. Fresh. New. Not taken too seriously. One should never take their life nor their writing too seriously; it’s a recipe for disappointment. If possible, Winters should start some very stupid writing project… Extreme horror. Fluff! Erotica… Anything that will stretch out the gray cells and put them to work. You don’t need a creative studio to make a story. All you need is an idea, skill, and a whole shitload of sitting your ass down and doing the hard work of getting the writing out of you. With unserious projects, you get to treat your shit like shit. You get to be messy about it. There are no expectations. You get to do whatever you want, and that’s what Winters needs right now. He needs the freedom to make shit. When you charge people for your stuff, they expect it not to be shit.

Milo. Shed expectation. Get a job at McDonalds if you have to, but make shit and treat it like shit. Roll in it like a dog. Find your 30 sickos and make for them. Make sure one of them is you. And when you’re happy with your shit, send it to me so I can roll in it too. This could be a net positive for you. Maybe not your career, but if you keep writing it’ll be a net positive for your craft. So get to it. Make shit.