jbhofstee

[jbhofstee]

someone on twitter is trying to claim that use of an em-dash is an indication of AI-generated writing because it’s “relatively rare” for actual humans to use it. skill issue

[jbhofstee]

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

[jbhofstee]

I enjoyed Superman (2025) except for one thing: the translation of the rest of Jor-el and Lara's message.

How did they find a linguist with the skills to accurately translate an alien language that was wiped out 30 years ago and there's only a handful of native speakers left?? Is there a xenolinguist or something??? Even then, it would be a newer field and would be rife with inaccuracies

The trope of demonization of one set of parents to elevate another set of parents for an adopted character. It's a pointless stupid trope and can damage public opinion about adoption a lot. Superman has normally had 4 loving, kind, supportive parents so why change that?

Tied in with above; demonizing others. Which plays into anti immigrant views. Also, in this instance due to the original writers of Superman, could possibly be interpreted as antisemitic. Superman, like his original writers, always balanced being both Kryptonian and Earthling (some writers less so but it's meant to be a thing). This relates to a lot of Americans, who say they're Irish American, Mexican American, Chinese American, and so on and so forth. To create a reason to demonize the "other" to have Clark fully embrace just being an Earthling is damaging to his legacy, history, and what he means to a lot of immigrant families.

[jbhofstee]

pro censorship people are always like “actually I’m living proof that books can be really harmful to kids! when I was a child I read a book that upset me and of course I couldn’t talk to my parents about it because they would throw rocks at me whenever I confessed to reading anything but the Bible, so as you can see, that book was the source of my trauma and warped ideas about right and wrong”

[jbhofstee]

okay maybe more than "slight"

I might have a slight hyperfixation with world building

[jbhofstee]

I might have a slight hyperfixation with world building

[jbhofstee]

Currently working on a map for my fantasy story to make it feel more solid to me to work on.

Used Inkarnate to get the basic geography then started editing in the countries myself. it's still rough but it's getting there. Due to the history of the continent, I wanted it to a mesh of languages of countries that evolved from people escaping a calamity and then carving out their own lands over millennia.

Currently working on city names and populations now.

[jbhofstee]

You use "arospec people can still date and feel romantic attraction " as an excuse to ship cannon aro characters , I use it as justification to headcannon characters who canonically feel romantic attraction as arospec , we are not the same

[jbhofstee]

[jbhofstee]

the realization your writing is a mix of British and American English due to the books you read so you die inside every time you go through spellcheck.

[jbhofstee]

Quick thing for people writing Scottish characters - dinnae, didnae and disnae are not interchangeable.

Dinnae - do not/don’t

Didnae - did not/didn’t

Disnae - does not/doesn’t

“I dinnae want to do that” means “I don’t want to do that.”

“They didnae find the loot” means “they didn’t find the loot”

“He disnae ken what he’s talking about” means “he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

What I’ve noticed is that there is a tendency for non-Scots writers to always use “dinnae” regardless of context. I’m assuming that’s because it’s a quick shorthand to show the character is Scottish for the audience which is pretty much… you know. How media works.

Unfortunately, every time I hit a sentence like “he dinnae want it”, my brain goes ERROR ERROR ABORT OUT OF CHEESE.

I doesn’t like it.

[jbhofstee]

this is so mean but sometimes i see published writing and suddenly no longer feel insecure about my own writing ability. like well okay that got published so im guessing i dont have much to worry about

[jbhofstee]

Dear Dracula Daily people,

You should read The Vampyr by John William Polidori. It was written by Lord Byron's physician at the same gathering that Frankenstein was written. Also read Carmilla. Varney the vampire from penny dreadfuls is questionable, in my opinion, though.

Signed,

A 19th century vampire lit nerd

[jbhofstee]

I saw a list of "problematic content" to watch out for in Dracula daily and I have two thoughts

1) it's a horror novel from late 1800s victorian England borrowing legends from Eastern Europe, what else are you expecting

2) I see they completely ignored the metaphorical sexual assault of Mina in their list

[jbhofstee]

the sea, the sea

[jbhofstee]

Brand new to writeblr and looking for blogs to follow and engage with as I draft my first series!

Especially excited to interact with:

Fellow lgbtq+ creators

Fantasy, historical fiction, and romance authors and readers

I follow from midnightprelude. ❤️

[jbhofstee]

I just learned about Götz of The Iron Hand from the early 14th century and his prosthetic hand which could hold quills and swords (he was a knight for hire)

So don't make excuses for why you can't have a mechanical prosthetic in your fantasy / medieval Europe based stories