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Say it with me! Wheelchairs aren’t sad! Mobility aids aren’t sad! Mobility aids are instruments of freedom!

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person whose birthday is coming up: yeah i'm like a bodhisattva now. i don't really "want" things. yeah i've renounced all earthly desires. so no i don't know what i want for my birthday

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I think the solution to kids on the Internet is to have specific, kid friendly spaces on the Internet. Kids wouldn't come across "adult content" on YouTube if barbie dot com still had flash games and this is a hill I will die on.

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Reading Meander, Spiral, Explode taught me about crots - the term for standalone fragments, often just a paragraph or so long. They're not full scenes, but they're self-contained and don't have strong connections to the text around them.

"Crot" is probably the term I use most often in my notes-to-self when outlining a story and yet I'm not sure I ever managed to write a piece that uses them. Not yet, at least.

But in the meantime, it's a fun word to say.

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Vancouver Public Library

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she’s right

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if you have a popular post on this site inevitably people will tag it with something like “croggles to bringles when they lost the ploogie in ep 10” and it rules. i have no idea what you’re talking about but you’re right this IS so croggles to bringles when they lost the ploogie in episode 10.

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tomorrobor day is labor day

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some of you think ‘nuanced’ only means ‘morally grey’ and I’m here to tell you that actually straight up good characters can still be nuanced and unapologetically evil characters can still be nuanced. the character doesn’t have to be an anti hero or morally dubious to have depth. they don’t even have to feel sorry about their crimes to have depth.

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Building on #3, one of the most unusual but fun pieces of writing advice I've heard is to take a favorite author, sit at your laptop and type up a page or two of writing from them. (Or use pen and pencil or whatever other method you use to get down first drafts.) It gives you a physical experience of "writing like them" and can make you more attentive to nuances of pacing and structure, as well as word choice and punctuation because you can't skim over any of that.

My micro-version of this is when I type up favorite quotes and excerpts to share here on Tumblr. It's one thing to know a poet uses very short lines or very long lines, another to feel myself hitting Ctrl + Enter often or rarely.

(My other advice on the fear of "being well-read but mediocre" is: accept you might never be good as the best things you've ever read, because there is some improbably good work out there. Also, be willing to do a lot of editing.)

in terms reading more to of write better, do you know how a person can absorb the quality of the things they've read to their own work? like a work can be mediocre even if the writer is well-read and i want to avoid that for myself

well, this is by no means definitive, but some things to do:

ask yourself what makes this compelling to you? is it the language? is it the tone / voice? what about the tone/voice? is it the ideas presented? the characters? the dialogues?

2. how is the author putting together these elements that compel you? what are the tools they're using to do so? do you know? if you don't know, look it up!

3. play parrot! sometimes it helps to just mimic / pastiche your favourite authors' voices. mix them together! does it work? does it not work? why does it not work? mix it around till you achieve something you like! you'll eventually settle into something that will be your own voice.

4. read literary criticism of the works / authors that you like. this could be something in a magazine like bookforum or london review of books. read widely. or it can be a straight up journal article! just open up google scholar and look up a specific theme + work or just look up the work and see what comes up. think about the criticism: do you agree with what they're saying? why or why not?

5. you have to be curious & open-minded about people & the world. not all the book and theory knowledge in the world can save you if you're not interested in understanding real people in the real world / are only interested in armchair analysis & diagnosis. 90% of writing sucks because people are uninterested in building on the scaffold of the simple fact that real people in the real world are both quite irrational and unreasonable AND yet are deeply compelled by their social structures and invisible psychological needs. can you analyse this in the people around you? if not, go back to zero and try again and again.

6. look at the world around you. think about how your favourite writer might describe how something looks. think about the way the light falls on something. how would you describe it? why? if you were a different person would you describe it differently? how might someone else describe it? why? (this will help you build up the skill of creating a specific set of metaphors and means of thinking for characters that reflects in their word, metaphor and simile choices, that in turn will shape the language and voice you employ for them both in dialogue and in free indirect speech)

7. ok so we've sorted out language, now start thinking about the underdark of the things you're reading. what is the social world that shapes the characters? how does the author depict this? (reading criticism on this can really help, whether yr reading thru a feminist lens or a marxist lens etc etc) how does the author decide on what to focus on? how does it propel the narrative and its stakes? (btw heyer and austen / older marriage plot novels are really good for practicing this, because they'll usually make obvious the social constraints of class and gender (for example) that are compelling the characters to act or not act in the ways they're acting.)

8. read the sort of books / history the author of the book you're reading might have read. e.g. reading about roman history, early modern gender roles and having a sense of 1930s - 1950s english social and economic history enriches my reading and understanding of tolkien's undergirding philosophical, social and economic concerns threading thru his works. i cannot stress this enough: reading accompanying history can make a huge difference in the depth with which you are able to read a text.

9. think about the author's politics & leave aside your own fanishness/your preconceptions of how this author should or should not be. how does that show up in their works? (again litcrit can be good for digging into this). where does that show up? do you think that was consciously employed? do you think it was unconsciously employed?

10. read your own work with this exact critical eye ;)

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#MondayReads I aim to finish this week:

Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage by Stephanie Coontz - a substantial history of the institution's evolution in Western history from the Bronze Age to the beginnings of same-sex marriage in 2005 (when this book was published). Hugely informative, often grim, but Coontz is good at contextualizing things in the larger (often economic) context: requiring parental approval of your spouse makes some sense when the family livelihood depends on you marrying someone who can help make it work. Also, it emphasizes just how weird the 1950s were, historically.

Once Dishonored by Mary Jo Putney - I've enjoyed Putney's historical romances before (they're often full of hurt/comfort themes) but honestly, I'd have grabbed this book from anyone just for the trouser-wearing swordswoman on the cover. Phew. Anyway, that woman is Kendra, a recent divorcee shunned by society in 1816 (hey, this book ties in with Coontz's!) who teams up with former prisoner of war Lucas to take revenge on her ex and regain custody of her son. A fantastic setup, but the pace is a bit breakneck for me--Kenda is baring her most painful experiences at the drop of a hat in the first few chapters, and Putney is not a great believer in subtext. People say exactly what they think and feel. So I feel like I'm always skimming the surface rather than getting into the deeper territory I love in romance and hurt/comfort. Also there was a fight scene that used "swift" 3 times in about 120 words, so you kind of have to skim to avoid being smacked by too much awareness of the awkward prose. (In fairness, the book came out in 2020, so Putney and her editorial team might have all been Going Through It.) I'm going to keep reading because the premise is still excellent, plus Kendra hasn't put on her trousers and boots yet, and I promise, however quick or thin the moment might be when it comes, I will infuse it with my own passion.

A Companion to Wolves by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear - this is a reread of a formative novel I first picked up in my teens. I don't know if it's quite held up, but look, I will always love F/SF for providing lots of worldbuilding and setups for passionate and outlandish sex. Bear and Monette are kinda inventing omegaverse from first principles here (the book was published in 2007 so might actually be an elder sister of omegaverse?) where these guys who are soulbonded to giant wolves to fight the trolls menacing their medieval-Norse-esque society will go into heat right alongside their wolf siblings. That part still holds up. What got to me, as I posted last night, is how many characters and names there are (some characters get multiple names: the protagonist starts off as Njall and, after joining the wolfheall, becomes Isolfr). I kind of wish the trolls had wiped a few more towns off the map early on and spared me the effort of keeping track. At times it will not be clear if a named character is a wolf or a human for a few sentences, but that might be a deliberate effect. The authors also have a lot of neologisms (wolfheall being one example), although these are easy enough to figure out from context. One other thing--and I can see how my own writing was influenced here--chunks of story move in great, loping sentences that cover a lot of time and ideas. I want to replace some "and"s with full stops to create more pauses for breath (as I do in self-editing). But when the technique works, it gives some epic sweep without taking much time, and overall I'd say this book's use of narrative summary proves summary can be as gripping and emotionally moving as a scene...provided you actually know the characters involved. (I have a half-formed thought about this being a novel paced like a short story.)

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sometimes I think I'm putting too many sex scenes into something . and then I look at what's happening in the world and I'm like oh yeah there's a massive puritan shift and censorship wave happening. why on earth am I feeling guilty for writing self indulgent fanfic lmao. I think I will make the characters do it sloppy AGAIN !!!!!

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people writing historical romance seem to love having a guy with a bad leg who walks with a cane but I’d like to see this energy in contemporary romance as well. there are handsome guys among us today who use canes

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i'm sorry but a lot of you guys need to be writing short stories.