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[canmom]

normal catgirl

[canmom]

Ron Cobb’s ornithopter concept for Jodorowsky’s Dune

[canmom]

The Three Commandments

The thing about writing is this: you gotta start in medias res, to hook your readers with action immediately. But readers aren’t invested in people they know nothing about, so start with a framing scene that instead describes the characters and the stakes. But those scenes are boring, so cut straight to the action, after opening with a clever quip, but open in the style of the story, and try not to be too clever in the opener, it looks tacky. One shouldn’t use too many dialogue tags, it’s distracting; but you can use ‘said’ a lot, because ‘said’ is invisible, but don’t use ‘said’ too much because it’s boring and uninformative – make sure to vary your dialogue tags to be as descriptive as possible, except don’t do that because it’s distracting, and instead rely mostly on ‘said’ and only use others when you need them. But don’t use ‘said’ too often; you should avoid dialogue tags as much as you possibly can and indicate speakers through describing their reactions. But don’t do that, it’s distracting.

Having a viewpoint character describe themselves is amateurish, so avoid that. But also be sure to describe your viewpoint character so that the reader can picture them. And include a lot of introspection, so we can see their mindset, but don’t include too much introspection, because it’s boring and takes away from the action and really bogs down the story, but also remember to include plenty of introspection so your character doesn’t feel like a robot. And adverbs are great action descriptors; you should have a lot of them, but don’t use a lot of adverbs; they’re amateurish and bog down the story. And

The reason new writers are bombarded with so much outright contradictory writing advice is that these tips are conditional. It depends on your style, your genre, your audience, your level of skill, and what problems in your writing you’re trying to fix. Which is why, when I’m writing, I tend to focus on what I call my Three Commandments of Writing. These are the overall rules; before accepting any writing advice, I check whether it reinforces one of these rules or not. If not, I ditch it.

1: Thou Shalt Have Something To Say

What’s your book about?

I don’t mean, describe to me the plot. I mean, why should anybody read this? What’s its thesis? What’s its reason for existence, from the reader’s perspective? People write stories for all kinds of reasons, but things like ‘I just wanted to get it out of my head’ are meaningless from a reader perspective. The greatest piece of writing advice I ever received was you putting words on a page does not obligate anybody to read them. So why are the words there? What point are you trying to make?

The purpose of your story can vary wildly. Usually, you’ll be exploring some kind of thesis, especially if you write genre fiction. Curse Words, for example, is an exploration of self-perpetuating power structures and how aiming for short-term stability and safety can cause long-term problems, as well as the responsibilities of an agitator when seeking to do the necessary work of dismantling those power structures. Most of the things in Curse Words eventually fold back into exploring this question. Alternately, you might just have a really cool idea for a society or alien species or something and want to show it off (note: it can be VERY VERY HARD to carry a story on a ‘cool original concept’ by itself. You think your sky society where they fly above the clouds and have no rainfall and have to harvest water from the clouds below is a cool enough idea to carry a story: You’re almost certainly wrong. These cool concept stories work best when they are either very short, or working in conjunction with exploring a theme). You might be writing a mystery series where each story is a standalone mystery and the point is to present a puzzle and solve a fun mystery each book. Maybe you’re just here to make the reader laugh, and will throw in anything you can find that’ll act as framing for better jokes. In some genres, readers know exactly what they want and have gotten it a hundred times before and want that story again but with different character names – maybe you’re writing one of those. (These stories are popular in romance, pulp fantasy, some action genres, and rather a lot of types of fanfiction).

Whatever the main point of your story is, you should know it by the time you finish the first draft, because you simply cannot write the second draft if you don’t know what the point of the story is. (If you write web serials and are publishing the first draft, you’ll need to figure it out a lot faster.)

Once you know what the point of your story is, you can assess all writing decisions through this lens – does this help or hurt the point of my story?

2: Thou Shalt Respect Thy Reader’s Investment

Readers invest a lot in a story. Sometimes it’s money, if they bought your book, but even if your story is free, they invest time, attention, and emotional investment. The vast majority of your job is making that investment worth it. There are two factors to this – lowering the investment, and increasing the payoff. If you can lower your audience’s suspension of disbelief through consistent characterisation, realistic (for your genre – this may deviate from real realism) worldbuilding, and appropriately foreshadowing and forewarning any unexpected rules of your world. You can lower the amount of effort or attention your audience need to put into getting into your story by writing in a clear manner, using an entertaining tone, and relying on cultural touchpoints they understand already instead of pushing them in the deep end into a completely unfamiliar situation. The lower their initial investment, the easier it is to make the payoff worth it.

Two important notes here: one, not all audiences view investment in the same way. Your average reader views time as a major investment, but readers of long fiction (epic fantasies, web serials, et cetera) often view length as part of the payoff. Brandon Sanderson fans don’t grab his latest book and think “Uuuugh, why does it have to be so looong!” Similarly, some people like being thrown in the deep end and having to put a lot of work into figuring out what the fuck is going on with no onboarding. This is one of science fiction’s main tactics for forcibly immersing you in a future world. So the valuation of what counts as too much investment varies drastically between readers.

Two, it’s not always the best idea to minimise the necessary investment at all costs. Generally, engagement with art asks something of us, and that’s part of the appeal. Minimum-effort books do have their appeal and their place, in the same way that idle games or repetitive sitcoms have their appeal and their place, but the memorable stories, the ones that have staying power and provide real value, are the ones that ask something of the reader. If they’re not investing anything, they have no incentive to engage, and you’re just filling in time. This commandment does not exist to tell you to try to ask nothing of your audience – you should be asking something of your audience. It exists to tell you to respect that investment. Know what you’re asking of your audience, and make sure that the ask is less than the payoff.

The other way to respect the investment is of course to focus on a great payoff. Make those characters socially fascinating, make that sacrifice emotionally rending, make the answer to that mystery intellectually fulfilling. If you can make the investment worth it, they’ll enjoy your story. And if you consistently make their investment worth it, you build trust, and they’ll be willing to invest more next time, which means you can ask more of them and give them an even better payoff. Audience trust is a very precious currency and this is how you build it – be worth their time.

But how do you know what your audience does and doesn’t consider an onerous investment? And how do you know what kinds of payoff they’ll find rewarding? Easy – they self-sort. Part of your job is telling your audience what to expect from you as soon as you can, so that if it’s not for them, they’ll leave, and if it is, they’ll invest and appreciate the return. (“Oh but I want as many people reading my story as possible!” No, you don’t. If you want that, you can write paint-by-numbers common denominator mass appeal fic. What you want is the audience who will enjoy your story; everyone else is a waste of time, and is in fact, detrimental to your success, because if they don’t like your story then they’re likely to be bad marketing. You want these people to bounce off and leave before you disappoint them. Don’t try to trick them into staying around.) Your audience should know, very early on, what kind of an experience they’re in for, what the tone will be, the genre and character(s) they’re going to follow, that sort of thing. The first couple of chapters of Time to Orbit: Unknown, for example, are a micro-example of the sorts of mysteries that Aspen will be dealing with for most of the book, as well as a sample of their character voice, the way they approach problems, and enough of their background, world and behaviour for the reader to decide if this sort of story is for them. We also start the story with some mildly graphic medical stuff, enough physics for the reader to determine the ‘hardness’ of the scifi, and about the level of physical risk that Aspen will be putting themselves at for most of the book. This is all important information for a reader to have.

If you are mindful of the investment your readers are making, mindful of the value of the payoff, and honest with them about both from the start so that they can decide whether the story is for them, you can respect their investment and make sure they have a good time.

3: Thou Shalt Not Make Thy World Less Interesting

This one’s really about payoff, but it’s important enough to be its own commandment. It relates primarily to twists, reveals, worldbuilding, and killing off storylines or characters. One mistake that I see new writers make all the time is that they tank the engagement of their story by introducing a cool fun twist that seems so awesome in the moment and then… is a major letdown, because the implications make the world less interesting.

“It was all a dream” twists often fall into this trap. Contrary to popular opinion, I think these twists can be done extremely well. I’ve seen them done extremely well. The vast majority of the time, they’re very bad. They’re bad because they take an interesting world and make it boring. The same is true of poorly thought out, shocking character deaths – when you kill a character, you kill their potential, and if they’re a character worth killing in a high impact way then this is always a huge sacrifice on your part. Is it worth it? Will it make the story more interesting? Similarly, if your bad guy is going to get up and gloat ‘Aha, your quest was all planned by me, I was working in the shadows to get you to acquire the Mystery Object since I could not! You have fallen into my trap! Now give me the Mystery Object!’, is this a more interesting story than if the protagonist’s journey had actually been their own unmanipulated adventure? It makes your bad guy look clever and can be a cool twist, but does it mean that all those times your protagonist escaped the bad guy’s men by the skin of his teeth, he was being allowed to escape? Are they retroactively less interesting now?

Whether these twists work or not will depend on how you’ve constructed the rest of your story. Do they make your world more or less interesting?

If you have the audience’s trust, it’s permissible to make your world temporarily less interesting. You can kill off the cool guy with the awesome plan, or make it so that the Chosen One wasn’t actually the Chosen One, or even have the main character wake up and find out it was all a dream, and let the reader marinate in disappointment for a little while before you pick it up again and turn things around so that actually, that twist does lead to a more interesting story! But you have to pick it up again. Don’t leave them with the version that’s less interesting than the story you tanked for the twist. The general slop of interest must trend upward, and your sacrifices need to all lead into the more interesting world. Otherwise, your readers will be disappointed, and their experience will be tainted.

Whenever I’m looking at a new piece of writing advice, I view it through these three rules. Is this plot still delivering on the book’s purpose, or have I gone off the rails somewhere and just stared writing random stuff? Does making this character ‘more relateable’ help or hinder that goal? Does this argument with the protagonists’ mother tell the reader anything or lead to any useful payoff; is it respectful of their time? Will starting in medias res give the audience an accurate view of the story and help them decide whether to invest? Does this big twist that challenges all the assumptions we’ve made so far imply a world that is more or less interesting than the world previously implied?

Hopefully these can help you, too.

[canmom]

Hey, so I just came across the post about your friend Peter. Idk about the UK, but Canada has a decent aslyum process for LGBT folks and I'd be happy to do what I can to facilitate getting them somewhere safe. It's not great here rn overall, but they could potentially live and work in relative safety and have access to medical care at least

You should def get in touch with him on tumblr (@peterkats )! When we talked about it, I think the biggest hurdle would be getting them out of where they are currently, so they get to somewhere to claim asylum. Not everyone in the group has a passport and flying is expensive. Passports could potentially be issued at an embassy but I don't really know the ins and outs of it, and I'm afraid of giving bad advice which would lead to them coming here at great expense only to end up incarcerated in Yarl's Wood or a similar facility, or deported straight back. If Canada is less cruel to migrants, that could definitely be a better option.

The size of the group is 13 people, I'm not sure how many of them have passports. 13 plane tickets would be well beyond what I can personally afford, but maybe with a fundraiser we could help them move.

[canmom]

also if anyone knows games that run on android and aren't region locked, by all accounts it's pretty boring hanging out in a refugee camp without much to do. i recced super hexagon but it turns out you can only download that in certain countries, which is kinda wank honestly

[canmom]

So a little over a month ago I was reached out to by @peterkats, a gay refugee currently living in a camp with a small group of other gay and trans refugees.

Peter has, to put it mildly, had a fucking time of it. In his home country, Uganda, his partner was murdered for being trans. He stayed for some time in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya with a group of gay and trans people (pictured above), but violence from police forced them to move, and they're currently in a refugee camp run by the UNHCR. (I've been asked not to explicitly name the country but you can probably figure it out.)

Unfortunately this has not in any way been a reprieve. They've managed to flee right into an impending famine, and if that's not enough, they're still facing violence from police and other refugees, and general indifference from the UNHCR medical staff - who are also facing supply shortages. But it's not completely hopeless. When Peter contacted me, he needed money for food - I sent him some via an intermediary and he was able to get quite a bit (the exchange rate seems to be favourable). With help, things can be quite different.

We've stayed in touch since then, talking about our respective lives, the lgbtq situation in different countries, even videogames and music. He's a really sweet guy, despite it all still trying to find a place he can live free. For real, I would not survive any of this shit.

Recently a couple of people in Peter's group have caught malaria. They are currently sleeping on bare mats without mosquito nets. There seems to be some confusion about the exchange rates but as far as I have been able to gather, about €150 (~20,000ssp) gets a mattress and €10(~1000ssp) a malaria net. The UNHCR have not been able to provide any medication except paracetamol, and it's raining which promotes mosquito activity, so this is kind of an emergency.

I would very much prefer if the new friend I've made doesn't die of starvation or malaria. Unfortunately, I do not have the money to support Peter and his group alone. I've sent him money for one mattress (via PayPal for expediency, it won't show up on GFM), and I would be immensely grateful if you would be able to contribute a bit to getting them another (which would be just about enough to keep six people safe from mosquitoes if sleeping three to a mattress).

Beyond that, these guys are prohibited from working so they would definitely benefit from food money. And if anyone has an idea for a long term plan to get them somewhere safer where they're less likely to get bashed, I am sure Peter would appreciate hearing about it. We talked a bit about the UK asylum process but getting everyone here would be very difficult (passports, flights etc.).

But still like, I can only do so much on my own, and I want to give these guys a fighting chance. So if you could pass this around and donate if you can spare a bit? I'd be insanely grateful.

[canmom]

did an interview with isis talked fear and hunger, pathologic, my books, cocks, roaches, all the good things in life...

[canmom]

sup belgrade I'm in you

[canmom]

if either of my siblings ever have kids I'm gonna be such a cool aunt. I'll lend them the weirdest comic books

[canmom]

Ice adolescence being cancelled is like the ultimate betrayal by mappa. Mappa's first BIG big hit, its magnum opus, was never jjk or csm or aot. It was Yuri on Ice. It's time they remember their roots, for those roots are gay.

[canmom]

what are the differences between marxism and anarchism?

one is based on the writings of Karl Marx and the other is based on the writings of Jean-Luc Anarquis

the respective ways in which they annoy me

it's difficult to get precise because anarchism is notably more expansive, which is sort of inherent to its nature. Marxism is thoroughly modern and often emphasizes its breakage with the previous radicalisms and socialisms that influenced it (while also being explicitly based on the models and preoccupations of a specific guy or set of guys). and although a lot of anarchism is to some extent also modern and similarly birthed out of 18th-century radicalism, it has a claim - much like communism outside of Marxism - to a longer, more extensive intellectual and political history. not to mention these two are, both being forms of socialism, kind of on a gradient (communization theory is a good contemporary example of a synthesis of the two). any attempt to kind of boil down either, and framing it as a binary in the first place, is going to miss a lot.

to bang my metapolitics drum: goals should be derived from values, and strategy and tactics are derived from both. I feel like you're probably familiar with the strategic/tactical disagreements among Marxists and anarchists (parties, cooperatives, state power, etc.) because they're...fairly obvious, so I'm more interested in emphasizing that first process.

there are (or at least can be) a number of overlapping values between Marxism and anarchism, even if the substantive content can vary. I think a notable breaking point is the central object of their ire. Marxism is interested in the rule of capital and its representatives, how this distorts and deranges social life, and more broadly how class conflict emerges from different methods of organizing social needs in ways that are destructive/irrational/restrictive on flourishing. I think anarchism's attention is towards processes of obedience and submission, how is it that people come to be positioned in hierarchical and coercive dynamics and either lose or surrender their personal and collective liberty, and how the state/political organization act as the chief source of this repression. I think there's obvious linkage here, and I wouldn't say they're mutually exclusive, but where you place your emphases matters and is going to lead you to different assessments of goals.

they primarily split on the question of what to do about political power, which I would suggest is related but non-identical to the break over what to do about political economy. assuming a revolutionary scenario (which not all anarchists do, see the individualist strain derived from thinkers like Stirner which I am somewhat influenced by, but this is the conventional tale of the Bakunin/Marx split): should political power, conceived as a weapon of class rule, be seized in some capacity before we seek its full abolition, or should this mode or conception of politics be abolished through the act of making revolution?

again, there's kind of a spectrum of answers here. I think how you flesh out the substantive content of specific values will inform where you land on this question, of exactly how to get to statelessness. fwiw, I think nobody has really cracked the problem of the state as a force with its own inertia and limitations for forming a desirable society vs. the demands of a defensive revolutionary position, but I think recognizing that it is a dilemma is more fruitful than just pretending it doesn't exist or like a clean answer has been handed down from on high by our predecessors.

and, to some extent, there's also a disparity (though not universal between the camps) on the matter of whether a post-capitalist society should have things like markets - not all anarchists are necessarily communists. not all Marxists are either but they usually at least pretend to be.

anyway, I think there's obviously a lot of other historical and ideological differences and tensions for a variety of reasons, but I think these are some of the most interesting threads right now. in conclusion,

[canmom]

The Ram and Warrior faces Death

The Red Goddess guides her general Yanafal Tarnils to defeat Humakt, God of War and Death, and become the new Lunar War God.

[canmom]

no animation night tonight. on consideration i think it's best if i just save my energy and get an early night for the flight tomorrow. but we'll be back for real once i'm back from serbia

[canmom]

i hear the independent comics scene is really good up there though, so the future is bright!

i'm really gonna miss Gosh Comics when i move out of london. hopefully i can find an equally cool comics shop up in Glasgow

[canmom]

i'm really gonna miss Gosh Comics when i move out of london. hopefully i can find an equally cool comics shop up in Glasgow

[canmom]

only a little of it, enough to tell me that I probably wouldn't get a lot out of it ^^' but yeah I will fully admit I'm sorta repeating stuff I heard secondhand from other people who have been able to compare both. I know the anime expands on some scenes that were relatively brief in the manga, but generally speaking I've heard that it's a faithful adaptation, and that the pacing/narrative focus issues in the anime are inherited from the source. if you see it different, fair dos!

anyway,

technical shit definitely isn't everything in comics (though it's a treat when it's there - I'm reading oyasumi punpun right now and the shit asano does with expressions and panel layouts is just insane), but the main things that appealed to me in the anime adaptation - the detailed backgrounds and relatively grounded setting, the strong direction - are mostly embellishments by the team at Madhouse, and the manga is kinda barebones. (some direct comparisons in this post, from about when I dropped the anime).

that said, as tempting as it was to respond to that setup with a one-liner like that ^^', I'm not actually all that invested in dissing Frieren - or really talking about it all that much. if you like it, that's great, please don't let me detract from your enjoyment of it because it wasn't what I wanted it to be! I really did enjoy the first episodes quite a bit, but at some point it became clear that what I liked there was not the main direction of the story. taking it for what it actually is, a splice of action and slice-of-life... well I wasn't particularly feeling the whole 'I'm too cool to show emotions' affect of most of the characters, but I don't want to dismiss the efforts of all the animators who went to realising those scenes. there is evidently a lot of love and plenty of cool shit in there. and maybe the manga is one of those ones that has a fairly rough start but improves over the course of its run, I barely ready any before bouncing, so apologies if I wrote it off unfairly.

I just can't deny that when I heard the entire second cour is about Frieren fighting duels to pass a magic exam so she can get a passport, my will to continue watching - already on the ropes after the first major demon arc - pretty much evaporated.

I caught up with the Dungeon Meshi anime while I was at my friend's place. Honestly marathoning it in a couple sessions like that was actually perfect - I could share it with someone who was new to the series (and I knew it would be up her street), and for my part, I could enjoy seeing all the adaptation decisions and crazy animation flexes.

it's honestly doing a really fantastic job of capturing a lot of the strengths of Kui's manga - the grounded attention to setting detail, the rich character dynamics - while mixing in the kind of exaggerated, loose, post-Kanada school animation and creativity with the medium that Trigger is known for. And it ends up a perfect match. Something is always lost in adaptation, but this is an excellent case of how to bring in a new ingredient to make it taste fresh all the same.

I never thought Dunmeshi would get such a labour-of-love adaptation - led by a really dedicated fan of the series, with some of the best animators in the industry. I did think Trigger would do a generally solid job from the day it was announced... but they're really going all-in on this one, way beyond what I thought would be realistic to hope for, and it's so good to see.

It's always a little odd when the fairly niche thing you're into suddenly gets crazy popular with a huge new audience, but I'm honestly really glad that more people are getting this story served up in such a tasty way. And hey, helps wash down the bitter taste of Frieren, as far as non-isekai fantasy anime goes...

[canmom]

well you see, Frieren isn't very good

(more serious answer, broadly agree with ash's comments. a passionate, high-effort adaptation with excellent animation... that ends up unable to live up to the potential suggested by its first episodes because the source material had no idea what to do with serialisation, so it gets bogged down in boring shōnen shit. i'll probably finish it at some point but it was one of the steepest arcs of 'this is great' to 'this is so disappointing' that i've encountered in anime.)

I caught up with the Dungeon Meshi anime while I was at my friend's place. Honestly marathoning it in a couple sessions like that was actually perfect - I could share it with someone who was new to the series (and I knew it would be up her street), and for my part, I could enjoy seeing all the adaptation decisions and crazy animation flexes.

it's honestly doing a really fantastic job of capturing a lot of the strengths of Kui's manga - the grounded attention to setting detail, the rich character dynamics - while mixing in the kind of exaggerated, loose, post-Kanada school animation and creativity with the medium that Trigger is known for. And it ends up a perfect match. Something is always lost in adaptation, but this is an excellent case of how to bring in a new ingredient to make it taste fresh all the same.

I never thought Dunmeshi would get such a labour-of-love adaptation - led by a really dedicated fan of the series, with some of the best animators in the industry. I did think Trigger would do a generally solid job from the day it was announced... but they're really going all-in on this one, way beyond what I thought would be realistic to hope for, and it's so good to see.

It's always a little odd when the fairly niche thing you're into suddenly gets crazy popular with a huge new audience, but I'm honestly really glad that more people are getting this story served up in such a tasty way. And hey, helps wash down the bitter taste of Frieren, as far as non-isekai fantasy anime goes...