ceslawrites - Tumblr blog

[ceslawrites]

Basic rules for analysing fiction, an incomprehensive list jotted down in a hurry:

The protagonist isn’t always right

The protagonist isn’t always good

The protagonist isn’t always written to be relatable or likeable

The narrator isn’t always right

The narrator isn’t always good

The narrator isn’t always telling the truth

The narrator isn’t always the author

The protagonist’s moral compass, the narrator’s moral compass and the author’s moral compass are three entirely different things that only occasionally overlap

Pay attention to what characters do and not just what they say

Pay special attention when what the characters do is at odds with what they say

A lot of the time the curtains are blue for a reason. If they aren’t, you should read better books

[ceslawrites]

It's fanfiction it doesn't have to be perfect it doesn't have to be accurate this is a hobby you're doing this for fun it's okay if it isn't perfect and polished you're doing it for fun [talking to myself in the mirror]

[ceslawrites]

It was a glorious rainy 68 degree day today but it's not gonna last x.x Looking at the forecast I gotta get cracking on trying to keep cool in advance. My power is still to fritzy to use the ac until so tinting is the next best option for now.

Still fighting with UE so this sudden cost is annoying but worth it to not roast indoors.

[ceslawrites]

Save My Family from the War Nightmare in Gaza

Hello

I am Mohammad Taysir, 34 years old, a Palestinian living in Gaza. I am married to Basma, and we have two children: Joud, who is 3 years old, and Yazan, who is 2 and a half. I am writing to you from the heart of destruction and suffering in palestine

Our lives used to be normal, filled with hope and hard work, until war came and destroyed everything.

Before the war, I worked as a mobile programmer, and my wife was a schoolteacher. We had many aspirations and lived a simple yet happy life, dreaming of a bright future for our children.

The war came and changed everything. Our home was destroyed, we lost our jobs, and we became homeless.

We tried to flee to safer areas in search of security. But safety in Gaza has become nearly impossible. Death and destruction are everywhere, and our children live in an endless nightmare. Opportunities for education and entertainment have vanished, and basic necessities are scarce. We are suffering from poverty and despair.

We are now searching for an opportunity to live in a safe place outside Gaza. However, this is very costly, and we are in desperate need of your support. We want to provide a dignified life and a better future for our children. We believe that humanity and compassion still exist, and that there are those who will respond to our desperate plea.

Every donation, no matter how small — $5 or $10, or 50$ will have a significant impact on our lives. Your contributions will help us cover the costs of travel and living in a safe country. We want to start a new life away from fear and destruction, giving our children a chance to dream and hope again.

My Campaign was Reblog by some and Vetted

vetted by @communistchilchuck 🌹link🌹

vetted by @northgazaupdates

🌹link🌹

vetted by

@mohammedalanqer

🌹link🌹

Thank you to everyone who supported us❤

[ceslawrites]

When sorrow and difficulties strike hard, hope becomes the lone star in the dark sky. This is the story of Amira, a 23-year-old girl who found herself bearing the burden of her family after her father's death three years ago due to the coronavirus.

After my father's passing, I found myself taking care of my family, consisting of my mother, sister Noor, and brother Abdulrahman. My mother, suffering from high blood pressure and diabetes, faces health problems that further complicate their situation. But courage and determination drive Amira forward.

I worked as a teaching assistant at the university while pursuing a master's degree in data science, and also worked as a programmer in a company. My life was going smoothly until war came and destroyed everything.

My university, workplace, and home were completely destroyed, forcing them to flee south in search of a safe haven. Now, I and my family live in tents for displaced people in Deir al-Balah, where they suffer from water shortages and the spread of diseases, posing an additional challenge, especially for my immunocompromised mother.

This is a brief about our daily suffering.

Please help me, my mother, my sister and my brother to go out to treat my mother because she suffers from widespread diseases because her immunity is weak and help us to complete our educational journey, me and my brother

[ceslawrites]

Just downloaded Hogwarts Legacy

[ceslawrites]

eroticism of the machine doesn’t apply to iphone….iphone is like a 25 year old instagram model living in LA who practices preventative botox….conventionally beautiful but ultimately sexless. unable to express any form of desire for fear of shattering a delicately crafted facade….iphone is the kelloggs cereal of machinery

[ceslawrites]

how are you still on this site.

this is my house, i live here.

[ceslawrites]

Ah, I see. Thank you for your honesty. Please, take as much as you need. There will be enough for everyone.

A change of scenery. Simple, but marvelous.

A glimpse into your future, for you brave souls! (Divination is tricky business, tread carefully my dear!)

Knowledge from the universe, eh? Perhaps this will be of interest to you.

Rest for the weary, right this way. It's a personal favourite of mine.

A home-cooked meal you say? I like how you think! A labour of love worth savoring (and sharing with friends!)

For something to pass the time, try looking here, or if that doesn't hit the spot, here.

Seeking adventure to a far-off place? I know a way to get you there.

✨

I hope you found what you were looking for!

[ceslawrites]

How do you write healthy parent-child relationships?

[ceslawrites]

hey if you're a UK resident can you sign this petition and if not please rb to spread the word

this is an official UK government petition that they have to respond to if it reaches 10,000 signatures

[ceslawrites]

"the curtains weren't blue on purpose. why should we care?"

my love! let me ask you this - did you eat breakfast today? this tiny moment in your life. just think about it. did you?

for some of you, the answer is yes and for some of you it is technically and for some of you it is does coffee count. some of you reached for cereal or gmo-free overnight oats or frozen waffles or 3-day-old pizza. sometimes we eat the same thing, every day, for weeks. i get tired of eggs randomly, only to go back to craving them desperately. i'm cuban; i take my coffee like my father showed me, very milky and sweet.

some of us ate in a hurry. some of us hate eating breakfast but if we don't we will get nauseous later. some of us took our meds first or took our meds after. some of us have a kitchen 5 feet wide and sometimes it's the biggest room in the house. some of us are confident there will be food in the pantry and some of us flinch and say well, the paycheck is coming. some of us turn on a podcast while we eat or we scroll our phones or write in our diaries.

some of us are choosing, specifically, not to eat breakfast. some of us are too busy. some of us are pretending we "just forgot," but we are ignoring the warning signs that everything feels too-heavy. some of us are so consumed with anxiety or grief that we can't eat. some of us can't stand up long enough to make our coffee. some of us have no table to sit down and eat.

i cannot tell you what an artist "meant" by their choices. but they did have to make a choice, conscious or otherwise, to give you information. to give you a little bit more light. each of these choices are little stars of data; connecting speckles for you to weave through, drawing a line.

you cannot use a mirror in a dark room. for some of us; we will not care that the curtains are blue, because that will just be a data point and not enough light to see by. for some of us, the blue curtains will be the same as our childhood bedroom. it will make us seasick. for some of us, blue will be the color of frostbite. it might look like a pixel up close; but from a distance, oh! the picture blooms.

i cannot tell you what will stick out for you. what will carry meaning. some of you will read the sentence "i didn't have breakfast today" and say "this means nothing." some of you will read that and say "oh, me neither." some of you will say "this means the character is probably a little grouchy." some of you will say "oh, i wonder if they're okay. why didn't they eat anything?" ... art is a mirror. i am holding hands with you, over space and time, and asking you to feel something with me.

i want you to read my work and find a blue pair of curtains. i want you to read my work and find things in it that i never imagined placing. i have no way of knowing what will resonate with you, that's true. and maybe i just was hungry while i wrote this, and thinking about the eggs in my fridge. but if you found meaning, that meaning is yours. it cannot be erased just because i didn't "intend" it. you created a different world by interpreting my work. it's collaborative! that's beautiful! that's stunning!

just! imagine looking at the night sky and saying - it's stupid to have a favorite constellation or a favorite star. they're just there.

because here's the thing - across centuries and cultures, we look up. we still find meaning in the stars. these beautiful, lovely scattered accidents. are you looking? they call. and we look back and say oh! of course we are!

[ceslawrites]

this should be a tweet but I don’t want to deal with people on Twitter. everyone stop having every character in your fiction talk like their goal is to get an A in therapy. 

[ceslawrites]

"Narrative distance"? Do tell!

Explain it in text? Without emphatic arm gestures or wine? Oh god. Okay. I’ll try.

All right, so narrative distance is all about the proximity between you the reader and the POV character in a story you’re reading. You might sometimes also hear it called “psychic distance.” It puts you right up close to that character or pulls you away, and the narrative distance an author chooses greatly affects how their story turns out, because it can drastically change the focus.

Here’s an illustration of narrative distance from far to close, from John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction (a book I yelled at a lot, because Gardner is a pretentious bastard, but he does say very smart things about craft):

It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.

Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.

Henry hated snowstorms.

God how he hated these damn snowstorms.

Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul

It feels a bit like zooming in with a camera, doesn’t it?  

I always hate making decisions about narrative distance, because I usually get it wrong on the first try and have to fix it in revision. When I was writing Lost Causes, the first thing I had to do in revision was go through and zoom in a little on the narrative distance, because it felt like it was sitting right on top of Bruce’s prickly skin and it needed to be underneath where the little biting comments and intrusive thoughts lived. 

Narrative distance is probably the simplest form of distance in POV, and there is where if I had two glasses of wine in me you would hit a vein of pure yelling. There are SO MANY forms of distance in POV. There’s the distance between the intended reader and the POV character, the distance between the POV character and the narrator (even if it’s 1st person!), the distance between the narrator and the author. There’s emotional distance, intellectual distance, psychological distance, experiential distance. If you look closely at a 3rd person POV story, you can tell things about the narrator as a person (and the narrator is an entity independent of the author) - like, for starters, you can tell if they’re sympathetic to the POV character by how they talk about their actions. Word choice and sentence structure can tell you a narrator’s level of education and where they’re from; you can sometimes even tell a narrator’s gender, class, and other less obvious identifying factors if you look closely enough. To find these details, ask: What does the narrator (or POV character, or author) understand?

I can’t put a name on the narrator of the Harry Potter books, but I can tell you he understands British culture intimately, what it’s like to be a teen boy with a crush, to not have money, to be lonely and abused, and to find and connect with people. There’s a lot he doesn’t understand (he doesn’t pick out little flags of queerness like I do, so he’s probably straight, for example), but he sympathizes with Harry and supports him. I like that narrator. I’m supposed to sympathize with him, and I do.

POV is made up of these little distances - countless small questions of proximity that, when stacked together, decide whether we’re going to root for or against a character, or whether we’ll put down a book 20 pages in, or whether a story will punch you in just the right place at just the right amount to make you bawl your eyes out.

There are so many different possible configurations of distance in this arena that there are literally infinite POVs. Fiction is magical and also intimidating as fuck.

[ceslawrites]

what do you dislike/disagree with anarchists about? (/gen)

I’m an anarchist so naturally I disagree with anarchists about anarchism

[ceslawrites]

I literally do not care what the Bible says about any political issue. I am not Christian. Christian scripture should have zero effect on my life or my personal freedoms. 

[ceslawrites]

All I'm saying is, if a fic refers to characters by their physical attributes instead of their names or pronouns ("he smiled at the older" "the blonde laughed") when we know who the character is, and ESPECIALLY if the descriptions include "ravenette" or "cyanette" or other ridiculous words--

I'm clicking out of that fic so fast my AO3 history won't even register I've been there.