mariaarnt

[mariaarnt]

I'd like to add some info that many traditionally published authors don't know because of how the self-publishing industry is changing.

It is entirely possible to self publish your book 100% for free, if you have the knowledge, skills, and technology to do for yourself, or if you're okay with a low-quality book that doesn't stand out from the crowd. But there are honest businesses and freelancers who can help you create the best book possible, if you have a reasonable amount of money and you want to do it that way. This involves things like cover illustration and interior design, printing, warehousing and distribution. Even some PR and publicity firms are the real deal. Always ask about their most successful titles, and do the research.

The maxim "money flows from the publisher to the author" still applies when it comes to the rights to the material. Any publisher who puts any kind of limitation on the rights should not be asking for money up front, and should be receiving a portion of your sales instead. Any publisher who asks for money up front should allow you to cancel the agreement at any time no questions asked with no more than 30 days notice. Preferably they should not be receiving any of your sales, but there are a couple decent companies that balance a less expensive up front cost with a small sales percentage. The company I created does not, because we publish anyone who we don't have legal concerns about, and that means there's no guarantee that the book will sell at all, to be honest. It's self publishing: it's up to the author to write a good book & market it well. Us gambling on your success doesn't make for reliable income. We take payment for our services up front and then carry them out as requested, no strings attached.

This kind of company, unlike vanity publishers or "self-publishing companies" (an oxymoron in itself) is pretty new to the industry, and has almost no overlap with the traditional publishing world. As such, venerable experts of said world such as Mr. Gaiman cannot be expected to have reason to know about it.

Respectfully,

An author services Senior Editor

Hi, really love that you keep up a tumblr. I have a question about publishing, and getting that first manuscript into the right hands. In your experience would you recommend use of a literary agent, or sending to “open submissions” or both? Navigating the publishing landscape as a new author is a bit daunting! Thank you in advance, ps love your master class!

It depends on the agent and the publisher. If it's a real publisher, like For, who read submissions, then that's a safe and sensible thing to do. There are things out there that look like publishers but who make their money from innocent would-be authors and not from selling books. They must be avoided.

If you can find a good agent who likes your work and wants to represent you, that's a good thing. But there are predators out there pretending to be agents who make their money by getting paid for things by would-be authors, not by selling books and taking their cut.

Remember money flows towards, not away from, the author. If people are asking you for money, they are probably not legit.

[mariaarnt]

Stockings Have Arrived! 

Part of my bucket list Edwardian Outfit!

These are absolutely perfect in every way. Soft, perfect fit that's loose enough to be comfortable but not enough to slip. Usually I have to cut the elastic tops off of stockings because they dig in to my thighs too much, but these are exactly the right tension to stay up comfortably. This is great because it means I can wait to add garter straps to my corset until I need winter weight stockings in the fall. I would 100% recommend these to anyone. You can get them at American Duchess. They are the Black with Clocking and Off-white with clocking. 

[mariaarnt]

!!!!UPDATE!!!

Bucket List Boots

FOUND!!!

Hey folks, I’ve been fighting Breast Cancer since June of 2020, and have just learned that it has metastasized to my cerebral spinal fluid. There is no current cure for this, and I’ve been given 2-12 months to live. I’ve decided my big bucket list thing is to get together one historically accurate Edwardian outfit, a passion project I’d been working on for years but never had much funding or energy for due to chronic illness (which caused cancer eventually).

Most of it I can get easily now as friends and family are pulling together to help pay. But there’s one thing I can’t find quickly: Boots! I know somewhere out there is an existing pair of boots that fit my needs that someone is willing to sell or rent out. I just need to get the message out as fast as possible because we really have no idea how much time I have left at this point.

Please help me spread this message as far and as fast as possible, sharing with any vintage, historybounding, cosplay, theater or reenactor groups that you know!

UPDATE: BOOTS FOUND!

Huge thanks to my friend Anisha who spotted a brand new etsy listing of ANTIQUE boots of exactly the right style AND SIZE. I have *never* seen antique boots in my size, and I've been trawling etsy for days.

Thank you all so much for your help, i never imagined I'd find a solution this quickly! I promise to post again when I receive them!!! I'm so happy!

[mariaarnt]

Fantasy Character Concept:

A linguist who either finds a magical item that allows them to communicate perfectly with the dead, or is somehow directly imbued with this ability. They use this power to unlock dead languages and revive dying indigenous languages. For adventure purposes, the magic may need proximity to the remains of the dead to work.

Go forth! Use this idea! I have no purpose for it but it fascinates me!

[mariaarnt]

Okay, crazy Star Wars theory time.

I have long suspected that the "keep people from dying" technique that Palpatine/Sidious mentions to Anakin requires that someone else's life force be sacrificed, and that's why it can't be learned from a Jedi. This is arguably what we see at the end of TRoS, only instead of sucking the life out of some hapless bystander, Ben sacrifices his own life force.

Now to the actual theory: Padme did not die of childbirth, or a broken heart, or whatever. The med droids even say there's nothing medically wrong with her, but she's still slipping away. Even after everything she's been through, she's insisting to Obi-wan that there's still good in Anakin.

Padme had outlived her usefulness in Palpatine's plot to create Darth Vader, and she now represented the biggest threat to keeping him. If she lived, she would do everything in her power to drag Anakin, kicking and screaming, back into the light. And Palpatine knew it.

So Palpatine used Padme's life force to stop Anakin from dying.

Now, you might argue, Padme is a long way away from Palpatine and Vader. But Palpatine was probably extremely familiar with Padme's life force. She was only 7 when he discovered her in the junior legislature and began grooming her to be queen and then senator (and the perfect bait for Anakin). Maybe he'd already manipulated her life force. Nothing so gauche as the mind trick - Padme's too strong-willed for that anyway - but maybe he augmented her fear after the assassination attempts (which he orchestrated) so she'd be emotionally vulnerable and therefore more open to Anakin's advances. Maybe he did something to tamper with whatever birth control she was using, and that's why she got pregnant. Or maybe just the literal decades of working in close quarters with her would be enough.

We've seen force users connect over long distance, and while it's usually due to a strong bond such as master/padawan, twins, or dyads, Palpatine is exceptionally powerful, and I wouldn't put it past him to be able to locate Padme's life force from half a galaxy away. And while she was traveling rapidly in the opposite direction, she wasn't as far away as that.

Also puts a little weight of truth behind Palpatine's lie that Anakin caused Padme's death.

Anyway, just a theory that neatly ties a bunch of stuff together. Feel free to poke holes in it or write some fanfic.

[mariaarnt]

One of the fucked up side effects of purity culture that I’ve seen in fandom is people bending over backwards to morally justify a character’s actions instead of just admitting that a character they like did some fucked up things and accepting it’s okay to like them anyway. 

Well-written characters, like people, are flawed. Sometimes they fuck up. Sometimes they’re problematic. This doesn’t make them unforgivable or unlovable. You can fully disagree with and disapprove of stuff a character has done and still be a fan of that character because you find them compelling and interesting and in many ways relatable.

But because of this warped purity culture bullshit telling kids that they’re TERRIBLE PEOPLE for liking X character because X character is problematic, they will do bugfuck insane mental gymnastics to argue that no, X character is a perfect pure cinnamon roll and everyone else is terrible and so mean to them and “protect X character at all costs!!!”

Because of this, you have fans who have now completely lost the capacity to acknowledge any of a character’s flaws, instead arguing in favor of some really atrocious stuff by trying to justify it. I’ve watched people argue in favor of torture, in favor of internment, in favor of genocide, in favor of terrorism, and in favor of murder, all because they were stanning for their fav and felt backed into a corner where they couldn’t admit that a character they liked was flawed, lest that somehow cast them as morally tainted in the eyes of this hellsite’s black and white ethical absolutism. 

For fuck’s sake. Let people like problematic things. Let people like problematic characters. Let people enjoy things without telling them they’re horrible people and forcing them to defend everything they like to the death. 

Because they will defend it, and we’ll wind up in a worse place than we started in. 

[mariaarnt]

Been a while since the muse bit me in the butt and made me crank out a piece in one sitting. I’m surprised though, this one only took 3 hours and 45 minutes. About time I did something new with these idiots.

A scene from “Beautiful, Disaster,” the upcoming sequel to “Vampire, Hunter.”

#Vampire/Hunter #SethWalker #TanyaCooper https://www.instagram.com/p/CK77tS8gqfa/?igshid=1fh4q8hm4pw7u

[mariaarnt]

As I contemplate the prospect of fake tattooed nipples, it suddenly occurs to me:

I will never nurse a baby.

And this hurts me, deep inside.

Even though I already knew that because years before I got cancer I had a medically necessary hysterectomy, and years before that I learned that I would never be able to carry a pregnancy to term.

The universe just keeps finding more & more brutal ways to remind me that it's not interested in giving me the one thing I have always wanted. It's not an exceptional desire, to have a child. It's the most basic, intrinsic desire of any species. But no, that is too much for me to ask of this body. I'm apparently already asking a lot of it to not die and maybe also not be in horrible excruciating pain all the time.

I will never see my husband's curly blonde hair or gorgeous eyes or any other feature in our child.

I will never be a grandmother.

Each of these small epiphanies is like a brick to the face.

YOU. CAN'T. HAVE. CHILDREN.

And while I've grown accustomed to the pain (isn't it astonishing how much pain you can get used to?) I'm terrified to discover that it isn't really getting any less, in the last 6 years since I've known. Maybe it's because I'm reminded by literally having parts of my traitorous body carved away.

It's starting to feel like fighting to keep living in this body is an exceptionally cruel ironic joke. Living... for what? On top of not being able to have kids, I also can't do most of the things I enjoy in this body. I can't even make a dependable income with it. I'm pretty much sticking around because there's a list of people who I care about who would be really sad if I didn't.

But that's not really a reason to live, just a pretty good reason not to die. That and at this point I've got a pretty convincing Sunk Cost Fallacy argument in the form of medical bills.

But like, fuck, man. I want to want to live. Just give me a damn reason and stop trying to make it so damn hard. And stop rubbing it in my face that the reason I had my heart set on since like age 6 just isn't in the cards.

[mariaarnt]

You know those things you thought would be important as a kid and ended up not mattering, like how to escape quicksand? Well for me, one of them was how on police and medical shows they talk about how you can tell if you have heavy metal poisoning by horizontal banding on your fingernails.

Guess what?

The funny thing is, I already knew I had heavy metal poisoning before these showed up. We had to stop my Carboplatin treatment because my skin was flaking off. (Like... all of it, even the calluses on my feet. Even while slathering my entire body with CeraVe twice a day. Second time nearly losing my skin during chemo, weee!) Carboplatin is made from Platinum Metal Salts. Like all chemo, the point is to poison you just enough that the cancer dies but you don't.

The bands didn't show up until weeks after the treatment was stopped. And they don't show up until that part of the nail is almost grown out all the way (they didn't start at the base and move up, they showed up exactly where they are).

So yeah, definitely a thing, but not nearly as useful a diagnostic/forensic tool as TV makes it out to be.

Anyway I'm done with chemo now but because it's accumulative I'll still be dealing with the symptoms for weeks/months, and this was one of the few nifty things, so enjoy!

[mariaarnt]

Hey, so like... apologies for glomming on to your post, but I agree with Maws so much that a while back I wrote an entire essay about this. With like... citations and stuff. I was going to make a YouTube video out of it, but I honestly don't have the skills for that and this seems as good a place to share it as any:

Humans and the Burden of Compassion

As a person with multiple disabilities – autism, chronic pain, cancer, among many other medical problems – I have often heard people try to reassure me that I am not a burden. I know these people mean well. I know that deep down what they’re trying to convey is that I am worth the enormous effort of others to care for me – and that message is wonderful & good and I need to hear it, as do many others.

But those words: “You are not a burden,” are wrong, and they hurt. 

What is a burden, then? The Oxford English Dictionary defines a burden as “a load, typically a heavy one,” and more specifically “a duty or misfortune that causes hardship, anxiety, or grief; a nuisance.” It’s that second connotation we’re dealing with here - not only that there is labor involved, but that it is somehow unpleasant. Nobody wants to be the cause of that. We sometimes feel pressured to ignore negative emotions like that - what is called Toxic Positivity - but pretending that disabilities don’t involve negative emotions can be terribly damaging.

So here’s the problem with saying you’re not a burden: When your caretaker is helping you out of the tub and pulls their back, at that moment you are a burden. Clearly, undeniably. Your care has caused them hardship, anxiety, or grief, directly. If you’ve been trying to convince yourself that you’re not a burden, you will experience dissonance in this moment that is coupled with guilt and shame. For a moment, you will glimpse the truth, and it will make you feel awful. This is because what we’re implying with “you’re not a burden” is “being a burden is a bad thing, and you are not bad.” So every time your needs cause others harm or even effort, you are secretly worrying that you are, in fact, a bad person. When they clean you, feed you, pay for your needs, drive you to the doctor for the fifth time this week. Every nice thing they do for you makes you feel a little bad.

And the truth of the fact is, we are all burdens at some point in our lives. Newborn infants are an enormous burden, as any new parent knows deep, deep in their very tired bones. They can also be an incredible blessing, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are a huge drain on resources and energy. So much so that, as a community, we not only support the infant directly but also act to offset the suffering new parents experience under this burden by helping out with food, chores, and gifts. It’s a fairly universal human tradition. And that's for a normal, healthy newborn! 

Now, you can take a very utilitarian attitude towards this: eventually, children grow and become less of a burden and can contribute materially to the community with their labor. And, as parents age and (surprise) become burdens again, the child will return the care they received. But even able-bodied adults are burdens at times, when they become sick or injured temporarily, and we do not – or at least should not – begrudge them the time & resources necessary to recover.

But what about people who are so disabled that the net effect of their life is a negative drain on resources?

Feel how uncomfortable you just got? No one likes to think about this grisly math. It goes against something deep inside of us, feels wrong. I believe this is because the inherent value of an individual human isn’t intrinsically linked to their ability to produce for the community, or even themselves. That’s not really how our current economic system looks at it, and it has serious consequences on our governmental policies concerning disabled people. But the archeological record seems to indicate that at least historically, I’m right.

Around the world, archeologists have found remains of disabled people who likely fit that bill – too disabled to contribute materially to the communities they lived in. A New York Times article recently described a man who lived in Vietnam 4,000 years ago, who became so profoundly paralyzed in adolescence that he could not have used his arms or legs for any basic functions. And yet he lived at least another 10 years. Someone – probably multiple people – would have had to care for his every need, including bodily functions. This was a subsistence-level society, people were gathering & fishing every day just to survive. But they found this man had such inherent value that it was worth the labor to care for him for roughly a third of his expected lifespan.

More examples from the NYT article:

“Such cases include at least one Neanderthal, Shanidar 1, from a site in Iraq, dating to 45,000 years ago, who died around age 50 with one arm amputated, loss of vision in one eye and other injuries. Another is Windover boy from about 7,500 years ago, found in Florida, who had a severe congenital spinal malformation known as spina bifida, and lived to around age 15. D. N. Dickel and G. H. Doran, from Florida State University wrote the original paper on the case in 1989, and they concluded that contrary to popular stereotypes of prehistoric people, “under some conditions life 7,500 years ago included an ability and willingness to help and sustain the chronically ill and handicapped.”

In another well-known case, the skeleton of a teenage boy, Romito 2, found at a site in Italy in the 1980s, and dating to 10,000 years ago, showed a form of severe dwarfism that left the boy with very short arms. His people were nomadic and they lived by hunting and gathering. He didn’t need nursing care, but the group would have had to accept that he couldn’t run at the same pace or participate in hunting in the same way others did.”

There are many philosophical arguments as to what makes humans so different from the rest of the animal world. Is it the use of tools? Art? Language? All of these things we glimpse elsewhere. Only this – the willingness – no, the desire to care for those who cannot care for themselves, even when they have no inherent productive value to the community but simply because they are a member of the community, is ours alone. We see a few outstanding exceptions among primates, but these are rare, and only parental, not communally achieved.

What the actual inherent value of a human is, beyond production, I don’t know, and I leave that much to the debate of philosophy and religion. I do know that it’s very real, and as a storyteller, I suspect it has something to do with the joy of sharing experiences, but that’s just my guess.

I am a human. I am disabled. And I am a burden. But because I am human, my fellow humans find value in me just the way I am. And embracing that has made me so much happier. Now, whenever someone has to go that extra mile to care for me, I no longer feel guilt and shame. Instead of revealing that I am a burden, these acts prove that others find me worthwhile to keep around, much more than any verbal reassurance could. I feel love, and gratitude, and the desire to return that help in any way I can. This is what makes us human: selfless compassion.

You are not a burden for being disabled.

[mariaarnt]

If you'd like purchasable literature to have searchable, author- and reader-generated tags like AO3, then you should follow (and support, if you can) @tag-cat

They're really great people who are working to make that a reality!

AHHHH I CAN FINALLY TALK ABOUT IT!! I’ve written a new book! It’s queer, it’s got kissing, it’s got solemnly swearing oaths of eternal devotion, it’s got everything you want.

Read more about it in the Tor.com article, above, but just to save you some time, here’s the fanfic tags for the book:

[mariaarnt]

Chess isn’t always competitive. Chess can also be… beautiful. It was the board I noticed first. It’s an entire world of just 64 squares. I feel safe in it. I can control it. I can dominate it. And it’s predictable, so if I get hurt, I only have myself to blame.          Anya Taylor-Joy as Beth Harmon in THE QUEEN’S GAMBIT (2020)

[mariaarnt]

Hi!

I’m one of the many who discovered you from your cat video reblog, Meoww! I just wanted to send you all the love and best of luck with your journey through chemo and beyond. I’m glad to hear your prognosis is good and have no doubt you will kick cancer’s ass. Anyway, just wanted to say hello to a fellow fanfic writer. Stay strong and keep fighting the good fight!! xx

Thank you so much! I had a really rough day yesterday, and this message is the best possible way to start anew today.

[mariaarnt]

Hi, I'm reading your fic Fear is the Heart of Love. I'm a bit late to the party, by 2 years! As well as loving the story and your amazing writing, I've obviously been following your trials and tribulations as well. I'm not sure if you're still writing or not, but I just want you to know that you're incredibly talented. Your story is beautifully detailed and rich, and in my year of trials and tribulations it's been a welcome escape from reality. I hope you're doing well. Thank you!

I'm so glad my story is still bringing happiness to people, and that it was able to make things a little bit better for you. I wish that I could tell you that I am doing better, but unfortunately I am currently battling breast cancer. But I think, or at least hope that when I get past this, things will finally start to improve. One day at a time, right?

[mariaarnt]

Well, I’m terrible at finding the center of a piece of cloth (or rather, at counting how many lines I need), it’s on the wrong side, and kind of looks like crap, but none of that matters because IT WORKS!!! #qrcodes #embroidery #stitchsampler https://www.instagram.com/p/CFLAFcJnbdH/?igshid=t3nqk3ddy8gi

[mariaarnt]

Foggy Dubai

Picture: This breathtaking view from the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, shows a thick blanket of smoggy fog smothering Dubai. The mist almost completely covers the skyscrapers which dominate the skyline.

© Bjoern Lauen/Solent News - Source

[mariaarnt]

2020 - Creative Plans & Cancer

So my big creative plan for 2020 was to construct an entire Edwardian wardrobe from the foundations up, in ode to the glorious Bernadette Banner whom I have fallen helplessly in love with.

I made some good headway - a trip to the very shops she recommends in the NYC garment district last fall snagged me some excellent fashion fabrics & trims. More basic fabrics like muslin, lawn, and the various corset construction materials were sourced online. I got all the way through mocking up a "cheater" S-bend corset (the cheat is the pushup cups I put between the two layers).

.....aaaand then I got breast cancer. Stage III, triple-negative, aggressive breast cancer. Fortunately the upsides of "aggressive" are I caught it very quickly (hard to miss your whole boob swelling up hard and 10% larger overnight) and it's looking like it's really responsive to chemo, which is often the case.

But the chemo is robbing me of a summer's worth of energy (my fibromyalgia - or rather as-yet unnamed autoimmune disorder we're now realizing - makes me too tired & painful to sew in the winter). And once chemo is done, I'll be getting a radical bilateral mastectomy & reconstruction, so my fit will likely be different anyway. Who knows, maybe I can convince the plastic surgeon to give me that enhancement I've always wanted and I won't need the cheater cups after all!

But having gotten this far in the project, it feels really frustrating to just stop making progress for like 6 months while I deal with this bullshit. Originally, I had planned to do research & skill training for decorative stuff once I had a few basic projects under my belt. My mom has an embroidery machine, and has offered to embellish anything I like, so I was mostly planning on using that, if anything. I'm not one for super ornate stuff anyway.

But as I lay in bed the other day, listening to an audio book to keep my mind busy & doing cross stitch to keep my hands busy, I realized... I can do almost any kind of decorative work in bed. And my doctor wants me focusing on fine motor skills to keep an eye out for neuralgia.

SOOO we're moving up the timeline! I've been doing a ton of research and finding some really great primary source materials for techniques & patterns used at the time, particularly through Project Gutenberg and the Antique Pattern Library which is an absolutely incredible resource and you should totally check it out.

Now here's where we get nerdy. Traditionally, when learning needlework arts, a practitioner creates a sampler book.

I plan to do likewise, but knowing me, I'll want to keep lots & lots of notes - where I sourced the stitches, and any thoughts I had on the technique, process of learning it, and potential uses. But how to refer between the physical book & the digital notes? Because I very quickly realized that physically handwriting it was not a great option.

Now, I could always embroider little labels on the sampler itself, as is traditional, (although I'd use a code to simplify) but that's laborious and inefficient, even if the notes are made easily searchable. I thought about trying to find a pen that would last & wouldn't bleed. And then I remembered this:

Soooo! Here is my extremely nerdy sampler plan:

Make notes in Google Docs

Bookmark notes with deep links

Use tinyurl to shorten deep links

Generate 25x25 pixel QR code for corresponding Sampler page

Embroider QR code on page

So that's my life lately, expect to see some extremely nerdy sewing samples coming this way, mostly shared over from Instagram. And Fuck Cancer.