#author drama

[whimsyandbooks]

Okay, so I got an eARC for Crown of Starlight by Cait Corrain, because I loved Play to Win and I was sure CoS was going to be great. BUT. With everything coming to light about the shady stuff they've done, I can't rate or read it in good conscience. So, others who rate books on NetGalley, what do I do? I don't want to potentially ruin my feedback ratio for such a stupid reason, and I don't want to leave a blank and/or review that would make Del Rey not want to give me early copies again. Help?! Do y'all think they'll remove it from NetGalley? should I just review it as DNF?

[ai-yo]

So basically, Xiran Jay Zhao just HBomberguy'ed Cait Corrain.

I wonder who else will be getting an exposé.

[readskiesatdawn]

Okay but about the author that faked her death I have one big question.

Who the fuck writes an explicit romance novels for their kid? As a wedding gift? Like I know the "daughter" here was an adult but seriously she was claiming her mother was essentially writing smut for her? Or is this one of those "clean" romance deals?

I am so confused. Did...did no one question a mother making sexual content for her child??? I feel like that would have been a read flag. Or is this my asexual side showing?

[cobblestonevoid]

you know you’re in deep when the video essay starts recounting the life events of Wilde and Stoker, notably their influences on and many love triangles with one another; and you could recite the entire thing in your sleep

[bixels]

I watched Starship Troopers tonight.

[justexistinginthislifeiguess]

years ago.  before starting our section on the author Pushkin, my college professor asked us what we knew about Pushkin as he started each section by giving the personal history of the author so we could understand the context.

  most students raised their hands and said various works about him or vague statements about the time period he lived. my ass raised my hand and looked this elderly Ukrainian man in the eyes and said “his wife was very beautiful” and he responded, yes, we’ll talk more about that later.

[thatsbelievable]

[pondering-the-blorbs]

jfc this is how i wrote my essays in high school not how the script for someone's monetized youtube video should look

[acepodcastweek]

Did I miss your favourite? Let me know!

Wondering where Jon Sims is? He is too powerful and would skew the poll, but rest assured I have not forgotten.

Don't know any of these? Pick a show and go listen!

Want to know more about Ace Week Fiction Podcast Festivities? Click here.

[robinsversion]

So to recount everything that’s happened in the past 24 or so hours, give or take:

James Somerton releases an “apology” and reactivates his patreon

James almost immediately deletes said apology, deactivates his patreon again, and puts out a community post statement saying that he was obviously not in the right headspace to make that video

A major author in the self-publishing space, Mark Dawson, is accused of mass plagiarism in his books (hey James you have a friend)

Todd in the Shadows breaks records (well his own) by uploading his Worst Hit Songs of 2023 video earlier than he’s ever released a Worst list before despite putting it on hold momentarily to make a nearly-two hour video debunking a ton of misinformation spread in James’s videos. Oh, and this video has a reference to James in the intro.

[cherimaho]

after all my screaming and crying ... i think we're finally getting a gl jdrama 😭😭😭

Edit: The airing date is on the first tweet, November 29th

2nd edit: The episodes will air from November 29th to December 14th. They seem to be ~15 mins long and there's going to be 10 of them.

3rd edit: TERFs fuck off this post the author literally believes your feminism is garbage

[suzannahnatters]

A hot take for you this morning:

The conviction has been growing upon me for several years that whole segments of Western media are steadily losing the ability to write for & about women. Female characters, female-led stories, and romantic literacy are all getting worse.

I grew up largely free of TV/movies, and for a long time prided myself on reading no book younger than 50 years old (yeah, I was insufferable). I've since sought to change that. That's why I believe I have the authority to say this: I see a really stark contrast between how it is now and how it used to be.

Compared to today, male authors like Shakespeare, Trollope, and even Tolkien had active empathy & respect for their female characters. They centred whole narratives around believable women. And they wrote unabashed romances.

That's largely gone now.

Compare western media to kdrama. Kdrama usually centres male protagonists in a way it doesn't centre female characters. But it also centres romance - HIGHLY sophisticated & detailed romance.

Watching kdrama cemented my suspicions, because it feels like the first storytelling I've found since the 1800s to treat romance with dignity and respect, & above all as something worthy of male attention. That is SO RARE these days.

I don't think something needs to get male attention in order to be worthy, but as any woman will tell you, if something DOESN'T get male attention, it's viewed as trivial and contemptible if its existence is noted at all.

It's true that more women than ever are writing stories about women, including romances. The problem is, this seems to have resulted in women's stories getting shoved into a ghetto; either YA or romance or the dreaded "chick flick"

As this genre divide developed between stories for men and stories for women, it seems like too many male storytellers took it as a license to care even less about writing for & about women.

Ahem, Popular Urban Fantasy Author Who Lists His Female Characters' Bust Size Without Fail.

Please note, I know many good and sincere men who want to do better. I see you and I'm so grateful for your efforts. But if you've mostly been reading "blokey" stories - and I know the appeal of stories about & for oneself - you haven't been given the tools you need.

The final straw seems to be the rise of vocal, self-consciously chauvinist online fandoms which rubbish media they see as being too feminine and loudly demand increasingly chauvinist storytelling. These people DO have an impact. Shows they bless get renewed season after season. Media they curse is lucky to survive. I mention no names. But we've all seen them shape public discourse.

What it all adds up to is this: if I want believable writing about women, in a lot of ways I'm better off reading a man from 1850 than a man from 2020. And that's pretty messed up.

How is this going to change? On a cultural level, I don't know. But I want to shout out to the fellow author who read my mixed review of his book, reached out to me for a detailed critique, and listened for an hour as I talked. You, sir, are one of the real ones.

[la-pheacienne]

Y'all. Probably the most UNIVERSALLY ACCEPTED criticism against grrm is the abundance of gratuitous extreme sexual violence against women in asoiaf. GoT doubled down on that and is endlessly criticized for that. On the ONE (1) INSTANCE where sexual violence was NOT part of a female character's arc in grrm's work, HotD decided to introduce it as a means of giving "nuance" to a story and making a character more sympathetic. And now not only is this not considered a sexist narrative but on top of that you call this an inspired twist ffs I'm gonna eat my hair

[darlingod]

Taryn Duarte should’ve ended up with a woman idc goodbye

[sunlightandfreshcherries]

End of this chapter, from A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss by Qvill

[total-drama-brainrot]

TD World Tour Alenoah AU... Where Noah is immune to Alejandro's fake charm... Instead, Noah gets charmed by the true Alejandro's quirks and dorky interests like dinosaurs and puppets... How would Alejandro feel about Noah only liking Alejandro, when Alejandro is being himself?... Especially since Alejandro's family shuns him for being himself? 🦕🦖🦕

Now you're speaking my language.

One of the most common running themes in all/near enough all Alenoah central AUs is having Noah be the first person to see past Alejandro's persona and actually appreciate the person he is, or at the very least prefer the real Alejandro to his mask of perfection. It's one of the draws of the ship itself; the idea that Noah, being the blunt person that he is, can and will wage a war of attrition against the walls Alejandro has built up around himself- not just to keep others out, but also to repress the more authentic aspects of himself to himself- in order to reveal the person beneath.

I touched on this a little bit in a previous post concerning this AU, but Alejandro and Noah both see glimpses of the other that they try so valiantly to hide- in Noah's case, Alejandro sees hints of the scheming mindset he's pretty much supressed under layers of apathy and sloth (as Noah's laziness is one of his biggest character foils, alongside his snarky attitude), and in Alejandro's case he reveals tid bits of information about the Real Alejandro, not the persona he's usually portraying himself as, which is enough to humanise him in Noah's eyes.

They both become People Of Interest in each other's eyes, because they're both puzzles to be solved. Alejandro's curious and competitive to a fault so he'd dedicate himself to unravelling the layers behind Noah's stony exterior, as he'd see Noah's continued distance as a challenge. That's a given. But the topic at hand here is Noah's interest in Alejandro.

Because Noah's not exactly competitive, so why would he be so interested in unveiling the real Alejandro? That's simple; Noah values authenticity. Look at his friendship group, it consists of people who are unapologetically themselves. Noah is also unapologetically himself, in all of his sarcastic glory. So of course he's see flickers of the real, authentic Alejandro and his natural inquisitiveness would be piqued- a novelty for him, as Noah's staunch apathy generally tends to override any semblance of curiosity.

So Noah goes out of his way to make notes of the small interests Alejandro offhandedly mentions at one point or another, like palaeontology or puppetry or even his fifteen-step skincare routine- things that Alejandro shows genuine excitement or passion over that shines through the cracks of his perfect persona. He sees the dorky giddiness Alejandro experiences when Noah lets him ramble on about how Jurassic Park was incredibly inaccurate from a scientific standpoint but monumental for people's interest in palaeontology (or something along those lines, I don't know I'm not a dinosaur nerd) and suddenly the annoyingly flirtatious faker he's spent the better half of his time on the jet is A Whole Ass Person with interests and passions and a sense of depth he's been so bereft of until now. Suddenly Alejandro's more than just the antagonist of the show Noah's working on, he's an interesting person that the bookworm finds himself wanting to know more about. And, perhaps, he finds himself growing genuinely fond of the person behind the mask.

And he uses those notes to prompt Alejandro into sharing more of himself, the real authentic Alejandro, in the privacy of their interactions.

At first, Alejandro's fairly oblivious to what Noah's doing, since he's so caught up in his own enjoyment of Noah's company plans to essentially do the same to Noah that he barely notices his own tricks being used against him.

Of course, he's also just elated at being able to infodump to someone who isn't outright penalising him for doing so; not that I think Alejandro is even aware that what he's doing is infodumping, nor the fact that he's so obviously autistic, because his family is a particular brand of awful that would never let him get a proper diagnoses and in all likelihood forced him to mask/supress his symptoms.

It isn't until Alejandro realises that he's shared a lot of information about himself that he (as a Burromuerto) is expected to keep close to his chest, and he sees the glimmers of satisfaction in Noah's intelligent eyes, that the archvillain catches on to the fact that he's been played. But the thing that really catches him off-guard isn't the trickery, it's the fact that Noah's done nothing with the uncharacteristic displays of vulnerability.

Alejandro can't understand why Noah hasn't taken advantage of his "weakness" yet. Inevitably leading to him confronting the assistant, as Alejandro isn't the type to "let sleeping dogs lie" so to speak, and he's still very much so in the one-track mindset of winning the competition- thus he assumes that any show of vulnerability can and will lead to his untimely elimination. But when he practically demands that Noah reveal what he's been planning, why he's been sneakily collecting information on him, all Noah can do is shrug his shoulders and say;

"I guess I just like seeing the real you. That's all."

And Alejandro doesn't know how to respond to that. No one's ever wanted the real him, he's always had to play the role of the perfect son, the perfect brother. He doesn't understand.

And like most people when they're faced with a foreign concept they have no basis of behaviour for, he lashes out.