#i'm thinking about the internal angle because (personal vague story time)

[greenwaterskeeter]

i think the thing with assigning blame is that it feels enough like a solution to let off frustration steam. sometimes we can’t do more than that immediately, and either way complaining and holding accountable are necessary! but i think assigning blame can also be a distraction, because the way we do it is often about dividing people into Good Guys and Bad Guys rather than figuring out what contributed to the event in order to prevent recurrences. And it’s easy to get stuck there, identifying with the Good Guys (or Bad Guys), trying to punish enough. But those are steps in the opposite direction from healing and preventing future harm. This is turning out to be just describing punitive vs restorative justice in vague and partial terms! But i’m talking about it so vaguely because i’m thinking about how it applies internally (like in a single person) as well as between people. how we are all Other People, even to ourselves...

[funkymbtifiction]

Charity's Book Gets The Kenny Stamp of Approval (for whatever that's worth)

Charity: Thanks for the great review (and yes, do work it into an Amazon one, heh)! I'm so glad to hear that the sensor descriptions are engaging and free of "boring" stereotypes -- it KILLED me to write them, because I have so little sensory awareness. That was probably the hardest thing I had to write, since I had to come up with sights, sounds, smells, examples of full-body awareness that I have never experienced in my life. I learned a LOT while writing this book. I really loved discovering certain processes that go along with the functions -- like the whole "thought experiment" angle of TiNe users. That made me understand my INTP brother SO MUCH MORE. It always drove me nuts that he would come up with these vague, hypothetical speculations to counter another person's argument with, but now I know he is just following thought experiments. Writing about the inner workings of mechanics was also a lot of fun, but it drove home how much I do NOT use Ti. LOL I also sneakily went more 'internal' with the introverted profiles, to try and depict a richer inner world, compared with the more fast-paced energy of the extroverted profiles. So all in all, it's my Grand Accomplishment (so far) and the fact that I did it, while battling chronic depression during a pandemic makes me feel even prouder of it. Thanks for making my day by liking it!

OP: Dear Charity,

From the moment I read that paragraph of the Si dom waxing poetically about that wooden bench I knew it was gonna be gold.

I remember proofreading someone's manuscript a few years back & thinking to myself that the dominant function really comes out very clear in first-person accounts, but I guess I did't have the practical thinking or net of social contacts to turn this insight into such an useful project. 

It's written in such a way that it'll likely appeal to the sort of ppl who don't normally do well with definitions & abstract distinctions & click better with the personal stories, but I think even experienced ppl who've been into the topic for a while will benefit just from how it conveys a very good, direct sense of inner experience & a glimpse of whats actually going on in other ppls heads.

I also appreciate that you didn't scrub the writeups of potentially controversial opinions of vulgarity. 

Back when I first got into mbti I spent some time mulling over INTP vs. INFP, whereas if this book had been my first source that would never have happened / I would have known right away that I'm definitely not any sort of high Fi user.

A particularly useful distinction here is that while Fi sorts/ponders/analyzes impressions as building blocks for ethics or identity, these 'atomic' like/dislike impressions are not the product of any thinking or reasoning (one presumes that they come straight from the midbrain) - that is obviously very different to how Ti works. 

I particularly appreciated the explacations about why inferior Se leads to being Like That (RIP my sister  who has that exact "she needs to know how it looks like in advance" problem & my ex who suffered from the apparently universal Ni dom problem of Misplacing The Housekeys All The Time)

And on a level of personal curiosity I was particularly delighted that you found  1 author of each type & asked them about their process, leaving the reader to speculate about which bits might be down to each function after contrasting & comparing.

At this point mentioning that it's blissfully free of Boring Sensor Description Syndrome is almost besides the point. It's a pretty recomendable "Babys First Mbti book", as the first person stuff makes ppl very likely to come away with a correct typing with which to engage with any further material they might read. 

...I realize also that I should probably rework this into an amazon review later. 

Greetings, 

Kendrix

[beggingwolf]

hi so I've just eaten too much ice cream, feel vaguely ill, and I'm here to tell you All About How I Failed At Outlining for SGKF this year!

that's partially just a fun tagline, but it's also a bit true. I told my friends I'd be trying to use several different outlining methods to try and knock out a plotty piece for the fest, and things did not go to plan!

important to begin with: I am what is referred to as a "pantser." I tend to just start writing. this is strangely contradictory to my personality, which deeply loves plans. unfortunately, what often happens is plans and outlines ruin my excitement and drive while working on a project (it tricks me into thinking I've done all the work and resolved the plot), leading me to abandon it.

and though I can throw together pretty words and made a decent fic, my fics never turned out as good as they could have been. I kept telling myself that if I planned in advanced and worked out what I was doing BEFORE I did it, I'd be able to craft a fic with such care and attention as to make it really SHINE.

so, uh, kinkfest rolls around, and since I was a mod I could see all the prompts before they even got released to the public, so I basically had a WHOLE EXTRA two-ish weeks to start planning and writing.

did I? NO.

so, despite the fact that I collect writing advice like a magpie , I'm not the greatest at implementing it. if you go into my SGKF google folder, you'll find a few instances of me TRYING to implement writing advice like metawriting:

(and you'll see some fics that didn't get finished/make it into the fest!)

my issue was (and still is) that I think I value every little word too much. this is a bad thing: I'm an overwriter by nature. when I get words down, I want to keep them because I feel like I worked hard for them, even if they're not great or don't actually serve the story in the way they should. that's not to say all my metawriting was bad; it wasn't. I tried it out for A Drowning in California as well [which will henceforth just be referred to as "California").

I had a whole subfolder for California. what kind of amazed me is how different my initial notes for the prompt are from what the story actually ended up being. here, take a look:

literally almost none of this is in california. the WWE and UFC stuff made it in, and so did sid wrestling with horny, but that was it. I was going to start this fic in the locker room, with sid wrestling someone, and it was seriously going to be a story about sex—about sid wanting to hold geno down in bed. that was the premise.

and instead, we got a really emotional story about familial rejection and the isolation it can make people feel. SO! something happened along the way, right?

when I started getting into the plot that would support this supposed sexfest, this is where I went at first:

geno wants the relationship to get serious, sid is like mentally still a 12 year old who just wants to wrestle people and doesn't want to talk about his emotions, and prefers to use physicality to communicate. this doesn't work for geno, who wants ... more

we can start to see the actual emotions come through, the things I was interested in: sid using touch to talk, and geno desperately wanting more

what did the most good for me, in the end, was "doing" the metawriting by talking with my friends.

I told them what i thought this story was about ("I'm thinking about making this a story about relationship-defining, maybe? and the communication needed for a lasting adult relationship? I think I'm going to set it in california/LA, where Sid has invited Geno along for the first time for his California Summer Fun/Training/Escape, whatever, and Geno's going to be emotionally preoccupied with Defining The Relationship—maybe they've been on-again-off-again? maybe they're just new to this, like almost a year deep, and they're not getting younger—and thinking this trip is about that [or hoping this trip is about that, and realizing it isn't, and being disappointed].") and they told me what jumped out at them.

Jes told me what would ramp up the tension would be a deadline of some sort; "Geno’s going to break up with Sid or make some decision or something, or there’s something approaching where they have to make a will they or won’t they decision of some kind related to the core ‘defining the relationship’ issue. Geno’s going back to russia and in previous summers they’ve always slept with other people while apart? or Sid has a wedding coming up and he’s offhandedly mentioned taking someone else as his plus one?"

I liked her thoughts. it made sense to add an external pressure to all this, and that wedding idea stuck out to me the most.

Lis said I should add a jealousy angle, so you can largely credit her for the club scene: "one thing i like to sort of headcanon/imply about sid's california trips is he uses them to hook up anonymously. so you could have, like, sid and geno seeing sid's friends, but also accidentally running into some of sid's friends. and geno's like oh, great, so here i am doing this horrible summertime training that i hate because i don't need to train in the offseason actually, and i'm learning what exactly sid gets up to when we're apart."

My magical solution these days is GOING FOR WALKS. do it if you're able. it clears out your brain. so on my walks I ended up deciding that I wanted a taylor crosby wedding. I like taylor as a character, and as a person with sisters I just like writing her in. best of all, she and sid are close and I like writing "I'd do anything for my family" sid.

and then I was like. oh. what if it's not that sid is afraid/nervous to bring geno, it's that he can't.

I... wasn't as conflicted as I thought I'd be about writing sid's parents as homophobic. I prefer to write them as supportive; I think troy crosby's been eviscerated more than he should have been in older fanworks, and though I respect their right to make fictional!troy whatever they want, I've been a little skeptical of outlandish takes on him ("he doesn't say I love you to his son because a camera caught them mid-interaction once!") ever since I read how the media has found him a convenient narrative villain while he tried to keep his underage son safe from the media as a child and while they needed to cook up Spicy Stories about squeaky-clean sid.

uh, tangent aside, I always thought I'd never write a "parents are the villains" story, but I did here. it felt right. it was easier, too, because they're not PRESENT in the story. I didn't have to write trina actually being horrible to her son. I just had to skirt the edges of the wound.

which works well on two fronts: I don't have to actively write the crosbys being horrible to sid, and I also leave more to the imagination of the reader, and that almost never fails to make the work better. whatever the reader imagines them saying to sid, it's going to be 10x more hurtful than anything I'd write.

I dug really deep on some personal emotions and fears I experience as a gay person for a lot of sid's arc here. sid is deeply imperfect in this story, and he's internalizing his pain and the horrible thing that's happened to him, which is making him pull away from his partner, and sid is not responding how geno wants, nor is he responding well, period, though he's trying in his own wounded, stilted way.

and beloved geno, whose tender heart is so hidden away for fear of someone hurting it. I really like writing geno; he's huffy and emotional and sometimes bitchy and feels things SO deeply.

once I had more of an idea, I was already working on a more detailed outline. this is where I seriously took Jes's advice and WROTE EVERYTHING OUT! it made it so much less daunting, because I didn't have to be figuring out my next steps AND crafting sentences at the same time. also this is where I tell you that the title of this post is mostly a lie, it was metawriting I failed at.

This outline also meant I avoided writing large swaths of things that should've been cut. Another beta told me I should delete three scenes and condense a bunch of emotions into the club scene, and she was SO right. Cutting events out of an outline is WAY easier than cutting out pages of text.

Ironically my outline kind of deteriorated after the club scene, but that's alright: after I wrote the club scene, I actually had a clear vision of what I wanted the end to be. I just had to trust myself. I CAN do this, I CAN still just write intuitively sometimes!

I think California did what I wanted it to do. I'd love to try something out that's longer and has more story arcs in it (jes has a post for that too!) but I think that's best saved for another, longer project, though 18k isn't short.

next up is maggie stief's writing seminar that I bought a month back. I'm going to start working on that this month and see how I like it. I have a few halloween fic ideas, plus spookfest, so these next two months we should be cooking in the kitchen!

[thewritingcoroner]

Character Intro: Reese, The Guardian Trilogy

Hello and welcome to my first ever character introduction! I'll be posting a couple of introductions today so keep an eye out! I don't really know how to do these so please lmk if I'm breaking some unspoken law of writeblr.

REESE (She/Her/Hers)

This is vaguely what Reese looks like, I used this picrew. I don't know if I'll keep that scar, I was just kinda playing around, but an option that was missing from the picrew that involves Reese's appearance is tattoos! Reese has black lines running in jagged and sharp angles all over her body, including her neck and throat.

Reese is the protagonist of The Guardian Trilogy, the story is told from her perspective. She is what's known as a Guardian. Guardians are people who lack the ability to connect to the life force of the world (also known as the Blossom) but are trained to fight the Lost Souls, vampiric creatures that feed off of the life force within people and the Blossom. Guardians are Paired with a Soul, someone who has the ability to manipulate their connection to the life force and the Blossom. Reese's Soul is Wil, who I will introduce later today.

That's who Reese is from a story perspective, but now it's time to examine her character a little more closely...

Character Name: Reese

Hair: dark brown

Eye: green

Weight: 175-200lbs

Height: 5'7"-5'9"

Build: This bitch is BUILT she's spent most of her life training to fight creatures bigger, faster, and stronger than her. She's lean and muscular, with broad, toned shoulders. She has lots of scars from training, and could probably pop a watermelon like a balloon with her thighs. It just be like that.

Age: She's in her early to mid twenties, around the age of becoming an independent adult and ready to find her own way in the world.

Clothing: She wears pretty typical athletic clothes for the world, form fitting but not tight. She has full range of motion in her everyday clothes, but when she's on a mission or doing her duty as a Guardian, she also wears leather armor across her torso and on her forearms. She's not wealthy or particularly well-known, so she doesn't have special clothing or armor she can use as a status symbol amongst the other Guardians.

Personal Item: The things she carries around everywhere are her dearest weapons. They protect her and Wil from the Lost Souls. Her short sword, a fantasy-looking sword that resembles the Roman Falcata. It has a pretty decent chopping blade with a hook on the opposite side for ripping and tearing. She also carries a push knife. It's a knife with a horizontal handle so that the blade settles between the fingers like a very sharp knuckle. These weapons are strategically important to fighting the Lost Souls, because the only injury Lost Souls can't heal using the life force they consume, is by being stabbed through the roof of the mouth. This makes it really difficult to kill them. Reese in order to survive a fight must disarm their attacks, get in close, and stab through the mouth into the brain using her push knife.

Likes: Reese loves herself. She thinks she's hot shit. Between being a brick wall of a human being and having her Guardian tattoos, she's overly confident. She likes fighting and causing trouble. Another weird thing she likes is technology. It's not like digital tech like you and I would know, but like the analogue tech that her society has developed over time. Their society is incredibly nature-focused. They worship their food and the natural resources they use to survive. Everything is taken with respect, and that means they're not very industrialized like our world is. But the invention that fascinates her the most is what we would call an elevator. Many villages are suspended in the trees, to protect from wild animals and Lost Souls. But for those who can't climb ladders or stairs, there is a pulley mechanical system that raises and lowers a large platform from the ground to the treetops. Reese is well aware of the different abilities and conditions the people around her are in, and therefore she finds adaptive technology like the "elevation mech" completely fascinating and great.

Dislikes: Wil. She hates Wil. Wil is suuuuuuper annoying and Reese hates her. She thinks Wil is nerdy and over confident (*cough* hypocrite *cough*) and privileged in a way she believes Wil will never understand.

Family: Reese has a grandfather, but she doesn't know her parents or any siblings she may have.

Ethnical Background: So this world isn't structured the same way ours are, ethnicities aren't like, European, Latino, etc. In fact, the world has only really one continent and several isolated islands on the other side of the planet where there are no humans living. Reese (and Wil) is from the central area of the continent, not too far from the Blossom (the central tree that her society considers the birth of all life and the center of their world). So that's probably the closest thing to an ethnicity they have. They're from the central zone.

Educational Background: Reese has a very low education level. She didn't attend school for most of her life, and only started learning her trade (as a Guardian) when she got into too much trouble to talk herself out of. She's been training for a good portion of her life.

Personality Type: Reese is a mess of a person. She's angry and a little self-absorbed and perhaps a little mean. But she also has an overall pretty optimistic view of the world. She believes it can be changed for the better. And she believes there's a lot that needs to be changed. She wants to be a part of that change, but she has no idea where to start or what to do. So when she's handed the opportunity to climb up the social ladder as a Guardian, she takes it.

Brief Life History: Reese grew up not far from the Blossom. She was a trouble maker in her childhood and as an early teen, she got into some serious trouble. I haven't decided what exactly yet. She was offered the opportunity to train to become a Guardian, and she seizes the opportunity to climb the social ladder out of her terrible socioeconomic status. We meet her when she is about to be Paired (to Wil) and, in her opinion, her life really begins.

Personal Goals: Reese has a few goals. But central most to her character arc, she wants to redeem herself. She messed up as a kid, and she needs the glory and status that comes with being a successful Guardian for a talented Soul. Her external goals change with the plot of the story, but her internal goal remains the same, she needs to prove herself.

Quirks: This kid is touch-starved. She grew up with the only way of being touched was through violence and fighting, sparring, hitting people. She has NO IDEA what to do with herself when eventually someone is kind to her physically. But not long after that first experience, she becomes addicted. It becomes her favorite thing to hug the people she cares about and to just touch and be touched. She needs it and she assumes other people need it too. She's not totally wrong, but like, the kid needs a hug.

And that is my character introduction for Reese! I would love to hear yalls thoughts, and if you would like to be added to the tag list for TGT let me know and I'll be happy to add you!

[tb5-heavenward]

You just know I'm going to ask about Covenant now, right?

well since you two are two of the only people who know about covenant (and i’m sorry bud, your editorial sensibilities are going to have to put up with my stylistic lower caps) and since I’ve finally watched that shitshow of a most recent episode, I am totally down to talk about covenant.

but first let’s talk a little bit about TAG

TAG is terrible.

Visually the show is gorgeous. It has improved by leaps and bounds and it was charming when it started and it is awesome now. WETA are absolutely the bedrock of what makes this show worth watching, and I love the visuals more and more as they continue to push those boundaries. The cinnamontography, etc.

The Thunderbirds are amazing. They are beautiful, intricate, wonderfully clever machines. Their pilots ain’t half bad either. If you know and truly love the show and think about them all as well and deeply as they deserve, I think it’s impossible to honestly pick a favourite. International Rescue is a fantastic premise. The Tracys and their associates are all strong, compelling characters who have been iterated into an updated retro-future and made universally deeper and more interesting.

The bread and butter conceit of the show is awesome, the tension and conflict and creativity around solving complex problems that they manage to demonstrate in the course of a twenty-two minute episode sometimes just boggles the mind. When IR gets put up against the forces of nature and straight bad luck and pure, audacious dumbassery, we have gotten some of the best moments this show has to offer.

And those first season episodes were ugly as shit and everybody sounded the same and there were maybe three spare models between the entire NPC cast, but my GOD did S1 ever have heart. The soul of the show belongs to S1 and no one will change my mind about that. Try it. EOS was incredible. Skyhook was the definition of a balanced ensemble episode. Fireflash. Tunnels of Time. Relic. Recharge. Extraction. S2 came back swinging out of the gate with Ghost Ship. Up from the Depths was an absolute masterclass and actually changed the stakes in the show for the first time. Bolt from the Blue. Power Play. Hyperspeed. We all know which episodes were fucking good as hell. S3 comes out and the visuals have improved yet further. They have firmly found their feet as animators and as actors and as characters. We are finally actually starting to learn about these boys and their father, the most glaringly obvious hole in the show at large. Night and Day. Life Signs. And then SOS 1/2 and a complete and total paradigm shift. There is a sense of mortality to TAG now and it is an edge of realism that SHOULD be able to elevate it beyond what it’s been so far.

And yet.

TAG is fucking terrible.

Five years on, I am entitled to say, TAG is absolutely the goddamn worst sometimes, holy fucking shit. And what makes that terribleness terrible in and of itself—is that it’s because this show fails to recognize its most fundamental strengths. It fails to know what its audience will really connect to. And it’s because the writers’ room must be the goddamn wild west at this point, with the sort of nonsense these fucks are throwing at the wall and hoping to see it stick. It’s because whoever is in charge of the overall narrative arc of these seventy-odd episodes has not done what’s necessary to ensure TAG’s cohesion as a unified work.

(y’all hang onto your butts, i’m gonna do another brick wall metaphor.)

So what we have, five years on and seventy-odd episodes later, is a heap of bricks that WANT to be a wall, and we’re led to the impression that they’re SUPPOSED to be a wall, but they haven’t been put together by any single person. They have been put together by a rotating cast of a few dozen people who orient the bricks they’re given in slightly different ways sometimes, or who lay them at odd angles or who brought their own bricks from home for some reason. David Tennant is there. He must have cost at least half the budget for all of S2. All in all, he’s just another brick in the wall.

We know by this point that there is some asshole vaguely in charge of the idea of the wall. You can kind of tell that he’s at least heard of walls and he would definitely like to build one, but he isn’t exactly making it happen. There is an edifice here. It is wall-like, in some regions. At the end of the day though, most people who come across it also step over it, no problem. Or they chisel out the bricks that look to be worth saving and kick the rest of the wall over. That’s just fandom. That’s what fandom does.

Now, it is necessary at any point when talking about children’s media to talk about another series that ran three seasons over sixty-one episodes, and covered a level of geopolitical conflict over the course of a single year from the perspective of five incredibly gifted young people, all of whom were complex and flawed and sympathetic, and who knew they were responsible with putting the world to right with their own hands and set about doing that in the face of incredible odds, against villains who were no less than ruthlessly sociopathic.

ATLA sets a high bar. TAG was never going to be ATLA.

But fuck, I wish it had tried.

I wish the people who had set out to remake this story had sat down together and said, “Over the course of the next three seasons, we will tell the story of what International Rescue is. We will explain how it came to be. We will have strong themes that persist through the show and repeat themselves for emphasis: One Problem At A Time, You Can’t Save Everyone, Someone Has To Try. We will explain who these boys are and how they came to be this way. We will make it deeply and obviously clear what they do, how they do it, and why. We will give them limits. We will let them fail. We will give them flaws, we will let them clash with each other. We will let them grow and change. We will give them one deep, powerful loss that is the bedrock of what they became. We will put a powerful force in the world that loathes and opposes them at all costs. We will give them a tiny fragment of hope to chase and chase and chase and let them catch it only at the moment when they’v’e finally learned that they can let it go.”

I wish there had been rules. I wish there hadn’t been a new villain crammed into every season, in a show where the villains are objectively the weakest part. To add four villains to a show that barely has room for one and then to expect to make them ALL have a sympathetic edge somehow—it’s absolute fucking idiocy. I don’t care that The Hood is Kayo’s Uncle and Smiled In a Picture One Time. I don’t care that The Mechanic Is Apparently Being Mind Controlled Though No Indication Of That Was Given At Any Point in His History Until We Were Told So Explicitly. I don’t fucking CARE that Havoc Gets Yelled At By Her Boss Who Is Mean. I don’t give a shit that Fuse Is Apparently Too Stupid To Have Recognized The Moral Component Of Any Of His Criminal Acts Up Until He Inflicts Them On The Tracys.

You know which villains are objectively incredible in this show? Langstrom Fischler. Professor Harold. Francois Lemaire. Ned Fucking Tedford, who is a villain on the grounds that he is an obstacle, a problem to be solved, a concept of a person so hapless that they have multiple times strayed in the most incredible kind of peril. The strongest villains in this show are the ones who are just PEOPLE. People who are being careless. Or who are being greedy. Or who are being self-aggrandizing. People who exhibit traits equal and opposite to what our boys in blue exemplify.

I don’t know. We’re coming to the end of S3, we’re nearing their grand, incredible climax, this promised moment of potential reunion—and I wish I cared. I really wish I could. But there’s so much clutter. There’s so much their pulling DIRECTLY out of their asses in the home stretch. There are so many loose threads, there are so many concepts that were introduced and then never explored, or which were introduced in the end game and then never reinforced. There is so much information that we should have had from the start, so many mysteries that went unsolved and uncared about because they were unmentioned. There is not enough room for them to resolve anything in a meanignful way. There it so much that it seems like THEY didn’t know, and they SHOULD HAVE. They had time. Five fucking years, they had so much time to figure this out. And yet.

anyway.

So, covenant. Covenant basically a codeword for what I would’ve done differently, the last time I got mad about this whole endemic problem with the writing in this show, round about two years ago now.

Covenant is just a good word, really, and while it means something as a title, that relevance has kind of degraded a bit. It was going to be a rewrite of the end of Season 2, and sort of a retrofitting of Season 2 as a whole. It was going to explore the ideas that they put down and then never picked up, it was going to seriously address a lot of the core conflicts in the show and set things in motion to resolve those problems. I have it started. I have a good couple thousand words of the beginning, but it’s a good enough beginning that it could potentially begin something else, and so I won’t publish it here, in case I end up using it somewhere else. As is, it’s a priveleged-eyes-only sort of work, it’s only really been passed around my inner circle. If anyone is interested in hearing more about that, hit me up and I’ll elabourate. But for now, it is quarter past eleven, and I have ranted for long enough.