#the worst of it is that this keeps coming up in professionally published novels

[demonicintegrity]

Since Welcome Home just had a speedrun record for viral bullshit, lemme key y'all in on what today's creatives think about.

For context, I'm in art school. Everyone around me including myself all have some sort of personal project(s) we wanna publish one day/are working on currently. And those specific projects are meant to make money so it means reaching a wider set of people.

I have several professors touch on what our online portfolio and presence needs, and it's led into class discussions on balancing putting ourselves/our work out there and keeping privacy. On top of learning how to deal with predatory editors and safe pitching practices, my peers are strongly voicing their distaste for any sort of proximity with any fandom they could accomplish because of rampant parasocial behaviors.

I got a roommate who wants to write a graphic novel and part of it is a sorta commentary on tiktok stardom in particular. They explained some of it to us and we all agreed the only way it would ever work is if it never went viral and prayed tiktok never got its hands on it.

Back in my wannabe youtuber days I took a good study at youtubers and realize the best fanbases were on the smaller side and that were encouraged into a specific way of engaging. (Like coming together specifically to do analysis or specifically to discuss smth, etc.) By nature of what people were attracted to what content.

I got book ideas I simply will not go through with if I'm in a peak/going viral because I know people will not handle them well. They will be shelved for another time. I also need to clean out and update my half-abandoned youtube before I start buckling down on my artistic endeavors because I know how the internet is. Never mind the fact that I'm willingly kneecapping myself by refusing to interact with instagram and pulling away from using twitter professionally. I value my tumblr circle so fucking much because it's so not insane and more on the wavelength with my bullshit. And I'm holding onto this more than any How To Market With Social Media advice.

Said roommate who's super passionate about their graphic novel idea exploring fame and what not (which I really can't wait to see happen one day) took inspiration from whatever the fuck tiktok did with Penelope Scott that one time. They explained she had the perfect amount of space away from her presence and an amazing social media balance that couldn't have been better and yet still got drag through the mud. My understanding is that watching that happened made my roommate go "what if" and want to explore some more concepts regarding fame and parasocial relationships.

I'm lucky. I have had minor "popularity" in certain circles on Tumblr (apparently) and yet have never got too dragged into discourse. Especially considering I've been here since I was twelve. The worst I've gotten is from the sociopolitical side of things, some of y'all probably remember how terfs were up my ass that one time.

My point being: Artists who are aware and in the industry and these spheres right now are hyperaware of what their presence can do. Hyperaware that their social media doesn't get to be the luxury of just a fun thing but an extension of their work life. That combined with how even traditionally published authors are more expected to be their own marketing these days, we are much more aware and even prepared than the averaged hobbyist.

And that's partly why all art is such a miserable hobby right now.

Never mind gaming algorithms and playing the luck game to even get seen, never mind the cultural idea that art is just something to be consumed and tossed out like it's a disposable napkin, but the average person is not prepared to handle what happens when lots of people start interacting with you specifically for your work. The masses simply cannot get their act together, especially in a post-covid world.

And the solutions aren't simple. Largely because the only way this is going to get better is if the people consuming learn how to behave. And you and I both can assume how likely that's going to be. Truly, I think meaningful change starts with media literacy. Just learning how to critically think about a piece. But I don't even think that's being taught in public schools, let alone to the focus it needs to have.

If we want the masses to stop harassing people unfortunately we gotta hope they have the reading comprehension to understand what's being put out there. That way they don't come out of left field with a wild accusation.

I remember being in 8th grade reading The Taming of The Shrew and the teacher have exactly zero acknowledgement on the blatant abuse that was taking place. The most we got from the class or her was "dang they didn't like women back then. Wild how she changed after being with this guy for only a short bit. anyways." and move on.

(I remember ranting to my mom borderline horrified how no one else was acknowledging the blatant abuse and horror. And how I just knew some boy my age was gonna sit in that class and read it and not see what was wrong cuz it wasn't explained. No one wanted to put effort understanding Ye Olde Speech. My mom was sorta proud of me in that moment. Said she would've never thought about those sorta things and thought I'd make a good teacher.)

I watched a Ted Ed last quarter in my philosophy class about an after school program teaching porn literacy and sex ed. The person speaking was pleasantly surprised at what was coming from the students once they were interested and encouraged. She (and our class) were horrified realizing porn was the only sex ed most teens were getting.

But my point here being: Teens were not engaging critically, not knowing how to properly get something out of media without being explicitly taught and walked through how to do that. Even though they were actively trying to learn something and intake information, they don't know how. I know my English classes were mostly just "we read this now write a paper about this from the text. Cite your sources and explain yourselves." But even I didn't know what explain yourselves meant and I did great in English.

And now attention spans seem to be on the fritz and the mob mentality is more rabid than ever.

I love making art so much. But trying to put anything out there is gonna suck because now I have to pull out ten different formulas of how do I get a big enough audience to sustain me but also curate and attract people who wont approach this/me in bad faith. All while knowing my social media will immediately become an extension of my work life instead of the stuff I do for funsies.

[ebookporn]

The Work of Oliver Byrd, by Adeline Sergeant (1902)

Here’s a Victorian writer’s conundrum for you.

by Dr. Sarah Lonsdale

Option one: you publish nearly 100 novels and stories – many bestsellers – in your lifetime. You make a good living from your writing and have some impact, particularly within the burgeoning women’s equality movement, as many of your female protagonists are strong, independent and clever. Highbrow critics, suspicious of your copious output however, ignore you. A century after your death, not one of your novels is read, beyond the odd specialist scholar. The occasional mildewed cloth-bound first edition turns up in second hand bookshops and anyone who takes the chance to read your effortless prose is amazed they hadn’t heard of you. But you’re never going to be canonical, not even in this current revival period when forgotten women novelists are being exhumed more rapidly than the dead rise up in a zombie apocalypse. There are just too many of you.

Option two: you publish a handful of well-received literary novels, a couple of which, 100 years after your death are still in print, having made it onto university English studies reading lists. One, about turn-of-the-century English rural life, that critics considered your best (though you didn’t), is turned into a costume drama starring, I don’t know, Benedict Cumberbatch or Alicia Vikander. In your lifetime you’re never quite solvent and never quite satisfied, but you have a kind of immortality, even in a fleeting film credit.

Which would you choose? Or back then, being a writer on a vast production line with very little agency, could you choose at all? So many late-Victorian novels have sunk without trace, victims of what was recognised even at the time as “over-production”. But this is of course what this site is for, to find gems such as those that disappeared under what the Daily Mail described in 1903 as “the flood of fiction”. The Mail complained that of the 1600 novels published each year, barely any would survive the season and that “women are the worst offenders if over-production be an offence.” One estimate is that 99.5% of all nineteenth century novels printed, read and relished in their tens of thousands have vanished into what Franco Moretti called ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’.

So, now we come to the case of Adeline Sergeant (1851-1904), named and shamed in the Daily Mail as one of the women culprits who wrote too many novels. She wrote 90 novels and stories in her lifetime, her output increasing with her years – publishing six a year 1901-1903 and eight in 1904. Even popular newspaper reviewers expressed fatigue at having to read yet another of her novels, one critic complaining: “Adeline Sergeant, like the poor, will always be with us.” She was so prolific that fourteen novels were published after she died, presumably of writing fatigue, in a boarding house on the south coast of England where so many English spinster novelists went to die. Her productivity meant that reviewers couldn’t keep up and only a fraction of her output received any critical notice. Many of her novels were sensational pot-boilers with romance or crime at their heart, often with a moral, heavily influenced by her religion – she moved from committed Methodist to committed Catholic through her life – and with titles like The Failure of Sibyl Fletcher and The Claim of Anthony Lockhart.

But even in cases like Sergeant’s, there is always the one that got away.

The Work of Oliver Byrd slipped out, unnoticed, in 1902, between The Master of Beechwood and Barbara’s Money. Very different from her other novels, it is remarkable for capturing the lives of early professional women living alone in London and negotiating social opprobrium for not accepting the chosen path laid for them of marriage and motherhood. While post-Second World War writers like Margaret Drabble and Muriel Spark are held to be the first to depict the lives of professional women, Sergeant and other forgotten women writers of the turn of the last century were doing this some fifty years earlier. The popular writer Dolf Wyllarde, for example, goes into great detail on lives in women-only boarding houses right down to the choice of wearing dark colours to disguise ink stains in her novel The Pathway of the Pioneer (1906).

READ MORE

[davidmariottecomics]

Comics Job Security

Hello! 

This week, Amazon gutted Comixology. Roughly 75% of staff was laid off in one fell swoop, with the remaining staff kept on with the knowledge that they are there to "mop up" and then will be let go. I've said it before, and we all live in the world and should be aware of this anyway, but Amazon sucks. And this is the latest in a series of bad practices that they've had. 

Also this week, the HarperCollins Union hit their 50th day on strike. One of those "post your cancellable comics take" tweets did the rounds over on Twitter. I questioned what, if anything, ever happened with all the creators who took money from Substack and said they'd be following up with the company in light of the amount of transphobia, nationalism, fearmongering, and misinformation spread through their distribution system. In publishing at large, there's also a lot going on in terms of the relationship of the author/editor and the reviewer, particularly on Tiktok and conversations around the general disconnect between decorum and actual professional behavior in the industry. And across the larger landscape, there's a lot of job instability happening in entertainment/tech--from massive layoffs at big tech companies to continued layoffs and restructuring (often merger based) at some of the media conglomerates to the lingering concerns about increased use of AI. 

This week, I want to talk about what that all means on a creator level and how you might be able to help cushion yourself from some of those blows. 

State of the Industry Just using publicly available information, we can say 2022 saw a weaker year across the entertainment industry as a whole. Bloomberg reported it as the worst year in like 3 decades for some of the major media companies as the split between the idea of theaters, traditional TV, and streaming become more complicated with things being reopened and, generally, some amount of fatigue over streaming's big swing changes and increased segmentation. And this will always matter to comics because Warner Bros owns DC, Disney owns Marvel, and various other comics companies are owned by other big media corps. 

In the book industry, overall book sales are understood to have fallen by about 6% last year. However, some categories still saw growth, one of which being adult graphic novels (which includes a lot of manga). That's an especially important number given that the previous year, 2021, may have been the greatest year of comic sales on record. Which is also very interesting given that comics sales records are getting increasingly hard to track. 

So overall, it's kind of a weird landscape. While a lot of comics and book publishers themselves might in okay shape after last year, their parent companies might not be doing so hot. And when the parent company isn't doing so good and is looking to tighten purse strings, publishing is an easy target. But also, maybe publishing is in a good place because while book sales were softer in 2022, books remain one of the last bastions of physical media (go to your local Target, chances are GOOD that you now have a book section in what used to be the Movies and Music section--not that they're all gone, but that the ration has inverted). 

Overall, I can't predict where publishing itself is going, but I think these factors are important to keep in mind, particularly when we're seeing things like the Comixology layoffs. 

On Cancellation In terms of staying afloat and secure in this industry, a lot of that for a creator comes down on the personal level. To that end, I wanted to talk briefly about being "cancelled". Projects get cancelled, people don't. Everyone knows that J.K. Rowling is a transphobe who has decided to double-down on her public persona being an advocate for anti-transness. Folks have extensively gone over her works and pointed out when they are transphobic, racist, and otherwise inherently engaging in the language of oppression against different groups. By all means, were "being cancelled" a thing, she would and should be. And yet, the upcoming game based on her works (and based specifically on one of the most antisemitic aspects of her work) is apparently the top selling game on Steam of the year so far even though it won't release for a few more weeks. 

There are also sooooooo many other celebrities we can look at, some of whom have not just been convicted in the court of public opinion, but LITERALLY CONVICED OF THEIR CRIMES who, uhh, lemme check my notes, continue to receive regular work, tour, and otherwise be hyped up and make money. The good news for dirt bags, I guess, is you can be a dirt bag and suffer relatively little punishment for it as long as there are people who enjoy your work, even if the work itself is also compromised by your dirt bag views. 

Relatedly, I think when we're having the conversation of "cancellable opinions" and using that language instead of, lightly controversial opinions or hot takes or whatever, it normalizes the idea that both "cancelling" is a thing and that it doesn't/shouldn't actually have any effect. And as a result, it makes accountability that much harder. 

So, no, you aren't going to get cancelled in comics. But there are a number of people who are in hiring positions who are paying attention to creators' behavior and who may want to hold those who are acting poorly accountable for their behavior. And I think that standard, largely, is like "hey, is this person fearmongering against a group of people" or "acting in a criminal manner" or "being a bully" or "closely associating with a person who does one of those things". So you should probably try to be a cool person to avoid losing work for being a dirt bag. 

Positive Considerations to Make

With that all understood, not being a dirt bag does seem like a pretty good way to ensure future work. But with the changing landscape, that's not enough. What else can you do to keep yourself in a good place? 

1. Be informed about this stuff. A big part of my personally following up about Substack is I still see a lot of people gravitating toward it and signing up and issuing their newsletters there. I understand that some of those people are being paid by Substack to be there--some are even receiving health benefits. I also know a lot of folks are defaulting to Substack because they've seen other people--including those who got paychecks from them--be successful there. It's similar to Patreon, right, where at least in the US comics community, it kind of blew up to be the standard quickly, and while there are definitely people using alternatives like pixiv fanbox or Subscribestar, there's some safety in name recognition of the platform, regardless of it's problems... This is not to say that I won't work with people who have a Substack, just that to be informed, it's worth pursuing and seeing if there was follow-up from people who theoretically were being courted and had some amount of power in that dynamic to make a change and whether or not anything came of it. I'll also say, Trung Le Nguyen shared a public Patreon post about declining Substack's offer that I think is worth reading. 

2. Be considerate about who you work for. I feel for the people who've lost their jobs at Comixology. I am in solidarity with the folks on strike at Harper. I inherently dislike their parent companies (Amazon and News Corp) and unfortunately find those companies disrespect for their employees unsurprising. Which is not to blame the folks at Comixology or at at Harper--there are many lovely people working there and fighting the good fight within the larger corporate megastructure. But between, say, not crossing the picket line and signing a deal with Harper while the workers are on strike to, say, using the Creator Resource publisher page to check in on the latest about various comics publishers as organized and vetted by your peers, knowing who you're dealing with can go a long way for you. 

3. Be considerate for those you work with. This is one of those things that gets repeated again and again, but comics is a collaborative medium. You can point at all the ways and times that isn't true, but, generally speaking, comics are often not made on an individual level. And a lot of us have very different takes on what behavior is acceptable--some folks are very comfortable producing NSFW work and some aren't, some are open with their political views and some only speak up occasionally, some people are very private and some are very open. It does you good to know the comfort levels of your peers and collaborators because sometimes a misstep might come off as a larger slight than it's meant to be, which is always unfortunate. 

4. Last and not least, don't buy into NFTs or AI or whatever the latest criminal "art" fad is. Y'know, that one seems pretty easy, but boy howdy. Just avoid that stuff. 

5. If you write a blog about the actions of various companies, know you may be putting yourself in a precarious position in the future, but feel secure in standing by your morals and the facts. 

And, again, a lot of that all folds in to if you act nicely and respectfully and professionally, other people in the profession will meet you at that level, which can be helpful when things are uncertain. You certainly can find success in comics outside of the industry, and different people have different standards of what they're looking for, but not being a jerk is a good thing. 

I think that wraps up this week. Next week: The brandification of nerd culture, or how Funko became the new Band-Aid. 

What I enjoyed this week: Abbott Elementary (TV show), Blank Check (Podcast), Honkai Impact (Video game), House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (Book), Kaguya-Sama: Love is War (Manga), Drip Drip by Paru Itagaki (Manga, I actually read this a few weeks ago and think I just forgot to mention quite enjoying it), Coraline (Movie), 17-21 by Tatsuki Fujimoto (Manga, I've only read the first story so far, but quite looking forward to the rest), Dungeons & Daddies (Podcast)  New Releases this week (1/18/2022): Sonic the Hedgehog: Scrapnik Island #4 (Editor)

New releases next week (1/25/2022): Godzilla Rivals: Round One TPB (Didn't work on this, but plugging Zilla)

Final Order Cutoff (1/23/2023): Sonic the Hedgehog #58 (Editor) 

Announcements: Arizona Comic Book Arts Festival - 2/25! It's a one day comic-focused event in Phoenix, AZ. Tickets are only $10. Attending artists include me, Becca (who once again is dropping some new stuff on their Patreon, see below), Mitch Gerads, Steve Rude, John Layman, Henry Barajas, Jay Fotos, Jeff Mariotte, Marcy Rockwell, John Yurcaba, Andrew MacLean, Alexis Zirrit, Meredith McClaren, James Owen, Ryan Cody, and many more! Come and see us! Becca'll have some very cool new merch, too!

Becca contributed to Aradia Beat, a Magical Girl Anthology Magazine! It's now on Kickstarter! It's both a tribute to 90s magical girl stories and part of a larger project about the overall preservation of magical girl stories! 

We're also waiting to hear back on if Becca got in to another con on their own, but may have another update soon. 

And finally, happy Lunar New Year! 

Pic of the Week: This is just our little banner pulled from the AZCAF site! It came out really well! See ya there in just over a month! 

[jaydicksummerexchange]

JAYDICK EXCHANGE: SEPTEMBER 1

[ ❤ Works posted so far! ❤ ]

Apologies for the delay. It was something of a busy day in modland. Here are Tuesday’s fanworks! Please leave a comment and kudos for the author if you enjoy their work. Authors/artists will be revealed September 3rd...ISH!

WE’RE AT 105 EXCHANGE WORKS FOR 2020 WILL IT EVER STOP!  All signs point to not anytime soon. Keep them coming folks!

Take your share of buckshot by anonymous for GavotteAndGigue [FIC, Teen, Major Character Death, Dick Grayson & Jason Todd] 

Additional Tags: justice league - Freeform, Eldritch, Heavy Angst, Hurt No Comfort, Time Travel, Gift Fic, Brief and Abridged Batfam

Summary: In which Dick and Jason must relive the worst day of Jason's history to reset the balance of his cosmically perceived unnatural existence.

The Gate Below Gotham by anonymous for stevieraebarnes [FIC, Mature, No Warnings Apply, JayDick] 

Additional Tags: Hurt/Comfort, Serious Injuries, Angst, Blood and Injury, Blood Loss, Missions Gone Wrong, Hurt Dick Grayson, Hurt Jason Todd, Emotional Baggage, Feelings Realization, Developing Relationship, Love Confessions, First Kiss, Fanart, Digital Art, JayDick Summer Exchange

Summary:  Dick wakes in a cold sweat. No, not sweat. Water. It surges around his limp, aching legs—swelling, rising—and soaks the fabric of his uniform. The water is a frothy grey, smelling of storms and asphalt.

 His first thought is: Jason.

Perks by anonymous for pastelfeathers and Lolistar92. [FIC, Explicit, No Warnings, JayDick] 

Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Bodyguard, Bodyguard, NO CAPES, Friends With Benefits, Feelings Realization, Jealousy, Get Together, Smut, Blow Jobs, Closet Sex, JayDick Summer Exchange

Summary: "Let's go dooo somethiiing," Dick whines like a small child, shaking Jason's arm. 

"We have to stay here until the end of the gala," Jason tells him firmly. He's used to putting up with Dick's whining. It's about ninety percent of his job after all. The other ten percent is trying to keep Dick Grayson out of trouble. Neither aspect of his job is enjoyable. 

"Well I saw a closet in the hallway on our way in. We could just disappear for a little break…" 

Dick's hands sneak up Jason's arm as he speaks, fingers tightening around firm muscle, and Jason suddenly finds his charge much closer, breath caressing Jason's cheek. Despite the challenges, there were some unexpected perks to this job. Unfortunately on this occasion Dick is just becoming another challenge.

-

Being a bodyguard for the son of a billionaire is challenging, even if it does come with the added benefit of occasionally getting to tap the best ass in Gotham. What is a poor bodyguard to do when he realizes his affections for his charge go beyond the professional or the physical? Especially when it seems Dick Grayson has tried to duck away from Jason's watch yet again, this time with another man in tow...

Trip Me Headfirst into Freedom by anonymous for Lolistar92 [ART, Teen, No Warnings Apply, Dick Grayson & Jason Todd] 

Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Pirate, Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Steampunk Pirates!, Gen or Pre-Slash, BAMF Jason Todd, He's the civilian but gets more action than Dick, hahaha, Civilian Jason Todd, Pirate Dick Grayson, Mercenary Dick Grayson, FanartComic, JayDick Summer Exchange, Treat

Summary: Jason Wayne, son of Lord Wayne, does not, in fact, want to inherit his father's House. Or his trading empire.

Brother, don’t go by anonymous for GavotteAndGigue [FIC, Mature, Graphic Depictions of Violence, Major Character Death, Dick Grayson & Jason Todd] 

Additional Tags: Bat Family, Brotherly Love, Explicit Language, Gun Violence, Dark, Angst, Violence, Graphic Threats, Non-Consensual Drug Use, drug use happens off screen, the Joker doing Joker-esque things, See End Notes for Trigger Warning Tags that could be potential spoilers, tags are subject to change

Summary: Someone's dying tonight, the only question is who.

(moon is out) we can dance amidst the silence by anonymous for GavotteAndGigue [ART, Teen, No Warnings, Dick Grayson & Jason Todd] 

Additional Tags: Alternate Universe, Ballroom Dancing, Tango, Top Dick Grayson, Bottom Jason Todd, Fanart

Summary:  Dick and Jason tango. They're very, very good at it.

or

No one has ever seen Jason dance in public. Wayne family members - who are either clueless or annoyingly cryptic - are consulted, articles are written, conspiracy theories are posted, and Gotham Twitter is abuzz with the newest topic. The general consensus is that he must be terrible at it. Finally fed up with all the ribbing he's been getting, Jason sets out to prove them wrong. Dick helps.

Dolce Vita by anonymous for BehindTheRobinsMask [FIC, Teen, No Warnings,  JayDick] 

Additional Tags: Established Relationship, Honeymoon, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Romantic Fluff, Slice of Life, Sightseeing, Set in Rome, Italy, JayDick Summer Exchange, Everything is Beautiful and Nothing Hurts, no beta we die like men

Summary: Red Hood put down his guns and Nightwing shelved his escrima sticks, as Jason and Dick stole away for their belated honeymoon in the Eternal City.

JayDick sightseeing Rome. That’s it. That’s the fic.

Genre-Savvy: A Novel by Jane Pyne by anonymous for solomanara [General Audiences, No Warnings Apply, Dick Grayson/ Jason Todd]

Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Writing & Publishing, Author Jason Todd, Cover Art, for one of Jason's novels, Jason is a Rom-Com Author, He writes under a pseudonym, Jason Todd is Jane Pyne, Secret Identity, Identity Porn, Fanart

Summary: Jason is a master at juggling multiple identities. There's Jay, the street rat; Jason Todd-Wayne, the (dead) adopted son of Bruce Wayne; Robin, the (dead) Good Soldier (TM); Jason of the League of Assassins; Jason of the All-Caste; Red Hood (2.0), also known as Jason Todd; and... Jane Pyne, moderately successful rom-com novelist whose latest novel just hit the New York Times' best selling list?

This is the cover of that novel.

(you'd think) sure, he's got everything by anonymous for 3isme [ART, Teen, No Warnings Apply, Dick Grayson/Jason Todd]

Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Underwater, Jason Todd Has Amnesia, mermaid jason todd, Mermaids, Gen or Pre-Slash, Mostly Gen, Fanart

Summary: Prompt from 3isme:

"Humanity escaped to settlements in the bottom of the sea after the world's skies were filled with acid rain. Humans live in clear, underwater domes connected by tunnels that can be sealed off when the ocean breaks in and floods the lives of survivors. Dick spends most of his sparse free time staring out into the ocean, wishing he was as free as the beautiful sea creatures that swim by. One of those creatures swims right up to him, separated by only the pane of the dome. To Dick's astonishment, it has the same face as Jason, someone he thought had drowned four years ago in the flood that destroyed his home."t.

Written In The Stars by anonymous for elwon [Fic, General Audiences, No Warnings Apply, JayDick]

Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle Fusion, Magic, Dimension Travel, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Slow Build, Wish Fulfillment, Secrets

Summary: Dick Grayson, the wizard of Gotham city, has his fair share of secrets to keep, the biggest one being his reason for running away from his own home, his own family. Jason Todd, the only male warrior of Themyscria, only ever wanted to be by his queen's side and become the strongest warrior in his world. That was until he was sent away. Now, as the paths of these two strangers collide, one desperate to keep running and the other trying to find his way back home, the only way for their wishes to come true is if they help the wayward children, Kon-El and Timothy, in their journey

[sometimesrosy]

Hello Rosy! This might be a difficult ask. Don’t know if you’ve already seen what’s going on on Twitter, but a white reviewer said she couldn’t understand a book because she started reading the sequel without reading the first book. It was a paid review, for a famous magazine. The book was written by a POC, and it was so enraging that suddenly a lot of reviews, written by her, with blatant racism started showing up. She’s said some pretty bad things, such as a white reader not understanding a different culture because it’s too exotic and was presented in a “non-white way”. She also said she clearly wasn’t the best reviewer for that book as she wasn’t of the author’s ethnicity. I think that’s super ignorant, because why can’t a white person try to understand a different culture? Anyway, this got me thinking. I love fantasy, and love it even more when it grabs elements and cultures of our own world. I love learning about different cultures than my own and just get to know them. I’m from a smaller country where most people are honestly ignorant about racism. I tend to believe I can easily put myself in other people’s shoes, and I never understood this white-privilege and need for everything to be about white-culture. I think it’s very dumb when we claim things need to be changed because we don’t understand them because we are white, and so POC should change their stories so we can “relate”. Reminds me of colonialism, tbh. I mean, the world is so beautiful and so diverse? Why do we feel the need to even dictate fantasy stories that way? What I wanted to ask is, as a white person, when does it become racist when trying to get to know another culture? Until a few years ago, I didn’t know the word “exotic” was bad, for example. Is too much enthusiasm bad? As an aspiring writer who’s white cis, when does it become disrespectful to write diverse characters and try to represent their culture in a respectful, truthful way? Thank you, and I’m sorry this is so long. (Didn’t proofread, hope it’s coherent!)

This is a difficult ask. Because it’s complicated and we are all right smack dab in the middle of this cultural upheaval. It’s had to get a clear perspective on it, because we’re drowning in it. I suppose I’ll answer it, not as if I have all the answers, but as if it’s a problem that I am sorting through and sometimes struggling with myself. I have been working on this answer for three  five days now so let’s see if I can wrap it up.

I did see the issue going around on twitter but I didn’t read the book and didn’t click on the review, because, well, sometimes I get tired of giving my attention to people who are acting in bad faith about issues of race and diversity. I saw a quote yesterday about the truth of a lot of people acting in bad faith. They can PRETEND they are innocent and ignorant and don’t know what they are doing, but a professional reviewer doesn’t bother reading the first book because it isn’t worth their time and then judges the book based on their ignorance?  That’s WILLFUL ignorance. That’s disrespect. Saying they couldn’t understand it because it’s not from a white perspective is both minimizing the humanity of the non white culture, the AOC, and the book, and also putting the white pov, the white audience and the white author ABOVE everyone who is not white. 

“I can’t relate to this book because I am not centered and it is not about people who look like me and are white.”

This is part of the “white default” mentality. This mentality says that the REAL human is a middle/upperclass, christian, cishet, abled, western white man, and everyone else is some sort of hyphenated person. The more hyphens, the less they count as human. A book about a hero, is about a white man. A book about a female hero-- or heroine, is a white woman. A Black hero, a Black man. A lesbian Black female hero. A poor, muslim, bisexual, Filipino, single mom... is apparently the kind of person that those at the “top” of the identity food chain can’t conceptualize as having universal human experiences. 

Because they are “the other.”

Saying that white people can’t relate to BIPOC in the content they consume is saying that white people and BIPOC do not share the same human experience. 

That’s one of the reasons why calling someone ‘exotic’ is problematic. Because it’s othering that person, saying they are odd or weird or unusual, not even in a bad way really, but in a way that makes them NOT a regular human. Perhaps something good enough for an exotic vacation or love affair or a night out at an exotic restaurant. It turns people into consumable goods that aren’t a part of the default human’s REAL world. Exotic is spicy and attractive and sexy and foreign. Something to be explored and then discarded when you go back to your real life.  

So yes it TOTALLY is akin to colonialism. And that reviewer, using their entitlement as the basis for their review shows a marked incompetence as a reviewer. That is a BAD reviewer who acted in bad faith to attack authors and stories that were different from their dominant experience.

Okay. So that’s the discussion about the reviewer and the BIPOC authors. Listen, the publishing industry is a MESS, and it has been for years. Publishers, editors, reviewers, marketing, book covers, agents, writing associations and, the worst one for the readers, the writers, too. Yes. It’s awful, every time you turn around you find out something horrible about a favorite creator. 

I think it’s because when we create, we use who we are, underneath our polite public personas, to create new worlds and characters. And that’s the part of us that is full of biases and unquestioned prejudices, wounds, resentments, fears and weaknesses. Those things come out in our stories. No matter who we are they do. But also when a person gets power and success, our cutlure allows them to abuse that power, and then we start hearing stories about what our favorite creators do with that power-- and we start to connect that abusive or toxic or racist or transphobic behavior back to the stories, books, movies and shows that they’ve created and then, voila. It’s all painted in black and white on the page or screen or whatever. 

I think it’s just part of the vulnerability of being an artist. You put yourself out there to be seen, and that means a lot of your ugliness is visible.  We all have ugliness. We’re all raised in a racist world. Not just those who are white and powerful, but also BIPOC who have all that internalized racism or racism against other minorities, or classism or homophobia or whatever. All that stuff is in there. 

How do we keep racism and other biases out of our work? We probably can’t get rid of it all, because humans are imperfect. And also, sometimes you want to write ABOUT that imperfection. Flaws are part of what make fictional characters interesting. And sometimes we want to address that. Sometimes we WANT to tell a story without explicitly saying, “this bad and shouldn’t be that way.” There is a reason to write about the bad, hard and unfair things in life, and they shouldn’t necessarily be erased from our fiction.

BUT.

As a writer, at this point in time, you really don’t want to be at the mercy of your unquestioned biases, blindspots, ignorance, bigotry, racism, homophobia, misogyny etc. 

We, as authors, want to be aware of how these things affect our writing and stories. So I guess the first step is to be pay attention when we hear about how racism etc is shown in the world and fiction. If you can see the problem of colonialism and exoticism in reviewers or authors, if you can see how taking, say, Chinese culture as a basis for your SF world, but not having any Chinese characters or actors in your show (Serenity/Firefly) is racist, colonialist, unfair, and tbh flawed storytelling, then you have to pay attention when you yourself want to use multicultural elements in your story.

I think one thing you have to look out for as a white author writing about other cultures is a kind of cultural tourism, where you look at other cultures and try to *use* the exotic elements to spice up your story. To indicate “the other.” Or perhaps something that is exotic and consumable. Even stereotypes that seem positive to you, powerful and beautiful and exotic can be dehumanizing. Like the “magical negro,” or the “spicy latina,” or the “tech genius east asian.” Why? Because they’re caricatures, not real people.  I have also heard that sometimes using religions in your work is considered offensive because they are closed religions. You have to be a part of them to understand them. I am not sure about this, because I am not from a closed religion. I’m from a buddhist tradition that was missionary in nature. (I however hate proselytizing and it’s one of the reasons I left that religion.)

Being a mixed race, multicultural person from a minority religion, who belongs to many cultures and so doesn’t belong to any, I personally think sharing culture, art, stories and influences is a good thing. I couldn’t exist if we didn’t. And I use influences from all over in my work. 

When does this enter into appropriation? I think that is a very good question. Using a native american war bonnet to fancy up your bikini so you can get drunk at a music festival definitely seems like appropriation. Writing a well developed, well rounded Lakota character who’s been well researched and stays away harmful stereotypes... maybe not.

I would NOT write a story attempting to Tell The Truth of what it is to BE another culture. Recently a part Puerto Rican, mostly white author wrote a novel attempting to do that with, I believe, the Mexican immigrant experience, American Dirt, and as far as I can tell, failed miserably. Maybe it was a good story, but it was NOT an authentic tale of the Mexican experience. I didn’t read it, but what I read about it felt as if she thought she could write an expressionist tear jerker about her impression of someone else’s experience. As someone who shares a similar background to that author, I would NEVER have had the temerity to write about that particular story. You’re from NYC lady. What do you know of border crossings? But if I HAD incorporated that experience into my stories (not trying to offer some sort of definitive narrative) I would have done more research from primary sources.

Now all authors are writing about other experiences. Other lives. If not, it would all be scarcely concealed autobiographies. We could only ever write about people who looked like us and came from exactly the same backgrounds and had the same experiences as ours and how boring would that be? This topic is SUPER complicated and I keep thinking about more things to address, but if I keep going I’ll never finish this and it will be too long for everyone to read anyway. 

Let’s sum up.

Can you, a white person, write about cultures not your own? Yes. With cautions.

be aware of your own biases and racism and assumptions

don’t attempt to write a definitive experience. Don’t write about what it’s like to BE Black unless you are Black. You can’t know. Even Black people don’t have the same experience.

stay away from negative stereotypes and be on the look out for less negative ones that are still dehumanizing.

don’t consume someone else’s culture and disrespect the people. 

remember to keep your BIPOC characters well rounded, realistic, and human. They all have pasts and families and fears and hopes and traumas and careers. Don’t treat them as a prop for your white characters. (although do remember that all secondary characters are there to support the MCs, so this can be tricky.)

RESEARCH. Simply basing a character or culture on someone you know is not enough. You should also be aware of history, culture, other depictions, the conversation about that culture, the voices of the people, etc.

Be willing to take criticism. Anyone writing BIPOC characters or cultures is going to get criticism. Period. It’s gonna happen, whether you’re a white author or a BIPOC. Sometimes AOC are more inspected than white authors. All the time, actually, from both white people and POC. 

BE RESPECTFUL. Write BIPOC characters as human as white characters who share your culture. 

oh I’m sure there’s more. but i’m hitting post now or I’ll never send this. 

[vidaflxwer]

17 Questions, 17 People

thank you to both @bluelric and @maldito-arbol for tagging me! i really appreciate it and love you both! <3

nicknames: meimei’s the only nickname i have and i think it’s cute

zodiac: when i was little, i thought i didn’t have one because this book i read just completely left out my birthday but i’m an aries/pisces cusp!

height: 5′2″, which is smaller than two of my sisters, though i’m certain the five year old’s gonna catch up eventually

last thing i googled: allergy tracker because the weather channel’s website can tell you what kind of pollen is in the air and i’ve been having the worst allergies lately

song stuck in my head: move your body by my darkest days because of this edit i saw... and the fact that i keep replaying it on a loop...

number of followers: 187, and i’m extremely grateful for every one of them!

amount of sleep: you do not want me to answer this question because you will yell at me 1. for how messed up my sleep schedule is and 2. for how little sleep i can somehow miraculously run on

lucky number: 13. seriously, everything good that’s ever happened to my family, has happened on the 13th of a month. it’s a magical number for us. 

dream job: author! as of late, i haven’t been able to write much, but it’s what i want to do more than anything. i love my original characters and my novel ideas, i just don’t know if i’m going to be able to execute them well. i have written bits and pieces of all the books i want to get published that i presently have ideas for but you know, anxiety! doesn’t help anything

wearing: this tank top i bought in middle school and some black skinny jeans!

favorite song: hostage or take this lonely heart by nothing but thieves. 

favorite instrument: piano! i love piano, i think it’s just absolutely beautiful and i desperately wish to learn it more. or, at least, more professionally. 

aesthetic: for those of you who have seen the corpse bride, it’s pretty much emily from that. i’m pretty sure she started what i’ve always considered to be my aesthetic, which is blue and butterflies and dead flowers and piano music and spooky things in general!

favorite author: you see, i have quite a few but my absolute favorite is leigh bardugo, who six of crows and ninth house, two books that i bawled my eyes out over because her writing is so insanely beautiful. victoria schwab is fantastic too - vicious, i feel, is going to be my absolute favorite book for a long time and i can’t wait for her book coming out in october - as well as rin chupeco, who wrote the girl from the well, which i read religiously throughout middle school and was my favorite book until i read vicious. i’d highly, highly recommend checking out their work, it’s amazing. 

favorite animal noise: wolves howling. or any noise baby wolves make because god, i love baby wolves. all wolves are just super beautiful and i have such an admiration of them. 

random: i have no idea if i’ve ever mentioned this before but i thought it’d make you all laugh regardless so i’ll tell you anyways! basically when i was two years old, my parents took me to the drive-in! and at the drive-in, they played some movie for kids first - i can’t remember what it was, i clearly didn’t care about it - but afterwards, alien vs. predator was set to play! my mom thought i would’ve been asleep by that point so she wasn’t concerned, but as it turns out, i was very much awake. and i very much wanted to watch alien vs predator. she kept asking me if i was okay while i was watching it because it’s obviously not a movie most two year olds would be fond of watching, but i was fine. so fine, in fact, that after we saw it and my dad showed me all of the VHS tapes we had of the other alien movies, i would stand in my parents closet and stare at them, trying to figure out if i should watch them or not. i never did but that movie was pretty great. 

tagging: i obviously don’t have 17 people to tag but! @huntersbunker @stray-tori @astravarsing @spaceoceania and anyone else who sees this and wants to do it, you’re welcome to! 

[blaizekit]

End-of-HFOWW update (Feb 2021) part 2: other projects

I have several ongoing original projects, but as of this post I’m in a sort of limbo with them. It’s kind of a long, personal story and not strictly related to my fics, so I split this off from the previous post. 

Tl;dr: This Pandemic™ really threw everything off at the worst time, so my 2021 is up in the air, but I’m going to focus hard on originals. The tag #blaizeoriginals will be used for future posts related to this topic. 

I don’t talk about it a lot on this blog because it doesn’t feel appropriate somehow (anxiety brain idek), but I got a manuscript request from a literary agent for a novel. That I wrote. 

Last March, literal days before lockdown began, I went to a writer’s conference. I’d just finished a rough draft, so I hadn’t signed up for any pitch sessions, since I know it’s frowned on to do a formal sit-down pitch for something as unpolished as this was. But I did submit the first page for a panel where agents would read the pages aloud and critique them. I was super nervous because it was the first time I’d ever shown my writing to professionals.

So that’s when it got really unexpected. The pages were randomly picked for reading, and mine got read. But the panel made their comments (and they were very nice! I will absolutely never forget one of them calling my writing “sticky” (complimentary). I loved that lol). Then, one said ‘whoever wrote this, come see me after’ and I internally freaked out, because I knew it meant I’d gotten their attention, and I wasn’t ready!!! So I went up there after and the agent gave me their card and said they wanted the full manuscript. (what!!!) I stumbled my way through an explanation that it wasn’t ready, and they said to polish it first then send.

Then the pandemic and lockdown started and... that didn’t happen. 

I was severely writer’s blocked, and knowing I was letting an opportunity slip away from me as the months passed made it even more painful. It’s very cringe, but since I couldn’t seem to write anything else, I started HFOWW as a way to vent and work through the multiple layers of existential angst I’m sure we all had to go through over last year. ‘Hope is the will to keep trying’ is the mantra I’m trying to carry into this year.

But I’m really not sure what I’m going to do. I know there are other opportunities out there if I want them, and I could probably try querying the same person and give some small explanation as to what happened. But I also lost my job (thanks Corona), so I am at the mercy of the unemployment system right now. It ran out at the beginning of December and didn’t come back until Jan 21, so I went hungry more than once as I tried to ration the food I had. I always made sure my babycat had the kibble he’s used to. I asked my partner to buy groceries for me instead of getting me a birthday present.

Why couldn’t I just work on my novel!!! Trust me, I metaphorically beat my head on my desk plenty of times wondering the same thing.

I don’t bring this up to throw a pity-party, but to underline how serious and important it is that I figure out something. I’m lucky that I don’t have to pay rent, so my home isn’t on the line or anything like that. But I’m definitely living on a tightrope.

I really don’t know what will happen long-term. For the immediate future, I’m going to save whenever I can to skate over any future shortages, and I’m going to focus on finishing projects I can legally sell. I have to. Whether that means pitching agents or self-publishing, I literally can’t afford to work on free content in 2021. 

I’ve thought about all sorts of possibilities for the meantime, like adding a shop to my ko-fi to sell original short stories or commissions or do freelance tutoring (I used to do that in college), but basically, it’s all up in the air right now and I might experiment with different things as I go along.

So that’s all I’m trying to say, really. That I might be trying out different things, and that I’ll only be working on fics sparingly.

If I do figure something out, I may mention it here or try to point to it a few times, but for the most part I’m going to keep all that stuff separate from this blog and my other fandom pages. I’ll use the tag #blaizeoriginals whenever I talk about it, so you can block accordingly (or follow if you want to be alerted if I make a separate blog, for example).

[paradisobound]

World’s Greatest First Love: Chapter 8

Summary: Dan Howell wanted a clean break from his father’s publishing company. It was why he applied for a different company in London: to stop the ridicule of his coworkers for riding on his ‘daddy’s coat tails’. But he wasn’t expecting to suddenly be going from a literature editor, to a graphic novel editor. And he certainly wasn’t expecting to come face first with his first love who broke his heart from when he was a teenager: who just happens to be his new editor-in-chief.

Based on the Anime and Manga “The World’s Greatest First Love: The Case of Ritsu Onodera” aka Sekai-Ichi Hatsukoi

Rating: Mature (For Now)

Word Count: 2.3k (this chapter)

Warnings: None

Beta Read by: @phanandpenguins 

Updates Every Tuesday 12pm EST and Saturday at 1pm EST

READ ON AO3

IMPORTANT A/N: These next few chapters, if you haven't seen the anime, might seen a bit like a fever dream haha I mean this as the storyline gets a bit more complex and new characters and other elements began to be thrown in. I'm trying to keep this as close to the anime as possible and follow these same plot points, while also keeping it as close to Dan and Phil as possible too. Like my outline is each chapter is an episode of the anime so keep that in mind too. That being said, these next few chapters, if you have any questions at all, please them in the comments on Ao3 or come to my inbox and ask them to me!

Dan’s next manuscript is due at five and he is currently fighting with his author to try and get it. He feels like he shouldn’t have to pry this hard to get the manuscript, but his author isn’t budging. He keeps telling Dan that it’s coming and Dan will have it soon but Dan is having a hard time believing that.

He really needs the manuscript because he needs to send it to the printer for the initial printing decision. But without it, he can’t do that and now the workers at the printer are going to be all up in arms because Dan just wasted their time.

Dan could go to Phil and ask what to do. But Dan has made it a point to avoid Phil these last two weeks since their interaction at his apartment. It wasn’t that he thought he needed to avoid Phil, but it was more or less the idea that he didn’t want to be confronted with the fact that they do need to talk about everything.

But Dan isn’t ready for any of that yet. So instead of letting himself just get the talking done and over with, he’s been walking opposite directions from Phil, taking the bus instead of the train even though he hates the bus, and just not talking to him besides exchanging pleasantries in the morning or when Phil walks by.

As Dan turns his head to take a quick look towards Phil, he notices Phil isn’t even there. His desk chair is pushed back and his laptop is still open but he’s gone. Dan feels like that’s normal, because of course Phil is busy and is being called to everywhere in the building. But it still bothers him a bit when he looks up and sees Phil isn’t there.

But he doesn’t have to wait long to know where Phil is because suddenly his tall, lanky frame is coming down the hallway and he has a book in his hand a bunch of paperwork in a manilla folder. Dan assumes that it’s for Phil’s book that he just tried to get published but instead, Phil makes a beeline right to his desk.

“Congratulations, Dan!” Phil says, placing the book and the papers on Dan’s desk. “This is the final printing edition for your book and on top of that, Onyx is asking for us to do a second printing due to the demand already. Here is the paperwork talking about how you’ll need to go about the second printing.”

Dan feels all air leave his body because his first graphic novel that he edited is getting a second printing! That’s amazing.

“We should celebrate!”

Dan looks up to see the other editors all perking up at their desks at Mitch’s exclamation.

“Yes!” Phil says back, “Let’s all go out for some drinks tonight in celebration for Dan’s first book getting a second run.”

“Oh no, I don’t think…”

“It’ll be fun,” Mitch speaks up, reaching out and putting his hand on Dan’s arm. “I promise we’re a fun crowd.”

Dan feels like he doesn’t have much of a say in the matter but he decides to give in because honestly, it’s just going out with coworkers. That’s all it’s going to be. It’s not going to be him and Phil alone and that's totally fine.

Phil leaves from behind him and walks back to his desk and sits back down into the seat. Dan looks down at the cover of the book and feels it. The hardcover feels amazing under his touch and he can’t believe that he’s just published his first book at Onyx. It feels a bit like this is all a dream.

***

Mitch had made reservations for a restaurant in central London for later that evening so since Dan had some time between when he left work and dinner, he decided to stop by W.H Smith and see if any of the copies of his book have made it to the shelves yet.

He was a bit eager to see how well it was selling so it would be really interesting for him to find a copy of it and see how many have been sold off from the shelves or the tables. He stops at the first one he sees between Onyx and the tube station and he walks inside the doors to see his book sitting in the front on a ‘New Releases’ table and he walks over to it.

Dan lifted the book up and flipped it over, looking at the back and seeing that the store was charging £15 for it and he knows that that’s mostly what the sales department decided but he feels like that’s a bit steep. But then again, he sees the contrasting colors and how high quality the book looks and he actually feels like the price is justifiable.

He fingers through the pages of the book and is looking through the published pages. He doesn't even remember what the books from his father’s company looked like while published but a thought in his head made him smile when he thought about how he these had to be a higher quality. He is still thumbing through the pages when he hears someone clear their throat behind him. He turns his head and sees Damien standing there.

“What are you doing here?” He asks, folding his arms over his chest, his blazer pulling tight across his shoulders. He looks so much more professional than Dan who is in just a sweater and a pair of black jeans.

“I was checking out my book.”

Damien shook his head and furrowed his brows, “Don’t do that.”

Dan furrowed his brows, “Why can’t I? It edited this.” He held the book up in his hand as if trying to make a point.

“Because that’s not your department. You’re editing, not sales. It’s not your job to see the book in stores. That’s mine. I’m the one who goes to the stores and gathers sales reports every month,” Damien says, snapping back.

“Why are you acting like this is such a big deal?” Dan asks, his voice getting huffy as he sets the book back down on the table. “I was just checking out the book.”

Damien lets his arms back down to his side and Dan watches as his chest puffs out and then retracts back, “Just...don’t do this again. It’s not your place.”

Dan softens his demeanor back, not wanting to continue the argument if Damien was backing down as well. It was clear that they were both coming to a compromise and that was good enough for Dan.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Dan says finally, not quite accepting Damien’s response but wanting to keep everything at a stasis.

Damien nods back and that’s when Dan sees he’s holding a bag in his hands that he hadn’t honestly noticed before in the momentary confrontation. It’s for a pet store and his stomach sinks a bit more as he remembers the animal it must be for.

“Is that for your cat?” Dan asks, not even realizing he’s talking until Damien’s eyes widen and he stiffens again.

“How do you know I have a cat?” He asks.

“I...I saw you chase after the cat one day when I was going to my apartment. You were coming out of Phil’s.”

“You live near Phil?” Damien asks, his voice changing a bit.

Dan nods and then quickly backtracks, “Well, yes, I do but I didn’t know he lived there before I moved in. I promise.”

Damien hikes his shoulders up for a second and crosses his arms again as he says, “It was Phil’s cat...but I’ve taken it over. It’s none of your business.”

Damien then turns on his heels and leaves Dan behind. Dan watches him leave out of the doors and he feels a bit like he has whiplash. He has many more questions roaming around in his head but he’s not sure if he wants any of them ever to be answered.

He leaves the store not long after.

***

Phil: Mitch and the others can’t come anymore so it’ll just be you and I

Dan stares at the text for a solid five minutes before he even begins to think of a reply. This is the worst possible scenario to have happened and he cannot believe that his luck is doing this to him. He genuinely wants to scream but he can’t.

He’s still contemplating a reply when Phil texts him back another message.

Phil: I’ll pick up some drinks and we can just celebrate at my apartment. I’ll be home in 20

Oh, that’s even worse, Dan thinks.

This entire night is just getting worse and worse and Dan falls back on his couch and groans out loud, rubbing his eyes with his hands. How on Earth could such a great thing of getting a second printing of your book suddenly turn into drinking with your boss because the others couldn’t attend.

Dan still hasn’t answered the message when his doorbell rings and jolts him from his thoughts. He stands up and walks over to the door, opening it up to see Phil standing there with a bottle of wine and a few other bottles in bags in his hands.

“Didn’t know what you drank so I picked up some different things,” He says. “Let’s go to my apartment and celebrate.”

“I’m not sure if I…”

“Come on, Dan,” Phil pushed. “It’s just celebrating for an actually super rare occasion. Hardly anyone gets a second printing on their first book. I definitely didn't so we need to celebrate!”

Dan doesn’t know what told him to agree inside of him, but suddenly he was walking to Phil’s apartment and sittin in Phil’s living room as they opened up a bottle of wine and Phil poured them both a glass.

Dan drank his down in no time, mostly because he didn’t really want to be sober right now. But Phil took slow sips of his and took a while longer to finish. They don’t speak much, which Dan doesn’t actually hate.

But the silence begins to eat at him more and more, and he finishes half of the bottle by himself. His world begins to get a bit cloudier, and his vision a bit softer as he sits back on his palms and tries to remain grounded.

“You’re a lightweight,” Phil says with a chuckle.

“Am not.”

Phil laughs. “You were already pissed after the first glass.”

Dan shakes his head and looks down at the floor in front of them. He’s not sure of what else to say.

“Damien told me he saw you at W.H Smith this afternoon,” Phil says and Dan looks up suddenly.

Of course Damien told Phil.

“I don’t mind if you go there every once and a while to check out your books,” Phil says. “But that is the sales department and if Damien sees you there often, he’s gonna start getting upset.”

Dan rolls his eyes, not even meaning to fully do that but it happens as a natural reaction.

“I know you don’t like Damien but he is your superior.”

“Can you stop mentioning him so damn much?” Dan snaps out. “I don’t want to talk about him.”

“Is this because of what happened the other day with him?” Phil asks, setting his glass down.

“I don’t like Damien,” Dan admits. “He’s mean.”

Phil shakes his head, “He’s really not when you get to know him.”

“Well if that’s the case, can you tell him to get off my fucking back?” Dan exclaims.

“What is Damien doing?” Phil asks, his tone serious.

Dan bites back his tongue from yelling out that he wishes Phil would stop playing with his emotions and just go to Damien but the small rational side of his brain is telling him that’s not fair for either of them.

“Damien told me that he is taking care of your cat.”

Phil looks at him and his mouth opens and shuts for a moment before he speaks up, “Oh? My cat? It’s not really my cat. I got it a few months ago but my demanding work schedule didn’t allow me to take care of the cat properly so Damien took it over since he works a set schedule.”

“Why was he coming out of your apartment with it a few weeks ago then?”

Phil shakes his head, almost as if he doesn’t know how to answer the question but then he says whatever he was thinking of, “Damien goes out of town for work on occasion and probably needed me to watch her. So he was probably bringing her over that day.”

Dan sat in silence because of course that’s the solid answer but Dan wishes for whatever reason that it was different. He sits back, trying to not stew on anything that was just said.

“Is this all why you don’t like Damien?” Phil asks, his voice questioning but sincere.

“Why don’t you just date Damien?” Dan asks, turning his head away. “Why are you still chasing after me when you’ve had him by your side all this time?”

Phil suddenly moves next to him and Dan does all that he can to remain fixed in his spot and not flinch and scutter away like a startled animal.

“We tried, back when we were in uni,” Phil says, “But it didn’t work because I’ve told you a million times. I never stopped thinking about you.”

Dan feels his eyes well up a bit with tears that he can’t control as feelings bubble in his chest. Because as much as Dan hates admitting it, he knows he never stopped thinking about Phil too.

Every night he dreamt about Phil until he suddenly stopped one day. Every day he thought about Phil, some days he even cried. He never wanted to admit it because deep down, he always figured he would never see Phil again.

But with the alcohol in his veins and Phil sitting beside him, so close to him, Dan feels his inhibitions lower a bit more than they should. He’s tired of fighting off these feelings that he knows are there. He’s tired of acting like he doesn’t feel the same because…

He does. He feels the same as Phil and fuck it hurts.

“You’re crying,” Phil says gently, reaching up and running his thumb over Dan’s cheek just as Dan feels the wetness seep down his skin.

“Sorry,” Dan apologizes with a watery laugh.

“Don’t apologize,” Phil says. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”

“We were really young, Phil,” Dan says, laughing a bit more now, “We didn’t even know what love was.”

“No, but it felt like we did.”

Dan nods because it did feel like that. Dan had felt genuine love in the short time he had been with Phil.

Dan doesn’t know who leaned in first, but all he knows is the feeling of Phil’s lips on his feels like a dream. Phil’s hand comes and cups his jaw and Dan allows the kiss to deepen. Dan can feel the heat coursing hotter in his veins and he can’t tell if it’s from this or from the alcohol.

All he knows is that it feels like ten years ago.

[cha-d]

Early in the formidable new essay collection “Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning,” the poet Cathy Park Hong delivers a fatalistic state-of-the-race survey. “In the popular imagination,” she writes, “Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status . . . distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down.” Asians, she observes, are perceived to be emotionless functionaries, and yet she is always “frantically paddling my feet underwater, always overcompensating to hide my devouring feelings of inadequacy.” Not enough has been said, Hong thinks, about the self-hatred that Asian-Americans experience. It becomes “a comfort,” she writes, “to peck yourself to death. You don’t like how you look, how you sound. You think your Asian features are undefined, like God started pinching out your features and then abandoned you. You hate that there are so many Asians in the room. Who let in all the Asians? you rant in your head.”

Hong, who teaches at Rutgers, is the author of three poetry collections, including “Dance Dance Revolution,” which was published in 2007, and is set in a surreal fictional waystation called the Desert, where the inhabitants speak a constantly evolving creole. (“Me fadder sees dis y decide to learn Engrish righteo dere,” the narrator says.) “Minor Feelings” consists of seven essays; Hong explains the book’s title in an essay called “Stand Up” that centers on Richard Pryor’s “Live in Concert.” Minor feelings are “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic.” One such minor feeling: the deadening sensation of seeing an Asian face on a movie screen and bracing for the ching-chong joke. Another: eating lunch with white schoolmates and perceiving the social tableaux as a frieze in which “everyone else was a relief, while I felt recessed, the declivity that gave everyone else shape.” Minor feelings involve a sense of lack, the knowledge that this lack is a social construction, and resentment of those who constructed it.

In “The End of White Innocence,” Hong describes her childhood home as “tense and petless, with sharp witchy stenches.” Her father drank; her mother, she writes, “beat my sister and me with a fury intended for my father.” Her parents grew up in postwar poverty in Korea—as a child, her father caught sparrows to eat. In order to get a visa to immigrate to the United States, he pretended to be a mechanic, and ended up working for Ryder trucks in Pennsylvania, where he was injured, and fired. He moved to Los Angeles and found a job selling life insurance in Koreatown, then bought a dry-cleaning supply warehouse, and became successful enough to send Hong to private high school and college. He recognized that Americans valued emotional forthrightness in business and developed a particular way of speaking at work. “Thanks for getting those orders in,” Hong remembers him saying on the phone. “Oh, and Kirby, I love you.”

Hong feels ashamed, but not of her proximity to awkward English, or her features, or witchy domestic stenches. “My shame is not cultural but political,” she writes. She is ashamed of the conflicted position of Asian-Americans in the racial and capital hierarchy—the way that subjugation mingles with promise. “If the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America, the child thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering,” Hong writes. “The indebted Asian American is therefore the ideal neoliberal subject.” She becomes a “dog cone of shame,” a “urinal cake of shame.” Hong’s metaphors are crafted with stinging care. To be Asian-American, she suggests, is to be tasked with making an injury inaccessible to the body that has been injured. It is to be pissed on at regular intervals while dutifully minimizing the odor of piss.

For a long time, Hong recounts in the book’s first essay, she did not want to write about her Asian identity. By the time she began studying for her M.F.A., at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she had concluded that doing so was “juvenile”—and she couldn’t find the right form, anyway. The confessional lyric felt too operatic, and realist fiction wasn’t right, either: “I didn’t care to injection-mold my thoughts into an anthropological experience where the reader, after reading my novel, would think, The life of Koreans is so heartbreaking!” In “Stand Up,” she asks, “Will there be a future where I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain?” The predicament of the Asian-American writer, as Hong articulates it, is to fear that both your existence and your interpretation of that existence will always be read the wrong way. At Iowa, Hong noticed other writers of color stripping out markers of race from their poems and stories to avoid being “branded as identitarians.” It was only later that Hong realized that all of the writers she had noticed doing this were Asian-American.

I read “Minor Feelings” in a fugue of enveloping recognition and distancing flinch. I have tended to interpret my own acquiescence to and resentment of capitalism in generational terms rather than racial ones; many people my age seem to accept economic structures that we find humiliating because we reached adulthood when the margins of resistance appeared to be shrinking. I know, too, that my desire to attain financial stability is connected with a hope, bordering on practical obligation, to protect my parents, as they grow older, from the worst of the country that they immigrated to for my benefit. But, for some reason, I haven’t written very much about that. Was I, like Hong’s grad-school classmates, afraid of being branded as an identitarian? Had I considered the possibility of being positioned as a proxy for an entire ethnic group, and, unlike Hong, turned away?The term “Asian-American” was invented by student activists in California, in the late sixties, who were inspired by the civil-rights movement and dreamed of activating a coalition of people from immigrant backgrounds who might organize against structural inequality. This is not what happened; for years, Asian-Americans were predominantly conservative, though that began changing, gradually, during the Obama years, then sharply under Trump. Today, “Asian-American” mainly signifies people with East Asian ancestry: most Americans, Hong writes, think “Chinese is synecdoche for Asians the way Kleenex is for tissues.” The term, for many people—and for Hollywood—seems to conjure upper-middle-class images: doctors, bankers. (We are imagined as the human equivalent of stainless-steel countertops: serviceable and interchangeable and blandly high-end.) But, although rich Asians earn more money than any other group of people in America, income inequality is also more extreme among Asians than it is within any other racial category. In New York, Asians are the poorest immigrant group.Hong describes a visit to a nail salon, where a surly Vietnamese teen-age boy gives her a painful pedicure. She imagines him and herself as “two negative ions repelling each other,” united and then divided by their discomfort in their own particular Asian positions. Then she pauses. “What evidence do I have that he hated himself?” she wonders. “I wished I had the confidence to bludgeon the public with we like a thousand trumpets against them,” she writes elsewhere. “But I feared the weight of my experiences—as East Asian, professional class, cis female, atheist, contrarian—tipped the scales of a racial group that remains so nonspecific that I wondered if there was any shared language between us. And so, like a snail’s antenna that’s been touched, I retracted the first person plural.” Hong doesn’t fully retract it—“we” appears fairly often in the book—but she favors the second person, deploying a “you” that really means “I,” in the hope that her experience might carry shards of the Asian-American universal.

Throughout the book, Hong at once presumes and doesn’t presume to speak for people whose families come from India, say, or Sri Lanka, or Thailand, or Laos—or the Philippines, where my parents were born. The Philippines were under Spanish control from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, and under American control until the middle of the twentieth. Many Filipinos have Spanish last names and come to the States speaking English; many have dark skin. In his book “The Latinos of Asia,” the sociologist Anthony Christian Ocampo argues that Filipinos tend to manifest a sort of ethnic flexibility, feeling more at home, compared with members of other Asian ethnic groups, with whites, African-Americans, Latinos, and other Asians. The experience of translating for one’s parents is often framed as definitive for Asian-Americans, but it’s not one that many Filipinos of my generation share; my parents came to North America listening to James Taylor and the Allman Brothers, speaking Tagalog only when they didn’t want their kids to listen. I grew up in a mixed extended family, with uncles who are black and Mexican and Chinese and white. Ocampo cites a study which found that less than half of Filipino-Americans checked “Asian” on forms that asked for racial background—a significant portion of them checked “Pacific Islander,” for no real reason. It denoted proximity to Asian-Americanness, perhaps, without indicating a direct claim to it. (About a month ago, at a doctor’s appointment, an East Asian nurse checked “Pacific Islander” when filling out a form for me.)

“Koreans are self-hating,” one of Hong’s Filipino friends tell her. “Filipinos, not so much.” My experience of racism has been different than Hong’s, as has my response to it. Much of the discourse around Asian-American identity centers on racist images associated with the stereotypical East Asian face: single-lidded eyes, yellow-toned skin, a supposed air of placid impassivity. I don’t have that face, exactly, and I’m not sure that I’ve confronted quite the same assumptions; when I hear people perform gross imitations of “Chinese” accents, I don’t know if it hurts the way it does because I’m an Asian person or because I come from a family of immigrants or simply because racism is embarrassing and foul.

If you escape the dominant experience of Asian-American marginalization, have you necessarily done so by way of avoidance, or denial, or conformity? What can you do when colonization is embedded in your family’s history, in your genetic background, in your very face? If I feel comforted in a room full of Asian people rather than alarmed at the possibility that my inner racial anxieties have been cloned all around me, is this another effect of the psychic freedom I’ve been granted with double eyelids and an ambiguously Western last name, or does it mark progress in the form of a meaningful generational shift? In the decade that separates me from Hong, the currency of whiteness has lost some of its inflated cultural value; one now sees Asian artists and chefs and skateboarders and dirtbags and novelists on the Internet, in the newspaper, and on TV. Is this freedom, or is it the latest form of assimilation? For Asian-Americans, can the two ever be fully distinct?

“Minor Feelings” bled a dormant discomfort out of me with surgical precision. Hong is deeply wary of living and writing to earn the favor of white institutions; like many of us, she has been raised and educated to earn white approval, and the book is an attempt to both acknowledge and excise such tendencies in real time. “Even to declare that I’m writing for myself would still mean I’m writing to a part of me that wants to please white people,” she explains. She’s circling the edges of a trap that often appears in Asian-American consciousness, in which love is suspicious and being unloved is even worse. The editors of “Aiiieeeee!,” one of the first anthologies of Asian-American literature—it was published in 1974—argued that “euphemized white racist love” had combined with legislative racism to mire the Asian-American psyche in a swamp of “self-contempt, self-rejection, and disintegration.” A quarter century later, in her book “The Melancholy of Race,” the literary theorist Anne Anlin Cheng described “the double bind that fetters the racially and ethnically denigrated subject: How is one to love oneself and the other when the very movement toward love is conditioned by the anticipation of denial and failure?” In the introduction to his essay collection “The Souls of Yellow Folk,” published in 2018, Wesley Yang writes about a realization that he regards as “unspeakable precisely because it need never be spoken: that as the bearer of an Asian face in America, you paid some incremental penalty, never absolute, but always omnipresent, that meant that you were default unlovable and unloved.”

The question of lovability, and desirability, is freighted for Asian men and Asian women in very different ways—and “Minor Feelings” serves as a case study in how a feminist point of view can both deepen an inquiry and widen its resonances to something like universality. Essays and articles about Asian-American consciousness often invoke issues of dominance and submission, and they often frame these issues according to the experiences of disenfranchised men. The editors of “Aiiieeeee!” call the stereotypical Asian-American “contemptible because he is womanly”; Yang often identifies the Asian-American condition with male rejection and disaffection. Hong reframes the quandary of negotiating dominance and submission—of desiring dominance, of hating the terms of that dominance, of submitting in the hopes of achieving some facsimile of dominance anyway—as a capitalist dilemma. I found myself thinking about how the interest and favor of white people, white men in particular, both professionally and personally, have insulated me from the feeling of being sidelined by America while compromising my instincts at a level I can barely access. Hong writes, “My ego is in free fall while my superego is boundless, railing that my existence is not enough, never enough, so I become compulsive in my efforts to do better, be better, blindly following this country’s gospel of self-interest, proving my individual worth by expanding my net worth, until I vanish.”

I hate my Asian self the way I worry about being written off as a woman writer—which is to say, not at all. Hong concedes that the self-hating Asian may be “on its way out” with her generation: for me, the formulation still has weight, but does not capture the efflorescence of the present. The question, then, is whether the movement toward love, as Anne Anlin Cheng put it, can be made outside the grasp of coercion. Is there a future of Asian-American identity that’s fundamentally expansive—that can encompass the divergent economic and cultural experiences of Asians in the United States, and form a bridge to the experiences of other marginalized groups?The answer depends on whom Asian-Americans choose to feel affinity and loyalty toward—whether we direct our sympathies to those with more power than us or less, not just outside our jerry-rigged ethnic coalition but within it. The history of Asian-Americans has involved repression and assimilation; it has also, to a degree that is often forgotten, involved radicalism and invention. “Aiiieeeee!” was published by Howard University Press, partly as a result of the friendship that one of its editors, Frank Chin, formed with the radical black writer Ishmael Reed. Gidra, an Asian-American zine that was published in Los Angeles in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, called for the “birth of a new Asian—one who will recognize and deal with injustices.” (Gidra reported on cases of local discrimination and profiled activists such as Yuri Kochiyama; it’s now back in print.) To occupy a conflicted position is also to inhabit a continual opportunity—the chance, to borrow Hong’s words, to “do better, be better,” but in moral and political rather than economic terms.In one of the essays in “Minor Feelings,” called “An Education,” Hong looks back on her friendships in college with two other Asian-American girls—brash, unstable hellions named Erin and Helen. They made art together, they traded poetry, they got drunk and fought and made up. “We had the confidence of white men,” Hong recalls, “which was swiftly cut down after graduation, upon our separation, when each of us had to prove ourselves again and again, because we were, at every stage of our career, underestimated.” The story of their friendship is a story about the way that loving others is often a less complex and more worthy act than loving ourselves—and the way that love can blunt the psychological force of marginalization. If structural oppression is the denial of justice, and if justice is what love looks like in public, then love demonstrated in private sometimes provides what the world doesn’t. Hong is writing in agonized pursuit of a liberation that doesn’t look white—a new sound, a new affect, a new consciousness—and the result feels like what she was waiting for. Her book is a reminder that we can be, and maybe have to be, what others are waiting for, too.

[magnoliawhetstone]

what dreams are made of → task sixteen

(tw mentioned of emotional abuse, bad parents)

what was your character like as a child? how about their teen years? what kind of life did your character have growing up?

“As a child?” Lia paused, tapping her fingers on the counter as she thought. “Well, uhm, I was a good child, I think. I don’t know.” She removed her hand from the table and dropped it into her lap, playing mindlessly with her fingers. She could hear Tonya’s voice, reminding her that it wasn’t her choice and it wasn’t her actions that got her sent into exile--she couldn’t hold that weight on her own shoulders any longer. And yet...well, how could she not? Even with all the conversations she’s had with Tonya, with Jack, with Moira (perhaps more vague with Moira than others, but still), there was still the heavy feeling of failure that loomed over her. Seeing Bennett again--no matter how much she knew she shouldn’t place blame on him, her heart still felt strained. “I liked to read a lot--that hasn’t changed. But I think I was more adventurous as a kid. I’d dance in hurricanes, I’d ride my horse for miles when I had the chance--need I remind everyone that I was the one who took the dare at the county fair that night.” She let out a rush of air, passing her fingers through her hair as she felt the weight of her mother’s choice settle in her bones again. “I was so different as a kid. So free. So happy. And then I got on that goddamn plane--” The blonde felt her eyes widened and she placed a hand over her mouth in shock. “I am...I am so sorry. That was absolutely uncalled for--can we just...forget I said that word? Sorry.” Her cheeks were flushed and she rushed to compose herself again. Except...maybe she didn’t want to compose herself. Perhaps, for once, she could let the chips fall where they may.

 “Something inside me broke when Momma sent me away. I stopped thinking the world was mine for the taking, I stopped wanting to take risks and try new things. I wanted a sense of safety, a sense of comfort--the world around me was never stable again, not after she handed me that stupid ticket and pushed me into the car. There wasn’t room for mistakes anymore, not that there really ever had been. But now more than ever it wasn’t safe to take risks, try new things. I just...did what was expected of me and nothing more. It was easier that way.” She closed her eyes to try to stop herself from crying. “Y’know--Jack asked me recently if South Carolina was really a crappy place, or something like that. If I ever missed it. And I do--but not because I miss home. But because I miss me. The one who wasn’t afraid to shoo away barn mice and sneak out to the old oak tree and just live. I miss that little girl who had hopes and dreams and believed in them. And I’m angry that she had that taken from her--and yes, there’s nothing stopping me from having them now, but...I spent fifteen years hiding them in some dusty closet of in my chest and they never got to come out. All because my momma and father said I was too much for them to handle. I think I get to feel a little...pissed off, don’t you?” She didn’t bother apologizing that time--it was well placed, for once.

what were your character’s dream job when they were younger?

“When I was younger I wanted to be a princess. I know, I know--it was definitely not the most realistic career aspiration, but you asked.” She snickered to herself, shaking her head as she thought harder. “Realistically, I wanted to be an English teacher. Or maybe a writer. I think I’ve always wanted to be a writer--I am just enthralled with the idea that putting words together could make people feel things and capture what it means to be human. Even if all I ever write is young adult novels, being able to have my words be apart of someone’s life? Something that gives them comfort, helps them understand themselves better? That’s really something special. But I’d be just as happy as an English teacher. I loved my teachers--Mrs. Buchanan was always someone who thought I had a lot more potential than I let myself believe. English teachers are always looking at you as more than a student--a person. I thought that was special, really special. Mrs. Buchanan did a lot for me, more than I think she even knows. I often think about her when I write today--she’s a special lady. But alas,” She smiled softly, tapping her foot on the ground as she thought. “I’m not called to be a writer--but that’s honestly ok. I don’t mind writing for fun, it’s less stressful that way. I don’t know if I’d want to publish anything, it all feels a little too...personal now. Which, again, is ok. I’m ok with that.” 

what does your character do for a living today? do they enjoy it or not so much? if they could choose any other career, what would it be?

“Oh, today? I’m Mr. Worthington’s personal assistant, of course. I think everyone probably knows that about me--which might not be a good thing.” A large sigh passed through her lips, but she was trying to be...less controlled here, so she would let her emotions come as they may. “Do I like it? Well, some days yes--I really enjoy the work I do, despite what some might think. It’s all about organization, keeping schedules, making sure things work and flow in an efficient, supportive way. I play around with excel sheets, calendars and other task management software and it feels really...satisfying to see it all work the way it should. So I like the work--but the work environment leaves much to be desired.” A hesitant pause sat in the room before Lia gained the courage to continue to speak. “He’s mean. He’s absolutely terribly mean--and I don’t tell people that, because they are already up in arms that I need to quit, if I told them the extent of it, they’d lose their minds. His comments--it’s like he knows exactly how to cut to the core of who you are and stab you in the softest spot. He’s cunning like that--which works in real estate but not in the workplace. I mean, is it necessary to always comment on some part of my outfit? Or the way I do a task? Is it always appropriate to make me feel small and insignificant after a mistake?” It wasn’t like Magnolia to complain--she spent so long doing her best to readjust her mindset to make it bearable, but she didn’t want to do that anymore. “I know I need to quit, I know--but I can’t. If I quit, I’m homeless--and my entire life is in this hotel.” Her face flushed slightly, knowing that she meant more than just her friends--but she wasn’t about to admit that outright, not right now. “Not to mention, I need a job and I really...I really don’t think I have that many more skills to make me employable to anywhere else. Plus it’s all I’ve ever done. I literally have never worked in a different job--I don’t even know what I could do. Jack said open a bakery--but that takes years to set up, right? I mean, its really not a bad idea and I kind of like thought of it--but I, I can’t just do that.. can I?” Her nerves had taken over and she was rambling now. “I just...I feel so trapped, y’know? I either sit and get emotionally abused,” the words flew from her mouth, a label she’d never, ever said aloud but she knew it to be true. “Or I am sitting on the side of Michigan Ave pushing pencils. It’s the worst feeling and I wake up everyday with this stupid choice. And I’m so tired of it.”

as far as school goes, how far did they take their education? did it help lead them to their current position?

“I have a high school diploma and that’s it.” Magnolia could feel the red hot ball of shame growing in her gut. She knew that college wasn’t something she could do when she was 18--no savings, no idea on how to get a loan and the worst part was that she had the money to pay for it. Or her parents did. But they had abandoned her and she was suddenly...completely on her own in a world that she had no training for. She might have been able to get scholarships, but she hadn’t thought that far. And who could blame her? Her parents had always told her college was Bennett’s thing--not hers. It wasn’t her fault the idea had never crossed her mind. Not really. “I think, uh, other things helped me land my position and I really don’t think Mr. Worthington cared too much about my education level.” At the time it was a blessing--but a curse surely followed that choice. 

to this day, what has been the hardest thing for your character to come up against or overcome, whether personally or professionally?

Lia’s gaze dropped and she took a deep breath in. “I mean, overcome feels like a weighty word but I think the hardest thing that I’m still working through is not letting my parents choice define who I am. I’m not who they thought I was. But it still hurts--like, it was so easy for them to just....write me out of their life. Like I meant nothing. Do you know that’s one of my greatest fears now? That the people I love will get...tired of me, frustrated with me, dislike me and then....leave? or kick me out? Why do you think I spend so much time doing things for others? I mean, of course because I care about them--but also because I think, somewhere deep inside of my heart, I’m terrified if I don’t I’ll be disposed of. I can’t keep losing people. I just can’t.” She took a deep, shaky breathe and looked away. “So, obviously, I haven’t overcome it. But Tonya says I’m doing good work--and that, that’s good. Baby steps, right?”

ten years ago, did your character ever think that they would be where they are now? are they happy with that spot in life? what do they hope to achieve yet in the future?

Finally, a truly genuine smile tugged at the corner of her lips. For the first time in this whole conversation she could talk about something that was positive for her. “Ten years ago? Absolutely not. Ten years ago, Magnolia Barnes thought her life would be nothing like it is today. In all honesty, I don’t think she thought ahead ten years. Not that she was too sad too or anything--but it was easier to just...stay in the moment as best she could. Going too far in the past or future just...hurt, and she needed to focus on the work at hand. I don’t think she would have ever believed she’d be in Chicago, that she’d have such a marvelous group of friends around her and that she’d ever see Jack again.” Let alone kiss him. And, to be fair, she also never  thought she’d see her brother again either. She felt herself stop at the word happy. Was she? What did a measure of happiness look like? Could she quantify that? Blinking for a moment, she opens her mouth for a little giggle to pass through. “Yes. I think I am happy--given all the insanity that is currently happening in my life right now, there are things and people and experiences I never thought I’d be able to experience again--the universe doesn’t give second chances very often, so I feel very thankful I was offered a few. As for the future? I don’t....know. I’m sure I’ll figure something out--it feels weird, but I guess life isn’t meant to always have a plan.”

where do they see themselves within ten years from now? are they still at the malnati? are they moved to a different city? transitioned into a different job? where would they want to be in ten years?

Magnolia hummed softly, letting her mind wander. While it felt nearly dangerous to do this a few years ago--things were different. Future didn’t seem like such a risk anymore. “I mean, in all honesty--I hope I’d be married. Moira got me thinking about that and I mean, I know that at one point I’d like to be. I don’t--I don’t know who I’d be married too, no matter what Moira says.” She shot a playful smirk in the direction of the woman’s room. That wasn’t to say that she didn’t have a hope, but she felt like announcing that would just be...too much. “But yeah, married with kids for sure. I don’t know how many I want, but more than two I think. A big family seems just...something that would be really nice. But I’m not set on that, I’m flexible.” She tapped her fingers on the table again, falling deeper into thought. “I love the Malnati, I do--but not to raise kids. I want them to have space to run around, explore, imagine,” Like I did, even if it was only for a short time. She didn’t want to raise kids in a concert jungle--she wanted to give them as much of the world as she could. She would not become her mother, boxing them in. That she could promise. “I don’t know where that’d be, but it’d be, uh, nice to maybe go back home. Or closer to it, I suppose.” Another sigh fell from her lips and she shook her head. “I will not be Mr. Worthington’s assistant forever, absolutely not. I always imagined that once I go married, I’d make a career switch--maybe? I don’t know, but I can promise you that I will not be having children working for that man. Not at all. I--Jack’s bakery suggestion is still really rumbling around in my mind, and I can’t seem to let it go. It sure would be a fun idea--and he’s right, I’d definitely enjoy it. I just...I guess I need to do more work on figuring out how I’d ever go about doing it. But yeah, in ten years--I just hope things continue to progress and I don’t fall back into something else. That’s really all I want.”

[withbloodiedfingertips]

an introduction to my characters: the protagonists

i decided that, for much needed context going forward, i’d introduce all of the protagonists (and their love interests, who are usually the dual protagonist of the novel) and the basic plots of all of my books so that you have a bit of an idea what to expect from this blog! i love all of these characters with my entire heart so if you ever have any questions about them, please feel free to ask! or if you want to know more about any of these books, just let me know! i’m gonna put all of the info under the cut just because i have a feeling this is going to be a bit of a long post, because i cannot shut up when it comes to my original characters, so i’m sorry in advance!

the resurrectionist:

summary:

moving away from home was supposed to make maisie’s life better.

she was supposed to fall in love, not get her heart broken by the only person who’d ever made her truly feel safe. she was supposed to make more friends, not actively hide from her coworkers unwanted attention in the backroom. she was supposed to be more than she was in high school, not wind up trapped in a shitty apartment with no hope of affording anything larger. she believes that she’s going to be stuck like this until she dies, wondering exactly what it is she’s sticking around for. 

that is, until she meets akira, who inexplicably takes her in as a friend. 

but is friendship really all he wants, or is it something more?

the characters:

maisie lovage:

i’d be lying if i said that i didn’t base maisie off of myself, in more ways than one. i always refer to her as essentially what i wish my future life could be like, if i had the courage to actually pursue it, though hers is a lot sadder than i always imagined mine to be. she’s a twenty two year old who is a huge fan of this japanese author - ayako uchida - and that’s pretty much the catalyst for her meeting with akira! maisie used to be much more of a dreamer when she was younger - she used to always imagine herself as a famous artist, showing her work in art galleries - but nowadays art’s more of a hobby she can barely bring herself to pursue anymore. she does sketch whenever things are slow at her job though, she’s a receptionist at a tattoo parlor. i think maisie’s different than me in a whole lot of ways, but at our cores we’re really similar. i don’t know. she’s just such a sweetheart there isn’t much i can say about her other than she’s grown far more cynical as she’s gotten older but still tries to be as nice as she can to others, though she snaps a lot easier at them if they manage to get on her nerves. 

akira uchida:

i’m going to try not to spoil much about his character, because i don’t know if you all want to know what the major plot twist of this book is yet or not, but i love akira with all of my heart. he’s such a broken character - his father abused both him and his mother, and viewed the latter as nothing more than his property. his mother actually is maisie’s favorite author, but he doesn’t have the heart to tell her that he’s her son and that she’s never going to be writing any more novels since she’s no longer alive. he’s twenty six years old and has some of the scariest icy blue eyes that maisie’s ever seen - his father’s eyes, which he hates more than anything. he’s tried to adjust his appearance from when he was younger as a means of escaping from his old life - akira uchida isn’t even his real name, it’s what his mother wanted to name him but never got the chance to. he’s tall and calculating, distant yet warms up almost immediately around maisie - though more because he loves teasing her for her naivety and how she still acts quite young at heart. i’m gonna leave it there because i think i’m going to spoil more about his character if i don’t but yeah! 

worst case scenario:

summary:

to be honest i don’t really have a great summary for this one so basically: lawrence is the son of one of the most powerful hero in the city that he and cullom live in, the latter who is the extremely poor son of a single mother who he barely sees, thanks to how often she works. they’ve been best friends for their entire lives, aspiring to fight as heroes and protect the citizens of their beloved city side by side, until one fateful day when they decide to break into lawrence’s father’s old hero equipment. because heroes in this world aren’t born or made, they’re bought with money. a fact that lawrence’s father makes abundantly clear to cullom, who still believed there was some way for someone like him to save others without having to spend ridiculous amount of money. when cullom runs out of lawrence’s place and asks him for comfort, the hero’s son merely replies that his father’s right and that he’s sorry. this causes cullom to basically go on such a downward spiral that, one day at the tender age of ten, he decides to run away from home. as he’s wandering around the rougher part of town, he sees a scuffle between a hero and a villain in an alleyway, and decides to pick up the villain’s gun and shoot the hero straight in the back of the head to save him. the villain thanks him and basically adopts him into the little family of villains they have living at this one bar, and the rest is basically history! cullom’s being trained up to be a sniper while lawrence is being trained up to inherit his father’s legacy. a lot of angsty conflict ensues for obvious reasons. 

the characters:

cullom cade:

this boy is my son. he’s one of my absolute favorite characters to write about because he’s, as most of my characters tend to be, so insanely broken in so many ways and just breaks further as the story progresses. and it’s that shattering that makes him sharper, darkens his heart to be only a distant shadow of what it once was. what i really focus on with him is this insanely pure, precious child’s descent into being far more morally grey than he originally was, but realizing with that, that the heroes aren’t actually the good guys. they’re insanely corrupt, which is what the villains are fighting back against. it’s painful to write about a character who still wants to be good but doesn’t really have the option to and grows pretty much complacent and, eventually, understanding of why he can’t be morally good but i think it’s an important story to tell. another important thing to mention is that cullom has pretty much an obsession with making lawrence pay - though there’s more feelings beneath that, as he realizes that he might’ve been more than a bit in love with him back when they were younger. i should add that cullom does grow up over the course of this novel. he’s not a ten year old forever. they don’t actually let a ten year old go out on missions. a fair bit of this book focuses on his actual training and him screwing up his first mission and all that. he also adopts a child at some point for very sad reasons i won’t reveal but it’s very cute. i love this bastard so much. 

lawrence who i have yet to give a last name:

i feel so bad for him too. he genuinely doesn’t understand that the heroes are corrupt - and if he does, he chooses to turn the other cheek because he doesn’t want to believe it - until a few encounters with cullom make him realize that maybe he doesn’t have a real understanding of how the world is. he’s does, however, believe that he’s completely in the morally right - that he’s always been in the morally right, but his story is really coming to terms with how much of a villain he truly is. and also coming to terms with his feelings for cullom, because he too doesn’t really understand why he still hesitates to kill him. these boys are both idiots, basically, but i love them. lawrence is a super fun character to write about just because he’s kind of awkward and distant from being raised to be professional his entire life. he’s basically always been a young businessman, and the only time he could really be a kid when he was younger was around cullom. it’s a part of the reason why his father never wanted them to be friends and they had to hang out in secret often times because lawrence still do desperately wanted to be his friend. they’re both good boys, even if they’ve done bad things. i don’t know. i love them. 

my unnamed plague romance novel:

summary:

the day the last of roisin’s family died of the bubonic plague, she made a vow to herself - that she’d do everything in her power to learn how to save anyone else fallen ill to this disease she somehow miraculously survived.

and maybe she could. if she weren’t an irish girl living in england, without even a scrap of hope for scraping up an apprenticeship. so she does what she can to ease the suffering of those on the verge of death. giving them water to wet their chapped lips. holding their frail bodies in her arms until their very last breath. singing the children lullabies so they can rest as easy as possible without their parents there to comfort them. until one day, she notices a band of thieves robbing valuables off of corpses. outraged, she goes to confront them, and falls prey to the teasing charms of none other than elliott leighton - son of the best doctor in all of london. but, for all of his medical training, he makes one fatal mistake that he can’t come back from.

revealing to roisin that his father doesn’t know about this side job of his. 

and thus a deal is made - roisin will keep quiet about it in exchange for training beneath elliott, who’s only a few years away from inheriting his father’s business.

but will she prove too weak under the pressure of being unable to save everyone?

the characters:

roisin quinn:

i! love! roisin! so! much! she is such a delight to write and has possibly the best banter ever with elliott because of how unafraid she is to call him out for his bullshit, yet she’s still so inanely motherly and caring. it’s really the best combination ever and i just love how strong she is. i haven’t really gotten to write much of her but she’s adorable on so many levels. plus she has freckles! which are precious! i don’t know man, roisin’s just great. there’s really not much more i can say about her but if you wanna know more, just ask!

elliott leighton:

this bastard. he’s such a bastard. that’s really all i can describe him as, a bastard. an insanely suave, flirty bastard who isn’t afraid to flaunt his talents. he’s really the perfect character to be with roisin just because he can be super selfish and he does genuinely think she’s troublesome at first, but grows to care for her overtime because he sees how much she cares and how she truly does deserve to be in the medical field and vows to help her succeed, however he can. i mean what did you really expect from a character who steals valuables off of corpses? he’s not very openly affectionate - rarely admits at all that he is being affectionate, and gets all flustered when he’s called out for it, which roisin does whenever she gets the chance - but when he is... it’s the softest thing ever. he does think very highly of himself though. probably a bit too highly - he’s a hard teacher on roisin, and always praises his abilities whenever she slips up - but like i said, he’s really not a bad guy. just takes some getting used to i guess. 

[juniper-tree]

writing life, 2: ghosts

(long post warning)

In a previous post wherein I talked about my NaNo failure and my writing process, I mentioned there were other things I hoped to do with my writing this year (and beyond). I’m an ambitious, driven person and have always had Big Plans.

All those plans have been hugely influenced by a project I took on earlier this year, and what I learned from it.  

I became a romance ghostwriter.  And then I quit.

Way back in the winter, I alluded to a writing project I was in the middle of, with an established author. Well, this was it. I was her ghostwriter.

I’m abiding by the NDA we agreed upon, though even if we had not, naming names in this context is tacky. So no titles, no links—just my experience and what I went through.

I submitted writing samples through a site, then had a few back and forth emails with the author to see if I would be a good fit. I was, and she hired me to write a novella for her second author brand.

I didn’t know either of her pen names, or her real name. It made sense to me she wouldn’t want to divulge her professional name and possibly be outed for hiring a ghostwriter until she knew it would work out.

Her main brand/name, she said, had a very specific theme. The second brand would be more contemporary, allow her to experiment with different styles and tropes. That made sense to me, too. I imagined her established brand as a Tessa Dare-style historical with all the expectations that would carry. Perhaps she wanted to publish contemporary stories with a little more spice, under a new name?

My assumptions were very wrong. But I’ll get to that.

Problem was, the demand for her content was so high that she could not fulfill it all. She needed a ghost to give her more to publish. I would come up with the idea, she would ok it, I would write it, she would tweak it, I would be paid, her readers would be happy. Decent arrangement.

And it really was. I don’t have a moral problem with ghostwriting, clearly. Some people do, and that’s fair. It is a lie, in a way. It upends the expected contract between reader and author of authenticity (though that’s questionable much of the time, regardless). 

There is a lot of abuse in it—plagiarism, for one; absolutely terrible pay for the work, for another.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be like that. This wasn’t. I went in with my eyes open about the system. I asked for what I felt was a fair price for my level of skill and what my time was worth. It was far above the dismal average that ghostwriters typically get.

I got it, without any experience or history, on the strength of my writing. She also made it very clear she did not want to perpetuate the content factory mentality of so many self-published, ghostwritten romances. This had to be good, original work, and I would be compensated fairly.

She was generous with money and with time, and very helpful in shaping my work into what she needed for her brand. No complaints about her as a person or from a work perspective.

When the work was finished, she was happy, and so was I, despite it being pretty far outside my area of interest. It was a decent story, it had feels, it had sexy times, it had a nice HEA.

I made a fairly strong attempt to subvert some of the more odious aspects of many mainstream, contemporary, heterosexual romances—iffy consent, power imbalances, misogyny, conservative ideas about money.  

That was probably my first mistake.

A lot of my subversions were changed or edited out. 

To give a minor example, I specifically noted many times that the male hero was pale. This was for situational character reasons—as well as the fact that I grow weary of tan, toned beefcakes as default in romance.

The author changed every “pale” to “tan.” Heaven forbid the sexy man not have a tan. (I think she put more muscles on him, too, but I don’t specifically recall.)

This sounds petty. Perhaps it is. But it’s also emblematic of other, larger changes that were made to fit the romance mold, as opposed to allowing anything slightly left of center.

There are many reasons romance is so popular, and one is, obviously, the comfort: of falling into repeated patterns and conventions, of reading your favorite tropes endlessly, of not having to think too hard about how things fit together. I appreciate all of that. 

We find it in fanfiction, too—we revel in it.

But there’s a reason why overturning even minor subversions bothers me. I’ll get to that, too.

Like I said, the author was happy. She wanted to continue working with me on a long-term basis, give me a co-writing credit for future works, help grow my own audience in the genre, etc. All very generous and great.

Problem was, when I saw the published work, I finally found out her pen names, so I could see her other books.

Not only were they nothing like what I had written (some of the reviews said it was “so different” for this author, which was hilarious), they made me very uncomfortable.

Again, under an NDA, so I can’t list specific details. There were just endless dominant, alpha-male, ultra-rich men who have disturbingly obsessive and coercive relationships with vulnerable young women. Money is involved in the relationship in some way. The heroines are nobody, the heroes are Somebody. Aren’t these women lucky to snag these guys?

The fact that I can say all that and have it be completely non-specific to any particular romance author is extremely telling of the problems of the genre. I could literally be talking about EL James (I’m not - her bad writing appears to be her own).

I read/skimmed a couple of them, and I could see an attempt was made to “sweeten” the heroes so they were vulnerable (or pitiable, really).  But the tropes themselves are toxic.

The author herself was great? We even had an early discussion on what were complete no-gos for romance, and judging by that I thought we were on the same page regarding what’s creepy and what’s romantic. Apparently not.

Who wants to read this? Who wants to write it? Lots of people, that’s who.

This is a chicken and egg thing, though, isn’t it? Someone wrote it first, way back when. 

Romance fans (and I count myself among them!) like to say that a lot of the worst, most “rapey” novels are way out of fashion, that the terrible misogyny is gone, that there’s a new kind of romance that people want to read today.  

And that is definitely true for a certain percentage of traditionally published romance novels. There are lots of good ones, unproblematic ones, progressive ones.

Please go read those—they are so fun and enjoyable and will make you feel good.

But what of the rest? The romance readers read and buy these toxic tropes. The authors keep putting them out, because that’s what readers want. The readers keeping buying it. The cycle continues.

(I want to go into this further with fanfiction, but that’s for another post.)

The fact that even the most minor of my attempts at subversion were squashed was really disheartening. It wasn’t that my writing was changed—I couldn’t care less about that. It was that the slightest diversion from the carved-in-stone Alpha Male Romance Idea was clearly unacceptable. Not to mention the larger diversions—I did make those, too.

I made my hero perfectly successful at what he did for a living, though not excessively so—but I also made my heroine perfectly successful and doing just fine, thanks. In the final work? He’s secretly a billionaire. He can just take care of her without all that pesky work. That depressed me.

I was cringing at the idea that I’d have to keep stuffing in worse and worse tropes, toxic relationships, misogynistic overtones, conservative philosophies, and scary power imbalances just to make some money.

This isn’t an audience I want.

The thought of reinforcing these ideas in any way threw me into a major crisis of conscience. I just couldn’t do it.

Like I said, it was a great and generous deal—for someone else. For someone who likes this kind of thing, or is a bit more mercenary than I am. I’m not willing to go there.

So that’s basically the end of ghostwriting for me. I have lots of my own ideas that are non-toxic, fun, and maybe people will even want to read them. But if they would rather read the stuff I hate, that’s their business. I won’t be a part of it.

Personally, I like lots of things in romance and fanfiction that are fantasies, that are not the ways in which I want to live my life—bad heroes and troubled women, relationships that make you go “hmmm,” problematic-ness and intense, dark passions, and all that stuff that’s over the top. I get it!

It’s just that I want subtlety and shades (not of Grey) and all the real dirt and grime and the beauty and joy that make your heart race and your mind wander. Not just the stamped, approved, here’s-what-you-get dosage of unexamined clichés. (Examined clichés are often very good.)

I learned so much from this process. Not only what my own limits are, but what I really want to do, by seeing up close what I do not. So I am grateful for the whole episode, but happy to be past it.  

On to greener pastures, and work which makes me proud.

[flopgoblins]

Ocelot Emperor

We emerge from the mists of Ireland - where we’re on retreat with next to no internet - to lay this offering at the feet of one of our favorite people and wish her a very happy birthday! @brazenbells we love you, thank you for two consecutive years of helping us write our boys, and for letting us throw them at your own.

Without further ado, the crossover smash the fans (us, mostly) have been clamoring for! Thanks, Ted. 

-

King Abran's throne was as vast and glorious as his kingdom. Made of teak, varnished until the wood seemed to glow with an inner fire, inlaid with gold and etched with scenes from myth and legend and the founding of his dynasty. 

And upon it, his wrists heavy with bangles, his fingers dripping rings, his eyes dark with kohl, lounged the crown prince, golden and glorious as a lion at rest. His eyes were lion-tawny too, and his neck was straight and proud, easily bearing the weight of the shining crown that rested upon his brow. 

“See,” said Matt, angling his phone so Nico could get a better look at himself. “You look way better in all this sparkly shit than I do.”

Nico slid off the throne with a gentle chinking and untangled the gold-ish polymer crown from his hair. Beneath the gilt, it was dark brown, but for the stark white streak Makeup had sprayed there two hours ago. “Yeah, the casting choices feel a little strange. I can see why everyone on Twitter was pulling up those fanart comps to complain about it. Still not as bad as the, uh - ”

“I know,” Matt said morosely, taking the crown back and putting it on wonky. ���I don’t even tan.” They’d dyed his hair again but thankfully drawn the line at trying to make him any less pasty. Manufacturing sexual tension with someone who looks like a stretched out Oompa Loompa might be beyond even Nico’s prodigious talents. 

“I’m billed above you though. That’s progress.” Nico tried to get the crown to sit right but succeeded in tilting it drunkenly to the other side. “And, hey, it’s not every day you get a big-budget fantasy epic with a queer romance.”

“They cut out the incest. And most of the sex.” Around them, the studio walls yawned tall and green; the only solid things onset were them and the throne, and the throne was mostly resin. 

“There wasn’t that much sex in the book,” said Nico, who’d picked up the novel as soon as the casting call went out and gone through making characterization notes on every page. 

Matt, who’d read the first draft as it was posted on AO3, complete with thirteen chapters of kink that hadn’t made it into the published version, sniffed and forbore from commenting. Some hauteur was probably in keeping with playing Gael anyway. More in keeping with Tigris, though, which was further evidence Ted Nord couldn’t cast to save his life. 

“I mean, I love it, it’s a really interesting role, but I’m finding it hard to get to grips with,” Nico had said, on the first day of shooting. “Spending your whole life pretending to be being vain and shallow, because it’s not safe to be anything else. Wearing a mask so long you must start to wonder whether you’ve become it. What does that do to a person?”

“Dunno,” Matt had said. “Did you see Ray Lelacheur’s Vogue cover yet? Terrible shoes.”

Now that Nico had abandoned the regal warmth that had settled on him as if it was second nature while draped over the throne, he was stirring the pages of the script again, frowning at his lines. Tigris had been the most he’d had to stretch for a character to date, he’d told Matt, though he’d earnestly added he liked the character’s ‘chewiness.’ 

Matt, who’d struggled equally hard to locate the generosity of spirit and ease of power that was Gael, continued to think that Ted was just as bad at casting to type as he was to aesthetic. 

Nico tossed his white-streaked hair back from his forehead and dragged on his black velvet cloak. “Will you run this scene again with me? I keep not getting the timbre of his ambition right.” He mouthed a few lines, twisted a green gemstone on his finger, and cast an agonized, kohl-rimmed look at Matt. “How do I channel the appropriate volume of petulance, the feeling of a man deprived what by all rights should be his?”

Matt draped himself over his rightful throne, trying to arrange his limbs with the same boneless grace Nico had achieved so easily. “Remember when we were at that falafel truck last week and it took twenty minutes for your order to come and you started cursing god?”

“Suck my dick, Rose,” said Nico reflexively, but looked thoughtful.  

“Later,” murmured Matt, and closed his eyes to wait.

-

“Spy,” snarled the prince, rounding on his cousin. Tigris stood his ground, jaw set against the taller man’s fury, lip curling with defiant derision. “You intrude here, in my father’s house, not content to be left to your life of indulgent luxury, so desperate for attention -”

Tigris’s eyes flashed, enraged despite himself. “Attention? You think that is what I crave? Heavens forbid I seek a world beyond the gilded cage my uncle keeps me in, indulging me like a spoilt puppy and giving me just as much freedom. Attention? I would give my eyeteeth for less! If one could trade condescending oversight for actual knowledge of how our kingdom is run-”

“Our kingdom,” repeated Gael. He cocked his head to the side, curiosity warring with the outrage in his noble features. “You truly think it so, do you? But our father-”

“Uncle,” said Tigris, under his breath.

“Our uncle -”

“My uncle,” said Tigris helpfully. “Your father.”

“My - okay, your -” Matt stopped. “Gawd. This doesn’t work at all.”

“See? It doesn’t work half as well without the incest.” Nico flicked a gem-encrusted finger at Matt’s nose.

Matt wrinkled it and adjusted the hang of gold chains over his collarbones. “You say this like I’m the one who made the script changes. And for the record, Cindy was as cut up about it as you are.” Cindy, script doctor extraordinaire, had also lurked the story on AO3 as it sailed up the ‘Original Fiction’ rankings, and was as distressed as he was about the loss of the throne sex scene. “It’s not my fault transgressive familial kink hasn’t crossed over from the hets yet.”

“Kink shmink, it totally shifts the dynamic.” Nico flapped his cloak emphatically. “Adopted cousins isn’t close to the same sort of layers of resentment and entitlement being a bastard half-brother would be.”

“Right,” said Matt, who’d definitely only re-read chapter 12 seven times for the entitlement, and not the way Tigris hissed ‘brother’ while bound to a bedpost. “The morality groups would lose their shit, though. Probably it was the right call.” It was impressive enough his agency had let him sign the role at all; he’d already rocked the boat enough asking if his casting was whitewashing.

“The morality groups are gonna lose their shit over the gay factor anyway,” said Nico stubbornly. “In for a penny...”

“What about the negative associations of homosexuality with sexual taboos?” 

“What about double standards?”

“Sure, it’s a double standard and it sucks, but you gotta start somewhere. It’s a story about being an outcast and fighting for scraps of dignity, fighting to be seen as human by people who want you to be less than that, and that’s gonna resonate with a lot of kids. You gotta lay the groundwork then fuck your brother.”

Nico raised an eyebrow and Matt shut up quickly; he, or rather his agency, had made a point of never letting him be drawn into these kinds of debates. “And I think compromise robs art of its power. What does the author think?” They both glanced across the set to where a woman in a peacock-print dress watched as Ted struggled to coral the child actors for the carnival scene. Her expression, behind her glasses, was unreadable. 

“Dunno.” Matt ran his hand through his hair. The dye had dried it out and he winced at the brittle, dead-grass feel of it. “Only time we spoke, we both tried to get each other’s autographs and it was really awkward. Bet she’d have some notes for you, though.”

“D’you know, Rose, that’s not a bad idea.” Once resolved, Nico was all action and he stood, script pages fluttering to the floor, velvet cloak swirling around his ankles. The jut of his jaw said that nothing short of poor falafel truck service would defeat him. 

“Ask her to show you the predicament bondage scene,” Matt told him helpfully. “There were some really important character beats in that, I thought.”

-

“You think you’re too good for me, don’t you?”

“What?” Matt looked up, taken completely off guard. He was stretched out in Nico’s window seat, deeply absorbed in a thinkpiece on why Kai Bourke would have been a better casting choice for Gael, and thoroughly agreeing with it. Seeing his boyfriend prowling towards him with a look of cold fury and a bare chest was enough to stop him mid-anonymous comment.

Nico stalked across the room towards him, the taut anger etched in every muscle creating a frayed grace that was almost violence. “That’s the worst of you, your highness. It’s not that you hate me. It’s not that you think less of me. It’s that you think nothing of me at all!”

Finally cottoning on, Matt swung his legs around and tried to remember his lines; it was hard, he truly couldn’t remember what part of the script this was. That in itself was unusual. Matt would hardly claim himself a natural thespian or even a diligent professional, but memorizing lines had been a skill drilled into him since he was eight years old and it was a tough habit to shake. Still, while Nico’s words - Tigris’s words - sounded vaguely familiar, he couldn’t for the life of him place them in Ted and Cindy’s script. 

“But I’m going to make certain you don’t forget me, brother,” whispered Nico, and that was just it, Matt realized. It wasn’t the script at all. It wasn’t even the book. It was the original.

“You read it?” he mouthed, as Nico’s hand wrapped around his wrist. 

“Shocked to learn I’m literate?” spat Nico, but favored him with the shadow of a wink. No shadow around his eyes this time, no gold woven into his hair, but he was more Tigris than he’d been on the soundstage. 

It was, simultaneously, extremely Nico. 

Matt tried, experimentally, to free his wrist and found he couldn’t. He shivered, feeling his pulse jump, knowing Nico could feel it too. “Was that an attempt to dig deeper into the artistic truth of the work, or to mine it for weird, kinky shit?” 

“Yes,” said Nico, bearing him down onto the cushions, beautiful and vengeful and careful not to knock Matt’s laptop off the seat.

-

One of the advantages of shooting a gay film with your boyfriend - one Arose had certainly never intended - was that when Nico turned, grabbed Matt by the lapels, and kissed him on the red carpet, everyone laughed and smiled and Matt knew the gossip mag headlines would be jokes about dedication to the craft and not shock sexuality scandals. His father probably wouldn’t- okay he’d definitely mind but it’d probably be a side note in a meeting about how to capitalize on the film’s success. 

And it was a success; some desperately hot sex aside, reading the story - the real story - had apparently been what Nico had needed to pull it together. All the pride and fear and desperate clawing longing of a tiger caged that had risen like a heat haze from Tigris’s story, and Nico had captured it, had reveled in it, and put it on the screen for all to see. 

Matt straightened his tie and winked to the paps - just a joke between bros, nothing queer here - and resolved to fuck Nico senseless in the restrooms after the premier. Nico laughed and stuck his tongue out. He’d left the white streak in his hair for the red carpet, as stark as the collar of his suit, and Matt had to say, it was growing on him. 

[thevividgreenmoss]

A good or great writer may refuse to accept any responsibility or morality that society wishes to impose on her. Yet the best and greatest of them know that if they abuse this hard-won freedom, it can only lead to bad art. There is an intricate web of morality, rigor, and responsibility that art, that writing itself, imposes on a writer. It’s singular, it’s individual, but nevertheless it’s there. At its best, it’s an exquisite bond between the artist and the medium. At its acceptable end, it’s a sort of sensible cooperation. At its worst, it’s a relationship of disrespect and exploitation.

The absence of external rules complicates things. There’s a very thin line that separates the strong, true, bright bird of the imagination from the synthetic, noisy bauble. Where is that line? How do you recognize it? How do you know you’ve crossed it? At the risk of sounding esoteric and arcane, I’m tempted to say that you just know. The fact is that nobody—no reader, no reviewer, agent, publisher, colleague, friend, or enemy—can tell for sure. A writer just has to ask herself that question and answer it as honestly as possible. The thing about this “line” is that once you learn to recognize it, once you see it, it’s impossible to ignore. You have no choice but to live with it, to follow it through. You have to bear with all its complexities, contradictions, and demands. And that’s not always easy. It doesn’t always lead to compliments and standing ovations. It can lead you to the strangest, wildest places. In the midst of a bloody military coup, for instance, you could find yourself fascinated by the mating rituals of a purple sunbird, or the secret life of captive goldfish, or an old aunt’s descent into madness. And nobody can say that there isn’t truth and art and beauty in that. Or, on the contrary, in the midst of putative peace, you could, like me, be unfortunate enough to stumble on a silent war. The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.

Today, perhaps more so than in any other era in history, the writer’s right to free speech is guarded and defended by the civil societies and state establishments of the most powerful countries in the world. Any overt attempt to silence or muffle a voice is met with furious opposition. The writer is embraced and protected. This is a wonderful thing. The writer, the actor, the musician, the filmmaker—they have become radiant jewels in the crown of modern civilization. The artist, I imagine, is finally as free as he or she will ever be. Never before have so many writers had their books published. (And now, of course, we have the Internet.) Never before have we been more commercially viable. We live and prosper in the heart of the marketplace. True, for every so-called success there are hundreds who “fail.” True, there are myriad art forms, both folk and classical, myriad languages, myriad cultural and artistic traditions that are being crushed and cast aside in the stampede to the big bumper sale in Wonderland. Still, there have never been more writers, singers, actors, or painters who have become influential, wealthy superstars. And they, the successful ones, spawn a million imitators, they become the torchbearers, their work becomes the benchmark for what art is, or ought to be.

Nowadays in India the scene is almost farcical. Following the recent commercial success of some Indian authors, Western publishers are desperately prospecting for the next big Indo-Anglian work of fiction. They’re doing everything short of interviewing English-speaking Indians for the post of “writer.” Ambitious middle-class parents who, a few years ago, would only settle for a future in Engineering, Medicine, or Management for their children, now hopefully send them to creative writing schools. People like myself are constantly petitioned by computer companies, watch manufacturers, even media magnates to endorse their products. A boutique owner in Bombay once asked me if he could “display” my book The God of Small Things (as if it were an accessory, a bracelet or a pair of earrings) while he filmed me shopping for clothes! Jhumpa Lahiri, the American writer of Indian origin who won the Pulitzer Prize, came to India recently to have a traditional Bengali wedding. The wedding was reported on the front page of national newspapers.

Now where does all this lead us? Is it just harmless nonsense that’s best ignored? How does all this ardent wooing affect our art? What kind of lenses does it put in our spectacles? How far does it remove us from the world around us?

There is very real danger that this neoteric seduction can shut us up far more effectively than violence and repression ever could. We have free speech. Maybe. But do we have Really Free Speech? If what we have to say doesn’t “sell,” will we still say it? Can we? Or is everybody looking for Things That Sell to say? Could writers end up playing the role of palace entertainers? Or the subtle twenty-first-century version of court eunuchs attending to the pleasures of our incumbent CEOs? You know—naughty, but nice. Risqué perhaps, but not risky. It has been nearly four years now since my first, and so far only, novel, The God of Small Things, was published. In the early days, I used to be described—introduced—as the author of an almost freakishly “successful” (if I may use so vulgar a term) first book. Nowadays I’m introduced as something of a freak myself. I am, apparently, what is known in twenty-first-century vernacular as a “writer-activist.” (Like a sofa-bed.)

Why am I called a “writer-activist” and why—even when it’s used approvingly, admiringly—does that term make me flinch? I’m called a writer-activist because after writing The God of Small Things I wrote three political essays: “The End of Imagination,” about India’s nuclear tests, “The Greater Common Good,” about Big Dams and the “development” debate, and “Power Politics: The Reincarnation of Rumpelstiltskin,” about the privatization and corporatization of essential infrastructure like water and electricity. Apart from the building of the temple in Ayodhya, these currently also happen to be the top priorities of the Indian government.4

Now, I’ve been wondering why it should be that the person who wrote The God of Small Things is called a writer, and the person who wrote the political essays is called an activist. True, The God of Small Things is a work of fiction, but it’s no less political than any of my essays. True, the essays are works of nonfiction, but since when did writers forgo the right to write nonfiction?

My thesis—my humble theory, as we say in India—is that I’ve been saddled with this double-barreled appellation, this awful professional label, not because my work is political but because in my essays, which are about very contentious issues, I take sides. I take a position. I have a point of view. What’s worse, I make it clear that I think it’s right and moral to take that position, and what’s even worse, I use everything in my power to flagrantly solicit support for that position. Now, for a writer of the twenty-first century, that’s considered a pretty uncool, unsophisticated thing to do. It skates uncomfortably close to the territory occupied by political party ideologues—a breed of people that the world has learned (quite rightly) to mistrust. I’m aware of this. I’m all for being circumspect. I’m all for discretion, prudence, tentativeness, subtlety, ambiguity, complexity. I love the unanswered question, the unresolved story, the unclimbed mountain, the tender shard of an incomplete dream. Most of the time.

But is it mandatory for a writer to be ambiguous about everything? Isn’t it true that there have been fearful episodes in human history when prudence and discretion would have just been euphemisms for pusillanimity? When caution was actually cowardice? When sophistication was disguised decadence? When circumspection was really a kind of espousal?

Isn’t it true, or at least theoretically possible, that there are times in the life of a people or a nation when the political climate demands that we—even the most sophisticated of us—overtly take sides? I believe that such times are upon us. And I believe that in the coming years intellectuals and artists in India will be called upon to take sides.

Arundhati Roy, The Ladies Have Feelings, So . . . Shall We Leave It to the Experts? (Based on a talk given at the Third Annual Eqbal Ahmad Lecture, Amherst, Massachusetts, February 15, 2001; compiled in The End of Imagination)

[leilas-digital-scrapbook-blog]

Giving Love a Bad Name – Confessions of a Fanfiction Writer

I know we’re supposed to blog about our major projects this week and I promise I will get to that soon, but I’d like to go off book for a moment to address something that’s been bugging me since last Thursday’s class. As someone who’s always tried to engage with fandom in as creative a way as possible, I hoped a class on user generated content would offer a fresher perspective than the usual amount of prejudice and self-righteous superiority that sadly seem to accompany the subject of fanfiction even amongst people that make stories and their passion for it their bread and butter.

Guess I should have known better.

In the world of professional writers, fanfiction is still a filthy word. It sums up everything that’s wrong with the people you’re sharing your stories with: the obsessiveness, the entitlement, the disregard for boundaries, the penchant for making everything about sex. Worse, gay sex, as unspeakably dirty as it’s hilarious. Be warned, writers: if you make it big, your stories will inevitably become a free-for-all at the mercy of those people. A worse fate than even George R. R. Martin could wish on his own characters.

I’m used to seeing the world of fanfiction belittled and disparaged, of course, and I’m the first to admit that the community is often its own worst enemy. But for some reason it still hurt a little to sit in class and listen to people I’ve come to like and respect during these past few months buy into every bad stereotype associated with the form. Not because I felt called out (though yes, I do write fanfiction from time to time, and I happen to quite enjoy reading it too), but because of the underlying assumptions that 1. something that’s not 100% original cannot be art, it’s a violence in fact, especially if it twists someone else’s creation into something it was never meant to be (in this case, queer representation); and 2. there’s something wrong with creating exclusively out of love, without ever expecting to be paid for it. And I have Strong Opinions on that.

So let’s talk about fanfiction.

Actually, scratch that, let’s talk about my favorite subject – yours truly. As you may have gathered by now, I love fanfiction. A whole fangirly lot. My gateway drug into it was my obsession with Lost about 10 years ago and its pesky habit of offing every character I was foolish enough to get attached to. But lo! Someone was keeping them alive through their stories! I felt blessed. I got to spend more time in a world I loved, and I stopped flirting with the idea of giving up on the show every time another character I liked bit the dust. Everybody won.

Even more than as a fan, though, I appreciated the world of possibilities that fanfiction opened up to me as a non-native speaker. I come from a small town in the north of Italy; the access I had to foreign books in their original language was limited, and if I wanted to read something in English I’d have to spend quite a lot of money on one of the very few novels (usually chunky airport bookshop thrillers or housewife romances – not exactly my preferred genres) that shared a single shelf in the bookstore with German, French, Spanish titles. But fanfiction was free, accessible, and there was so much of it. If I didn’t like a story, all I needed to do was move on to the next. Suddenly there was an infinite library of engaging stories to help me make my English better. True, they didn’t all read like a published novel would – there’s a lot of unpolished, error-plagued, stream-of-consciousness-y material out there. But there are also so, so many beautifully written works, and believe me, even for a non-native speaker it’s very easy to spot the difference.

Fanfiction also gave me the chance and motivation to practice my English writing in a way school never could have done. I’ve been writing my own stories since I could hold a pen, but I didn’t dare write in English until I was a fanfiction-loving teenager. It was a marketing decision, really – my first foray into writing fanfiction was for a fandom so small that I wouldn’t be surprised to find out I’m the only Italian representative, so if I wanted any kind of feedback on my work I’d have to suck it up and try my hand at writing in a language that didn’t come natural to me. I would never argue that the feedback I got on my works made me a better writer – contrary to popular opinion, the fanfiction community is made up of the nicest, most supportive people, and alas, you’ll never get a comment on everything you did wrong with your structure or even just pointing out common grammar mistakes from them (though I was lucky enough to have someone explain to me how dialogue punctuation works differently in English than in Italian, so I guess something can be learned even from the Internet). It did motivate me to keep writing, though, and that made me a better writer. If you think I’m being too dramatic, dishing out this monster of a post nobody asked for just to declare my eternal devotion to fanfiction, it’s because it’s personal to me. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve been told that I write in English as well as native speakers, and fanfiction is a big part of why that’s true. I doubt I would even be in this course if it wasn’t for it.

And then, of course, there’s the gay thing. I’m not going to argue about how heteronormativity sucks and representation matters because I’m sure everyone’s as sick of talking about it as I am, but please try to understand how it felt for a gay person like me, used to be depicted in media as a plot device or token secondary-character representation if at all, to be able to step into a world where queerness was the default for once. Where queer protagonists had meaningful queer love stories and queer friends and got to save the world from the Apocalypse too. Or to fight the Empire or go to Hogwarts or everything else fictional straight people have had a right to do since the dawn of storytelling in addition to romancing the hottie of their choice. I’m not asking you to feel as passionately about it, of course, but (especially if you’re straight) you might try and empathize the next time you think a fanart of two boys kissing is something deserving of your amused contempt.

I hope I’m not coming across as the person that screams “homophobe” at everyone who disagrees with her because I guarantee that’s not what I’m trying to do here, but I think the general distaste for slash says a lot about the way our society sees heterosexual relationships as love and homosexual relationships as sex. Yes, there’s a lot of gay porn in the world of fanfiction. But you know what you’re most likely to find? Romance. Not in the saucy literary sense of the word, but in its simpler, most literal acceptation. Fanfiction is just one more way for humans to express themselves, after all, and love has always been front and center in our art. Love, not sex – even if it’s gay. In fact, explicit material doesn’t even make up the majority of what you’ll find on a fanfiction website. Don’t worry, I don’t want anyone to taint their souls by visiting one of those dens of iniquity so I pulled some stats myself. Here’s the number of works for each rating in three of the most popular fandoms on Archive Of Our Own, the current go-to website for the fanfiction community (sorry Fanfiction.net) – Harry Potter, Supernatural and the Marvel Cinematic Universe as of 9/3/2019:

Even counting both Mature and Explicit works as straight-up porn (which I don’t think is quite fair, but that’s a discussion for another day), they only make up less than 1/3 of the material. Kinda disappointing, for a medium that’s supposed to be all about filthy graphic gay sex. Imagine if only one in three musicals actually featured singing and dancing, or superheroes weren’t in the majority of superhero movies. They’re lucky fanfiction is shared for free, or I’d be screaming for my money back.

Maybe I’ve just been brainwashed by SJWs, though, and this has nothing to do with my being an immigrant or a lesbian. Maybe my inability to see what’s so bad about appropriating someone else’s intellectual property for your own amusement is a cultural thing. I apologize – as mentioned, I’m Italian, and we all know Ancient Roman culture was basically just a ripoff of everything those inventive Greeks came up with. It’s in our blood. Hell, our 2€ coin, the biggest, has the face of Dante Alighieri on it, a writer most famous for having written 14.000+ verses of self-insert real-person-fic in which the girl he fancied as a teenager, his favorite author, and God himself all fall over themselves to tell him how awesome he is and he gets to prophesy an eternity in Hell for his political enemies. Talk about wish-fulfilling entitlement. Not to mention all those creatively arid Renaissance “artists” celebrated for stealing characters from the Bible and Greek mythology (seriously, the fact that Greece hasn’t unleashed an army of lawyers on us yet is nothing short of a miracle) and putting them in their cheesy paintings. Other countries can rely on a much stronger moral backbone and endless imagination – I’m sure Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, those creative geniuses at Disney and countless others never had to resort to something as cheap and despicable as borrowing other people’s characters to tell the stories they wanted to tell.

Either way, I can’t help it – I see the prospect of creating something that will resonate with people so strongly that they’ll make it a part of themselves, that it’ll compel them to make more art, to reach out and connect with other fans, as something incredibly beautiful rather than scary. Maybe this is my usual naiveté speaking, and I will come to eat my words. It’s certainly disturbing that a bunch of entitled fans bullied the Mass Effect developers into changing the series’ ending, and sending actors explicit fanart of themselves is straight-up harassment, but is fanfiction really the problem here? Or is it social network culture, with its power to destroy all barriers and foster hive mind? To give resentment a platform to spread and be heard? I promise that the average fanfiction writer wouldn’t campaign to get an ending changed. They’d just roll up their sleeves and write a better one themselves.

[ginnyzero]

Trusting Yourself as a Writer

It's Writer Wednesday, let's talk about writerly things!

Back in 2013, thewritelife.com posted an article about "The Worst Ways to Begin Your Novel: Advice From Literary Agents."  And excerpts of it have most likely been making the rounds on tumblr ever since. The post that crossed my dash had over 30,000 notes. I reblogged it with a few I felt were relevant to my own feelings. Before you read, remember, agents are human beings with tastes, preferences and biases like everyone else. They're expressing an opinion not a fact. The problem with an agent's opinion is that they hold a modest amount of power over writers who want to be traditionally published. (Problem 2, they often express their opinions as facts.)

One of the quotes is by Kristen Nelson of Nelson Literary about how the worst way fantasy novels is that they open up in the middle of action scenes (or people gathering herbs.) And her preference, directly contradicts the old adage advice of opening up in the middle of the story (and in science fiction and fantasy, that's usually some sort of action scene unless it's leaning towards the heavily political.) And Peter Miller of PMA Literary and Chip MacGregor of MacGregor Literary don't want you to open with lengthy exposition and description. These are contradictory pieces of advice in the same article. (Because what else is there?)

All writing advice from agents ends up being like this. Contradictory.

Changes quickly and mostly negative. Agents very rarely use the internet platform as a message board for what they really want in a story. (They are overloaded with queries already, why solicit more? I mean, if they posted their preferences more clearly and not "the next Tolkien or GRR Martin, they might actually get something suited to their taste.) It becomes easy to be blown about in every direction from every piece of advice you read and soon as a writer, you might have six drafts of your story and be so overwhelmed and befuddled not knowing which one is the best. Because you've lost your best temperature gauge when it comes to your writing, your own gut and instincts. The head becomes so filled with "professional" advice and self doubt about living up to that advice it drowns out your own voice!

(Really, read the bios of some of these agents. Most of them don't have English Degrees or come from any sort of storytelling background. Their advice is that, opinions and advice. They just happen to have industry contacts that an aspiring writer who wants to be published needs. There are no qualifications for writing a good novel and sometimes you have to wonder if there are any qualifications for being a good literary agent.)

So, when it comes to the best writing for your story, it all really comes down to how much do you trust yourself as a writer?

Your writing style and voice is unique. It's an expression of your inner self and it can't be forced and shouldn't be pushed to bend to fit some sort of "this is what is selling right this minute" box.

I'm not talking about bad writing such as purple prose, lack of any grammar skills, the inability to use spell check, lack of story structure and conflict and have flat characters. Because there are stories that are technically bad. There is no way around it. And it's sad. Not all of them can be edited to greatness either. Though enough of those still manage to get professional published through the big houses.

I'm talking about writing that is an expression of your creative process, thoughts and comes naturally to you without reaching for a dictionary or a thesaurus. Where the characters come to life on the page and the story has tension and questions to answer and is legible. (House of Leaves notwithstanding, legible is important.) The type of story that sucks you in and makes you want to curl up with it until it's done. And I don't really care about the genre, I've read just about everything at least once. A good mystery or romance novel can keep me just as enthralled as my favorite fantasy or science fiction novel.

I'm afraid that Kristen Nelson and I are never going to get along, because she doesn't post publicly on her website where it is easily found that she dislikes speculative fiction books that open with action scenes. Both of my books open with action scenes. Why? Because I'm an action adventure writer. Let's get this out of the way. You open my book, you read the first chapter, you know what you're getting into, fighting, explosions, people making hopefully funny quips.

I had to rely on my instincts when choosing the first paragraph for the Lone Prospect. Where was I going to begin this story? In the first draft of the Lone Prospect, chapter two was actually the first chapter, and chapter one was, oh, a third to halfway through the story? A third I think. I'd written the story chronologically. But was that really the best way to draw in the reader?

Here is the first paragraph of Chapter Two:

Brand leaned closer to the table. His nose almost hit the glowing green projection that rose from the table's surface. The motion made his black leather vest, covered in patches and a few studs and pins, gape open. His dark brown hair fell across his face and was slightly gray at the temples, feathered at the ends. His two-day growth of beard on his square jaw was going gray too.

Really, it's not very grabby. It didn't feel grabby to me as a writer or as a reader. It's mostly description, that tired old exposition and prose. Hey, we know Brand is older, he's wearing leather and has longer hair so he's probably some sort of rebel type. Oh, and there is some sort of green projection over a table. What's that about?

And here is the first paragraph of current Chapter One:

Pande-fucking-monium. Gideon jumped into the air over the chaos. Rockets built into his armor kept him above it all. Soldiers shouted and waved their arms. The back of Gideon’s head still echoed from explosions. Music, like a psychotic backdrop, blared out of the enemy camp’s speakers from Blake’s earlier hack. Conflicting smells of gunpowder, chemicals, animals, and the smell of humans living together in packed quarters overwhelmed his nose. And ahead of Gideon, an enemy soldier pulled a truck into the middle of his flight path.

Hey, not only do I drop you into the middle of a fight, there's more description. But in this paragraph, we've got some more questions, why is Gideon flying in the air with rockets in his armor? Who is Blake? Why is Gideon's nose so sensitive? It's more likely to grab the reader's attention for more than one reason.

The opening paragraph of The Lone Prospect is a deliberate homage to one of my favorite science fiction novels, Starship Troopers. By making this homage to Starship Troopers, the reader may or not pick up on it, but it will feel familiar to them if they like old school science fiction. It will feel familiar and they'll, hopefully, be more likely to pick up and read the book because of that familiarity. "Hey, maybe this is like Starship Troopers."

It's also a shout out the Expendables movie that also opens up in the middle of a mercenary job.

Maybe Kristen Nelson doesn't like Starship Troopers. (No idea.)

I can't afford fancy editors. I don't have a lot of friends who enjoy science fantasy or reading for that matter that I would entrust with a book to go "hey, this is good." I have myself, my decades of reading experience and another decade of writing experience writing character driven, action adventure, romantic comedies. That's it. I have no choice but to trust my gut and my instincts.

My guts and instincts are still my biases, opinions, preferences and likes. Just like an agent. Unlike an agent though, I have complete control over my work. I have complete control to say whether or not changing the opening scene is really the best way to go or not. I have complete control to reject or accept advice depending on how it fits the story, tone, mood and message of what I'm writing. It took a lot of time for me to build those skills and those instincts to find a story with a message that I truly wanted to tell. I abandon those instincts at my peril. Abandoning them can make me paralyzed with fear and when you are paralyzed with fear you don't write and nothing gets done.

All an agent can do is tell me, "No. I'm not going to represent this book to my publishing contacts." And I can then go, "Then you aren't the agent for me. Thank you for your time." If another person doesn't understand your writing, then they don't deserve you. It's time to move on, politely, especially if all they gave you was an "I'm not excited about this concept and I'm going to pass," as a response. (This is the standard agent rejection outside of silence.)

I don't appreciate it when agents put out blanket statements that tell me that they aren't willing to give an entire story a chance if the writing (such as the style, prose, grammar and concept) are good over something that's pretty standard in the genre. It's easy to tell someone "this is wrong, this is a problem" when it's something concrete, like bad grammar, purple prose, the story is too long to fit spec. But when it's an opinion like "I don't like stories that open with action sequences, thus, it's wrong and the worst way to open a story." They take an opinion and make it fact and then dismiss everything under that umbrella. It's much more difficult to give advice that is more along the lines of "in my opinion, I'd like to see more of..." or even making a positive comment about the concept or the writing or the voice of the story. It's easy to tear something down. It's hard to build something up.

There's a mode of thought that you have to tear something down in order to rebuild it. That's all well and good if you've joined the military. Here is my experience, that most of the time people go ahead and do the tearing down and completely forget about the building back up. That's what that article was about. It was all tearing down. It was about stating opinions as facts. There wasn't any building up. It would have been a better, more balanced, article that would have made me rant a little less if it was the "worst and best" ways  to open your story. That way, a writer can compare the opinions about best and worst and test their own instincts and opinions. (Or at least find an agent that their writing might actually appeal to.)

Look, I have been on the end of the constant tearing down. I've been to art school. I've sat through the critiques. I've bit my tongue and swallowed the misery of being torn apart on something that the school never taught me. A five minute demo about markers doesn't really count as teaching. (And there wasn't anything available in the major specifically for what we were doing at that time. These were supposed to be FAST illustrations. They instituted a class later, I took it and felt like I got worse.) As a result, I know I'm a decent designer. I'm not expressly innovative, but I design clothes that people would most likely wear. I can do a line drawing. I can do technical flats. My coloring skills to me, look and feel like shit. I don't bother coloring my fashion design drawings anymore because I can't get them to look the way I want them to look. I'm doing it for fun. Fun shouldn't be frustrating.

Maybe if someone had said to me, "Hey, Ginny, it's okay to have flat color. Maybe that's your style." Or. "It's okay to have thick colored pencil outlines. Those are strong enough on their own." Then, maybe, maybe, I'd trust myself on my drawings. My instincts wouldn't be so messed up on my coloring skills. Because I can do simple shading. Not always good on light source, but I can do shading. Rendering patterns and different fabrics, not really, but I can SHADE. I don't trust myself to do so anymore.

And that's what happens when you constantly tear someone down without supporting them in other ways and building them back up.

Your instincts and gut as a writer are there for a reason. Listen to them. The more experience you have in reading and writing and your own preferences when it comes to writing and knowledge of your writing style, the stronger and better your gut and instincts will be to push back against "this is a horrible way to write" that is stated like fact instead of opinion.

Of course, this is coming from someone with about 55 dollars worth of sales. Take from it what you will.