#was technically a fiction novelist

[performing-personhood]

[ichangeintothemule]

also i feel like the label "writer" is too broad it could be literally anybody but isn't the main criteria "professionalism", skill?? idk idk i have a lot of thoughts on the topic but im sleepy :(

[writingquestionsanswered]

so I want to start writing but I don’t know where and how to start writing. Any tips??

Where (and How) to Start Writing

1 - Start by filling your "creative well."

Writers are storytellers, but you can't tell stories if you have no stories to tell. That's why it's so important to fill your "creative well" by becoming an observer of life and consuming the stories unfolding around you. My guide to Filling Your Creative Well will help you with that.

2 - Learn about the different types of writing.

"Writing" doesn't just mean being a novelist. You could write fan-fiction, short stories, plays, poetry, screenplays, songs... you can journal, write a memoir, write non-fiction, write children's books, blog, become a journalist, or write op-eds. You can be a copy writer, technical writer, ghost writer, biographer, critic, essayist... Where and how you start depends on what type of writer you want to be. You can research the type of writing that interests you to learn the best way to start.

3 - Journal or do some writing prompts.

Regardless of the type of writer you want to be, a great way to start is by doing some daily journaling and/or doing writing prompts. Both options will help you practice things like sentence structure, description, grammar, and punctuation. You can find all sorts of free writing prompt resources right here on tumblr, as well as all over the internet, and there are also some great writing prompt books out there. Or, you may choose instead to journal about your day, your thoughts and feelings, or random subjects that pop into your head.

4 - Learn how stories generally work.

If you want to write fiction--whether that's fan-fiction, short stories, or long fiction like novellas and novels, it's important to learn how stories generally work. I say "generally" because there are many different kinds of stories and exactly how stories work can vary across time and place. However, there are a lot of general basics that tend to apply to modern popular stories. You can learn about those here: Beginning a New Story Guide: Starting a New (Long Fiction) Story How to Move a Story Forward

You might also find the following posts to be helpful: Want to Write but Can’t Come Up with a Plot It’s Never Too Late to Become a Writer Where to Go from Initial Book Idea

And finally, you can take a look through my master list of posts for additional help. :)

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

I’ve been writing seriously for over 30 years and love to share what I’ve learned. Have a writing question? My inbox is always open!

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[thebibliosphere]

Hi Joy,

Regarding Anne Rice, I got in a two-hour argument with my older sister about if she was a bitch or not for what she did to her fandom, with the whole sending lawyers after fans who wrote fanfiction, and siccing her fans on those who said her writing wasn't very good. (I maintain yes; Anne may have had the legal right but she was still a bitch for doing it.) Technically my sister won the argument and said that the allegations against Anne were made by "bitter people who couldn't achieve the success that she had."

What could I have said that might have persuaded my sister? We made up when she realized that she really hurt my feelings by saying that I couldn't be an expert on reviewing vampire fiction unless I read Anne Rice and I said after our brother broke us up that I didn't want a damn argument on our vacation time when we were just chilling around the fire. Between you and me, I don't think reading someone's plantation stories makes one more of a vampire expert when Robin McKinley and Octavia Butler wrote much better tales. But still, could I have argued my point better?

Tell her a best selling vampire novelist says to stop being mean to her sibling over someone as over hyped and lackluster as Anne Rice.

In all seriousness, is it worth arguing with her? She can be wrong and you can go on being a competent vampire reviewer without her opinion.

[hyperannotation]

Official Report on The Intransitionalist Chronotopologies of Kenji Siratori (TRS 109)

YOU CANNOT ESCAPE THE INEFFABLE FOREST

Official Report on The Intransitionalist Chronotopologies of Kenji Siratori: Appendix 8.2.3 is a xenopoetic data/dada anthology that documents the activities of the artist collective The Ministry of Transrational Research into Anastrophic Manifolds. The anthology results from an experimental approach to impersonal literary composition. Similar to surrealist definitions, but on the scale of a technical document, members of the Ministry—poets, musicians, novelists, painters, curators, artists, scientists, philosophers, and physicians—were asked to offer a microfiction, poem, essay, fictional citation, or computer code, in the form of a footnote or annotation to a glitch-generated novel by iconoclastic Japanese artist Kenji Siratori; however, each participant wrote their contribution without any access to or knowledge about the nature of Siratori’s source text. After collecting the contributions, the “footnotes” were each algorithmically linked to an arbitrary word from Siratori’s novel. The result is a work of xenopoetic emergence: a beautifully absurd, alien document scintillating with strange potency. Bringing together algorithmically and AI-generated electronic literature with analogue collage and traditional modes of literary composition, the Ministry refuses to commit solely to digital, automated, or analogue art and instead seeks technological mutualism and a radically alien future for the arts. Accompanied by a groundbreaking original score by electro-acoustic duo Wormwood, the anthology offers the radical defamiliarization and weird worlds of science fiction, but now the strangeness bites back on the level form. Readers should expect to discover strange portals from which new ways of thinking, feeling, and being emerge. A conceptual and experimental anthology, Official Report on The Intransitionalist Chronotopologies of Kenji Siratori inaugurates collective xenopoetic writing and the conceit that the future of art will consist of impersonal acts of material emergence, not personal expression. Consume with caution.

AUTHORS AND CONTRIBUTORS Rosaire Appel, Louis Armand, David Barrick, Gary Barwin, Steve Beard, Gregory Betts, Christian Bök, Mike Bonsall, Peter Bouscheljong, Maria Chenut, Shane Jesse Christmas, Roy Christopher, Tabasco “Ralph” Contra, Mike Corrao, R.J. Dent, Paul Di Filippo, Zak Ferguson, Colin Herrick, S.C. Hickman, Maxwell Hyatt, Justin Isis, Andrew Joron, Chris Kelso, Phillip Klingler, Adam Lovasz, Daniel Lukes , Ania Malinowska, Claudia Manley, Ryota Matsumoto, Michael Mc Aloran, Andrew McLuhan, Jeff Noon, Jim Osman, Suarjan Prasai, Tom Prime , David Leo Rice, Virgilio Rivas, David Roden, B.R. Yeager, Andrej Shakowski , Aaron Schneider, Gary J. Shipley, Kenji Siratori , Sean Smith, Kristine Snodgrass, Sean Sokolov, Alan Sondheim, Simon Spiegel, Henry Adam Svec, Jeff VanderMeer, R.G. Vasicek, Andrew C. Wenaus, William Wenaus, Eileen Wennekers, Christina Marie Willatt, Saywrane Alfonso Williams, D. Harlan Wilson, Andrew Wilt

early September release

[justforbooks]

The American novelist John Barth, who has died aged 93, was a noted evangelist for experimental fiction, beguiling his readers with complex stories within stories.

He claimed as his patron saint Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights, the vizier’s daughter whose tales, spun out for 1,001 nights, entranced King Shahryar: “The whole frame of these thousand nights and a night,” Barth said, “speaks to my heart, directly and intimately – and in many ways at once personal and technical.”

He came to notice with his third novel, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), a riotous mock-epic pastiche that drew upon a satire of American manners of the same title published in 1708 by one Ebenezer Cooke.

Reviewers compared the book to Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, and enjoyed Barth’s rollicking use of coincidence, parody, farce, sentimentality and melodrama. It was much-hyped – “One of the greatest works of fiction of our time,” said the writer and artist Richard Kostelanetz – but Gore Vidal found Barth’s humour to be laboured: “I could not so much as summon up a smile at the lazy jokes and the horrendous pastiche of what Barth takes to be 18th-century English.” Other critics complained of its excessive length, narrow emotional range and an underlying facetiousness in Barth’s tone.

His next novel, Giles Goat-Boy (1966), brought Barth critical and commercial success. It was a mythology drenched campus novel, complete with cold war allegories and self-reflexive narratives, 766 pages long. Barth’s penchant for addressing political, religious and philosophical issues gave his novel a flavour of seriousness that was widely praised. Vidal, however, called it “a book to be taught rather than read”.

The following year, Barth published The Literature of Exhaustion, a manifesto for literary postmodernism, in the Atlantic magazine. The traditional forms of representation were used up, he argued. There were too many contemporary writers who went about their business as though James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov had never written. Barth’s impatience with most fiction and his eloquent enthusiasm for the experimental caught a moment in contemporary culture. He became the poster boy for postmodernism.

One of the three children of Georgia (nee Simmons) and John Barth, who ran a sweet shop, he was born in Cambridge, a small crab and oyster town in Maryland, and grew up amid the flat, low-lying tidal marshlands on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay.

His twin sister was whimsically named Jill, and Barth’s family knew him as Jack, a source of teasing during their schooldays.

After graduating from high school, Barth enrolled in a summer programme at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. An enthusiastic jazz drummer, he hoped for a career as an arranger, but at the Juilliard he encountered some seriously talented performers and his ambitions shrank.

Instead, he enrolled at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, to study journalism. He remained at Hopkins to complete a master’s degree, and in 1953 landed a job in the English department at Pennsylvania State University, where he remained for 12 years.

Barth’s first published novel, The Floating Opera (1956), was a traditional first-person narrative about boozing, desire and nihilism on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake. The End of the Road (1958), described by the critic Leslie Fiedler as an example of “provincial American existentialism”, was a darker novel about a grad-school dropout, ending with an abortion. Some of the more gruesome details were cut at the insistence of his publishers, but restored when the novel was later reissued.

In 1965 he took a job teaching at the Buffalo campus of the State University of New York, where he remained until 1973. During that time of student unrest, the campus was repeatedly occupied by local police and troopers of the National Guard. Barth was less sympathetic to the protesters than some of his colleagues, but he wholeheartedly threw himself into the trashing of the practitioners of “traditional” fiction such as John Updike and William Styron, whose work he felt was a literary dead end.

Under the growing influence of Borges and 60s counterculture, Barth turned away from fat pastiche-novels to short fictional forms. Lost in the Funhouse (1968) was a melange of short fictions for print, tape and live voice, which he staged on campuses across the nation. In 1973 he returned to Johns Hopkins to take up a chair of creative writing, and stayed until retirement in 1992.

By the 80s, the frisky, postmodern self-consciousness that had made readers sit up in the 60s had lost some of its capacity to shock. It had gone, within a generation, from being a great cause to a routine, a shtick. Barth’s books increasingly needed to be explained to readers, and sales fell away. Complex, self-referential novels such as Chimera, which shared the National Book Award in 1973, the epistolary Letters (1979) and Sabbatical (1982) were seen as working out the implications of The Literature of Exhaustion.

In 1980 he revisited this essay with The Literature of Replenishment, in which he repented his youthful scorn for the 19th-century novel as practised by the “great premodernists” such as Dickens, Twain and Tolstoy. If, as the modernists asserted, linearity, rationality and consciousness are not the whole story, argued Barth, “we may appreciate that the contraries of those things are not the whole story either … A worthy program for postmodernist fiction, I believe, is the synthesis … of these modes of writing.”

Barth’s essays were collected in three volumes as The Friday Book (1984), Further Fridays (1995) and Final Fridays (2012). A further collection of short nonfiction pieces, Postscripts, was published in 2022. Once Upon a Time (1994), with its teasing promise of tall tales, was his most autobiographical novel. Coming Soon!!! (2001), with its references to The Floating Opera, showed that the old postmodernist playfulness was unquenched.

In 1998, Barth won both the Lannan Foundation’s lifetime achievement award and the Pen/Malamud award for excellence in the short story.

He married Anne Strickland in 1950 and they had three children, Christine, John and Daniel. The couple divorced in 1969 and the following year he married Shelly Rosenberg. She and his children survive him.

🔔 John Simmons Barth, writer, born 27 May 1930; died 2 April 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[july-19th-club]

the thing is, there's this jarring push and pull between the narrating voice and the focal point of the narrating voice, like this - the narrator can say things like "feminism" (a word that's not used in britain until fifty years after the story is set) or use modern political terms and phrases, and that's fine, because when you're writing nonfiction (or fiction structured like nonfiction) about an event in the past it's customary to do such things; you're writing for a modern audience and it's expected that you will be using terms familiar to them. BUT the book also has a pretty consistent close-third point of view, and when using a close third-person, narration *usually* hews pretty closely to terms and vocabulary that the protagonist it's following knows and uses. which in this case is the vocabulary of a polyglot in the 1830s specifically, and so like i said, there's this uncomfortable push and pull between a contemporary nonfiction tone, warring for room with a novelistic close-third POV.

and it doesn't work out well; they don't complement one another easily and what happens instead is that the close-third feels, despite the fact that it is a pretty close perspective, oddly detached, distant, despite relaying everything robin thinks and feels. and the academic nonfiction tone feels disjointed because the reader, if they're versed at all in the subjects the book is built around, can't stop thinking about which parts of the narration don't fit into the close point of view. and sometimes it bleeds into the dialogue, too, so that the 1830s college students have conversations not out of place among 2010s college students, vocabulary and all, and i'm NOT the first person to say that this feels goofy in a book that's all about language and vocabulary, nor am i unaware that some readers defend it as a deliberate choice of language and vocabulary. what if the only two things that are different in this alternate history are a) silver magic and b) use of contemporary political lanugage? because the book is technically a fantasy, you COULD say, well, what if all those words and phrases were just invented earlier? it's an alternate history, anything's possible. but i think it's a lot simpler than that: i think this book could've just used a couple more passes before being considered done, and maybe then the people who are nitpicking (me included) would have less to nitpick about. a more consistent hand in terms of tone would've made a difference.

another thing: i certainly sympathize with the author's assertion that some readers need to be spoon-fed, and that those who balk most intensely at the book's occasional heavy-handedness are those who are interested in nobody saying harsh truths where they have to see it. but i'd also counter: those people are never going to like a book like this anyway. they'll be the people writing racist reviews and claiming that anyone who reviews the book negatively agrees with them but is just too liberal to admit it; this book is not ever going to reach those people, no matter how simply or thoroughly it structures its argument. for the rest of the audience, it can afford to have more nuance, and those readers will appreciate it. i hesitate to say it's condescending, but also, it's not...not condescending either.

so i wanted to like this book. god, i did. and i think if it had been through even one more editing pass, i might like it more than i do! but as it stands; with the awkward imbalance between tone and point of view, the fact that is very thin for 500 pages, and - this is just a me thing, because i'm an extreme stickler for voice, but it's still a thing - the prose was not near as rapturous as the best reviews led me to believe...i don't know. this book just wasn't it. or, at least, not all of it.

[quinnfabrayapologist]

Okay anyone not involved in author twitter needs to know what's happening

Basically Patricia Lockwood is an author who just won an award for best debut novelist for her novel No One Is Talking About This.

Patricia Lockwood already has half a dozen books out, all published before this one, including the book that this current book is based on, Priestdaddy, which was a memoir. No One Is Talking About This is a rework of the real life events in Priestdaddy, this time presented as fiction.

Some authors (mostly people who were also up for the debut novelist award) are very upset about this because as this was not her first novel, her winning debut novelist on a technicality (it's the first she's done in this format) has upset authors who actually published debut novels this year

And normally this is not something I would make a post for on here, particularly as it affects such a niche side of twitter, but Patricia Lockwood, who is at the centre of this debate

Is Miette's mother

[whetstonefires]

💖🎶🛒

For the fanfic ask meme :3

💖 What made you start writing?

I...okay so there's a dumb literal answer to this I'm going to give first. My sixth grade English class was a two-semester-long creative writing seminar, where we were honestly taught almost nothing; the teacher just. Made us write things. Whatever things. For months.

She was incredibly patient with our baby shit, looking back, although when two of her students started writing execrable sixth grade poetry she set us on each other so we could get feedback without her, and managed not to make it obvious she was trying to escape the horror of sing-song childish scansion and the way kids that age take themselves horribly seriously and you have to not laugh.

Her name was Keely and I owe her, because up to that point I had refused to write my ideas down because if I slowed down enough to get a sentence written out I'd have forgotten all the bits that came after and the story was now dead and stupid and it was the worst, so writing was clearly not for me.

(I couldn't really type at this point, and didn't have reliable computer access anyway, and I'm left-handed, which makes writing longhand slightly slower and more difficult no matter what you do. Also you just don't write fast when you're ten.)

But Keely made me, for months, and it turned out this was a skillset I'd just had to work to acquire, and then I could do it and it wasn't a miserable soul-killing process after all. That's the first time I remember learning that lesson in life, and it's such a useful one. (Technically I went through a similar process with reading several years earlier, but that was partly because some very bad pedagogy put me off it at first, so it was less enlightening.)

Less prosaically, I got stuck on writing because I was a voracious reader and I kept thinking up stories, and writing them down was rewarding.

I find it's a great craft because you can get in all kinds of practice without actually doing it; you can string and edit sentences in your head when you have nothing to do or while doing something boring, and critique fiction you're exposed to, and try to understand literally anything you experience, and it's all applicable. As someone who gets frustrated with 1) materials consumed 2) skill plateaus and 3) having a Thing around after having made it, writing in the era of the word processor and cheap data storage is ideal, because it's both easier to keep my skills growing and harder to notice when they aren't than with most creative outlets, because I can store all the millions of words I've written in an object the size of my thumbnail, and because it's not supposed to do anything useful in the first place. If it does that's a happy bonus but if it doesn't I don't have to feel bad.

Fic is nice because it's got an audience to share the Things with, which makes it even better. And because you get to start at around the complexity level of a third or even fourth draft, skipping a lot of grunt work that I think is honestly overvalued--not that it's not valuable or important skill to have, especially if you want to be a novelist, but also there's a reason people on the whole mostly tell familiar stories over again, but better. The first go will suck in basically any medium. Insisting on starting there every time can lead to subtler skills getting underdeveloped.

🎶 Do you listen to music while you write? What song have you been playing on loop lately?

Occasionally? Most of the time it would just be a distraction I'd have to work through, setting myself up for sensory overload and maybe a migraine.

But when I do it often is a single song on a loop, because the point is that I'm keeping myself suspended in a particular vibe as I pursue a specific scene or character relationship or something. Hasn't happened recently, but I should maybe pull that trick out and see if it helps with any of my stuck pieces.

I seem to recall writing something once to about 19 iterations of Dessa's 'The Lamb?' Oh and several passages of Angels Still Have Faces were written to the Sonata Arctica song I took the title from; it helped me get Angeal to the right state of repressed extreme melodrama.

🛒 What are some common things you incorporate in your fics? Themes, feels, scenes, imagery, etc.

Um. Food? Definitely food, between my strong opinions about subsistence informing social priorities and my personal sense that meals are both a major part of the daily pattern of life and very grounding in a place and body, I come back to it endlessly. 'Two people in a room (or other defined space granting privacy) trying so so hard to communicate' is, you know, pretty common motif but I go embarrassingly hard on it.

I'm a sucker for certain flavors of angst, and for when someone is very hopeless and then someone else gives them support. I think maybe people breaking down and asking for help and then actually getting it? And just how gross and messy it feels to be miserable and how much of it happens in the body.

What else? I feel like a third party would be better able to call me out on my patterns. A lot of them after all are the patterns of my thoughts, to a sufficient extent that I experience the universe in those terms by default and that's why it keeps being there.

When I describe hugs I tend to be very precise about where everyone's arms are because I feel like that's important. I try to be specific about features of nature like the species of a bird or tree or whatever, unless the pov character wouldn't notice such a thing, and even then I often know for the sake of precision. Lots of hand gestures, and putting of one's hands on pieces of scenery and so forth, that's my theater background coming through mostly. A tendency to emphasize the kinetic relationship between objects perhaps a bit more than usual.

If I'm describing a character that has an existing visual form, I drill in on the most distinctive details I can find; this is probably by way of mild face-blindness meaning I care a great deal about whether someone has a crooked eyebrow or distinctive dimpling or something, because I'm not going to learn their face fast enough to get away with not being able to id them and call them by name until then. It usually takes months.

Diana Wynne Jones advised making sure your mental image when you describe something, especially a place, is as precise as possible, so you won't decline into abstraction, and I've found following this advice to reliably net good results. If you only know about the things you actually mention, things get flat real fast.

(The trick then is not getting bogged down in deciding which things to mention.)

I dunno, what would you guys say are my signature moves?

[jennablackmorebooks]

I wrote and submitted a story for the short fiction section of a local arts award. It's my sixth time entering, since there were a couple of years I did not submit anything for it. I'm quite proud of the story I have written, and surprised, too, for it is a piece of literary fiction, which is not something I write often (<- this user is a genre fiction novelist most of the time).

It is not the piece I was working on for it before. It was something I started entirely fresh today. Leave it to me to get it started, finished, edited, and submitted all within the day it's due (well, technically tomorrow at midnight, but that's pretty immediate into tomorrow isn't it).

I wish I could share it now, but that would get me so totally disqualified, so I'm not going to do that.

[anoelleart]

Author Ask Tag

Kindly tagged by @mysticstarlightduck 💕

1. What is the main lesson of your story (e.g. kindness, diversity, anti-war), and why did you choose it?

Ultimately The Protolith is story about liberation from gender and imperialist norms. I write more about this in my posts about representation in Fantasy settings. The main character Charlotte combats the patriarchal expectations on her when she's in love with men, even well-meaning ones. She explores her identity as a person of color and how colonization impacted her late mother. It's very fun to explore these themes in science fiction fantasy because you can be incredibly literal. I don't want to spoil my WIP and also I have fully explored these themes yet, so I'll stop here.

2. What did you use as inspiration for your worldbuilding (like real-life cultures, animals, famous media, websites, etc.)?

Honestly, anytime I see something neat, I throw it into my world. It's so easy to fall into making a gas lamp fantasy look like some iteration of Victorian England. I attempted to make the main setting (Lorenzia) a combination of French and Mediterranean culture, flora, food, etc. We have olive trees, lamb is commonly eaten, formal titles are derivatives of Monsieur, Mademoiselle, Madame (but I abbreviate them as M, Mme, and Mde which is not technically correct). The sexually free culture is reminiscent of 1800s France and the oppressive church that of Europe in the same century.

I even have a mountain valley that's based on a rock formation I studied in California; it's rainbow because of the different oxidation states of iron. In contrast, the country where our main character Charlotte's mom is from is loosely based on Nigeria. It's a fun coincidence that the names I've found for these characters are based on Igbo names - which is the tribe from which I'm descendent (yes, I did a 23&Me).

Some of the worldbuilding is done out of convenience. For example, the initial romance arc needs a reason why our love interests Charlotte and Byron can't be together. In every version of this story, he's been a soldier of some kind. It came to me late at night that making him a priest with a vow of celibacy would be the perfect plot device to keep my characters apart. Thus, the militant oppressive Church was born. Eventually, this Church became a thinly veiled statement on religious imperialism, but that's just a happy side effect.

Additionally, I wanted a world where wars are still waged with swords, but has technology such as gas light, running water, the beginning of electricity, steam engines, etc. I decided that in this setting, gun are exceptionally hard to make because due to the atmospheric composition, explosives are more violent and harder to contain.

Finally, I've really wanted to pull science fiction elements into this story, which is where I came up with the World Wound; a crater formed from an ancient meteorite which has never been explored by man.

In summary, I crafted my world based on places I've been (through travel or as a scientist) and for plot convenience.

3. What is your MC trying to achieve, and what are you, the writer, trying to achieve with them? Do you want to inspire others, teach forgiveness, and help readers grow as a person?

Look at answer #1

4. How many chapters is your story going to have?

50 😅 help me

5. Is it fanfiction or original content? Where do you plan to post it?

Original! I've started posting a few chapters here (only the first scene before I redirect readers to Google Drive). I'm not sure how many chapters I'll post here or what I plan to do after my first draft.

6. When and why did you start writing?

I've always been writing! My twin and I used to have a binder of pictures books we wrong in elementary school. We joined Wattpad at the beginning of high school, but both of us moved on from there by the time we were 18. My twin continued on as a fantastic short story writer and future novelist. I stopped writing for a really long time. I started writing seriously last December. I'd flown home to help my mom after she had surgery, and when I wasn't with her I didn't really have much to do. Honestly, it was the most free time I'd had since finishing undergrad four years ago.

7. Do you have any words of engagement for fellow writers of Writeblr? What other writers on Tumblr do you follow?

I just got here so what I say doesn't mean much. Writing something bad is better than writing nothing at all? Cliched advice.

Tagging: @asablehart, @broodparasitism, @carrotblr, @anyablackwood, @authoralexharvey

[essefryu]

[If you are so inclined, no pressure.] List 5 things that make you happy, then put this in the askbox for the last 10 people who liked or reblogged something from you! Get to know your mutuals and followers!

1. Tea. I'm a remarkably hydrated person, 90% of my waking time I have a cup of something liquid beside me, and usually it's tea. Whether it's fancy Chinese tea or shit from a nearby supermarket, it is very much the fuel for my life.

2. Nature. I love hiking, because getting away from the civilization takes my mind away from the worldly concerns, I love walks in parks, I love most of the living things, and even in the hardest times witnessing seasons change has always brought a sense of hope to my mind. I might be at rock bottom, but all the fucking trees around are getting covered with tiny light green fucking buds, because it's spring and spring doesn't care about my insignificant human problems. Good for it.

3. "Suffering porn" kind of media. While I usually wish all the best to real life beings, there's something weirdly satisfying in seeing fictional characters having the worst time of their lives. Remember the "tragedy enjoyers when..." meme? I am the tragedy enjoyers. Torture that 2d guy some more.

Let me use this opportunity to promote ID Invaded. A great and criminally underrated anime with a vibe that is quite similar to some of the 20th century Japanese novelist's works, and it'd full of aforementioned suffering porn.

4. Music and all the activities related to enjoying it. I have a pretty diverse musical taste, but first and foremost I am a metalhead and it has some great benefits. Going to concerts and letting my steam off in the moshpit is some extremely therapeutic stuff. I often notice how after going to a gig I become much more affable and kind person for the next couple of weeks. That plus the intellectual appreciation of the musician's composing ingenuity and technical craftsmanship are great sources of joy in my life.

5. Human interaction. I might be a quite introverted person who needs a lot of solitary time, but I do love my friends and I do enjoy a good conversation partner. Even the simplest forms or it - or maybe precisely the simplest forms of it because they don't strain my little socially awkward brain too much - are quite enjoyable to me. I loved the boopening for that reason, I hope tumblr will do something similar again in the future.

[nocturnalfrenzy]

Is Brokeback Mountain a True Story?

Brokeback Mountain directed by Taiwanese director Ang Lee saw the theatres in the year 2005. Primarily, a romantic-drama set in old west theme introduces us to two American cowboys Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar; the story takes us through their terrain like lives after they meet in 1963 while working as sheep herders on pastures of Brokeback Mountain. The film keeping their relationship at its core threads various phases of Jack and Ennis lives as they ride ahead. The depiction of Homosexuals in a Homophobic society makes it first one of its kind.

Ang Lee won his first Academy Award as Best Director for this movie. Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger gave two brilliant performances in their respective roles each demanding attention when on-screen, the cast also consisted names like Anne Hathaway, Michelle Willaims, David Harbour, Kate Mara.

Is Brokeback Mountain based on a true story?

The technically correct answer to this question would be a ‘NO’, the movie was adapted from a short story penned by Pulitzer fame American novelist Annie Proulx, the screenplay being written by Larry McMurty and Diana Ossana.

Fictionally the story is about these two characters and their love and journey of twenty years from 1963 to 1983 but it in actuality it’s the untold stories of all those Jack and Ennis that really existed in the fog of homophobic society.

In the early 1960s to late 1990s homosexuality was dangerous notion to have in U.S, several hate crimes that occurred in these times are the alibi of the aforementioned statement until 2003 when Lawrence vs Texas case brought a change in the laws. Jack and Ennis discover each other sexually, emotionally on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming and keep seeing each other secretly in the name of fishing trips to hide from everyone. Duality in their lives makes the viewer a part of their journey since many of us live in duality, they prioritize responsibilities over love. Each of two leads get married to a woman but finding them in the want of each other’s company; the excitement in the body language and eyes of characters when they meet tells us all we need to know. Each of characters have different stands; Jack being more confident wants to have a life with Ennis divorcing his wife whereas Ennis even though divorced is afraid of the thorns of society they live in. In one scene Ennis says “If this things grabs hold of us again in wrong place, wrong time, then we are dead” all the while thinking about the thought process of his late homophobic father.

As the story rolls ahead both of them finds it difficult to maintain their dual lives showing the frustration and fits of rage in various altercations they have, both Jack and Ennis are distanced from their respective wives. Even through the tough times their love and emotional connection stays strong but they are not able live it to fullest. They live of the moments they spent together in Brokeback Mountain as Jack mentions aptly in a scene “All we have is Brokeback Mountain”. Since Brokeback Mountain stays as only standing proof of their relationship. The sexuality of the characters take a side seat while the film focuses on the mental struggle a homosexual person went through in those times.

The grounded and mature depiction of homosexual characters brings it more close to reality. In popular culture gay men are imagined of possessing flamboyant characteristics and being effeminate but in this film the characters don’t clad any of this colorful traits. So it seems Jack and Ennis could be anywhere or anyone hiding from the mindset of our social structure of this world we all belong to willingly or unwillingly. Once Ennis gets the knowledge about Jack’s death is taken aback and imagines him getting killed in the same way his father had described killing a homosexual person. This imagination of his brings forth the fear Ennis had in him throughout the story. The screenplay keeps the viewer guessing the validity of his imagination hence asking ourselves whether he died because of a hate crime or an accident, sadly the former option seeming more probable. In broader spectrum answering the big question that even though the film is fictional the building blocks are picked from reality of many homosexual men in those time periods.

[ladyantiheroine]

Thank you so much for the tag, @ninebluehearts !

15 questions & 15 mutuals

1. are you named after anyone?

Not my first name, but I think my middle name comes from a grandmother/great-grandmother of mine?

2. when was the last time you cried?

Probably sometime this week? (I’m not a huge crier but ya girl is going through it :) )

3. do you have kids?

No, and I never want them.

4. do you use sarcasm a lot?

Much like alcohol, I enjoy it every now and then. With the right company.

5. what's the first thing you notice about people? their attitudes?

I have no clue, probably how friendly/approachable they seem?

6. what's your eye color?

Green!

7. scary movies or happy endings?

Why not both??

8. any special talents?

Um...I’m a good writer?...I’m a decent-ish actress and singer?...I can make realistic dentist drill noises?

9. where were you born?

Indiana!

10. what are your hobbies? 

Writing, reading, watching YouTube videos, occasionally video games, and starring into the abyss.

11. have you any pets?

Technically, no. But my parents have a dog named Nora. She’s a rescue, we aren’t sure what breed she is, (she kind of looks like a golden retriever/lab). She’s timid but I love her &lt;3

12. what sports do you play/have you played?

I played some basketball/soccer as a kid, but then discovered theatre and stopped. To quote a former high school classmate, I have the athleticism of a chicken nugget.

13. how tall are you? 

5′2? 

14. favorite subject in school?

English! Drama/music was great too!

15. dream job? 

A novelist, or possibly even a screenwriter! I love fiction!

Tagging: @nightwingthesamuraifool @paradisechid800 @robert-montague-renfield

@oceanview15 @girlnovels @sentimentalities

@chicowitch @uwucthulu @m0th-b0nes

@boringasspotato @jorality @hidinmydisguise

@justduckie1031 @

[phanfictioncatalogue]

Author/Writer (5) Masterlist

part one, part two, part three, part four

A Comma After Dearest (ao3) - niennaerso

Summary: Phil writes as a hobby. Dan has a favorite writer, and it happens to be Phil, but he doesn't know, yet.

and we're out here in plain sight (ao3) - orphan_account

Summary: Phil's an optimistic author whose science fiction novel is well on its way to becoming a film. Dan's an actor whose cynism toward love is nothing short of infuriating. It takes a while, but they find something to agree on.

Broken Like You (ao3) - TearDrop1234

Summary: Dan and Phil meet at a theater in a nowhere town. Their friendship is instant, but the rest not so much.

Christmas Trees With Orange Leaves (ao3) - orphan_account

Summary: When Dan announces he can't spend Christmas with Phil, they celebrate a wonderful 'Christmas' in the amber months of October and November.

Dan's Phanfictions (ao3) - JulienneJc

Summary: Jule demands Dan to show her his fanfictions while Phil watches.

Diagnosed for the Worst (ao3) - Star4545

Summary: Phil can't speak and has always found home in books. Dan Howell is his favorite author who writes books that always speak for Phil.

Every Saturday Morning (ao3) - croissantbleu (orphan_account)

Summary: Dan's life was uneventful, working at a law firm, trying (and failing) to stay on top of his work despite his ADHD getting in the way, and playing the piano on Saturdays. But things changed when he found a phone number in a book, and finds someone who makes him want to follow his dreams.

friday night placebo (ao3) - kishere

Summary: Phil Lester never thought that he was going to be here in his life: successful, healthy, a little lonely, and helping produce his own Netflix show. Dan Howell, YouTube fanboy and food aficionado, just wants to get a job in television acting. One audition could help both of their problems.

I Can Feel Your Pulse in the Pages (ao3) - coldtea (orphan_account)

Summary: Phil is a writer who can’t seem to stop including Dan in everything he writes.

it's the love of the chase that created the ride (ao3) - dogcafe

Summary: The next time Dan sees Phil, the novelty has yet to wear off and Dan finds himself this time on the swing set. He can't adjust his body to where he's holding on right without dropping his things from his lap, and he feels like his hands are starting to turn into the rust from the chains where he's gripping so deathly hard.

NEIGHBOR (ao3) - frnklyiero

Summary: "You don't happen to be a Jack, are you?"

"I'm not sure if that's an honest inquiry or a subtle insult."

where Phil meets a guy who matches the description of an original character he made minutes before they met.

Oceans and Skies and Mountains (ao3) - orphan_account

Summary: A single color has seeped it's way into Dan's dreamed, and it's changed his world for the better.

Pretty Guy (ao3) - Archive (Curlylinguist)

Summary: Phil stumbles across a Pride rally and a certain curly-haired queer activist catches his eye.

Saint and Rennis (ao3) - JulienneJc

Summary: Phil get's bored and finds out Dan is writing

Seven days of sushi (ao3) - Portia331

Summary: Phil Lester is a well-regarded sci-fi author. Well, post-apocalyptic sci-fi zombie survival horror, if you're being technical about it. After an epiphany-inducing series of life events, he decides he wants a break from robots and gore and to step into the non-fiction world. His agent and publisher are on board, but there's a catch - he has to give up his artistic integrity and make his work * scholarly * ... within the next week. Is Phil up for the challenge?

song and story (ao3) - kay_okay 

Summary: In this universe, Dan, a music composition grad student working on his thesis, and Phil, a novelist trying his best to get over his sophomore slump, book the week before Christmas in a bed and breakfast nestled against snow-covered mountains in France. They're tapped out creatively and need the week to work on their projects.

In this universe, Dan and Phil don't know each other. At least, that's how it starts.

Tumbling down the rabbit hole (ao3) - GabbyGums

Summary: Dan reads fanfiction. But he also writes fanfiction.

where we belong (ao3) - parentaladvisorybullshitcontent

Summary: "Only you," Martyn says.

"Only me what?"

"Only you could end up stranded in the middle of nowhere with a gay author who writes gay books. Jesus Christ, Phil."

In which Phil is snowed in with nobody but the mysterious dark haired author next door for company.

[trevorendeavors]

December 9, 2022.

HAH ENTHUSIASTS, CHAPTER 4 RELEASES SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2022!

That's right everybody! After a near five month hiatus, two hurricanes, and the completion of my Graphic Design major, the long-awaited fourth chapter is about to release! Get ready for 14,000 words of angst and intercultural shenanigans!

-

Summary: After an exhausting evening, the Hexsquad dines with the Nocedas. A riveting intercultural exchange ensues! Blending dishes and customs from the Boiling Isles and the human realm... what could possibly go wrong?

TW: apple-related gore, mentions of alcohol

-

"But Trevor, I thought you said this chapter was 17,000 words?"

Technically, it is! However, the advice of my betas and those who've read my snippets compelled me to cut off the chapter for ease of legibility. The downside is that this was an unexpected cut and not my intention; the positive side to this is that means that Chapter 5 already has 3000+ words to it!

Thank you so so much to everyone who was so patient for this! Your continued support and clamor for this fan fiction is the reason I've had the motivation to continue! A special thanks to my betas @edenihira and @camomile-t for helping me perfect this fic, and special thanks to @novelist-becca for giving yet another look-over and helping me fix dialogue!!! This has truly been a labor of love and I could not be more grateful.

Also friendly reminder that if you do any fanart for this fic I WILL upload it into my fanfic! I see every piece you show me and it makes me!!! so soft!!! to see that people love my work this much.

HAH Tag list - comment below if you want to be in the tag list:

@anni-chan95 

@cozytealeaf93

@trueduckweed