Latest Posts by feralpaules - Page 3

Mr. Gaiman, I love your writing and your tumblr presence. If I can ask your advice, I’m a writer and I feel like I’ve lost inspiration for plot. I want to write emotions and relationships, but the story always escapes me. What do you do when you know your characters and how they relate to each other but not the story? Thank you!

The quickest way, if you have two characters you like and want to see succeed, is to have them want mutually exclusive things. And that’s a plot.

On Liking Stuff (or not)

So, back when Ancillary Justice was essentially sweeping that year’s SF awards, there was some talk from certain quarters about it not really being all that, people only claimed to like it because Politics and SJWs and PC points and Affirmative Action and nobody was really reading the book and if they were they didn’t really enjoy it, they just claimed they did so they could seem cool and woke.

My feelings were so hurt that I wept bitter, miserable tears every time I drove to the bank with my royalty checks. I mean, those people must be right, it’s totally typical for non-fans who don’t actually like a book to write fanfic or draw fan art, totally boringly normal for students to choose to write papers about a book that just isn’t really very good or interesting, and for professors to use that boringly not-very-good book in their courses, and for that book to continue to sell steadily five years after it came out. I totally did not laugh out loud whenever I came across such assertions, because they were absolutely not ridiculous Sour Grape Vineyards tended by folks who, for the most part, hadn’t even read the book.

Now I am sorry–but not surprised–to see some folks making similar assertions about N.K. Jemisin’s historic (and entirely deserved) Hugo Threepeat. Most of them haven’t read the books in question.

But some of them have. Some of them have indeed read the books and not understood why so many people are so excited by them.

Now, Nora doesn’t need me to defend her, and she doesn’t need lessons from me about the best way to dry a tear-soaked award-dusting cloth, or the best brands of chocolate ice cream to fortify yourself for that arduous trip to the bank. Actually, she could probably give me some pointers.

But I have some thoughts about the idea that, because you (generic you) didn’t like a work, that must mean folks who say they did like it are Lying Liars Who Lie to Look Cool.

So, in order to believe this, one has to believe that A) one’s own taste is infallible and objective and thus universally shared and B) people who openly don’t share your taste are characterless sheep who will do anything to seem cool.

But the fact is, one doesn’t like or dislike things without context. We are all of us judging things from our own point of view, not some disembodied perfectly objective nowhere. It’s really easy to assume that our context is The Context–to not even see that there’s a context at all, it’s just How Things Are. But you are always seeing things from the perspective of your experiences, your biases, your expectations of how things work. Those may not match other people’s.

Of course, if you’re in a certain category–if you’re a guy, if you’re White, if you’re straight, if you’re cis–our society is set up to make that invisible, to encourage you in the assumption that the way you see things is objective and right, and not just a product of that very society. Nearly all of the readily available entertainment is catering to you, nearly all of it accepts and reinforces the status quo. If you’ve never questioned that, it can seem utterly baffling that people can claim to enjoy things that you see no value in. You’ll maybe think it makes sense to assume that such people are only pretending to like those things, or only like them for reasons you consider unworthy. It might not ever occur to you that some folks are just reading from a different context–sometimes slightly different, sometimes radically different, but even a small difference can be enough to make a work seem strange or bafflingly flat.

Now, I’m sure that there are people somewhere at some time who have in fact claimed to like a thing they didn’t, just for cool points. People will on occasion do all kinds of ill-advised or bananapants things. But enough of them to show up on every SF award shortlist that year? Enough to vote for a historic, record-breaking three Hugos in a row? Really?

Stop and think about what you’re saying when you say this. Stop and think about who you’re not saying it about.

You might not have the context to see what a writer is doing. When you don’t have the context, so much is invisible. You can only see patterns that match what you already know.*

Of course, you’re not a helpless victim of your context–you can change it, by reading other things and listening to various conversations. Maybe you don’t want to do that work, which, ok? But maybe a lot of other folks have indeed been doing that, and their context, the position they’re reading stories from, has shifted over the last several years. It’s a thing that can happen.

Stop and think–you’ve gotten as far as “everyone must be kind of like me” and stepped over into “therefore they can’t really like what they say they like because I don’t like those things.” Try on “therefore they must really mean it when they say they like something, because I mean it when I say it.” It’s funny, isn’t it, that so many folks step into the one and not the other. Maybe ask yourself why that is.

This also applies to “pretentious” writing. “That writer is only trying to look smart! Readers who say they like it are only trying to look smarter that me, a genuine,honest person, who only likes down-to-earth plain solid storytelling.” Friend, your claims to be a better and more honest person because of your distaste for “pretentious” writing is pretension itself, and says far more about you than the work you criticize this way. You are exactly the sort of snob you decry, and you have just announced this to the world.

Like or don’t like. No worries. It’s not a contest, there’s no moral value attached to liking or not liking a thing. Hell, there are highly-regarded things I dislike, or don’t see the appeal of! There are things I love that lots of other folks don’t like at all. That’s life.

And sure, if you want to, talk about why you do or don’t like a thing. That’s super interesting, and thoughtful criticism is good for art.

But think twice before you sneer at what other folks like, think three times before you declare that no one could really like a thing so it must be political correctness, or pretension, or whatever. Consider the possibility that whatever it is is just not your thing. Consider the possibility that it might be all right if not everything is aimed at you. Consider that you might not actually be the center of the universe, and your opinions and tastes might not be the product of your utterly rational objective view of the world. Consider the possibility that a given work might not have been written just for you, but for a bunch of other people who’ve been waiting for it, maybe for a long time, and that might just possibly be okay.

____ *Kind of like the way some folks insist my Ancillary trilogy is obviously strongly influenced by Iain Banks (who I’d read very little of, and that after AJ was already under way) and very few critics bring up the influence of C.J. Cherryh (definitely there, deliberate, and there are several explicit hat tips to her work in the text). Those folks have read Banks, but they haven’t read Cherryh. They see something that isn’t there, and don’t see what is there, because they don’t have the same reading history I do. It’s interesting to me how many folks assume I must have the same reading history as they do. It’s interesting to me how sure they are of their conclusions.

(Crossposted from https://www.annleckie.com/2018/08/27/on-liking-stuff-or-not/)

When Men Write Fanfiction, It Isn’t Fanfiction Because It’s “Academic”

Today in the worst things I have ever read, an author claims that his book is "not fanfic" for a variety of reasons that seem to coalesce in his need to quote literary theorists.

Some of you might have spotted this week’s kerfuffle about how it if was written by a dude it can’t be fanfic, in the guise of an interview with author Lonely Christopher, who claims not to have written fan fiction of Stephen King’s The Shining. The Mary Sue article covers it pretty well (and has a link to the original interview, should you be that way inclined), but we thought we’d highlight some Fan Studies research that could help Christopher put his work in the wider fan fiction context.

Here are a couple of extracts from the interview to get us started:

“LC: The book can be read as a self-contained “novel,” but it’s more than that. I used another text conceptually, structurally, and materially to generate a resultant yet original work. That’s what I mean by “source.”

The text that I was utilizing was the novel The Shining by Stephen King and the subsequent media iterations and interpretations and its cultural ubiquity. So I wrote my story in relation to another, more specifically on top of it. I took the basic tropes of The Shining and replicated and subverted them, and I also took chunks of language and interwove material pieces of Stephen King’s novel.

(…)

Interviewer: You’ve described this book as “intertextual.” Tell us a little bit more about this book’s relationship to other literature.

LC: The book is a concerted rejection of the standards of any type of literature, so in that way it is reacting to the formal elements it eschews, and interacting with readerly expectations as well as the history of the medium.

I guess the reason why this isn’t “fan fiction” is because, first of all, it’s not enjoyable in the same way and then it’s vaguely academic. Aesthetically speaking, it owes much to Stein, Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, and Bernhard. Intellectually, it has a relationship to Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Debord, and especially Baudrillard. So it is having conversations with different texts in different ways.”

You may recall a couple of relevant articles, such as this one by Abigail Derecho on fan fiction as “archontic literature”. One of the really interesting points Derecho makes in it is how fan fiction writers will frequently repeat the same motif, explore the same scene, but with a difference. (For those interested in the “vaguely academic”, Derecho bases on Deleuze’s concept of “repetition with a difference”.) So we may look at something from a different character’s point of view, or take a group of characters and put them in a coffee shop AU, or try to work out what would be different if a character had made a slightly different choice. You know what that does? It plays with and challenges the reader’s expectations, and allows readers to make meanings from both the similarities and the differences between the two texts.

You may also remember this paper by Mafalda Stasi which looks at fan fiction as a “palimpsest” - the medieval practice of partially erasing and writing over past manuscripts, creating layers of text and meaning. Does that sound a bit like what Christopher is doung by writing his novel “on top of” The Shining? Maybe a bit.

Fan fiction and transformative work intellectual property law scholars like Rebecca Tushnet may also have something to say about Christopher’s taking “chunks of language” and “inter[weaving] material pieces” of King’s novel, and how ideas about this both among the fan fiction community and among rightholders of the commercial works we base our fan fiction on have evolved over time to a point where Lonely Christopher can do this.

When writing descriptions, consider what you want to accomplish. Giving the reader an idea of the layout of a room will require different types of descriptions/different descriptive words than evoking emotions. Think also of who is giving the descriptions: a first person or subjective third person narrator should describe based on how they experience the setting, while an objective third person narrator may have more freedom to match the descriptions to your own preference.

Underlined PSA

Figment, the recently closed writing website, has just launched (after a long delay) their long-awaited successor to figment known as Underlined, where users can post their work and receive feedback, supposedly.

DO NOT USE UNDERLINED. DO NOT POST YOUR WORK ON UNDERLINED.

Underlined’s terms and conditions contains a clause stating that the rights to all your work that you post on their website belongs to them!!!!

Underlined belongs to Penguin Random House. This is an extremely dirty trick for them to play on writers, especially young writers and children, who come to the internet to get feedback and will lose the rights to their work. Please boost!!!

The Left Hand of Darkness went on to win both the Nebula and Hugo Awards, among others, has been reprinted more than 30 times, and is considered a groundbreaking work of science fiction.

It’s also a bloody good read.

source

i haaaaaAAATE descriptions of older women in books like “looking at her face it was easy to imagine how beautiful she once was” and the woman is like. 60 years old. 60. so she’s got like, some wrinkles? and gray hair??? but otherwise doesnt look that much different than when she was “young” and she’s still probably beautiful like a description like that isn’t even EDGING on acceptable unless the character is in their 90s and barely resembles what they would have 70 years ago and even in that case fuck you??? they’ve got more important things to do and recollect than missing an allegedly hot body byee

So sometimes I see bros on the internet talk about how women couldn’t have worn armor historically, because it was too heavy for them.

Here is a picture of me wearing armor when I was a nerdy 14-year-old girl who was about 5 feet tall and weighed less than 95 pounds. I sometimes wore it for 6 hours straight in summer heat, and I would run and turn summersaults in it for fun.

And before you start asking: this was authentic full steel plate with a padded arming doublet underneath. It weighed so much that I couldn’t carry the plastic tub it was stored in on my own. It was heavy. But once I was wearing it I just felt like I was being hugged or wrapped up in a really heavy blanket. That’s how armor works. The whole point is that the weight is distributed across your whole body, and your whole body can lift a huge amount. It has nothing to do with how strong you are or how much you can bench.

So if you think women are too weak to wear armor, you are wrong on so many levels. It does not even matter if you believe in your little misogynistic heart that all women are defined by their physical inferiority when compared to men, because you are also just wrong about how armor works. Even skinny teen girls can wear armor just fine. Everyone can wear armor.

Are there any works in the post-apocalyptic genre with post-apocalyptic librarians? People who worked in the public library and after the Bad Thing decide to stay and keep the library clean, safe and available for anyone who needs it. People can’t remove books from the premises anymore, because they’re too precious, but you can stay as long as you want and read them or copy them out–the librarians encourage making copies, so that the information can circulate beyond the physical boundaries of the library. 

After a while it becomes an unspoken reality of the post apocalyptic society that you Just Don’t fuck with the library. You don’t fight there, you don’t steal from it, you don’t allow harm to come to librarians when they have to leave the building for supplies. 

People donate food and books and paper with no expectation of reciprocity, because the librarians don’t ask for anything when you need a place to hide or information or, fuck, to read a schlocky crime novel because you need to escape reality in some purple prose. 

you can make nearly any object into a good insult if you put ‘you absolute’ in front of it

example: you absolute coat hanger

Super helpful for writers to take a lot at as well.

For those who do not have Twitter, Bob Schooley posted a Kim Possible series bible on there today. This contains material on the basic outline for the series. This was made about two years before the first episode was aired. There is so many amazing things in here that ended up being changed or did not happen or appear in the show entirely. A must look for any hardcore KP Fan!

“it would be impossible for this disabled character to be played by a disabled actor because of the things this character can do in this movie” well then maybe…… you fucked up in the writing of this disabled character……

There is already considerable speculation about how Congress would react to a replay of the Saturday Night Massacre, when President Richard Nixon ordered his attorney general to fire the Watergate special prosecutor. Senators of both parties have warned the president against dismissing Mueller, some in very strong language (dismissal would cross a “red line” or be “explosive”). Members of Congress would no doubt demand an immediate, serious congressional inquiry into the matters the special counsel is investigating, if not impeachment proceedings based on the dismissal itself.

Trump Can Fire Mueller, But Not a Grand Jury 

One of the reasons Trump keeps getting away with his lawlessness and his lies, is that reporters and pundits keep acting like this craven, Vichy Congress will do ANYTHING of meaningful consequence when he steps up his obstruction of justice to firing Mueller.

We have been in a Constitutional Crisis since McConnell blocked President Obama’s Constitutional right and duty to nominate to SCOTUS, and nobody in Congress or the punditocracy seemed to give a fuck about THAT, so it’s laughable to think that Congress – especially a Congress that allows Trump Toady Devin Nunes to oversee an investigation into anything involving the administration he’s protecting – will do anything more meaningful than wring their hands and make some speeches.

The only way to do anything about any of this is to DESTROY the GOP in the election this year, in a wave election of historical proportions.

(via wilwheaton)

The war on drugs is rooted in racist policies . The failure of the war and drugs is obvious. We need to find a better solution, because people of color should never be the victims of racist policies. White Americans are more likely than black Americans to have used most kinds of illegal drugs, including cocaine and LSD. Yet blacks are far more likely to go to prison for marijuana, which is not a hard drug. Moreover , even when white people get caught , they get less time in prison. 

by Ashton MV

Quick Plotting Tip: Write Your Story Backwards

If you have a difficult time plotting, try writing or outlining your story backwards—from the end to the beginning. Writers who have a difficult time outlining, plotting, and planning their stories often benefit from this technique. You’ll need a general idea of what your story is about for this to work, and of course you need to know the ending, but you might be amazed how helpful this trick can be.

Why is writing backwards easier? Basically, instead of answering the question “this happened… now what comes next?,” you’ll be answering the question “this happened… so what would come right before that?” which narrows the possibilities for your next move and can help keep your story on track. (Incidentally, it’s also the way Joseph Gordan-Levitt’s character comes out on top in the film The Lookout.)

Writing backwards can also help you more tightly weave together your subplots, themes, and character relationships, and keep you from going too far down any irrelevant rabbit holes.

If you don’t want to write or outline completely backwards, remember that you’re free to jump around! If you’re feeling stuck in your story or novel, jump to the middle or end and write a few scenes. Many writers get stuck because they feel they have to write their story linearly from beginning to end, which results in an overdeveloped (and often irrelevant) beginning and an underdeveloped ending.

So go work on that ending! It’s much more likely that you will need to change your beginning to fit your ending than the other way around, so spend time on your ending sooner rather than later!

How do you do, fellow kids?

I have a homework assignment on color theory, and could really use your help! Do you have a minute to take a quick 7 question survey about the color in this picture? Follow the link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZYD7MDK

Are you a “can’t write dialogue” writer or a “can’t describe anything” writer

Disney Princesses at their Current Ages

Disney Princesses at their Current Ages

honey production does hurt the bees. the honey stolen is replaced with a toxic synthetic sugar substance which isn't healthy for them. honey isn't for humans to steal, please educate yourself.

Arright, sit down, you’re about to get some knowledge dropped on you by somebody with beekeepers and meadmakers in the family.

The “toxic synthetic sugar substance” you’re referring to? Is sugar water. Literally SUGAR and WATER. There’s nothing synthetic about it. And the bees only rarely need a LITTLE bit of sugar water to help them get through, because if they’re provided with enough nectar, bees will make a shit-ton of honey. Most hives generate more honey than they can ever use.

And when a hive starts getting too full, the bees may swarm and try to go find a new place to live. Do you know what happens to a more than three-quarters of swarms that leave their hive? THEY DIE. Yup. Either they can’t find a new hive, or they run into predators, or they wind up landing somewhere that humans don’t want them and then exterminators get called.

So removing a few frames from the hive, taking out the wax and the honey, and replacing them for the bees to fill with new comb and honey and larvae is actually GOOD for the hive. The bees stay busy, they’ve got frames to fill, the queen doesn’t feel the need to go anywhere, and their human buddies can help keep them safe from natural predators and pesticides.

The mutually-beneficial relationship between humans and bees has existed for literally thousands of years. People keep hives, bees pollinate crops and make honey, people harvest the honey, the bees get extra protection and can happily buzz away keeping the plants healthy and making more sweet sugary goo.

Honeybees are an endangered species. If they die, not only does your vegan diet become completely impossible, but the entire planet is royally fucked.

And do you know who’s doing more than anybody else to keep them alive and make sure we don’t all starve?

BEEKEEPERS. And they treat those bees like their own damn children. They’re not going to feed them toxins or “steal” all their food, they want the bees to be happy and healthy and THRIVING.

Being vegan is absolutely fine, but don’t go trying to tell other people how to eat and don’t sound off on shit until YOU educate YOURSELF. Try talking to an actual beekeeper sometime. Or at the very least, read an article by a beekeeper instead of relying on someone else’s scare tactics.

Accepting help is brave - Hotlines/crisis lines

Spring Reading Reviews '16

This spring's list: NK Jemison, Rainbow Rowell, Stephen King, & Agatha Christie #amreading

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve written anything here.  I’ve been hard at work at my new novel, so apologies for my absences but really Sorry, Not Sorry. I have been reading though, and here are my thoughts on what I read this spring (March-May).  Minor spoilers (nothing plot related) below for The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by NK Jemison, Carry On by Rainbow Rowell, The Future of Life by Edward…

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Year 5: Surviving, Living, Changing

Surviving #TSS changed me. But one turn that I have never talked about is in my politics.

#WhenIWas is trending today on Twitter, and while that is about sexual assault and harassment, it strikes me as particularly, I don’t know, fateful that it would be today, April 19, 2016.  When I was 21, my world changed.  When I was 21, I died.  And when I was 21, I became alive again.  And everything that happened on April 19, 2011, everything that has happened in the five years since, so much…

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Why I’m Team Cap (and It Really Couldn’t Be Any Other Way)

#TeamCap and the big problem with the superhero genre #Arrow #Daredevil #CivilWar #MCU #DC

I recently started watching Arrow on Netflix; everyone on Tumblr seems to think “Olicity” is the greatest OTP since The One True Way or at least Destiel (neither Destiel nor Olicity reaching the heights of OTW obvi) and I wanted to understand (this is also how I ended up watching 9.5 seasons of Supernatural, but that is a story for another time). I also recently, like everyone else with a Netflix…

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Downton Abbey Blues

Downton Abbey is over.  Naturally, I’ve been watching the series over again on Prime.  But that and the latest season of Daredevil aren’t enough for me.  So, I thought I’d share some other period shows with awesome ladies being awesome.  They’re listed in chronological order from the time period. 1928-1931: Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (on Netflix) The Honorable Miss Phryne Fisher hasn’t taken…

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Winter Reading Reviews '16

Winter '16 Reading Reviews #bookreviews #amreading

A couple weeks late, but it gave me a chance to finally finish Tigana, which has been haunting me since the fall.  This review has minor spoilers for Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay, The Steel Remains by Richard Morgan, Before the Awakening by Greg Rucka, The Force Awakens by Alan Dean Foster, Games Wizards Play (Young Wizards series) by Diane Duane. (more…)

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Structuring a Series: Part IV

Structuring a Series Part IV: Follow-Up

Welcome back to Structuring a Series! This is mostly a follow-up to the rest of the blog series.  If you haven’t yet read Parts I, II, or III, or familiarized yourselves with Dan Well’s 7 Point Plot Structure, now’s a good time to do it! This installment is for structuring a series that is not a trilogy.  Using this structure is best for series with a serialized structure (or mythology arc)…

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Structuring a Series: Part III

Structuring a Series Part III: Planning a Series from 1 Book

Welcome back to Part III of Structuring a Series!  If you haven’t read Parts I and II yet, you might want to.  Or at least familiarize yourself with Dan Wells’s 7 Point Plot Structure. (No word on which one is a bigger time commitment.) Ok, so… you want to write a trilogy (or some other type of close-ended series with at least one arc running through the whole thing), BUT you only know what you…

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The Whole Potter-Dumbledore Relationship

Is Dumbledore actually evil or is he way more tragic than anyone realized? So I’ve been thinking recently about Harry Potter, and by recently I mean for the past decade and a half. But recently, as “since Thursday, February 11,” I’ve been thinking about a very specific thing in Harry Potter. Over at Tor.Com, Emily Asher-Perrin has a fabulous reread going on (that’s almost over *sob*), and in her…

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