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something so beautiful about good omens, heartstopper and red white and royal blue coming out on consecutive weeks. like yes, give me all the british gays, this is how it should be

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THE TRANSSEXUAL

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As we come upon the gay month, here is a friendly reminder about something because it comes up literally every year for me. In general and around this time.

If you see a post that is about or includes positivity about kink and sex and sexuality, please don’t comment “ewww sex” or “this !!! but without the sex part”.

And this is not to say you have to like sex. I am well aware that this heteronormative society places way too much emphasis on sexual chemistry in relationships. And that there are plenty of people who don’t experience sexual attraction, sexual enjoyment, or are sex repulsed. And that’s okay. And society shouldn’t be putting the pressure on you to want or enjoy sex.

This is to say that enjoying and indulging in sex and sexuality is a very important part to tons of communities, and it would be very helpful to not chime in on sex positive posts saying you don’t like sex. It’s almost like a “don’t yuck my yum” thing. ‘Cause like. I’ve noticed a ton of LGBTQ+ people feel the need to hide the sexual part of their identity. And emphasize “actually my relationships are totally emotionally fulfilling” but keep the sex part hush hush. And they shouldn’t have to avoid expressing sexual joy if they don’t want to. They should get to go “I fucked someone NASTY” or like “I masturbated in such a gender euphoric way” without feeling like they’re gross. ‘Cause they’re not! That’s awesome!

And it isn’t appropriate to go on posts celebrating and caring for people not having sex or not desiring sex or being sex repulsed and say “omg but what if you had sex” or “but sex is so good though!!!”.

Let’s all celebrate our experiences with sex and sexuality, whether sex is something we have and crave or not and not step on each other’s toes. ‘Cause we’re not supposed to be each other’s enemies. Infighting is a weapon oppressors use against us. So let’s all celebrate instead.

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i feel like no one really talks about the loneliness of writing original fiction. sharing your work is hard. believing that people like it is so hard. explaining yourself to people who don’t write feels messy and the mild exasperation when you say you’re working on something new (again? another one) like you’re inconveniencing them by sharing, even if they don’t feel that way, like you have to beg people to love this world that you create and the fear that they don’t or the fear that they are pretending, that they are putting up with your writing talk.

to be creative is to be chaotic and confusing and obsessed, and sometimes it feels like too much, too often, too all-encompassing. i don’t know how to be less.

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i finished reading your story and i must say that, while it's alright, there's so many plot holes because the characters made irrational decisions and didn't think logically 100% of the time. consider fixing this next time please

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A bad day of writing does not make you a bad writer. Nor does an odd piece of dialogue, or an illogical plot line.

Cut yourself some slack. Writing gets tedious sometimes.

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shoutout to everyone in iowa who protested matt "i'd rather be dead than have a trans child" walsh, thats not cancel culture thats defending psychology as a science and yall were fucking great

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lord the women you put on earth to enjoy media are being forced to log in to outlook and microsoft teams

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when you start writing a queer novel but you unexpectedly have a gender crisis which makes you add another trans character to your book making it even more complicated...

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I can confirm that it’s typically not a good idea to be vulnerable around a sibling. Especially if that sibling happens to be a younger brother. As well as a genius. (He’ll just catalogue your weaknesses and then figure out how to exploit you later. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

first paragraph of my WIP

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Tell me if you would you read this book idea:

There are five high schoolers who are both popular and queer. The cis hets are asking them out all the time and they’re tired of it. They band together to figure it out. But they eventually realize that their real problems actually have nothing to do with being popular or queer.

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I'm curious to hear if this resonates with anyone else...

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 Hi all! You may have heard there might be a writer’s strike soon. The reason for this is that every three years, the Writer’s Guild (which represents basically every television and movie writer) negotiates with the studios and networks (collectively called the AMPTP) to hash out an agreement of what guidelines the AMPTP have to follow if they want to hire a Writer’s Guild writer. If they can’t make an agreement by the time the contract from three years ago expires, which is on May 1, then no one will be able to employ a Writer’s Guild writer until a new contract is reached. That’s what a strike is. I don’t know if one will happen or not. Everyone, including the writers, deeply hope we’re able to make an agreement before May 1 and everyone will keep working. That being said, our last contract expired right at the start of the pandemic and everyone involved just kind of said “hey everything is weird right now so let’s not fight” so essentially we’ve got six years’ worth of grievances to talk about – that is why this one seems especially contentious.

So that’s the background. The WGA and the AMPTP started negotiations this week. This is expected to continue throughout April – no one expects to know either way until the end of April. Something very important I want everyone on Tumblr to know – while negotiations are happening, the WGA has committed to a complete media blackout. No member of WGA leadership or the negotiating committee will be speaking about how things are going to the media. This means that if you see an article talking about the WGA’s position, whoever gave them that information is not talking for us – and, since this is a two-sided negotiation we’re talking about, are probably talking directly against us. Use critical thinking on any negotiation-related articles you read – does what they’re saying make sense? Who benefits from saying this?

Why am I saying this now? Well, yesterday, Variety published an article claiming that the Writer’s Guild is advocating for the use of AI. The article was full of twisted facts and confused falsehoods. The article took the WGA’s position that you can’t replace credited writers with AI and touted it as “the WGA is okay with AI as long as writers are credited!” That is an extremely bad-faith twisting of our position.The WGA had to issue a clarification of our position on twitter and now I’ve seen articles taking bits of THAT out of context – specifically a Gizmodo article that implies that the Guild wants to take advantage of AI because it can’t be copyrighted, but their proof of that is a snippet from a section saying the reason we’re CONCERNED about AI writing is that it can’t be copyrighted.

And just, like….think about this for a second. Why on Earth would the Writer’s Guild WANT to replace writers with AI? Literally the organization whose entire purpose is to protect writing as a job? There’s no organization on Earth who would be opposed to it more. Every meeting I’ve been in has been unequivocally clear. WE ARE AGAINST AI. The second tweet in the thread I linked above says it outright: “AI can’t be used as source material, to create MBA-covered writing or rewrite MBA-covered work…” 

It just seems to me like it would suck if we do head into a strike in May, and everyone is pissed off at us because they believe we are striking for something that is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what we want. 

The WGA is in a media blackout. Be very skeptical of anything you read claiming to represent our position unless it comes from an official WGA source, like the one I linked above.

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I've seen some recent discourse on here (some highly outraged!) about how queer books are marketed & discussed on social media and here's my decontexualized two cents because I don't actually want to debate anyone:

Most of the books I've personally seen marketed like "gay! + (list of tropes)" are romances; they're marketed like this bc romances generally are very formulaic and readers generally know what plot beats to expect and are searching for certain specific character archetypes/dynamics. It's effective marketing for the target audience; you and I might just not be in that audience. I have some beef w/mainstream romance but it's not relevant here; my point is that you should know what you're criticizing, at least!

Interpreting like, cis MM romance novels as cynically trying to pander to the gays is a misstep to begin with, imo. The target audience for most of these is straight women. (Before you @ me consider the words "target" and "most!")

Queer books, outside of certain demographics within the romance genre—and YA, maybe? less sure of this one—are still largely considered very niche and unmarketable

Defining a target audience works both ways; cis het people are famously not very chill about being "tricked" into experiencing queer stories. "This book has trans characters" is also transphobe repellent.

On this website and only on this website I've had people scolding me on multiple occasions for mentioning in promotional materials for my books (which, yes, otherwise address the plot, genre, themes, etc.) that there are queer people in them. Like, I've gotten homophobic comments before, but only on tumblr dot com have people been pro-gay-content but anti-acknowledgement-of-gay-content-in-summary. Baffling!

People like to say "I don't care if the books are queer, I care if they're good!" but unfortunately, even though my books are good, saying this is not generally considered an effective marketing technique

This isn't a "you must uncritically support all queer art" post; more of a "perhaps unplug from the discourse before you start tilting at windmills" post :)

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perpetually annoyed by character criticism that is just “is this character sympathetic? is this character relatable? does this character get an ending they ‘deserve’ (as it correlates with their own moral goodness)?” so what if they’re unsympathetic. so what if they’re unrelatable. so what if they are made suffer. so what if they’re a symbol. they’re not real! fictional characters are tools in a story, like setting, or tropes, or tone, or style, or pacing, or medium. they are a figment, a fragment. they are not human beings, and they do not exist in a real life moral framework. this is not good analysis. ask better questions.