maddstermind

[maddstermind]

OH MY GOD THEYRE BEAUTIFUL!!!!!!! THIS IS AMAZING THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!! :D

Sutton for @maddstermind as part of the @writeblrgarden secret santa exchange!

I wanted to give you a version with and without freckles, since you said you were still in the fence about that.

They were a lot of fun to draw; I hope you enjoy!!

[maddstermind]

Hello hello @theglitchywriterboi!!! It's me, your secret santa for @writeblrgarden!!!!

I had. A lot of ideas of what I wanted to do, but I was limited by time (holiday season - working a LOT at a job I'm still new at), but I hope you like these two!!!! I had a blast drawing em!!! :D

[maddstermind]

being a writer leads to a genuinely helpful but also very stupid kind of mindfulness where you'll be having a sobbing breakdown or the worst anxiety attack of your life and think "okay, I really need to pay attention to how this feels. so I can incorporate it into my fanfiction."

[maddstermind]

“be stubborn about your goals but flexible about your methods.” the best advice I’ve ever received.

[maddstermind]

there are two types of writers.

“this plot has been in my head for 10 years and finally it’s perfect.”

“what if frogs had a secret government?”

[maddstermind]

you know its bad for you when you start coming up with aus for your own ocs

[maddstermind]

trying to be a writer is so scary. like what if I’m actually a Wronger

[maddstermind]

Was wishing there was a positivity post for original fiction writers since I see so many about how fanfic writers are doing so much for their communities even when they're not actively writing, and then I thought:

Be the change you want to see in the world.

So this is a positivity post for the writers out here who are working very hard on stories with no established community. Who can't talk about their blorbos and plot lines and brainstorming to anyone and expect them to know what any of it means. Who don't have much to share publicly, but are hoping they will one day.

You're doing a lot of hard work, and I recognize and appreciate what you're putting into the world, even when you're resting.

[maddstermind]

You all need to hear this:

1. You probably dont suck at your craft as much as you think you do, I bet a lot of people are amazed at what you can make, and

2. If you actually are the Literal Worst In The Whole Wide World at your craft... who the fuck cares? What are they gonna do, call the police on you? Keep making your shitty little things, youre the boss of you, fuck the haters.

[maddstermind]

oc asks that reveal more than you think

Do they sleep with a stuffed animal? If they have multiple, who’s the favorite?

Can they take care of a plant? What about a pet? What about a child?

Ask them to describe their love interest.

Do they look good in red?

Speech! Speech! Speech! Speech! Will they give one, and what about?

Who will they take advice from, no matter what it is? Who won’t they take advice from, no matter what it is?

Describe them in three words. Now let them describe themself in three words.

Do complex puzzles intrigue or frustrate them?

Do they empathize with non-sentient things (dolls, plants, books…)?

What age do they most want to be right now?

They’ve won the lottery. Spend, or save?

Do they like romance in the books they read (or in the book they’re in)?

Name one thing their parents taught them.

Would they agree with the term ‘guilty pleasure’? Do they have any?

What would they consider a waste of time– other than school or work?

If money wasn’t a limit, what would they wear?

Do they like children?

Kissing: tongue or no tongue?

Do they study before tests? Practice before job interviews?

What do they like that nobody else does?

What would it take for them to break up with someone? What would be the last straw?

Do they like being called pet names? Do they call other people pet names? What’s their go-to?

Stability or novelty?

Honesty or charity?

Safety or possibility?

Talent or effort?

Forgiveness or vengeance (or…)?

Would they date a fixer-upper?

What recurring dreams do they have?

What would they do if they knew it would be forgiven?

Support the author: all writing | book | ko-fi | Patreon

[maddstermind]

*writes a sentence or two after writing nothing for days*

[maddstermind]

It's fucking

here

Do you like tracking your words (or hours spent writing)? Do you like seeing statistics about your writing trends and habits? Do you like doing these things offline and/or for free, on something you can customise and fine-tune to your heart's content? Do you like doing it year-round for multiple projects simultaneously?

If you answered yes to any of the above, then you may like this. A spreadsheet workbook that's compatible with Excel, Google Sheets and Calc (and possibly more, but I've only tested it in those three). Set it up (with the help of a very detailed instruction manual, if you need it) and then all you need to do is type your words written/hours spent and watch everything else evolve across the year. You can do a bunch of stuff with it, including:

Track your writing progress

Set, track and manage project goals & watch line go up a la NaNoWriMo

Separate writing into and compare by different project "types" (e.g., fanfic or original writing)

And see different statistics about your writing habits/trends throughout the year, like:

Daily hours/words spent across the year

Daily and monthly averages

Top project and top month

Daily streaks, usual streak length and longest streak

See the linked blog post for a full "tour", or go straight to payhip to download directly: hours version / words version

i love you all. merry crisis and happy writing <3

[maddstermind]

Discussions of what "counts" as "canon" queer representation fall apart the second you start talking about media older than about five years or so. If your only metric for "canon queerness" is a character looking directly into the camera and explaining their identity in specific, modern, US-American-English terminology, you're not going to get a good picture of what queer media looks like. If your barometer for what counts as "canon" requires two characters of the same gender to kiss on-screen, you're not going to get a good picture of what queer media looks like.

Dr. Septimus Pretorius (portrayed by Ernest Thesiger in 1935's Bride of Frankenstein) was never going to look directly into the camera and explain his sexuality in 2024 terms, but he remains an icon in queer media history. You cannot look at that character (blatantly queer-coded in the manner of the time, played by a queer man in a film directed by another queer man) and tell me that he isn't a part of queer media history.

To be honest, even when discussing modern queer media, I would argue that the popular idea of what "counts" as "canon" is very narrow and flawed. I've seen multiple posts in the past few days that say the Nimona movie is "implied" trans representation, and I just...no, y'all, it's not "implied," it's an allegory. The entire damn movie is about transgender struggle, and the original comic is deeply tied into N.D. Stevenson's own queer journey. It isn't subtle. You cannot look at that movie and pretend that it isn't about trans struggle. It's blatant, and to say that Nimona "isn't canonically trans" is a take that misses the story's entire message, and the blatant queerphobia that almost kept the movie from happening. (I wrote a five thousand word essay about the topic.)

Queer themes, queer coding, queer exploration, and queer representation can all exist in a piece of media that doesn't seem to have "canon queer characters" on the surface. Most queer characters are never going to be able to explicitly state their specific identity labels, be it due to censorship or just due to the fact that scenes like that don't fit in some narratives. Some stories aren't conducive to a big "so what's your identity?" scene.

Explicit, undeniable, "this is my identity in no uncertain terms" scenes are very important and radical, and I'm not saying they shouldn't ever exist. I am saying that you can't consider those scenes the only way for queerness in a piece of media to be "canon."

[maddstermind]

"you're the writer, you control how the story goes" no not really. i wrote the first sentence and then my characters said "WE WILL TAKE IT FROM HERE" and promptly swerved into an electrical fence.

[maddstermind]

Avalon Fantasy Couture "Spring Goddess" Haute Couture Gown

[maddstermind]

“How’s your WIP going?”

"Have you made any progress?”

“How close are you to being done?”

[maddstermind]

Hey, remember GONCHAROV? I just saw this paper:

“Goncharov (1973), Internet Folklore, and Corporate Copyright”

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4776768

Abstract

Goncharov (1973) is a meme – an especially rich, complex, collaborative, and mutating one. It revolves around a movie that doesn’t exist: Goncharov, a fictional Martin Scorsese film that the internet decided to collectively pretend had been made in 1973. Over the course of a few feverish weeks in the fall of 2022, a variety of social media users, with no coordination and without knowing anything about each other or the overall project, created a cast, a storyline, a soundtrack, reviews, fanfiction, and a promotional poster. And they did it all for free. Actually, they did it all for fun – a concept foreign to copyright law’s idea of creativity.

This Article uses the Goncharov meme to illustrate exactly how much copyright law doctrines have been developed to support a narrow, corporate conception of copyright. Copyright law depends heavily on an understanding of creativity as an economic venture mediated by contractual relationships. Sprawling collaborative and unmonetized memes like the Goncharov meme sit uneasily in the system, likely uncopyrightable as a type of folklore. However, positioning a meme like Goncharov as the equivalent of public domain folklore leaves the meme vulnerable to financial exploitation by others. This Article uses the vehicle of Goncharov to ask whether such a result is what copyright law should support, or whether we should rethink how we treat the new traditional knowledge being developed daily by our creative culture. This Article argues that copyright law dangerously focuses attention on a very small slice of human creativity, leaving huge amounts of creativity devalued as undeserving of legal protection. This hierarchy paints a watered-down picture of creativity. Creativity, as can be seen just in the single example of the Goncharov meme, is so much more complex, multi-faceted, unpredictable, and interesting than the law posits. As we prepare to grapple with machine-generated creativity that may challenge copyright assumptions, we shouldn’t forget the vast swaths of human-created creativity that also challenge those assumptions.