purpleyin

[purpleyin]

my family is lucky enough to own a 26 acre mountain property, log cabin and all. Most people would go up there and think that it is fairly pristine nature. There’s the cabin, and a few dirt roads for 4-wheelers, but the surrounding woods look untouched.

But we actually carefully maintain that nature. We cut down the deadfall. We pull invasive plants. We trim the elderberry bushes. We get more animals than almost anywhere else on the mountain because we put up salt licks and water troughs.

some of these same things are true of national parks. A lot of places that you think of as “untouched wilderness” are influenced heavily by human care and maintenance. And this isn’t a bad thing. We are animals too. In many ways, our ecosystems depend on us to keep them healthy. Many “wild” plants that are useful for food or building materials are actually semi-domesticated because indigenous groups cared for them and encouraged their growth so they do better with human care.

we have a place in nature. We just need to be conscious of our actions.

[purpleyin]

There are a lot of abuse and recovery stories out there in fandom.  A lot of them are written by people who’ve never been in an abusive relationship.  That’s fine, that certainly doesn’t mean you can't write it, especially when it’s present in canon.  Unfortunately, it does mean that a lot of people get it wrong.

The usual abuse narrative you see in fandom is a story about absence.  The lack of safety.  The lack of freedom.  The lack of love, or of hope, or of trust.  They try to characterize the life of an abused kid, or an abused partner, based on what’s missing.  They characterize recovery based on getting things back: finding safety, discovering freedom, and slowly regaining the ability to trust–other people, the security of the world, themselves.

That doesn’t work.  That is not how it works.

Lives cannot be characterized by negative space.  This is a statement about writing.  It’s also a statement about life.

You can’t write about somebody by describing what isn’t there.  Or you can, but you’ll get a strange, inverted, abstracted picture of a life, with none of the right detail.  A silhouette.  The gaps are real but they're not the point.

If you’re writing a story, you need to make it about the things that are there.  Don’t try to tell me about the absence of safety.  Safety is relative.  There are moments of more or less safety all throughout your character’s day.  Absolute safety doesn’t exist in anyone’s life, abusive situation or not.

If you are trying to tell me a story about not feeling safe, then the question you need to be thinking about is, when safety is gone, what grows in the space it left behind?

Don’t try to tell me a story about a life characterized by the lack of safety.  Tell me a story about a life defined by the presence of fear.

What's there in somebody’s life when their safety, their freedom, their hope and trust are all gone?  It’s not just gaps waiting to be filled when everything comes out right in the end.  It’s not just a void.

The absence of safety is the presence of fear.  The absence of freedom is the presence of rules, the constant litany of must do this and don’t do that and a very very complicated kind of math beneath every single decision.  The lack of love feels like self-loathing.  The lack of trust translates as learning skills and strategies and skepticism, how to get what you need because you can’t be sure it’ll be there otherwise.

You don’t draw the lack of hope by telling me how your character rarely dares to dream about having better.  You draw it by telling me all the ways your character is up to their neck in what it takes to survive this life, this now, by telling me all the plans they do have and never once in any of them mentioning the idea of getting out.

This is of major importance when it comes to aftermath stories, too.  Your character isn’t a hollow shell to be filled with trust and affection and security.  Your character is full.  They are brimming over with coping mechanisms and certainties about the world.  They are packed with strategies and quickfire risk-reward assessments, and depending on the person it may look more calculated or more instinctual, but it’s there.  It’s always there.  You’re not filling holes or teaching your teenage/adult character basic facts of life like they’re a child.  You’re taking a human being out of one culture and trying to immerse them in another. People who are abused make choices.  In a world where the ‘wrong’ choice means pain and injury, they make a damn career out of figuring out and trying to make the right choice, again and again and again.  People who are abused have a framework for the world, they are not utterly baffled by everyone else, they make assumptions and fit observations together in a way that corresponds with the world they know.

They’re not little lost children.  They’re not empty.  They’re human beings trying to live in a way that’s as natural for them as life is for anybody, and if you’re going to write abuse/recovery, you need to know that in your bones.

Don’t tell me about gaps.  Tell me about what’s there instead.

[purpleyin]

Just something I really want to share on here because it’s important.

[purpleyin]

the best fanfic is the one the author had fun writing actually.

[purpleyin]

scribbellz

[purpleyin]

may i offer you a gift basket in these trying times

[purpleyin]

[just sing, canary.] actually, it’s black canary.

[purpleyin]

I don’t know who needs to hear this but grief is so much more than just something you experience when someone dies. it’s okay to grief opportunities and time lost. people you used to know. people you used to be. relationships. ways of living. places. your childhood. you can feel grief over so many things and it’s okay and real and seeking help is okay too, you’re not being disrespectful.

[purpleyin]

"average cat owner spends 3 years in prison" factoid actualy just statistical error. average owner spends 0 years in prison. Miette's mother, who kicked her body like the football and went to jail for One Thousand Years is an outlier adn should not have been counted

[purpleyin]

Celebrate Trans Authors and Trans Characters this Transgender Awareness Week!

Happy Transgender Awareness Week everyone!! We asked our rec list contributors for their favorite books with trans characters or by trans authors, and the result is this list of 20 awesome books, all with trans characters (though some open to interpretation) and most by trans authors! This adds to the list of 11 books we did for Transgender Awareness Week last year. The contributors to this list are: Linnea Peterson, S. J. Ralston, Nina Waters and Shannon.

May the Best Man Win by Z.R. Ellor

Acting the Part by Z.R. Ellor

The Pairing by Casey McQuiston

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

Most Ardently by Gabe Cole Novoa

An Accident of Stars by Foz Meadows

Dreadnought by April Daniels

The Autobiography of a Transgender Scientist by Ben Barres

Fine: A Comic About Gender by Rhea Ewing

Deadendia: The Watcher’s Test by Hamish Steele

Cheer Up! Love and Pompoms by Crystal Frasier & Val Wise

The Pirate and the Porcelain Girl by Emily Riesbeck

Kim & Kim by Magdalene Visaggio & Eva Cabrera

Submerged by Vita Ayala

Rules For Ghosting by Shelly Jay Shore

Self-Made Boys by Anna-Marie McLemore

The Prospects by KT Hoffman

Brooms by Jasmine Walls

A Lady for a Duke by Alexis Hall

Free From Falling by E.L. Massey

What are your favorite books by trans authors and/or starring trans characters?

You can see all our favorite books with transgender characters by visiting our related shelf on Goodreads.

See a book you need to buy? Shop our affiliate shop on Bookshop.org to browse these and more books there!

Want to contribute to these lists? Patreon backers at all levels can join our Discord and become reccers with the Press!

[purpleyin]

nothinggg better than torturing an emotionally repressed character until every single trauma they've ever refused to process starts spilling uncontrollably out of the cracks. like a matryoshka doll situation of repressed trauma and baby you better believe i'm going in there with a hammer

[purpleyin]

So, there's a dirty little secret in indie publishing a lot of people won't tell you, and if you aren't aware of it, self-publishing feels even scarier than it actually is.

There's a subset of self-published indie authors who write a ludicrous number of books a year, we're talking double digit releases of full novels, and these folks make a lot of money telling you how you can do the same thing. A lot of them feature in breathless puff pieces about how "competitive" self-publishing is as an industry now.

A lot of these authors aren't being completely honest with you, though. They'll give you secrets for time management and plotting and outlining and marketing and what have you. But the way they're able to write, edit, and publish 10+ books a year, by and large, is that they're hiring ghostwriters.

They're using upwork or fiverr to find people to outline, draft, edit, and market their books. Most of them, presumably, do write some of their own stuff! But many "prolific" indie writers are absolutely using ghostwriters to speed up their process, get higher Amazon best-seller ratings, and, bluntly, make more money faster.

When you see some godawful puff piece floating around about how some indie writer is thinking about having to start using AI to "stay competitive in self-publishing", the part the journalist isn't telling you is that the 'indie writer' in question is planning to use AI instead of paying some guy on Upwork to do the drafting.

If you are writing your books the old fashioned way and are trying to build a readerbase who cares about your work, you don't need to use AI to 'stay competitive', because you're not competing with these people. You're playing an entirely different game.

[purpleyin]

Explain yourself.

[purpleyin]

see one of my problems w movies n tv shows is that they often show a character of like a scientist or a historian and try and make them extremely boring but that shit just doesnt work on me. theyll b like 'well in 13th century turkey...' n everyone will b like ughhh shut up professor dinglebarry no one cares and like. well excuse me. stop the movie. id like to hear more about 13th century turkey.

[purpleyin]

curious to hear y'all's suggestions for the worst possible pasta shape

(Assume that "pasta" needs to be made of sheets or strands of dough with enough surface area relative to thickness so that they can be cooked.)

[purpleyin]

Okay so this is a big deal

To me, and to a significant subset of Sir Terry's fans (including most of you who've found this by the tags), his writing is serious commentary on the human condition - politics, prejudice, self-control, revenge vs. justice, religion, idealism, faith in people vs. cynicism, and more - dressed up with fantasy settings and a hefty leavening of humor to make it fun to read. And it is WILDLY fun to read, actual laugh-out-loud or at least a snicker averaging about every page.

But there's this common idea among the "important literature" people that fun and funny books are not also worthwhile or important in the same way.

This is a Discworld book being released WITH ACADEMIC COMMENTARY and AS A PENGUIN CLASSIC. That's a HUGE amount of recognition.

[purpleyin]

There are so many different shades of white light bulbs, I am so overwhelmed walking down the light bulb aisle, and then I'm never happy with the one I choose, no matter which one I choose, I get it home and I put it in and I'm like, ugh, I don't like THAT white