#I’m not rereading this you can have my unedited ramblings

[mightbewriting]

Do you edit as you go or do you finish the chapter/scene then edit? I find myself rereading my work after I read and thinking it sucks and stopping it. Do you edit your work? I feel as though I compare myself to writers believing they write so well they don’t edit and that I must suck if i edit so much. So sorry if i’m rambling 😭. Writing is hard.

hi anon,

writing is hard. incredibly hard. and it's not worth it in the slightest to compare your drafts to someone else's finished works! of course i edit my work. i edit it to hell and back. and i'm not sure i could come up with a single person i know who puts their work out there 100% unedited. editing is a massive part of the writing process, and usually where a story really starts to take shape.

as for the logistics of the first couple of questions, if you find that rereading what you're working on zaps your motivation to finish, then my vote is to finish first, then reread. that's usually my process. if im writing something longer i might edit/revise chapter by chapter. but if i'm working on a one shot or something shorter, i don't let myself reread at all until i have draft one done. especially if you're someone with perfectionist tendencies, editing as you go can sometimes mean never finishing because the edit loop can trap you and kill all forward momentum.

i'm a big fan of doing word sprints as a way to combat the impulse to reread. a true word sprint involves a getting as many words written in a set amount of time (best experienced with friends imo), with no deleting or editing during the sprint. all the typos stay. all the wording you want to change the moment you finish the sentence stays. its a great way to desensitize yourself to your work being messy and imperfect. so if you haven't tried word sprints before, highly recommend!

hopefully some of this helps, anon!

[kekeslider]

Hi, I'm not in the fandom and have never seen an episode of Voltron. How come Altean Lance bothers ppl?

There could be a lot of different reasons varying from person to person and may also depend on what version of Altean Lance it is. Altean Lance aus have existed basically since the start of the show. Lance is not actually Altean at any point in the show, he’s just given the marks at the end of the show by Allura as a mark of love or something. So early in the fandom, there were theories that Lance might have some Altean heritage, the basis of which was that the blue lion opened a wormhole in the first episode, which later on is something only Allura can do. And then you add in that Keith turns out to be part galra, fandom liked the idea of Lance being Altean to play into the rival/enemies dynamic they had and for their relationship to be a symbol of progress and healing (pretty much what the show did with Lotura and what could have also been achieved with kallura without having the racebend anyone). Not everyone held altean Lance as an actual theory about the future of the show, many people just used it as an au. In Fic, Klance “galtean” AUs became very common especially to create stories about royalty, wherein Lance would typically be an Altean prince (often Allura’s brother 🤮), whereas Keith might be a galran bodyguard or prince or whatever. I always, always hated these AU’s because Altean Lance is almost always written atrociously, writers making him meek and effeminate, a flighty, pompous Royal who can’t do anything for himself. And many people have pointed out that the fandom’s obsession with Lance being alien in someway when there was really nothing backing it up was pretty nasty considering he was canonically Latino, and that was always being pushed aside to focus on him maybe being something cool and different. I couldn’t say for sure, but in anon’s case I think the aversion to Altean Lance (or just Lance with the Altean marks) might come from how he got them. For me, they’re a constant reminder that Allura died at the end of the show right after giving them to him, and Lance went on to spend his life never moving on from her loss, never looking for love again, and telling people about Allura as if she was a prophet and he was an apostle spreading the good word. In showing how Lance would always love Allura, the show made him isolated and made it seem like he worshiped her as an idol rather than loved her as a person, someone he knew well and was close to. Lance gave up everything we knew he cared about before. I didn’t want to be a pilot anymore, wasn’t anywhere close to it, he went and worked on a farm growing Allura’s favorite flowers. The boy who out of the whole team was always the one looking for love is implied to have spent the rest of his life single after losing his first girlfriend in his early 20s. The Altean marks pack a lot of bad feelings and memories into 2 little crescents, but that’s how it falls. It’s always been especially annoying because Lance getting them in canon made them basically unavoidable, every klance artist in the world now puts them on Lance in every canon setting, even though they don’t add anything to it besides dredging up all those bad feelings from many other people

[tthael]

Hi Hollers! I hope you're doing well. I adored the last Indelicate chapter, and I cannot thank you enough for writing this story and sharing it with us all. I was wondering if you would be able to, please, discuss your rewrites and drafting process? If not, that's okay! I'm just interested, because you're an immensely talented writer. Have a good day!

Absolutely! I’ll use Indelicate as an example. I’m not super great at starting out with a complete outline when I come up with a story idea, but I have some big beats in mind--it was going to be Eddie waking up and telling Richie he loves him, the kiss scene at Ben’s house, and then some secret scenes I haven’t gotten to yet because they’re part of the endgame!

So when I have a scene in mind, basically I have to write myself from point A to point B. So far I’ve been doing this sort of as it would work in real life. We start with Eddie in the hospital, and then we move on to his time in the hospital and what he has to accomplish before his release, and then we move from his release to his decision about where to go because he doesn’t want to stay in Maine. But there’s the built in constriction of a follow-up doctor’s appointment 3 weeks after his surgery, so I have some artificial structure in there. And then I find smaller events to write about--Eddie eating meals, Richie and Eddie having conversations, Eddie and Richie going on a date.

So every chapter is basically three or four scenes strung together. I write the scene the way I want it to, and then I put them in the right order. Sometimes I change my mind and decide I want other things to come first, so I shuffle them around. This is the hardest part of the writing, because I’m starting with nothing. Revisions and edits are easier. I aim for 21 pages--it’s an arbitrary number, that’s just the length that the unedited first chapter of Things That Happen After Eddie Lives turned out to be, so it was my target for the rest of the project--but I’ve frequently doubled that writing Indelicate.

Then, when I have my four scenes, I open a second doc right next to my big Indelicate document and I rewrite the whole thing. I make edits as I go--I improve my word choices, I pick better verbs and eliminate passive phrasing, and I clarify the blocking in the chapter. For instance, I recently published a chapter that has Richie being very physical--and in the first draft it wasn’t clear where he was in the room, how many arms he had, and exactly how he was roughhousing with Eddie. I knew it in my head, but I had to clarify it in my edits, and my beta agreed with me that it was much clearer that Richie had only 2 arms. This is what I consider my “revisions.” I can feel when revisions are going well because the writing feels tighter and less rambly, and there’s a sort of... spark, that I’m really going for. Usually the banter improves in drafts, because I get more in the mood to write funny things. It might even change entirely. Banter is just usually better the second time around. I’ve also noticed that the revision is usually longer than the original draft, because I’m able to expand more on the narration and description.

Then I do a third revision. This I call edits, because it’s less of a decision of “what” I want to say and more “how,” on a smaller scale. Usually I edit scene by scene, with an editing doc open next to the revision doc. All in all, I’ll retype the whole chapter at least 3 times, so I’m very familiar with what I’m saying and I’m also very tired of rereading it. I want to cut down on repeats of words, adjust my paragraph breaks for dialogue, and make sure everything sounds finished.

THEN I put the completed chapter in the AO3 text box. Because I like to do my content warnings in my chapter notes, I reread the entire chapter again and I make my content warnings in chronological order, unless there’s something very big and obviously triggering--like homophobic bullying, or sexual violence, something like that, which goes at the very top of the content warnings list. This is when I insert my line breaks--I really like the line break that AO3 has. This is where I tend to catch the last of my typos or smaller errors.

Then I hit preview to make sure that the formatting is all working, and if the line breaks are in the correct place, I hit publish! That’s a full chapter.

And then, the further I get in the story, the closer I get to those main beats, the more I know what’s happening chapter by chapter. Sometimes I’ll realize that something is going to be a big deal in the very end of the story, and I need to start laying the track for that early on. It’s not a perfect system, but the chapter installation format helps me finish things in chronological order.

If I’m too excited about writing a scene, I’ll lose momentum for writing everything that comes before it, so I have to hold off. It’s the delayed gratification of “okay, you can’t write the big kiss scene right now, BUT if you write these less interesting scenes, then you get to write the big kiss scene.” I’m not naturally a super disciplined person, so it’s good for me to have rules for myself in writing.

Thank you so much for asking and I hope that this helps!

[terramythos]

TerraMythos' 2020 Reading Challenge - Book 3 of 26

Title: Shriek: An Afterword (Ambergris #2) (2006)

Author: Jeff VanderMeer

Genre/Tags: Weird, Memoir, Historical (like... in a fictional world lol), Horror, Fantasy, War, Mushroompunk (yeah), Postmodern, Female Protagonist, Disabled Protagonist, First Person, Unreliable Narrator.

Rating: 7/10

Date Began: 1/19/2020

Date Finished: 1/29/2020

Shriek: An Afterword is a pseudo-memoir by a woman named Janice Shriek about the troubled lives and relationships of her and her brother Duncan Shriek in the strange, fungus-riddled city of Ambergris. While Janice believes Duncan is dead, he's apparently found her manuscript and makes extensive edits and commentary throughout the story. (This is indicated in parenthetical sentences, like this one.) 

The closer I get to the end, the closer I get to the beginning. Memories waft up out of the ether, out of nothing. They attach themselves to me like the green light, like the fungi that continue to colonize my typewriter. I had to stop for a while -- my fingers ached and, even after all that I have seen, the fungi unnerved me. I spent the time flexing and unflexing my fingers, pacing back and forth. I also spent it going through a box of my father’s old papers -- nothing I haven’t read through a hundred times before... On top, Duncan had placed the dried-up starfish, its skeleton brittle with age. (I kept it there as a reminder to myself. After your letter to me -- which, while reading this account, I sometimes think was written by an entirely different side of your personality -- I wanted to remember that no matter how isolated I might feel, separated from others by secret knowledge, I was still connected. It didn’t help much, though -- it reminded me of how different I had become.) 

To qualify my rating, I have to be honest. This book is officially separated into two parts, and I found Part I -- which makes up about 60% of the novel -- pretty boring. On the other hand, Part II is brilliant, and everything coalesces beautifully in this second act. Is it worth it? I thought it was, but I understand anyone who tries and gives up. 

Even though Shriek is technically a standalone, I would strongly recommend you read City of Saints and Madmen (#1) first. Both Duncan and Janice are key characters in two of those stories (The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris and The Transformation of Martin Lake, respectively), and there are references and connections all over the place. I’m not sure if Shriek does a great job introducing Ambergris to new readers, so people starting here will be pretty lost without reading the first book.

Just to clear the air, I really liked this book... overall. As I said, the first half-or-so of the book was pretty rough, but the second half redeems it in a lot of ways, even justifying certain writing/plot decisions that didn’t gel with me at first. However “it gets good eventually” is not really an excuse for the rough first half. Hence the mediocre rating. I was close to giving this book a 6/10, but I found that I appreciated the first half much more by the time I got to the ending, so that bumped it up a little. Maybe I’ll enjoy this book more on a reread when I can see the patterns and know where they’re leading ahead of time. 

Before I dive into my issues with it, I’d like to discuss the strong points of this novel. 

At a base level, VanderMeer is a great writer. He has a mastery of the English language that always delights me when I read his stuff. So even when I struggled to like this story in the first half, his wordplay and prose were entertaining and thought-provoking. 

I loved the format. The story basically has two protagonists, since you see things from Janice’s point of view and then Duncan’s interpretations-- but it’s in a very postmodern way, not just a perspective switch like most novels do. Duncan’s commentary often brings much needed humor or heartbreak, depending on the situation. 

In particular, any scene in which Janice and Duncan interact directly is brilliant. Janice recalls a scene, but her memory is faulty (like anyone’s), so sometimes she forgets what they talked about, or interpreted an interaction in a certain way. Then Duncan dives in with his own commentary, supplying information Janice didn’t include or forgot, or correcting something she said, or offering an alternate interpretation... these scenes were fascinating to read and some of my favorite parts of the novel. 

There’s a lot of fun revelations and Easter eggs for people who read City of Saints and Madmen. In particular: 

My favorite story in the first book was The Cage, which is a work of fiction  within the universe of Ambergris by a man named Sirin. In particular there is a very creepy and distinct monster that plays a pivotal role in the story. However, since it’s technically fiction within fiction, that monster and the events didn’t really happen in canon... right? Imagine my surprise in this book when Janice encounters and describes a very similar monster. This struck me as odd, until I got to epilogue/afterword at the end... written by Sirin, and everything clicked. He got the idea for his “fictional” monster from Janice’s account in this story. He doesn’t state this outright, but it’s the only explanation that makes sense. I loved that. It was like putting a puzzle together and it would have been so easy to miss. And there’s the extra horror that something like that really exists in this world. There was other stuff like this but this one stood out to me, and I’m sure there’s other things I missed. 

This mostly concerns the second half, but the war sequences and memories are horrific and brilliant. It's very World War II-esque with a unique twist to it (the awful fungal bio weapons one of the sides uses). In particular, the war is introduced with a chapter about a ceasefire opera staged in the broken city... without spoiling it, it’s an excellent and intriguing self-contained story. 

And the horror chapter about the Festival, which is conspicuously absent in the rest of the story? Just so goddamn good. VanderMeer strikes just the right chord with me when it comes to horror. It’s always fresh and intensely creepy. 

If you told me this during the first half, I wouldn’t believe you -- but I ended up loving the characters and finding most of their relationships fascinating. This is a heartbreaking story and it really hit home by the end. 

With that lofty praise, what’s my issue with Part I? The simplest way I can put it is that the struggles Duncan and Janice face are so mundane. They would maybe be interesting in a generic work of fiction, but here they felt out of place. For example, Janice’s arc concerns her rise to fame, which leads to success, which leads to lavish parties and orgies, which leads to excesses and a drug addiction, which leads to a suicide attempt, which leads to rehab, which leads to a diminished life of poverty. Yes, these can be interesting and harrowing problems in the right context, but the strongest point of these books is the setting, and there was nothing that tied these events to Ambergris. You could easily go through and change the character/place names and it wouldn’t seem off. 

Duncan is a little more interesting in this regard, because his is a story of obsession. In particular, he’s obsessed with the gray caps (strange humanoid mushroom creatures that haunt the pages of these books), and it takes over his life until he becomes totally discredited as a historian. But even he falls into this trap when he becomes a college professor and has an affair with one of his much younger students (Yikes! Though it is treated as creepy within the story, at least). That takes over most of his character’s emotional core from that point. 

Said student -- Mary Sabon -- is a core antagonist in the story. Janice in particular obsesses over her and her personal vendetta against her, and honestly even with the second part I was never really sold on this or cared about it all that much, so I was disappointed it took up so much of the story. 

All of this would be one thing, but there’s all sorts of tantalizing hints about more interesting things. The gray caps probably have some ulterior motive that no one knows! There’s this crazy eldritch Machine hidden underground! Duncan is sort of turning into a mushroom! But these are only teased before the story pivots back to something comparatively uninteresting. Rather than encouraging me with the cool foreshadowing, it just got grating because it meant there were more interesting events and stories going on that I didn’t get to see for some arbitrary reason. Janice also rambles and goes back and forth quite a bit. This is clearly intentional (after all, you learn in the end this is a mostly unedited draft -- at least in the fiction of the story), but even so, it can be hard to follow at times. 

Part II justifies a lot of this because these hints do pay off. You DO get to see a lot of the interesting stuff in detail at this later point of the story, and it’s not always what you expect. There’s overt and subtle dramatic irony and contrast between what characters go through in the first half versus the stranger, more profound traumas of the second half. You learn Janice is suffering from some severe PTSD and it explains a lot of the manic style in the first half. But again, is it worth 245-ish mediocre (to me) pages? I think that probably depends on the reader. I had a problem with it-- but clearly a lot of people don’t, based on reviews I’ve skimmed. Many put the book down and don’t finish it, but that’s true for any book. Hell, lots of people preferred the first half, so who knows. 

Ultimately, I’m glad I read this book. For me it really does come together in an amazing way toward the end, and I found myself really caring about Janice and Duncan. If you read City of Saints and Madmen and want more of the characters and the world, then definitely give this a try. But it is a pretty niche book as these things go, so I can’t recommend it to everyone. 

Anyway, I’ve come this far -- so I’m going to read Finch, the final (for now?) installment in this universe. 

[spuriusbrocoli]

I'm not straight at all and I don't get most of your posts about being LGBT vs. being straight?

So I presume you’re talking about this post that I made as well as… another one. Which I’ll talk about later.

Basically, this post is about how I have an irrational association between my experiences as a queer person (nonbinary mlm is a pretty accurate label, I think) and my experience raising my pets. And I know that this association between my queerness and my pets is entirely imagined; I draw attention to the fact that it wasn’t logical in the post.

(bolding edited in here)

I can’t imagine how heterosexuals do pet-rearing.

Like, I got my first cat at the same time as I did my first live-in boyfriend, and then we got my first dog where we were the primary caregivers to the dog as opposed to our parents.

As a result, the emotions of my overwhelming queerness and the emotions associated with raising my sons (i.e., the cat and dog) are probably more intertwined than is logical. And when I see cishets with pets I’m just like “¿¿¿¿¿¿¿???????? the straights aren’t allowed to do that”.

The point of this post is “Hey, I have this weird association that doesn’t make any sense! Isn’t that funny?” I know straight people can have pets; I was in fact raised by two straight people with pets. That’s part of the joke (that straight people can have pets, not that my parents in specific did). The punchline is supposed to be me and the inherent absurdity of my reaction to seeing straight people with pets, because, again, straight people can and do raise pets and everyone knows this including myself which is the entire joke.

Like, I did actively call attention to that fact in the post. I’m kind of at a loss as to how to make my posts more unambiguously facetious. Maybe I could tag it as “#jowak” to let audiences know that I’m kidding, but I tagged The One Post as “#rant”, and it didn’t do shit, so idk.

But anyway, let’s talk about The One Post, shall we?

On the third-and-twentieth of April, two-thousands-and-eighteen anno domini, according to Tumblr, I made a post that got… some attention.

Rather a lot of attention, actually.

My do these folks know how to make a girl blush.

Just so many lovely characters here…

And that’s without the reblogs (mostly more of the same, but editing out the usernames and profiles is a pain, so I’m not gonna bother).

Sot tldr: it got attention. Almost 5k notes’ worth of attention in fact. Yay me.

Now I will openly admit that the original is an incoherent rant. It’s all over the place, and if people missed the point, I’d understand. I considered addressing some of the legitimate points, but until now they had been too buried in the crap for me to really bother (though I will address some of the less-shitty vitriol here).

But enough talking about The One Post, let’s just read the whole unedited thing, shall we?

a straight girl will date anything vaguely male-shaped so long as its as cis and het as she is. istfg you could line up the handsomest butches who could eat her pussy for days or the most genteel bi boys who could top her from wall to wall of her tacky apartment, and she’ll still choose her broke, ugly trogolodyte boyfriend who thinks staring at her tits is foreplay and humping vaguely in her direction will get her to cum bc gay men are meant only to compliment her tasteless dress over brunch and lesbians are gross.

(whole thing can be found here as well)

So this post was actually inspired by two very specific neighbors. They had two dogs–Pluto and Coppernicus, whom my puppy was not allowed to socialize with. The two of them were actually kind of infamously unfriendly with everyone in the building, tbth. That’s neither here nor there, but it’s some context.

Anyway, I see this miserable woman while we’re both going in and out of the laundry room. She’s, like, decent-looking, but my type for women tends to err between butch and futch. And her husband/fiance/boyfriend/partner/whatever is real ugly. Like, a potential project for Queer Eye type: utter lack for clothing or basic skincare. Except he’s also an ass.

So I made a post that was mostly about how straight boys are ugly. And straight boys are kind of ugly. Bc we as a society code that sort of basic self-care as queer/feminine, which is the fault of no individual straight boy–and certainly not the fault of this one dude.

But as I was making the post, it kind of occurred to me that many straight women are not only complicit in this system, but they actively encourage it. Straight women do avoid men attracted to women–even straight men–if they seem “too effeminate”. So I went back and edited the post to be inclusive of queer men attracted to women.

Then it kind of occurred to me that attraction isn’t really perfectly binary to begin with and that we as humans are primarily attracted to features like how our potential partners conduct themselves and not really to abstract labels like “man” or “woman”. This isn’t to say that people aren’t attracted to people with any given label (there’s a big difference between men attracted to feminine women and men attracted to feminine men, for instance), but they aren’t coherent classes. And straight women are getting wise to this; look at this comic routine about a straight woman’s first time at a gay bar (yeah, it’s hardly scientific evidence, but this isn’t my fucking thesis). Hence why I went back again and edited in the butch comment.

So yeah, the result was an incoherent mess. And I can sort of understand how someone could read this post and think I was equating butches with straight men, which I do not want to do. Women, no matter how masculine, have a fundamentally less privileged position than men, and gnc women experience the intersectional oppressions of patriarchy and gender conformity. And if this all-over-the-place rant seems to be equivocating between cis and trans people’s experiences or men and butches’ to you, I get that. My wording was bad, and I should’ve done a reread. I’m sorry for that.

What I wasn’t expecting and am definitely not apologizing for is the influx of hatemail from straight people calling me a lesbian incel. And I know that it’s coming from straight people bc wlw would never call another wlw an incel bc the incel subculture is distinctly one rooted in the experiences of male entitlement to women’s bodies. And bc wlw are objectified like all women, they understand that the experiences of an entitled straight man are not equivalent to wlw who can’t find a partner bc of systemic issues that affect all women and especially sapphic women. (Or I hope that wlw have that level of understanding at least.) Or like, just listen to the original, mournful “Slow Dance” compared to the quietly negging “White Blank Page” or “Treat You Better”. (No shade against Mumford and Sons, but both of these examples show how jealous straight men tend to turn their lack of unrequited love at either the other man or at the object of his affection; Babeo Baggins is just sad.)

So given that I am (i) assigned male and male-aligned, (ii) attracted primarily to men, and (iii) in a happy relationship with a nonbinary person with a penis; the hatemail is rather ridiculous.

And that’s exactly what it is: hatemail. Reread through that shit, and it’s just utterly vitriolic. And I’m not gonna say my post wasn’t vitriolic in turn; it definitely was. But my faggot exasperation with straight dudes is not equivalent to the degree to which people on this site harass lesbians. And even if I were a lesbian who couldn’t get with a girl bc she had some ugly-ass boyfriend, that’s still no excuse to turn her personal, rambly post into a nearly 5,000 note meme.

So tldr: Leave lesbians tf alone.

Now to loop back to your original statement, dear Nonnie (I know it has a question-mark, but I read that as upspeak in this context and not a true question):

I’m not straight at all and I don’t get most of your posts about being LGBT vs. being straight?

Well, I’m a queer talking about my queer-ass experiences and my queer-ass thoughts. If your not-straight self relates to that, well great. If you don’t, that’s kind of not my problem. My blog isn’t a resource of any sort, and I wouldn’t claim otherwise; even my linguistics tag is mostly my opinions (though my opinions on linguistics are gonna be way-the-hell better-informed than a non-linguist’s, just sayin’).

So frankly, unfollow. Or don’t. I kind of don’t care. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯