#author death

[prokopetz]

Folks act like "maybe the author isn't the final authority about what their work means" is some wanky post-modern nonsense and not a simple recognition that a lot of authors are perfectly prepared to bullshit about their own work. Like, leaving big-name popular media aside, I have personally encountered authors being actively disingenuous about their own work for all of the following reasons:

A true answer wouldn't fit the image they've cultivated.

They've decided they like the explanation the readers/viewers have come up with better than what they actually had in mind.

Something that was originally intended as a standalone work ended up growing into a franchise or series, and now they're pretending that was the plan all along for some reason.

They don't want to admit that the bit you're asking about is genuinely just a plot hole.

The real answer gets into some shit they don't care to discuss, so they've prepared a cover story to explain away the parts they don't want to talk about.

Their politics have changed since they wrote it, but they don't want to acknowledge that, so they're constantly trying to re-interpret everything they've ever written to be perfectly consistent with whatever their positions are this week.

They wrote it decades ago and they honestly don't remember what they were thinking at the time, so they're just making shit up; sometimes they also don't remember what shit they made up the last time, so the answer is different every time they're asked.

The work in question is at least partly autobiographical and they can't tell the truth without confessing to a crime in the process.

Most of the good bits are plagiarised and they don't really understand it themselves.

They're lying to you on purpose, for evil reasons.

[throesofincreasingwonder]

"A story doesn't need a theme in order to be good" I'm only saying this once but a theme isn't some secret coded message an author weaves into a piece so that your English teacher can talk about Death or Family. A theme is a summary of an idea in the work. If the story is "Susan went grocery shopping and saw a weird bird" then it might have themes like 'birds don't belong in grocery stores' or 'nature is interesting and worth paying attention to' or 'small things can be worth hearing about.' Those could be the themes of the work. It doesn't matter if the author intended them or not, because reading is collaborative and the text gets its meaning from the reader (this is what "death of the author" means).

Every work has themes in it, and not just the ones your teachers made you read in high school. Stories that are bad or clearly not intended to have deep messages still have themes. It is inherent in being a story. All stories have themes, even if those themes are shallow, because stories are sentences connected together for the purpose of expressing ideas, and ideas are all that themes are.

[rs-hawk]

Working on my novel and couldn’t figure out why it felt so empty. I didn’t have any filler. It was all 100% plot. The characters only interacted when necessary. I didn’t prattle on about the scenery or how the birds sounded. I had all my fuller stuff that I loved saved in another file because I “didn’t need it”.

Y’all, I knew this existed in TV shows but it didn’t hit me until this that everything is being whittled down. We are so starving for filler that we snap up anything. I unload all mine on Tumblr or keep it in a massive Google Docs. It SUCKS.

Honestly? Death to plot necessity. Revive filler. Revive unnecessary interactions. Revive just vibing with characters sometimes. I don’t want to just consume the plot and I don’t want to just create the plot either.

[neil-gaiman]

I told my mother you had Tumblr and the absolute shock she was in that you are still alive and of somewhat sound mind was hilarious, would you be able to just tell her you are alive and not super old?

If not that's totally okay, ik you probably get a ton of these :)

I am sorry, but I fear I must disappoint you, for when you reach my advanced age it is difficult to remember whether you are alive or not.

[galaghiel]

Both Jack and Maddie stared at him, speechless. Silence blanketed the lab, everything but Danny’s strangled crying, his hand pressed over the muzzle as if to hide it. No- to hold it still, to still the dozen wicked barbs that were digging into his tongue, probably ripping it with each sob.

a little sketch of @liketolaugh-writes amazing one-shot fanfic that you can read here

[harbingerofsoup]

there’s death of the author and then there’s whatever the fuck is up with danny phantom

[angry-kid-with-no-money]

"Nora doesn't know anything about the things she writes about" "aftg is terrible queer rep" "the queer characters in aftg are so problematic"

Idk guys maybe the book series abt problematic ppl set in 2006 and written in the mid 2010s shouldn't be expected to hold up against scrutiny of what we consider to be moral and correct now, in 2024

Idk tho, idk

[tampire]

"Give me Coffee or give me Death"

[artemis-pendragon]

Imagine you're some religious guy who agrees to let an angel inhabit your body for a holy purpose and it all goes great except your wife thinks you're insane and threatens to take your daughter and leave but this is IMPORTANT so you let the angel in anyway. But then BUT THEN. it turns out the angel's mission is to pull Some Guy out of Hell and the fucking angel is gay and insane and rebels against Heaven because he wants to kiss this guy from literal Hell on the mouth so so so bad. Also many years later he does use your now thankfully empty human body (you got killed by Lucifer during the fight to stop the apocalypse btw) to fuck nasty with the guy he rescued because again, he's gay and insane. Every day Jimmy Novak wakes up

[the960writers]

Seconding all of the above, this has to be clearly stated in writing. As WQA said, the friend has to write down what they want to happen and assign someone to finish that story for them. Robert Jordan did that, he had in his will that his estate ask Brandon Sanderson to finish The Wheel of Time.

I just want to add, if we're talking about fanfiction, AO3 has the Fannish Next of Kin for this case. To quote: "someone who would gain access to your account in case of death or incapacitation. By naming another individual who can act on your behalf, you can decide ahead of time how you want your AO3 accounts handled going into the future."

Hello I have a question on behalf of my friend who doesn't have tumblr. So, my friend has been working on her long story for about 2 years now when she found time after school. However, it was recently discovered that she has a tumour in her brain that she will have surgically removed within the coming months and while she told me the chances of anything happening is low, she is still worried and has expressed concern over her story. She told me that she has so much of the story planned out but not written down, so many details or plotpoints etc.... So her question is: how can one prepare for the worst case senario if you have an unfinished story? There are so many details and conversations that need to happen.

Friend Concerned About Surgery/Not Finishing Story

It's very nice of you to ask on her behalf. Just to clarify, though, I'm not a legal expert, so I can't give you or your friend legal advice. Just some ideas based on personal experience.

As much as I wish this would be an easy thing for your friend to address, it isn't. Our stories are copyrighted the moment they are written down in a tangible form, and if something happens to us, that manuscript and all of the pertinent documents and notes become part of our estate. That said, it would be up to the executor of the estate to determine what is done with the story based on the person's wishes as outlined in their will. If someone wanted another person to finish the story for them, they would be designated as this person in their will and the executor would contact them and give them any documents and instructions that were needed. But, ideally, this will have been arranged between the writer and other person long before. If there isn't time for those conversations, your friend could put as much of the detail and instructions as they can in a document and have it kept with their important documents.

If your friend doesn't have a will or an estate (if they're a minor, for example), this is just something that will have to be arranged between them and the person they want to finish their story, but they should also make sure to notify their parents/guardians that this permission has been given, and may even want to give the person a notarized document stating that they give the person permission to finish the story. Otherwise, the friend's family could potentially file for copyright infringement.

I worry a little because I remember getting a similar ask a while back about someone who had been reading a story in progress, and it looked like the writer had passed, and this person wanted to know if they could just finish the story since they'd talked to this person and knew where the story was going. And I'm hoping this ask isn't coming from the same person looking for some loophole that would allow them to go ahead and do this. So, just in case and to clarify: you can't finish someone else's story without their express written permission. It doesn't matter whether that story was posted online and abandoned, or whether they told you what was going to happen and you're the only one who can finish it, or even if you had a verbal agreement. The best anyone could do in that scenario would be to contact the family (who either hold the copyright or have a right to contest infringement) and ask for permission.

And, in the case of this ask specifically, if the friend wants you or someone else to finish their story if the worst happens, they need to make sure they have granted you written permission that is notarized or otherwise legally commissioned.

Ultimately, your friend probably will want to talk to a lawyer. Though, I am deeply hoping that they come through their surgery safely and successfully so they don't have to worry about it. ♥

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I’ve been writing seriously for over 30 years and love to share what I’ve learned. Have a writing question? My inbox is always open!

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[katakaluptastrophy]

Periodically, I remember how absolutely fucked up the necromancers in TLT are meant to look. Like, necromancy does an absolute number on people physically.

Harrow is "rather small and feeble".

Necromantic Ianthe is "the starved shadow" of her non-necromantic twin.

Our first description of Palamedes is "a rangy, underfed young man" who is "gaunt".

Silas is "knife-faced...He had a necromancer build."

Ianthe parodies make-over scenes in House novels with "if the hero’s a necromancer it’ll be described like, ‘His frailty made his unearthly handsomeness all the more ephemeral'"

Jod acknowledges to Wake that even small children with aptitude would look odd to non-House eyes: "“I have access to any number of cute pictures of necromantic toddlers with their first bone. They don’t make for fat-cheeked roly-poly babies, but they’ve got a certain something."

In As Yet Unsent, Judith brags about her previous physical fitness: "I could run a kilometre in ten minutes, which was among the fastest for my adept group in the junior reserves." Which is about double the time you might expect for a physically fit woman her age.

In non-necromancer-friendly New Rho, Harrow's body is mistaken for a child's and has to be explained as a result of starvation and trauma to seem plausible: "Pyrrha explained without missing a beat that what with everything Nona had gone through she had been ill and still didn’t eat very much, which was why she was so knobbly and undergrown. The nice lady said that yes, many of the children had problems like that, but it was still hard to imagine Nona was anywhere over fourteen, wasn’t it?"

Tamsyn Muir's descriptions of the Canaan House gang on Tumblr back this up: "Judith is somewhat less completely scrawny than other necromancers on the cast, though she should be less built than Marta is", Palamedes is "seriously underfed" and "bony", Harrow is "scrawny".

And that's just what I can think of off the top of my head - I'm sure there's more.

Anyway, necromancers aren't slender in a conventionally attractive way, they're gaunt in a concerning way...and probably the only reason no one instantly clocked that Coronabeth wasn't a necromancer was because they all just thought it was par for the course that a Third House princess would have had a lot of plastic surgery flesh magic.

[fallenclan]

shits gettin REAL!!!! who is pumped. i know i am. enjoy the random ass starclan cat cameos that I crammed in here <3

finished this update JUST in time, but next week I'm gonna be even more busy so I guess we'll see!

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[cidr18]

Hehe🫀

[millaniumcat]

"But we need to separate the art from the artist..."

NO. STOP.

"Separating the art from the artist" and "death of the author" does not mean what most people think it means, and i am so sick of people using this as an excuse for an artists horrible behaviour. Yes, i am looking at you, J.K Rowling and Till Lindemann (and so many more.)

"Death of the author" is a LITERARY THEORY that argues that the meaning of a piece of art is determined by the readers interpretation, not the authors intention. It is a TOOL used by LITERARY STUDIES to determine the meaning of a piece of art.

It is not a good argument in an everyday discussion about problematic authors. And it is certainly not an excuse for people to keep supporting artists (and art!) that are queerphobic, transphobic, anti-feminisitc, antisemitic and misogynistic.

And no, "separation of artist and art" is not a reason to ignore the problematic views of the author that are INHERENTLY INCOPORATED in the art.

DO NOT EVER use "death of the author" or "separate art from artist" as an excuse. It is not.

[silverwolves14]

I was hoping she was just taking a break from writing, dammit ..

I hope you rest in peace vixen_tail

Thank you for writing so many amazing story

So today I had learned that a fanfiction author, whose work I had spent the last 8 or so years reading and rereading has departed this world. It's not a recent passing mind you but I only just found out that she, Vixen Tail, had passed away due to a Car Accident back on the 3rd of May which was eleven days after her last fanfiction update.

I waited patiently for a new update, there was often times months between updates which wasn't new and I know there were bouts of writers block but I never suspected anything until I shocked her profile.

So in memoriam to them, please given their works a look and enjoy what she had poured so much creativity into producing for us to read.

Naruto, Final Fantasy VII, Katekyo Hitman Reborn, and a Transformers/Halo Fanfictions were brought before us to read. So please have a read.

Serious warning though, their last project was Russian Roulette and has a grand total of 2,327,306 Words across 217 Chapters and three Works [110/101/6] but is still am amazing read full of worldbuilding

[filibusterfrog]

could i ask if you'd do a version of sapient undead sorcerer that isnt evil?