#is any of this relevant? idk but be glad i deleted the two paragraphs that were basically just my autobiography

[tyrannuspitch]

@kidrat:

ok u know thats a great point bc i hadn't even realised how weird it was that ppl only mention lesbians as women who use he/him! but yh it's weird. like all the stuff i've seen abt elliot coming out is a) transphobes sad they 'lost a lesbian' and b) queer ppl immediately reminding other queer ppl he's allowed to play lesbian characters and id that way and like??? i literally dont care how he labels his sexuality unless he decides to tell us. it's no one's business and i dont get the obsession w whether or not he's a lesbian. 

also like. may take a bit to explain this but it's almost like 'previously ided as a lesbian' is part of the trans narrative for transmascs? and like i said many ppl Did but it's weirdly invalidating at times! ppl will talk as if past (butch) lesbian identity is Always how transmascs question. meanwhile i was and am feminine *in a queer way* bc i am and so in a sense was a queer man. but there are times when the lesbian to transmasc narrative seems like a way to prove queer cred? when, we're all queer, and most have experienced being gnc in some gender or other, whether that was in a way stereotypical to our agab and therefore recogisable to cis and het ppl or not

(moving this here for legibility, hope that’s okay)

yeah to all this!! i get that for some people, cis gay/lesbian might be the *only* queer identity they know about when they start questioning... but for me personally? even that probably wouldn’t have made me think i was a lesbian! i would decide on “cishet but an alien i guess” or reinvent the concept of transness before i thought i was a lesbian, because honestly, the only thing i have in common with cis lesbians is that we’re both queer. they’re cis, i’m trans; they’re women, i’m a man; gnc for them (stereotypically) means butch, gnc for me (personally) means fem-flavoured androgynous; they’re attracted only to women, i’m attracted only to men. and yet for some reason ppl love to imply that my main qualification for my gay card is that i Obviously Used To Be A Lesbian?

but uhhh yeah more to the point. i think it’s like... being recognisable to cishet (or just cis tbh) ppl + the idea that being gnc is specifically “a gay thing” rather than a queer experience in its own right. as in, that’s why a lot of transmascs mistakenly think they’re lesbians, but it’s also why that experience is assumed to be the default. because like, (straight gender-conforming) transmasc and (cis butch) lesbian ARE quite similar identities, but they’re far from the only ways to be transmasc or a lesbian. they’re just the most recognisable ways to be transmasc or a lesbian, and therefore... they’re not the most acceptable, exactly, but they have a certain established status within the queer community that other identities don’t.

possibly also relevant: cis gay ppl assuming The Way to discover you’re queer is your first notable crush; the way nb people, especially transfem nb people, are often dismissed as not really trans, “just gnc gays”, regardless of their actual orientation; the fucking annoying old idea that being trans just means being So Gay that you gnc-ed so hard you transed

(not necessarily saying ppl literally consciously think these things, just that it might still be a subconscious bias)

[eclairbrun]

Long ramble post below the cut. Reminder to my fellow writers to not get too out of touch with your WIP before you start revising it!

I have been doing a rush edit of a somewhat older WIP of mine for the last few days to get it in slightly better shape to use as this year’s “submit to mentorships” manuscript, since I don’t want to endlessly submit the same story over and over to people who already turned it down. (I think I wrote this in 2016? I wasn’t as good at revising at the time, so I made myself a project of organizing the feedback I got from my beta reader, never organized it, and moved on to a different WIP.) This has been a trip because while I do usually heed the “give yourself some distance” advise for revising stories, this is a lot more distance than normal, and I’m genuinely surprised by a lot of plot threads that I more or less forgot about.

I’ve got 4 different chapters so far I feel like I could probably merge into other scenes to be more efficient with but idk if I’ll have the time before submissions are due. I kind of forgot about AMM until it was two weeks away and was originally planning to submit a different manuscript I won’t finish in time. If I get rejected, I’ll have plenty of time to make those bigger edits before Pitch Wars.

Mostly, this rush edit is just “fat trimming” since I have a bad habit in first drafts of writing too much internal monologue. I’ve been deleting bloat paragraphs and chunks of dialogue that pad scenes without contributing anything. It’s actually not a small edit and I’ve already shaved like 15k while doing a bit of rewriting as well to smooth out moments where the character writing is janky, but it’s also not a comprehensive fix of plot and pacing. I just have a disgustingly huge word count and I’m trying to simultaneously refresh my memory of the story and make the size of it less daunting to the people I submit to.

I’m moderately sure it’s the last story I wrote before getting the hang of Scriviner, and like the data hoarder I am I saved all my MS word files for the story. There’s a lot less in terms of setting/character notes, etc. because I didn’t get as into working on that sort of stuff before picking up Scrivener, but I’m nonetheless really glad I saved those files.

So, in this story, there’s a prophecy about an evil threat and a chosen one who’s the only guy who can stop it. The prophecy doesn’t impact much of the plot, but it is relevant, and it’s set up to flow with the general atmosphere of the world building. And I, having forgotten a variety of plot threads after so distancing myself from this story completely forgot a major detail of the prophecy.

Mind you, the whole prophecy is provided to the reader early on, so I read it. I just forgot, like, how to read it. I spent a good thirty minutes or so today freaking out because I caught an actual error, then misread the prophecy and thought I straight up failed to write a chunk of it, which would force me to either abandon the setting details its meant to flow with or rework the payoff of the prophecy with only 5 days before submissions are due. So I am panicking.

And during my panic, I remember the word documents! I don’t think I’ve ever had to actually reference them before. For any project I’ve moved onto Scriv. And I really don’t have many old notes on characters or setting or plot plans or anything. But I did make separate files for a few segments of the story that are written in a different style, including the prophecy. And past!me color-coded  the text in that file with notes in the margins on what is being referenced in each verse so that I could re-read everything correctly and realize the prophecy is solid. I could kiss her.