I want a dyke for president. I want a person with AIDS for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to AIDS, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down to rest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no air-conditioning, a president who has stood in line at the clinic, at the DMV, at the welfare office, and has been unemployed and laid off and sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president. I want someone with bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn’t possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown. Always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker. Always a liar, always a thief, and never caught. Zoe Leonard
i hate diet culture so much. i hate how everyone steamrolls over my "i don't like talking about dieting." i hate seeing vibrant, beautiful personalities turn into someone who only talks about their weight loss. i hate when people brag abt how little they've eaten. i hate being expected to fawn over ppl for being on a crash diet. i hate when women go "hahah, i just don't really eat!" i hate when ppl use coffee or cigarettes to suppress their appetite and think that's healthy. i hate when i see the pain in my friend's eyes because someone around them lost weight and they feel Too Fat by comparison. i hate when people assume I'm unhealthy because im fat. i hate that this is something i've had to deal with since i was 7. i hate when fat people, stranded in a culture that villifies every aspect of their being, are asked to clap and cheer for thinness.
“scientists don’t want you know” is a phrase that always cracks me up because if you actually meet a scientist they will be shaking and crying like an overstimulated chihuahua with the need to let you know
what would you reccomend if someone beginner-mid writing level wanted to write an amateur webnovel to develop their writing craft? hypothetically? in terms of vibe and tips but also concretely in terms of structure, organization, and venue?
Ive told this anecdote before but I will tell it again:
One of my best friends wanted to write a screenplay. He wrote the first 25%, and then re-wrote that eight times. He wrote two whole screenplays worth of words, and had a fragment of a draft to show for it. If I had a first commandment for my writing career, it is this:
No Backspace until the first draft is done.
Most of writing as a craft --the actual process of producing a written work-- is editing. To practice writing, you need a finished draft to edit. That first draft will inevitably be incoherent, embarrassing, bloated, personally revealing of your own unexamined biases and quirks, and generally not very good. You have to embrace this. This is what editors are for. @/mortalityplays has a post that articulates this better than I can.
In this vein, I would recommend that your theoretical practice webnovel be as indulgent as possible. Write your potato chips. Something that sparks a bit of chuuni glee. Whatever gets you to that daily word count every single day. Take Amber Skies, my own experimental webnovel; it is a far-future found-family bildungsroman full of pornographic gore and biomechanical dragons. It is my chuuni. The prose is adolescent, melodramatic, and riddled with grammatical errors. I love it.
Writing Amber Skies taught me what it feels like to actually sit down and write 125,000 words. How much effort that takes, the effect it has on my body, what is physically possible for me to produce in a single day without burning out. It is also a marathon, not a sprint. Consistency and routine are your strongest soldiers.
In terms of concrete structure, I have fewer thoughts. My first webnovel was written as a serial, which worked for my strengths as a writer, and the nature of the text. A thousand words a day, every sunday, for 125 sundays, published to the audience SOON as I was done writing. Don't do this. Let things cook a bit. Maybe 5-10k chunks?
If you asked me to run Webnovel Boot Camp, the regimen would be something along these lines: Write a rip-off of the Odyssey, with at least 2 POV characters. Aim for 100,000 words.
Having someone ask ChatGPT in a meeting is like being a grown-ass professional adult in a room full of other grown-ass professional adults trying to solve a problem, while a colleague with one of those baby toys that makes animal sounds repeatedly presses the cow button. And we all have to stop what we're doing and listen to cow go moo and say "wow hm yeah that's not really what we're asking but the cow does definitely go moo, good thoughts"
Except increasingly the cow is being treated as a respected contributor to meetings as we pivot to a moo-centric business model that principally produces bullshit
this quarter we're rightsizing, and cutting about 20% of our corporate family. very sad but we can't justify keeping them on- after all, we have to pay them way too much to say things, given that simply hitting the moo button over and over will make just as much noise
I live in South Africa. And if you live in South Africa and you have any contact with people from the US or Canada you might have run into a question about wildlife like lions and elephants roaming our streets. Most South Africans get pretty offended by questions like this. We are a civilized country, our large and dangerous wildlife gets contained in properly fenced parks.
I use to get offended by this until I visited a few places in Canada and realized that the reason why you ask is that some of your large and dangerous wildlife does simply roam the countryside and sometimes make excursions into town.
This honestly blew my mind. What do you mean, you have bears just walking around? What the hell?
north americans don't all encounter deadly megafauna on our porches and front lawns but it happens often enough that we all think this is a reasonable amount of gigantic animal to happen to your house. so when we think of africa we kinda imagine it like this:
like. if we had elephants here. this is what we would be putting up with on the regular. what do you mean you guys are more sensible than us.
TELL ME AGAIN HOW AUSTRALIA IS THE DEATH COUNTRY
We have two spiders and (apparently) 12 snakes but we don’t have lions, bears, wildcats, AND crocodiles.
We sometimes have crocodiles and large boas in certain areas. We don’t have to worry about a bear attacking our halloween decor. Or moose deciding to joust on the front lawn.
Maybe similar to Africa, America’s fear of Australia is because you all assume our wildlife is exactly as huge and space-invadey.
I live halfway between two large cities in a pretty damn suburban area and hearing the sentence “did you hear there was a bear* spotted on [road that is pretty built up and I don’t think of as wild at all]” only left me a little surprised. My mother once saw what she described as a coyote going to school- just walking around a university campus.
so.... yes I was absolutely picturing elephants reaching over your back yard fences for some tasty leaves.
* Ursus americanus for clarification not homosexual sapiens
Couple years ago we had a bear in the market of downtown Ottawa. Ottawa has a population of 1 million, and it made it to the largest market (byward), and had to be removed with sedatives.
Saturn used to advertise moose-resistant doors for their cars in case a horny one took you for competition. Never mind that if you hit a moose in the road, your car would be totalled, Saturn or not.
Animals Getting Up To Shit is so normalized that when I first moved to a new town and the news announced an escaped tiger (from some zoo, I guess) spotted in my specific neighbourhood, I just went out anyway. I needed groceries and it's not like it was a horny moose or anything.
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