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izzy's playlists!
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@aletheiawriting
the dynamic between two people who love a third person so much and come to understand each other because of that is so important to me. you would put them first, and so would i. you understand why we have to save them from themself. i trust you with their life, and so, that means more than if i trusted you with mine. the love doesn't have to be the same, but it's powerful enough that you understand why you're not the only satellite drawn into their orbit.
Nobody knows if writing a story is possible
THE devotionshipping trope is "are they loyal to me or to my title" and the answer HAS to be that they genuinely don't differentiate between the two and are confused and slightly alarmed by the question
Never read Baldwin before?
Nonfiction
The Price of The Ticket (borrow from IA)
The Fire Next Time (pdf download)
Notes of A Native Son (pdf download)
Nothing Personal (read on IA - not great quality sorry)
The Last Interview (pdf download) (only 10 pages!)
Fiction
Giovanni's Room (pdf download)
If Beale Street Could Talk (pdf download)
BONUS
Little Man Little Man (read or pdf download on scribd) (Baldwin's only children's book)
Go Tell It On The Mountain (pdf download)
Another Country (pdf and epub download)
Sonny's Blues (pdf download)
Going to Meet the Man (pdf download)
My next Black History Month request:
Pick one of James Baldwin's works and read it!!! The Fire Next Time is an excellent essay, most of us are familiar with the quote on gay white people from The Last Interview but not the rest of it. If Beale Street Could Talk even has a movie!
When I was in college, my Creative Nonfiction professor would regularly have us do something she called "hotspotting" (she didn't know that this was already a term tbc) with our rough drafts. Basically, hotspotting is when you look at your draft and pick out your favorite sentence, or one of your favorite sentences--one that you're really proud of--and write it down in a blank sheet in a notebook. Not a new document, a physical notebook. (You are not allowed to use technology for hotspotting.) And then you set a timer for however long--like maybe ten to twenty minutes--and you elaborate. You treat that one sentence as if it's the opening sentence to a new draft, and you write from there, until the timer is up.
It sounds like a gimmick, but honestly, some of my best writing in that class came from hotspotting. Usually, the sentence you consider the "best" is the one that really gets to the heart of something you're trying to convey. In a rough draft, it tends to be that you're fumbling around a bit before you really hit on the heart of things. So with hotspotting, you're starting from a less fumbly place, which means you're able to dig into your subject in a much deeper and more precise way. It makes you feel like a surgeon, a little bit.
So I do recommend trying it, even just for fun, even if you think the rough draft you have is already good. You might surprise yourself with what you come up with! :)
One of my all time biggest pet peeves with historical(ish) fantasy is when the writer constructs a religion with a clear bias that it's stupid and false and therefore only the Stupid People and/or commoners believe in it and all the smart/elite main characters are like, quasi-atheists or otherwise just routinely flout established religious conventions of orthodoxy and/or orthopraxy because they're Too Smart for it or etc.
It's usually an extension of assumptions that people in the past were just less intelligent than in the contemporary, just being like "I know that the sun is a star millions of miles away that the earth orbits, but this ancient religion describes it as a chariot flying through the sky" and not really bothering to learn the context and just (consciously or subconsciously) settling on 'that's a crazy thing to think and was probably believed in because they were Stupid'.
And that whole attitude pisses me off so much. People were as 'smart' 10,000 years ago as they are today. These beliefs aren't just desperate, random flailing to explain phenomena that could not directly be accounted for either, it's not like people just looked at the sun and went "Uhhh I don't know what the fuck that thing is, actually. I guess it might be a chariot or a boat or something?? Yeah let's go with that." and based entire religious practices on this. Every well-established belief system exists within broader contexts of cultural values/subjective perceptions of reality/knowledge systems/etc, and exist as part of a historical continuum of religious practices that came before. Even when not Materially Correct, they have context and internal logic, they're not always dead literal with zero levels of allegory, and they're never a result of stupidity.
Writing advice from my uni teachers:
If your dialog feels flat, rewrite the scene pretending the characters cannot at any cost say exactly what they mean. No one says “I’m mad” but they can say it in 100 other ways.
Wrote a chapter but you dislike it? Rewrite it again from memory. That way you’re only remembering the main parts and can fill in extra details. My teacher who was a playwright literally writes every single script twice because of this.
Don’t overuse metaphors, or they lose their potency. Limit yourself.
Before you write your novel, write a page of anything from your characters POV so you can get their voice right. Do this for every main character introduced.
This is legit good writing advice, especially the first bullet point! In playwriting class we did a bit where every bit of dialogue had to be an accusatory question and it was glorious.
Tragedy alignment chart. Feel free to use, but please reblog if you do.
And of course the second part of the tragedy, which is: which quadrant did you think you were in vs. which one you were really in
developed a real fondness lately for characters who experience a horrific act of violence and come out the other side saying "ah. I don't think I get to be me anymore. they took out the part that was me, killed it, and put something else back in its place, and now I'm whoever the hell that is." love it when someone becomes a corpse and replaces themself <3
Occasionally I get asked about my outlining process, which is probably more than a little overwrought, but certainly easier to explain with visuals. I've shared this guide on twitter and insta, so I'm adding it here too, and hopefully there's something useful in it for you!
"I love you but you're doing wrong in a way I cannot condone" and "I hate you but you're being wronged in a way I cannot stomach" are top tier and I need more of them.
My vampires CAN walk into the sunlight but doing so would reveal what they would look like if they aged normally
Younger vampires don’t have much to worry about but older vamps have reason to avoid sunlight as they age. They are still immortal, but their aged, sunlit selves are significantly weaker than their non-sunlit forms. Vamps over 100 years old run the risk of crumpling over, fully immobile, but still conscious
This feels like a good time to post a reminder about the NaNo-inspired spreadsheet I made, based on the old website:
It's available here for download - free if you want, any support is appreciated because it means I can keep making trackers and helps with my website costs, but I know times are tough for a lot of us. I've also put it up on Google Sheets here, but it looks a little different because the fancier chart effects aren't supported. You'll have to download it or make a copy to be able to use it. (Please don't ask me for edit access, that won't work. File > Make a copy, and you'll have it on your own Google Drive.)
I also made this in four other designs, available here. They all come with character and plot development sheets, and pages for novel info, chapters, timeline, etc. And there are versions for every month, so we're not confined to November!
And finally, because I always loved seeing everyone's word counts and accountability really helps me personally, I made a basic spreadsheet that you can use as a group to collectively track word counts or goals. This version's made for up to 8 people. Again you'll have to make a copy in your Drive to use it, and you'll need to give edit access to your whole group as well.
If there's interest, I'll keep making these as well for each new month. I can also expand it or add more columns/features, so feel free to let me know if you're interested and what you'd like to see!
After losing everything in service to the Evil Queen, and driven to the edge of sanity by a narrator who won’t let him die, Hansel must bring himself to do the impossible: forge his own destiny, or give up on his Happily Ever After.
do you like gay shit? do you like crying?
then grab a copy of my book, HOW TO SURVIVE THIS FAIRYTALE!
you can buy it wherever you buy your books! you can order it from your local indie! you can ask your local library to keep it on the shelves!
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still not convinced? here's one last review excerpt:
It's very #problematic of me I'm sure but if they must do either I really desperately prefer authors coming up with fancy always-italicized elven words for being gay or trans than having preindustrial warrior aristocrats and barely-socialized monsters have a vocabulary that casually includes 'demisexual' and 'enby'.
This is only slightly a principled stance (queernorm fantasy worlds are very obviously not trying to have any sort of realistic political economy of gender, which I only slightly judge them for), mostly just painful aesthetic mismatch.
The thing that irks me about using modern queer terminology in fantasy is that you're depriving yourself of a way to Say Things about people in your world.
In my YA fantasy book with the trans prince stealing back his kingdom, trans people are called cymerans. Cymerans are named after the goddess Cymera, who presides over death and change.
A person who decides to trans their gender is, in this society's conception, dying and being reborn. They throw a wake for the person they used to be, a big party with food and drink and stories and laughter. (Part of the wake is the 'deceased' giving their own eulogy, which is often an incredible self-roast.) It's equal parts funeral for your past self and coming-out ball for your new self.
When someone is born, in this world, they're consecrated to a god. Most of the time, you're consecrated to the Lady of Currents (goddess of luck and the sea), Atheran (the god of bloodlines, and patron of the royal family), or the Beetlemaker (god of craftspeople). It really depends on who your parents are and what they want for your future. If your parents want you to be prosperous, they'll consecrate you to the Lady. If your parents want you to be clever and inquisitive, they'll consecrate you to the Beetlemaker. And if you're the eldest son... you'll get stuck getting consecrated to Atheran.
Most of the time, people don't get consecrated to Cymera. If your baby is really sickly and you're scared they'll die, maybe? However.... there's no formal rebaptism process, but most people see cymerans as having been re-dedicated to Cymera after their rebirth.
In this world, cymerans are Cymera's children. They died and came out the other side of death, like a moth from the chrysalis.
.... You cannot get that across the same way if you just say 'transgender'.
You just can't. It's a completely different mindset. It's a completely different conception of gender, trans genders, and religion-re:-queerness. Calling my protagonist "trans" isn't inaccurate, but it leaves out a huge dimension of how he interacts with his gender and his world.
Using modern queer terminology in a secondary-world fantasy story is the same kind of thing as having your characters eat potatoes. Sometimes, it's the right choice. A lot of the time, they should be eating cabbage, or turnips, or aklano root.
LOVE the trans worldbuilding there and 100% agree that giving them a Word for it is the same thing as giving them a Concept for it, and the Concept (as illustrated above) is so much deeper and more interesting. Cultures all over the world have had their own ways of categorizing/classifying the gender spectrum, and those categorical systems are can't really be fully "translated". For example, we can't say that being two-spirit is the same as being nonbinary, because it's not -- it is as much an expression of Native culture as it is an expression of gender. That cultural element is significant enough that it must be considered as its own thing rather than shoved under the umbrella of "nonbinary" and therefore erased.
Now, there has been an ongoing conversation in the fantasy community about, "When is it appropriate to make up a word, and when should we just use the English word?" This is sometimes joked about as The Great Kahvee* Debate (*or other fantastical spellings of the word "coffee"), because of a trend in the 80s/90s for scifi/fantasy writers to anxiously try to erase all real-world concepts from their books in pursuit of Worldbuilding. "Well, you see, they can't drink coffee because they're not on Earth and they've never heard of it," says the Fantasy Writer™, except the drink in question looks like coffee, tastes like coffee, has the same physiological effect as coffee, is drunk in the same contexts as we drink coffee, and is potentially flavored with sukrr (fantasy sugar; spellings vary) and milk from a creature you've never heard of (or, if your author is really unhinged, some other appalling bodily excretion). We have, as a society, mostly agreed that this is Silly, and now characters drink coffee in your fantasy novels.
So the question you face as a writer is, "If this character is [trans, gay, nonbinary, whatever], and it's exactly the same as it is in the real world, should I bother to make up a word for it?" The authors who are answering "If it is the Exact Same, I will use the IRL word for it" have swung the pendulum of fashion on the Great Kahvee Debate allllllllll the way to the other end, possibly out of a desire to do Good Representation. Except... I don't really feel like mentioning a label IS good representation (except perhaps to small babies who don't have enough reading comprehension to recognize a concept unless it is Clearly Labeled), so the way it actually comes across is, rather, a desire to BE SEEN to be doing Good Representation without actually doing much work. Because being queer in your fantasy world ISN'T going to be exactly the same as being queer in the real world. Whatever culture your character is operating within IS DIFFERENT, that is why you have gone to all the trouble to talk about their special magical tattoos or their special magical dragon familiars or their special magical prophecies or whatever. Give them their own word for what they are, IF that categorization system is important in their culture -- and it might not be! In which case they might not have a word for it! Like, a character might just say, "Oh, that man? No, girl, you don't have a chance, he only has boyfriends" instead of "He's gay."
You don't have to give them a label, either a fantasy one or a real-world one. You're allowed to say, "They don't think about sexuality that way" -- that is a perfectly valid worldbuilding choice, and I encourage you to lean into that and explore it! You don't have to have a label! But what you DO have to do is treat your queer characters like whole, complex people and honor the culture that they come from even if it's a made-up one.
Which brings me to the subject of italicizing the special fantasy words -- I'd encourage people to just leave them in plaintext, actually! This ties into an ongoing discussion on the exoticization of foreign languages in English text (link to an article on the subject). Basically, it marks those words out as jarringly OTHER, which 1) doesn't make a whole lot of sense when the speakers themselves are using the words with fluent familiarity, 2) implicitly frames English as the dominant language over all other languages (linguistic imperialism as an expression of white supremacy), and 3) doesn't even make sense from a descriptive-linguistic perspective when you look at how easily and readily English adopts words from other languages into common parlance.
Consider the sentence: "I went to the cafe and ordered a chai latte" -- italicize chai for emphasis is fine ("no, i didn't order a coffee latte, it was a chai latte"); but it is patently absurd to italicize it (or cafe!) for being an ✨exotic foreign word✨. We know what chai is, we know you can buy it at a cafe. The words have entered our language. English speakers are very, very used to learning new words for a Specific Concept ("Sitting in the sauna eating naan and sipping boba that I bought from the tomato-colored kiosk"). Scifi/fantasy readers will do this even more readily (see Jo Walton's article about SF Reading Protocols).
If you're in the dialogue/narration of someone for whom the word/concept is just part of the ambient cultural background, honor that! Even if they are a fantasy person from a fantasy culture, honor it! It's good practice for real life. :)
Edgy vampire accessories except it's what vampire society would deem edgy by their perspective, so like. Brooches that are made to look like you've been stabbed in the heart with a wooden stake when you're wearing it, or plastic garlic earrings, sun motifs on clothing, bralecets / chain accessories that have little "silver" bullets, any accessories with a mirror on it just for funsies..
For my vampire mutuals @albatris @bloodmoodtrash @transmasc-wizard
Weirdly Healing Things to Do When You’re Feeling Creatively Burned Out...
Write a fake 5-star Goodreads review of your WIP—as if you didn’t write it. Go ahead. Pretend you're a giddy reader who just discovered this masterpiece. Bonus: add emojis, chaotic metaphors, and all-caps screaming. It’s self-indulgent. It’s delusional. It’s delicious.
Give your main character a Pinterest board titled “Mentally Unstable but Aesthetic.” Include outfits, quotes, memes, cursed objects, and that one painting that haunts their dreams. This is not about logic. This is about ✨vibes.✨
Make a “deleted scenes” folder and write something that would never make it into the book. A crackfic. A “what if they were roommates” AU. The group chat from hell. This is your WIP’s blooper reel. Let it be silly, chaotic, or wildly off-brand.
Interview your villain like you’re Oprah. Ask the hard-hitting questions. “When did you know you were the drama?” “Do you regret the murder, or just the way you did it?” Bonus points if they lie to your face.
Host a fake awards show for your characters. Categories like “Most Likely to Die for Vibes,” “Worst Emotional Regulation,” “Himbo Energy Supreme,” or “Best Use of a Dramatic Exit.” Write their acceptance speeches. Yes, this counts as writing.
Write a breakup letter… to your inner critic. Be petty. Be dramatic. “Dear Self-Doubt, this isn’t working for me anymore. You bring nothing to the table but anxiety and bad vibes.” Rip it up. Burn it. Tape it to your mirror. Your call.
Create a “writing comfort kit” like you’re a cozy witch. A candle that smells like your WIP. A tea that your characters would drink. A playlist labeled “for writing when I’m one rejection email away from giving up.” This is a ritual now.
Design a fake movie poster or book cover like your story is already famous. Add star ratings, critic quotes, and some pretentious tagline like “One soul. One destiny. No chill.”
Write a scene you’re not ready to write—but just a rough, messy outline version. Not the polished thing. Just the raw emotion. The shape of it. Like sketching the bones of a future punch to the gut. You don’t have to make it perfect. Just open the door.
Let your story be bad on purpose for a day. Like, aggressively bad. Give everyone ridiculous names. Add an evil talking cat. Write a fight scene with laser swords and emotional damage. Just remind yourself that stories are meant to be played with, not feared.
