AnnemaReads

Writer//25 yo//bisexual// Norwegian//they/them

[sumerianlanguage]

Terms of endearment?

Hi! So, I've been working on revamping this short story that I originally wrote about 2 years ago in which some of it takes place in Mesopotamia, and I've just realised that the language I used is probably either made up or from the wrong time period.

What I used before was ana libbu, which I thought would mean "my love/my heart", but I'm realising that doesn't even work with the possessive not being -ngu...

Do you know how someone would say "my love" in Sumerian? Or maybe some other terms of endearment, both for a romantic partner and friends or family members? Did they have an equivalent of "darling" or "sweetheart"?

Hope you can help :)

Hello!

First, I did some digging on “ana libbu”, which seems to be a small part of a set phrase shag ana libbu, meaning something like “into its heart” or “into its interior” - shag “heart”, ana “its/that one” and libbu “interior, inner organs”. I can’t find an association with romance or love, so not sure what your source was on that. If you wanted a literal translation of “my heart” it would be shagngu or shangu (as the g of shag often drops out before a consonant), written 𒊮𒈬 in cuneiform.

The term I have seen most often for “my love”, for a romantic partner, is kiang 𒆠𒉘 or kianga 𒆠𒉘𒀀, meaning “beloved”. It’s derived from the verb phrase ki ang “to love”. There’s no vocab distinction between romantic v nonromantic love in Sumerian, but they wrote much more often of romantic love, so I’d definitely use kiang in a romantic context.

For a nonromantic context, I’ve found the Sumerians often used what would be the “regular” term as a term of endearment. In the well-known Sumerian lullaby, the child is addressed simply as “child”, dumu. So for a spouse, you could say dam(ngu) “(my) spouse”, or for a sister, nin “sister” would suffice. A lot of Sumerian literature can read to modern eyes as surprisingly distant or abrasive, because they were a pretty direct people, and didn’t use separate terms in this way, but calling your relative by their relevant term could hold just as much endearment as “sweetheart” would to us.

Best of luck with your writing!

[annemareads97]

Thank youuu, this is so helpful!

[tracing-rivers]

[funnytwittertweets]

[first-sight-and-second-thoughts]

[aftabkaran]

People protect a woman who is burning her scarf

[cop-disliker69]

A little context for those who don’t know: recently a woman was arrested by the Iranian morality police (who enforce mandatory headscarves and other theocratic policies) and died in custody. This has sparked massive protests across Iran.

[qwertyu858]

And she wasnt even arrested for not using the hijab but bc she was using it "incorrectly". So she was even following the law and still got killed.

They have also tried to claim that she died from natural causes, even when she was 22. And they realesed a very fake video as evidence of that.

[aftabkaran]

THIS. For the love of every thing that is good, if you considered yourself a feminist or a progressive of any sort, support Iranian women. It’s not complicated what is happening what’s wrong with you people.

[pluutosplants]

A WIN FOR THE BISEXUALS

[annemareads97]

I present: a screenshot from my Eurovision group chat (with Norwegians and Brits)

[annemareads97]

Vortex UoW 2020

Welcome to the fifteenth edition of Vortex, an inclusive student-led literary magazine that showcases vivid and diverse writing for anyone with an interest in the written word. When we took over the reins of Vortex, we talked about themes and asked ourselves what we thought Vortex meant to us: as a word, as a concept, as a literary magazine. When Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis harnessed the word ‘vortex’ for their own outré literary magazine Blast, they understood that it embodied the essence of their radical new journal: ‘The magic of a word! The vague impulses of the movement could now be defined in terms of a whirlpool, a whirlwind, a vortex that unites rushing force and stillness to create a perpetually self-renewing expression of energy.’ This edition includes a fusion of high-quality poetry, flash fiction, short stories and non-fiction.

I wrote a thing! And it got published!

[coolcurrybooks-deactivated20230]

I’ve been working on this post on and off for the last few months. I always intended to post it during Pride Month, and hey, here we are. I’ve got a lot going on in my life right now, so this might be the last book rec post for quite a while.

When possible, I’m linking to the Queer SFF Book Database since it has information on trigger warnings and links to reviews by queer readers. When not in the database of 6/15/20, I’ll be linking to Goodreads. Links are all below the cut.

Do not recommend cis authors on this post. This post is for centering trans and nonbinary authors. Please note that trans people write all sorts of stories and protagonists, and these books don’t automatically have trans or queer protagonists. 

My master list of book rec posts is here, if you want to find more.

If you’re looking for a starting place on trans SFF, I strongly suggest the Transcendent anthology series as an overview. It’ll introduce you to a wide array of incredible stories from trans and nonbinary authors. 

This list does not cover all of the amazing trans and nonbinary authors writing science fiction and fantasy! There are many more, and please feel free to suggest them here.

If you see any exclusionists or TERFs on this post, let me know without engaging and I will block them ASAP. I would prefer to keep this post a safe, positive place for trans readers. 

[cabeswater-and-camaros]

Keep reading

[jhameia]

As the editor of The Four Profound Weaves (which drops in September btw!!! but you can already order it now!!) I would like to point out that it falls under the novella category, not novel. (It’s a shave under 38k words.)

it’s an epic fantasy about finding your own self, confronting the past that’s held you back, and also, creating magic carpets that can eat dictators. 

[adamthegirl]

california wildfires surrounding coronavirus protocols sign. 2020 in an image.

photo by noah berger

[blisslai-remade-deactivated2020]

i’ve tried writing this post twice now and i am literally incapable of putting it into words but like,,the way platonic love is so overwhelming and so powerful like it’s Literally everywhere like my friends tagging me in dumb tiktoks that they think i’d like and spamming the comments of my posts saying nice things and fucking around in the drinks aisle of the supermarket with me and going to concerts for artists that they don’t even like that much because i asked because they know we can still have fun together no matter where we are and falling back into the same patterns even though we haven’t seen each other in 5 months and reading my favourite books because i keep mentioning them to them and watching terrible horror movies together because one of them said they liked it and texting me whenever they listen to a song i recommended to them and knowing my favourite flavour of the shitty drinks they sell in the school canteen and falling asleep together on facetime only to wake up at 3am and play minecraft and spending hours talking about what we want from the future and how we feel about kids and relationships and the thought of growing up and moving away but still talking about how we’d all go to each other’s weddings despite none of us knowing what could happen in the future but that doesn’t even matter because right now we all still have each other and yeah ok i could go years without being in a romantic relationship but i don’t think it would matter because platonic bonds are so Good for us and so powerful and once you get over the fear of losing them literally nothing else matters

[stagecoachjessi]

Classic Hollywood Bloopers

[izzzzzzieeeeeeeee]

And the greatest Hollywood blooper of all time:

[mermaidsandcats29]

These are WONDERFUL

[stagecoachjessi]

Two more of my favorites:

[absolutelyaddictedpoldarky]

These are great..made me smile😊💖

[darkseraphscorner]

The fact these exist are truly amazing.

In the olden days, if footage was not used in a film, it was either destroyed or erased so they could reuse the reel, because it was cheaper than storing unused film.

Google the BBC’s lost archives to find out more.

[thewritingumbrellas]

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.

[annemareads97]

I’ll add some of the advice I’ve gotten that also really helps:

Read your work out loud, even if it’s just to yourself. This will give you a better sense of the dialogue and whether or not it is something that people would actually say out loud.

Beware of “talking heads”. If you have a section where it’s purely dialogue, make sure to break it up with some action. Are they gesturing with their hands? Moving around? Maybe there’s a change in their tone of voice?

Apparently, adverbs are the devil. I’m not entirely sure about this one, but I do agree that you shouldn’t use too many of them. A specific verb often works better on its own than accompanied by an adverb. For example, “he moved quickly” could be replaced with “he hurried” or “he rushed”.

[weaver-z]

Divergent is a bad book, but its accidental brilliance is that it completely mauled the YA dystopian genre by stripping it down to its barest bones for maximum marketability, utterly destroying the chances of YA dystopian literature’s long-term survival 

[thatbassistbitch]

please elaborate

[weaver-z]

Sure. Imagine that you need to make a book, and this book needs to be successful. This book needs to be the perfect Marketable YA Dystopian.

So you build your protagonist. She has no personality traits beyond being decently strong-willed, so that her quirks and interesting traits absolutely can’t get in the way of the audience’s projection onto her. She is dainty, birdlike, beautiful despite her protestations that she is ugly–yet she can still hold her own against significantly taller and stronger combatants. She is the perfect mask for the bashful, insecure tweens you are marketing to to wear while they read.

You think, as you draft your novel, that you need to add something that appeals to the basest nature of teenagers, something this government does that will be perversely appealing to them. The Hunger Games’ titular games were the main draw of the books, despite the hatred its characters hold for the event. So the government forces everyone into Harry Potter houses. 

So the government makes everyone choose their faction, their single personality trait. Teenagers and tweens are basic–they likely identify by one distinct personality trait or career aspiration, and they’ll thus be enchanted by this system. For years, Tumblr and Twitter bios will include Erudite or Dauntless alongside Aquarius and Ravenclaw and INTJ. Congratulations, you just made having more than one personality trait anathema to your worldbuilding. 

Your readers and thus your protagonist are naturally drawn to the faction that you have made RIDICULOUSLY cooler and better than the others: Dauntless. The faction where they play dangerous games of Capture the Flag and don’t work and act remarkably like teenagers with a budget. You add an attractive, tall man to help and hinder the protagonist. He is brooding and handsome; he doesn’t need to be anything else. 

The villains appear soon afterward. They are your tried and true dystopian government: polished, sleek, intelligent, headed by a woman for some reason. They fight the protagonists, they carry out their evil, Machiavellian, stupid plan. You finish the novel with duct tape and fanservice, action sequences and skin and just enough glue and spit to seal the terrible, hollow world you have made shut just long enough to put it on the shelf. 

And you have just destroyed YA dystopian literature. Because you have boiled it down to its bare essentials. A sleek, futuristic government borrowing its aesthetic from modern minimalism and wealth forces the population to participate in a perversely cool-to-read-about system like the Hunger Games or the factions, and one brave, slender, pretty, hollow main character is the only one brave–no, special enough to stand against it. 

And by making this bare-bones world, crafted for maximum marketability, you expose yourself and every other YA dystopian writer as a lazy worldbuilder driven too far by the “rule of cool” and the formulas of other, better dystopian books before yours. In the following five years, you watch in real time as the dystopian genre crumbles under your feet, as the movies made based on your successful (but later widely-panned and mocked) books slowly regress to video-only releases, as fewer and fewer releases try to do what you did. And maybe you realize what you’ve done.

[roach-works]

one quibble: hunger games was intense and sincere and the writer had worked for tv and knew exactly what she was talking about when she wrote how media machines create golden idols out of abused kids and then leave the actual people inside their glamorous shells to rot. hunger games had a genuine core of righteous anger that resonated with a lot of people. the hunger games was genuinely angry about shit that is genuinely wrong. 

but divergent was clumsy make-believe the whole way through. it aped the forms and functions of dystopian lit but the writer didn’t actually have any real, passionate, sincere anger to put on the page. she didn’t know what it was talking about, so she didn’t have anything worth listening to.

there’s a difference between anti-authoritarianism as a disaffected, cynical pose and anti-authoritarianism as a rallying cry by people who believe in a bitter world. and the former is something corporations and industries and publishing houses are so much more comfortable with. so divergent and the flood of books published and marketed alongide and after it showed how the dystopian genre was no longer truly revolutionary, no longer a sincere condemnation of corporate oligarchies. the mass-market dystopian genre was now nothing more than an insincere playspace for people who were writing dystopia as a safely distant, abstract make-believe stage for their pretty girl heroes, rather than a direct allegory for everything that needs to be torn down in this world today. 

[jackawful]

This is the second branch of this post I’ve reblogged and like the fourth I’ve seen and I’m just thinking about how the Uglies series, a pre-Hunger Games forerunner of the YA Dystopia boom, had significantly less staying power than it could have specifically because…with the toxic beauty standards forced on teenagers being a Big Theme, studios couldn’t figure out how to make a profitable movie out of it. The book got optioned multiple times, but a film version made in Hollywood was destined to fall apart at casting & makeup - their marketing methods relied on exactly what the series was criticizing, which is…part of what made it so popular with teenage girls to begin with.

You contrast that with how the marketing for the Hunger Games films directly contradicts the messaging of the text, and how Divergent seems ready-made for the big screen, and it becomes really apparent why the genre folded in on itself. Capitalism tried to recuperate dystopian fiction criticizing capitalism, and in doing so, butchered the genre.

There’s also something rattling around my brain about a correlation between how made-for-screen a dystopian book is and how much it Doesn’t Understand Dystopia, with the culmination being Ready Player One, a piece set in a dystopia that somehow still actively glorifies capitalism & that was literally optioned for film before the book was published, but I don’t…know how to expand on that point.

[glittering-treasure]

A study in dragons

[iliako-fos]

as a bi girl, i’m fucking tired of hearing other wlw say that f/f relationships are inherently better, healthier, and more pure than m/f relationships. stop telling wlw that women are never abusive. stop telling bi girls that men cant love them the way women can. if you believe that love is love, fucking act like it.

[vampish-glamour]

Seriously though, you’re putting so many wlw in a position to be abused or to be an abuser. If you tell wlw their love with women will always be pure, they won’t be able to recognize abuse when it happens to them, because they’ve been told women are too “pure” to do such a thing. And others may not recognize their own abusive behaviour, because they’ll think they’re incapable of abusing just because they’re women.

[elalmadelmar]

That is radfem rhetoric. 

I’m not joking, exaggerating, or engaging in an ad hominem. One of the foundational elements of radical feminism is the notion that violence and abuse are masculine traits, and that women, freed of patriarchal influence, are naturally nurturing, loving, and positive. It proposes that abuse in any form is almost always perpetrated by men, and when a woman commits abuse it is only because she has been poisoned by the patriarchy into believing that abusive acts are okay. 

Incidentally, radical feminism is also the source of political lesbianism, which promotes the idea that regardless of their actual orientation, it is more feminist to commit romantically to other women as a means of avoiding male domination. 

There’s some fascinating reading to be done on the rise of women’s shelters, which were often founded by radical feminists (who, in all fairness, do deserve a fair bit of credit for that; women’s shelters are a good thing) and were not prepared either to assist women fleeing domestic violence from other women or for the abusive relationships that arose between women residing in the shelters.

[headspace-hotel]

The “Older Than Dirt” page on TvTropes is my favorite page on the Internet

[headspace-hotel]

[mckitterick]

this feels relevant

[mckitterick]

art from Outbreak, by Bryn Barnard

[mckitterick]

found this new term over at Urban Dictionary