No gate, no lock, no bolt

My Goodreads is bookishwordish, feel free to add me.

[treasuredplanet]

in hindsight sending the number one digit at a time created the funniest half second of either of our lives

[parakeet]

Give a man a leaf and he will eat it. Teach a man to leaf and he will go away

[marzipanandminutiae]

posts that could have also been in a newspaper in 1910 on a slow day

[rednines]

[cair--paravel]

Page decorations for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1899 edition.

[fostershyperfixator]

My local library had a days since James Patterson last published counter.

[official-library-posts]

official library post

[intothestacks]

I need non-librarians to understand that this is not a celebratory counter. It's a plea for help.

[unpretty]

How did you get so good at writing??? Did you take classes? I feel like you should get paid all the money for this! (I subscribe to your website!)

after i dropped out of high school i found a torrent of like 5GB of OCRd romance novels and i read like 3 romance novels a day for a while

read enough romance novels and you will realize that they live or die entirely on technical skill. if you are new to romance novels then even bad ones can dazzle you with novelty but by the time you are on your 30th historical fake engagement between a bluestocking and a rakish duke you can grade them and you know when they've failed. when two books have what should be the same main characters hitting the same plot beats, but one of those books is delightful and the other fucking sucks, you learn some things. some books are bad and still delightful. other books are good but they just don't hit. you start to see the seams in the bad ones. 'oh, this is a weird out of character moment because she wanted to have the kabedon moment and didn't know how to get there'. 'she didn't want the ust to end but couldn't think of a better reason than this deus ex cockblock.' that kind of thing.

you could probably do this with other genres but i like romance because the plot is two people fall in love. that's it. everything else is set dressing. if you can figure out how to make that work you can carry it over into whatever other genre you feel like. mysteries would give you a different skillset around plotting that i don't have.

anyway after that i wrote a lot.

[unpretty]

i said it in my original tags but i want to talk out of my ass and say that one place that a lot of current romantasy falls short for me is that it ends up being written by people who mostly read other romantasy without going back to the original genres of romance and fantasy. it's like a 'learn the rules before you can break them' kind of thing. you have all these magical macguffins to hit the tropes but can you make me believe that these characters have chemistry without that? is there chemistry, or did you tell me they're fated mates and now i'm supposed to assume this fight is sexy? does the fantasy aspect exist for anything aside from the magical macguffins? i'm not going to throw stones from inside my house made of worldbuilding designed to make all my fetishes happen, but the really fun part is when the lore spins out of control and you end up really going in depth on linguistic anthropology things that aren't relevant to the makeouts.

and the other thing is that you can't really sub in fanfic for this. plenty of fanfic takes characters from other genres and plops them into romance, but it's not the same. a good romance novel says, "here are two characters. you may know their archetypes, but you don't know them. you are going to get to know them, and you are going to love them, and you are going to want them to love each other, and when they love each other you are going to be happy for them". i love a rakish duke. when a man who's never had to do his own laundry is slutty as fuck that's my shit. but you still have to make me like him. you can take that archetype and make a guy who fucking sucks. most fanfic will not impart to you any knowledge about how to make a reader like a guy from scratch. you already know that guy. that's the whole point. fanfic with as much character building as an original work is the exception, not the rule.

the whole reason i get catty about fics that just make a different guy is that... you've made a different guy. i don't know who this guy is and i don't like him, and you haven't bothered trying to make me like him, because you slapped another guy's nametag on him like a cheat code. it's cool if you did make me like this new guy, but why is he wearing that other guy's nametag if no other aspect of him is present?

read the genres you want to write, obviously, but there's a reason the shitty comphet romantic subplot is a cliche. it's because romance is its own skillset, and if you try to fit romance in your thriller when you only read thrillers it's probably going to be the weakest part. if you want an ensemble cast then chemistry between characters is important regardless of whether they're going to fuck about it.

[thegunlady]

#this is also what i call the Star Wars Problem (although: wide category lol)#but i mean specifically the thing where george lucas watched a BUNCH of westerns and samurai films and ww2 flying ace films#and then made a space movie ABOUT high points in those other story forms#because he knew those pulp genres inside out and knew what bits he needed to hit in RAF Dambusters pulp when he added laser swords#or in western saloon showdowns when he added spaceships#but then you fast-forward a few decades and people are making star wars movies ABOUT other star wars movies#and like not many of those scenes are going to hit that way - they just wont have the chance#they’ll be a copy of a copy and the emotion is going to degrade like the worlds crustiest reformatted ocr PDF#or a xerox of a xerox of a xerox#they’ve ceased to be about the feeling generated by the Form and have become simply the Form in isolation (via harrietvane)

[romanceyourdemons]

whenever i look into a historical monarch who doesn’t get talked about much and is just kind of a blank spot in my understanding of the historical narrative, 95% of the time what i find is pure white hot blistering capability. a pencil pusher for the ages. a 39 year reign with no more than three hours of sleep a night. there aren’t any good stories from his reign because he systematically caught and stopped all catastrophic good stories before they could start. you shrimply must respect it

[romanceyourdemons]

semi-related but it’s ironic that game of thrones famously neglects to worldbuild textiles when (for me at least) textile history has proven one of the best lenses for an “aragorn’s tax policy” grounded view of history, especially for a late medieval-early modern english setting. yes henry vii of england reinstated the court of the star chamber, but you’ll get a better sense for the character of his reign by looking at how and why and with what result he disrupted the trans-european alum trade. yes elizabeth i of england loved essex and killed him, but you’ll get a better sense for her reign by looking at her sumptuary laws, why she passed them and how they were obeyed. the history of european pin manufacturing sheds more light on spanish-english relationships than any anecdote of walter raleigh could

[kitchen-light]

“Every poet should want to be knocked off course by some incredible new-to-them poem, whether it’s contemporary, ancient, or from any of the several hundred misery-infused centuries humankind has inflicted on the earth. Nobody should need to know whether a poem is important or permanent before allowing him or herself to get renovated by it.”

— Joyelle McSweeney, from her essay “FUTURE NO FUTURE” (published in the Poetry Magazine blog, April 1st, 2014)

[someforbiddenparadise]

The Writer's Technique in Thirteen Theses by Walter Benjamin (as appears in his 1928 treatise One-Way Street, in a section titled "Post No Bills")

[rowanisawriter]

write insane shit that’s way beyond your perceived ability and skill level even if you don’t finish it even if you think it sucks

[nathanielthecurious]

academic writing these days is always like “be/longing” “re-membering” “(under)standing”

[662607015]

STEM academic writing is like "we present the results of the ACRONYM project (A ContRived mnemOnic is NecessarY Material)"

[rowanisawriter]

that “negative kudos” poll really got me lol i have a full time job and a family. do you know what that means lol. I don’t think many people know what that means? it means i have maybe 1 hour MAYBE 2 hours a day that are mine unless i sacrifice sleep. and i use them to write fic most of the time and then i chose to post it online. And there is a subset of people that exists out there that thinks they can and should be able to publicly dislike or negative kudos your fic if they don’t like it instead of just continuing to scroll or hitting back. man no wonder so many people are so easily turning to AI, this unfeeling unflinching thing that just gives and gives more and more slop but who cares about the quality or the person who made it as long as you can just demand more and more and be given more and more. Fic and fanart are not products, you do not get to “review” them. We call it commenting because it’s not a review. And kudos doesn’t reflect on quality, it means thank you for sharing. if you feel the need to complain about something someone used their precious and rare and still valuable time to create for you for free, keep scrolling or literally just die

[thedreadvampy]

I have never. Seen this specific typesetting mistake before. I've seen editing mistakes I've seen writing mistakes I've seen typos aplenty I have never seen someone accidentally paste the file version details into the text while typesetting.

that's the first page of the book as well like. I'm assuming this got missed because it obviously happened after the copy was finalised. that's an InDesign file (and not the first InDesign file of the project (clock the 'V2')) so idk much about the publishing process but this is presumably final final steps before committing to print.

but like. idk. this is delightful to me. this is such a specific error. wow.

[pangur-and-grim]

I swear to GOD I’m not vagueing my situation, but I made a post recently about books I was planning to read this year, and I find it very….. interesting that multiple people came into my inbox afterward to tell me that all the queer authors in the bunch had sinned. like maybe they had, I dunno. it wouldn’t stop me reading (I love Interview with the Vampire, I have Thoughts about Anne Rice, etc). but it is interesting that none of the non-queer authors merited this whisper campaign, despite some of them honestly deserving it. not saying anything outright here, just making an observation. listening and learning. you know

[pangur-and-grim]

[pangur-and-grim]

I'm still thinking about the time that someone came into my dms to tell me that Gideon the Ninth's author had written problematic fanfiction.

maybe it's because I don't read or write fanfiction, so all related discourse has always been an iceberg sailing past me, but I just can't imagine who would give a shit. like oh, they wrote about a taboo topic? is it well written? should I read it?

and also, I'm reading work by wife abusers, religious fanatics, old timey racists, antisemites, misogynists, fascists, murderers...... knowing how these people conducted themselves in life gives context to better understand their writing, but that's about it. the only authors I'm actively boycotting for moral reasons are Neil Gaiman and J. K. Rowling, because they're using the money from their book sales in present day to harm people.

[nat-20s]

out of curiosity, how many books have you read this year

0

1-5

6-10

11-15

16-20

21-25

26-30

31-35

36-40

41-45

45-50

over 50

Voting ended onJun 5

[socialistexan]

French-Iranian author Marjane Satrapi, author of 'Persepolis', dies of 'sadness' at 56

French-Iranian author and illustrator Marjane Satrapi, best known for the book and film “Persopolis”, has died of "sadness", members of her

This one hurt, her work had such a profound effect on my life, thoughts, and politics.

May her memory be a blessing

[kitchen-light]

“Not all writing is cursed, but surely all of it is haunted. Literature is a catacomb of past readers, past writers, past books. Traces of those who are responsible for creation linger among the words on a page; Shakespeare can’t hear us, but we can still hear him (and don’t ghosts wander through those estate houses upon the moors unaware that they’ve died?). […] Of all of the forms of expression that humanity has worked with—painting, music, sculpture—literature is the eeriest. Poetry and fiction are both incantation and conjuration, the spinning of specters and the invoking of ghosts; it is very literally listening to somebody who isn’t there, and might not have been for a long while. All writing is occult, because it’s the creation of something from ether, and magic is simply a way of acknowledging that—a linguistic practice, an attitude, a critical method more than a body of spells. We should be disquieted by literature; we should be unnerved.”

— Ed Simon, from his essay “Who’s There?: Every Story Is a Ghost Story”, published in The Millions, August 18, 2021