WHY NOT WRITE OUT YOUR SOULS

Angelicque Bautista, puertorican reader and writer; traveling through the interwebs one listicle at a time.

[pohroro]

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[superheroesincolor]

Black Girl Magic Lit Mag: Issue 2 ( 2016)

“Black Girl Magic Lit Mag is a literary magazine created to address the lack of diverse, non-majority voices and characters in speculative fiction, especially Black women’s voices. Black Girl Magic Lit Mag believes that by showcasing stories featuring Black female voices and characters we can create a reflection of ourselves in the literature that we love, in a world where our images are constantly controlled, shaped, and distorted by those outside of our experiences .

In issue 2 we have six short stories:

The Stars for a Song ‘The Stars for a Song’ is a flash fiction piece regarding the creation of the moon by a saddened deity.

Doughnuts This is a horror/vampire story about a cop killing in NYC. The protagonists are Black women.

World of Rain: Adaeze’s Ambition A YA Sci-Fi Fantasy about a chosen one.

Sisters A supernatural story about sisters that can’t let each other go.

The Souvenir A psychic battle with historic significance is waged between two individuals with family ties.

From Peter From Peter is a whimsical snapshot of the fantastic clashing with reality, all from the perspective a half-Jamaican, half-white lesbian.  “

Get it  now here and leave a review if you can.

[ Follow SuperheroesInColor on facebook / instagram / twitter / tumblr ]

[devotedscripturient]

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Ernest Hemingway (via psych-facts)

[duskenpath]

Rest stops on highways are liminal spaces where the veil is thin and nobody can tell me differently

[oli-via]

Explain

[duskenpath]

The explanation is that liminal spaces are in between places that bridge Here with There, so in fairy tales we often have the Fairy Ring, the Forest Clearing, the Sudden Misty Foggy Forest, the Bridge, the River, graveyards, in some cases

We also have a ton of american urban mythology around famous roadways and sites off the sides of roads

Archetypes like these occur to mark the places in the world where the veil goes thin and humans can have extra-worldly experiences, out of the ordinary way of living

So why wouldn’t transient spaces like rest stops where everyone is just passing through from one place to the next, never stopping for too long, not be a liminal space where spirits frequent, too

Especially since nobody would know if they were real or not

[pardonmewhileipanic]

Ok but this speaks to me

I always feel like something isn’t quite right at rest stops

[confusingteen]

I once slept though three gas stations on a road trip, and the second the car started to slow to turn into a rest stop, I was basically wide awake.

[prismatic-bell]

My mom and I were on I-90 in a blizzard once and pulled off at the first exit we could find. Turns out that if we’d gone even a mile further, we would have happened on a 49-and-counting car pileup, and that 90 was closed for MILES. How we found an unblocked ramp was a matter of great debate, but where this gets weirder still is that at the bottom of the ramp was a closed truck stop and an open church full of teenagers–they went for youth group, the blizzard started, and they were stuck until the snow stopped. They fed us leftovers from their potluck dinner, prayed with us for safe travel, and when the snow let up they saw us on our way.

Three days later–Sunday–we were traveling back and decided to stop at that church to thank them. We found it thanks to the truck stop, but this time it was the truck stop that was open and the church that was closed. Neither of us remembered it looking so decrepit on the trip down, and granted we saw it first at night in a snowstorm, but you’d think we’d have noticed the boarded-up windows. So we asked in at the truck stop.

The church had been abandoned for ten years. And yet I still had one of their youth group programs under my sun visor, very clearly labeled for the previous week.

To this day I’m sure we crossed dimensions somewhere on I-90, and that’s how we stayed safe. You could tell me it’s because the truck stop was a liminal space and I’d 100% believe you.

[duskenpath]

I don’t mind when this post goes around again because sometimes I get stories like this

[epiesque]

six by six

Notes: Six six-word stories (mostly about love or lack thereof).

I: Yellow roses for my returning lover.

II: He cries, “He is always hers.”

III: Love is my vice to covet.

IV: Hearts should be kissed, not polished.

V: “Hello, I’ve loved you since we—”

VI: An empty vase for a heart.

[epiesque]

olive’s jacket

notes: originally written for a creative writing course led by profesor and writer elidio la torre lagares; you can check out his work here. 

The jacket's sleek blackness wore off from years of rampant twisting and bundling. Nothing could soothe the grey vines of tear around its shoulders: not draping it over chairs or carefully cleansing it in sinks. Juliette holds it with her thin chocolate fingers against the light filtering in through her window. There the shadow of the jacket passes over her as she lays on the bed. It carries earth and grass to her nose every time she hugs it, and her thin arms still too small to bundle it up quickly. Then she lays it beside her on the bed, one leg over the patchwork of Riot Grrrl and Equality Now! slogans sewn into its black skin.

Juliette routinely washes the jacket on its own and hangs it to dry by the window where the sun cast  a shadow beside her desk. Between studying on tax paperwork and analyzing stock profitability, she peers at it from the corner of her eye. Studies the thick shoulders and sections where brown leather covered rips in the black fabric.

The jacket hangs at that light window and sometimes rests at the back of her chair, the arms held in her fingers as she read through FAFSA regulations and HR terms. Its warmth is too inviting not to keep around, and her thin frame always shook with cold save for a moment such as this; and another beautiful exception: when the owner of this second skin would rap her knuckles at Juliette's door.

The black jacket mirrors the mess of tight curls that compliments the owner's olive skin and Olive's eyes crinkle with delight when Juliette speaks of it. Tall and broad shouldered like the patchwork jacket, Olive drapes herself over Juliette to keep watch in  her dear's sleep; sometimes she stands by that light window to read out loud and lets her shadow cover the tinier woman. Olive leaves that second skin for when she's to be away, and Juliette keeps that second skin as a promise of her return.

[bostonpoetryslam]

How she kisses my skin like the forest fires south of here, like pain ignited just to be put out.

Meredith Adams, “South of Here,” published in Wyvern Lit (via bostonpoetryslam)

[epiesque]

The Last Wardens | Members of the Immortal Flames' Free Brigade; a company of adventurers seeking...

A new side project; had some friends introduce me to Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn and I absolutely fell in love with the fantasy settings, the long and winding tale and its cast of amazing characters. So, after getting some permissions from my fellow free company members, I created a blog for my interpretation of their adventures across Eorzea. Come and check it out. 

[thestudyingcabin]

Alternatives for Overused Words, inspired by this post from Ultrafacts

[bookshop]

I'm done explaining why fanfic is okay.

Note: this post was originally made in 2010 in response to Diana Gabaldon’s epic rant about fanfiction. The original version is still being updated. I’m reposting it to Tumblr by request, but if you have any additions, please feel free to drop a comment at LJ so they can be added to the masterpost!

Dear Author of the Week, You think fanfic is a personal affront to the many hours you’ve spent carefully crafting your characters. You think fanfic is “immoral and illegal.” You think fanfiction is just plagiarism. You think fanfiction is cheating. You think fanfic is for people who are too stupid/lazy/unimaginative to write stories of their own. You think there are exceptions for people who write published derivative works as part of a brand or franchise, because they’re clearly only doing it because they have to. You’re personally traumatized by the idea that someone else could look at your characters and decide that you did it wrong and they need to fix it/add original characters to your universe/send your characters to the moon/Japan/their hometown. You think all fanfic is basically porn. You’re revolted by the very idea that fic writers think what they do is legitimate. We get it.  Congratulations! You’ve just summarily dismissed as criminal, immoral, and unimaginative each of the following Pulitzer Prize-winning writers and works:

Keep reading

[startravellerfiction-deactivate]

This is so important, I cannot reblog this fast enough. (I also suggest that you read this addendum explaining how fanfic writers don’t operate with the hope of eventually receiving monetary value for their efforts. This was a fact that I could never adequately explain to my family members.)

If you’re getting grief over creating fan fiction, print this sucker up and hand it out like a pamphlet.

As I work toward publishing my first original novels, I would be beside myself with glee if any of my stories inspired a reader to write fic. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the true mark of how good my tales are–not the number of book sales. (And heck, a couple of the stories I have in the works are legit derivative pieces.)

VIVA LA FANFIC!!

[losille2000]

sobeautifullyobsessed and cinderella1181: This was in my queue, but I finally found it as it pertains to this weekend’s conversation.

[laughterkey]

All hail bookshop <3

[bookshop]

I told myself I’d reblog this post when it hit 15,000 notes. It’s close enough, so should I tack on the addendum linked above? Here you go, and thanks to everyone who’s continued to pass this post around fandom. <3333

The thing is that fanfic is not something you–by which I mean the publishing industry as a collective–can or should stop. It literally exists by the millions, across the internet and in the notebooks of countless writers across the universe. Not only that, but it’s been going on for centuries. I might as well link to my post again for anyone new to the discussion, because you can’t understand fanfic without understanding the tradition that it is a part of. You, (collectively) cannot systematically take down an embedded culture of borrowing/remixing/transforming/expanding on Story. Fan fiction has always existed. I remember reading interviews with Meg Cabot years ago where she talked about writing fanfic at home by herself as a teenager, before she knew the word for what she was doing. I’ve heard similar stories from dozens of authors. When I read my first Georgette Heyer novel as a kid, I immediately threw myself into writing stories with original characters reworking the same plot tropes Heyer explored in that book. Fan fiction is natural. It’s also part of a literary tradition of deconstructing, evaluating, and critiquing authorial texts. Literary theory has long held that the author is dead. That is the best tradition by which you can understand fanfic. It has nothing to do with copyright violation. Nothing. It is a derailing argument to compare fanfiction to internet piracy. Piracy involves robbing something of its initial value. Fanfiction, almost universally, constitutes an example of what the Campbell vs. Acuff-Rose case defines as “an obvious claim to transformative value.” In other words, unlike internet piracty, fanfic doesn’t rob the inherent original value of a creative work. Fanfic develops and enhances it. The e-publishing issues [that Diana Gabaldon talked about in her now-deleted anti-fanfic posts] are linked to the sale and transfer of a commodity, the original work. Fanfiction has always operated outside of a commercial framework, because it deals in cultural, not monetary, capital. You’re operating out of the worldview that fanfic is a deflation of your property. But fandom operates as a group collaboration of literary theory applied to your work, one that incidentally enhances your property value by building a community around it, and by adding tropes, new ideas, and emotional attachment to it. People always assume fanfic is free bc fic writers think they’ll get in trouble by selling it. The reality is that fandom creates its own non-commercial capital around fan work; some fanworks, like Cesperanza’s monumental SGA fanfic Written by the Victors, have entire universes and multiple fics written collaboratively around them. The fanfic writer is *very* interested in profit, but the profit is not monetary. I can’t stress that enough. The profit is purely social/literary/technical/emotional, and the reward is getting to be closer to the canon they love and a community of people that love that canon too. Fandom does not operate under a capitalist structure, purely and simply. You cannot compare it to internet piracy because the motives, the mechanisms, and the outcomes are different in every respect.

[keliandrada-deactivated20170226]

It should be noted also that BIOWARE clearly does endorse their fandom’s. There is a section on their very own forums for fanfiction. They have also specifically thanked artists at the end of DA:I. So for those writing fanfiction or doing art for Bioware games, know that you are most likely doing so with Bioware’s endorsement :) I think they love it!

[erebones]

Fanfiction is the highest form of praise imo. It means your readers connected so much with your world and your characters that they want to be a part of it. If I were a published author I would LOVE if fanfic happened.

[flamingculture]

Women often resist being described as “women writers,” and with good reason. The need to prefix “writer” with a tag suggests that writer really means male writer (or perhaps, more specifically, white, straight male writer). It implies that readers need to be warned; that women are intruders on the default terrain — which, in the pages of many magazines, they are. Similarly, the idea of “women’s writing” provokes ambivalence precisely because it implies that women are writing only from, and about, their experience as women (unlike men, who are asking the big universal questions of interest to all, in their great American novels-to-be). The implication is that women are trapped within their particularity, unable to speak to those who don’t share it, while the writing of (straight, white) men is universal rather than particular. But everyone is shaped by their experience of gender, whatever that experience is; there is no view from nowhere. Men’s experience is no less specific than women’s; it’s just that we fail to see it as such.

Katherine Angel, Gender, blah, blah, blah  (via flamingculture)

[flamingculture]

On women and writing

It’s happened to me several times at a literary event — sometimes one at which I’m reading or speaking — that a kindly, affable chap, after regaling me with a long account of his next book, smiles generously and asks me what I do at Penguin, or how long I’ve been working for the venue. When I say, Oh, actually I’m a writer, a spasm of embarrassment comes over his face. As it should. Not, of course, because of any career’s merit over another’s, but because he’s revealed his inability to see me as a writer. A flustered flash of insight has taken place. One such occasion was an event organized by one of my European publishers, at which I and three other writers (all men) read from our books; a dozen journalists (all men) were present, as were other guest writers (all men). Sort of the equivalent of a New York Review of Bookswith 26 men writers and 1 woman; or a London Review of Books with 14 men and 2 women. In a sense, I can’t really fault those male writers who inquire politely as to my job. They’re kind of right: I don’t look like a writer.

It’s not just men who reveal their assumptions in this way. Being underestimated — by men, by women, by themselves — is something most women have in common. We have to work harder from the outset to resist being dismissed, to attain equal footing, and then to maintain it. It’s endless, repetitive work, cut across and intensified by yet other assumptions based on accent, skin color, class, education, dress. And it’s a powerful thing, the learnt reflex to look at a woman and see someone who is by definition unaccomplished, a novice; someone’s disciple, companion, muse; someone with no power or expertise of her own. I’m not immune to it — I’ve caught myself in the act of underestimating women, of having assumed that the woman in the room isn’t the expert in the room. It’s a reflex so disturbing to notice that it’s tempting to pass over it in silence. But it’s a reflex enabled by the shocking paucity of women of authority and expertise across all media — a paucity not easily registered, so used are we to it.

Katherine Angel, Gender, blah, blah, blah 

[freekicks]

[plotlinehotline]

3 Myths of Fiction Research

One of my favorite things about writing is having built-in motivation to educate myself on unfamiliar topics and learn about new and exciting things. But for many writers, research is a task of drudgery, and most have absolutely no idea what they’re looking for or where to start. Your process will depend largely on what it is you’re researching, but I thought I’d share what I feel are big myths regarding fiction research, based on the research I’m doing for my current novel.

Myth 1: Research is endless Googling

Don’t get me wrong. I love Google, and Google is the best place to start if you know absolutely nothing about a topic. But after a while, filtering through web pages, bookmarking, taking notes…it all starts to feel very…academic. It starts to feel like you’re gathering sources for a research paper. For me, I spend so much time on my computer when I’m actually writing my fiction, so if I can find ways to get away from the computer when I’m brainstorming, outlining, and researching, all the better. 

There are likely lots of little things you Google to help clear things up, but if you’re writing a novel about a general topic that you know very little about - a mental illness, a type of profession, a technology or science, a historical time period, ect., find a book. 

And I’m not talking about a giant textbook, or a book with lots of footnotes, or even a book with an index and a glossary. I’m talking about nonfiction that actually discusses the topic, as opposed to just teaching it. While a field of science can be very technical, there also may be a number of sociological debates surrounding it, and that’s good information to have when you’re writing a story about people that may or may not understand and embrace that branch of science you’re discussing. 

Nonfiction on a historical time period might give you more about the day-to-day lives of the people, and may even have anecdotes and hypothetical stories based on historical fact, all of which will make it more relatable and interesting. 

Ordinarily, judging books by their covers is a bad idea, but try to find books that are small and that have engaging covers. Go to a library, find the section that houses your topic and just start browsing for something. 

I love reading nonfiction as a means of research. I have more fun reading a few comprehensive books on a topic than clicking through hundreds of search results. Because each book has one author, I’m able to settle into that author’s style, and the flow from one chapter to the next ensures that I’m more engaged with the content. Plus, I can do it on my couch or in bed without a bulky laptop on my legs. 

I’ve also gotten great ideas to fill plot holes just by reading nonfiction. That’s research at its best. 

Myth 2: Research is all reading. 

Research for a novel can be all kinds of things! Some examples:

If you have a character that has a talent or skill you know nothing about, try learning it. You may not be very good, because it will likely take years to become a master, but if you’re going to write about an artist or musician, or even an athlete, you’ll be better able to get into that character’s head if you know more about hand positions, body movements and physical sensations, as well as the emotional feelings you get while doing it. 

If it’s a broad topic, watch a documentary. You’ll be able to absorb a lot of information in just a couple of hours, and if it’s a good documentary, it’ll have interviews from people who really know what they’re talking about. Pop some popcorn, grab a soda, and enjoy the research. 

Do some setting research. Go to places that have similarities to the setting you’re writing about. These could be settings you’re unfamiliar with, or they could be things you know very well. If you’re writing about a group of employees that work in a coffee shop, visit lots and lots of coffee shops and observe the interactions of the staff. Go to a bar, a bookstore, a rec center, a college campus…go to places that will inspire you to work on your story. If you have the money, you might also do some heavy or light traveling - going to the nearest city, or to the beach or the mountains. Go somewhere that will make you feel like you’re in your story, instead of just writing it. 

Talk to people. If you know people in real life you can consult about topics, that’s wonderful, but if not, find some online forums/communities you can find a home at, where people don’t mind sharing their expertise and experiences. Don’t think of it as “interviewing” people - just have casual conversations, and ask questions when you’re curious to know more. 

Broaden the type of research you do to make it more interesting, not to mention comprehensive. 

Myth 3: Research must be done before writing. 

You’ll never be ready to start writing. There will always be something that you feel you need to figure out, work out, straighten out, and basically put off the inevitable. Research can be done before writing, but sometimes it’s actually better to wait. 

Write a first draft, and BS your way through the things you don’t know. The first draft is the closest depiction of what your final draft will look like. You’ll get ideas for character backgrounds as you go, you’ll throw new plot twists or plot arcs in there to keep the writing interesting, and you’ll discover plot holes that you were pretty sure didn’t exist during the planning. If you think that researching for months prior to writing will stop all this from happening, I promise you there’s no guarantee of that. What’s worse, you might spend a lot of your time researching something that ultimately doesn’t make it into the novel. 

So if you’re ready to write, but you’re afraid of jumping into the story without researching a topic first, don’t be. Go ahead and start writing, and once the draft is finished, you can look at what you’ve got and pinpoint what specific topics need research. And the plot holes that come up will likely get filled while you’re doing that research. Then, start on the second draft with both intimate knowledge of your story and the topics you cover.

Happy researching!

-Rebekah

[neotropicalprince-deactivated20]

we have all read fanfiction that we shouldn’t have

[goodbyenow]

[wawalu]

John Newman. Charlie Wilson. ’Tiring Game’.