Andulka
Not today Justin
KIROKAZE
#extradirty
Today's Document
Mike Driver
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Sade Olutola
titsay
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JVL
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
shark vs the universe
bliss lane
Love Begins
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Noah Kahan
Claire Keane
taylor price
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@hannahleighbooks
A Romance Where Nothing Bad Happens!
My book is out!! Read about Drew and Ellis, a recovering workaholic and a recovering asshole who find love at a community volunteer group! It's got queers, it's got disability, it's got immigrants, and they spend the book working together and slowly becoming happier.
www.amazon.com/dp/B0GKXFRXD5
Anyway.
Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart.
When Everything Everywhere All at Once said “The only thing I do know is that we have to be kind. Please, be kind, especially when we don’t know what’s going on"
When the Good Place said “Why choose to be good every day when there is no guaranteed reward now or in the afterlife… I argue that we choose to be good because of our bonds with other people and our innate desire to treat them with dignity. Simply put, we are not in this alone.”
When Jean-Paul Sartre said ”‘Hell is other people’ is only one side of the coin. The other side, which no one seems to mention, is also ‘Heaven is each other’. Hell is separateness, uncommunicability, self-centeredness, lust for power, for riches, for fame. Heaven on the other hand is very simple, and very hard: caring about your fellow beings.“
Love that we’ve elevated the conversation to such a degree that, if you’re going to be grimdark nihilistic in fiction, you need to argue philosophically against 4 seasons of The Good Place.
From the comments and other reblogs:
When Kurt Vonnegut said, “Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
How to write a book where nothing bad happens
So I thought a lot about this, obviously, while writing my book. The whole concept of the book, the whole point of it, was to have a story where the reader didn't have to white-knuckle through the huge crisis and Long Dark Night of the Soul, which stresses me out every time. Like, I love romance novels but I hate seeing the inevitable breakup coming. Gimme happy queers! I want happy queers, please!
But the crisis is a big source of tension. No conflict, no story, right? So what do?
Reader, I returned to my roots, and my roots are fanfic. There are SO many fanfics where nothing bad happens. Even novel-length ones. Often these are my favorite stories! I love watching the characters slowly get better and better until they hit a point where you can actually believe that these repressed, traumatized, broken dudes could have a happy ending. It's like a delicious meal for me and I could eat it every day.
So I was like: is this really dependent on having a canon behind it? Can you do it without the weight of prior experience with the characters?
But I've read stories like this in canons I wasn't familiar with, where I just had to be like "okay, I understand these guys have Been Through The Wars, I see that X is a poor little meow meow and Y is a beautiful cinnamon roll too good for this world, LET'S WATCH 'EM KISS." And I still had a great time.
I decided that the key wasn't an existing canon, it was locating the characters in the context of desperately wanting, needing, something better than what they've got. Framing them in a way that centralizes that need, and then showing how they work to get it. (This post, though it's mostly about fantasy and my book is contemporary, gets at this principle also.) Then there are absolutely stakes (the stakes are literally whether they're capable of happiness!) and tension (how can these traumatized, broken people make this work?) and a real narrative journey, one you care about.
I like thinking about narratives as shapes, and I realized a long time ago that my favorite narrative shape is a staircase. The story goes up - not immediately, and not without some effort, of course. Maybe it's really steep sometimes. Maybe the characters even have to hop over some missing stairs. But the journey is moving upward. I think it's really important to remember that the only alternative to the classic Western narrative type - one where the character falls and hits rock-bottom - is not a flat line. Character growth and narrative tension can still happen. The reader doesn't have to be bored.
Anyway, you don't have to take my word for it! If you want an ARC copy of Kind: A Romance Where Nothing Bad Happens, you can judge whether I did a good job yourself. And if you have any recs for staircase books, please send 'em my way! They're my favorite kind.
Cozy Fantasy and Why It Doesn't Work
I think I am among many who feel like they should love cozy fantasy and have found it an incredibly lacking genre.
This newly branded "cozy fantasy" genre that has taken readers by storm since 2020 and while it is new that books are now marketed as cozy, the genre itself isn't new. Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones is a great example of the genre before it was labeled and also how to make it work.
Cozy fantasy is defined by many as fantasy with low stakes. Fantasy aesthetic but less sword fights. On paper, it sounds great. But the execution has been less than stellar for readers like me. The lack of physical stakes has also impacted the emotional stakes of these books, creating forgettable characters with boring problems. As a romance reader, I find this frustrating. Romance is known for being a predictable and formulaic genre, the now defunct Romance Writers of America defined romances as needing happy endings, a term romances have continued to follow. Yet these romance texts manage to have low physical stakes (how to date your neighbor, how to confront your toxic friends, etc) while still maintaining high personal stakes that keep readers invested and begging for more. So I was initially confused why cozy fantasy authors struggle to write texts that connect to readers like me.
I think I have found the answer which is the genre is just here for vibes. It is all about aesthetic, not even worldbuilding that fantasy is known for as most cozy fantasy I read have so many problems as soon as you ask one question. It is hard to acknowledge that a genre that is pitched to work for readers like me doesn't work for many of us. Especially because occasionally there is one that works beautifully to my taste.
I often say my favorite cozy fantasies that are more contemporary are short and visual, which I plays into the idea of the genre being an aesthetic. The Bakery Dragon by Devin Elle Kurtz is a good example because it is a simple story that is given the perfect amount of pages and gorgeous visuals without dragging on when the message is very clear and easy to understand. Books like The Phoenix Keeper and Legends and Lattes have absolutely nothing for me, their very clear message hitting the reader over and over so the readers don't miss it and focusing on the aesthetic of worldbuilding rather than the reality of the fantastic elements within the world.
I guess my point is. . . I realize this genre isn't for me since I have realized it is more of an aesthetic than anything. .. .but I want it to be. Should I let it go and put my efforts elsewhere? Or should I keep exploring this new trend and find the hidden gems?
I think you nailed it on the head but also:
So many cozy fantasies seem to do no work to make you like the characters. They feel like the epilogue to another story, or like fanfic in the sense that you're expected to already care about these people, but they're skipping the leg work to get you there.
Legends and lattes worked for me mostly because I had fun with the exploration of how a fantasy setting would reinvent a coffee shop. It also felt a bit like a videogame, delimiting tasks and creating new, small problems each time one goal was reached. Which is to say, it appealed to the part of my brain that likes puzzles, but failed to reach me with its characters. I don't remember a single thing about the love interest aside what she looks like on the cover lol
Stories with high stakes immediately make you see what your character cares about: justice for murdered parents, saving their home from the armies of evil, and so on. In low stakes fantasies, you're handed a character whose values are just the bland goodness people pretty much universally strive for. It makes them both forgettable and unremarkable. And a story that has no plot and very little worldbuilding cannot afford to have weak protagonists on top of it.
Which honestly might bring me back to my main theory of what makes a story good: it's a balancing act of Plot, Worldbuilding, Characters, and usually the stronger a book is in one of these aspects, the more likely I am to overlook flaws in the others. But by definition, cozy fantasy starts off with only two of these, so it makes it all the more important and unforgivable when an aspect is weak. Its like trying to build a stool with two legs.
Hello, professional author here, I have a *slight* tweak of a suggestion to offer, or an alternate take from a slightly different perspective. First, I 100% agree with the meat of what you're both saying here, and I absolutely share your frustrations with the genre of cozy fantasy as a whole -- so many of them have something going wrong with the engine of the story. The car won't start. You turn the ignition and all you get out of it is a weak grumbling. So what's happening here from a mechanical perspective?
We're talking about cozy fantasy being "low stakes", and that's certainly how it bills itself. But low stakes are not the source of the problem -- there are plenty of stories/movies/tv shows with very low stakes that we still enjoy watching! Great British Bake Off, for example. The stakes are only "Will the cake come out right" and "how will the judges react". Right? Those are low stakes! The world is not ending, society is not in danger of crumbling to pieces, there is no great battle between Good and Evil for the fate of all humanity. But we watch GBBO and we're ENRAPTURED. We're INVESTED. Why?
Not because of the stakes, but because of the tension.
wait hang on i need to say this in the loud font because it's crucially important
IT'S BECAUSE OF THE TENSION
Both readers and apprentice writers often confuse "stakes" and "tension" because, frankly, increasing the stakes is often a cheap and easy way to increase the tension. Here's the difference, just to make sure we're all on the same page: Stakes are an external, objective thing -- "will the cake come out right, how will the judges react" -- but tension is internal. It is the pull between two things: On one hand, how much this contestant wants to win, how hard they've been trying, how emotional they're getting about a mishap, and our knowledge from an earlier episode about how their mum always believed in them and how they've struggled to believe in themself but since making it onto GBBO they've been thinking that maybe... maybe they can believe in themself.
And what's pulling from the other side is: How their nervousness and lack of confidence is causing them to make mistakes; how we as the audience don't know whether this challenging thing they're trying is going to turn out well; how they're ever going to recover from a cataclysm like forgetting to turn the oven on; whether they could do their absolute best and try so so so SO HARD and it might not make any difference because the other contestants also were all trying their hardest.
Man, I don't know about you, but even just as I was writing that out, my heart was in my throat and I was getting a little choked up.
THAT'S tension. And that's what a lot of cozy fantasy is lacking, because they say "low stakes" and they think that stakes and tension are the same thing, and so they forget that YOU STILL HAVE TO MAKE YOUR CHARACTERS CARE PASSIONATELY IF YOU WANT THE READER TO HAVE ANYTHING THAT THEY CARE ABOUT. As readers, we care when the character has something that really, really, REALLY matters to them. We literally cannot help it -- look up "mirror neurons" if you want the neuroscience explanation for why we literally cannot help it.
High stakes is a cheap cheat code to tension because something like "We have to save the world to keep the Dark Lord from invading the kingdom and slaughtering everyone" is sort of self-explanatory about why it matters. Ah, yes, We Don't Want To Be Slaughtered. Got it. No explanation necessary. You can get away with not really showing whether it matters to the character, because the audience just naturally ASSUMES that it's a Good and Important thing to be doing.
You can't get away with cutting corners like that if you're doing low stakes. Here, look:
High stakes & high tension = Think Mad Max: Fury Road. It is a LOT and you can't look away but you might feel sort of exhausted afterwards and need a nap.
High stakes & low tension = Many Marvel films. Sure ok yeah we're saving the world, that's fun, whatever. Probably saving the world is a good thing to do so that's fine
Low stakes & high tension = GBBO as previously mentioned. Also pretty much any sport (sorry, sports fans, but "will they win the big game" is not high stakes, it just SEEMS like high stakes because of ow much you care about it -- which is TENSION!!!) You will be on the edge of your seat, you will be crying about how amazingly well that border collie/papillon mix did in the agility course.
Low stakes & low tension: Legends & Lattes. Probably if Plan A doesn't work out, the character could just wander off and try Plan B and it wouldn't be that personally upsetting.
So that's my two cents on where a lot of cozy fantasy is going wrong. And like, I can kind of see where my colleagues are coming from and why books like this keep being produced these days??? Like the pandemic really fucked up everybody, and so many of us are incredibly burned out and running on fumes... And so sometimes it feels impossibly challenging to write any book except one where nothing bad happens and nothing is in danger and nobody is really bothered or worried about anything and everything is mostly fine and there aren't any major setbacks.....
But that leaves readers cold. And frankly, I don't feel like it does much of anything to nourish either our souls or theirs. It feels like eating a bag of potato chips for dinner instead of going to the effort of even just heating up a frozen dinner that has a vegetable in it.
idk, man. I've taught university classes about this shit, but what do I know. Maybe I'm talking out of my ass. (Also, if you would like an example of cozy fantasy where it really fucking matters to the person going through it, may I humbly suggest Yield Under Great Persuasion? I wrote it partially as an illustration of how there's a difference between Stakes and Tension. :D)
I feel like in the rush of “throw out etiquette who cares what fork you use or who gets introduced first” we actually lost a lot of social scripts that the younger generations are floundering without.
A lot of tough situations where we now feel like we “don’t know what to do or say” had social scripts just a couple of generations ago and they might have been canned phrases or robotic actions but they could still be meant sincerely and unfortunately we haven’t replaced them with any more sincere or easier new script.
a lot of people are giving examples in the notes of things they just find annoying like not using headphones in public, but OP is talking about actual literal scripts of things to say in awkward situations
if you have a date or two with someone and you don't see a relationship developing? most millennials / gen Zers just end up ghosting. but a social script that might have been taught and rehearsed in the past could be:
"I really appreciated getting dinner with you the other night and I enjoyed your company, but I'm afraid I didn't feel a spark. I wish you the best, and hope you find that special someone!"
like it sounds kind of trite but it was at least something to say and it can still be meant with kind sincerity. it also communicates in 2 sentences that you don't want to see them romantically again, but there aren't any hard feelings about that. that's it!!! that's all it takes!!!
Another example is that at parties a lot of people talk about how awkward it is to mingle or talk to people they dont know. But at old timey parties that was traditionally the HOST'S job, and there was a specific scripted way of doing it that eased the process! The host would bring you in, introduce you and maybe even a little bit about you like what you did for a living, and then guide you to a group you could talk to. They didn't just let you in the door and then ditch you to fend for yourself in a sea of strangers. That would be unthinkable and no one would be surprised if a get-together like that wound up being awkward.
I still do the party-host thing and yall can, too! (Thanks Mad Men for teaching me a lot of outmoded social scripts... no really tho)
Remember things about your friends! Ask people about their weekends, hobbies, holidays, studies, and jobs! Listen for the concerns people have and what they are working on! Draw connections between one person and another to get the ball rolling. "Oh, Maura, you just got your first cat! You should talk to Felix, he used to work at a rescue. Felix, please tell Maura all the new-cat-guardian pointers."
"Bill, Sheila, Xan, this is my friend Kale. Kale is really into Star Trek, Bill you and them should talk about it!"
Orrr whatever! After you make the introduction and draw the connection you just float on into the next interaction with someone else at the function. Just listen, care about your friends, get our of your own head, and think of how you can bring other people together and you will feel 100% less awkward.
hi i am so excited about this post because i have posted this exact thing MANY times on here, often in the specific context of how formal etiquette is so useful for autistic people especially, but also for everyone. even if you come off a little bit formal, which you will sometimes, having Old School Manners (or just knowing what they are) for various common scenarios is like having a magic ticket that will just sail you through all kinds of social iinteractions, gatekeeping, social weirdness, and as is pointed out in the above posts about introducing people to each other, can make you into a really valuable and helpful person for an entire gathering or group of people.
i also want to point out that knowing what the polite thing to do in all situations makes you a lot more effective at being rude and obnoxious when the situation calls for it, which is also a valuable and necessary adult skill
#things to write#but also#things to do#I could certainly benefit from a manual...
If you're looking for a manual on these sorts of things; social etiquette, social scripts, how to handle difficult and/or awkward social situations, etc. then I highly recommend picking up any book by Miss Manners. Her books really are the gold standard for learning the types of skills this post is talking about. I should also mention that Miss Manners is witty and hilarious so her books are also fun to read.
The best book by Miss Manners to get started with would be Miss Manner's Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior. This one is probably the best starting point because it gives the best overview of all the basics.
If you're the type who likes to listen to podcasts, I recommend checking out "Were You Raised By Wolves?" and/or "Awesome Etiquette". Both are also great tools for learning the type of social skills this post is talking about. I'm personally a fan of "Were You Raised By Wolves?" because not only are they pretty funny and informative, they also bother to try to teach the underlying social intelligence behind various manners and social etiquette so that you can have the skills to solve social dilemmas on your own. However, "Awesome Etiquette" is also pretty fun and informative.
#long post#I feel like 'i dont do small talk nobody cares about the weather' had a negative impact on social interaction#I mean yeah sometimes small talk about nothing gets awkward. but often it leads to the most interesting conversations#just asking 'what kind of music do you listen to at the gym' or 'have you read any books lately' could be such a lovely subject#I'm sometimes socially awkward despite being a huge extrovert. that's why etiquette is such a great thing#if you don't know how to act around people just stick to the etiquette rules. if they have a problem with it they're not for me anyways
Sorry @darlingdear but I couldn't let this stay in the tags.
I say this as someone who is neurodivergent had grew up very socially awkward, but recently I find the "screw small talk, I wanna get to know the REAL you" attitude to be pretentious as well as a demonstration of a lack of boundaries.
But also, I think a lot of people who have this attitude don't actually really know what does qualify as small talk. The definition of small talk is any topic that's of no real consequence and includes topics like food, pets, sports, music, whatever show you're currently streaming, whatever book you're currently reading, and yes, the weather. A lot of people who have this "I hate small talk / I don't do small talk" attitude probably think it's only reciting a bunch of secret scripts about the weather, and don't realize how much they engage in small talk whenever they talk about their pets or their favorite foods or the really cool show they're watching right now.
Small talk is just about boundaries and getting to know someone *before* you move into more serious and personal topics. The older I get the more I learn you really can't just trust anyone with more serious and personal subjects. Small talk first is important to gauge if they're someone safe and trustworthy first before moving into more serious and personal subjects. If you really genuinely refuse to get to know someone before immediately discussing serious and personal subjects you may have an issue with boundaries and should consider working on that.
Oh my god, so much the last point. All of them, but especially the last.
Small talk is a way of sounding out a person’s attitudes. It’s about finding out if they’re a rabid asshole or someone you want to spend more time with.
I had a professor who got angry at a group of (mostly women), from five countries, all of whom met yesterday, for talking about daytime TV. He basically insulted us and called us shallow.
Dude, we were figuring each other out with a safe topic! We were the best of friends three weeks later. We could broach harder topics because we understood each other’s boundaries better. If you immediately demand people bare their souls, you’re not likely to get them to be honest.
also it's always polite / a good idea to balance the conversation out between yourself and the other person. By which I mean, if they've asked you several questions, turn it around: "and what about you?" / "what has your experience been in [topic]?" I used to be too awkward to do it but noticed conversations would bleed to death. Then I overcompensated and only asked the other person question upon question. This was also Not Ideal because guys would end up thinking I was super interested in them and get confused when I shut off my interest / social battery later on. So, balance: I try to talk about 50% of the time and share something that is either useful or relatable to the other or important to me. And by being interested and asking real questions you can get to know someone better and they will also know you a little, which can be really lovely.
"I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed."
—Mary Oliver
i think a lot of ppl assume food pantries are for if you're completely destitute and have no food in your house at all.
just so you know if you forego certain foods because you can't afford them or you can't "justify" spending the money, you might be able to get that food at a pantry.
i was living in a super wealthy area once where the only grocery store within a 40 minute drive was all fancy upcharged local organic and i literally pretty much stopped eating fresh produce because i couldn't afford it. i went months without eating a carrot or greens or anything that didn't come from a can. sometimes i got frozen veggies.
so sure, i was eating. i wasn't starving. i was getting nutrition. but it was nuts that as an animal on earth where plants grow in abundance, i didn't get to eat any of them fresh. people deserve fresh produce!
one day i was lamenting it and my friend was like, "oh yeah i get all of my produce every week at the food pantry."
i was surprised bc she made the same paycheck as me and i wouldn't have thought of either of us as someone who 'qualified' for food assistance. i went to the food pantry and found out because the median income in our town was so high, i did qualify. more than that, they asked for no proof of income, it was more of a 'if you think you need help, we don't make you prove it,' situation.
for like 8 months i got all of my produce (and eggs!) there every week. and yes if i had made sacrifices elsewhere in my life i probably could have afforded some produce at the local grocery store. i could have, i don't know, skipped seeing the one movie i saw at a move theater once every couple of months and spent the $8 on spinach one time instead of the ticket and had spinach once every couple of months.
but the point is the food pantry had more than enough to go around. if i hadn't taken some of their produce, it would have gone bad. the resource was available to me, and there was no reason for me to crawl on my hands and knees to qualify for it.
resources like food assistance are not available everywhere and they can be very limited and hard to come by. they won't be given out just for fun to anyone. if you ask for assistance and are offered assistance in reply, you need to believe that the assistance is available for you.
if a food assistance program doesn't have resources to help you, it'll say so. there is no harm in asking! you will be told 'yes' or 'no.' but you won't know until you ask.
stop convincing yourself that you don't deserve assistance, that everyone else needs it more than you, that you're taking it from someone else, that you should have nothing at all in order to deserve anything.
you deserve to not only eat but to eat well. if there's assistance for you to access better foods than what you have, understand how fortunate you are, and stop denying yourself that resource!
accessing food assistance at pantries is also a great way to help yr community, because you can spread the word and help normalize receiving food assistance in yr community. you can even become a volunteer and be part of the team providing to you and others (i did that and it rocked)!
my point is, yes, there is always someone who needs something 'more' than others. i have been completely destitute and it sucks. but when i went to the food pantry never once did i think, 'nobody better be here if they have more than me.' i was grateful that we all had support.
"the world isn't kind" ok??? Much more importantly are you?????
"the world isnt kind" skill issue. I am
This is a threat
thought of this immediately and was delighted to discover it’s the same op
Be an ARC reader for my MM romance novel!
Drew is an overachieving perfectionist who doesn't understand how anyone can just relax on the couch with a book. But working too hard literally put him in the hospital. So what does he do?
Ellis used to be the worst guy at the D&D table. He was a walking Reddit troll. But being a dick had one too many consequences, and now he's determined to be different. But how does that work?
Kind: A Romance Where Nothing Bad Happens is a book about a recovering workaholic and a recovering asshole who find love at a community volunteer group. It's a novel with no crises, no breakups, no long dark nights of the soul - just a slow climb out of misery and into happiness.
Sign up to be an ARC reader here!
