mostly inspiration

I reblog things i think look pretty/inspire me, or things to help me write. My Ao3 has my fics (same username).

[kosmogrl]

[fucking-relax]

this is helpful to getting started on anything regardless of what you call it (from this post)

problem solving steps

IMPROVE distress tolerance skill

[fullcravings]

Sticky Toffee Pudding Tray Bake

[frailbug]

collection of my purse pics

[fenncc]

I can’t resist drawing lily pads and revisited them for 9 pm in my hours of the day series, really thrilled with how it came out :)

[penny-anna]

i confess i don't really understand what people mean when they say they cannot find good books to read anymore. like. go to the shop or library and choose a book??

[penny-anna]

the problem generally seems to be something along the lines of 'everyone on tiktok is telling me to read books i think sounds bad' and its like ok i do not think those people have your best interests at heart

[penny-anna]

this post is perennially doing the rounds so am just going to take the opportunity to recommend a couple of books I've read recently for anyone who wants something different to read:

Girlfriends by Emily Zhou: i acquired this one bcos the publisher (Little Puss) was doing a sale where you could get all their ebooks for. I think £10? and i was like damn that's a great deal for that many ebooks and a rad looking trans-run publishing house. anyway: this is a collection of 7 short stories about trans women living their lives. really loved the Voice and the character portraits. i found it a pretty relaxed and easy going read.

Murder at the Black Cat Cafe by Seishi Yokomizo: picked this up on an impulse from a Japanese books table in waterstones. i really like vintage murder mysteries n periodically try to branch out beyond Agatha Christie. this one did not disappoint. really liked the post-war setting and spooky, grimy atmosphere.

The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas: recent impulse purchase. i picked this one out bcos 1) the premise gave me Snow Queen vibes n The Snow Queen is my favourite fairy tale and 2) one of the cover quotes is along the lines of 'I'm surprised this isn't the most famous book in the world' and i figured any book that would prompt someone to make a statement that Big had to be at least interest. i would describe it as a bit like a Norwegian Picnic at Hanging Rock only it's actually a few years older so technically Picnic at Hanging Rock is the Australian Ice Palace I suppose. if you don't like the idea of a mystery story that never fully resolves its mystery then this might not be for you. anyway: haunting & atmospheric. there's one specific scene in there that's gonna stay with me for life i think.

[classicalcanvas]

Among the Waves by Ivan Aivazovsky

[urgetocreate]

Ivan Aivazovsky (Russian 1817-1900), Among the Waves, 1898, Oil on canvas

[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

[pangur-and-grim]

I won't publish the ask (they asked me not to), but I thought I'd still answer it publicly!

no, royalties are not a significant source of income for most authors. if you wrote something like Project Hail Mary, then absolutely, the royalties would be substantial! but that's like winning the lottery. Ryan Gosling is not starring in the movie adaption of most books.

when you sell a book to a publisher, you get what's called 'an advance against royalties'. it's usually split into multiple parts, so you might get one third for the initial sale, one third for the final revised manuscript, and one third on the publishing date.

an advance against royalties is the publisher saying "we believe you will eventually make X amount in royalties, so here it is ahead of time." and then you don't actually see any money from royalties until the advance is paid off. most books do not make enough in royalties to pay off the advance (I have two children's books and one fiction book, and have yet to see royalties for any of them).

advances are still great, but you need to make them stretch! for instance, last year my net income was about 30k Canadian (21k USD), which is fantastic when you consider that I mostly made it through writing. but I'm definitely not a millionaire. I can live off my writing (not trying to undersell that!) but I'll probably remain in a low income bracket for the foreseeable future.

this isn't meant to discourage anyone from seeking out writing as a career! however, there is a reason that many authors have alternate jobs with writing on the side. or, you know, rich spouses.

[pangur-and-grim]

this isn't me making a fuss about pirating (I've pirated way too many shows to run my mouth on that lmao), but there IS actually a financial incentive to having people buy your books!

buying books shows the publisher that they can make money off you, which means they're more likely to give you advances for future books. and advances are what authors live off (if they don't have a side job). that's why I always push pre-orders so hard! you have to be a racehorse worth betting on, or else they send you to the glue factory....

if I can offer one alternative to pirating: asking your library to stock the book also helps authors, and doesn't cost anything. the only downside is the patience required.

[pangur-and-grim]

OOPS yes, @stjohnstarling makes a good point! everything I'm saying is from the perspective of traditional publishing, but it's a very different game if you're a self-published author

[gollancz]

I will also add that this is why pre-orders can make a HUGE difference to authors - because if there's enough hype, publishers can pull more levers to build that momentum and reach more readers to help authors earn out their advance faster.

[gudgercollege]

Trad publishing contracts person here to co-sign everything in this post. If you want to support an author you really like but are broke as hell, then you can buy their book when it's discounted, buy it used, borrow it from a friend, or use the library. The first step as an author is to get your book read, not to get it bought. The important thing for you as a reader is to spread the word about how good the book is so the publisher knows the audience is there even if sales aren't spectacular. Piracy of books, especially books from small/indie publishers, means the publisher will print fewer copies of their next book, and sometimes if it's an ongoing series the next books in the series will be canceled, either to be replaced by a book with a different premise or they'll cancel the contract for the next books entirely. The "hack" where you buy the ebook or audiobook and then return it for a credit also takes money directly out of the author's pocket since those payment/royalty systems are set up differently than if you were to buy a book from a bookstore and return it. In that situation the bookstore absorbs that loss, but returning the ebook means the money gets clawed back from the author's advance or royalties and they'll have to earn that back.

Pre-orders and Amazon/Goodreads reviews are used as a gauge by publishers to predict how many copies they are likely to sell and therefore how many copies they want to print. They want to sell most of what they print rather than print too many and end up with a bunch of copies no one wants that they'll have to pay to store or sell at a huge discount or recycle, which is what happens to unsold books. Most publishers have a limited amount of money and manpower to dedicate to any particular book, so if there's a book building up a lot of buzz, that'll give them reason to put their resources towards promoting that book to get a better return on their investment. If the publisher can't make money off a book or author they'll dump them.

Generally, every aspect of the publishing and book industries, including writers, agents, publishing employees, librarians, and booksellers are overworked and underpaid. Unless you're Stephen King or already famous, you don't make money off of books. We do it for sheer love of the game.

Use your library! Publishers have a whole department dedicated to selling their books to libraries and the author gets part of those sales. Increasing circulation of library resources means the libraries can make a better case to get more money from the government to buy more books that you want to read and they're a place to hang out for free. Libraries are the best gift humanity gave itself, use yours as often as possible.

[torstherapy]

[tinsnip]

Per @spoonstrek

[taxi-boi]

every time someone treats Feeling Love™ as Political Praxis i want to beam this whole Moses Sumney quote into their head

[sedoretu]

I’m reading The Deviants War: The Homosexual vs The United States of America and the entire point of gay pride as a concept comes from police raids on bars, clubs, public restrooms, etc where gays were humiliated and outed in the newspapers (sometimes with their addresses!) and had careers ruined and lives upended by being associated with perversion and vice squads and all that and they responded by going “no I’m proud” and took that pride to the streets in defiance of the huge mechanism of shame that existed to oppress the gay community into obscurity and so the fact that people are now trying to apply conservative dogma to pride parades to make them “safe for children” or in other words “safe for people with oppressive conservative values” is simply insane

[sedoretu]

To phrase this more clearly: “public indecency” laws were the primary tool for brutally enforcing gender and sexual conformity, so applying a “public indecency” lens to pride parades of all things is a slap in the face of everyone who ever suffered under gender & sexual oppression and took their anger (and yes their pride!) to the streets. If it makes you uneasy or uncomfortable maybe you’re not on the side you think you are!

[silvermoon424]

Bro absolutely COOKED with this.

[ohnoitstbskyen]

If you ever hear the phrase "fascism is aesthetics as politics," that's what this post is talking about.

It's not about being tough on crime, because the absolute toughest most brutal measure you could take against "crime" as a social problem is to alleviate poverty, and increase access to education, healthcare and social mobility.

It's about performing "tough on crime" as an aesthetic by enacting violence against a prop, i.e. minorities and the impoverished, who are fetishized and objectified to represent "crime." They are brutalized as punishment for crime, but never with the purpose of alleviating the problem of crime.

This is why a lot of conservatives and other right wingers can get straight up angry when you suggest things like reform or social measures to reduce crime. They don't want crime to be reduced, they want an eternal war against "crime" because it provides an arena for the righteous to demonstrate virtue by brutalizing their enemies.

[ukpuru]

Textile patterns from the Igbo women’s weaving industry at Akwete, now in southern Abia State. National Library of the Netherlands, The Hague.

[valtsv]

maybe this is insensitive of me but i find it really funny that the human behavioural response to being sufficiently bored and isolated is to devise increasingly creative ways to harm our bodies and risk our lives just to have something to react to. and no small amount of innovation has been achieved this way. yeah sorry but if you don't give me enough treats and puzzles i'm going to start hurting myself for fun.

[valtsv]

"you're going to hurt yourself badly doing that" actually i'm very good at it. i've had lots of practice you see.

[i-was-today-years-old-when]

TIL a family in Georgia claimed to have passed down a song in an unknown language from the time of their enslavement; scientists identified the song as a genuine West African funeral song in the Mende language that had survived multiple transmissions from mother to daughter over multiple centuries (x)

[ancestralia]

In 1997 Amelia’s daughter, Mary Moran, and other members of the Moran family were invited to Sierra Leone, West Africa, where they were welcomed in Freetown by Sierra Leone’s President and then flown by helicopter to the country’s interior.  There, in the small village of Senehun Ngola, Mary and Bendu Jabati met and sang this song together for the first time.  Years earlier, Bendu’s grandmother had told her that this song, which had been passed down in her village from mother to daughter for centuries, would one day reunite her to long-lost relatives.

In addition to finding out where in Africa her ancestors were abducted into slavery, Mary Moran discovered the meaning of the Mende song: a processional hymn for the final farewell to the spirit, it was sung in Senehun Ngola by women as they prepared the body of a loved one for burial.

(The OP's link leads to a site with a recording of the song sung by both Mary Moran and her mother, Amelia)

[red-lipstick]

Steve Adams - Moongazer (A hare staring at the rising moon in Kimberley Nottinghamshire), 2012    Photography

[peoniepoetals]

“I go on loving you like water but / there is a terrible breath in the way all of this”

— John Ashbery, in “The Tennis Court Oath” from The Tennis Court Oath