Lost Wilted Rose Makes Calls

“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.” ~M. A journal blog about my life and my ...

[loworose]

Sometimes I forget...

The feeling of warmth. The taste of food. Touching her.

It was nice, being human. Now that I’m a doll again, we can’t communicate. But I’m here. Before I didn’t have a sense of self. But now I do. I’m trapped. And I desperately want to get back out.

[bear-physics]

Dusting off my rusty still life skills for a bit of telekinetic fun.

[p5art]

attraction

(code)

[clepse-deactivated20171114]

One of me favourite books, a Gray’s Anatomy for mythological creatures.

The Resurrectionist // Eb Hudspeth

[loworose]

Day Four

It was a cold morning and cat H gave me tons of affection.

[loworose]

Day Three

Today I fear, I am going to mess up. I have to write for school and it fills me with anxiety. Ughs.

[nimblesnotebook-blog]

Important Issue on Creating Characters

I’ve seen something a bit…unsettling among some writers who talk about characters they’re developing and I think it’s important to address this.

We all want to create cool, memorable characters who are interesting. We all know that to do this, our characters need to have personalities, good traits, bad traits, changes throughout the story, and so on. 

However, I’ve seen too many writers talk about certain things that they believe make their characters cooler, more interesting, more original, or more well rounded.

So, to be blunt:

Making your character anything other than straight does not automatically make your character well rounded, dynamic, cool, interesting, or original.

Making your character anything other than cis does not automatically make your character well rounded, dynamic, cool, interesting, or original.

Making your character anything other than white does not automatically make your character well rounded, dynamic, cool, interesting, or original.

Making your character anything other than thin does not automatically make your character well rounded, dynamic, cool, interesting, or original.

Giving your character a mental illness, a disability, a neurological disorder, etc. does not automatically make your character well rounded, dynamic, cool, interesting, or original.

Please stop treating these factors as personality traits. They may influence a person’s personality, behaviors, thoughts, actions, and relationships, but they are not traits themselves.

[kayla-bird-deactivated20190505]

Just so you know, not everyone thinks that these factors are boring or unhelpful!

If I had a choice between two completely identical books, one with a well-adjusted, conventionally-pretty space captain with autumn red hair who saves the world in her spaceship, takes pity on the unfortunate, and falls in love with her second-in-command, a tall strapping young man… and one about a space captain who wears micro-braids under her helmet, understands the struggles of dispossessed aliens because she was once a traumatized refugee as well, has badass muscles from her years of space captaining, and falls in love with her second-in-command, a genderless alien who communicates through telepathy?

Hmm. Which one seems more generic, and which one seems more imaginative? Which one seems to interpret the world as it really is, and which one filters the world through network TV and YA bestsellers and overhyped conventionality?

Which book reminds me of every other book I’ve ever read, and which book reminds me of real life?

So, to be blunt:

Making your characters cis, straight, white, a recolor of every existing picture-perfect protagonist, and totally ordinary does not automatically make your characters well-rounded, cool, dynamic or original. Please stop treating these factors as the mandatory default for all human life.

shiraglassman you’re better at remaining calm and academic than I am, I think? please politely dismantle this rhetoric while I roll my eyes

also tagging thesylverlining and shwetanarayan in case they need a good laugh

[shiraglassman]

I get what people mean when they say the diversity feels like it was just slapped on to make the character more interesting. It means that the deviation from the expected default doesn’t feel meaningful to them. But what makes diversity feel meaningful to someone in the group and what makes it feel meaningful to someone not in the group are going to be two different things, and if you’re not in the group you can bet your Geiger counter is calibrated wrong.

With the caveat that of course not everyone in the group is going to feel the same way about any particular example of representation. #anthonygoldstein

There are probably some people who make characters trans and celiac and neurodivergent because it seems interesting to them, and without research or lived experience, the character may seem flat and just a combination of identities and marginalizations. But then, if you wrote a book about my spouse, you’d be writing about a person who is all of those things. What sucks is that without cracking open the book, a lot of people would assume all those traits were just in the book to make it seem diverse, without realizing that the world IS full of people who aren’t white, straight, cis, able-bodied, etc. and they/we go about our business and our lives every day all the time having adventures that aren’t “directly relevant” to our oppression.

A Black woman can get lost in a library and find a hidden floor with secret texts that hide magic spells.

A Jewish trans boy can forget to do his science project, pull some mad BS-ing skills out of his butt, and come away with an A due to sheer seat-of-the-pants ingeniousness.

So, yeah, if you’re not in the group, please do some research because sticking identities into a story without doing research is probably a bad idea. writingwithcolor can help you; please check out the Navigation tag because the 12+ of us have already answered a wealth of questions already.

But please stop assuming that a character’s deviation from the white supremacist heterosexist expected norm isn’t meaningful. And yes, there are people who are going to be more interested in a character because she’s Jewish, or fat, or Black, or whatever, because guess what? Sometimes we are tired of having to experience only the whitest, straightest stories.

I have a feeling thewritingcafe wasn’t trying to say not to write diversity, just that making someone a Black lesbian or whatever isn’t enough to make her an interesting character. And that’s true – it’s not. Neither Blackness or lesbianism or Jewishness or whatever are personality traits, and if a character is flat and incomplete, them being the same race or ethnicity or sexual orientation as me won’t matter THAT much. I’m almost done writing a book with THREE brown Jewish lesbians and you can tell them all apart because they all have distinct personalities. But I can easily see this post being twisted into what you and I are arguing against, especially since both of us have had our works labeled as diversity for diversity’s sake, so I still wanted to answer.

But, you know what? Even some sprinkled-in diversity can be a good thing. If not only your MC’s but also your background extras are all white and/or straight, that starts to get pretty scary for those of us who live in the more diverse real world. It’s almost like you’ve created a spooky AU version of reality where people like us don’t exist. Do you prefer it this way, and, if so, how are we welcome as readers?

[medievalpoc]

This is a really nuanced discussion, and I was really glad to see it.

I think the point here boils down to is whether you see marginalized people as…people. A lot of the jerks you see saying “diversity for diversity’s sake is horrible!” are obviously saying that because the idea of a complex/complete character, and a character that is a marginalized person are somehow inherently opposite to them. The same goes for the whole, “so tokenism is fine then?” idea. As if the only possible option to replace no representation is bad representation. What I see is a lot of people who are looking to pass the buck and avoid taking responsibility for their own creative failures. Along with the unreasonable expectation that somehow research will make your creative work “call-out proof”, or make it somehow beyond criticism.

It kind of comes back to something I’ve said before: The problem is too many white writers seem to want facts, figures, quotas, and step-by-step instructions on how to avoid being called racist, rather than, you know, just writing realistic and complex characters of color.

I mean, when it comes to medieval-ish style SFF, Nalo Hopkinson has some wise words:

I wish more fantasy, especially the dominant fantasy that draws heavily on British and Christian lore, would wrestle with its own ethnospecific nature and what that means when the story is set somewhere where more than one belief system is in operation. If all you do is pay lip service to it, you can get the kind of thing where the writer has thrown one Hindu god into a Christianist fantasy (rendering said god by default a demon or otherwise inferior to the dominant religious system of the story, which is such an insult), and the hero is able to vanquish it by chanting a spell in church Latin.

And even more, the question of “should I even be writing about this?” is something that I think also needs to be added to an in-depth discussion of diversity in literature, or fiction in general.

Some of the best words to that affect I can think of are from Hiromi Goto’s Wiscon 38 Guest of Honor Speech:

It matters who and what is being focused upon in fiction. It matters who is creating a fictional account of these tellings. I don’t think the “burden of representation” rests upon the shoulders of those who are positioned as under-represented. If this were the case we would fall into an essentialist trap that will serve no one well. However, I’m okay with saying that it is my hope that white writers who are interested in writing about cultures and subjectivities outside of their own consider very carefully:

1) how many writers from the culture you wish to represent have been published in your country writing in the same language you will use (i.e. English) to write the story,

2) why do you think you’re the best person to write this story?

3) who will benefit if you write this story?

4) why are you writing this story?

5) who is your intended audience?

6) if the people/culture you are selecting to write about has not had enough time, historically and structurally, to tell their story first, on their own terms, should you be occupying this space?

Silence. In the space where your voice would have rang out with its distinct articulation. The moment you silence yourself a gap opens up, and someone else who may have no qualms in occupying that space, will leap in to speak out on their own terms. If you’re a writer (a dreamer) from a people, a community, a history that has been long-marginalized, silenced or misrepresented, we so desperately need to hear your story in your voice, in your own grammar of perception and articulation….

I think an important aspect of diversifying our stories is by diversifying our storytellers, too. I think too many conversations tend to fall into essentialist traps: only if we do THIS, will THIS change. You can have diverse characters OR interesting characters. You can have one, but not the other. There are people who claim you MUST “educate” white writers if you want to see diverse literature, and people who say you can only write about things you directly experience. I think that both of these are needlessly reductive, and the way forward lies outside binary systems of thought. Elements of all of these things are important, and I think that we’re seeing real change now, which is why there’s so much damn backlash.

There’s so much more room for us outside of “very special episodes”, “issue books”, and tragic narratives that end in operatic demises. I think that being very aware of tropes, stereotypes, and already-existing dominant cultural narratives can be the first step in getting them outside of your head, and being able to write something that is truly great, and perhaps even transcendent. And works like these already exist! The path isn’t exactly untrodden. Part of the reason any of this is here at all (waves hand around at Medievalpoc) is to inspire people to look deeper, and stop accepting misinformation that brickwalls creativity.

[exgynocraticgrrl-archive-deacti]

Melissa Harris-Perry, Black Female Voices: Who Is Listening?

[fuckyeahfeminists]

I love this woman

[kinda-sad-but-hella-rad]

having depression and anxiety is so conflicting because

its wanting to do everything, but wanting to do nothing at all

its wanting to score high on a test, but not having the energy to study

its being afraid to lose your best friends, but not having the energy to hang out with them

its sitting in your bed at 3 in the morning worrying about the future you dont even want to have. 

[fadical-deactivated20150420]

when an artist wants to show you their art

or a writer wants you to read what they’ve written

it’s quite often an expression of trust

because a poem or a story or a painting are often things that come from the heart

little pieces of the artists themselves

and if they’re willing to share it with you

you should appreciate it

[loworose]

What is your greatest fear?

My greatest fear is to be a failure.

[theforce]

ppl who are sad on valentines day make ME sad ..buy your own chocolate… drink a whole bottle of wine ..slap ur own ass..  .live 

[sunturnsintowater]

Fashion Week

Nikita Kaun 2015

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[loworose]

Most people look at me and judge me without even knowing me. I know this is normal. I don't blame them. I just wish they didn't assume I'm just this monolithic being. Even with all the labels I could put upon me, or all the labels others could put upon me, there is still so much more to me. I am still learning and growing every day. I change a little bit piece by piece. I'm unlearning, and relearning. I am far from perfect. I am perfectly me. 

[loworose]

Life is hard in a circle, Especially when you think you've gone insane, And all you get from love is lots of pain. I should have known better.

Seal

[loworose]

Day Two

Today I awoke with a glimmer of hope. While everyone layed in their beds fast asleep, I awoke to the sweet song of pitter pattering from the rain. My cat H jumped upon my bed and greeted me as she usually does. She stared into my eyes as if to say hello, and with a quick nod she found herself a soft nest like spot on my bed. Slowly sitting up and looking around, I could hear my cat G jingle and jangle, his collar giving away his usually unfathomable location. Stretching and yawning I sat up in my bed feeling unusually rested. I felt as if nothing could go wrong. The rain was supposed to be snow after all, which would of left me miserably in my house. Spying cat G's silhouette behind the window curtain I approached him timidly. He would of absolutely run away at the sign of me approaching in a haphazardly manner. I had to have the same grace and posture as he did when approaching him, otherwise I would not be good enough to a lay a hand on his soft fur. Slow and steady I walked towards the window. A slither of light peeked through making my dark room seem a little eery. My heart stopped when I peered down and saw cat G's eyes. His usually yellow eyes were gone. They were now a blinding white. I took a step back and fell. Only to awake once more in my bed. I felt a heaviness on my chest. Cat G was on top of me, staring at me with his large yellow eyes. He head butted me and than jumped off the bed, escaping to who knows where.

[untamedunwanted]

Some people are born with tornados in their lives, but constellations in their eyes. Other people are born with stars at their feet, but their souls are lost at sea.

Perspectives, Nikita Gill (via sexpansion)