Novella-November @novella-november - Tumblr Blog

i see a post talking doom and gloom about how we'll never escape toxic masculinity. i think about back in 2017 when american girl released their first boy doll, and a review for him went viral in the collecting community. the review was written by a mom, who said they went into the store to get their daughter a doll, only to see their son's eyes light up like fire when he saw a doll that looked like him, and now every night he puts his doll in pajamas and rocks him to sleep. i think about the toddler in my daycare room a few years back who was obsessed with baby dolls, carrying them everywhere, and his mom proudly told us he uses his sisters' old baby dolls and wants to be just like them. that toddler saw another toddler crying one day and gave her the doll he had to cheer her up. i think about the eight-year-old boy i saw a few years back, excitedly waving around raya's sword in a target checkout line like all his dreams were coming true. there was a video on my instagram the other day of a little boy at disneyworld crying with joy upon meeting his hero, mulan. i think about the voice actor for bow in the she-ra reboot saying his nephews only wanted adora action figures. celebrity men are wearing dresses on tv now. last halloween i saw a little boy dressed as elsa. i went to go see spiderverse over the summer, and in the line ahead of me was a boy who couldn't be older than twelve or thirteen, bouncing and beaming, giddy with excitement over getting to see the female-led romance movie elemental. i think about the five-year-old boy at my library who breathlessly asked me where the pinkalicious books were, eyes widening when i had more on my cart, his mom explaining that he is all about pinkalicious and fancy nancy. i saw so many pictures online of boys and men dressed in pink to see barbie. teenage boys are gonna open their phones and see the man who wrote fucking game of thrones dressed in pink to see barbie. when i was a kid, a boy dressing in pink was practically a social death sentence. there are boys running around in pink on my street right now.

aint-love-heavy

I know we talk a lot about the literacy crisis and the horrible anti-intellectualism happening rn but I think we need to talk more about how much of an entitlement complex the stupidest among us have developed

lycosofscribes

To the scholar making a request for easy words. No. No, I will not dumb down my works. Being alive means you learn and struggle, if literacy is a struggle for you a thesaurus and dictionary are useful tools, in fact you carry one on your person at all times (your phone) perhaps put this useful technical marvel to work to add wrinkles to your brain instead of using it to iron them all out. I know thinking is hard these days, but I promise it will not kill you.

theivorybilledwoodpecker

^^This.

Also, there's no shame in not reading a book that's at a higher grade level than you can handle.

No one starts out reading Charles Dickens. The best thing to do is pick a book where you understand most of the words but are unfamiliar with others. Then, either look up the words you don't know or use context clues to figure it out.

You want a book where you don't need to constantly look stuff up (which can make it hard to enjoy a story), but which makes you think.

After a while of doing this, and after several books, you'll find you can read more complex books than you used to be able to.

#no id

vitiligo-is-not-a-trend

Just thought this might make your life a little bit easier, since you have to say it non fucking stop

things you can give characters that ARENT VITILIGO but still affect/change appearance:

Magic scars - they can be any color or shape you want. They got struck with a weird spell, now they have a yellow heart on their shoulder. Think Harry Potter but more creative

Chemical burns - a scar from a chemical burn can look weird, they don’t always look like regular scars (speaking from experience)

burn scars

Birth marks (how does everyone forget these exist??? You can have white birth marks btw)

Face paint or body paint

An autoimmune disease isn’t aesthetic. It’s often devastating. If you think something like vitiligo is cool, then maybe you shouldn’t make an oc without understanding it. Maybe just create some random bs magic that isn’t vitiligo, just magic. There’s plenty of other things that can alter someone’s appearance that aren’t viltigo

(I may be wrong about some of this and I’m sorry if I am but I’ve been trying to do research.)

I appreciate the sentiment but those are all (minus the paint) still things that can be disabling one way or another, especially with the burns, and shouldnt be a catch-all for vitiligo alternatives.

wholeheartedsuggestions

it’s not too late, because you’re alive right now, reading this

wholeheartedsuggestions

🏆

here’s your trophy for surviving today. i’m proud of you. i know it hasn’t been easy but you’re doing it. keep going. you got this.

"""climate change isn't real!""" "

Okay.

So why has it been over 110 degrees fahrenheit (43 degrees celsius) up to 120 degrees fahrenheit (48.8 degrees celsius) on the Heat Index for *7 straight days in a row*...?

#not writing #us politics

segamascott

i will no longer be practicing radical acceptance and/or accepting the things i can not change #fuckbadthings #changeit

Track your words across any website. Every word counts toward your 4thewords battles.

4TheWords now has an extension (so far only in Chrome/Chromium browsers) that lets you count all of your typed words across websites towards your writing goal, not just what you type directly into the 4thewords documents :D

Hopefully there will be a Firefox extension option soon too :D

#creative writing #4thewords

mckitterick

Deadly egg recall

The FDA has upgraded an egg recall issued last month to “Class I,” its highest risk level, as it warns the public that consuming the products could cause “serious adverse health consequences or death.”

The recall of 1,589,577 dozen white-shell eggs and brown cage-free shell eggs was initially issued by Midwest Poultry Services in late July, which warned they might be contaminated with Salmonella Enteritidis.

According to the company, the eggs were produced and distributed from farms in Texas (to there and at least a few neighboring US states) between June 6 and July 3 and have sell-by or best-by dates between July 20 and August 17.

The recalled egg cartons have either the code P-1950 or 0840962 and Julian Dates between 157-184.

source: X

FDA recall info: X

novella-november

Recalled eggs were shipped to foodservice and retail customers in Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana.

Recalled eggs were available to consumers at Kroger stores in Texas and Louisiana; Brookshire Grocery stores in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana, and other smaller retail and foodservice outlets in these states plus Mississippi and New Mexico.

lesbian-moon-gf

Min wage should be 80k salaried

lesbian-moon-gf

Like this isn't an exaggeration. You should be able to rent alone, buy groceries, have disposable income, and still save for a vacation or whatever tf. I cannot emphasize enough how little people are being paid

novella-november

Fellow non-Black Followers, do me a favor:

Go into your account settings, dashboard settings, filtered post content, and add "woke" to the list.

Hit save.

Any time you see a post flagged as containing the word "woke", click it, read it, and if its being used by non-Black people as a sarcastic way to way "progressive" do not reblog the post, and inform the OP to please change the wording to not misuse the word.

Woke is AAVE and like a lot of AAVE, it is being bastardized into meaninglessness by not just conservatives, but also people on the left (or, in the case of Liberals, people who claim to be on the left but embrace genocide and more) by sarcastically, *jokingly* parroting the conservative rhetoric... And it needs to stop.

Do not use the word Woke if you're going to misuse it from its original meaning in AAVE.

Listen to and platform Black people, don't just steal and bastardize their words.

azaleabranch

hi guys. why the fuck did any of you try to tell me the murderbot diaries gets better. or even that it's good at all. honest to god so much of my vehement hatred for it comes from the fact the martha wells thinks her audience are the stupidest people alive. everything about her storytelling so obviously starts from where she wants it to be and works backwards from there, even when it means forcing the narrative to makes the stupidest & most irrational turns possible to force it to fit; every reference to anything that suggests the politics, economy, society, or general structure of the world lacks any actual thought; the characters have nothing to them, they're cardboard cutouts that could be replaced or removed without anything changing; and the logical holes are numerous and glaring.

who the fuck is reading a book where, in chapter one, a robot uses wound sealant on its self-sealing wounds and still continues "leaking" everywhere, and thinking it's good? genuinely. and then it smears blood from another robot of the same type, with self-sealing wounds, without it being a horrifically violent ordeal? it ceases to call itself a security unit a couple of paragraphs before they receive the news they are no longer a security unit. the "murderbot" thing makes no sense whatsoever, why is it applying this label to all secunits??, but even if it did the rationale behind it is an incident with a body count that capitalism is directly responsible for & yet there is no actual critique of capitalism nor any indication that capitalism negatively impacts the average person in this world. for some reason we're meant to believe that the murderbot was capable of fully hacking the hubsystem the very exact nanosecond it came online without the hubsystem giving any indication of attempts at tampering. the whole big mystery and conflict of the book goes soooo hard if you do not think at all about it. the murderbot's endless endless thinking about how awful and fucked up it is falls really short when you stop to realize that while it gets anxious around humans it does not appear to feel any way in particular about whatever it thinks is so fucked up and awful about itself. i read 150 pages and don't know what an augmented human is. the names are so absurd i laughed out loud at them (DeltFall EvilSurvey GrayCris PreservationAux etc). not to mention the racism. why was 10 pages of this 150 page book about how awesome it is that murderbot is now the legal property of an ambiguous asian

novella-november

I don't know if you're planning on reading the rest of the books, but Mensah is described by Martha Wells as a Black woman, but also, she's the only character in the entire 8+ group of human characters to get any physical description at all, which is the exactly one line about her having brown skin and even lighter brown hair, and also, literally, almost a decade later, and eight useless books into the series, none of the other characters even when they reappear, get any physical description at all, and, they don't even have first names.

Literally all they have, 8 books and almost a decade later, is the ethnic names she picked out of a hat to try to get diversity points, while she, a white woman from Texas, for romanticizes slavery, constantly justifies slavery at all turns, downplays the horrors of it, and thinks it's progressive to have a cast of quirky, queer, ambiguously Brown people own a dark-skinned person of color as a slave, because they are "nice slave owners".

The books themselves are also a complete and utter scam, With eight tiny novellas costing 20 plus to $30 plus dollars a piece, of which the first four novellas are published 3 months apart for the price each of an entire full-length novel!

If at any point you do decide to continue reading them, don't waste your money buying them, grab them from your local library, or wait for the scammy publisher, Tor, to release the ebooks completely for free, which they do all the time because it's the only way they know they can get more people to buy the next book, and even that is failing horribly because more and more people waking up to the fact that this book series, that is now eight books long, is going absolutely nowhere, with zero character development zero plot, and every single new book introduces an entirely new cast of like, 20 plus named characters who don't need to exist and are all completely and utterly interchangeable.

In the newest book, the literal villains are the *only* queer characters in the entire book, both of them being non-binary men, who are child murdering fascists.

Because she's also not so secretly extremely conservative as evidence in all of her writing, has some extremely fucked up Quiverful ideology in all of her books, and just last year, wrote and published an **anti-abortion** story set in this same universe, along with a thing marketed as a "short story" that is only 7k words with no plot, that depicts the heroes is that we're supposed to love and respect and think are progressive,* waltzing past ad ongoing genocide* all without lifting a finger or even *thinking of* lifting a finger to help anyone when it is more than within their means to do so, because they're all obscenely rich out of touch academics, and they're here to study racist ancient aliens bullshit so they gotta Walk Fast and Look Away from all of the poor people getting grabbed by ICE agents -- ahem, I mean, a random corporation.

The newest book also features her trying to make the audience feel sad about a rich, fascist space nazi dying, " because she was a person too!" And it's just like, *gee*, I wonder what the authors thoughts on Charlie Kirk's death was, and her reaction to people celebrating?

Not only does the first book get worse the more you think about it logically, it just gets worse and worse the more amount of books into the series you get, especially when they're charging almost $30 for something that is only 60k words, and has absolutely no right to be even *that* long, because *literally nothing happens* and no one cares about the brand new cardboard cutout characters she's decided to insert instead of actually fleshing out the existing ones.

azaleabranch

the brief physical description of dr mensah + martha's apparent belief that Very Smart Successful Scientist = asian (with the exception of two presumably white people, one of which is nebulously balkan, neither of which have names that seem to exist) made me so sure she was asian. LOL. (also, typing pin-lee in the roman alphabet in search of an origin of the name yields no results, so if it's a real name in i believe east or southeast asia it's almost certainly a coincidence. do you think she even considered that names from places that use other writing systems were not intended for the roman alphabet?) not that there's any indication of actual racial background since their names are all they have, as though they all speak "Regular" Generic White American English natively and exclusively. it's actually not racist at all to give no consideration whatsoever to the fact that not everyone natively speaks generic white american english.

the idea of spending $30 on a novella is abhorrent LOL. i checked and you can get all 8 of them on kindle for $104! (no idea why it's making me purchase in usd? lol?) i had previously wondered what the point of a novella series was, instead of just writing full novels, but i think this is a pretty definitive answer. the more individual volumes of content, the more you can charge people! if i keep reading there's rest assured i will be acquiring it through alternative means.

we are chaaaarlie kiiiiirk we caaaaarry the flame. that's fucking crazy. white people have got to learn the difference between humanizing fascists (something that is essential; humans don't cease to be just people regardless of the atrocities they commit and you should never lose sight of this) and regarding them as worthy of sympathy, empathy, or understanding. but what else can one expect from someone who thinks slavery is okay as long as the slave owner is so nicies. this sounds abysmal. my curiosity grows. there's a dark evil voice whispering in my ear telling me to read more...

novella-november

I, and the... hmm, six other people I know on tumblr at least, would be extremely happy to see your analysis and commentary on these books!

The fandom is absolutely rabid and will dogpile anyone they see breathing even slightly in the direction of criticizing these books, and if you have anonymous asks turned on, you'll probably get racist anons in your inbox saying that I am actually @rjalker or claiming that *you* are Rjalker, and we're all just a million evil sockpuppets for the crime of *checks notes* "criticizing racist books written by a white woman from texas".

People will legitimately try to claim that it's ""geographic discrimination" to mention that Martha Wells is a white woman from Texas, (When Geographic Discrimination is a very real thing that this situation does not apply to!) when talking about the bigotry baked into *all* of her books, because it really is just that key piece of information that draws all of it together and makes it really "click" about why her writing is the way it is.

Literally just watched an interview from late 2025, where she literally was happy for Gurathin in the show to be played by a very pale man, and give *him* Pin-Lee's job as a lawyer to give him more screen time, because the show not only whitewashes and ciswashes the main character (that Martha Wells spent years telling people was a nonbinary dark-skinned person of color), it also whitewashes Gurathin and prioritizes the two white or white-passing male leads while apparently demonizing all of the other cast who are non-white, and not even making them evil because they're slave owners but just because It's Funny To Make Fun of Queer Brown People, I guess???

But yeah, like, the show apparently takes Pin-Lee, the background cardboard cutout female character who's *only thing* is that she is a Laywer, and gives her job to *Gurathin*, who is whitewashed and made into a male lead.

[ID: a screenshot from the Murderbot tv show, Showing Murderbot and Gurathin, both played by white actors. Murderbot has short blonde hair, while Gurathin has short black hair. End ID]

There's plenty of people on goodreads, youtube, and various book review podcasts that are talking about the flaws in this series, but most people on tumblr are terrified of the racist fandom and don't want to step on their toes, so the more people who start talking about the blatant racism (and more! So much more!) in this series, the better.

One thing to note, is you'll see a *ton* of Murderbot stans who claim they regularly re-read the books....

....but not a single one of them will be able to actually, accurately describe or even remember the basic plot or scenes in any of the books. To the point that I made a series of polls, and less than half of the readers who voted could accurately remember how the "villains" of the first book were defeated, with most either not have any clue, or actively mis-remembering that the characters actually had an active role and used their wits to defeat them, instead of the enemies self-sabotaging themselves because Martha Wells wanted the story to end.

It comes as no surprise to me to hear that most Murderbot fans are not *actually* reading the text with their own two eyes, but they're literally just listening to the audiobook...... as background noise,instead of even actively listening.

Someone actually saw @rjalker talking about racial phrenology in Martha Well's books and compared it to an example quote from Moby Dick which is a prime example of the origin of a lot of modern, more subtle racial phrenology, and a Murderbot stan crawled out of the woodwork to exclaim that of course Martha Wells wasn't being racist, she [Martha Wells] compared this Black man to George Washington 😭

Murderbot stans legitimately know so little of the work they claim to love and re-read all of the time that they will see a quote from the 1800s and full-throatedly defend it thinking that Martha Fucking Wells wrote it as part of the Murderbot Diaries , despite the obscenely clear difference in tone, style, prose, and you know, actual content of the quote that has nothing to do with scifi 💀

So yes. *please* keep reading them and post your thoughts and critiques because they're extremely quick reads and trust me, it *only gets worse* the furher into the series you get, and we need more people to call this shit out on social media outside of private podcasts.

I cannot wait for the 9th and last book to come out, and start getting "complete series retrospective" reviews from people once everyone realizes the entire book series was a streaming crock of scamming shit the whole time that goes nowhere and accomplishes nothing whatsoever, and that the "progressive" politics are actually just extremely regressive once you actually start thinking critically about the messages instead of cheering it on purely for the diverse names the author herself can't even pronounce correctly because she doesn't do any research ever.

Like, the pricing scheme is so bad that *collector's edition complete sets* cost less to buy brand new than it would for someone to buy the individual, standard trade books new.

There were no less than three different "Complete series collector's sets" released for $100+ in 2025/2026 alone, including that that was almost $100 for just *dustjackets to put on the existing standard books*, and at least one that proved the point of the books being a scam, by combining the first 4 books into one single volume of around 600 pages, proving that there was absolutely no reason to split them up into seperate books except to make big bucks by parceling them out as DLC.

They literally charge people $16 to buy the first book as an ebook, and want almost $20 per book purely as ebooks, which leads to people purchasing them thinking they're getting huge, well-written novels only to get a novella with a plot that makes no sense, zero worldbuilding, and nothing happening.

It's even worse with her new Fantasy series, "The Rising World" where she and Tor actively adertized the first book as "an Epic Standalone Fantasy novel" only for it to be 400 pages of absolute slogging shit where nothing happens, we romanticize pedophilia, incest, and eugenics programs, she invents an entire Fantasy Indigenous People just so she can say they're all incestuous pedophiles who traffic children (while framing this as a positive thing???) and then genocide them to give her main character a tragic backstory. It's even worse, because she and tor *exclusively* advertized this shit book as Epic Standalone.... only for it to not standalone, and six months after it was published they announced a sequel... and it's actually a trilogy now, which she and Tor knew all along it was going to be, and she still allowed them to advertize it as a standalone despite her knowing she had signed a contract with them to make it a trilogy.

The book is so bad that literally, the second book a year later still only has 600 reviews on Goodreads (where book 1 has 4k+) and of those 600, 200+ were all ARC copies, which Tor is still handing out a year later in a desperate attempt to make more sales for when the third one comes out and flops hard directly into a dumpster.

And in this fantasy series, not only does she make Fantasy Native Americans who traffic children into their pedophilic eugenics program, she also woobifies literal Fantasy Nazis and has a dark-skinned Black woman fall in love with and marry a White Supremacist Fantasy Nazi woman as instalove in the background, but it's okay, because that Fantasy Nazi didn't take part in the active genocide of the main character's people, just other people, so he doesn't give a fuck about her actions 💀

I can't exactly reccomend anyone read Witch King because it will make your brain melt from the sheer slog of it, but if you want to see just how bad the Murderbot Diaries is, they at least are quick and easy reads that will only melt your brain a *little bit* in rage and frustration!

Oh, and a lot more people are also just.... using the Murderbot Diaries as direct inspiration to write actual science fiction stories that actually critically examine capitalism an its impact on disabled and marginalized people, including people who are dehumanized under these systems in order to exploit them, and while there's no official group, I've made the tags #RobotRevolutionCyborgSolidarity / # Robot Revolution Cyborg Solidarity to collect posts and writing prompts about it, and for old Public Domain stories exploring the topic as civil rights as inspiration as well!

azaleabranch

fortunately i have 10+ years of experience being a hater of various extremely bigoted pieces of media so i'm very aware of how far racist fandoms will go to defend their faves. the number of times i've been accused of secretly being someone i'd never heard of before just because i'm a hater is staggering. something about racist fanbases makes them think there can only be one hater per piece of media.

the idea of it being "geographic discrimination" to bring up the fact that this is a white woman from texas is a racist piece of shit is crazy work. next thing you know it will be racist to mention that she's white. but given the racism, slavery apologia, deranged handling of genocide, etc i feel like that's probably one of those opinions much of the fandom does hold but they're just too chickenshit to say it because it's not very #woke of them to do so LOL. i saw discourse about whether when the text unambiguously describes the murderbot as legally a piece of property if that actually meant it's a slave. how fucking lost do you have to be where you're asking if enslaving someone is slavery. anyway i thought that was pretty exemplary of basically everything.

something i find interesting about it being cast as a white man in the show - despite martha's praise for the casting and the show overall, she's openly expressed that she doesn't like it very much when people read murderbot femininely, despite the fact that if one is going to have a gendered reading (not even pinning a binary gender on murderbot, but favoring a gendered lean to the read), then a feminine lens makes far more sense than a masculine one. especially interesting is that when i mentioned this, and how it's androcentric + misogynistic, i had someone who i'm pretty sure followed me for previous literary analysis in my replies telling me all about how there no precedent in a story ostensibly about oppression, objectification, dehumanization, having one's body treated as a tool for others' benefit, etc to apply a feminine lens, and that it's just a bunch of people seeing the word "diary" and thinking that means woman. as a bonus i called them a misogynist and they tried to change the subject; and then i checked their blog and they were reveling in the death of a fictional teen girl because she's AWFUL and FUCKED UP (behaved pretty understandably for a teen girl in her situation). and frankly it's hard for me to envision that the average murderbot fan is any different than this.

to be honest i'm kind of floored by every new thing i hear. there are those piece of media that are horrendously bigoted that, well, grit your teeth and bear it and you might get a good story out of it, just never lose sight of how bad it is, as long as you stay alert and aware of the incessant bigotry you're all good, no issues! and then there's media where it's got nothing except the bigotry. i've beein playing world of warcraft since it came out, i know all about the "grit your teeth and bear it" types of media. but some shit just can't be salvaged. sometimes everything is so fundamentally entrenched bigotry that there's nothing left to enjoy unless you're an under-18 who is probably white and your media literacy and critical thinking aren't good at all yet. lol. the number of queer scifi lists i've seen murderbot diaries on makes me want to do something drastic.

i've noticed this fascinating trend among the fanbases of racist, badly-written media where nothing happens, where they'll just... invent a story. it's kind of like goncharov. they're all acting like there's this beautiful masterpiece that's written so intelligently & poignantly when it simply doesn't exist. it's kind of impressive how many times i've encountered this phenomenon.

EDIT. FORGOT TO ADD THIS. i'm admittedly not usually super into scifi as a means of analyzing capitalism, oppression, etc, especially as i often find it to be significantly lacking a lot of the time. but i do love scalping shitty media for parts and i always appreciate what actually diabled people have to say about their experiences, whether it's direct analysis or analysis through fiction. so i'll be lurking even if i'm not fully the intended audience!

novella-november

(By the way, before I forget, Black activists have asked people not to use Woke sarcastically, as it helps dilute it's meaning by feeding into the misuse as it being a negative thing by conservative rhetoric instead of it's original meaning of Black people being aware of systemic racism, and instead of sarcastically saying woke, something like a sarcstic "progressive" fits better, because that's what conservatives have tried to twist woke derogatorily into meaning)

onto the reply:

"i've noticed this fascinating trend among the fanbases of racist, badly-written media where nothing happens, where they'll just… invent a story. it's kind of like goncharov. they're all acting like there's this beautiful masterpiece that's written so intelligently & poignantly when it simply doesn't exist. it's kind of impressive how many times i've encountered this phenomenon."

Yeah, that pretty much sums up the entire thing. For a lot of fans, it's a desperate and very misplaced hope that somehow, all of the racism in the books is deliberate, but deliberate in a way that it's going to get confronted and resolved in the story..

... only for more and more people to realize, yes, the racism *is* deliberate, but its baked into the narrative because the author is racist, not because she's writing some long-game glacially paced series *about* racism. It's literally *just* racist writing, and more people are slowly realizing that as they continue to shell out more and more obscene amounts of money for something that had no right being published, *let alone professionally published*

Especially when you present direct quotes from the book to them and they argue it doesn't mean what it literally says in the text, and that none of these "fans" can ever accurately recall any scene in the books when prompted to give their own examples.

Kinda like the author herself advertising this book series as a *romance series* when interviewed by a romance author, and also getting up on stage to tell people if they find the books funny they're "willfully obtuse" because the book is purely and deeply serious even if it has one or two jokes how dare you describe it as light hearted, and also that its so profound how Murderbot decided of its own volitiion to tell PresAux it had hacked its governor module, or how she was soooo confused that people were mad the tv show was a comedy, because it had always been funny and lighthearted…. also *bragging* to that same romance author that she "never read *anything* until after college when a friend got her into Jane Eyre", and then telling other random interviewer that she grew up as a child reading science fiction voraciously.

…. yeah you read all that right. These are all completely contradicotry thing's she's said in interviews over the years. (including that Murderbot and the other robots are just generative AI chatbots better at fooling Real People into thinking they're people, lmfao. That interview has since been deleted but still exists on the wayback machine)

She literally can't even accurately describe the events of her own book series that *she wrote*.

Is it any wonder that the ""fans"" can't remember either and have to make up a completely different story in their head? 😂

Oh, and on the topic of Martha Wells treating Murderbot and its storyline through an extremely misogynistic lens... she literally wrote an interview she she, herself, interviewed her own characters and thought it was hilarious if she *sexually harassed her own main character off screen* so that ART (her favorite character, introduced in book 2) could speak *for and over* Murderbot itself. In a magazine dedicated to the theme of "bodily autonomy".

All without a shred of irony, while treating sexual harassment as hilarious, which is apparently a big thing in the show as well, to no one's surprise...

Edit myself lol: oh, and yes, people are indeed saying it's racist against white people to say a white person is being racist. They'll also claim I (and anyone else who critiques the series) are doing ""digital Blackface"" (?????) by calling out antiblack racism...while being white (at least in my case). Someone literally tried to say I was doing "digital Blackface" for calling out racism because I'm also white and I'm critiquing another white person.

Which uh, sure is a take from the same racist coward anon who claimed it was racist to call other white people racist to begin with...

#long post #very long post #replies #murderbot critical #racism #fandom racism #media literacy #critical thinking skills #very very long post #misogyny #sexual harassment

If you ever need a final confirmation that no, you don't need to worry about people pirating your books*, just know that the Big Publishers already *know* that people are much more likely to cash out on books if they've been given the opportunity to read them for free first, and they actively profit from this tactic by giving ebook copies away for free not just to ARC reviewers, but also just as random promotions before the newest book in a series is set to publish, and they've been doing this successfully for *years*.

It's the same concept as free samples at a bakery --

If someone gives you a delicious cookie for free, you're a *lot* more likely to go buy a dozen cookies you know you'll love.

... rather than risking buying a dozen cookies with no sample, when you have no idea if they're gonna be amazing or taste like stale cardboard and be a huge waste of money (and food!)

Even just that publishers send people ARCs in the *first place* tells you that Publishers *know* giving books away for free helps drive sales, because the book is able to be hyped up by word of mouth and early reviews, and gets people motivated to place pre-orders and buy copies at their local stores as well as online.

I fully plan on releasing my book as a completely free ebook edition, with an option for people to send money my way directly if they want, or they can purchase a physical copy to support me directly, but I want people who want to read my book to be able to, regardless of if they can afford a physical copy, or even physically obtain a copy in their part of the world to begin with.

#not writing #piracy #arcs #free media #litteralllyyy the publishers themselves know this and take advantage of it #people who have the money to spend and want to spend it on media ARE going to spend it on media #most of the time they're the biggest spenders on media too

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