Writing Beyond the Rainbow

Nonbinary asexual writer of queer fic!

[pascalcampion]

The right question. Again. Just doodling around and letting things happen. It’s fun. Like automatic drawing/writing ! I like the black cat. #pascalcampion

[coolcurrybooks-deactivated20230]

The February updates to the Queer SFF Database are here! New entries include:

The Lifeline Signal by RoAnna Sylver

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

A Promise Broken by Lynn E. O’Connacht

No More Heroes by Michelle Kan

Smoke Signals by Meredith Katz

Steel Crow Saga by Paul Krueger

The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells

Pet by Akwaeke Emezi

Moonshine by Jasmine Gower

I’ve currently got 170 entries in the database, 75 scheduled to be added, and 175 books still in draft. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that queer sci-fi and fantasy books don’t exist!

[prexxor]

no offense but i’m not about to sit here and let the culture and language of my ancestors disappear off of the face of the earth

i may look white, most of my ancestors may be white, but i refuse to lose sight of my native ancestors and their systematic oppression under colonial powers

blood quantum only seeks to suppress and eliminate native identity from this country, and bitch i don’t care if i’m 100% native or 10% native or 1% native, i’m sure as hell going to pay respect to the ancestors that gave up everything they knew just for this country to exist

so here’s to all my anishinaabe family, and even more, here’s to all the diné and mi’kmaq and kanien'kehá:ka and nēhiyaw and tsalagi and lakȟóta families and all the other indigenous peoples of the americas that i could spend hours talking about

much love to you all at the end of this indigenous history month, and hopefully all you people without indigenous ancestors will consider looking into the native languages and cultures of the land we live on because they’re cool as hell

[technoskittles]

I keep forgetting that NT people don’t do math the same way people with ADHD do it until I try to explain my thought process and get weird looks from people who are like “how the FUCK did you do that?”

whoops

[technoskittles]

and for those of you who DON’T know what I’m talking about I’ll give you an example

42 + 29 = 71

for neurotypical people, they use the method we were all taught in grade school where you add 9 + 2 to get 11 and then move the extra one over to make 4 + 2 + 1 which equals 7 to give you 71

but the way I do it (as many other people with ADHD as I’ve come to find out) is this:

okay so you have 42 + 29. if you take 1 away from 42 and give it to 29 to make it an even 30, you now have 41 + 30 which is an easy 71

or, another problem: 53 + 88

round that 88 up to 90 and take the two from 53 so you have 51 + 90. but wait I can make this easier. take 10 more from 51 to make 90, 100 and now you have 41 + 100 which equals 141

it’s just…so much faster? and makes so much more sense to me

[technoskittles]

also? the math teachers that always took off points for kids not showing their work?

fucking HATED that. as someone who could get from point A to point D in my head in a split second, I felt like showing my work was often a waste of time when sometimes it felt like I just automatically knew the answer

or, if I did put down my work, I went through a process that wasn’t taught and would get points reduced anyway because it wasn’t the way we were taught just because my brain worked differently than the rest of the class. my answer was always right. they just didn’t like how I got it

never did like that much 

[technoskittles]

also, this is another way of doing it that I just saw on facebook that I’ve also done before

because I do things to that extent too

so if you give me something like 37 + 45 I’ll go “well 30 + 40 is 70 and 7 + 5 is 12 so 70 + 12 is 82″

there’s just…so many ways to do math that make more sense than the way I was taught

[technoskittles]

this post got a lot more popular than I was expecting wow

I’ve seen some people reblogging this saying they don’t have adhd but have autism and yes! People with autism do this too! I’ve learned that a lot of people with adhd and/or autism do things that overlap and this is one of them!

[technoskittles]

i’m sorry but these are the only valid tags on this post

[everythingfox]

Patient Zero

(via)

[goawfma]

literally throwing hands with anyone who has dumb shit to say about asians at this point

[tibby]

heads up for anyone interested in this movie

[dusterluster]

so i started a new book

*drags hands down face*

[robotsandfrippary]

Not all of us were fucked up by our parents. Many of us had loving parents who were unable to shield us from fucked up school systems which we spent 7 hours of our days from ages 6-18.  

[thatdiabolicalfeminist]

Our culture really romanticises the idea of a brooding misunderstood loner who’s an asshole to everyone but secretly has a heart of gold, so it’s frighteningly easy to meet a guy who treats everyone around him badly and believe without evidence that he has a heart of gold. 

Don’t fall for it.

And a lapse in cruelty is not evidence of kindness.

[rnr4ev]

“A lapse in cruelty is not evidence of kindness” Bolded because that line is so incredibly important

[prokopetz]

It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?

[veteratorianvillainy]

#friendly reminder that I once put my statistics degree to good use and did some calculations about ship ratios#and yes considering the gender ratios of characters#the prevalence of gay ships is completely predictable (via sarahtonin42)

[persephoneshadow-deactivated202]

I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.

[prokopetz]

Totally.

A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.

(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)

Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:

Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36

TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66

Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.

The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom - and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women - for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?

[observethewalrus]

YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!

[ainedubh]

Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.

[slitthelizardking]

I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.

[lierdumoa]

This doesn’t even account  for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well. 

But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.

[destinationtoast]

Yay, mathy arguments. :)

This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.

In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het).  (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.

[olderthannetfic]

All great points. Another thing I notice is that many shows are built around the idea that the team or the partner is the most important thing in the universe. Watch any buddy cop show, and half of the episodes have a character on a date that is inevitably interrupted because The Job comes first… except “The Job” actually means “My Partner”.

When it’s a male-female buddy show, all of the failed relationships are usually, canonically, because the leads belong together. (Look at early Bones: she dates that guy who is his old friend and clearly a stand-in for him. They break up because *coughcoughhandwave*. That stuff happens constantly.) Male-male buddy shows write the central relationship the exact same way except that they expect us to read it as platonic.

Long before it becomes canon, the potential ship of Mulder/Scully or Booth/Bones or whatever lead male/female couple consumes the fandom. It’s not about the genders involved. Rizzoli/Isles was like this too.

If canon tells us that no other relationship has ever measured up to this one, why should we keep them apart? Don’t like slash of your shows, prissy writers? Then stop writing all of your leads locked in epic One True Love romance novel relationships with their same-sex coworkers. Give them warm, funny, interesting love interests, not cardboard cutouts…

And then we will ship an OT3.

[kyraneko]

I’m going to bring up (invent?) the concept of subjectification.

As in, people gravitate to the characters given the most depth, complexity, and satisfying interactions for their shipping needs, because those characters are most human, and we want the realest characters to play with.

In a lot of media, the most depth gets handed to male characters.

And, oftentimes, even when the screentime and depth and interactions are granted equally well to female characters, there can be a level of, for lack of a better word, dis-authenticity to those female characters: they are pared down, washed out, or otherwise made slightly less themselves than they could be, in the interest of making them decorative, or likeable, or “good,” or keeping them from upstaging or emasculating their male companions, or just that the writer whose job it is to write them doesn’t know how to write women the way they write men.

And you get the characterization equivalent of that comparison chart where so many animated female characters have the same facial features because the animators and designers are so worried about not letting them be ugly.

When you have a group that’s allowed to be themselves, warts and all, and another group that has to be decorative at all costs, the impression given on some level is that the decorative quality is making up for a shortcoming. That they wouldn’t be enough in their own right.

And sometimes that cost is authenticity. The interesting, striking, awe-inspiring, bold and glorious unapologetic selfhood that draws the viewer most particularly to those characters who are unapologetic in their particular existence, standing clear of the generic and bland and unchallenging “safe” appearances.

It is authenticity, not beauty, which powers subjectification. The love for a character, not because they are perfect, but because they are them.

They can be pretty, sure. They can be sweet. But being pretty and sweet is not a replacement, and too many female characters have been written by writers who think it is, while the interest—in appearance, in personality, in interactions, in plot development—goes to the men.

And when that happens, well. Surprise, surprise, that’s where the shipping goes.

[whetstonefires]

Yeah I don’t really ship but I do write a fair amount of fanfic, and in most franchises working with the female characters is a chore.

You have to do so much of the work yourself, because the canon left them unfinished, with huge gaps or unexplored contradictions that you have to somehow resolve. Every female character you decide to integrate into your fanwork in some major role constitutes an undertaking in her own right as you patch together an understanding of her sufficient to model a consistent set of reactions and priorities &c.

The dudes just get handed to you. Even the ones whose canon is a mess have properly developed character cores.

That you don’t have to unearth and piece together like some sort of volunteer archeologist coming up with theories way more complex than the available artifacts truly support.

[headspace-hotel]

Guys read this this is an amazing breakdown of it

[totallysilvergirl]

ALWAYS reblog.

[trynottodrown]

Moon Snail (x)

[bugsrfckdup]

Impressive

[vanquishedvaliant]

If you’re like sleep spooning a centaur and they roll over in bed do you just die

[null-set]

sleep on her back, then you’ll just roll off if she shifts

[vanquishedvaliant]

i dont follow

[null-set]

+

[vanquishedvaliant]

okay but what if you had a special bed instead 

nothing says commitment like buying a new mattress

[mythicalwashrag]

Centaur Comfort Mattress™: The Horse Hole Keeps Your Bones Safe

[celtic-pyro-deactivated20230725]

I’m honestly so glad Tumblr discusses things like “How can I comfortably sleep with a centaur?” and “What kind of chairs would dragons have?”

[captainsnoop-deactivated2020041]

there are some internet friends where eventually you start calling them by their real name and then there’s times where its like nah son your name is crispy forever

[bovel]

[cottagewarlock]

you know what’s a good feeling? a real good feeling?

when sunbeams do this.

that is all.

[tonysopranobignaturals-deactiva]

economists really took the divine right of kings and turned it into billionaire CEOs

[tonysopranobignaturals-deactiva]

“it’s kinda fucked up to reject the business practices of jeff bezos when he rightfully earned his position under capitalism”

[acti-veg]

“About twenty years ago, I attended a lecture by a Harvard professor who talked about how corporations operate like modern-day kingdoms. At one time, she said, people believed kings ruled by divine right, and today we seem to believe the same thing about corporations. Toward the end, she asked, “Do you know what it is that allowed people to let go of, overcome, and reject the notion of the divine right of kings?” I held my breath and got ready to take some notes. Her answer: “They just stopped believing in it.”

- Frances Moore Lappé

[highfantasyfromhell]

i don't know what writer needs to hear this, but

if you've just read a bunch of your own works and noticed some similarities between all of them,

like odd (but grammatically correct) placement of commas,

or scarcely any contraction words,

or conversely a fuck ton of contraction words,

or long sentences full of semicolons and hyphens and exquisite (but not purple) prose,

or paragraphs and sentences that are straight and to the point, telling you in a blunt but sufficiently descriptive manner exactly what's happening,

that's not a bad habit you need to break.

nor is it a sign of amateur writing.

that's your style.

sob story upcoming:

it took me a long, long time to realize that no, my writing wasn't full of repetitive phrasing, it wasn't overly pretentious/eloquent, and my frequent use of semicolons wasn't anything like a bad habit.

i had found my writing voice.

and instead of being proud, i thought it was something much different, something in need of fixing, because kurt mcfucking vonnegut told me semicolons were transvestite hermaphrodites.

don't dismiss your voice as a bad habit. don't make my mistake. and for the love of god, don't take all that writing advice telling you "anything that differs from these stupidass rules i made up is bad writing" to heart. please.