The Pages Within

The Writing Blog. The Book Blog. The Everything Blog.

[gatalentan]

🗣 WRITERS AREN'T SHUTTING DOWN HOLLYWOOD THE NETWORKS ARE

[sleepeys]

licherally cannot explain to adults these days that im actually so cool with the idea of being "just an employee" somewhere as long as i am paid enough to live comfortably and i also like the job. "but dont you want to be rich?? dont you want to always be striving for more???" like that sounds EXHAUSTING and i like having friends so

[annakarenina]

[thepageswithin]

Very true.

[ukeking]

the secret to losing followers is being yourself

[thepageswithin]

Yup. That's why you stay on tumblr.

[bigsadeyes]

being the waitresses defense lawyer every time you go out to eat with your family. it ain’t much but it’s honest work

[thepageswithin]

Yup.

[antique-symbolism]

What's up Amazon haters! Bookshop.org is doing free shipping to combat Prime Day. Purchases on Bookshop help support the indie bookstores in your location!

[thepageswithin]

Do it for the people!

[neil-gaiman]

How do you make shit up and get money for it???

Make up the shit.

Give it to someone who wants the shit you made up.

They charge lots of people who want to enjoy the shit you made up something to read, watch, experience or listen to the shit you made up.

They give you a share of what the people paid to enjoy the shit you made up.

[teesadutta]

6.27.22

Gems from Chelsea Handler's monologue

[thepageswithin]

When you got something to say, say it but with the added flair like Chelsea Handler.

[vbartilucci]

Preach, LeVar.

[thepageswithin]

Best kept secret.

[furiousgoldfish]

Living only thru fiction and ‘magical thinking’ are common childhood ways to survive the cruel reality of abuse. If you don’t find any safety, understanding, support or nurturing in your immediate environment, the only other place you can look as a child is books, series, movies, anime. Child fiction specifically deals with a lot of trauma, lots of independent and abandoned children who you can relate to, with adults being absent, uninvolved, or dead in the story. Protagonists deal with a hell of trouble on their own and succeed, and it’s hopeful that you could too. They also have loyal friend groups often risking lives for each other, which is a common desire to have for an isolated, trapped and friendless child. Having someone passionately ready to risk everything for you would do so much for your feeling of self value.

Magical thinking is another common way for children to survive abuse, and it can be interlaced with fiction. Since the forces of evil in your young life are so strong and prevalent, you have to imagine the forces of good are as strong and prevalent too. So that if you suffer pain and struggle past your endurance, then this means miracles could happen too. Waiting to be taken away, to be transported to another dimension which is your real home, to be materialized in a book or a movie, to be given your fictional friends in real life, to be given magical powers, believing you are special and chosen, believing you will become strong and powerful if you only wish it enough, and this feeling like an inevitable reality, that is magical thinking. It can get dangerous, because as a child you’ve learned that for a little bit of good, you need to suffer a lot, so by that logic, to get your miracle, it can feel like you need to sacrifice something big, pray endlessly, provide extraordinary circumstances and relentless faith, believe it into becoming the truth, or even give up on the rest of your life only to make it happen. It can go as far as a child founding their own personal religion or set of beliefs that are very removed from reality. 

Magical thinking is designed to help you survive as a child, but it can grow into an obsession, or something that takes over your life and becomes impossible to let go of, because you feel your life now depends on it. It’s a life of waiting and inability to let go of the thing you’re waiting for, because you lived just for that, it was the only thing that made sense.

Not being able to bear your reality, you can get stuck only feeling alive in fiction, or thru maladaptive daydreaming, and these strategies to protect yourself are very hard to let go of. If you’ve experienced these, it’s likely you’ve been dealing with trauma that couldn’t be faced, couldn’t be processed by a kid, and wasn’t survivable without a fictional escape. There is no shame or embarrassment in getting lost in fiction, magical thinking, or daydreaming; in fact, you’re still alive because of it. You wouldn’t have gotten lost in them if there was any other alternative. You gave yourself a reason to go on where there was none. You found a way to keep being alive thru unsurvivable. Your mind saved you in the best way it could.

[bastille]

its kinda scary how your whole life depends on how well you do as a teenager 

[phantasmsystem]

oh my god No it doesn’t don’t put this kind of pressure on people?? you can absolutely fuck up in your teen years and continue on to a good life just fine. you can drop out of school, get a GED, still go to college and finish your degree as late as you want. i know people in my school who still haven’t graduated and they’re 26. some older. you can always transfer someplace else, always build yourself up from the ground. after a certain amount of college credits, a lot of schools really don’t care about your high school GED or your SAT scores anymore. if you fuck up in your teenage years you are not a failure!! you can ALWAYS re-invent yourself, always start over. there is always a second chance.

[iainart-deactivated20200509]

Reblogging this for my followers freaking out over art school/college. I dropped out of high school and never thought I’d get into college as easily as I did. You will be fine!

[scottandhiskind]

Fun story my biology professor just told us:  When he was 23 he was married to his wife and worked two jobs to support them since she was in college: gas station attendant and construction worker.  He worked these two jobs because that was the only work he could get since he was at the reading level of a third grader.  

One night he was writing something and his wife noticed he was writing from right to left.  Since she was studying occupational therapy she realized he had a learning disability and started working with him.  He slowly began to learn to read, and at 26 got his GED and went to college.

His first year of college he took the lowest level math course he could take, 001.  Over the years he worked on learning what he needed to, ended up graduating with a biology degree.  He then went on to get his masters and PhD, graduating at the top of his class.  He is now an extremely accomplished biologist and professor.

So don’t let anyone tell you that you’re future is based on your choices as a teenager.

[geekyangie]

Seriously.  Do not believe this.  You aren’t even stuck with your choices you make in your 20s.  I didn’t start working in my current field until just after my 30th birthday.  It has nothing to do with what I went to school for in my 20s.  My husband has a political science degree, and he’s a sports journalist.

You are not tied to anything.  Go.  Be.

[roane72]

My day job did not exist when I was a teenager. And the idea of trying to be an author was a distant thing on my radar. I thought I was going to be an English teacher. And then I thought I was going to be a music teacher. And then I thought I was going to be a drama teacher.

Also in there: therapist, early childhood educator, then finally: web developer–because by then it was an actual thing that existed. I didn’t actually figure out what I “wanted to do when I grew up” until about eight years ago, when I was 36. I tried pursuing writing when I was 30, stopped, then started pursuing it seriously again when I was 40. 

There is always time to change. And don’t let anyone tell you that high school is “the best time of your life” either, because that’s bullshit too.

[drachenkinder]

I was a high school drop out and didn’t go to college until I was within a month of my 40th birthday. While there I changed my major twice. Then I taught art long enough to earn retirement. Before college I’ve worked in dog kennels, as a cashier, a dental assistant, a vet assistant, electronics assembly,  a machinist in the military, picking up trash in a state park and as locksmith at a university. After teaching I worked night shift as a securety guard. Life is freaking adventure, not a locked grid you must move from one square to another. Take a chance, If you fail, get back up, dust yourself off and try something new. 

[solarishashernoseinabook]

Your life is not over at 25. You can continue to learn and engage with hobbies and change your life path and meet new people. Get rid of this idea that what you decide to do at 18 is gonna be what you do for life

[starlightshadowsworld]

As someone who freaks out at times about this kind of thing in my final year of university, this really helped.

[mresundance]

After 14 years I changed careers and I’m starting over from an entry level position at the ripe age of 38. But it’s AWESOME. I thought I would be a college professor for life. Instead I’m in marketing right now. I’m not sure where I’ll be in five or ten years, but I’m open to whatever awaits me and I know that whatever I’m doing doesn’t have to be for forever.

[kenyatta]

A 27-year-old wanted to see her Asian American story reflected in bookstores. So she opened her own.

Yu and Me Books is believed to be NYC Chinatown’s first Asian American, women-owned bookstore.

On Dec. 11, 27-year-old Lucy Yu — a chemical engineer by trade, most recently working as a supply chain manager — opened the bookstore, which she said she’s wished existed since she was a child. As violence against the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities spiked during the pandemic, Yu felt her lifelong dream become more urgent, she said. With the opening of Yu and Me Books, Yu is hoping to create not only a bookstore, but a community space that centers Asian storytelling and specifically immigrant narratives.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Yu said she never saw a space full of stories that represented her and her family’s experiences. “There’s not a lack of books being written about immigrants” or by authors of color, she said, which she realized as she began researching what it would take to open her own bookstore. But those books were never “put at the forefront of a lot of the bookstores that I grew up with,” she added.

[…]

Yu hopes that, in time, the bookstore will become a community space not only for sharing books, but for sharing personal, and sometimes difficult, stories. She’s already planning a partnership with the Cosmos, an Asian woman-led self-care and mental health organization, for next year. “We’re trying to create a space” where “people come and talk about mental health within the Asian community,” Yu said.

And although Yu says she’s proud to be among the first Asian American woman bookstore owners in Manhattan, she hopes bookstore owners of all backgrounds will try to build more diversity into their shelves: “I think that’s really important to create a path forward” to “showcase stories that may not always be heard.”

[thepageswithin]

Making moves. Changing the game.

[neil-gaiman]

Eight Rules For Writing -- from a long ago piece I wrote for The Guardian.

1 Write.

2 Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.

3 Finish what you're writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.

4 Put it aside. Read it pretending you've never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.

5 Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

6 Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

7 Laugh at your own jokes.

8 The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you're allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it's definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

[booksandbodies]

Books & Bodies

[christophernolan]

AVATAR:THE LAST AIRBENDER | 3x11 ‘The day of the Black Sun’

[thepageswithin]

BEST. SHOW. EVER.

[la-laborista-republiko]

[cryptiboy]

what if public libraries were open late every night so that:

- children and teens who cant get home until a later time have a safe, warm, well lit, populated area to socialize, charge devices, rest, etc

- children and teens have a safe place to go to stay away from danger

- people who have jobs that take up most of the day would still have time ANY DAY OF THE WEEK to go use the libraries facilities (printing, computers, etc)

[raptorkin]

This is exactly what public libraries are trying to achieve - public libraries as a third place is a whole thing - it’s just that the funding isn’t there (yet).

[captaindibbzy]

Libraries need and deserve so much funding

[entamewitchlulu]

I’m going to apologize if this post comes off as sounding very aggressive, but having just been through one of the most stressful experiences of my entire career in libraries: 

if you want this, you need to be at your local community government meetings. you need to be talking to your representatives.  you need to be out there Lobbying.

Just a few weeks ago, my library, me, my coworkers, we had to write letters, send emails, make phone calls, speak at council meetings, just to beg our aldermen to give us our usual funding. Which they didn’t even give to us last year.  Losing last year’s funding forced us to cut staff, hours, and all of our databases.  If we’d lost this year’s funding? two positions would have been gone and we would have likely had to close on Saturdays.  On Saturdays.  The day of the week most of y’all working M-F jobs actually have time to go to the fucking library.

And do you want to know how much money we were asking? We were asking for an increase of approximately 13 cents a person.

13.

Fucking.

Cents.

ACROSS AN ENTIRE YEAR.

No one seems to understand how libraries are funded.  It’s not just Free Stuff.  It’s your tax dollars being paid back into your community.  It’s crowdfunding.  The highest cost anyone in my community pays for the library a year is approximately $250.  Divide that up.  That’s just $4 a week.  That’s less than a coffee.  It’s the equivalent of purchasing about 10 hardcover books a year.  For that price, you could have access to every book that has ever been written, a place to go that’s not a bar, programs for kids, teens, and adults, educated staff that can help you find the answers to your questions, and so much more.

You want these late-night libraries?  You want all this stuff?  Start fighting for it.  Start showing up.  Start making phone calls.  It’s not going to come out of thin air.  Start fighting to erase the idea that taxes = evil.  Start fighting to spread the understanding that taxes are what help us build a better society.

Make sure the people who represent you know that you want this.  That this is where you want your tax dollars to go.  That this is what you want them to support.  That you are willing to see your tax bill go up a few more dollars for this.

Because otherwise?  None of this is going to happen.  Libraries are going to keep cutting their opening hours.  Keep cutting staff.  Keep cutting programs and databases and collections.

We NEED your support, and we need more than just a post on Tumblr.  We need to see people show up and speak out. 

[cardigarden]

Public libraries need your support for all of that and also because when we (librarians) lobby for ourselves, the usual reaction is “oh you’re only here because it’s your job on the line and it’s a cost center that we’re cutting from the budget” like our livelihoods aren’t important enough as-is. But if the community (read: taxpayers) starts talking about it, suddenly it’s worth listening to.

[rebelwithoutpaws]

this is true everywhere - libraries are a necessity, not a luxury. Also, homeless people are just as entitled to use the library as anyone else.

[medievalthymes]

deleting my dating apps because i want to meet someone the old fashioned way (at the ball, where i tell her she’s too ugly to dance with, then ask her for her hand in marriage a few months later by insulting her family, wealth, and social status)

[thepageswithin]

Amen.