pixel skylines
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
official daine visual archive
Three Goblin Art
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Not today Justin
oozey mess
Discoholic 🪩
Stranger Things
🩵 avery cochrane 🩵
Product Placement
occasionally subtle
No title available
Sade Olutola
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
untitled
No title available
izzy's playlists!
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
tumblr dot com
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Argentina
seen from Netherlands
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Italy
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Myanmar (Burma)
seen from Egypt
@thewrittenbookworm
I dreamt — marvelous error! — that I had a beehive here inside my heart. And the golden bees were making white combs and sweet honey from my old failures.
Antonio Machado, from “Last night, as I was sleeping,” Times Alone: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado, trans. Robert Bly (Wesleyan University Press, 1983)
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it a thousand more times: No piece of dystopian fiction has ever been a prediction of the future. They are observations and criticisms of the present.
“Wooow! How did Orwell predict the surveillance state so well in 1984??”
He didn’t. He was making an observation of the surveillance state that already existed in his present, and exaggerated it to make the metaphor obvious.
Learning and discussing these works in terms of them being predictions and having test questions like “do you think his prediction came true?” is not only pointless, but actively counterintuitive. When you frame these works as being ‘people from the past knew that the future would be terrible’ you shift the entire perspective to one of some kind of nostalgia for a past that didn’t exist.
These author’s aren’t oracles. They’re satirists. Their predictions ‘come true’ because they were already true when they wrote them.
“How about, in Marxist terms, “the proletariat”? Where are they in SF? Where are the poor, the people who work hard and go to bed hungry? Are they ever persons, in SF? No. They appear as vast anonymous masses fleeing from giant slime-globules from the Chicago sewers, or dying off by the billion from pollution or radiation, or as faceless armies being led to battle by generals and statesmen. In sword and sorcery they behave like the walk-on parts in a high school performance of The Chocolate Prince. Now and then there’s a busty lass amongst them who is honored by the attentions of the Captain of the Supreme Terran Command, or in a space-ship crew there’s a quaint old cook, with a Scots or Swedish accent, representing the Wisdom of the Common Folk. The people, in SF, are not people. They are masses, existing for one purpose: to be led by their superiors.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, American SF and the Other (via probablyasocialecologist)
WISTERIA MORNINGS
The day is here! Wisteria Mornings is available on Etsy as either a PDF download or a print-to-order zine-style chapbook.
Creating this chapbook has been such a rewarding experience: I’ve written plenty of poetry (not all of it good!) and I’ve edited and had a hand in the creation of a couple of collections, but the experience of taking control of my whole creative process, conception to…
View On WordPress
June Newsletter #BLM
Transcription of June’s Newsletter. PDF attached includes a list of resources to donate to or access. #BlackLivesMatter
This is not the June I expected, as I’m sure is true for many of us. We knew months ago that Pride would be cancelled due to the pandemic, but we had no way to predict that this would be the moment that our country would rise up against the fascist arm of the government we call…
View On WordPress
Update/Patreon
A quick note crossposted from Patreon Hey friends. As you may have noticed, this past month was slow with regards to content. I admit I’ve fallen behind. I went back to work and have been exhausted, so I haven’t dedicated the usual amount of time to my work. I’m catching up now and you can expect a windfall of content later this month to make up for it. I’m posting a poem and an excerpt of a side…
View On WordPress
Wisteria Mornings
I’ve got a chapbook in the works! I’ll be self-publishing it this summer, though I’m still hammering out the details. I’m trying to avoid using Amazon and am looking at other platforms on which I can sell a PDF version and (possibly!) a limited run of home-printed (zine style) copies. Updates about this will come on here, on Twitter, and on Patreon.
The chapbook will be a collection of recent…
View On WordPress
The Patreon
I launched a Patreon! If you’ve liked my work in the past, especially my poetry, I suggest checking it out. I’ve got a tier for poetry specifically, at only two US dollars! There you can get exclusive access to poems before I publish them for the general public. Right now, that means poems that are going to be included in my upcoming self-published poetry collection Wisteria Mornings.
There’s…
View On WordPress
I just discovered foodtimeline.org, which is exactly what it sounds like: centuries worth of information about FOOD. If you are writing something historical and you want a starting point for figuring out what people should be eating, this might be a good place?
CHRISTMAS CAME EARLY
this is awesome but the original link just turned into a redirect loop for me, here it is again (x)
OH HELLO
learned that the new yorker has free rolling submissions for UP TO SIX POEMS at a time and immediately sent some in because nobody can STOP ME and genuinely it’s the funniest thing I’ve done in a while
“I’m finally going to write! I have a great idea!”
LAUGHS LOUDLY
OK but like… first sentences don’t have to be there forever. I cannot begin to count the number of times I’ve started a story like:
And just write the ideas down until the story starts to shape itself. Then when you’re ready, go back and delete everything before the point where the story actually starts.
Writing yourself into an idea is a time-honoured technique, and it works.
thanks inspirobot
things i’ve learned as a slush reader
in the past month, i’ve read over 200 submissions for the literary organizations i volunteer with, and i want to share some of the stuff i’ve learned about writing as a slush reader.
(a slush reader is someone who reads submissions, and either declines them or pushes them through for editors/judges to make a final decision on whether or not a story will be published.)
a rejection does not mean you are a bad writer or that you’ve written a bad story. it’s all chaos. there’s no rhyme or reason to any of it. i was chosen as a reader for these publications because my personal taste in literature jived with the editors. that’s all it comes down to – personal taste. if your taste doesn’t match the taste of the slush readers, you’re not going to get published. there is no way you can predict that, so all you can do is keep writing and keep submitting and hope your work aligns with someone who gets what you’re trying to do. that said, there are some across-the-board things that are worth noting:
your story should be doing some kind of Work. what is the intention of your piece? what are you trying to comment on, explore, or do? it doesn’t have to be concise or obvious or complex, it can be literally anything in any way, but if you’re writing something just for the sake of getting published, or to validate yourself, it’s going to be pretty obvious to readers. that is not to say that self-validating work is not valuable, or that a story cannot be both Doing Something and self-validating, but readers want to see that you have something to say, some work to do other than, “i want to be a good writer.”
readers will probably have made their decision by page 4. probably sooner than that depending on the quality of the writing. that means you have (if you’ve written in 12pt serif font and double-spaced, and please dear god, do these things unless you’re intentionally playing with form) about a thousand words to engage a reader. if you’ve written a short story, personal essay, or novel excerpt (sorry, cannot speak for poetry), this means your core conflict needs to have been introduced by this point and headed in some kind of direction. to put it more clearly: i need to know what’s going on. elusiveness is not your friend. i want to know: 1) who is the main character, and 2) what do they want? if you do not have these things established by page 4, your work might still be an early draft.
caveat being, of course, if you’re writing experimentally, in which case i hope you’ve submitted to an experimental publication. but there’s a big difference in good experimental vs bad experimental writing, and that is:
write with intention. intention is the difference between dancing alone in your bedroom and becoming a ballerina. both forms of dance might be good, you might be an innately talented dancer alone in your bedroom, but choreographed dancing takes discipline and practice. when it comes to writing, every sentence needs to be chosen to determine if it works for the piece. this is unfortunately one of the hardest parts about writing.
take risks. my least favorite stories are the ones that make me think, this has been done before. having to read hundreds of stories means repetition – i see the same themes over and over (white man feeling conflicted about cheating on his wife), the same writing styles (purple prose run-on sentences), the same characters (middle-class english teachers). i want to read words i don’t expect about stories i’ve never thought of. i want to see confidence in creativity. i want to see writing that acknowledges convention and destroys it for something better. show me newness, ingenuity, artistic expression. show me the stuff you’re afraid to write for fear of ridicule – that’s the stuff that gets published.
THE WORLD WANTS TO HEAR FROM FANFIC WRITERS. when i volunteered with one publication, the application involved a list of the last 15 novels i’d read. and i thought, i don’t want this gig if i can’t be brutally honest, so you bet your ass i put fanfic on there. i was accepted within a day. when i’ve told my writing mentors that i write fanfic, their faces have all lit up in excitement and they have a ton of questions. i cannot tell you how many submissions i’ve read where the interactions between characters feel stilted and normative, and all i’m looking for is the kind of dynamic tension and chemistry that fanfic authors have mastered. so if you write fanfic and don’t think you’re good enough to write “literature” i’m here to tell you, you absolutely are.
Some advice for our followers
That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
T. S. Eliot
Daily #2,292! No one is more shocked than me.
Now if only I could *always* not be anxious…
I’ve seen the Ursula K LeGuin quote about capitalism going around, but to really appreciate it you have to know the context.
The year is 2014. She has been given a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Awards. Neil Gaiman puts it on her neck in front of a crowd of booksellers who bankrolled the event, and it’s time to make a standard “thank you for this award, insert story here, something about diversity, blah blah blah” speech. She starts off doing just that, thanking her friends and fellow authors. All is well.
Then this old lady from Oregon looks her audience of executives dead in the eye, and says “Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.”
She rails against the reduction of her art to a commodity produced only for profit. She denounces publishers who overcharge libraries for their products and censor writers in favor of something “more profitable”. She specifically denounces Amazon and its business practices, knowing full well that her audience is filled with Amazon employees. And to cap it off, she warns them: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”
Ursula K LeGuin got up in front of an audience of some of the most powerful people in publishing, was expected to give a trite and politically safe argument about literature, and instead told them directly “Your empire will fall. And I will help it along.”
We stan an icon.
In honour of H.P. Lovecraft’s birthday
I would just like to remind everyone that on this day, 128 years ago, Sarah Susan Philips Lovecraft gave birth to what would become one of the greatest pissboys in all of western literature. Not only would this child grow into a massive antisemite, racist, xenophobe and class elitist, but he would also manage to weasel his way into the english literary canon with an oeuvre of almost pure purple prose, peppered with aforementioned shitty opinions. This shitty son of Providence, Rhode Island would later be hailed for his innovative approach to horror by utilizing the fear of the unknown, something he had in heaps, and it really is a tragedy that, apart from ethnic and racial minorities, he was not more acquainted with the sensation of a fist in his face or a good kick in the knees. So this 20th of August, let us remember the start of a rightfully sad life of one of the scummiest pricks to ever hold a pen, and be thankful that literally everything he ever did was done better by someone else after him.
