Just Finished An Entire Chapter-by-chapter Outline In One Day, I Need A Shot And A Burrito

Between Cait Corrain and James Somerton, I’m becoming really fucking sick of people using neurodiversity and mental health struggles as excuses to do shitty things.

Autism didn’t make you racist and adhd didn’t make you plagiarize.

You’re just a shitty person.

how jingo went

close ups on his face, bc i like when hes holding on by a thread

oh my god...

so the first screenshot is trying to look this up on tiktok normally, "donald trump rigged election" and it says that search violates community guidelines.

the second screenshot is looking up the same exact thing, but with a (australian) vpn on. canadian vpn didn't fix it fyi.

THIS is exactly the type of censorship to be looking out for on tiktok. this actually is crazy.

HA I just got a super positive rejection! I’ll put it under the cut (because it might get long), but this is genuinely helpful writing advice

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i know i've said this before but i'm going to say it again because the more i work with geriatric women the stronger i feel about the fact that the only anti-aging that women in their 20s/30s should be obsessed with is building strong bones and muscle mass. that's like the most important thing you can you can do right now to lay a good foundation for healthy aging. you can botox the shit out of your face but that's not going to do anything to save you from dying prematurely from a fatal hip fracture that you can't bounce back from because you didn't do anything to prevent yourself from becoming frail and breakable. like i know that sounds harsh but that is reality for a lot of older women and i don't want that to be you.

Discussions of what "counts" as "canon" queer representation fall apart the second you start talking about media older than about five years or so. If your only metric for "canon queerness" is a character looking directly into the camera and explaining their identity in specific, modern, US-American-English terminology, you're not going to get a good picture of what queer media looks like. If your barometer for what counts as "canon" requires two characters of the same gender to kiss on-screen, you're not going to get a good picture of what queer media looks like.

Dr. Septimus Pretorius (portrayed by Ernest Thesiger in 1935's Bride of Frankenstein) was never going to look directly into the camera and explain his sexuality in 2024 terms, but he remains an icon in queer media history. You cannot look at that character (blatantly queer-coded in the manner of the time, played by a queer man in a film directed by another queer man) and tell me that he isn't a part of queer media history.

To be honest, even when discussing modern queer media, I would argue that the popular idea of what "counts" as "canon" is very narrow and flawed. I've seen multiple posts in the past few days that say the Nimona movie is "implied" trans representation, and I just...no, y'all, it's not "implied," it's an allegory. The entire damn movie is about transgender struggle, and the original comic is deeply tied into N.D. Stevenson's own queer journey. It isn't subtle. You cannot look at that movie and pretend that it isn't about trans struggle. It's blatant, and to say that Nimona "isn't canonically trans" is a take that misses the story's entire message, and the blatant queerphobia that almost kept the movie from happening. (I wrote a five thousand word essay about the topic.)

Queer themes, queer coding, queer exploration, and queer representation can all exist in a piece of media that doesn't seem to have "canon queer characters" on the surface. Most queer characters are never going to be able to explicitly state their specific identity labels, be it due to censorship or just due to the fact that scenes like that don't fit in some narratives. Some stories aren't conducive to a big "so what's your identity?" scene.

Explicit, undeniable, "this is my identity in no uncertain terms" scenes are very important and radical, and I'm not saying they shouldn't ever exist. I am saying that you can't consider those scenes the only way for queerness in a piece of media to be "canon."

the "canon isn't real we make our own rules" to "i am begging you people to revisit the source material" pipeline

"Narrative distance"? Do tell!

Explain it in text? Without emphatic arm gestures or wine? Oh god. Okay. I’ll try.

All right, so narrative distance is all about the proximity between you the reader and the POV character in a story you’re reading. You might sometimes also hear it called “psychic distance.” It puts you right up close to that character or pulls you away, and the narrative distance an author chooses greatly affects how their story turns out, because it can drastically change the focus.

Here’s an illustration of narrative distance from far to close, from John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction (a book I yelled at a lot, because Gardner is a pretentious bastard, but he does say very smart things about craft):

It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.

Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.

Henry hated snowstorms.

God how he hated these damn snowstorms.

Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul

It feels a bit like zooming in with a camera, doesn’t it?  

I always hate making decisions about narrative distance, because I usually get it wrong on the first try and have to fix it in revision. When I was writing Lost Causes, the first thing I had to do in revision was go through and zoom in a little on the narrative distance, because it felt like it was sitting right on top of Bruce’s prickly skin and it needed to be underneath where the little biting comments and intrusive thoughts lived. 

Narrative distance is probably the simplest form of distance in POV, and there is where if I had two glasses of wine in me you would hit a vein of pure yelling. There are SO MANY forms of distance in POV. There’s the distance between the intended reader and the POV character, the distance between the POV character and the narrator (even if it’s 1st person!), the distance between the narrator and the author. There’s emotional distance, intellectual distance, psychological distance, experiential distance. If you look closely at a 3rd person POV story, you can tell things about the narrator as a person (and the narrator is an entity independent of the author) - like, for starters, you can tell if they’re sympathetic to the POV character by how they talk about their actions. Word choice and sentence structure can tell you a narrator’s level of education and where they’re from; you can sometimes even tell a narrator’s gender, class, and other less obvious identifying factors if you look closely enough. To find these details, ask: What does the narrator (or POV character, or author) understand?

I can’t put a name on the narrator of the Harry Potter books, but I can tell you he understands British culture intimately, what it’s like to be a teen boy with a crush, to not have money, to be lonely and abused, and to find and connect with people. There’s a lot he doesn’t understand (he doesn’t pick out little flags of queerness like I do, so he’s probably straight, for example), but he sympathizes with Harry and supports him. I like that narrator. I’m supposed to sympathize with him, and I do.

POV is made up of these little distances - countless small questions of proximity that, when stacked together, decide whether we’re going to root for or against a character, or whether we’ll put down a book 20 pages in, or whether a story will punch you in just the right place at just the right amount to make you bawl your eyes out.

There are so many different possible configurations of distance in this arena that there are literally infinite POVs. Fiction is magical and also intimidating as fuck.