Thequeerish - Dystopic And Smutty Fiction Is Admired Here.

Inspired by comments I received from my writing group, I decided to tweak my plot. But ... looking at my plot spreadsheet and at my many notes I felt overwhelmed. Solution (for today,at least) I created a mind map for my story. In the map, major the two nodes are: reality, in universe (e.g. what is allowed to happen in the story’s world). These have sub nodes of locations, technology, big events and characters. I’m hopeful this will help me make decisions about my wip’s plot.

Thank you @the-wip-project for this challenge!

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Day Forty-five

of @the-wip-project‘s challenge

Q45: Write five keywords that describe each of your WIPs

current original wip: grey, magnetic field, bioengineering, gluttony, charm

current clexa wip: horses, artificial intelligence, flashbacks, red, scorpion

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I already thought he was evil. This confirms it.

what do you mean elon musk did a nazi salute on live tv at the united states presidential inauguration twice and is now erasing the evidence off the internet by replacing the footage with the crowd cheering instead?

would be a shame if people reblogged this, wouldn’t it?

Fanfiction Club: The Rules

This idea came to me when I woke up first thing this morning.

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The deal

An Open Letter to Tumblr about the Adult Content Ban and How it is Hurting Your Users:

Recently, Tumblr was removed from the Apple app store due to an incident involving child pornography. This incident is incredibly unfortunate, but it doesn’t stand alone. Tumblr was also removed from the app store due to the large influx of porn bots and pornographic spam, users claiming to be proud to be pedophiles, blatant Nazism, racists who are not deleted for sending hate and harassing users, and more. I myself reported someone for harassing me, but because I had blocked the person and couldn’t access the messages where they harassed me, they were still able to send me anonymous asks. Your support staff, with back doors to the website (presumably), claimed they could not access the messages, and I was left SOL. Many features on this website do nothing to actually protect your users from harassment, racism, homophobia, transphobia, Nazis, pedophiles, predators, porn bots, and more. 

You claim in your statement to us that you “have been working on these problems for a long time”. This is blatantly untrue. Please do not lie to us and patronize us. We’ve been here. We’ve seen you do nothing over, and over, and over again. 

We complained to you for months and months about the rampant porn bots, and you did nothing except add a report button on mobile which only reported sensitive content or spam at best. You could have addressed this problem with an effective algorithm, but you did not. We complained to you about being harassed and sent hate speech for being LGBT+, and you did nothing. We complained to you about blogs being randomly deleted, and sometimes you’ve restored them, other times you have not. We complained to you that there were people proudly claiming to be “Minor Attracted Persons”, or pedophiles, and you did nothing. We complained to you about people proudly claiming to be white supremacists, and you did nothing. All of these things are “against the community guidelines”, and yet over and over, you have not found effective ways to handle these problems or suppress the feeling of welcome that these users claim to get here. You have had a long time to work on these problems, but you haven’t addressed them. To say you have is untrue. 

 Multiple other social networking websites, such as Wordpress, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and others have effectively dealt with rampant pornography, racism, pedophilia, and other problems without causing massive issues for their users who are not misusing the platform. They are continuing to find new, effective ways to deal with these issues without causing problems for their userbase as a whole.  There is no reason that you are unable to do this effectively other than that you wanted to do it quickly. You have once again chosen your stock holders over your users. And we have had enough. 

You have already started to ban “Adult” content with a new algorithm. Here are screenshots of just a fraction of the posts you have flagged as containing adult content:

Your new system of simply tackling everything at once is not working. At all. And each of these screenshots is proof of your utter incompetence. None of these posts contain pornographic acts, “female nipples”, or any community violation of any kind. 

We, the users, have been asking you for months to deal with these problems - particularly, the porn bots and bots that spam. In order to block a bot from a side blog, I have to do it manually, even though they are in my side blog’s feed. This is a huge issue for mobile - only users. They keep cropping up in droves, taking over our posts and tricking google into making it look like a legitimate blog linked to a pornographic website. We have complained to you for months and months now, and your solution to simply “ban all adult content” is ineffective. I agree that children should not be able to access pornography - but this is not how you tackle a porn bot problem. Your system is utterly useless, allows for racists, pedophiles, porn bots, and Nazis to remain untouched. It also harms sex workers and real people who may use this website for some forms of adult content responsibly. Moreover, as seen above, it harms plenty of users who have in no way violated your terms of service.

 If you keep this up, you threaten your website and company as a whole. Many of us are backing up our blogs and planning places to go to. 

You already have a content filter for “sensitive” content (content inappropriate for younger viewers). You could have improved this, instead of attacking your entire user base. It seems to be a very lazy “solution”, if you could call it one at all, and one that harms your entire userbase.

If you are going to keep this filter in place and make Tumblr, a website that has never been known for being family friendly and has never claimed to be, you are going to lose millions of your users. We are already planning our exodus. It isn’t hard to follow. Censor us, and we will go somewhere else. That is not a threat. It is a promise. 

Sincerely, 

The users of your website. 

@staff @support

Clexa + Parallels Lil’ gift for you Erin, I know how much you love these. I hope it will “cheer you up”’. Thank you for everything. But this gifset is also for all the Clexa fans as well. THANK YOU FOR BEING AWESOME.

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Are you a Gold Star lesbian? (Just in case you don't know what it means, a Gold Star lesbian is a lesbian that has never had the sex with a guy and would never have any intentions of ever doing so)

No. Why do you ask?

#thank you for this brilliant analysis #raven is the best

This is minute and not really well-thought out as I’m still trying to process some things that have happened in the last episode, but can we talk about how Raven does not only grow as a person the way she once told Sinclair she would, but actually comes to terms with Sinclair’s death through that?

The thing with her line “You’re always with me” and her deciding to choose life over pain is that it brings attention to one very particular emotional scene between them that took place way back in season 3 (3x03).

We all know that Raven’s need to hide her pain becomes very hard in the beginning, most notable when she tries to fight her physical disability by lying about it, but also visible through the emotional toll the traumatic experiences she’d been exposed to have taken on her by keeping a certain distance from the people she loves. It becomes clear that she can’t think of happiness or self-acceptance as a possibility at that time - driving herself to the point wherein she can’t even work anymore (which usually represented an escape for her).

When Sinclair breaks through Raven’s barrier and notices that she is a bundle of neuroses who purposely refuses Abby’s help (even though there is a way for her to get it with the medical equipment in Mount Weather) as she thinks she deserves the pain for all the things she’s failed to do and treats it as a sort of self-punishment for every person she couldn’t save while also believing that she is broken and therefore not fixable it’s him who let’s her know that she deserves more than any of this. That she is more than her pain and the losses.

I think I will never get over the motivation Sinclair brought out in Raven in this show, because this is something that he always made clear to her. That he always saw her awesomeness in a way no one else ever did, giving her the chances of a lifetime because he understood that she’s always been special - a little heart-murmur is nothing to him if it means that she can be who she wants to be. He’s come to represent the hand on her shoulder that grounds her, the one person who never once stopped believing that she is able to pull it off.

And while Raven wants to believe the things he says she doesn’t come to that understanding in 3x03 - not just because it is a process in itself, but because right after this conversation Raven fails to save more people - including a friend, Gina. So, diluted by that loss and fresh pain, Raven spirals deeper into darkness and isolation and becomes an easy target for none other than ALIE.

She takes the chip after convincing herself that she’s got nothing to lose and gets rid of everything, stripping her body and mind from who she actually is.

The fact that, for a while, Raven seems to be okay with what the chip does to her doesn’t escape anyone, even when we, as the audience, know that ALIE isn’t to be trusted since we know what her “key” does to people. She finds the solace in it that she hadn’t been experiencing for a long time, so she let’s that feeling wash over her and affect her to the point that she forgets about things - not just her pain, but also the things and people she loves (e.g Finn).

When Raven gets rid of the chip the first thing she experiences is death again. And it’s not just a simple death, but it’s her witnessing Sinclair dying on the ground, a fight she faces and can’t overcome, because she can’t save him.

While many people have made clear that Raven doesn’t let Sinclair’s death distract her from saving the world, working day in and out (Monty says that she hasn’t been sleeping for days - the circle under her eyes certainly tell the story) trying to find a way to defeat ALIE with her friends, there is a part in her that refuses to accept it. The difference this time is that the ALIE-upgrade - that she isn’t aware of in season 3 - and being able to focus on work/a fight give her the opportunity to not think about it (something she didn’t have before she took the chip), but the loss doesn’t go by her. Instead it hits her straight in the heart.

The first time we come to that realization is in 4x02, when she mentions Sinclair while she believes that she can’t run the repair of the ship alone, not able to place any trust in her skill-set as the awesome Raven Reyes she is:

And In 4x11, when she literally manifests him during another seizure, seeing her heart fight the remains of ALIE’s code in her brain for the first (and last) time:

The thing with 4x11 is that Raven does all the things she thought she couldn’t do before. For example, to win the fight against the brain damage (ALIE’s upgrade that Jasper first noticed about Raven way back in 4x01) - especially alone. Or the fact that she can and should place trust in herself and her talent, because she does not only come to realize that she, in fact, can save herself from dying in Becca’s lab or somewhere up in space, but also that she can be who she has always been at her core - the Raven Reyes who doesn’t quit, but keeps fighting. Live for herself without punishing her being with pain or the losses of the people she loves  “I don’t choose pain. I choose life”.

And when she says “You’re always with me” she, for the first time, genuinely accept the loss of someone without blaming herself - Sinclair’s death. For the first time she does not distract her mind or delves into pain or isolates herself in yet another room only to end up looking out of the window because she hates being alone, but she focuses on getting to her hearts true desire, to drive her body forward so that she can come out of this situation un-dead, to reach out to her friends through the radio and say “This is Raven Reyes, and I am alive”.

I said it before, but I will say it again. Raven’s story line this season has catapulted my love for her into a whole new sphere and the character growth (especially the emotional progression) is off the fucking charts.

Yes, Raven couldn’t save Sinclair back in Arkadia, there was just no chance, but there is no blame either. Instead, she tells him that he has been and will always be with her, because at her heart she never forgets.

I’m going to try this!

how to make a story file

As I am preparing for Camp NaNo*, I have been working on my story file. It occurred to me this might not be common or popular practice. “Story File” is a name I gave it and maybe some of y’all have a different name with the same contents. 

*There’s still time to apply to join my Camp NaNo cabin!

My Story File contains everything about my story that doesn’t go in the outline.

It’s broken up into major categories and specific templates. So without further ado, here is how I structure my Story File. 

Intro

Title

Logline

Synopsis

Genre

Estimated Total Length (word count)

Draft Length Goal (word count)

Character Bank

Main characters and brief, one-sentence descriptions with ages

Themes and Character Development

Central Question

The Yes/No question that is being asked through the whole story

Should have objective qualities, rather than subjective

i.e. “Will they fall in love?” (subjective) vs. “Will they leave their partners and become a couple?” (objective)

Thematic Questions

These are the internal conflict questions that reside in your character(s) and your story

ex. “Can there really be a successful government?”

ex. “Does grief excuse bad actions?”

Themes at a Glance

Words or phrases that relate to the themes of the story

ex. person vs. nature

ex. isolation

ex. grief

ex. first love

Motivation / Stasis State / Final State

for each main character, you should write a sentence or two pertaining to these three things

Motivation: What is the drive behind this character and their past, present, and future actions? What part of their background makes them the way that they are? What are they looking for? What do they want out of this/a situation?

Stasis State: What are they like before the inciting incident? What problems and questions do they have?

Final State: What has changed about them and their outlook? What questions have they resolved? What has happened to their internal conflict?

Relationships

I usually make a little web of the MCs and their relationship to one another. One for the stasis and one for final.

Stasis: How do these characters see each other? How do they act toward the other? (All before the inciting incident)

Final: How do these characters see each other now? How has their idea of one another shifted? 

Even if a character dies before the end, include the most recent relationship status in the Final web.

ex. this is how I organize it, using the Draw feature of Google Docs

Character Bank

This is just a very preliminary character bank. If you prefer a more in-depth one, check out my 6 Box Method.

Per (relevant/important) character:

Name

Nickname/preferred name

Age

Field/Occupation

Physical Description

Personality

Personal History

Education/Occupation History

Extra Notes:

Worldbuilding Bank

(Check out my worldbuilding posts on Categories Pt. 1 and 2 for better context)

Seasons and Climate

Languages

Other Cultural Pockets

Folklore and Legends

Fine Arts

Dress and Modesty

Classes

Jobs

Currency and Economics

Shopping

Agriculture and Livestock

Imports and Exports

Literature, Pop Culture, and Entertainment

Food and Water

Holidays and Festivals

Family and Parenting

Relationships

Housing

Religion and Beliefs

Government

Health and Medicine

Technology and Communication

Death

Transportation

Plants, Animals, and Human-environment Interaction

Education

Beauty Standards

Gender and Sexuality

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I hope this helps y’all and supplements what you’re probably already doing. I know it’s helped me tons to have everything in a central place.

Best of luck!

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Day 2 of @the-wip-project ‘s 100 day challenge

My current wip is a love letter to my home town. It’s also a call for people to “love the body they have the day they have it”.

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