shadowvalkyrie:

Okay, Leute, Zeit für ein bisschen Amateurlinguistik: da anscheinend auch innerhalb Deutschlands nicht alle die Spider App kennen (ist super, braucht man nicht mal runterladen, kommt ganz automatisch!), rebloggt doch bitte alle mal mit eurer generellen Region oder dem lokalen Akzent, eurem Alter, und ob ihr dieses oder ein anderes Wort für einen angeknacksten Smartphonebildschirm benutzt.

Region: Australien

Alter: Baby Boomer (zwischen 1945 und 1965 geboren)

Spider App: nie davon gehört

quittingcamazotz:

“[The older generation of writers who had established the rules for modern fiction under the assumption that their experience was “universal”] gained the ability to write stories where they could “show” and not “tell" … They had this ability not because they were masterful stylists of language or because they dripped with innate talent. The power to “show, not tell” stemmed from the writing for an audience that shared so many assumptions with them that the audience would feel that those settings and stories were “universal.” (It’s the same hubris that led the white Western establishment to assume its medicine, science, and values superior to all other cultures …) Look at the literary fiction techniques that are supposedly the hallmarks of good writing: nearly all of them rely not on what was said, but on what is left unsaid. Always come at things sideways; don’t be too direct, too pat, or too slick. Lead the reader in a direction but allow them to come to the conclusion. Ask the question but don’t state the answer too baldly. Leave things open to interpretation… but not too open, of course, or you have chaos. Make allusions and references to the works of the literary canon, the Bible, and familiar events of history to add a layer of evocation—but don’t make it too obvious or you’re copycatting. These are the do’s and don’ts of MFA programs everywhere. They rely on a shared pool of knowledge and cultural assumptions so that the words left unsaid are powerfully communicated. I am not saying this is not a worthwhile experience as reader or writer, but I am saying anointing it the pinnacle of “craft” leaves out any voice, genre, or experience that falls outside the status quo. The inverse is also true, then: writing about any experience that is “foreign” to that body of shared knowledge is too often deemed less worthy because to make it understandable to the mainstream takes a lot of explanation. Which we’ve been taught is bad writing!”

— — Cecilia Tan, from Uncanny Magainze 18 (via violetephemera)

Tips and discussions most welcome

Have been watching a couple of episodes of three new(ish) series recommended by friends. All three interesting and exciting at times, but none is (to me) a match to Black Sails.

PEAKY BLINDERS. Rival criminal gangs, police, and a hero with multiple personal and social bonds, set in the UK during World War I. Well-written, political, zero slash so far. The title refers to the gang members’ habit of wearing caps whose tips (peaks) contained bits of sharpened metals (blinders).

TABOO. Set in the UK in 1815, conflicts around a piece of land near the yet-to-be-defined border between Canada and the United States. Hero vaguely reminiscent of Flint in that he is an Outcast with a Past, and can swim aboard ships and set them on fire. Complex, deals with slavery, zero slash so far.

KILLING EVE. Spies, counter-spies and assassins in contemporary Europe. The main character is a villainess appropriately known as Villanelle. She is incredibly evil and incredibly beautiful. Women are over half of the main characters. Suspenseful and witty. Vague (?) possibilities of slash between hunter and hunted, difficult as it is for me so far to determine who is what.

greywash:

Hello! I am a fandom person who writes and reads LOTS AND LOTS OF PORN. I’m also a fandom person who just closed out of a huge—like, >100k—fanfic epic at the last chapter, which is where the author put the porn. The story was well-written. The porn was well written. So why did I close out?

Because the story was over. It didn’t need the porn. So adding the porn made it a less good story.

This last-scene-sex-scene-close-out thing is a thing that I do, when reading fanfic, a lot, because this thing where the author tacks on sex after the story is over, and it doesn’t fit, and it makes the story worse—is a thing that fannish authors do a lot. And it’s kind of a pet peeve of mine, so I would like to talk about a) why this happens, b) how to spot it in the wild, and c) how to avoid it in your own writing. As always: you do you, and YMMV. Write what you want to write and fuck everyone else (including me!). But this is a very frequent thing that causes many, many, many fanfic authors to lose at least one reader (me), and I suspect more readers as well, so if you want to know how to not do it, read on.

Keep reading

Great essay on sex scenes at the end of stories – when they make narrative sense and when they don’t.