Over the years that I've been writing and posting A Thing Of Vikings, a lot of people have expressed interest in reading my original work. Now, after a lot of work and thought, I'm going ahead with self-publication. Specifically, I'm going to post chapters weekly online, with a Patreon for income.
I decided on this model for a couple of reasons, including that my writing style isn't the sort of thing that a lot of publishers would be willing to accept from a first-time author, and right now a lot of publishers are flooded with submissions, so they can afford to be picky. Maybe one day I'll get an offer for a future book, maybe I won't, but for now, I'll go with self-publishing online.
My first novel, Imprudent, will be posted here on tumblr at first. If I get enough of a following, I'll move to a website of my own as soon as I can. You can find it at @fractured-legacies, which will be my tumblr for my original work.
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james ortiz provided some of his own personal rocky backstory on the sag aftra podcast, transcribed by me because we all have to be miserable about it together.
link to the podcast, this section below is from timestamp 24.35
“andy weir provided a packet to the creature shop that was like a packet of eridian biology and stuff but there wasn’t much about eridian culture or eridian sociology and i made a bunch of choices going in because i just needed to have like a ‘who am i?’ right?
[…] and i made a decision that rocky’s species, that eridians are really social animals that in fact are like a beehive or a pod of dolphins - it’s a unique and really integrated ecosystem of everybody doing their [specific] part. and the fact that rocky had to fly that ship for about 45 years - longer than grace has been alive, i wanna point that out - he’s been alone on that ship, having to run that by himself and- ryan and i would talk about that, one day we sat down and he was like “so what’s the movie from rocky’s perspective?” and i was like “oh it’s like ‘alien’, […] like he’s in a ‘contagion’ movie by himself and he has no idea what’s going on.”
he’s basically in castaway by himself which of course ryan is too but like, one reason why we never cut to the past of rocky is like, i think it was really horrifying! i don’t think rocky has slept in however many years and so a thing i was really struggling with is this idea of like “rocky must watch sleep” because how do you make that a need as opposed to like, a cute idea? and i just had to make the decision that […] he has a lot of unprocessed trauma around the things that he doesn’t understand and how much he is blaming himself because he’s the guy who fixes, he’s the guy who fixes and there was something really freeing about deciding that rocky was a deeply emotional, deeply anxious, deeply horrified person - being - that is trying to move through that in some way and how that affects the early scenes with him until there’s a point in the story where you can see we’ve physically softened rocky’s behaviour, because he’s finally feeling more safe and ok but all of that lore, all of that information [was essential].
i also decided, this is just a small nerdy thing, that there was actually some of his family, was on that ship too.”
A new Broadway play about Roald Dahl and his prejudice captures uncomfortable truths.
The malefactors in Roald Dahl’s fiction are easy to spot. “If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face,” the author writes in The Twits. “And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.” Miss Trunchbull, the abusive headmistress of Matilda, is a “gigantic holy terror” with “an obstinate chin, a cruel mouth and small arrogant eyes.” Augustus Gloop, the greedy glutton of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, is a “big fat boy” who is likened to a dog and a pig. In James and the Giant Peach, the protagonist is oppressed by his “enormously fat” Aunt Sponge, who resembles “soggy overboiled cabbage,” and the “bony” Aunt Spiker, with her “screeching voice and long wet narrow lips.” In Dahl’s children’s books, evil is self-evident and announces itself in crude, stereotypical terms.
Giant, a play about Dahl running on Broadway through June, is anything but childish. And although the celebrated writer might be construed as the villain of the production, he is nothing like the villains of his own work. The play dramatizes a debate between Dahl and his associates over a book review he published in 1983, which began with criticism of Israel’s recent military campaign in Lebanon but swerved into negative generalizations about “a race of people”—Jews. Dahl is pressed by his publisher to walk back some of his more incendiary assertions, but instead he doubles down, telling a dumbstruck journalist at the end of the play that “there is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity” and that “even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” (Although the play itself is fiction based on true events, this exchange is genuine and reenacted verbatim.)
Giant could have taken the same approach to Dahl as Dahl took to his own characters, clearly telegraphing the author’s ills and reducing him to them. But as written by Mark Rosenblatt and directed by Nicholas Hytner, Giant doesn’t caricature its subject. Instead, the play does something much more difficult: It shows how Dahl excels at many things—including anti-Semitism.
As embodied by John Lithgow, Dahl is incisive, avuncular, irascible, acerbic, and always entertaining. He has deep compassion for the suffering of innocents, an irresistible sense of comic timing, and considered critiques of the state of Israel. He also engages in casual misogyny, narcissism, and anti-Semitism. He repeatedly casts Jews as cowards, claiming that he never saw any engaged in combat in World War II—more than 1 million in fact served in the Allied armies—and derides the Jewish victims of the Nazis as submissive in the face of their aggressors. By the end of the play, one understands why this otherwise impressive man was—according to his own daughter—once expelled from a social club that he’d complained had too many Jews in it.
By presenting Dahl in all his maddening and flawed humanity, Giant explores an uncomfortable truth: Bigots do not present themselves for easy identification as they do in children’s stories like Dahl’s. “There was such a courtesy and an intelligence in the way he framed his answers to me that it was very disarming,” Michael Coren, the journalist who elicited Dahl’s Hitler remarks, told me. “Plus, he came with this heroic baggage, the way he had dealt with tragedy in his life, and he was such a gifted writer. So, yeah, it was very jarring to hear it from him.”
As history shows, and Giant demonstrates, prejudice is often sustained not by the casual intolerance of the unwashed masses, but by the sophisticated justifications and permission structures devised by educated elites. Anti-Semitism is built on conspiracies and contradictions that take time for an observer to unravel. In fact, the very term anti-Semitism was popularized by Wilhelm Marr, a German nationalist who sought to distinguish his anti-Jewish ideology from the crass bigotry of the common folk by dressing his hate up in pseudoscientific terms.
Giant illustrates how prejudice can coexist with intelligence, talent, refinement, and even empathy. Shakespeare’s genius is as evident in The Merchant of Venice, which is pervaded by anti-Semitism, as in his other work. The technical and business acumen of Henry Ford, the music of Richard Wagner, and the heroic feats of physical endurance by the likes of Charles Lindbergh all thrived alongside their anti-Jewish activism.
Dahl was a polymath. He was a war hero and a literary virtuoso, responsible for both best sellers and Hollywood blockbusters. He even invented a valve to drain fluid from the brain of his injured infant son after contemporary remedies proved inadequate. “He was a pathological fixer of problems,” Rosenblatt, the playwright, told me. And “one of the most illusory tools for fixing problems, because it simplifies the world so much, is a conspiracy theory or anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.”
Dahl’s achievements would not have been possible without immense self-confidence. But such self-regard also made him obstinate, immune to correction, and prone to hubris—as well as prejudice. “Any person who is greater than another,” the Talmud declares, has a greater “evil inclination.” Or as a different giant of children’s literature, Albus Dumbledore, once put it: “Being—forgive me—rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger.”
Many struggle with this idea. They want to believe that those responsible for great deeds or good art are uncomplicatedly great and good themselves. And they want prejudiced people to be readily identifiable, defined by their shortcomings, and easily expunged from our collective canon and society. Put another way, they want bigots to be like the villains in Dahl’s books, not like Dahl himself. But Giant refuses to indulge this soothing fiction about human nature.
Whether the subject is Dahl, Israel, Palestine, or Lebanon, the play wants audiences to sit with reality in all its knottiness, contradiction, and brokenness. And it reminds them that the most frightening monster of all is not the sensational stuff of children’s stories, but the propensity to monstrosity that lives within all of us.
This is literally what people are talking about when they say AI will be used to mainstream widely held bigotry. LLMs are trained on frequency and probability -> straight relationships are more well represented in the dataset -> straight pronouns and terms become the "correct" normal.
This is a form of backdoor bigotry from both normative facts (there are more straight than gay relationships) and well represented bigoted beliefs (men are superior to women).
Combine this with the mass of people inclined to believe (and being encouraged to believe) that if AI says and does something it must be correct
I have a male character who is a healer. Every goddamn time I have an AI LLM on in a word processor, I will know because that fucking thing always tries to make Aza a woman.
It's a nice way to know there's hidden AI but also... fucking gender essentialist bullshit. There is no reason for it to think he is a woman other than the fact that he has healing magic. None.
AI is not the solution to any problem you have with your own writing. It never will be.
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One of the best things about being a writer is thinking of something small you can add to your work that’s just. Devastating. Like you’re sitting there going. Oh. That would be diabolical. People would get really riled up about that. Exquisite. Let’s do it.
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The scammers on AO3 seem to be upping their game - now their comments may actually relate specifically to the story. Otherwise the comment follows the usual formula.
On top of this, this is a registered user, which means I can't simply mark the comment as spam. I'll have to manually file a report.
What really galls me is that they must've fed my story through genAI to get relevant commentary.
OP, I know these are two different realms, but this is exactly like the spam I've been getting to my author email. Just swap out a specific fic for a specific book and the wording and tone is exactly the same. (Only the spammer signs off asking for you to talk to them about marketing, not commissioning art).
I don't even have anything useful or insightful to add, just that its so freaky seeing this pop up on my dash. I hate this kind of bot so much, because its so fucking disheartening and you end up feeling gross that they've fed your work into AI to generate this trash.
𓍊𓋼𓍊 My piece for "Together from Afar: a How to Train Your Dragon" tribute exhibition at Gallery Nucleus! The show runs from April 11-26 and opens tonight from 5-8pm (free + no RSVP needed) 𓍊𓋼𓍊
I love Astrid and Stormfly, so I was really honored and excited to get to draw them🙇 John Powell was on full blast the entire time 🙇🙇🙇
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i got my first hotmail account in 1999. one of the usernames i still use (not on tumblr dear god) i've had since i started going on chatrooms made with iframes in 2001. it's a word i got from the dictionary, which was a physical object in my home that i frequently referenced.
i see kids being like "why are you still here?" like man this is where i've always been? i was here for IRC and AIM and Windows/MSN Messenger. i was here for dialup and desktop PCs that lived in cabinet-like desks. i had a GeoCities website before my school friends had email.
my dad worked for IBM, but he also taught me piracy before it was commonplace. i learned how to download music and burn it to CD, which took over my prior hobby of recording songs on cassette from the radio to make mixtapes. i had photoshop 7 which you could pirate with a keygen, and i made covers for my mixes.
[Image ID: An Ao3 comment that reads: “You are one sick fuck. Thank you for sharing this. How fucking dare you. This was beautifully written. May your soul burn.”]
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