If you wish to follow me then know that in so doing in place of a Dark Lord you would have a queen! Not dark but beautiful as the dawn! Treacherous as the Sea! Stronger than the foundations of the Earth! All shall love me and despair!

I block very liberally. Nothing personal is meant by it.

I have many posts queued. They aren't always tagged b/c it's way more work on mobile.

You’ll see explanations for frequently used tags under the cut.

workshops aren't the end all be all of writing instruction, but regularly participating in workshops changes how you approach others' work. In workshops you'll be reading stories that are unpolished, half-written, bursting with passion, deeply personal to the writer, and oftentimes so outside of your tastes that you'd never in a million years read that story if not for sharing the workshop with that person. Regularly being in workshops you're forced to develop an eye for what a writer is aiming for, and an ear for how to offer suggestions that fit with their voice.

you'll get to hear other writers' worries, their ambitions, and their interests. you'll get to see folks produce astounding work one week and then absolute dogwater the next. learning to offer constructive feedback to writing that's totally unresonant to you, and learning to help a writer achieve their aims on their particular projects is hugely instructive for seeing the cracks & weaknesses in your own work, and instructive in how to fix those issues in your own work.

if you've ever watched a movie with your film buff friend and chatted about it afterwards, that friend might have pulled hours more of conversation out of the same 90 minutes of screentime, and wondered how the fuck they did that - it's not raw intelligence, it's a skill that's been honed. And I learned a lot about film from talking to friends who knew about film, and reading critique by film scholars

literature works exactly the same. so if you want to get more out of your reading, there are things you can do to train that. Find a book or short story you think you've got a pretty good grasp on, preferably from a widely read & respected author like Ursula K Le Guin or Ray Bradbury (if you're new at this don't swing for the Toni Morrison or the Samuel Beckett yet unless you feel very comfortable with the complexity of the text - the point is to develop a complicated new skill on good foundations). Then go to JSTOR, create a free account, and look up criticism on the story you've chosen. Find something that looks readable to you and at least somewhat interesting. Read that article, and look at what that writer got out of the same story you've read that you didn't get. Do you see the critic's points? Did they teach you something about the text? Go reread that story and see if the criticism has changed how you read it. Are you seeing more? Are you thinking about the implications of a line that you hadn't noticed before? Does the story feel richer now?