JAWBREAKER!

There are going to be days (or weeks, or months) where you sit down to write and feel... disconnected. From your voice, from your characters, from your ideas. Like the person who used to write your stories just packed up and left.

They didn't. They're just tired. Here's how to keep writing anyway:

Lower the bar (Until it's on the floor) You are not here to write something brilliant. You are here to write something. A paragraph. A sentence. A single line of dialogue. Movement matters way more than quality.

Write around the story Don't force it. If you can't write the scene, try: ⋆ A character ramble / journal entry ⋆ A conversation that won't be included in the final draft ⋆ A list of things the character would never admit out loud ⋆ A messy summary of what should happen Engage with the story from a different angle.

Borrow a voice until yours comes back No, not with AI. Read something that feels close to what you want to write, or watch a scene that captures the tone, then write immediately after. Not to copy, to reignite your instincts.

Write the emotion, not the plot. What is your character feeling in this moment? What are they afraid of? What do they want but won't say? What's being kept from them? The emotion leads, the plot catches up later.

Stop trying to "feel like a writer" first. You don't write when you feel like a writer. You feel like a writer because you write.

Aariyah + Keisha drawings from earlier this year and last year 🥰

in aotearoa, june isn’t our pride, it’s theirs. marsha p johnson and sylvia rivera are their historical figures, not ours. the phrase that “you owe your rights to Black trans women” is true there, but here we owe our rights to (mostly) Māori historical figures. i have the freedoms i do because of the legacy of an entirely different set of people operating in an entirely different context at entirely different times.

But because of american cultural imperialism, most queer people in Aotearoa don’t even know our own queer history. Carmen Rupe, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the Dorian Society, Gillian Laundon, Georgina Beyer, and the Wolfenden Association are some of our queer history. We should know their names! we should know what they did for us! but because of the power of the american imperial machine, we don’t.

our national pride month should be july, the month that the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1986. our two largest cities hold their pride festivals in february and march, respectively. american queer history has very little (or nothing, depending on who you ask) to do with our queer history. anecdotally, from my own queries, queer youth in aotearoa know more about american queer history than our own.

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A tame example? Two questions into a phone interview, the guy on the other end of the line asked: “How old are you?” I said “Excuse me?” - giving him a chance to rethink that. He didn’t. “How old are you?” “Sir, you are not allowed to ask me that question.” “Well, I want to know. I’m asking.” “And you’re legally not allowed to ask me that. I’m not required to tell you my age.” At that point, I guess he managed to remember an old HR bulletin or something (I hope to god he wasn’t actually HR himself), and he said, “Well, I need to know if you’re over the age of 18.” (Which is what he should have asked in the first place… or not, since that was in the application that he could have read.) “Yes. I’m over the age of 18.”  And we moved on. Two questions later, he tried another illegal question. I called him on it again and ended the interview, citing that a workplace with such a clear disregard for the law, especially upon first contact with a potential employee, was not going to be a good fit. (They offered me the job anyway, lol. I didn’t send a thank-you or a response.)

At a different interview, the majority of questions were “fishing” questions - just looking for that info they’re not actually allowed to ask. (This person was also either not really HR or an HR person who was exceptionally bad at their job.)

Remember when Lil Nas X beautifully explored his sexuality, seduced and killed the devil to the banger of all time, and instead of cheering on this openly gay and proud Black artist for his artistry and fighting back against respectability politics, suddenly said respectability politics was all the Queerest Place on the Internet cared about? Hm. Wonder what happened there.