Quick Story Reviews

“If you give children a vocabulary that’s large enough and complex enough to express their emotions and their ideas, you give them access to complex feelings and emotions in themselves. So that if you talk to a teenager and all they can say about how they feel is BAD, and they haven’t got, you know, a larger vocabulary for lonely, abused, insecure, frightened…I mean there’s this huge panoply which…I remember when my daughter was just telling me that she just felt bad, I bought her a thesaurus. I said, “Look up, is it sort of over lonely, or is it insecure…and look up under lonely, you’ll find two hundred words for lonely. Which one?” But what that does is that it makes you feel that there’s this huge complexity of emotions and there are words for all of them. If you want children to feel less frustrated and less disenfranchised and less unable to even feel comfortable with their own emotions, you’ll have to give them a vocabulary that’s as complicated as their inner lives. And one of the things we see in children is this incredibly reduced capacity for reporting their inner lives to the exterior world. One of the things is just teaching them poems, just teaching them to memorize poems in school, they don’t have to interpret them, if they just internalize the language of the poem, the complexity of the emotion in the poems…” -Jorie Graham, in a conversation 

Thinking about Raffles and Bunny . If anyone cares

Guess what I am doing today

you have to be careful reading too many things that are good/smart/well-written bc then you encounter something that isnt and you get confused like ? why didnt they just make this good ? were they stupid

I am so tired of short-attention-span, trim-the-fat culture. All writing advice these days is for how to write like Chuck Palahniuk. "Cut 'think', cut 'feel', cut 'wonder' - only action, only pushing forward, show and move and move and move." What if I could emulate this style, and still don't want to? What if I want to write like Henry James, with three paragraphs of introspective musings between each dialogue line? The music advice is, "make it shortform, make it Tik-Tok compatible, make it punchy, hit the refrain as soon as possible." What if I want that 10-minute prog rock piece? What if I want that symphony? What if I want it slow and luxurious and lazy? Movies. Series. Poetry. Bodies. Everything is "trimmed trimmed trimmed trimmed, stripped bare, you have three seconds to win me over, make it airport chic." I don't want to win you over, then, I guess. I want the fat left it. I want the pleasure and the indolence and the indulgence. Fuck this art-advice that's always "your art needs Ozempic."

sometimes artists worry if their art is actually capable of making the world a better place, or if its all just wasted effort. what you need to remember is: all art is evil, and the sole aspiration of the artist should be to maim as many onlookers as possible.

the style of writing is not the problem, not the genre, not the subject matter, not even the words themselves. the SINGLE defining issue with the “Tumblr Prose” style i was trying to tackle is that it’s front loaded with imagery and metaphor and completely lacking in sense, reason, symmetry, motion, conveying information. i agree that plenty of writing can sound good and feel good to read when it’s all metaphor and visceral images but it needs to have a baseline that can carry it through or else the tail wags the dog and it’s all cool “quotable” lines and no substance, nothing to read between the lines, no character

read a couple cozy mysteries the last couple weeks which is a genre i haven't really touched despite reading a lot of mysteries. learned that i don't like cozy mysteries lollllllll.

friend of mine and coworker at the library is a big fan of cozy mystery (also cozy romance, cozy fantasy, etc.) and it's very interesting to talk about genre tendencies and tropes with her as an avid reader of pretentious grimdark tomes #mytomes. anyway she says that a very common trope in cozy mystery is to have the murder victim be unsympathetic so you don't feel too sad about them dying which is somehow more unsettling to me than reading about fictional people getting murdered period. and cozies also usually avoid Gritty Real World Issues like sexual violence or domestic violence so by "unsympathetic murder victim" I mean like...a grumpy old codger. Something about like...welcome to our town full of nice sweet people who bake muffins and knit and then someone gets murdered but oh welp! it's a mean old dude with no friends so it's not THAT sad. This somehow feels dystopian to me.

on the subject I obviously don't think writing about murder in fiction is necessarily exploitative or bad and I do read murder mysteries but I do think it's very sociologically interesting how differently sexual violence is treated in fiction/by readers than other types of violence. like the entire existence of a genre of cozy mystery that centers on homicide (even if it typically avoids graphic descriptions of violence) while completely eschewing depictions of sexual or gendered motivations for homicide. I think also of the way that ASOIAF fandom tends to be much more critical of depictions of sexual violence than murder and war crimes both in terms of criticizing its inclusion in the series in the first place and in terms of whether characters who perpetrate violence are seen as redeemable or sympathetic. I think this largely stems from the fact that sexual violence feels real and immediate to readers esp female readers and war and murder feels much more remote. But I think there's this false understanding of separateness there and also a belief that no one in the prospective audience could have also been affected by other types of violence. Like obviously it is less common by several orders of magnitude but I personally know several people who have parents or siblings that were murdered. I'm probably not articulating this well but there's something very othering about this seeming perspective that murder is a fictional dramatic plot point while sexual assault is a real world trigger.

i’ve seen so many stories where revenge is awesome and cool and the best thing you can possibly do. just once i would like to see a story in which revenge has two victims, the target and the pursuer. but i guess society has not yet come as far as i have in deconstructing destructive notions of honor and valor entwined with hate. maybe someday someone will write this. not me, though.

thanks for the recs everyone. can you point me in the direction of things that are about how family doesn’t have to be your blood relatives, but instead can be people you have chosen. what about some creative works that are about the power of creative works. or where the main character is a writer. or something set in new york city where it’s like the city itself is a character. is there anything that is secretly about trauma, bonus points if it’s the way trauma is passed down. these are all ideas i yearn to see represented but i’ve never seen before and i don’r know if they’ve ever been done.

can I say something. it is really funny when you see people ripping random queer books to shreds, like dream daddy cancellation style, and then you dig a little deeper to see what unproblematic material meets their standards, and it's all Supernatural and Death Note

The only media I ever watched was avatar the lost air bender and dnd podcasts can I write a novel to change the world?

Did something happen?

it's a shame that fatphobia has rendered almost all common usage of 'corpulent' as negative or at least implying excess, because it's a beautiful word to me. corpulent. bodified. possessing body in abundance. a body filled with its own bodyness. rich and brimming with corpus. god we could be so effusive if we ever really meant what we said.

at some point it became a very common talking point that science fiction and fantasy ought to Represent Trans People and that exploring Weird Gender Shit without also depicting characters who are legibly transgender in Normal Ways is passé. and honestlyyyy i don't care give me a hundred more male characters possessed by female ghosts or nonbinary robots or whatever. literally what is the point of the scifi fantasy genre if you cannot connect to the fantastical

if i wanted to read about people being transgender without a wizard being involved i would open my tumblr dash. Representation will kill the reader she needs a guy who accidentally downloaded the memories of a woman on the CyberLine and can't tell them apart from his own to live