play stupid games, win stupid prizes

If you're struggling to write sex, write food. if you're struggling to write food, write gore. if you're struggling to write gore, write sex. They're all variations on the same themes.

it's all sensation and consumption and intimacy. it's all violence and beauty and taste. it's all wild and animalistic and elevated by our humanity. it's all deeply cultural and symbolic. it's all enjoyed by every sense the body has to offer.

"copper syrup drenched her tongue as she dug into its flesh" can be the act of eating pussy, biting through skin, or eating a piece of fruit.

My #1 recurring thing as an editor is to guide people away from writing shyly and defensively. If you preempt aggression and try defuse it in your writing itself, you are showing your belly. The audience wants blood.

If you write with the expectation of being hated, you are writing for your haters. This is exactly what they want. So the more you do it, the more of your readers will be haters.

“The way I personally stay true to the story I started down on is to give myself permission to not teach anyone anything. I’m not writing a manual. I’m not delivering bromides. I know that a lot of people do take enormous pleasure and relief in lines or phrases or ideas from stories that ring true to their own lives, but it’s important for me that I tell a story and that I’m not writing Chicken Soup for the Necromantic Soul. It is getting harder and harder again, especially for authors from marginalised places or backgrounds, to write works where the takeaway isn’t ‘this is to succour all my marginalised people’. For anyone on the female-identified axis this is especially hard because it seems to me that most books by anyone female-adjacent have an expectation that they will comfort the uncomfortable and discomfit the comfortable etc., whereas a guy can just tell an adventure story and be done with it. This ties in with an idea that I think nowadays that good art is moral and bad art is immoral: i.e. if a story is bad it actually has to be because the lessons are bad, and if a story is good it must somehow be beautiful on the moral scale. We go looking for why the art we love is moral even if the art we love is a donut. I think this is the pressure of capitalism on time – that everything has to double or triple up in benefit compared to the time we take on it: if we’re prepared to waste eight hours on a book we had better be able to tot up at the end how that book was also feeding us in some way. That’s brand time we just used.“  (Tamsyn Muir) Holy shit, Ms. Muir, marry me.

my bad for assuming everyone has critical thinking skills btw

legend tells of a mysterious being called “nuance” that allows multiple things to be true at the same time. some say you can still hear its voice whispering in the trees

Write a story that just takes place inside one pathetic little person’s head. Do it. It’s enrichment in your enclosure.

Do the writer’s equivalent of playing with finger paints. Do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it

It’s the middle of the night and I should be sleeping but listen. Listen. Just get weird with it. Open your soul up a little bit. Like actually don’t worry about it being palatable. I’m serious. Get weirder. Get weirder right now. I’m demanding that you get weirder right now. It’s not your responsibility to make your reader feel good. It’s your job to make art, goddamnit. Make art. Make weird art. Open up your third eye and eat an entire cheesecake.