all the love im legally allowed to give

What if the children go to schools unafraid of tear gas and bullets?

What if the birds come back, and the bees are healed, and every species moves from endangered, to threatened, to thriving?

What if the rainforest ADVANCES?

What if every parking lot had solar panels? What if every structure had solar panels? What if we built climbing gyms and terraced gardens in the skeletons of old coal power plants?

What if you baked your neighbor bread, and they shared their home-grown blackberries?

What if every person who needed a home, had one? What if every person who needed healing was healed?

What if every body was treasured for what it was, not what it should be?

What if every trans child's parents attended their graduation, their wedding, their new-name-day?

What if every warehouse became a closed-circle repair station? Goods flowing out, and back, and out again? What if landfills started to SHRINK?

What if the water and air were clean? What if there was enough public transit that the cars dwindled, leaving the streets safe for kids on bikes, evening deer, midnight cats and foxes?

What if we win?

The condors are back. The whales are saved. The sea turtles are no longer endangered. The cranes are back. The bees are recovering. The air in LA and Tokyo and London is clean again. The aquifers in the LA Basin are refilling.

Children are kinder than previous generations. Parents are stopping the abuse cycle. Being trans and queer is more acceptable than ever on a ground level.

It's hard to see if you're young, if you don't know how to step back from social media and the news. But remember--bad news sells, and the algorithm knows despair keeps you scrolling. It's a skewed lens.

We are fighting and we are winning against this adminstration's bullying. We are coming together against the bullies and they are running away scared because they don't understand that we will do that.

People are working hard every day to find ways to make sure fewer animals get hit by cars and planes and rockets.

Maker spaces are more common than ever. Solar and wind are more common than ever. Coal plants are shutting down every day.

Unprecedented numbers of acres are being bought back or given back to their rightful stewards, and the world heals because of it. People are working hard every day to learn how to help a forest recover faster.

We are not at zero. We are at decades of effort to heal the world. We've come SO far.

In 1982 there were only 22 California Condors left in the world. In 1992, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), with its public and private partners, began reintroducing captive-bred condors to the wild. In 2001 the first wild nesting occurred in Grand Canyon National Park since re-introduction. In 2002 there were only 8 pairs of wild nesting birds population-wide. In 2008, for the first time since the program began, more California condors were flying free in the wild than in captivity. Today there are nearly 500 – more than half of them flying free in Arizona, Utah, California, and Baja Mexico.

When I was born, there were no condors in the wild. I'm 37 now, and there are over 250 condors flying free.

When my mom was born in 1955, there were days when she wasn't allowed to go outside to play, because of the air pollution. When I was born, that never happened anymore.

When I was born, humpback whales were critically endangered, and people thought they were going to go extinct. Today, they've recovered to exceed their recorded numbers. Other whales too!

We fixed it.

Since 1990 extreme poverty has decreased worldwide by over HALF.

Across the (several) novels I wrote as a teenager, nothing ever fit into the "rough draft -> more polished drafts -> final draft" sequence.

I would write something that was supposed to be a first draft, then completely rewrite it to the point that I didn't have a first draft and a second draft, I had two different first drafts. My sense of what I wanted to write evolved very quickly, and I never reached a stable enough sense of what my stories were about that I could begin to refine it instead of being trapped in an endless cycle of scrapping everything and starting over

My adventure with Bucky Barnes fanfiction (first reading it, then writing it) led me to these things:

multiple different, mutually contradictory versions of the same story can exist and all of them can have value at the same time.

The idea that writers imagine "their own" stories and characters out of nothing is a cultural idea we made up. Nothing is really "original," we just have a (legally enforced) cultural norm of making stories appear separate by giving characters distinct names, using different plot and worldbuilding elements, not deriving too much from any one particular influence

Being a storyteller is deeply connected to being a story-listener. You have to hear the story before telling it yourself.

the concept of "originality" makes it really difficult to learn the storyteller/story-listener thing, because the way we're taught to see it is that writers can somehow, like, sublimate everything they read into raw Ideas and then use those ideas as ingredients to create Their Own Thing.

Which, yes you can pick and choose what tropes you want to use, but breaking something down to its atoms means you can no longer see how the thing works as an organism, because you took it apart.

I think our culture has difficulty seeing stories holistically because the idea of "originality" is so pervasive.

Playing in an environment where the storytellers are exchanging the same story, telling and re-telling different parts and in different ways, deriving ideas from each other and refining those ideas with further iterations until they become their own "canons" that sprout more stories, helped me understand a lot of things I didn't understand before.

In the Bucky fanfiction ecosystem, those ideas and tropes that were assembled to form the whole weren't just interchangeable parts anymore: it was clear how they supported certain themes, evoked certain emotions, explored certain ideas, and so on.

The "nodes" of story that clustered together and intensely cultivated new variations were functionally entangled with imagery, symbolism, and particular literary techniques, and seeing how different storytellers engaged these things taught me a deep understanding of their possibilities.

Therefore when I got it in my head to write my own fanfiction I had done a lot of deep thinking about what my take on the story was going to be "about" and the themes it would engage and the techniques it would use to do that. Because I had already read 30+ different iterations of the story of Bucky Barnes, the man who would become the Winter Soldier, that were all compelling in their own way.

I'm starting to think that this is a fundamental part of the storytelling process and the idea of "original fiction" has grimed it up a little bit. You have to hear the story before you can tell it.

Is it possible, I thought, that this is what a "first draft" often functionally is? I ended up writing so many "first drafts" that were just sloppy assemblages of ideas I imperfectly guessed I might like, and once they were assembled, I realized I didn't like those ideas and what they communicated.

So I thought, What if all writing is fanfiction, and when you write a first draft, you are essentially writing something to write fanfiction of.

This way of thinking of it is fascinating in what it implies. Fanfiction is not a linear continuation or refinement of the original; it can be a retort, a further extrapolation, a complementary piece, an antagonistic refutation. There's always an inversion: listener becomes teller. In other words it implies that first draft and further drafts are a call and a response, rather than an increasingly "improved" version of the same thing.

It suggests that it's actually fine or even expected to have multiple drafts that aren't necessarily linear improvements on each other. It also suggests that a first draft shouldn't be read thinking "okay how do I improve this" but "what sticks with me about this?" The failures or inadequacies of the first draft are not so much things to repair as things to respond to.

I don't know what I think about this, because honestly, after experiencing fanfiction, the intensely private nature of writing original fiction seems to run contrary to the nature of storytelling, which is communal.

Cole

it should be an explosive device, so they widen that part of the cave at the same time and no other spelunkers will get stuck there

Based off this post by @7-inches-of-satanic-panic

Endurance runners