lion turtles all the way down

I love this ask so much!

I always feel bad dunking on By The Grace; I worry that I'm making people who like it feel like I'm telling them they're wrong.

But ultimately it's been such a lesson for me, teaching me exactly what you're saying--that we really can each see things in a different light. I've recently had that happen with my novel; I've given it to a number of people and quite a few times it's happened that someone will say something like "I don't like this chapter; I think you could just leave it out" about a chapter that someone else has said is their favorite chapters in the whole book, or someone will say "this part makes zero sense to me" and another person will say that same part made them cry.

I think it's an inspiration to me too, because I write a lot of things that I don't like. But it's nice to know that even if I can't be proud of something it can still be worth while.

I'm from Europe, I'd currently never get a plane to Seattle, it's too expensive, too heavy on co2 emissions etc, but if I could I would. Do you have an opinion on Seattle? I think it's awesome

Also I dislike the option you presented of putting your ideas about writing on a pay per view platform - it would cheapen them. I would gladly pay for shipment to EU plus the cost of the item for a book you wrote, even if it's just ideas glued together. Imho, don't go the gig way away

I lived in Seattle ~17 years before I moved to Europe. Seattle had a great indie artist scene when I first moved there, which I think must've been the case in the 90s, when grunge evolved there. There were lots of small bars for bands to play in and small concert venues, there were tons of tiny community theater, quite a burlesque and comics scene, there's a circus school there, I knew butoh dancers, etc.

Microsoft was founded just outside of Seattle, which brought in a lot of tech folks, though I will say that Microsoft donates a whole lot to the Seattle community and keeps a lot of the cultural institutions funded. The Museum of History and Industry and the Seattle Aquarium are particularly good, imo.

However, Amazon was also founded there, right in the middle of Seattle, which brought even more tech people, and other tech companies that want to take advantage of that population if any of them want to switch jobs. And tech folks make lots of money, which real estate giants want to take advantage of. Which leads to some of those artistic spaces being bought out by companies who are going to put in a sleek cocktail bar, instead of a grungy pub where the local band plays. They're going to put in high rises that artists can no longer afford. And the poorest in the city are going to live in the streets while the next tiers of income are forced to leave.

There's still a lot happening in Seattle--there's still indie theater, though about 10% of what was there when I moved there. Most of the bars I know that had local bands don't anymore or shut down. But the circus school is still there, some artists are still making it. And they recently renovated a large recreational space along the water front that makes it easy to get from the downtown historic market (Pike Place, which has the first Starbucks) to the Puget Sound. It's very cool. And one thing that will never change is that the Olympic Mountains and Cascades are very close and the city is between the Puget Sound and Lake Washington, and the forests have the giant trees endemic to the Pacific Northwest. So most places you go you can get views of stunning mountains, waters, and forest, and some of the parks make you feel like you're miles away from civilization.

Ultimately it's a city I grew out of and feel sad about, but I think someone going there today could find a home that's very different than what I loved in it, but is still special and worthwhile.

I'm so glad you like my writing! I'm extremely proud of the book I've written and really hope I can one day share it.

I'm struggling to find an agent. The only ones who even want to look at the manuscript are folks I had some other connection to, because I knew someone or they'd read my fic. And all of those agents say it's a great book but hard to sell.

'Hard to sell' makes it sound like I've written something unusual and strange, but right now, 'unusual and strange' are actually pretty easy to sell, because you can do a cool elevator pitch like "a woman made entirely of a colony of spiders falls into a time warp where she and an eighteenth century gentleman are gay and fight crime." Honestly, I'd read that book.

Meanwhile, my book has a very generic summary. A girl grows up and finds love. I don't believe it's a generic book, but it's not quite romantic enough to be seen as genre romance, not quite literary enough to qualify as lit fic, and not plotty enough to be anything else, so even the people who like it don't know how they'd market it.

It's not a book I expect to get a really huge audience. But I do think it will be incredibly meaningful for some people, and I hope I can get there some day.

The thing is, I have a lot of observations and analyses about various aspects of writing, some of which is kind of advice and a lot of which just boils down to basic tools I use and think about when writing. A lot of it feels so connected to all my other thoughts about writing, however, that I kind of struggle to come up with answers on the spot. I'd really love to share a lot of what I think about these writing tools, though, and I'm wondering how best to do it. I already started writing posts about said writing tools, but it's already quite long.

I'm not very eager to post these thoughts on tumblr, because of the length. Even if I break the thoughts up into much shorter and digestible bits (which I've already done, really), they should be read somewhat sequentially, and tumblr doesn't work well as an archive. Additionally, tumblr isn't great for conversation, and it could be really neat to go back and forth about some of this stuff if people have contributions.

I've thought about Patreon or Substack, because it's a little easier to keep things organized there. I don't particularly want to do this for money, partly because I started doing it for fun, and I resent hobbies being co-opted by capitalism. You can still post for free on both those sites, but I don't know if people would look at them there. And then, since you can get paid if people choose a paid subscription there, I start thinking...maybe I should just offer a paid option, even if most of it is free.

anyway.

I started writing a few Due South fics and then found Speranza's fics and . . . realized that was all I wanted.

I’ve been running into an issue with my stories where I write pairings where there is a large seemingly insurmountable obstacle—a teacher student relationship, a character with intense internalized homophobia, etc. The problem is, I write the setup where the longing and the obstacle are established, and then I sort of buy in maybe too much and I find it impossible to write the characters coming together. It’s very strange. I clearly have the desire to write these stories about people abandoning reason and giving into their forbidden longings, but that abstract notion of “and then they abandon reason give into their forbidden longings” seems to be as much as I can do. I become so convinced by the characters' perception of the obstacle it seems impossible to imagine how it might be surmounted. I do just try and push through this feeling of not knowing how to do it, and write the scenes where it happens, but the writing becomes noticeably worse. In these moments it feels like my imagination has shut off, and I need to literally talk myself through what needs to happen. I don’t feel like everything I write needs to be well-written (far from it), but I do feel like I need at least a certain degree of specificity and earnestness of feeling from myself in the writing to actually communicate a mood/feeling/idea in a way that is effective. I'm generally a rule-follower who is prone to rigid thinking and I kind of am starting to worry I don’t have sufficient theory of mind for other sorts of people to write the kinds of stories I want to. I have two drafts I wrote a fair amount on and quit because I couldn’t see a way for the characters to be together after all, and a third is likely going the same way. I’ve wrote several shorter fics, which don’t have this problem, and one longfic where I did somehow push through, though there is a quality dip that I’m not happy with (but at least I got it out). Do you have any advice for me? Sorry for the inarticulate question, I've been feeling a little inarticulate lately.

what a cool question.

I by no means am an authority, but I'm chuffed you like my work and discussions of creative process.

Okay so I don't really think this is an imagination issue. Yes, it's really important that a writer be able to put themselves in someone else's shoes and be someone completely different, who would make completely different decisions. But in the end, you're one person, and every character you write is a facet of you in some way.

Imo this is what makes a novel magical. It might be full of very different characters, but those characters are coming from one mind, that whole world is coming from one mind. And so the characters and settings and themes resonate and rhyme with each other in ways the writer does not purposely intend, and furthermore could not be achieved by specific intent if attempted by many people at once. (That is, collaborative projects like TV shows or plays are cool for the opposite reason.)

And because this aspect of writing is so cool, I think it's something to be embraced and even leveraged. When I get to a point where I need the characters to do something for the plot, but it's not something that makes sense to me, or it doesn't feel right, I never make them do it. I never force myself through writing it.

I mean, I have to force myself through writing a bunch of things, because sometimes I'm just not in the mood and something needs to get done. But I'm not forcing my characters to do things that I can't buy into.

When I don't buy into it, something is wrong, but not necessarily with what I'm trying to make them do. Something is wrong with how I've constructed them, or constructed the lead-up to that point. For instance, taking one of the examples you provided: internalized homophobia, say I'm writing an intensely homophobic character and I want them to suddenly engage in homosexual sex. If I get to the point where sex is meant to happen, and all I can think is "nope, they would never, they're too homophobic for this!" then I need go back over the lead-up and either tone down their homophobia, or ramp up their latent homosexual desire so that it's not so latent. Sometimes that involves tweaking some things. Sometimes it involves rewriting or even rethinking the whole character. It's a pain in the butt, but much better than writing something you don't believe.

An alternative to changing the lead-up is to alter the inciting event that makes the characters "allowed" to engage in whatever it is you want them to do. Using your other example, teacher/student, if you've got a teacher thinking for your whole story "I couldn't possibly, they're a student!!!" and you don't want to change anything about that or increase the tension in their desire vs their reservations, then you need to rethink what makes them finally give into their desire. If the reservations are strong enough, it can't be just "the student looks especially hot today." It must be something that somehow alters the circumstances--the student graduates, the student is no longer in the class, the student drops out, the student has a birthday.

Usually, I would use both methods--change some of the lead-up, then increase the impact of the inciting event. For instance, the example where the student has a birthday. If this teacher is seriously thinking about the ethical implications of having sex with a student, then an arbitrary date is not going to change their mind. BUT if you tweak the story such that all the ethical implications eventually boil down to the teacher chanting "they are seventeen, they are seventeen, THEY ARE SEVENTEEN" in their mind, and then the student says "today I turned eighteen," it will feel clearer to you why this teacher abandons their compunctions. I think you'll be able to feel how it feels when you've packaged every objection into a neat little bundle, such that when said bundle gets blown out of the water, suddenly you're scrambling for what your reasons were, and you can't think, and you can't find that objection to hold onto in a solid way.

Lastly, I'm sorry to say, I do think that sometimes you just need to accept sometimes that here is something you will not be writing. I can write almost any kink, even ones I don't have. But I could not, for instance, write student/teacher where it was realistic, where it felt like there really were deep ethical issues with it, where there was a power imbalance that felt real and important to the characters' real lives, because I just...wouldn't be able to respect that teacher, would get too worried about the student, would not find the sex sexy, etc. Instead, if I'm going to write student/teacher, it's not going to be very realistic, the actual implications probably won't be discussed much, the idea that it's wrong will only appear as titillation, etc.

I find this a little sad, as there are some things I'd really like to write, but I know I just won't be able to achieve. For instance, I have another WIP where I thought I was writing A/B, but it started B/C. And I wrote the B/C so strong that I realized that breaking them up, then making A/B happen, would take forever, I might not buy B's changed feelings, and even if I did it would just be kind of...sad, I don't know, depressing. A/B is my ship! I wrote the story to be A/B! But idk, forcing it when it feels like B doesn't want it doesn't feel great. I could follow my own advice--rework the story so that the B/C feelings are less strong, etc, but I like what I've written; it's really good. And I could add some big events that would make B's feelings change drastically, thus easing the way for A/B--but that's just not the story I imagine, and it's not really what I want. So I have to either suck it up and make it a B/C story, or I have to let it go.

yay! That's so cool!