Unrepentant Studio Rat

1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.

2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.

3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.

4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.

5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.

Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.

August is already here!

How are you doing?

Last week Barbex talked about how to figure out what sort of schedule and habits work for you. And of course the first step in doing that is tracking those habits.

Honestly tracking my own behaviour is something I am pretty bad at.

Simply logging how many words I've written in a session often feels like the worst sort of torture. Often because I have a certain level of shame. I'm very well aware that my writing habits can be erratic. I get bored, I get Shiny New Idea, or sometimes I get overwhelmed and quit. And somehow, logging that instead of writing current novel, I wrote 1500 words of a brand new fic idea… it's a bit embarrassing. It's even worse when I'm supposed to be editing.

So I tend to be only tracking when I'm trying to engage with a challenge, and even then it never sits comfortably.

So instead of tracking myself this last week, I've been thinking about what sort of alternative tracking has worked best for me in the past, and if I can get myself to do anything like that in August.

For me, the best tracking I've ever done, was a sort a writer mood scarf. Each day that I wrote at least 150 words, I got to knit a couple of rows in a colour that reflected how I was feeling about my writing. I loved that entire process, and I do love the scarf I got out of it too. But I don't feel an urge to repeat it. I can't imagine how many striped scarves I'd have at this point!

The second most helpful kind of tracking I've done, is that for each day I've written to take a moment and post my favourite line of the day to tumblr.

After thinking about it a bit, I realised that both kinds of tracking are about reflection. Stepping out of the process, and thinking about how I felt. What I liked about my own writing.

Sometimes we get so caught up in the race for word-count, the pursuit of that elusive finish-line, the grind of the process, that we forget to think about why we're writing in the first place. And that reason is (hopefully) love. Love of story telling, love of the characters, love for the written word.

Here's a new calendar to take notes on for this week.

Online, you can find quite a lot databases for photography in the public domain that you could use (always check their specific rules regarding commercial use), like Pixabay, Unsplash, or Pexels.

But, even a tad more charming, there are also hundreds of thousands of paintings in the public domain. If the artist has been dead for over 70 years, the image is (typically) in the public domain and can be used however you want it. This is not a new concept, big publishers like Penguin and the Oxford’s World Classics do the same!

When you use such images, always make sure that 1. the painting really is in the public domain (sometimes the art itself may be in the public domain, but the photograph you are using to see it is not!), and 2. that it is an appropriate image. Sometimes, an image may look innocent and fitting, but would actually cause irritation, like accidentally using a painting of siblings for a romance or using a controversial image for different reasons.

Some places you can find art in the public domain (always double check!): National Gallery of Art, Artvee, Public Domain Image Archive, and most websites of bigger museums.

And I don’t mean that in sort of “uwu have faith in yourself! You can do it!!” kind of way. I’m not here to repeat empty affirmations–I’m saying you’ve consumed a lot of media over the years. You know what you like and what you don’t like. You have good taste. 

But if you’re like me, all that certainty goes out the window when you’re writing your own stuff. “Will the readers like that?” you think. “This is too weird. It’s unrelatable. Nobody else’s story looks like this–I must be doing something wrong.”

“This is silly,” you tell yourself. “Why do I even bother?”

And when you start doubting yourself like that, that’s the moment you stop creating. You get blocked and stressed and it gets all too easy to fall back on cliches and stereotypes. You start stripping away the things that make the story uniquely yours in order to make it look more like everyone else’s. 

Which is infinitely sad. 

You’ve lived a life no one else has seen, and you have ideas that nobody else in the world could think of. Even if the story has been ‘done’ before, there’s nobody else who can tell it like you. You can start with the most ‘cliche’ idea ever, but if you come at it with any measure of emotional honesty, it’ll still be new–because it’s being told by you. 

I just finished a draft of a book that’s probably the most painful thing I’ve written so far. It’s way out of my comfort zone, and I had to explore aspects of myself I prefer not to think about. I did a lot of second guessing, and a good bit of whimpering facedown on the floor because writing is scary and hard. 

And rereading the draft now, the absolute best parts are the bits where I gave up on convention and I wrote what I wanted exactly the way I wanted to write it. Yeah, it’s kinda silly and kinda dumb and kinda just a big load on nonsense–but it’s MY nonsense. If people like it, great. Wonderful. If they don’t like it, well–reading is a subjective experience, and maybe my work just isn’t for them. That’s okay. 

Be you. Be honestly, genuinely you. It’s a scary, vulnerable position to put yourself in, but… Even if you’re one in a million, there are 7,000 people just like you–and that’s 7,000 people who will read your work and go “this writer gets me.”

Yes. Please use nouns and pronouns as often as you need to.

The best way to use a word less is not to replace it with another word, but to just find reasons not to use it again. If you introduce the subject noun at the right time, readers can assume you're still talking about the same thing within the same paragraph.

Fear of using normal words too often is how we end up with eyes being renamed "orbs."

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+ Please review my pinned Ask Policy before sending in your ask. Thank you.

When Life Gives You Corpses is a brilliant YA about a cursed praying mantis who falls for a young witch. Yield Under Great Persuasion is a raunchy, but surprisingly sweet story about two men repairing their relationship. Fabulous Bodies is a horror story about a queer rockstar rising from the dead.

This is Where the Future Bleeds is a fantasy set in a vividly imagined land, where two women (who happen to kiss) are the key to healing the broken sky. You're No Better is a story about a teen struggling in the shadow of his murderous parent. Oil on Canvas is about a woman who finds disturbing paintings in the home of her dead mother.

(Some) Queer Presses:

Lurid Editions are "a publishing project committed to intentional and conscientious acts of archival repair". They are "attentive to how marginalised histories are forgotten and remembered, [and] hungry to rediscover overlooked queer books". They've just received funding from Arts Council England to engage queer readers in a project to contribute to the archive!

Cipher Press "We’re really keen on the idea that queer and minority stories are for everybody, and we want to make our books – and the stories they tell - accessible to all" (what an amazing mission statement!)

Anamot Press "Anamot [Անամոթ] means shameless in Armenian. ⁣⁣Anamot Press publishes poetry and prose on intersecting experiences of gender, sexuality, race, migration, class, belonging and loss - with no shame."

(Some) Queer Bookshops

Queer Lit Oh man, I remember when this was just a tiny little shop, and now they're the biggest LGBT+ bookshop in Europe! They do amazing work in donating books about being trans to schools and parliament! They have a pay-it-forward board that will make you sob with its notes of love and support. (You can tell I wish I still lived nearby)

Lighthouse For Scottish friends - "a queer-owned and woman led independent community bookshop. We are an unapologetically activist, intersectional, feminist, antiracist, lgbtq+ community space"

Gay's The Word The OG Queer bookshop in the UK. One day I will make my pilgrimage!!

No matter how great your query letter or story pitch, if you send it to the wrong email address (or to any email address, if the agent uses QueryTracker), you're out of luck.

If someone wants to commission you, but they can't find your contact information, you're out of luck.

If you use a photo on your book cover or website that needs to be licensed and you didn't pay for it per the terms of the license, you could face legal and financial consequences.

If your editor has informed you about a misspelling, a factual error, or offensive word choice, and you don't fix it, people will read it and react accordingly.

If your story file has nonstandard formatting and you don't check how it converted on Amazon or Draft2Digital, your ebook may turn out unreadable. (You can hire people do to ebook formatting, but you need to understand enough of the principles to find the right person to hire and also to evaluate their work.)

A lot of this stuff can be confusing or counterintuitive, but there are explainers and FAQs and other resources out there. A handful of people either learn some of this stuff from their employers or were lucky enough to attend a class that taught it, but for the most part, we're all self-educated.

It's not that you have some abstract moral duty to Be Competent (things like licensing and paying contractors aside, you don't, so long as people aren't endangered, and publishing isn't exactly life-or-death). But you deserve to share your art in as clear and seamless a fashion as possible. And the only way to do that is to understand how these processes get done.

Doing everything competently isn't a guarantee of success, but success is virtually impossible without doing things correctly (hiring the right person to do it for you counts, but again, you need to understand enough to hire the right person and you need to work with them professionally).