Caffeinated Dumpster Witch

Not to keep, not to polish… Just to shake the rust loose.

• A character deletes and rewrites a text three times before sending it • Two people arguing quietly so no one else hears • Someone almost confessing something and backing out • A character lying about being “fine” in a way that convinces no one • Bonus: Same scene but they convince everyone, and it's even worse • An apology that comes moments too late • A secret revealed accidentally, not dramatically • A character overhearing only half a conversation • Someone packing a bag and pretending it’s temporary • A reunion where one person is happier than the other • A goodbye that is meant to be casual but isn’t

like, are they in cahoots. can they laugh together. do they have a similar enough or at least complementary enough outlook that they can connect over something being funny (even if it's funny in a fucked up way! sometimes those are the best in-jokes!)

Historian Ruth Goodman dives into the demanding world of Tudor childhood – a world where respect was compulsory, work began early, and most young people were expected to leave home by fourteen.

Forget any notion of carefree childhood. Most Tudor boys and girls were expected to contribute to the household from the moment they could hold a spinning whorl or chase a stray sheep.

For many, childhood ended early. As many as three-quarters of Tudor teenagers left home at fourteen years old, moving into other households to work as servants. It was hard work, but it also meant wages, new skills, and a chance to see more of the world than the family farm.

And yet, amid this hard work, Tudor children still played. They enjoyed games that remain familiar today: leapfrog, blind man’s buff, tops, balls, hobby horses, and small pull-along toys on wheels. Their world was strict, but it wasn’t joyless.

positive critique, however, requires What, How, and Why the author wrote the way they did if you want to say something that doesnt read as inane to the common audience. identifying an author's successes isn't always particularly difficult, but articulating it in a thorough and interesting way often is. you have to know a LOT about writing to make interesting positive critique of What and How. you have to know almost as much to make that critique of What, How, and Why.

im sorta discounting poorly-made negative critique here because it's generally obvious when you see it. bad-faith readings, missing the point, etc.

now. really wanna qualify this statement, because i think praising each other's work is good and important. praise that only states what the author did well is valuable on a different wavelength from praise that includes educational insights about the work. if you're a welder and nobody tells you when you've laid a good bead, you won't learn to recognize it as keenly. simple praise is educational in its own way.

however, there are bits of feedback praise that ive received that have included insights into Why i wrote something that hadn't initially occurred to me. sometimes other people are better at identifying your -isms than you are. i have lots of gunkisms. sometimes one of my friends will have an incisive comment about how one of my gunkisms plays towards a central theme i was working on. that's identifying a Why, and it allows me to move forward with awareness that that particular gunkism DOES point to that theme in that context. it puts another drill bit in my toolbox, so to speak.

this 👆 is achingly difficult to do as a reader. it requires an intimate attention to detail that any writer, myself included, ought to count themself lucky to receive.

however, again, the fact that it's harder to do doesn't make it more valuable than direct praise, just rarer.

anyway, what i'm getting at here is that semi-coherent positivity is better than semi-coherent negativity while being similarly easy; meanwhile, articulate negativity has similar merit to articulate positivity while the latter is MUCH harder to pull off.

difficulty scale: simple positivity = simple negativity < articulate negativity <<< articulate positivity

And even after noticing the stuff, presenting the critique is a valuable test of writing skill on a rhetorical level. How do you present a wall of observations, suggestions, feedback, etc. especially when some are, to use your terminology, articulate negativity and others are articulate positivity? Crafting a balanced, diplomatic, and well-structured response in the level of formality appropriate to the medium and to the personality of the reader takes a lot of skill.

Recently I read a retelling of a classic public domain work by a Black author. The publisher has thrown a ton of marketing force behind this book: it’s Classic You Know From High School! But Black!

What they did not do was give it even one historical accuracy edit or copyediting pass to ensure that the author looked like they understood the text they were working with. The text was riddled with inaccuracies. Because of the marketing, a lot of people are going to pick it up, and any of them who know anything about the work it’s retelling will know it is inaccurate.

This is, in essence, “feeding shelter cats to the coyotes”. You’re feeding a Black author to every critic who is primed (consciously or unconsciously) to object to a racebent retelling of a “white” classic. You are relying on the retelling angle to attract thousands of eyes to this person’s work and have given them no support for acquiring the author’s first line of defense, which is good trade reviews. You have also made it more difficult to any other Black author to retell the same public domain story: if this book doesn’t do well editors will say “there’s already a Black version and it was poorly executed”.

Well yes obviously if a book isn’t great that’s partly the author’s fault but that isn’t really new information, it’s just the sort of baseline assumption everyone already has, so I didn’t think it was necessary to articulate.

If a publisher is CHOOSING TO PUBLISH the bad book an author wrote, without even improving it, that is not the author’s fault. This is an industry and if the industry pressure is to produce hasty half-assed work of course people are going to produce hasty half-assed work, like why wouldn’t they?

But the result is that people are chewed up and spat out because their publisher doesn’t really care to protect them when they misstep, or they don’t have enough followers to hit a list and they burn out, and in five years no one remembers them… or else if they’re happy with being a cog in the wheel they produce half-assed works at a rate of 400 pages of a year until they die or become James Patterson

By contrast, Inelle has a biting wit. She is a character defined by always being on the defensive and her jokes are generally barbs and retorts that leave people covering their mouths while they laugh. She probably wishes she weren’t so cruel without reason but it feels good to wield a bit of power for just a moment.

Ferand is goofy. He’s a goober. He’s clumsy and awkward like his whole personality fits wrong the way clothes two sizes too large fit wrong. But he’s earnest in his kindness and he laughs all the time. He’d love to turn everything into a joke if he could, something reflexive he reaches to when a situation is spiraling.