panatheism

Second thing I want to say is that it is not possible to create fiction that is universally good for people’s mental health.  Tumblr fandom tends to treat certain mental health needs as implicitly the most legitimate, and inherent universal needs, but it’s way more complicated than that.  Many people will absolutely thrive on stories of loving, supportive families, while some people will need to avoid them due to their specific family history.  Some people are helped by reading about characters they enjoy practicing healthy communication and getting positive results, while other people might come away hearing, “Everyone can do healthy communication and get helpful responses if they try hard enough, so therefore the problem must be you screwing it up!”   Some people might find “Destroy the evil abuser” revenge fantasies a helpful way to process anger, while other people might find they do more harm than good.    A lot of people find stories of a character being gently nurtured by someone else, while some people have negative associations with other people trying to take care of them and have bad psychological reactions to these stories.  (And let me tell you, if you have a bad associations with soft pastel nurturing that mean it can put you in a bad headspace, Tumblr can be pure hell.)

All those posts you see of young artists charging $3, $6, $10 for a drawing because they need help? That’s fucking exploitation, and fuck you if you think it’s reasonable or a “good deal" to pay nickels and dimes to squeeze a full-color original drawing out of some talented, hardworking kid because things are tight, and they can’t afford their textbooks. Or food. They sure as hell can’t afford to make you art for $6.

Instead, stop. And ask them where you can donate. If you can afford a $6 drawing, then you can afford to spend $6 simply to help someone. You don’t need internal organs as payment.

And if someone claims something that took you an hour to draw isn’t worth at least around $10 per hour of work, dont listen to their bullying. To the non-artist, its hard to see the worth in art especially if they didn’t put 10, 5, 2 or even 1 years of solid effort to get to the level of artistic ability there are today.

If the person complaining is still unhappy with the price despite that reasoning? Well let THEM make their own drawing themselves and spend the $10 elsewhere. GL to them getting the level of artistry you have without those years of experience they put behind them!

Dear wintts,

They say not to talk about politics or religion or sex in public, but that knocks out a third of the Raven Cycle, so I am going to put that advice aside for the moment.

My work gets all Catholic up in there partially because I was raised Catholic, but also because religion is the mainstream guardian of magic for most people, for better or for worse. If you are looking for the Something More, that’s where it’s at.

Growing up reading fantasy, I didn’t question why fantasy and modern religion  didn’t seem to coexist. That was just the way it was. You had magic, or you had religion. If I thought hard about it, I suppose I thought it made sense: one disproved the other. This was a pretty common thought at the time, which might have been why I arrived at it. One had to be an atheist or pagan to write fantasy, I was informed at parties, and likewise, one could not enjoy reading fantasies without imperiling one’s mortal soul in the capital G God department. I was told by a customer who caught me reading Harry Potter at my retail job that I was going to hell — why? Because wand-waving disproves capital G God. So goes the theory.

But I find that rather boring. 

I also don’t find it particularly true. Without getting into what I believe, the bottom line is that I don’t find it at all true to ask the question “what if there is magic in the world” and not have the secondary question “what does it do to religion.” It’s a hard question and easier to skip if you’re just being fun and flirty with magic, but it’s not really how I use magic in my novels.

The most obvious example of this is Ronan Lynch from TRC (I have another ask just below this one asking if we’ll see more about his Catholicism in CDtH). I gave him a splendid, outrageous ability: to create things from his dreams. And then made him also very, very Catholic. I suppose the easiest form of his character arc is to move him to disbelief. He is the god now, after all, isn’t he, and now capital G God is extinct? But to me it’s far more interesting to watch the more complicated ways he moves through his religion, because it parallels the complicated ways he is beginning to move through society. 

Ronan’s rise to power in TRC started with him feeling like a powerless outcast and ended with him feeling like he was a powerful outcast, like he was participating in a society that had been built entirely by people (creatures?) unlike himself, making choices for him that are irrelevant. Society, he thinks, is built by people who must labor and hope for things that he can manifest overnight — what does that mean for him? At the end of the series, he drops out of high school as a concrete gesture of also opting out of ordinary human society, but he hasn’t yet made a decision about what replaces it. He wants something, but what?

And that’s where he is with religion as well. Catholicism is designed for people who cannot wake with their dreams, who are at the mercy of the world, who are, in comparison to Ronan, so very powerless. So does he opt out of it too? Quit it like high school? And if so, what takes its place? Does he become the religion? If so, what responsibility does that force upon him, and if he accepts it, is there still a Yoda out there who he can ask for guidance at the end of the day?

These are all questions I love prodding at. Power, personal responsibility, and finding one’s place in society — all things I love thinking about and writing about. I don’t reckon I’ll get tired of them any time soon.

Good thing I have three books to do it in over the next few years.

urs,

Second thing I want to say is that it is not possible to create fiction that is universally good for people’s mental health.  Tumblr fandom tends to treat certain mental health needs as implicitly the most legitimate, and inherent universal needs, but it’s way more complicated than that.  Many people will absolutely thrive on stories of loving, supportive families, while some people will need to avoid them due to their specific family history.  Some people are helped by reading about characters they enjoy practicing healthy communication and getting positive results, while other people might come away hearing, “Everyone can do healthy communication and get helpful responses if they try hard enough, so therefore the problem must be you screwing it up!”   Some people might find “Destroy the evil abuser” revenge fantasies a helpful way to process anger, while other people might find they do more harm than good.    A lot of people find stories of a character being gently nurtured by someone else, while some people have negative associations with other people trying to take care of them and have bad psychological reactions to these stories.  (And let me tell you, if you have a bad associations with soft pastel nurturing that mean it can put you in a bad headspace, Tumblr can be pure hell.)

As of June 15th, 2018, PayPal has changed their user policy with little to no fanfare at all in ways that could literally destroy your business. I’m going to say this as plainly as possible:

DO NOT USE PAYPAL AT ALL IF POSSIBLE.

I know this is a lot to ask, especially since PayPal is the most globally accepted digital tender, but unless you want to lose access to your funds for six months and PayPal possibly forever, you need to read this.

PayPal Business accounts are now being flagged, locked, and completely shut down if:

1. If you haven’t shipping anything within 21 days of your first transaction

2. You’ve received more than 200 orders

and/or

3. You’ve made an excess of $20,000 (USD)

If this happens to you, you will not be able to access your money for up to six months. PayPal is NOT willing to work with you, all they will say is there’s nothing they can do, they’re cutting business ties, and offer you the MAILING address of their legal department. That’s right, you can’t even get a direct line to these people, they’re just going to tank your business by dicking around with your money for six months. Your only options are to:

1. Wait six months and frustrate customers, and by-proxy tarnish your reputation.

2. Refund everyone, possibly lose their business, and tarnish your reputation.

3. Pursue the matter legally, which will likely take longer than six months anyway, not to mention cost money out of pocket.

IF YOU ARE CURRENTLY USING A PAYPAL ACCOUNT FOR PRE-ORDERS, GET OUT NOW. Deposit your funds and part ways with PayPal as a tender, this is not a battle they’re willing to let you win.

——

★ canon = the text itself; the show/movie/book/comic; the actual up-on-Netflix content; anything a casual fan would reasonably interact with ★ word of god = anything else, i.e. interviews with cast/crew/showrunners; DVD commentaries; comments from the crew on social media or at cons; literally any written or verbal remarks about the text made by writers or showrunners or actors

word of god does not equal canon, and yet i increasingly see fandoms conflating the two and acting like word of god comments from The Powers That Be count as canon and are equivalent to canon footnotes to the text and i’m. NO. listen. it’s not. that’s not what canon means, and word of god comments should not be treated as part of the canon text. this isn’t just me being a pedantic text purist, this has actual negative consequences for shows and fandoms and people’s experience of the stories, i mean:

it privileges the creator’s interpretation of the text as the only “correct” one. death of the author? no one’s heard of her. writers and showrunners get to tell fans how to interpret the text, and a solid 80% of fandom is going “okay, if you say so!”

it stifles fandom debate and analysis, because fan analysis of the text at hand is rejected outright by other fans on the basis that “well the showrunners said it’s like this”

it contributes to fandom bullying, in which word of god comments are used to harass people who have the audacity to want to interpret the work differently, or who disagree with the powers that be, or just don’t want to consider those comments at all in their understanding of the story

word of god comments may be confusing; they may change over time or contradict earlier statements; they may even contradict the text itself. all of which leads to fans frantically trying to reconcile word of god comments with actual canon, rather than going “okay fuck this, it doesn’t make sense so i’m disregarding it”

again: this only creates more arguments in fandom; if creators say x at one point, and y at another, you end up with more fandom slap-fights over which comment was the ‘correct’ one and which interpretation ‘wins’

it encourages lazy and unsatisfying storytelling. if fanon will accept word of god comments as canon, showrunners develop an attitude of “it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make sense, we can just handwave it in an interview”

this results in poor writing, or important plot points being explained in word of god comments rather than in actual canon

this in turn makes the story confusing and incomprehensible to anyone who’s not knee-deep in fandom. casual fans, kids, someone bingeing the series 5 years from now on crunchyroll… they’re not reading the interviews or tweets or watching the comicon panels. those viewers still need to be able to understand the story, and we are slip-sliding towards a creator-fandom model in which they won’t be able to, because word of god comments run the risk of becoming required reading for understanding the story

this has serious implications for how stories handle representation: if fans start accepting word of god as equivalent to canon, it means shows can keep canon rep (particularly queer rep) vague and ambiguous, and prop it up with word of god comments that “confirm the representation”. there’s no incentive to actually commit to unambiguous, clear canon rep if stories can lean on word of god to compensate for the utter lack of actual diversity in the canon text itself

the canon text has to stand alone. word of god should serve as a trove of fun trivia or behind-the-scenes tidbits about the writing process; it is not supposed to be a substitute for clear, concise, and comprehensive storytelling. a story that doesn’t make sense unless you’ve read 8 different explanatory interviews by the writers is badly written. showrunners who treat interviews as a place to offload all the character development or plot explanations they didn’t bother to include in the actual text are lazy hacks who are bad at their jobs.

Dear voltorn-up-inside,

I’m glad readers are excited (it is exciting). 

Most creators actually don’t get to work on their own adaptations, and honestly, I don’t know if that’s necessarily a bad thing. Prose and tv/film are two very different story-telling medias with very different strengths. The difference between them means that often significant changes must happen in order to make the story make sense, carry tension, or even feel the same as the original. 

Imagine it: every time a character thinks of a piece of world-building without saying it aloud, a show would need to find a way to demonstrate it. Every time a brief memory flickers, the show has to decide if that information needs to happen in a full on flashback or if whatever it’s conveying can happen later. A letter appears on page. Does the tv character read it out loud? Do you show it? Better be short or you’ll be making viewers stare at it a long time. A shocking magical thing happens to a character but there’s no one else around to comment upon the rules of whatever just happened. Does your character … deliver a monologue? 

No. 

You have to find ways to revise and shape and clarify and streamline. You’re trying to make it feel like it’s the same, even when it can’t be blow-for-blow the same. Making that shift can be a pretty tall order for someone who’s very close to the work — anyone who’s revised their own writing knows that objectivity is a tricky thing. An author isn’t necessarily the best at assessing their own work, and is certainly not the only one who can. My role in this was quite accidental, but I had a blast writing the pilot. It was very satisfying to look around corners I didn’t get a chance to look around in the novel.

It’s gonna be cool. 

urs,