sjacik

no girl we don't "understand martyrdom" because we love our children & want them to be alive while you're glad to see them dead for the Omnicause.

a) konjac (pronounced con-yack) is an asian vegetable that is the base of this and can be made into a substitute rice or noodle base,

b) the low-carb factor of this food makes it a recommended alternative for type 2 diabetics who need to REDUCE or monitor their carb intake.

As a type 2 diabetic I certainly know of this, but I don't like the somewhat slimy texture of it, even in a soup-based meal.

from an indie author who's published 4 books and written 20+, as well as 400k in fanfiction (who is also a professional beta reader who encounters the same issues in my clients' books over and over)

show don't tell is every bit as important as they say it is, no matter how sick you are of hearing about it. "the floor shifted beneath her feet" hits harder than "she felt sick with shock."

no head hopping. if you want to change pov mid scene, put a scene break. you can change it multiple times in the same scene! just put a break so your readers know you've changed pov.

if you have to infodump, do it through dialogue instead of exposition. your reader will feel like they're learning alongside the character, and it will flow naturally into your story.

never open your book with an exposition dump. instead, your opening scene should drop into the heart of the action with little to no context. raise questions to the reader and sprinkle in the answers bit by bit. let your reader discover the context slowly instead of holding their hand from the start. trust your reader; donn't overexplain the details. this is how you create a perfect hook.

every chapter should end on a cliffhanger. doesn't have to be major, can be as simple as ending a chapter mid conversation and picking it up immediately on the next one. tease your reader and make them need to turn the page.

every scene should subvert the character's expectations, as big as a plot twist or as small as a conversation having a surprising outcome. scenes that meet the character's expectations, such as a boring supply run, should be summarized.

arrive late and leave early to every scene. if you're character's at a party, open with them mid conversation instead of describing how they got dressed, left their house, arrived at the party, (because those things don't subvert their expectations). and when you're done with the reason for the scene is there, i.e. an important conversation, end it. once you've shown what you needed to show, get out, instead of describing your character commuting home (because it doesn't subvert expectations!)

epithets are the devil. "the blond man smiled--" you've lost me. use their name. use it often. don't be afraid of it. the reader won't get tired of it. it will serve you far better than epithets, especially if you have two people of the same pronouns interacting.

your character should always be working towards a goal, internal or external (i.e learning to love themself/killing the villain.) try to establish that goal as soon as possible in the reader's mind. the goal can change, the goal can evolve. as long as the reader knows the character isn't floating aimlessly through the world around them with no agency and no desire. that gets boring fast.

plan scenes that you know you'll have fun writing, instead of scenes that might seem cool in your head but you know you'll loathe every second of. besides the fact that your top priority in writing should be writing for only yourself and having fun, if you're just dragging through a scene you really hate, the scene will suffer for it, and readers can tell. the scenes i get the most praise on are always the scenes i had the most fun writing. an ideal outline shouldn't have parts that make you groan to look at. you'll thank yourself later.

Here are a couple of point enhancements, and a rant about how a famous production torpedoed itself - IMO, anyway - by getting fixated on one of them

*****

(2) Head-hopping / POV change - think screen format and a change of camera angle. A "dinkus" (one or more asterisks, bullets or other symbol) between paragraphs is enough to indicate this, and you're good to go.

I do something similar in my own posts, including this one, though properly speaking the asterisks would be centred. I've done that with the next set, though since I've done the centring by inserting spaces, they may be well off-centre in other themes:

*****

(3) and (4) Treat info- and expo-dumps like pungent seasoning. Your recipe (story) needs them, but Not All In A Lump.

A good way to do this (the equivalent to "stir in gradually") is to combine them with other action - eating a meal, a walk-and-talk, watching some non-essential business like someone grooming a horse, washing a car, mowing a lawn etc., etc.

Intersperse the necessary dialogue of the info-expo with descriptions of and comments on the other business. If that business can be made relevant to the info-expo (comparisons, side-comments etc.) so much the better, but the point is to break up what can too easily be what TVTropes calls A Wall Of Text.

Thriller-writer Philip Kerr's later books are notorious for this: there are numerous instances where a character starts to talk ("Open Quotes") at the top of one page and - without interruption and sometimes even without paragraphs - doesn't finish ("Close Quotes") until halfway down the next.

Worse, the character is often reciting a chunk of background information from Kerr's research files which should have stayed there, or at the very least been pared down to its bare essentials as something a human being might say during a conversation with another human being.

Which Does Not Happen. :-P

*****

(8) about epithets, tackles something well-enough known that it has a TV Trope, "Burly Detective Syndrome". This has a cousin, "Said-Bookism", and no matter what you might have heard or indeed seen posted along with lists of sometimes-ridiculous alternatives on Tumblr, "said" is not dead.

It's alive, it's well and it's doing its job, which is to be the unobtrusive hook from which dialogue is hung. As I've said more than once, if a hook attracts more attention than the thing it's holding up, something's gone wrong.

*****

(10) If there's a scene that's likely to be fun to write, and another that's likely to be a slog, then if it works for your writing habits try to swap to and fro between the writing of them, with fun as a reward for slog.

If chop-and-change writing like this throws you off, then write the slog first and the fun after since once again, that's the reward, something to look forward to. Doing it the other way means you're looking at the slog to come, and that's not my idea of a reward.

Also, it can happen (personal experience) that after the refreshment of the fun, you'll come back to the first-draft slog bit and revise it into something better.

*****

I'd suggest (6) and (7) about subverting expectations - whether characters' or readers', and the one will become the other as reading happens - are something that need approached with care, and should always have a solid reason beyond (box tick) Not What They Expect.

Showing an unsubverted episode or incident - for instance the character's going-out preparations, or their commuting-home routine - is necessary, often more than once *, to establish Normality, so the character and reader are aware that This Time Is Different.

(* I've seen this done by cut-and-paste repeating the same description from one chapter into the next. It was imaginative and effective there, but could easily have tripped up on its own cleverness by seeming UNimaginative. YMMV.)

Why is the character including a concealed weapon in their party dress-up? Why is the character concerned they might be tailed during that commute? A comparison between ordinary and extraordinary is needed to show this doesn't happen every single time.

It's also a good way of racking up page-turning tension before invoking (5) that cliff-hanger chapter ending... :->

*****

And now the rant... :-p

Subverting expectations as a (box tick) action because it was So Effective That One Time is what transformed the final seasons of a once-popular fantasy adaptation into such a disappointment.

"Game of Thrones" is an excellent example of subverted expectations, such as the Red Wedding where - despite the way heroes are expected to escape at the last minute - a crapsack world like Westeros means bad things play all the way through to their bad conclusion.

*****

It's also an excellent example of how bad writing and a (box tick) attitude can lead to subversions that should have been left alone.

One instance is the way Jaime Lannister's redemption was abandoned "to subvert expectations" (box tick) complete with redemption-dismissive dialogue that was a slap in the face to several seasons of character development.

The lack of any hint or implication that such a thing was even possible suggests - to this viewer anyway - that it was no more than a (box tick) without additional thought as to whether it was logical in-story, as long as it generated yet another "Oh No, we didn't see that coming!" reaction from the audience.

(Of course nobody saw it coming, since neither plot requirement nor character development had any reason for it to happen.)

Sometimes a story should play out logically as a story because It's A Story, Not A Documentary. Terry Pratchett knew this and called it Narrativium, the element which drives stories. TV Tropes calls it The Theory of Narrative Causality.

Whatever the name, and however storytellers may tinker and tweak with it, they ignore its basic rules at their peril.

*****

Another example is Cersei's death.

When a writer as amiable as C.S. Lewis said:

"Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let villains be soundly killed at the end..."

...just dropping a building on her without involving any of the many other High-Profile Characters she'd hurt throughout the series was ridiculous, especially with one of those High-Profile Characters already in the vicinity.

It may well have subverted expectations, but it was a lousy resolution.

It was also bad storytelling which abandoned at least one long-anticipated set-up (all too common in later GoT), and still vexes me since in a storyline filled with subversions for the sake of shock value, NOT subverting audience expectations but instead rewarding them with what they want (what they really, really want) becomes a subversion in itself.

*****

It's not hard to imagine more original and entertaining ways of bringing Cersei's pigeons home to roost, the most obvious being a fatal encounter with Arya-reFaced-as-Jaime.

This IMO would have been a much more satisfying use of her well-established Faceless Man sneakmurder skills than that no-setup leap from nowhere onto the Ice King, another Bad Guy built up to deserve a more spectacular termination than his you're-done-now-kthxbye demise.

Certainly after eight seasons of scheming, murder, cruelty - and infuriating smugness, oh yes, that too - having Cersei "soundly killed" should have involved something, anything, more conclusive, up-front and personal than a load of bricks landing on her head.

Subvert, yes. But not just for the sake of doing it.

*****

And here is the resulting image. There is at least Someone in the U.K. government who is actually doing their job, and it is Chief Mouser to the Cabinet, Larry the Cat.

The ICC actually doing something good for once was definitely not something I was expecting - but they finally voted to remove Karm Khan (the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court). A.k.a. the guy who issued the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and others in the Israeli government after October 7.

I mean, of course they didn't do it because of that: they did it because he's a sexual predator, who also got disbarred by the Bar Standards Board (the British bar association). But a W is still a W 🎉

It should btw of course not surprise anyone at all that his victim is being accused of being an "Israeli agent", just because Khan decided to assault her around the time of the issuing of the arrest warrants. This is all because Israel controls everything, because of course it is. I guess Israel was the ones who actually assaulted the victim too, or something, and I'm sure the British Bar Standards Board is being puppeteered by Bibi himself 🫡

As the abuse allegations were swirling among ICC staff and others, Khan allegedly tried to get his accuser to disavow them by telling her the charges would hurt the Palestinian investigation, according to her testimony.  The casualties of the allegations would include “the justice of the victims that are on the cusp of progress,” he said to her, according to a record of a call that is now part of an independent U.N. investigation into her allegations. “Think about the Palestinian arrest warrants,” she said he told her on another occasion, according to the testimony. 

And also both of their families:

On a phone call in October, Khan warned her of the repercussions of pursuing an investigation. “The casualties will unfortunately be three: You and your family, me and my family and the justice of the victims,” Khan told the woman, according to a record of the call.

And it almost worked, too:

By around August, the female staffer was becoming increasingly distressed by the constant pressure to say that nothing happened, ICC officials said. She reached out to members of the governing board of the ICC to discuss her allegations.  “I held on for as long as I could because I didn’t want to f— up the Palestinian arrest warrants,” according to her testimony.

Despicable.

As we all know, thanks to the support of the good people of Tumblr, Tylenol has experienced a meteoric rise to second place. Even though her competition is stiff, I believe in Tylenol's ability to go the distance.

But let's take a look at the competition:

Elmer seems to be a lovely boy. I have no qualms with Elmer, and think he would look fantastic on a beer can. But what about Elmer's campaigns? Who is the power behind the throne here, and how have they managed to find such breakout success on this competition?

A handful of wealthy donors are trying to buy this competition.

At the end of the day, all donations are good donations here. This is a charity event so every penny earned is going to help animals in need. But it's not lost on me that Elmer's current ranking is thanks entirely to a few individuals with the financial means to put their thumbs on the scale.

Tylenol's donors, comparatively, are small and numerous, mostly $1-10 donations from many passionate believers in what she stands for (autism and pain relief I think).

Overall, the donations tell a very different story than what the base ranking shows you. Elmer is held aloft by just 24 donors and bolstered by a few wealthy patrons, whereas Tylenol has won the hearts of literally hundreds of people. Even the current third place, Abby, owes her ranking to numerous small contributions rather than one or two large ones.

i'm doing a poll and i'm gonna split the answers because i feel like jumblr is gonna bias the results otherwise.

Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis each currently hold dictatorships over parts of Palestine, Lebanon, and Yemen respectively. Did you know that? (If you only knew it about the first two groups, go ahead and take the win.)

after you vote, you get to read essays about it by Gazan activist Hamza Howidy as a Treat because he's amazing

that they have collective rights to representation, self-determination, and independent sovereignty, and the right to maintain structures to secure those rights.

And the way those rights are secured—the mechanism that exists and has been shown that it can protect those rights at scale (however imperfectly, precariously, or inconsistently)—in the current order of the world, is a state.

It’s that being stateless leaves a people vulnerable and unprotected against massive violations of their human rights, thus it is widely understood that having a state is a human right, and in order to have a state, it must exist.

Zionism, Fascism, and Loaded Questions

Anon's logical fallacy is The Loaded Question. 

The Loaded Question is a rhetorical tactic which embeds controversial, unjustified, unsupported, or false assumptions into the question itself. The goal is to force the responder to either:

Answer within the false frame

or

Reject the premise entirely, often at the cost of appearing evasive.

Anon will know in the future that this sort of rhetorical dishonesty works far better verbally. 

Doing it in writing gives the responder the opportunity to dissect the dishonesty and display its innards like a specimen in formalin.

(The analogy works because what's on display is both repulsive and educational.)

First lie: "Zionism calls for an all-Jewish Israel"

No, it doesn't.

Zionism is the movement for Jewish national self-determination in a portion of the historic land of Israel, to which the Jewish people are indigenous.

That's it. 

Nothing about "only Jews allowed." Nothing about kicking everyone else out. Nothing about "extermination."

Israel's founding documents are explicitly pluralistic. 

From Theodore Herzl's Der Judenstaat:

Every man will be as free and undisturbed in his faith or his disbelief as he is in his nationality. And if it should occur that men of other creeds and different nationalities come to live amongst us, we should accord them honorable protection and equality before the law.

Israel's 1948 Declaration of Independence includes:

The State of Israel… will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture…

It also pledges to "Safeguard the Holy Places of all religions," and has consistently kept those promises. Talk to religious minorities in Israel and they'll tell you. (The Baha'i faith originated in Iran, but the Islamic regime has endlessly persecuted them. Their world headquarters is in Israel.)

The State of Israel has always had a sizable non-Jewish population and was founded with a commitment to equal rights for all its citizens regardless of religion or ethnicity. In 1948, Israel had about 156,000 Arab citizens. It has over 2 million Arab citizens today who vote, hold office, and serve in the judiciary and military.

If Zionism really called for an all-Jewish state, Israel wouldn't have:

21% non-Jewish citizens (mostly Arab)

Arab Supreme Court justices

Arab parties in the Knesset...including Antizionist parties

A movement which calls for extermination does not preserve voting rights and legal protections to those it supposedly seeks to destroy.

You don't have to like Zionism, Anon, but you don't get to invent your own definition for it.

Second  Lie: "Necessitating extermination of all others"

This is more than a lie, it's incitement.

Like falsely yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, the aim isn't to warn, but to provoke panic and hostility. The charge weaponizes moral outrage through fabricated stakes, collapsing any possibility for honest discourse under the weight of its dishonesty.

There is no Zionist doctrine that calls for extermination.

None.

I'd like to believe Anon has simply been misled by propaganda, but it's more likely they’re repeating this falsehood knowingly.

This accusation doesn’t come out of nowhere, it plays on longstanding antisemitic tropes.

For centuries, Jews have been accused of plotting secret control, poisoning wells, harvesting organs, and killing children. The idea that Jews need others to disappear in order to be free is one of the more recent remixes of that tune.

Like Holocaust inversion, it accuses Jews of the very crimes committed against them. In this case, the ideology that gave rise to the actual genocide of Jews, fascism, is being projected onto Jews...for building a refuge against it.

That's more than  intellectually lazy. It's morally bankrupt.

Third lie: "Isn't that fascism?"

Words mean things. Specific things.

Fascism is not a term for "stuff I don’t like." It's a political ideology characterized by:

Authoritarian, centralized power

Suppression of dissent

Ethnic supremacy

Militarism and expansionism

The glorification of violence and obedience

Fascism was pioneered in Mussolini’s Italy, developed in Franco’s Spain, and perfected by Hitler’s Germany, the regime which murdered six million Jews while the world looked the other way.

It resulted in book burnings, secret police, mass exterminations, and world war.

Zionism, by contrast, is a democratic national movement. It exists across the political spectrum from far left to socialist to liberal to conservative to far right. It includes Orthodox Jews and secular atheists. It's messy, contested, and noisy. Israeli politics are combative and often infuriating, but Israel is not monolithic, authoritarian, or totalitarian. Israel has free press, regular elections, and independent courts. That's democracy, not fascism. Like all democracies, it is deeply flawed and not remotely comparable to fascist regimes.

If Israel was expansionist, it would not have given the Sinai (larger than Israel itself) back to Egypt for peace. If it was militaristic, it would have started at least some of the wars it has been forced to fight by being attacked.

Anon may not like nationalism, and that's fine if Anon is willing to condemn all nations similarly.

Anon may not like religion playing a role in state identity, and that’s fine if Anon also condemns the other ~80 countries which make religion part of their national identity.

But Anon is focused only on Israel. Huh.

Crying Wolf/Fascism

If they truly oppose fascism (as we all should), Anon should understand that diluting the meaning of the word through strategic misuse is a gift to actual fascists.

When you misuse the word fascism, you weaken its meaning. The word loses its power to describe real threats and that helps those threats go unrecognized. Movements which thrive on confusion and historical amnesia benefit from the kind of fog this strategic, dishonest misuse of the word creates. 

You're not calling out fascism, Anon. You're helping clear the way for it.

Turn out your pockets!

This indictment-disguised-as-a-question has three major components:

"Zionism means all-Jewish Israel." (False)

"All-Jewish Israel requires exterminating others." (False and inflammatory)

"That sounds like fascism." (Only if you rewrite history and all dictionaries)

This method of framing falsehoods as questions is common in conspiratorial thinking and was once seen mostly on the political far right (Tucker Carlson is famous for it).

It works by bypassing critical scrutiny. It attempts to shift the burden of proof onto the accused and then demands they explain why they're not guilty of something they never did.

Jews recognize this for what it is immediately because it's very familiar to us.

There’s an old Jewish saying:

The antisemite doesn't accuse the Jew of stealing because he thinks he stole something. He does it because he enjoys watching the Jew turn out his pockets to prove his innocence.

As Haviv Rettig Gur put it:

They’ve only got one trick. This is that trick. They think words are weapons, so they throw them around mindlessly and see what sticks.

Why Does This Seem Plausible to Some People?

It confirms what they want to believe.

When people have decided to see Israel as a colonial, racist, or imperialist project, every fact get twisted to fit that framing.

Arabs in Israel? Tokenism.

Elections? Apartheid theater.

Self-defense? Genocide.

This is confirmation bias at its most toxic. They first decide that Zionism/Israel is evil, and then reinterpret or contort every detail as proof to fit that assertion, no matter how contradictory or nonsensical.

What’s Actually Going On Here

Here's the trick at the core of this question:

It turns Jewish survival into Jewish aggression. 

It takes the desire of a historically oppressed people to live in safety and reframes it as domination. 

It takes victims of fascism and accuses them of being fascists. 

It takes a people who have been repeatedly expelled, persecuted, and murdered…and accuses them of genocidal intent for wanting a homeland.

It's DARVO. (Ironically, antizionists love to accuse Israel of DARVO!)

Yes, these inversions are antisemitic, and not because they seek to criticize Israel. 

This trick is antisemitic because it demands that Jewish nationhood be uniquely criminalized and uniquely illegitimate…based on unsupported, unsupportable lies.

You don’t need to support Israel's policies. Many Israelis don't. 

You don't need to agree with Zionism. About ~10% of Jews don't.

But if you're going to accuse an entire national movement of being inherently fascist, genocidal, and illegitimate, the burden of proof is on you, Anon.

You've offered no proof. Just buzzwords, historical inversions, and invented definitions.

That's most of what we see from the antizionist camp. 

Lies don't build peace. Slanders don't help Palestinians. Calling Zionism fascism won’t bring a Palestinian state closer, it just fuels hatred and pushes compromise further out of reach.

Zionism isn't above criticism because no national movement should be above criticism.

Criticism based on fiction, however, is propaganda. 

If you're sincerely interested in understanding Zionism (as a movement, a history, and a lived reality for millions of Jews), you need to start with what it is, not with what its enemies say it is.

The path to a better conversation (and maybe even a better future) starts with honesty.

TLDR:

Zionism isn’t fascism. It doesn’t call for extermination. It doesn’t seek ethnic purity. What it seeks is what nearly every people on Earth seeks: a place to live freely, safely, and with dignity.

If you have a problem with that only when it applies to the Jewish people, Anon, your issue isn’t Zionism.

They’ve returned to a conspiracy that was debunked countless times.

Members of this cohort include antizionist Jews I personally know.

I’ve always made jokes about pluralising with ‘-im’ where it doesn’t belong, but nothing can actually match Israel itself.

See also: Chips (singular), Chipsim (plural), or brakes (singular, pronounced ‘brex’) and brakesim (plural).

Also they assign you membership to one of there Twelve Tribes when you’re a teenager.