Oh Worm?

So… new chapter soon?

HE'S GOT THE COWL AND EVERYTHING 🥺

here's wolf showing off her gains

Now it's, "keep your US imperialist thoughts to yourself, we do things differently here, the US is far from perfect" like I'm aware, hence why we keep on talking about it. But apparently, if we talk about the antiblackness in our own country, we disregard everyone else. So we still have to give everyone else attention, and help spread the word from Black people of other nations, but that's also apparently wrong

As a brother, there is no pain greater than watching someone you love suffer every single day, knowing you cannot take their pain away.

My brother has already been through surgery, endless hospital visits, and unimaginable hardship. We hoped the worst was behind us, but his journey is far from over. He still needs $1,500 to continue his treatment, receive the medications he depends on, and complete the medical care that gives him a real chance to recover.

Deadline: 21 Jul

Current Progress: $23,946 / $ 25,446

Every day we delay his treatment is another day of pain, fear, and uncertainty. Seeing him struggle while worrying about how we will afford his care is heartbreaking. We have done everything we can, but we have reached a point where we simply cannot do this alone.

Your support will help cover:

• Ongoing medical treatment

• Essential medications

• Medical supplies

• Follow-up care and rehabilitation

Every donation, no matter how small, brings my brother one step closer to recovery. If you're unable to donate, please consider sharing our fundraiser. One share could reach the person who changes everything for my brother.

Thank you for reading, for caring, and for standing with my family during one of the hardest times of our lives. Your kindness gives us hope. ❤️

There is $1,353 left to raise to continue his treatment.

That's crazy, because you wanna know a specific moment where someone being Black clearly mattered more than being an American? At the World Cup, where IShowSpeed was called racial slurs on live TV. Over soccer. Once again, the situation which kickstarted this conversation.

Clearly his being American did not stop them from very comfortably calling him a monkey! I wonder what they saw about his identity first that made that happen 👀 I wonder what sort of society one must be raised in, in order to call someone a racial slur so comfortably 👀 But you know, apparently white supremacy can only be called out in the United States.

Anyway, every single response to this situation has sounded like this to me

Fascinating question. I really appreciate the implication that I'm not still learning to write.

The short answer is by reading and watching and overall consuming stories written by other people. The stories that move you are also the stories that inspire you, and inspiration is direction that helps you figure out what you want to pursue. When a story hits you with a moment that cuts right to your core, you might want to figure out why that moment hit you so hard, what parts of it worked, what parts of the rest of the story built up to it, how it's doing that. Possibly even more vitally, when a story is absolutely losing you, chase down what's broken about it and why that might be happening. Once you start seeing how stories are put together, it becomes a lot easier to build your own.

It's not enough just to read. Writing can't be done in a vacuum. You have to read what other people write in order to write your own works, but you have to also go out into the world and experience it in order to build worlds of your own. Writing is an act of creation, but it's also an act of consumption; you the writer are consuming the things that you've learned and experienced and turning them into something new. You can't do that on an empty stomach. Step zero of writing is touching grass.

Writing makes you hungry, and hunger gives you direction. If fantasy inspires you, that might give you the direction of researching folklore and mythology and the other pillars that inspired the great works in the fantasy genre. A love of battle anime might turn into a pursuit of martial arts. Mystery novels might lead you into forensics or psychology or anatomical study. The things you love reading about are connected to other things you'll probably love learning, and once you learn them they'll become foundational substrate in your mind from which your own stories can grow.

Sometimes the harder question isn't how to write, it's how to stop writing. Storytelling is a hard habit to break, arguably impossible. The majority of us do it mostly unconsciously or in times of stress - catastrophizing, fears, anxieties are us telling ourselves scary stories about worst case scenarios. What if the worst possible thing happened, or this nightmare played out; what if I fell here, what if this killed me, what if they hate me, what if they gave me reason to hate them, what if I woke up and a scary guy was there? Our minds concoct stories constantly and compulsively, usually unprompted. Learning to recognize this for what it is is a very useful first step in the pursuit of writing on purpose.

It's easy for these stories to compel us when we spin them, because we're our own captive audience. The hard part of writing is figuring out how to take that story out of our heads and get it into someone else's instead. This is where the craft of writing comes into play, and it's again best learned by reading. How do the stories you experience influence your thoughts and feelings? What methods of phrasing and framing do they use to comfort you, intrigue you, gutpunch you? What matters to the writer to communicate with specificity, and what are they leaving up to you, their audience? Why did the writer choose to do it like that? How would you do it?

Once the story is out of your brain and into a first draft, editing and constructive criticism become possible. Step one was "make it exist", steps two through forever are "make it good." You intend your story to impact in a certain way, but you won't know how well you've succeeded until you see how other people take it. Not all critiques are equally useful, so at this stage it's mostly good to find people whose perspectives you trust and value and listen to them. Once the story exists in its final form, disregard this step and stay out of your story's reviews. Those aren't criticism of your writing process, they're buyer testimonials for readers. They're not useful for you.

Screenshot via Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net on bluesky

Tldr Amnesty International, global human rights organisation, published a report called 'A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK'. In it is detailed, amongst others, a whole bunch of transphobic groups and organisations, including Beira's Place, JK Rowling's trans exclusionary sexual violence support service. JK Rowling threw a shit fit and got Amnesty to take the report down by threatening libel. This was obviously not enough, because you can't appease a fascist, so now she's going to bankroll a bunch of lawsuits anyway through the JK Rowling Women's Fund.*

You can read an archived version of the report here, please save it and share it.