the colour yes

hello there! i have not been on tumblr in years, barring a brief resurgence for the c77 fandom, so OBVIOUSLY i thought it would be a BRILLIANT IDEA to return out of nowhere and start liveblogging my own writing, something which few people have read and probably none but me care about

if you would like to follow along, you can check it out in its complete form on AO3, and it's in progress of being cross published to royal road. the sequel is currently with my beta, and i'm working on the third book, but I make no promises about timeline.

and now, onto the proper content, my ingenious thoughts about my own writing:

oh my god mal is such a drama queen (slamming HIS OWN FUCKING DOOR on alice in the first five minutes of meeting her! i mean what the heck, dude!)

In other news, I forgot how much Leyha and Alice overlap, especially when they both pass their charisma checks, because apparently I only know how to write time-filling dialog one way. Who knew!

in other news, i find it mildly incredibly that every time I read these chapters i have some small copyedit to make in each chapter. will they ever be done?

although given that this is only the ninth chapter i have a feeling any decent reader could recognize it wasn't going to be the end of the story.

hello there! i have not been on tumblr in years, barring a brief resurgence for the c77 fandom, so OBVIOUSLY i thought it would be a BRILLIANT IDEA to return out of nowhere and start liveblogging my own writing, something which few people have read and probably none but me care about

if you would like to follow along, you can check it out in its complete form on AO3, and it's in progress of being cross published to royal road. the sequel is currently with my beta, and i'm working on the third book, but I make no promises about timeline.

and now, onto the proper content, my ingenious thoughts about my own writing:

oh my god mal is such a drama queen (slamming HIS OWN FUCKING DOOR on alice in the first five minutes of meeting her! i mean what the heck, dude!)

In other news, I forgot how much Leyha and Alice overlap, especially when they both pass their charisma checks, because apparently I only know how to write time-filling dialog one way. Who knew!

in other news, i find it mildly incredibly that every time I read these chapters i have some small copyedit to make in each chapter. will they ever be done?

although given that this is only the ninth chapter i have a feeling any decent reader could recognize it wasn't going to be the end of the story.

hello there! i have not been on tumblr in years, barring a brief resurgence for the c77 fandom, so OBVIOUSLY i thought it would be a BRILLIANT IDEA to return out of nowhere and start liveblogging my own writing, something which few people have read and probably none but me care about

if you would like to follow along, you can check it out in its complete form on AO3, and it's in progress of being cross published to royal road. the sequel is currently with my beta, and i'm working on the third book, but I make no promises about timeline.

and now, onto the proper content, my ingenious thoughts about my own writing:

oh my god mal is such a drama queen (slamming HIS OWN FUCKING DOOR on alice in the first five minutes of meeting her! i mean what the heck, dude!)

In other news, I forgot how much Leyha and Alice overlap, especially when they both pass their charisma checks, because apparently I only know how to write time-filling dialog one way. Who knew!

in other news, i find it mildly incredibly that every time I read these chapters i have some small copyedit to make in each chapter. will they ever be done?

hello there! i have not been on tumblr in years, barring a brief resurgence for the c77 fandom, so OBVIOUSLY i thought it would be a BRILLIANT IDEA to return out of nowhere and start liveblogging my own writing, something which few people have read and probably none but me care about

if you would like to follow along, you can check it out in its complete form on AO3, and it's in progress of being cross published to royal road. the sequel is currently with my beta, and i'm working on the third book, but I make no promises about timeline.

and now, onto the proper content, my ingenious thoughts about my own writing:

oh my god mal is such a drama queen (slamming HIS OWN FUCKING DOOR on alice in the first five minutes of meeting her! i mean what the heck, dude!)

In other news, I forgot how much Leyha and Alice overlap, especially when they both pass their charisma checks, because apparently I only know how to write time-filling dialog one way. Who knew!

in other news, i find it mildly incredibly that every time I read these chapters i have some small copyedit to make in each chapter. will they ever be done?

hello there! i have not been on tumblr in years, barring a brief resurgence for the c77 fandom, so OBVIOUSLY i thought it would be a BRILLIANT IDEA to return out of nowhere and start liveblogging my own writing, something which few people have read and probably none but me care about

if you would like to follow along, you can check it out in its complete form on AO3, and it's in progress of being cross published to royal road. the sequel is currently with my beta, and i'm working on the third book, but I make no promises about timeline.

and now, onto the proper content, my ingenious thoughts about my own writing:

oh my god mal is such a drama queen (slamming HIS OWN FUCKING DOOR on alice in the first five minutes of meeting her! i mean what the heck, dude!)

In other news, I forgot how much Leyha and Alice overlap, especially when they both pass their charisma checks, because apparently I only know how to write time-filling dialog one way. Who knew!

in other news, i find it mildly incredibly that every time I read these chapters i have some small copyedit to make in each chapter. will they ever be done?

hello there! i have not been on tumblr in years, barring a brief resurgence for the c77 fandom, so OBVIOUSLY i thought it would be a BRILLIANT IDEA to return out of nowhere and start liveblogging my own writing, something which few people have read and probably none but me care about

if you would like to follow along, you can check it out in its complete form on AO3, and it's in progress of being cross published to royal road. the sequel is currently with my beta, and i'm working on the third book, but I make no promises about timeline.

and now, onto the proper content, my ingenious thoughts about my own writing:

oh my god mal is such a drama queen (slamming HIS OWN FUCKING DOOR on alice in the first five minutes of meeting her! i mean what the heck, dude!)

In other news, I forgot how much Leyha and Alice overlap, especially when they both pass their charisma checks, because apparently I only know how to write time-filling dialog one way. Who knew!

in other news, i find it mildly incredibly that every time I read these chapters i have some small copyedit to make in each chapter. will they ever be done?

hello there! i have not been on tumblr in years, barring a brief resurgence for the c77 fandom, so OBVIOUSLY i thought it would be a BRILLIANT IDEA to return out of nowhere and start liveblogging my own writing, something which few people have read and probably none but me care about

if you would like to follow along, you can check it out in its complete form on AO3, and it's in progress of being cross published to royal road. the sequel is currently with my beta, and i'm working on the third book, but I make no promises about timeline.

and now, onto the proper content, my ingenious thoughts about my own writing:

oh my god mal is such a drama queen (slamming HIS OWN FUCKING DOOR on alice in the first five minutes of meeting her! i mean what the heck, dude!)

In other news, I forgot how much Leyha and Alice overlap, especially when they both pass their charisma checks, because apparently I only know how to write time-filling dialog one way. Who knew!

in other news, i find it mildly incredibly that every time I read these chapters i have some small copyedit to make in each chapter. will they ever be done?

hello there! i have not been on tumblr in years, barring a brief resurgence for the c77 fandom, so OBVIOUSLY i thought it would be a BRILLIANT IDEA to return out of nowhere and start liveblogging my own writing, something which few people have read and probably none but me care about

if you would like to follow along, you can check it out in its complete form on AO3, and it's in progress of being cross published to royal road. the sequel is currently with my beta, and i'm working on the third book, but I make no promises about timeline.

and now, onto the proper content, my ingenious thoughts about my own writing:

oh my god mal is such a drama queen (slamming HIS OWN FUCKING DOOR on alice in the first five minutes of meeting her! i mean what the heck, dude!)

In other news, I forgot how much Leyha and Alice overlap, especially when they both pass their charisma checks, because apparently I only know how to write time-filling dialog one way. Who knew!

hello there! i have not been on tumblr in years, barring a brief resurgence for the c77 fandom, so OBVIOUSLY i thought it would be a BRILLIANT IDEA to return out of nowhere and start liveblogging my own writing, something which few people have read and probably none but me care about

if you would like to follow along, you can check it out in its complete form on AO3, and it's in progress of being cross published to royal road. the sequel is currently with my beta, and i'm working on the third book, but I make no promises about timeline.

and now, onto the proper content, my ingenious thoughts about my own writing:

oh my god mal is such a drama queen (slamming HIS OWN FUCKING DOOR on alice in the first five minutes of meeting her! i mean what the heck, dude!)

In other news, I forgot how much Leyha and Alice overlap, especially when they both pass their charisma checks, because apparently I only know how to write time-filling dialog one way. Who knew!

So you build your protagonist. She has no personality traits beyond being decently strong-willed, so that her quirks and interesting traits absolutely can’t get in the way of the audience’s projection onto her. She is dainty, birdlike, beautiful despite her protestations that she is ugly–yet she can still hold her own against significantly taller and stronger combatants. She is the perfect mask for the bashful, insecure tweens you are marketing to to wear while they read.

You think, as you draft your novel, that you need to add something that appeals to the basest nature of teenagers, something this government does that will be perversely appealing to them. The Hunger Games’ titular games were the main draw of the books, despite the hatred its characters hold for the event. So the government forces everyone into Harry Potter houses. 

So the government makes everyone choose their faction, their single personality trait. Teenagers and tweens are basic–they likely identify by one distinct personality trait or career aspiration, and they’ll thus be enchanted by this system. For years, Tumblr and Twitter bios will include Erudite or Dauntless alongside Aquarius and Ravenclaw and INTJ. Congratulations, you just made having more than one personality trait anathema to your worldbuilding. 

Your readers and thus your protagonist are naturally drawn to the faction that you have made RIDICULOUSLY cooler and better than the others: Dauntless. The faction where they play dangerous games of Capture the Flag and don’t work and act remarkably like teenagers with a budget. You add an attractive, tall man to help and hinder the protagonist. He is brooding and handsome; he doesn’t need to be anything else. 

The villains appear soon afterward. They are your tried and true dystopian government: polished, sleek, intelligent, headed by a woman for some reason. They fight the protagonists, they carry out their evil, Machiavellian, stupid plan. You finish the novel with duct tape and fanservice, action sequences and skin and just enough glue and spit to seal the terrible, hollow world you have made shut just long enough to put it on the shelf. 

And you have just destroyed YA dystopian literature. Because you have boiled it down to its bare essentials. A sleek, futuristic government borrowing its aesthetic from modern minimalism and wealth forces the population to participate in a perversely cool-to-read-about system like the Hunger Games or the factions, and one brave, slender, pretty, hollow main character is the only one brave–no, special enough to stand against it. 

but divergent was clumsy make-believe the whole way through. it aped the forms and functions of dystopian lit but the writer didn’t actually have any real, passionate, sincere anger to put on the page. she didn’t know what it was talking about, so she didn’t have anything worth listening to.

You contrast that with how the marketing for the Hunger Games films directly contradicts the messaging of the text, and how Divergent seems ready-made for the big screen, and it becomes really apparent why the genre folded in on itself. Capitalism tried to recuperate dystopian fiction criticizing capitalism, and in doing so, butchered the genre.

One is the narrative of taking what is broken and fixing it. It is not about the ‘broken’ person, it’s about the ‘savior’ who ‘fixes’ them.

One is a tale of healing. It is not about one person 'fixing’ the other, it’s about the person who makes a conscious decision to not let their pain define them.

In one, the story is about the person who loves the hurt person, and the hurt person’s pain is incidental to the main character’s arc. In the other, the story is about the hurt person themself, and the other person’s love is incidental to their arc.