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#DRYER #promptMore you might like
One time my dad came to family dinner all excited “you know that show Sherlock? I hear fans are writing whole new stories for it online”
And in perfect unison my sister and I yelled “DAD NO!” So vehemently he stopped in his tracks.
Then a look of dawning comprehension on his face.
“Oh, this is like Kirk and Spock, isn’t it”
And I died right then and there.
My mom was into fanfic back when it was still all in handmade zines passed back and forth in-person. My mother is the one who first told me what fanfic was. My mother used to print her favorite fics out on our home printer and stick them on the shelf to read again later. My mom had an Ao3 account before I'd ever heard of Ao3.
Fanfic is not some new millennial/gen z thing that nobody over 35 knows about. It's really not that weird for middle-aged folks and elders to be into it. The folks who were writing Spirk fic in the 60s are, like. Still around.
Yes they are. And some of them have given me actual money to write for them!
It's an amazing world we live in. :)
My dad has an Ao3 account. I don’t know what his preferred fandoms are. The only reason he knows mine is because I talk about them, but he doesn’t ask me for links.
Jane Austen really said ‘I respect the “I can fix him” movement but that’s just not me. He’ll fix himself if knows what’s good for him’ and that’s why her works are still calling the shots today.
Meanwhile Emily Brönte just said “We can make each other worse.”
Mary Shelley said, "I can make him
One of the things that’s really struck me while rereading the Lord of the Rings–knowing much more about Tolkien than I did the last time I read it–is how individual a story it is.
We tend to think of it as a genre story now, I think–because it’s so good, and so unprecedented, that Tolkien accidentally inspired a whole new fantasy culture, which is kind of hilarious. Wanting to “write like Tolkien,” I think, is generally seen as “writing an Epic Fantasy Universe with invented races and geography and history and languages, world-saving quests and dragons and kings.” But… But…
Here’s the thing. I don’t think those elements are at all what make The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings so good. Because I’m realizing, as I did not realize when I was a kid, that Tolkien didn’t use those elements because they’re somehow inherently better than other things. He used them purely because they were what he liked and what he knew.
The Shire exists because he was an Englishman who partially grew up in, and loved, the British countryside, and Hobbits are born out of his very English, very traditionalist values. Tom Bombadil was one of his kids’ toys that he had already invented stories about and then incorporated into Middle-Earth. He wrote about elves and dwarves because he knew elves and dwarves from the old literature/mythology that he’d made his career. The Rohirrim are an expression of the ancient cultures he studied. There are a half-dozen invented languages in Middle-Earth because he was a linguist. The themes of war and loss and corruption were important to him, and were things he knew intimately, because of the point in history during which he lived; and all the morality of the stories, the grace and humility and hope-in-despair, was an expression of his Catholic faith.
J. R. R. Tolkien created an incredible, beautiful, unparalleled world not specifically by writing about elves and dwarves and linguistics, but by embracing all of his strengths and loves and all the things he best understood, and writing about them with all of his skill and talent. The fact that those things happened to be elves and dwarves and linguistics is what makes Middle-Earth Middle-Earth; but it is not what makes Middle-Earth good.
What makes it good is that every element that went into it was an element J. R. R. Tolkien knew and loved and understood. He brought it out of his scholarship and hobbies and life experience and ideals, and he wrote the story no one else could have written… And did it so well that other people have been trying to write it ever since.
So… I think, if we really want to write like Tolkien (as I do), we shouldn’t specifically be trying to write like linguists, or historical experts, or veterans, or or or… We should try to write like people who’ve gathered all their favorite and most important things together, and are playing with the stuff those things are made of just for the joy of it. We need to write like ourselves.
this is such a beautiful way of saying ‘write what you know’ that I feel explains it better than so many other people fail to do so, and as such, people always misunderstand what it means!
next year james patterson is slapping his name on a book called "the secret lives of booksellers and librarians," which is real bold considering that every bookseller and librarian that i've met in my time as a bookseller and librarian absolutely loathes him. including me.
"rowan if you hate james patterson how come you know about a book of his that's coming out seven months from now?"
I Must Keep The Scope Of My Sniper Rifle Trained On The Beast At All Times
Okay, I feel the need to explain just why James Patterson is so hated by librarians.
See, it's not just that he writes mediocre, churned-out thrillers; there are many, many authors of mediocre, churned-out thrillers out there, he ain't special.
It's also not that he "writes" them with "coauthors" and slaps his name on them - again, this is not unique.
It's not even - though this is starting to get there- that he chases every publishing trend and creates His Version of everything from Diary of a Wimpy Kid to Nicholas Sparks, which nobody likes as well as they like his thrillers but still buy because they have His Name on them like a summoning charm.
No, what makes James Patterson uniquely loathed is the combination of the frequency of publication and his popularity. Because, to be honest, I'm not sure that anyone even likes his books anymore, but it doesn't matter, because if they have the James Patterson name on them then readers will be queuing up like zombies desperate for a fix of decaying cerebral matter. Which would be tolerable if he had the decency to only write one book a year like most other bestselling authors, but "James Patterson" (quotes VERY intentional) puts out roughly two books per month. So as a librarian, not only do you have to buy every new book James Patterson puts out, you have to buy multiple copies in order to fulfill demand. Somewhere around 5% of my fiction budget is spent ENTIRELY ON JAMES PATTERSON. Every new James Patterson that comes out means a dozen or more queer romances, inventive sci-fi novellas, unique cultural viewpoints, etc, etc that you can't buy because YOU HAVE TO BUY JAMES PATTERSON INSTEAD. (See also, you just weeded and shifted the Ps in fiction to make room and now it's full again oh god why.)
And the clincher - the absolute clincher - is the knowledge that the publishers will be "finding" "unfinished manuscripts" by "James Patterson" for a minimum of fifty years after his death, so even if some right-minded bibliophile with a claymore takes one for the team, we will never, ever be free.
And that is why we hate James Patterson.
I was wondering about this when i saw the first version of this post
Some things I think people are overlooking in the tiktok ban bill, because it's not just a tiktok ban:
- It gives the US government the ability to ban *any* app, website, or company they believe to be "controlled" by an "adversarial power" which can change whenever they want
- It allows the President and the Administrative branch almost unilateral power to designate *any* app, website, or company to be under the control of an "adversarial power" (and just think about how that can be used un the hands of, say, Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis)
- They have to offer little to no evidence for this. For example, tiktok - a Singaporean-headquartered and ran company, partially owned by US interests, incorporated in the Cayman Islands, and whose userdata is stored Austin, TX - is apparently controlled by the Chinese government
- It also gives the Federal Government the ability to investigate and shut down any provider who gives access to these banned websites or services, including VPN. They will have unilateral power to dismantle VPNs through outrageous fines what will essentially force them to not operate in the US
- A lot of the Congressional Representatives who supported this bill have large donors and/or stock in US Tech companies like Meta, Google, or Palantier who would benefit from the downfall of tiktok or the ability to purchase it and monopolize the market
- Those same tech companies which sell our data constantly anyway, including to "adversarial powers"
This is so much more than just a tiktok ban.
from the NPR story:
...but first it must clear the Senate, where it faces an uncertain future. Several other anti-TikTok efforts in the Senate have stalled, and it is too soon to tell whether the House's legislation will meet a different fate.
Whatever happens with this measure, it marks the first time a chamber of Congress has passed a bill that could shut down a social media platform, a move that civil liberties advocates say tramples on the free speech rights of millions of American users.
opening your writing doc and immediately scrolling back 3 pages like "alright what the fuck is this story about again?"
Saying this cause I'm seeing stuff on tiktok but folks
I am begging y'all to just print out your fave fanfic if you really want a physical copy of it
Paying someone to print and bind a fanfic for you can get BOTH of you AND THE FANFIC AUTHOR into legal trouble
Theres a reason ye old fanfiction.net/wattpad times had fanfic authors explicitly stating that they do not own the characters being used in the fic-