ealdwineoldfriend

Latest Posts by ealdwineoldfriend

via @swatercolor [insta]

I think about this drawing every single time I'm doing something badly. Whatever I am doing, at least I'm not destroying things.

Getting moldy this semester

The thing nobody tells you about writing is that you have to keep fucking doing it

Here are some thoughts about dialogue tags while I have my editor hat on:

It's fine to use said as a dialogue tag. 'Said' works the way jeans do. Jeans are so ubiquitous that they function as a neutral colour in an outfit despite the fact that they are blue. Said is so ubiquitous in fiction that it functions as a neutral tag to indicate the speaker in much the same way

Using 'said' where necessary will stand out much less than elaborate attempts to avoid it

It is possible to reduce the use of said by reducing the number of dialogue tags overall.

Other dialogue tags are not neutral; you can use them to get various effects. One of these potential effects is '4th grade English class exercise'. Sometimes that's what you're going for and I would not dream of stopping you.

"You can use dialogue tags in the middle of speech," they say, "to affect the perception of the pacing."

"Or," they add, "to give an impression of delivery and tone without resorting to direct descriptions."

"You can even..." They pause to consider how to convey this, toying with their water bottle while they think. "Break dialogue up with actions instead of tags to avoid having blocks of dialogue in which everyone stands stock still and speaks in a monotone. This also contributes to conveying tone without describing it and can add to characterisation."

marie howe, in an interview with krista tippett of on being

Hello! I’m a horror & dark whimsy writer/content creator, and I was just published for the first time a couple months ago with my environmental horror short story “HAUSTORIUM.” It’d mean a lot if folks checked it out! Keep an eye on this space, more to come 👀👻🌲

devour-journal.com

Haustorium | 𝔇𝔢𝔳𝔬𝔲𝔯 ☙ 𝔐𝔬𝔯𝔰𝔢𝔩𝔰 𝔬𝔣 𝔊𝔢𝔫𝔯𝔢 𝔏𝔦𝔱𝔢𝔯𝔞𝔱𝔲𝔯𝔢

A dying lumberman joins a logging crew for one final job, only to face a supernatural nightmare when an ancient tree resists its felling.

CNBC

Meta goes to arbitrator to prevent whistleblower from promoting tell-all book

An emergency arbitrator ruled that former Meta staffer Sarah Wynn-Williams is prohibited from promoting memoir of her tenure at the social m

Hey did you know there's a tell all book about the behind the scenes of Meta and the author is forbidden from promoting it?

The good news is however that it's already published and can't be stifled and whoever didn't sign the NDA can promote it as much as they want.

Mattresses, unbeknownst to many, are a lot like cars. Every year new ones roll out, they’re always tweaking and innovating and you’ll never find the same one you loved decades ago when buying a new one.

Where I sold mattresses had a three month return or exchange program for this reason. New beds take a while to break in, and they’re a big expense. Your body is used to the old one. So we made sure people were loving it. If a bed got returned we’d take it back, sanitize and clean it, then sell it again on clearance.

To sell these we always had to disclose what clearance meant to customers, and they had to sign that they knew what they were getting. (FYI, not every company is as… forthright about the used bed situation)

In clearance we had beds that were floor models, we had returns, and more rarely we had old models whose line had been discontinued. These clearance beds were always final sale, so a bed could only be sold twice.

Now, the manager at the store I was working at had realized a vital fact. Clearance beds in the warehouse didn’t sell, especially old models that salespeople weren’t familiar with. And even more especially in odd sizes, like twin extra longs. So he set up a split king on the showroom floor to exhibit clearance beds, pulling all those forgotten twin extra longs out onto the showroom.

Almost all of these were brand new discontinued models. Beds I’d never learned in training were exhumed to be displayed. The manufacturers had moved on to new lines and they’d been left behind. Why would he take such in interest in selling old stock, you might wonder? Because we made double commission on the sales margin of clearance beds, and if we’d had a bed long enough they dropped the cost in the system so it was a fucking cash cow to sell these. Even with huge discounts the commissions were wonderful so it was a win win.

When I got started I was jazzed about this program, I was so on board to sell weird old brand new beds and make a ton of money. I had a wonderful older couple come in, looking for a split king adjustable set. This was a white whale sale.

The current clearance models on the floor were a latex mattress that was brand new despite being of an age to start first grade, and a tempurpedic floor model. The couple laid down and it was like magic. They each loved the bed they’d laid down on. They wanted to buy the whole shebang.

I. Was. Thrilled. I told them about the clearance program and what that meant, and they weren’t bothered in the least. I wrote up the sale then dashed into the back, fizzing with excitement to tell my manager what I’d done.

“You sold the death bed?!” He asked in delight.

I pulled up short, my smile freezing in place. “What…?”

“Didn’t you check the notes?”

I hesitated for a long beat then slowly shook my head. You see, dear reader, all beds had a personal history. Every clearance bed had logs written up by the person who took the return, as well as warehouse crew after sanitizing. It helped us know what to expect when selling them. “Wasn’t it just a floor model? You said it was a floor model…”

He slowly shook his head. I checked the notes.

It turned out, it had been sold as a floor model. The first time. But the company had made an exception and taken it back as a return two months later. Why? Because it’s owner had passed away.

I stared at the computer in horror and my manager shrugged. “They signed the clearance form. Technically it was a floor model.”

“We know for a fact that a man died in that bed!”

“What they don’t know can’t haunt them,” he said philosophically.

The man came back a week later for more sheets, utterly delighted to tell me how well they were sleeping. I clamped my teeth down around the secret of the deathbed, choosing to let them love their new bed without the stigma. Only one person would be haunted by that deathbed, and it was me.

Fantasy writers should be more anthropology brained. More theology brained. More wacky intellectual history brained. You should be giving out interesting and novel but believable social structures. Oh they don't have monogamy they have some other thing and they're just as violent about it? Perfect. There should be religions that aren't just gods of x y z. Folio gods are out! And the theology shouldn't fall apart from a moderately intelligent person thinking about it for 4 seconds. Of it falls apart in five econds that's fine. Like just crazy enough to think that a real human society could get down with it. There should be like bizarre new architecture that ye oldifies modernist movements. Oh amd the thing where every city and region is somehow completely homogenous is crazy; do something else. Put people living together with a complicated history. Oh and you can just give them a completely different conceptual scheme for talking about gay and trans people. That would be fun. I should be saying "I never thought of it that way." Make up norms and then think what are all the ways in which this can go wrong. Tell me how people disagree on the interpretation of some doctrine. Create a parodying spectre of some constitutional arrangement. Go crazy

“Pratchett went back to older throwaway jokes (like dwarves being apparently unisex) and used them as metaphors to discuss social change, racial assimilation, and other complex issues, while reexamining the species he’d thrown in at the margins of his world simply because they existed at the margins of every other fantasy universe. If goblins and orcs and trolls could think, then why were they always just there to be slaughtered by the heroes? And if the heroes slaughtered sentient beings en masse, how heroic exactly were they? It was a long overdue start on redressing issues long swept under the rug by a parade of Tolkien successors who never thought of anyone green and slimy as anything but a notch on the protagonist’s sword, and much of the urgency in Pratchett’s last few books seemed to be related to them. “There’s only one true evil in the world,” he said through his characters. “And that’s treating people like they were things.” And in the last of his “grown-up” Discworld books, that idea is shouted with the ferocity of those who have only a few words left and want to make them count. Goblins are people. Golems are people. Dwarves are people, and they do not become any less people because they decide to go by the gender they know themselves to be instead of the one society forces on them. Even trains might be people, and you’ll never know one way or the other unless you ask them, because treating someone like they’re a person and not a thing should be your default. And the only people who cling to tradition at the expense of real people are sad, angry dwellers in the darkness who don’t even understand how pathetic they are, clutching and grasping at the things they remember without ever understanding that the world was never that simple to begin with. The future is bright, it is shining, and it belongs to everyone.”

— John Seavey, The Evolution of the Disc (via pornosophical)

do people have no shame anymore?

I was talking to a kid in my daughter’s class today, and she said that she thought it would be fun to write a story about the Titanic, but with supernatural creatures.

So I said, “Yeah, that would great! What would the creatures do? Would they save the Titanic from sinking?”

And she gave me the most disgusted look. I have never seen a 9 year old face look so appalled.

“No,” she said, speaking very clearly so as to never be so grossly misunderstood again, “they’re going to eat the passengers.”

God I hope she lets me read it.

I’m writing scenes which are good, and I don’t know where they are going to fit in the book. But it’s what I call ‘The Valley Filled With Clouds’ technique. You’re at the edge of the valley, and there is a church steeple, and there is a tree, and there is a rocky outcrop, but the rest of it is mist. But you know that because they exist, there must be ways of getting from one to the other that you cannot see. And so you start the journey. And when I write, I write a draft entirely for myself, just to walk the valley and find out what the book is going to be all about.

-- Terry Pratchett - A Slip Of The Keyboard: Collected Non-fiction

I'm so fascinated by languages with different levels of formality built in because it immediately introduces such complex social dynamics. The social distance between people is palpable when it's built right into the language, in a way it's not really palpable in English.

So for example. I speak Spanish, and i was taught to address everyone formally unless specifically invited otherwise. People explained to me that "usted" was formal, for use with strangers, bosses, and other people you respect or are distant from, while "tú" is used most often between family and good friends.

That's pretty straightforward, but it gets interesting when you see people using "tú" as a form of address for flirting with strangers, or for picking a fight or intimidating someone. In other languages I've sometimes heard people switch to formal address with partners, friends or family to show when they are upset. That's just so interesting! You're indicating social and emotional space and hierarchy just in the words you choose to address the other person as "you"!!

Not to mention the "what form of address should I use for you...?" conversation which, idk how other people feel about it, but to me it always felt awkward as heck, like a DTR but with someone you're only just becoming comfortable with. "You can use tú with me" always felt... Weirdly intimate? Like, i am comfortable around you, i consider you a friend. Like what a vulnerable thing to say to a person. (That's probably also just a function of how i was strictly told to use formal address when i was learning. Maybe others don't feel so weird about it?)

And if you aren't going to have a conversation about it and you're just going to switch, how do you know when? If you switch too soon it might feel overly familiar and pushy but if you don't switch soon enough you might seem cold??? It's so interesting.

Anyway. As an English-speaking American (even if i can speak a bit of Spanish), i feel like i just don't have a sense for social distance and hierarchy, really, simply because there isn't really language for it in my mother tongue. The fact that others can be keenly aware of that all the time just because they have words to describe it blows my mind!

Diesel thinks the only reaS;AJSSDR

Just got the invoice from Ceiling Man and

WHY DOES HE KNOW THIS

Ever since I learned that the people at Bunnings recognise my name due to my frequent delivery orders I've wondered what they think of said orders. Do they have theories on what I've used the well over a hundred 0.9m run of the mill pine shorts that I regularly buy in batches of 20-30 for. Do they wonder why I need quite so many metal brackets. When I stopped buying tiles and grout in small batches at random intervals, did they have feelings on the fact that I'd obviously finished my tiling project.

Anyway if you see this you have to reblog and tag with a delight from ur day -- even the littlest thing counts

the most humbling experience of being a writer is when you spend hours writing and think you wrote 10k words but it was actually more like 400. and then you do it again

It’s uncanny how similar Trump is acting like Hitler. People are now doing the Nazi salute. They’re drawing the symbol. The KKK was seen in Kentucky asking people to join them. ICE has been ripping families apart. Companies have pulled back Diversity Initiatives. We’re no longer part of WHO and there won’t be any communication from the CDC at least until February 1st. We’re being censored and the news can’t be trusted. Thousands of Americans didn’t know there were protests against Trump yesterday outside the U.S. Quotes from The Handmaid’s Tale and Anne Frank have been compared to what’s going on right now.

According to The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Studies and Prevention the U.S. has officially been given a red flag alert for Genocide.

I’m exhausted but I will never stop being angry.

now say it with me: authors/artists dont owe you moral purity. an author/artist job is not to hold you by the hand & tell you exactly what is Good™ & what is Bad™. you should be able to think for yourself

Nothing exposes the inability of people to navigate power imbalances quite like the relationship between drivers and pedestrians.

For example, I just had a driver get screaming-at-me mad because I stopped walking at a slip lane to make sure he was going to stop. And like, buddy, I know I have the right of way, but if I assume you are going to stop and I guess wrong, I will literally die. Whereas if I wait to see if you're actually going to slow down, I am just delaying both of us by a couple of seconds. And that might have more to do with why I made the choice that I did than my being a stupid bitch who needs to learn the rules. Like, if you can't understand why the fact that you could effortlessly accidentally kill me (and likely face no consequences) means I am reticent to assume the best from you, maybe you just shouldn't have any power over anyone ever.

"Narrative distance"? Do tell!

Explain it in text? Without emphatic arm gestures or wine? Oh god. Okay. I’ll try.

All right, so narrative distance is all about the proximity between you the reader and the POV character in a story you’re reading. You might sometimes also hear it called “psychic distance.” It puts you right up close to that character or pulls you away, and the narrative distance an author chooses greatly affects how their story turns out, because it can drastically change the focus.

Here’s an illustration of narrative distance from far to close, from John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction (a book I yelled at a lot, because Gardner is a pretentious bastard, but he does say very smart things about craft):

It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.

Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.

Henry hated snowstorms.

God how he hated these damn snowstorms.

Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul

It feels a bit like zooming in with a camera, doesn’t it?  

I always hate making decisions about narrative distance, because I usually get it wrong on the first try and have to fix it in revision. When I was writing Lost Causes, the first thing I had to do in revision was go through and zoom in a little on the narrative distance, because it felt like it was sitting right on top of Bruce’s prickly skin and it needed to be underneath where the little biting comments and intrusive thoughts lived. 

Narrative distance is probably the simplest form of distance in POV, and there is where if I had two glasses of wine in me you would hit a vein of pure yelling. There are SO MANY forms of distance in POV. There’s the distance between the intended reader and the POV character, the distance between the POV character and the narrator (even if it’s 1st person!), the distance between the narrator and the author. There’s emotional distance, intellectual distance, psychological distance, experiential distance. If you look closely at a 3rd person POV story, you can tell things about the narrator as a person (and the narrator is an entity independent of the author) - like, for starters, you can tell if they’re sympathetic to the POV character by how they talk about their actions. Word choice and sentence structure can tell you a narrator’s level of education and where they’re from; you can sometimes even tell a narrator’s gender, class, and other less obvious identifying factors if you look closely enough. To find these details, ask: What does the narrator (or POV character, or author) understand?

I can’t put a name on the narrator of the Harry Potter books, but I can tell you he understands British culture intimately, what it’s like to be a teen boy with a crush, to not have money, to be lonely and abused, and to find and connect with people. There’s a lot he doesn’t understand (he doesn’t pick out little flags of queerness like I do, so he’s probably straight, for example), but he sympathizes with Harry and supports him. I like that narrator. I’m supposed to sympathize with him, and I do.

POV is made up of these little distances - countless small questions of proximity that, when stacked together, decide whether we’re going to root for or against a character, or whether we’ll put down a book 20 pages in, or whether a story will punch you in just the right place at just the right amount to make you bawl your eyes out.

There are so many different possible configurations of distance in this arena that there are literally infinite POVs. Fiction is magical and also intimidating as fuck.

Also. ALSO.

Plot…and action…are DIFFERENT THINGS. 

I’m making up assignments from when I was woefully ill a few weeks ago, and that was a week of amazing readings, one of which laid out this very thing. Actions are the concrete events that happen, while plot is the non-concrete, the thematic - what changes. You can explain the plot of a story without even touching on the individual actions within it.

Actions: John Watson awakes from nightmares of the war to a small, bleak rental room. His therapist presses on what he’s written on his blog, and he says nothing interesting ever happens to him. John meets an old friend in the park, his friend takes him to the lab at St. Barts where he introduces him to Sherlock Holmes, a genius who needs a roommate. When John goes to see the flat, Sherlock takes him along to a crime scene to which he’s been summoned by the Met. Blah blah blah etcetera, John figures out who the killer is just in time and races to the scene, shooting the cabbie before Sherlock can take the potentially poisoned pill. They walk off together, talking about dinner.

Plot: Veteran John Watson is struggling to adjust to civilian life until he meets Sherlock Holmes, the world’s only consulting detective, who offers him reason to live - the war against crime being waged on London’s streets - and a friendship that will define them both. 

The first is a point by point description of what happens; the second is the heart of the story - why what happens matters - and it’s a bit more wibbly wobbly and open to interpretation. A good fic summary, story pitch, movie review, etc. focuses mainly, if not entirely, on the plot and not the actions.

I was talking about this with a writer-friend, and we sat in her parked car for like five minutes miming head explosions at each other and going, “HOLY CRAP. THEY’RE DIFFERENT” and “I KNOW, RIGHT?” and “I NEVER THOUGH ABOUT IT BEFORE” and “I KNOW, RIGHT.”  So, yeah. Actions and plot. Different things. I’m going to want to kiss that essay on its stupid essay face the next time I’m writing a plot summary.

ohsweetcrepes replied to your post: Also. ALSO.

This essay. I would like to read it.

“Incremental Perturbation: How to Know Whether You’ve Got a Plot or Not” by John Barth. I don’t know if it’s available online, but I read it in Creating Fiction (ed. Julie Checkoway), which is a book I highly recommend after having read about a third of its essays.

And here comes my plug for this book, because I’ve been arguing with every book but this one this semester, and I feel like it deserves some love.

Creating Fiction also contains the essay “The Lingerie Theory of Literature: Describing and Withholding, Beginning and Ending” by Checkoway, which uses Victoria’s Secret catalogues to demonstrate how much detail you need in a story, and “Icebergs, Glaciers, and Arctic Dreams: Developing Characters” by Kim Edwards, which is just an all-around fantastic examination of characterization. I think it’s out of print, but you can get it for under $10 used or as a Google ebooks download. 

Procrastination!

I’m trying to do my homework, but I keep looking at the syllabus and going, “UGH, HEMINGWAY!” and then retreating to Tumblr. So. Gonna blather about POV a bit more here instead of reading “Hills Like White Elephants” for the eleventy-billionth time.

sheffiesharpe said: Oh. Hell. Yes. Keep talking point of view. I wish you’d been in my classes. Have you read Dorrit Cohn’s Transparent Minds? Her discussion of point of view, particularly free-indirect discourse (more or less limited 3rd), rocked my world pretty hard.

I haven’t, but I’ve added it to my Amazon wishlist. Mmm, craft books. Third person is one of my weak points, so I’d love to get another perspective on it! (Outside of fanfic, I usually default to first person; in fanfic, I use third person but always feel a little clunky with it.)

So, here’s a thought that I’ve been mulling over: In class last week, my prof pointed out that inserting a character’s thoughts in italics is a POV switch and, in general, is kind of a lazy trick. Any time you switch POVs, she’s been telling us all semester, your reader notices and you risk pulling them out of the story - so only switch POVs for a good damn reason. Suddenly listening in on a character’s thoughts directly when the rest of the story is told from outside their head? Not a good idea.

My gut reaction was “WHAT? NO” because I do that a lot and some of my favorite stories do as well. I always like to be inside a character’s head and know what they’re thinking - I’m a very character-oriented reader and writer, and I love that narrative intimacy. So something like this:

Good god, look at that arse, he thought, eyeing Sherlock from behind as they left the flat. 

…reads as a neat little porthole into the character’s inner workings. But my professor’s right in that, if the rest of the story has a POV that’s a bit more distant, it doesn’t read as well. Something like this would work better:

He eyed Sherlock from behind as they left the flat, admiring one of his few consistently charming assets.

(For some reason I read this in Karen Eiffel’s voice. Oh, Sherlock/Stranger Than Fiction fusion, someday I’ll get around to you!)

Meanwhile, if the POV is closer, right up in the character’s head anyway, you can get a similar effect by just ditching the italics and thought tags:

He eyed Sherlock from behind as they left the flat. Good god, look at that arse. 

…Which reads more fluidly to me than the original example. There may be something to this. 

I went looking through the fic I’ve always felt was my best example of a successful third person POV, The Apocrypha of Chuck, and figured out that I’d been doing that very thing for much if not all of that fic. The narrative distance between Chuck and the narrator is so close that the narrator may as well be munching on popcorn in a viewing room in the back of his head. There’s no need for the “he thought” tags because the narrator is just spouting verbatim what Chuck’s feeling, pop culture references and all:

Chuck was frozen. His head rang like someone had pounded it on the inside of the Liberty Bell, and it was starting to ache. He wanted to ask aloud, “What do I do?” but the last time he asked that, Dickface told him to write. Chuck was pretty sure that writing wasn’t the proper response to a dead angel on the floor. He was also pretty sure that doing a “Replace All” in The Winchester Gospel to substitute “Dickface” for Zachariah’s name wasn’t the proper response to being told he was Heaven’s butt monkey, but hey, everybody copes differently with stress.

This could’ve easily drifted into internal monologue territory, but the narrator said everything Chuck could’ve, in his own dialect, using the references Chuck himself would’ve used. But this narrator, while being sympathetic to Chuck and sharing all of his pop culture references, has the ability to put Chuck’s thoughts into words when Chuck himself can’t - generally at dramatically appropriate moments.  

That’s the really cool thing about third person narrators: they can carry on telling the story coherently even when your POV character is too overwrought to explain what’s happening. I love my first-person narrators and all, but they take a kick in the ass to explain what’s happening sometimes. 

I’m just rambling at this point and have no good conclusiony point to make, so I’ll just leave this here:

Dear friend, if you are a writer — particularly a young writer — who is reading this right now, I want you to promise me something. Are you ready? l want you to promise me that you will stay away from epithets when you are talking about characters who know one another’s names.

You do not need to say, “the blond man.” You do not need to say “the older man,” or “the taller man,” or “the smaller man.” You definitely do not need to transform adjectives into nouns and say things like, “the older,” “the younger,” or lord forbid, “the other.” (Unless you are writing the kind of academic paper that cites Lacan or bell hooks, in which using the other/Other is allowed, and also important). 

I know it might seem repetitive, but using names and pronouns is enough. They are the kinds of words that fade into the rhythm of your writing, and they will never stand out to your reader. They are the words that make sense.

When you look at your friends, you’re not thinking of them as “the red-headed woman,” or “the shorter person.” You’re probably thinking something like, “Natasha’s hair is getting so long,” or, “she looks beautiful today,” or “Jamie’s got a great shirt.” You think of people’s pronouns. You think of their names. And that is what your character does, too.