i will defend improvised storytelling till the day i fucking die i think stories told by people under pressure to do it fast, stories told in collaboration…. that shits gorgeous and ALIVE. have you ever gone to a writing workshop and someone writes the rawest shit in the entire world during a ten minute free write? playing dnd and some dialogue is so moving it makes you wonder how it came from your dumbass friends? got really into one of those ‘one sentence at a time’ campfire story games and ended up making something— totally unrecorded, lost except to the people who were there— that should have been in the fucking moma?
people are full to the BRIM with stories and honing that storytelling into a specific practice (ex. writing) is for sure a learned skill that takes tons of practice to do effectively but…… it’s there. it’s there and anyone can tap into it if they’re given opportunity and an audience to say it to.
look, the point of telling stories is to connect with other people. and all we’ve ever done throughout human history is connect connect connect so is it any wonder when you put a human being in front of an outlet and you say ‘tell me a story’, no one stays silent?
Now imagine if instead of saying “I don’t understand why you make these stories, but you do you” and fucking off to look at stories they do like, that character instead says “your stories are ugly and unwanted, no decent person should tolerate you making them” and rallies the others to ban the creation of these kind of stories, shame the creator out of town, and declare anyone who would want such a story to be nasty and gross.
How to plan a long-term creative project for serial publication:
1. Make a firm decision about how big a single update is going to be, and estimate your sustainable update frequency based on that. This estimate should be based solely on your own demonstrated performance; you may anticipate that future productivity will exceed past productivity, but never make long-range plans on the assumption that future productivity will exceed past productivity. That is called the Planning Fallacy, and it will eat you alive.
2. Estimate how often you’re likely to miss updates. As a rough guideline, if you’re physically and mentally healthy and have no major commitments that would interfere with your ability to work on the project, figure that you’ll miss about 10% of your updates for various reasons. If you have health issues or frequent Real Life commitments, make it 20%. If 20% sounds low to you, you weren’t being honest with yourself about your sustainable update frequency; return to step 1 and re-assess.
3. Figure that you’ve got about two years before you lose interest in the project, gain some new commitment that will preclude continuing to work on it, or your art style evolves enough to make creative continuity impractical. If there’s some upcoming major life change that you’re able to anticipate – like, say, graduating from school – use either two years or that event as your soft deadline, whichever is less.
4. Use the figures from steps 1-3 to estimate how many updates you’re likely to be able to squeeze into this project, and write your outline/script based on that. You don’t need to wrap up every tiny little loose thread by that point, but ideally it needs to reach a point where you could stop and be satisfied with whatever conclusion has been reached. If you get there and you’re still enthusiastic about continuing, fantastic – return to step 1 and re-assess.
So, as a simple example: if you’re planning a webcomic, you figure you can reasonably manage about 1 page a week, and you’ve got a lot going on that’s likely to get in your way, that’s (2 years * 52 weeks/year * 1 update/week * 80% success rate on updates) = around 83 pages to work with, or about the length of a four-issue miniseries. What kind of story can you tell in 80-odd pages?
(Hint: it’s not a story that involves fifty-page combat scenes!)
Dole’s required to defend their trademarks or they might lose them. That vaguely threatening letter reads to me as “I have to legally say this but I don’t want to because I’m laughing too hard and they’re actually giving us marketing, but…I have to say it.”
The thing with telling “cliche” stories, but with representation, is… these stories aren’t cliche for us.
Picture this. The people at the table next to you have been getting chocolate cake as a dessert for YEARS. After every meal, they get a chocolate cake. Now, it’s been years, and the people at that table can barely stand chocolate anymore. They want maybe a cheesecake. Or lemon mousse.
But your table? Has NEVER had chocolate cake. Mousse is also good, but you are SO hungry for that chocolate cake, cause you never had it before, and it’s brand new for you, and you’ve been watching the other table eat it for YEARS.
That’s what’s like getting a “cliche” story that’s representative. Has it been done a million times before? Yes. Has it ever been done for US? Well… no. Maybe it’s the 500th chocolate cake in existence, but all the other chocolate cakes weren’t meant for us (girls/PoC/queer folk/disabled folk/etc)
So it being cliche is not a bad thing. You may not want chocolate cake anymore. But we want our slice too.
A Beauty and the Beast AU where Belle realizing she loves Beast isn’t at some dramatic climactic event but during some randome everyday moment. Like, she’s filing her nails and just kinda glances up at him and he’s like doing something just as dull and it just kinda dawns on her that she loves him but she doesn’t voice it cause she isn’t exactly ready to confront thoes emotions and what they mean so she goes back to filing her nails but then is starts raining glitter and Beast is defying gravity in a glowing ball of light and the castle is changing back and everyone becomes human again. Then everyone is left in silent moment of shock and confusion and Belle, being completely unaware of what it takes to break the curse, is just staring around in horror while everyone freshly humanized comes running into whatever room she and Beast were in (probably the library) expecting to see something other than human Beast in a heap on the ground and Belle across the room in a chair frozen in shock and confusion and everyone just kinda looks at each other for a couple of seconds not realy sure what to say cause nobody is entirely sure what happened other than the curse was broken. Then Beast finaly gets up and looks around and realizes what this means and looks at Belle and is just like “you love me?” And Belle is just like “wat?”
ALTERNATELY: Belle falls in love slowly. As a result, Beast turns back into a human slowly. She overhears him singing in the shower (it’s amazing how old pipes echo) and realizes it’s that song she was trying to teach herself on the piano (okay, that the piano was teaching her). It’s sweet and mundane, and lovely. Meanwhile, in the bathroom, Beast is humming nervously as he looks at the fur clogging the drain. He thought at least he’d be free of male pattern balding since he’s cursed! Later, Belle gets a cold, and Beast brings her soup and sandwiches, and she curses at him because how dare he have such a hearty immune system, and he chuckles and leaves it. After he’s gone, she notices he cut the grilled cheese on the diagonal, crusts off, exactly right. Beast, downstairs, trips and falls, because the sudden lack of toe-claws threw off his balance.
And so on and so forth, so slowly she doesn’t really see it, she just assumes her memories were colored by her fear. Until one day, as he goes out to tend his roses, she yells “Bye, love you!” and when he comes back in, all excited, she nearly beans him with an encyclopedia, because “WHAT THE FUCK, WHO ARE YOU?” and Beast is just “You seriously didn’t notice me turning back into a human? You are so smart… and SO DUMB, I BEEN NEARLY DYING EVERY TIME, WHY DO I LOVE YOU, YOU BEAUTIFUL DISASTER WOMAN!”
It’s time for another Installment of Family Lore from my wierd-ass childhood!
Story contains: poor childhood decisions, profanity, extremely poor animal handling practices, and a semi-graphic description of an injury. Mind the content warnings, your health comes first. As usual, all names have been changed to protect everyone’s privacy. rest of the story under the cut to avoid a five-mile post.
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This is the story of the first time I said the word “Fuck” In front of my mother.
When I was a kid, my parents would drive to Ohio from California every other summer of so to visit my Mom’s family, who never figured out that they can escape. Four days is a long ass time to be a small child in the back of an unairconditioned van with a bunch of rotting bananas but it was worth it for being able to more or less run wild through the Ohio woods.
My mother’s family consisted of my grandparents Polly and Bobby, and her younger brother, Bobby. Bobby has a saint of a wife named Stephanie, and three children. My sister was very fond of cousins Samantha and Amanda.
Due to a combination of Ye Olde Misogyny and post-delivery drugs, for about five generations there, the men had been naming all the children, so literally every AMAB person born into the family was named “Robert” and immediately shortened to “Bobby”. Uncle Bobby very nearly did this to his firstborn, wich would have brought the total number of Bobbies to 8 between the miscellaneous cousins and uncles, when Stephanie put her foot down and named him Jonathan Jackson the second she found out what sex he was.
Cousin JonJack is still my favorite cousin- he has a heart big enough to house every creeping and crawling thing on this planet, and a quiet determination to make things right with the world, even if that means doing something completely batshit insane.
We were camping at a place near West Branch State Park, at what is advertised as a “Luxury Campground next to a Private Lake” but is really an RV collection next to a glorified sump. It has the extremely redeeming feature of being smack in the middle of Northeast Ohio’s dense hardwood forest, and since we had parents that grew up in the area and had passed a reasonable amount of scouting knowledge onto us, we were turned lose after breakfast and told to return by dark or if anyone got hurt. This was splendid, as the woods were full of interesting things like nests of day-old rabbits, their hearts visible as they beat against their delicate rib cages, shimmering black rat snakes longer than we were tall, hives of wild bees, intricate in their geometric structure and remarkably patient as long as you didn’t poke them.
The Sump was even better- it had dozens of baby snapping turtles for the catch-and-releasing, catfish twice the size of any cat, a plethora of bugs and worms and crawdads and families of duck and best of all, Arthur, The Swan.
LINGUISTICS: Human language is very difficult. Too much is conveyed by body language and what they call ‘tone’. Thankfully Humans are patient with misunderstandings, and largely shrug off difficulties and explain as needed. No one is quite sure what the word ‘fuck’ means, and they are all afraid to ask. Its use is wide and varied, and too often leads to violence of one kind or another.
HOBBIES: When Humans began signing on as crew for multi-species vessels, they began hauling in all sorts of… things. Things that had NOTHING to do with their abilities to do their jobs. Musical instruments, pictures that were cut to pieces which are then reassembled painstakingly, chemical enhancements imbibed for recreational purposes, miniature pre-contact transportation vessels built in containers of glass that serve no evident purpose, meters and kilometers and LIGHT YEARS of string and sticks and small fiddly bits. “What do you do when you’re not working?” “Prepare for more work.” “Wow. Sounds boring.”
KNITTING: Really, not just knitting. The construction of any and all garments on-board ship. Often garments that serve no clear purpose. All needed gear is issued upon arrival. So why is that human standing watch with a handful of long metal wires and a ball of string? AND HOW DID IT BECOME A SOCK? WHY DO THEY KNOW WHAT SOCKS ARE? Crocheted lace is banned among some species because it triggers a closed-loop neurological function when watched.
BOREDOM: It’s not so much being bored that confuses other species. Any beings who traverse the stars are familiar with moments, sometimes long moments, of nothing to do. It is Humans’ approach to this feeling that is unusual. They DO THINGS. Too often, they involve others. “Bands” playing harmonious sounds. “Movie Night” becomes a thing in Human space, so common that for a long time other species thought it was a ritual of some kind. They include the rest of the crew; the crew is usually confused by Human ideas of entertainment. Attempts to share stories in the other direction only lead to the Humans themselves being confused.
The first Human to introduce rugby to a ship as a way to kill time was nearly tried for mutiny.
i'll apple your turnover 