Sister Corita Kent’s "10 Rules for Students, Teachers, and Life," 1967-68.

Corita Kent’s list for students, educators, and everyday experiences, serves as sagely and flexible advice for living life in a more creative capacity. It incorporates the trials and tribulations, as well as the joys of being an artist (or being artful) and/or an educator. Read more about the pedagogy behind Kent's list in my Artfully Learning post "Making a list, checking it twice, going to receive some artistic advice"

Re: Kastor's bachelor party

Concordia by Ccainao3

Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I’m Home

Yeah, there's something in the water lately! I've noticed a huge uptick in visceral CoHo and SJM hate that kind of alarms me. I'm not exactly a fan, but the criticism doesn't even really seemed to be aimed AT the authors. It's aimed at their readers in the patronizing tone of, "How DARE you read something that romanticizes X, Y, and Z?" And yeah, lately I've been seeing big BookTokers who've never really read fic before reading some of the big popular fics, and most of them are pretty generous and open-minded about it, but they're still ultimately approaching them as if they're published books, which is making all the people watching them think that's okay, and ugh!

I made a TikTok yesterday about my thoughts on SenLinYu's Manacled getting picked up by Del Rey, focusing mostly on what I think it means for publishing, how I think pull-to-publish is incredibly hard to do well, and how I doubt Del Rey is actually interested in giving SenLinYu the resources she'll need to pull it off. And it was beyond the scope of what I was trying to accomplish in the video, but the ethics of Dramione inevitably came up in the comments. I don’t really want to make a follow-up video, and I made a video about Dramione a couple years ago that I more or less stand by, but I have to get this thought out:

I don't begrudge people not liking Dramione as a ship because of the oppressor/oppressed dynamics. I think that's reasonable. But I do kinda worry about people forgetting that Wizards are not real and that Muggles are not an actual oppressed group. They were made up by a lady who has repeatedly demonstrated that she herself does not have a sophisticated understanding of those concepts. She thinks the thing that makes people Nazis is hating love and friendship and wanting to live forever. And I think it's pretty normal for people to want to engage with that more deeply through their own fiction because of what a bad and incomplete job she did the first time around.

I made a TikTok yesterday about my thoughts on SenLinYu's Manacled getting picked up by Del Rey, focusing mostly on what I think it means for publishing, how I think pull-to-publish is incredibly hard to do well, and how I doubt Del Rey is actually interested in giving SenLinYu the resources she'll need to pull it off. And it was beyond the scope of what I was trying to accomplish in the video, but the ethics of Dramione inevitably came up in the comments. I don’t really want to make a follow-up video, and I made a video about Dramione a couple years ago that I more or less stand by, but I have to get this thought out:

I don't begrudge people not liking Dramione as a ship because of the oppressor/oppressed dynamics. I think that's reasonable. But I do kinda worry about people forgetting that Wizards are not real and that Muggles are not an actual oppressed group. They were made up by a lady who has repeatedly demonstrated that she herself does not have a sophisticated understanding of those concepts. She thinks the thing that makes people Nazis is hating love and friendship and wanting to live forever. And I think it's pretty normal for people to want to engage with that more deeply through their own fiction because of what a bad and incomplete job she did the first time around.

Somebody wrote to ask me for advice on writing. This is what I told them:

I'm terrible at giving writing advice. I know that the best advice for one person can be the very worst for another, so feel free to ignore all of this except for the very first bit:  

There are a lot of people who will tell you they can help you write better, get your manuscript edited, get your book published.  A lot of them just want your money. As a general rule, don't give people your money for what you write -- make people give you THEIR money for what you write.  I've heard this called Yog's Law:  Money Should Flow to the Author.

Check out the Writer Beware site run by SFWA.

Not every writing program is a scam, but don't think you have to have an MFA or attend a famous writing workshop to be taken seriously as a writer.  You don't.

Decide who you are writing for before you start.  It's okay to write for yourself.  It's okay to write for that one person in high school with whom you shared fanfiction.  (I did that, it was The Thief).  It's okay to aim for a worldwide audience and it's okay to write for the three people in the entire world who will appreciate your story.  When you run into criticism (and you will) you want to be able to ask yourself if the criticism is coming from your audience.  If it's not, take it with a big grain of salt.

Writing can be hard work and it feels good to work hard, but it's okay to do it for fun.  Maybe you just want to write craptastic fanfiction -- you should do that and I hope you enjoy yourself.  Don't let other people dictate what "worthwhile" writing is.

Don't be afraid to write badly. Don't be afraid you'll "waste" that really good idea you have because you couldn't write well enough to do it justice.  You'll have another good idea.  

You have to write to be a writer.  That sounds obvious, but you have to figure out for yourself what makes writing happen and then you have to do it.  Some people will tell you their way of writing is guaranteed to work.  Do not believe them.  Some people can set themselves goals -- they write 2,000 words a day and they are good words!  Some set themselves a goal and they waste an entire day squeezing out 2,000 garbage words. Sometimes the conditions that you need in order to work will seem silly.  Friederich Von Schiller kept rotting apples around to sniff while he wrote.  I don't know if that would work for you. Only you know the way for you.  

Good luck,

~mwt

Jim Hodges at the Walker Art Center

Untitled (one day it all comes true), 2013

denim fabric, thread

i have no moral issues with filing the serial numbers off your fic, do whatever you want. but after working on my silly lil fanfic for over a year now… like... the idea of traditionally publishing it is absolutely unfathomable to me. it would literally require me to strip varnish away every little detail and texture that make it special. i would have to rework it so completely that by the time it was anything good again it would be unrecognizable. and also probably not very good.

sad reality of the fanfic-to-published work economy is that the weirdest people are willing to do it. that's why there's now hundreds of shitty no plot cishet hate-to-love enemies-to-lovers books that are ex reylo fanfic. and it's not even good. that's because the people who wrote book-quality steve/bucky and kirk/spock fic are too normal to think to themselves "i should get this porn published". they're too busy working in local government offices

shut up, i'm having fun

still toiling away at my silly lil fanfic btw

Freehand 70s and 80s computers. The inaccuracy is on purpose (I wanted to be loose w it)

Detroit painter Andy Krieger

Eleanor Coen

Photos of Mississippi Delta bars in the 1980s from the photobook Juke Joint by Birney Imes

“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.” - James Baldwin

Frank Bidart, “To the Dead”, Half-Light: Collected Poems, 1965-2016

[Text ID: “The love I’ve known is the love of two people staring

not at each other, but in the same direction.”]