omelas writing masterpost

accepting that I will be thinking really hard about omelas approximately once per year for the rest of my life so here's a bunch of links for future me next time I go down this rabbithole

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, Ursula K. Le Guin (1973)

Omelas, Je T’Aime, Kurt Schiller (2022)

The Ones Who Stay and Fight, N.K. Jemisin (2018)

The Ones Who Yell at Omelas, Rite Gud podcast (2022) [links a bunch of other responses]

tumblr post by shedoesnotcomprehend (2018)

After We Walked Away, Erica L. Satifka (2016)

Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole, Isabel J. Kim (2024)

and bc I always forget, the BTS music video that references it is Spring Day

@ myself read another story jfc

The Rite Gud podcast lady was annoyed with Women Talking because she associated the dialogue with therapy language. Nevermind that the actual conversation is fictional and functions as a metaphor. The women also don't speak Plautdietsch so realism: 0.

@gatheringbones replied to your post “I read a podcast transcript about commodified...”:

@chaos0pikachu ….. I knew I didn’t want to read that

​lol yeah I haven’t read the book itself so I can’t judge it and shit but listening to the description especially what the author said his inspirations were and how everything is resolved with “kindness” like miss me with that basic ass pete buttigieg shit lmao 

I don’t think squeecore is a “bad” thing which is what the original discourse was trying to proposite (if anyone is curious Rite Gud did a follow up episode about the backlash they received) but it IS circle-jerky in lit spaces and I think that bit was lost in The Discourse like marketing depts (who in some pub houses have A LOT of say in acquisitions) will really push for squeecore content which is also predominantly white like publishing is still an industry that favors white voices (I’m still hella mad over American Dirt lmao) 

I think the other thing is squeecore books, writers, fans, and even critics overhype the importance of these books. House in the Cerulean Sea got a FUCK TON of praise from booktok and critics (which the podcast talks about), similarly American Dirt also got a fck ton of praise from booktube and critics but both stories were written by white authors appropriating the historical struggles of people of color and commodifying them for their own capital without examining any of the systems they were acknowledging 

I don’t mind squeecore as a sub-genre in the same way that while I don’t care much for cyberpunk I can still dig some stories or have a general ‘yeah, tight’ attitude towards the sub-genre but like, the overhype the way squeecore titles or authors by critics or fans that position them as like Activism is fucking annoying its not activism, The Goblin Emperor is not activism, go volunteer at your local community kitchen or food bank or LGBTQ support group my god 

anyways

A reminder for those in fiction #writing #amwriting on the power of vibes

#RiteGud No Plot Just Vibes https://kittysneezes.com/no-plot-just-vibes/ (1 hr 20m podcast)

https://youtu.be/Cm0maIh0K8g

"Many writers overemphasize the importance of plot. They focus on plot so much they forget about everything else. In this episode of Rite Gud, we are joined once again by Karlo Yeager Rodríguez, who is going to tell us why plot isn’t everything."

As "geek" culture dominates the box office, horror—with its gory, upsetting complexity—has proven to be the one genre capable of fighting back.

HORROR—WITH ALL ITS GORY, UPSETTING COMPLEXITY—MAKES FOR AN UNEASY PRODUCT.

Honestly, the kneejerk reaction to the squeecore podcast is kind of funny to me.

I don’t understand how people can get as upset about it as some people are getting unless they fundamentally agree with the squeecore tenet that fiction being artistically good is and must be equivalent to fiction being morally good, and they therefore parse “this fiction is artistically bad” as an attack on their moral character.

Notes on Squeecore

On January 13 R.S. Benedict’s Rite Gud podcast published an episode titled A Guide to Squeecore which served as an addendum and exploration of some topics raised during the previous November 11, 2021 episode Puppy Play. The discussion in this later podcast episode was wide-ranging and loose but it broadly posited that there is a dominant movement within SFF, that the participants in this movement…

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What are your favorite podcasts?

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs is the best music podcast that is out there and is exactly what it says on the tin. I am on the board of directors for Dig Me Out (literally the #forgotten nineties bands podcast) and becoming a part of that web community is, no joke, one of the best things that has ever happened to me in my 20+ years of talking to people on the internet. The podcast itself is fun, and I have contributed to a few episodes myself, but hanging out on Discord all day with a bunch of walking encyclopedias on obscure guitar bands is my ideal digital milieu. LOVE those guys. They have introduced me to so many albums and artists that never would have pinged my radar otherwise. Fuck algorithms, engage w/ human beings for your music recs!

So those are my two podcasts that I listen to regularly. Everything else is randomized. I like Flow State if I have to get work done and pop music is too distracting. Rite Gud and Bandsplain have some entertaining episodes. That's about it for me.

do you have any writing tips or writing advice? 👉👈

If you want to get better at writing, then read books and short stories, basically anything that isn’t fanfiction. Reading and writing original stories will show you how to get people invested in characters and settings from scratch and how immersive prose can be on its own merits without ties to a pre-existing, familiar, external source material. Even if all you’re writing is fanfiction, this approach will only make it better.

Movies, comic books, video games, television, and other media can be fine for conceptual inspiration, but nothing will show you how to write better prose than reading good prose, and understanding the unique strengths of prose as opposed to other media is instrumental to improving as well (and of course if you’re writing a comic book then you’ll want to read good comic books, etc.). Even reading bad writing will teach you something because if you think that it’s bad, so long as you can understand why then you’ll know that you don’t want to write like that.

Also, don’t only consume media from the particular genre or story structure you’re writing in. You see this a lot when someone who writes horror only reads horror, someone who writes romance only reads romance, or someone who wants to write a noir only checks out detective stories. Obviously it’s good to take inspiration intentionally, so don’t not read anything similar to what you’re writing, but it’s usually pretty obvious when someone is only making a pastiche of all the tropes and story beats they’ve seen other people do already; it strengthens a work a lot when the author is drawing from a diverse array of influences and are treating a story as a story, not necessarily one particular cookie-cutter thing.

In specific, I’m a very thorough outliner and I meticulously plan and sketch out all of my stories. This is a personal approach, maybe yours is similar or maybe you’re the kind of person who can just start typing away off the top of your head and then you revise it into a coherent story later. I also don’t “write 500 words everyday,” I tend to go on benders where I write a lot nonstop and then don’t write for a few days. But that’s more about process than anything else. The best writing advice I could give you is that the only universally good writing advice is that if you want to be a good writer you should also be a good reader, and that if you want to be a good writer then you have to enjoy writing as an activity and a process and not just be in it for the gratification and attention.

I also recommend the podcast Rite Gud if you want to learn how to rite gud, and it’s usually what I’m listening to while drawing comic book pages.

A log entry in the voyage of genre name looking for a genre

A log entry in the voyage of genre name looking for a genre

No, no, new topic tomorrow – finish old topic first. There’s a Reddit discussion on the squeecore conversation: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/s5mtre/whats_up_with_squeecore_and_superversive/ The Reddit discussion isn’t that interesting except that one of the comments there has since been endorsed by one of the Rite Gud podcasters promoting the idea. “amazing that some random…

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Be Thankful That Your Pablum is Exactly the Same Today as it Was Yesterday

Be Thankful That Your Pablum is Exactly the Same Today as it Was Yesterday

Camestros Felapton, Cora Buhlert, John Scalzi and numerous others are weighing in on the Rite Gud’s podcast about “squeecore”, the supposed dominant form of science fiction and fantasy that is dominating the field and driving all other forms out; or have resurrected the puppy argument more academically; or YA fiction is having inordinate influence on contemporary authors or Hard SF isn’t really…

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AHHHHHHHHH! I love Kendall and her husband so much 🤧🤧🤧 do you watch their mile higher podcasts? sum gud shiet rite there 👌🏽

NO I DONT BUT I REALLY NEED TO!!

here are some reccomendations for alternatives to harry potter: 

reddit post from r/fantasy with alternatives to harry potter

Trans-inclusive fantasy and sci-fi books

podcasts:

Rite Gud - Reed Gud, part 1 

Reading Glasses episode 158 

Enjoy!

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