#probably one of those topics i could have written an actual term paper on if i were still in my 20s
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You have in fact been saved from having to think about our beloved nemesis Inoue because I just remembered something older:
Hongo/Ichimonji, OG and Shin versions, compare and contrast? (And any other versions you happen to have encountered)
(Also totally agree Kaguragi-shipping contains unexplored possibilities, as much as I love his backstabbing games with Racles. Himeno, Rita and Jeramie would all be very strong dynamics)
(I'm glad you're doing this ask thing because it's fun chatting to you, disabled replies etc (which to be clear--very sensible in this hell world) would normally mean bombarding you with more asks would be the only way of directly replying haha)
OH MAN I AM FAILING AT TUMBLR
I read this and couldn't figure out why you couldn't reply...the problem was, evidently, we weren't mutuals. Do I know why? Nope. 🤦 Anyway, fixed that and adjusted my settings, because I do like replies, just not from randos.
ANYWAY!
All forms of Hongo/Ichimonji are valid and good! It makes sense and I am compelled by it! I am QUITE compelled by it. But you asked for more analysis and I can't do that while actively drooling, so let's mop up and proceed.
The KR71 version of the pairing, true originators of love in the 1970s, are one of those ships (and these are among my favorite kinds) that gives you a lot to think about in relatively little content. It's not often you get both Riders in the same place at the same time, but when you do, it instantly feels like a big deal. Obviously because it signals that the stakes are rising in the story, but also because, IMO, of the chemistry they have with each other. I point out the coin flip scene in the Sakurajima arc as an obvious example, but there are more.
Then I found out they have a canonical telepathic bond and basically catapulted into full fandom mode. There really are few things more intimate than the ability to touch minds.
And speaking of the types of weird intimacy you can only find in genre fiction, I must of course mention the manga, and one page thereof that has lived rent-free in my brain since the day I read it. The characterization is different here - for Ichimonji in particular - and it affects how they relate to each other in a way I don't care for as much. But come on. These guys got to share a body! Their minds joined together, all of their senses experienced as one! And that's incredibly sexy! (I wrote fic about that. And it takes A Lot for me to be into something enough to surpass my hangups and write smut.)
Which brings me to Shin, and the literal flailing meltdown I had in the movie theater when I saw my favorite manga page replicated in exact detail. These poor guys. They both wear their emotional wounds much more openly than their 71 counterparts, but they are also much more visibly healed by each other. This version I think offers the best example of how much of a relief it can be to find someone who shares your experiences, your pain, and to realize you aren't alone.
I love Shin KR dearly, wouldn't change a thing, so this is much more me lamenting the constraints of a feature film format than it is an actual complaint. I wish we had more time to see the Double Riders getting to know each other. But hey, that leaves plenty of room for fic, and I am more than good with that.
I've seen First/Next twice now and my brain still tries to pretend those movies don't exist most of the time. We'll leave it at that.
#ship it#ship it good#this is a lot of words#probably one of those topics i could have written an actual term paper on if i were still in my 20s#but im not so you'll have to settle for brainspew#seriously thank you for asking me this#kamen rider#kamen rider 1971#shin kamen rider#do these guys have a ship tag?#fuck it we ball
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6, 14, 17, 18, and 29 for the fic writer asks (or however many of those you want to answer!! I know thats a lot sorry lol)
6. Are there any fics from others you reread all the time?
@spectralsleuth's Little Scraps of Wisdom. It's the perfect blend of just fluffy enough to not require tons of mental energy, but also serious and angsty enough to keep my attention. Also the format makes it really easy to pick a section and just dip in-perfect for my ADHD ass.
14. If you could see one of your fics adapted into a visual medium, such as comic or film, which fan fic would you pick?
Doth, at least parts of it. The whole thing wouldn't translate well to visual media-there's tons of introspection, conversations that wouldn't be all that interesting visually. (at least not animated-you don't really get Cersei Lannister-esque performances from animated characters) Stuff like the actions scenes, big scenes with multiple people speaking, those would probably translate the best.
My Dishonored fic, god no. It's video game media and it's very obvious that that's the source material. It would be incredibly boring if you weren't in Daud's head the whole time.
17. What’s something you’ve learned about while doing research for a fic?
Uhh. Like. So much stuff?
For doth, it's been insanely broad. On any given day, my writing window might be filled with Wikipedia pages on scientific topics, cultural, history, law. Right now I have a bunch of pages open about military tactics and technology, a Google Maps of NYC, and then some articles on nobility and royal titles.
For The Red Queen, I had to learn a lot of architecture terms when writing Daud running around doing backflips off rooftops. I don't even think half of them even made it into the text, but I had to know what he was perched on top of like a daddy seagull. I also did a whole dive into the Black Death for that one. Oh, if you want an interesting fact, did you know the plague was actually carried by fleas and not rats like many assumed? That's partially why it was so bad in cities. Poland actually had a much lower death toll than the rest of Europe in part because of its high Jewish population (mostly refugees because many cities blamed them for the plague-because of fucking course they did) who washed more frequently than the average peasant at the time and their neighbors decided to get in on that too. Milan survived relatively unscathed because whenever someone showed signs of plague, they and their family members were walled up in their homes and set on fire.
18. What’s one of your favorite lines you’ve written in a fic?
I like the entire exchange between Leo and Draxum on the roof. There were a lot of details written into those lines that gave extra information or conveyed something about their mental states.
29. Share a bit from a fic you’ll never post OR from a scene that was cut from an already posted fic. (If you don’t have either, just share a random fic idea you have that you don’t plan on getting to.)
I've played around with writing out Cass's consensual kidnapping and walking in on Gale being brainwashed, with some blurbs about her adjusting to life in the Hidden City. They never really got past scraps, but I can post this scrap.
She’s just getting back from school, last week before winter break, her head swarming with final this and final that. Tom says hello to her from where he’s working at the dining room table. Casey says hello back and promptly excuses herself to go work on her final paper for English.
He should be happy about that. She’s actually doing her homework.
Tom’s not bad, she supposes. He’s nice enough and doesn’t try to catch her coming out of the shower. He and Cindy offered to pay the fee if she rejoined the hockey team this year. But he gets on her every last nerve. She’s their first foster and they are absolutely trying too hard. At least Cindy isn’t home enough to annoy her.
She shuts her bedroom door and drops her backpack on the floor. Ugh. She could kill whoever invented academic papers. Well, the Odyssey isn’t going to write about itself.
“I have to say, this wasn’t-”
Casey whirls around, grabbing the first thing she registers-some Hello Kitty knick-knack she keeps on her dresser, in this case-and hurls it at the intruder.
Draxum bats it away, barely raising an eyebrow.
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last book, current book, next book
tagged by @grassangel
Last Book: Death and the Virgin: Elizabeth, Dudley and the Mysterious Fate of Amy Robsart, by a Tory MP (I DIDN'T KNOW). This one was okay overall but I was confused about who the target audience was supposed to be, and part of that is that most of the book isn't actually about Amy Robsart (RIP) so if she's what you picked it up for you'll have to get through a lot of stuff you already know about the Elizabeth/Leicester pairing, and it seemingly dimisses the murder idea about halfway through (she doesn't die until about page 150 or something) only to suddenly decide "well actually" in the final chapter which is too little too late for me - if I pick up a book that promises SCANDAL and MURDER then I want that to be more prominent. (I suppose this book suffers from what plagues many of those Liz/Rob OTP novels, which is that their SCANDALOUS behaviour mostly just isn't by modern standards. OH MY GOD HE TOUCHED HER HAND?! IN FRONT OF THE SPANISH AMBASSADOR?!?! *FAINTS*)
So I wouldn't really recommend that one, and not just because it was written by a Tory MP (don't worry my copy was secondhand).
Current Book(s): Current paper book is Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II by Paul Doherty, which is full of exciting plot twists that I discussed recently, and the bit I am up to is after Hugh de Spense's been horribly killed but before Edward dies (this is not a spoiler because a) it's in the title of the book and b) this all happened in the 14th century of course he's dead by now), and currently Queen Isabella's shacked up with Roger Mortimer and ruling via her son (which is one of my favourite scheming queen tropes, yay!!) and Edward's in a castle, possibly in poor conditions, and yeah I assume he's about to get murdered and then we'll probably spend a chapter or two discussing whether or not this was Isabella's fault. OH NO, WHO HATH WROUGHT THIS TRAGIC TURN OF EVENTS?
Current Kindle book (main one, as I dip in and out of things a bit) is something about the six wives of Henry VIII by Antonia 'I'm Very Posh BTW' Fraser. Quite enjoying this one despite knowing what's going to happen to all of them. I'm only up to Anne Boleyn though and she's not even queen yet, we're still in The Interminable Divorce Proceedings which I feel is often the hardest part for a writer dealing with The Wives because it involves not much actually happening for ages and everyone gets increasingly depressed about Katherine of Aragon and then as soon as you're past THAT it's time to get depressed about Anne Boleyn. Anyway at the moment it's very awkward because Henry keeps frothing about Leviticus and how he is CURSED BY GOD because sure he has one legitimate child but she's THE WRONG SEX and this sort of thing is the reason Henry is always the least sympathetic character in any fictional version, even when they do a Bitch Anne Boleyn (oh, how edgy!). So there's a good chance I won't get to the end of this one because it's a big book with a complete shit as the 'protagonist' (it's non-fiction but u kno wot I mean) BUT in terms of the writing I'm enjoying it and it's a nice mix of Facts and Commentary so if you want a long book on this topic you could do a lot worse.
Next book(s): for paper book I plan on reading something fairly thin (because ow hand) which has maybe a 90% of being about a dead queen of England, and the next Kindle choice is further away (maybe) and will possibly depend on which Richard III biography is next to get a deep discount on Amazon.
I tag everyone, because why not?
#books and reading#history fandom#i am kind of stuck reading about kings etc because i don't feel up to anything else but at least a lot of it's entertaingly gossipy#occasionally i am forced to deal with something i actually give a fuck about like the peasant's revolt but that's usually fairly brief#like i don't really care too much if the duke of whever-the-fuckington gets stabbed in the eyes by the earl of cuntsdown#which makes up for the occasional chapter spent going “YOU LEAVE WAT TYLER ALONE YOU FUCKING PARASITE”#(obvious exception is that my Ironic Richard III Stanning has - of course! - long passed the point where Bosworth is An Proper Tragedy)
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some thoughts on ADHD and ASD
Hej, my name's Ise (she/they), 24 years old, student, and about a month and a half ago I was diagnosed with ADHD and ASD. I am currently in treatment (meds and therapy) for ADHD, but my doctor says that we should first tackle that before we look at its brother, ASD.
The too-much gene
Jenna Marble's phrase "too much gene" really resonates me, because when I get excited I also have a tendency to be a bit too much to handle. When speaking about my passions, I can talk anyone into a corner, and I will dominate any seminar if I find the subject even a bit interesting. I also have a strong tendency to be a "klugscheißer" or "besserwisser" (i think that is the more international one), so I will often correct people, not to show them how i am better than them but in the interest of creating the best product. I also gague when to make those remarks: I will not apply the same scrutiny to a text written by someone who is a beginner in that language as I would to a text written by someone who is a native speaker. I usually point out, correct and sometimes explain, but I dont belittle, e.g. by saying how elementary that is.
That too much gene also shows itself in my writing, as you might have noticed. What was supposed to be a straight forward short text turns into a novel. I have really big problems narrowing in on just one topic: when tasked to write a paper one any topic regarding scandinavian monarchy, I spend two months on researching the entire history of three royal houses and earldoms and in the end could not single out a reasonable topic for one term paper.
And I have a bit of anxiety that the ADHD meds will only make me more unbearable, more to handle.
2. How do I know they are working?
I am on a constantly rising dosis of Medikinet, as of today I am taking 30mg of them in the morning and another 20mg around mid-day.
While I do notice the constant tiredness that had been bugging me has reduced, i still dont "think in HD", as my doctor said I might. I am still trailing off in class, but can nevertheless still answer when the prof asks a question. I can write a pagelong essay for the student magazine in one sitting, but thanks to hyperfocus that was something I could do before. I think that maybe my energy and my motivation has risen, but not so much my ability to (control my) focus.
There is also the general problem that I am a very critical person, not (only) as in self-critical but also very much as in critical theory, how do I know that what I am experiencing is real and not a simulation, critical. Okay, maybe thats a bit too much, but more like: how do I know the meds are doing their job and this isnt just a placebo effect taking place? And what if my increase in energy is simply due to my surroundings, the sun coming back and the end of the semester approaching, the new flat, different people I hang out with or my diet and exercise, and not the meds?
And additionally, how do I know that my brain does what it is supposed to do, when it has probably never in my life done that? (And lets not get into a rant about normativity here.) This is actually a thing I was already thinking about when I was about ten years old: how I can I know what I am feeling, both emotion and sensory/pain wise, when those feelings dont come with a label and I can never know what exactly someone else is feeling?
Life doesnt come with a pop-up menu for stats, where you can clearly see whether the pain your feeling is the worst pain imaginable or whether that little hitch in your breating is due to anxiety, walking up the stairs or a cold.
#autism#adhd#i had a third thing about taking meds to be a productive member of society but it got too complicated and i started getting distracted#responses are welcome
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on women speaking up.
Since I started writing about radical feminism, I’ve had several people — all women — angrily denounce my opinions and writing, some of them former friends, directly to my face. They’ve said things like, “you’re not a scholar!” I have never claimed to be. “You think you’re some kind of philosopher!” Actually, I don’t think that. All I’ve ever said is that I am a writer, which is true. All that qualifies one to be a writer is that one has thoughts; one writes them down; one does it with some regularity. That’s all.
I wondered why I began to get these strange reactions when I had never had that kind of reaction to anything else I’ve ever written or spoken about. My friends have always known me to be opinionated, fiery, and forthright. They never up and dropped me for speaking out on other politically charged topics, even if we did not completely agree; it’s just this one topic. Feminism. When I started speaking up for myself, as a woman, and began writing and sharing feminist analysis. When I began aligning myself with women. That was what enraged these women to the point of ending our friendship without a word.
Not all of the reactions have been so negative. I’ve gotten very positive responses, too, which encourages me. But the negative responses from fellow women are extreme in a way I’ve never experienced before. I wondered why.
I think what is happening is that these women are resentful that I am speaking about women’s issues. These are women whom I know to be intelligent and opinionated; I know they feel silenced. I know they feel stifled. I know they lack the language of feminism that would enable them to articulate their feelings. I know they are confused, and very angry. I know how that feels. I was there not very long ago.
It’s why I did not share my writing for a very long time. I knew that the things I wanted to say were going to hit a nerve. It’s why I struggle to continue sharing every time I write something that has to do with women’s liberation – whenever I am writing something that I know is “forbidden” because I am not concerning myself with what men will find acceptable. Probably 95% of my writing stays hidden in my extensive collection of journals and drafts and random papers and notes on my phone – not because I am afraid of men but because I am afraid of negative backlash from other women. Men may disapprove, but they largely ignore what I have to say at this point; I have no credit with men anymore and that suits me fine. It is fellow women who become absolutely furious with me for the things I say.
I used to resent women who spoke out, too. I was jealous. I thought, who gave her the right to say that?? Who gave her the right speak so confidently, so unapologetically?? I saw these women as sneering and self-righteous, narrow-minded, pretentious and egotistical, what have you — all the terms and phrases used against women who are not properly deferential toward men, who do not bother to coddle male feelings with their words. I realized, eventually, that I was projecting all my fears onto these women. I knew how men characterized these outspoken women, and I knew that if I spoke the way they did, that I would be called those things, too.
Eventually, I realized how desperately I wanted to be a part of this conversation. I realized how much my fear was holding me back. I admired the way these women spoke, and I wanted to be like them. I was exasperated by the conundrum presented to me when I saw them speak. I could do that — speak for myself — there was nothing truly stopping me. But I was haunted by the awareness that I would be punished severely for it.
Before I had any inkling of a feminist consciousness, which armed me with an understanding of the invisible dynamic I saw before me, the unfairness of it all was too much for me to bear. Radical feminism affirmed to me that it was, indeed, unfair. That I was right to be angry. But those outspoken women were not the deserving recipients of my anger; they were only the reminders of the price I, too, would have to pay if I gave myself permission to speak. This, too, I knew. And I felt ashamed for feeling angry at them anyway.
I was trapped by the patriarchal principle that a woman must seek permission from a man before she is allowed to speak. We are taught that we must obtain approval from a man — a professor, a college president, a doctor, a lawmaker, a boyfriend or husband or brother or father; any kind of male "expert” or master — before we are allowed to say anything about our lives and experiences. This is, of course, not true. We don't need permission from men to speak. We are conditioned to seek male approval for anything we as women think, do, and say, and male approval acts as a powerfully intoxicating drug. Male disapproval feels even more frightening, threatening, and disorienting. And it only takes a few encounters with male disapproval to teach us that we must avoid it or else we shall pay a costly price.
Though when you stop seeking male approval, and stop arranging your life around avoiding male disapproval, you will find that it is not so bad as you feared. You will start to notice how much of your life was wasted on worrying what men think of you. You will notice the tradeoff is not so awful as you had been warned. You have lost male approval, but you have won your own self-respect. You begin to trust yourself again.
You notice how men do not seek permission from anybody before saying what they think. They rarely second-guess themselves at all. Women are so used to feeling stifled, silenced, trapped by men – and by other women who are aligned with male interests – that it’s very easy for us to look at another woman who is giving herself permission to speak, and to be angry at her; why has she broken the rules? Who told her she could do that, and why not me?? She feels like an appropriate target for our repressed rage. It isn’t socially sanctioned to direct that rage at the men who are silencing us.
I decided one day to give myself permission to speak about my life and my experiences. Any woman can decide to do this. You can decide today, right now, to permit yourself to speak.
When I speak about myself and my experiences, I am not preventing you from speaking about your experiences. I am not declaring myself an expert on your life. Only mine. When you speak up about your experiences, it does not prevent me from speaking up about mine. Does it upset you to see a woman speaking for herself without asking permission? Are you really angry at the outspoken woman herself, or is it because you wish that you, too, could speak out?
When I write, I am hoping for conversation. I'm not trying to speak over anyone or prevent anyone else from speaking. On the contrary, I love when women respond to me and refute things that I have written. I am positively giddy when women read my words and respond with their own. I welcome other women's interpretations on what I have said, who connect things that I may not have connected. It is not always pleasant or easy. I have had plenty of difficult and uncomfortable conversations, misunderstandings, and miscommunications. I have made mistakes and expect to make plenty more. But that is life. I am trying.
I was tired of staying silent, and I am not silent anymore — I am saying something. That is why I write, so that I can be a part of the great ongoing conversation of humanity. I gave myself permission to do this when I realized I was not going to get permission from anyone else.
It is an indignity to be shamed and silenced and threatened for daring to speak up for oneself. We women cannot allow our anger and resentment at this indignity to tear us apart; we may not always agree with each other, but we all deserve to be a part of the conversation if we wish to be, if we have something to say. I believe all women have something important to say. A woman permitting herself to take part in this conversation does not take away another woman’s right to contribute, too. All of our voices are important — and our voices are stronger together than alone.
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I'm reading The Viking Spirit by Daniel McCoy after being recommend it, but I'm finding myself quite disappointed with it as the author seems to often insert his own opinions and emotions, mostly without clearly stating what is his own conjecture and personal opinion and biases.
Do you know of any better books that go over the history of the religion of the Norse peoples?
Hey, yeah, I don’t recommend Dan McCoy -- anyone presenting their website as “Norse Mythology for Smart People” is trying to sell you something other than just the information you’re looking for.
I gotta admit, the longer I’ve been out of academia, the less qualified I’ve become to answer this. Still, if I sat here for a while I could probably come up with hundreds of books on the topic off the top of my head (although to be fair, most of the authors would be listed as “I forget their name, I think they’re Danish?”). It’s a huge, multidisciplinary field. The old general introductions are all out of date and the topic has gotten so broad and detailed that a new general overview probably couldn’t possibly be written, because it would be such a massive undertaking that by the time it’s done, it would already be obsolete. I’ll give you a few recommendations though. Some of these are about narrow topics like seiðr or fate, but it’s impossible to treat those thoroughly without also digging into other aspects of Norse religion, so even those may be helpful even if those more narrow subjects aren’t of particular interest.
The best way to find good reading material is, once you have something already that you like, check out that book’s footnotes and works cited. Look into the author, see what else they’ve written and who they’ve worked with. Of course, you need to already have gotten started for that to work, so hopefully my response can help with that.
I have a lot of very well-informed followers, so hopefully some of them can add some stuff to the list too.
Most of the work that gets done in the field gets is in articles rather than books. That can be hard to break into, because most of them assume you already know a bunch of stuff that you might not. Any peer-reviewed article should be well-cited enough for you to investigate any of that, but sometimes those sources will turn out to be hard to acquire or maybe in a language you don’t know. Still, it’s not a bad idea to head to https://www.academia.edu and search for some sub-topics interesting to you, or find a paper like this one (just a random example) and check out the related papers on the right.
Old Norse religion in long-term perspectives, ed. Anders Andrén, Kristina Jennbert, and Catharina Raudvere (2006). A big collection of conference papers from a conference on this topic in 2004 by some 70ish authors, covering a huge range of topics. It’s not a general overview -- this is like going to academia.edu to look for papers but taking a shortcut by having a collection curated for you, but it’s a good collection by some of the most important authors in the field.
Thomas DuBois, Nordic Religions in the Viking Age (1999). I’ll be honest, it’s been a long time since I’ve actually read this, but it was kind of a game-changer when it was written. I found it early in my own development and it helped send me in the right direction. Once this book came out, it was no longer possible to write about all Nordic peoples having a single monolithic culture. It also takes the Sámi people into account in an actually respectful and considered way, which has become more common since then, but was a big deal when it was written.
Christopher Abram, Myths of the Pagan North: The Gods of the Norsemen (2011). This is an introduction to the study of Norse mythology, which is to say, not an introduction to Norse religion. It treats these as two distinct spheres of study with different methods for approaching them
Anders Andrén, Tracing Old Norse Cosmology (2014). This is actually about the pre-history of Nordic religions. It’s about using a dialogue between archaeology and later mythological texts to try to see what can be learned about the development of that later mythology. Andrén focuses specifically on three aspects of the cosmology: the world tree, middle-earth, and the sun.
Karen Bek-Pedersen, The Norns in Old Norse Mythology (2011) or her dissertation, which is free online, Nornir in Old Norse Mythology (2008). The most thorough source out there on the topic of the norns and of fate in Norse myth and religion. One thing that stands out about this book is just how much upheaval of old assumptions and misunderstandings it does. If you happen to be heathen yourself, that probably makes this one even more important.
Neil Price, The Viking Way (2019). An extremely dense, detailed book about seiðr, using mostly an archaeological and anthropological perspective. Definitely a must-read for anyone interested in the topic, and it’s very well-sourced and there is a great deal of text in it explaining the history of research and fairly presenting opinions of other authors that diverge from his.
And here are some more that might be useful, but should be read with a little bit of caution:
Neil Price, The Children of Ash and Elm (2020). Full confession: I haven’t read this one. It comes highly recommended from many corners of the internet. I’ve already recommended a book by the same author. This is probably something somewhat like what you’re looking for. Just, if you’re going to read it, read this review by Mathias Nordvig and keep the criticisms in mind.
E.O.G. Turville-Petre, Myth and Religion of the North (1964). This is kind of the old standard introduction. It’s quite out of date, having been written back when such a general overview was possible. While I recommend reading it with the understanding that anything in it could have become corrected, recontextualized, debunked, or otherwise made obsolete in the last half-century, it’s still actually not a bad idea to read it anyway, not only because there’s plenty of stuff that actually will be found to hold up, but also because it gives you a picture of the state of scholarship as it went into the more contemporary modes of research. Norse mythology has been studied for so long now that scholars aren’t just studying that, they’re also observing and dialoguing with Norse studies from earlier periods, and this is among the best of that. It also has the benefit of being in the public domain: https://archive.org/details/TurvillePetreMythAndReligionOfTheNorth
I hope that helps, and if you want some more, or if there are particular subtopics that you’re looking for, or if there’s anything I can clarify for you feel free to send another ask.
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Stars Aligned Chapter 3
(Please do not ask when the next chapter will be, I do not know. Links to AO3/FFN will be included in reblog.)
.
Here’s the thing. The very, very, stupid thing. Despite all his planning for this trip, Danny had no idea what his birth family looked like. Presumably, they also had no idea what he looked like.
As much as Danny would like to blame this on a wizardly aversion to the internet and photographs, he couldn’t. Danny could have sent them a picture of himself through the mail at any time. Even if wizard mail involved owls for some unexplained reason. But he didn’t. Because he was dumb.
And his equally dumb wizard family had also failed to send any pictures.
What were they thinking? Did they assume they’d somehow recognize each other on sight? Was that a wizard thing? Did they expect to spontaneously develop blood-relative telepathy? Was that a thing?
Danny did not know what to expect. He honestly didn’t know enough about wizards.
The end result was that Danny was standing in the middle of the wizarding world’s equivalent of an airport, which involved way more open fires than could possibly be safe, and people stepping into those open fires, which, again, could not possibly be safe. Of course, Danny had done it, as uncomfortable as it was for his core, and anything that used internal combustion was technically also using fire as a means of transportation, so Danny might have been a bit of a hypocrite, but still.
But, back to his dilemma. He, a dumb teenager, could be expected to do dumb, thoughtless things and make easily avoidable mistakes. It was basically a requirement. His actual family, who probably could have realized the error, didn’t want him to go and could be forgiven for any oversight. But dumb wizard birth family had at least one semi-competent adult in it. Supposedly.
Despite himself, his desire to kidnap his brother increased. Even though it would most likely cause an international incident.
He sighed. Maybe he should just follow the crowd and see if anyone stopped him. After all wizards might have magic blood-relative detection something or other.
He trudged along, pulling his trundle suitcase behind him. Silver lining was that whatever happened, he didn’t have to spend hours in a metal tube breathing recycled air. Silver lining. Silver lining. Silver—
Ah. Hm.
Danny blinked at his name written in large letters on a square of poster paper. His first and middle names, that is, and his bio-family’s last name.
He was highlytempted to turn around and go back home, but there was his twin, holding the card and looking fragile and hopeful, standing next to a tall woman with greying black hair.
He sighed. He was doing this, then.
“Hi,” he said, “you must be Draco. I’m Danny. And, uh, you must be Narcissa Malfoy?” He sort of held his hand out, feeling awkward.
“You can call me mother, Deneb,” said Narcissa. She sounded slightly tearful.
“It good to meet you, Deneb. Er. Danny.” Draco’s eyes flitted up to his mother.
“Yeah, um. Please don’t take this the wrong way, Mrs. Malfoy, but I don’t actually know you. And I’ve got a mom.”
“Yet,” interjected Draco. “You don’t know mother yet. That’s what this visit is about, right?”
“Right,” said Danny. “I’m… really looking forward to it.”
Draco looked relieved. “Excellent. Well, then, Looky can get your luggage and we can floo home.”
A very small, rather wizened person stepped out from behind Draco’s legs.
Okay. Danny had questions.
.
Danny did not particularly care for the answers to his questions.
.
Draco didn’t know why his twin had stopped talking to him before they’d even gotten home. He had, to some degree, expected rough spots. Merlin knew his family didn’t get along perfectly. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t hoped he and his twin would have a special connection. That they would mesh.
That… wasn’t happening. In fact, this was rather… awkward. Painful, almost.
He thought back to what they had been talking about. He didn’t think he’d said anything particularly objectionable. Had he hit on some chip on the shoulder those squibs had inculcated in him? Well, he thought, rather shamefacedly, he shouldn’t think of them like that. They hadn’t been the ones to abandon Deneb – Danny – just for not being immediately magical.
“Right,” he said, as Danny stepped (jumped, looking slightly disturbed) out of the fire. “Let me show you your room. We’ve had the house elves clean it out.”
Something on Danny’s face went dark, but he visibly controlled himself. “Thank you,” he said. “And, um, thank you, Looky. For your help.”
Draco frowned. He was confused, and he didn’t like feeling confused. He knew muggles didn’t have house elves, of course, but still. The concept wasn’t that hard to understand, was it? Although, it was possible Danny had never come across house elves at all, even second or third hand.
He supposed they might be unsettling if they were the first magical creature one came across. Ugh. He’d never tried to put himself in the position of someone learning about magic for the first time. Why would he? That was mudblood business, and he’d never associate with one of those.
But Danny was in that position, just about.
That meant it was Draco’s job to help Danny understand.
.
Danny was hoping he was misunderstanding something and that wizards did not, in fact, practice slavery.
This seemed to be a forlorn hope.
“So,” said Draco clasping his hands behind his back in the doorway of ‘Danny’s’ room, “er, house elves. You’ve probably not seen them before.”
“Can’t really say so, no.”
“Probably the first magical creatures you’ve seen.”
“Um,” said Danny. “Also no. I did have to go get a wand and stuff, and you’ve got to go to a wizard town to do that. I saw a bunch of different stuff there.” He didn’t really want to explain the ghosts, but… “Also, my parents study ghosts.”
“You mean, your adopted parents.”
“My parents, yes.”
“I didn’t know squibs could see ghosts. Well, they never seemed to have any trouble with it, so…” He shrugged.
“I… see.”
Danny doubted it, somehow. “But you were saying? About house elves?” Benefit of the doubt, he reminded himself.
“They’re servants,” said Draco. “Magically bound to serve certain families.”
“Magically bound,” repeated Danny, liking this less and less.
“Yes, it’s very old magic. An ancient agreement between our race and theirs, and the individual families and the house elves in question.”
“They can’t, like, opt out or anything?”
“That would defeat the point.”
“Okay,” said Danny. “So… Do they get, you know, paid at all?”
“Of course not,” said Draco.
Danny closed his eyes. “Okay. Um. Draco.” How to put this in a way that wouldn’t immediately alienate him. “Isn’t that slavery?”
“No,” said Draco, immediately. “They want to serve.”
“Well, they might say that to you, but human slaves used to say the same thing, because they’d get in trouble if they didn’t.”
Draco opened his mouth, closed it, and then said, confidently, “It isn’t like that.”
“Are you sure?”
“They aren’t human. They want to do this.”
Danny was no stranger to dealing with inhuman mindsets (but he most definitely did not have one himself). Even so…
“I think my point still stands. Like, are there very many house elves in this situation?”
“I don’t know,” said Draco. “I suppose so. Most families of substance and breeding have at least one.”
“Okay. Ah. Look. I’m not even sure where to start with this. Slavery is bad, right? We can agree on that.”
An annoyed expression passed over Draco’s face. “Yes, we can. That’s a given. But that’s for humans—"
“Great. Let’s start there. It’s bad for any human, right? Even, like, no-majs, or stupid humans, or—”
“Muggles,” corrected Draco. “No-maj is the American term.”
“When in Rome, I guess, sure. Muggles, then.”
“Yeah,” said Draco, uncomfortably crossing his arms.
Oh, Ancients, there was something there. Which Danny should have expected, given his birth father, whom he had yet to meet, threw him out of the house literally at birth.
Wizard supremacist weirdos corrupting his poor twin brother.
“Then what makes house elves so different?”
“Like I said, they want to do this. It’s in their nature. You wouldn’t, I don’t know, decide a dog was unhealthy because it barked instead of meowed, would you?” He spread his hands in frustration.
“I’ll give you that, but Looky looked actively afraid of you. And what was she even dressed in? That can’t be comfortable.”
“Giving them real clothes would free them – only if it’s their master, which in this case is Father.” He shifted slightly. “Except for Looky, I suppose, who is technicallymine. Great Aunt—Oh, you won’t know her. Why do you even care?”
“Why do I care about other people suffering? But otherthan that, what’s the difference between a house elf and a human servant? Like, would you treat a human servant like that? If you were a servant, wouldn’t you want to be treated with respect, even if being a servant was all you’d ever wanted?”
“But I’m not a servant.”
“But if you were. Can’t you just try to imagine it? A little? Please?”
“I… fine. But don’t bring this up to Mother and Father. They wouldn’t be pleased.”
“Okay. Deal.”
“Deal,” agreed Draco. “So. Do you like your room?”
Danny looked around. “Yeah, actually. It’s nice. Bit different from what I have at home, but, yeah. Good, um. Good floors. And wallpaper. And, um. Do all wizard paintings move like that?” He genuinely hadn’t noticed until just now, intent on the house elf problem.
“Yeah,” said Draco, seemingly relieved at the more normal topic. “It’s an enchantment on the canvas and paint.”
“Seems like it’d be hard to work with,” observed Danny.
“Well, the spell isn’t finished until after the actual painting part is done. At least, that’s my understanding.”
“I see, that would be easier.”
Silence.
“Would you like to see the peacocks?”
“Sure, why not?”
.
It took a bit of time to get bundled up in coats (cloaks in Draco’s case) because it was cold outside, but once they did…
“Wow. They’re albino peacocks.”
“Yes.”
“Wild.”
“No, they’re quite tame.”
“Oh, it’s, um, it’s an idiom. Like cool. Or wicked, I guess? Do British people use that?”
“I’ve heard some people use it. But Mother and Father are… not particularly enamored of slang.”
“Right,” said Danny. “I’ll remember that.”
They continued walking through the garden, towards the pond. Danny tried not to dwell on how much labor it would take to keep the grounds here so pristine.
“What do you do for fun in America?” asked Draco, out of nowhere.
Danny blinked. “Different people do different things,” he said. “Uh, a lot of things I usually do won’t work here because of the whole magic and electricity not getting along well thing. Have you ever heard about video games?”
“No,” said Draco. “Is it anything like quidditch?”
“I have only the loosest of understandings of what that is. It’s that broom sport, right? The one where you fly?”
Draco looked scandalized. “… Yes,” he said, finally. “I’m going to have to teach you how to use a broom before you have to go back to America.”
“The flying type of broom?” asked Danny, teasingly. Sure, he already could fly, but whatever.
“Merlin, yes.” Draco rolled his eyes. “I’m part of my house’s quidditch team. Letting you leave without some understanding of the rules would be a crime.”
“Draco, are you a jock?” asked Danny. “What is this world coming to. Related to a jock.” He shook his head dramatically. “I’ll never live it down.”
Draco nudged him slightly. “I’m not a meathead beater, at least,” he said. “I’m the team seeker.”
“I have no idea what that means.”
Draco’s smile slowly slid off his face.
“What?” said Danny.
“It’s just… you should. You should have grown up here, with family, as part of this world.”
“I did grow up with family,” said Danny. “Just not direct blood relatives. It kind of sucks that we didn’t get the chance to grow up together, but, like, I’m not really impressedby your parents so far.”
“Mother was very upset when she heard what Father did.”
“Sure, but she also kind of ditched us as soon as we got back here.”
“She has a delicate constitution? I’m sure she’s just trying to decide how to act… giving you space to make you feel more comfortable?”
Danny shrugged. “Well, we’ll see what happens. I’m going to be here until the end of the break, after all.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to go to Hogwarts, just for the rest of the school year? I’m sure they’ll be better than any alternative in America, when it comes to catching you up. Father has friends on the board of governors and the Ministry Department of Educational Oversight. It would be easy for you to go.”
“My friends are all back home,” said Danny, “and magic or not, what I really want to do with my life is become an astronaut, and I need ‘muggle’ grades and school for that.”
“A what now?”
“An astronaut?”
Surely, Draco had just misheard him.
“Is that some sort of muggle thing, then?”
“I- Do you not know what an astronaut is?” asked Danny, flabbergasted. “Really?”
Draco’s eyebrows were furrowed. “No, I don’t.”
“How about cosmonauts? Do you know about them?”
“No,” said Draco. “Is this related to the Argonauts, somehow? That Greek thing?”
“No,” said Danny. “I mean, the root word – But no. Not the same thing at all. How do I even… Do you know what outer space is?”
“Astronomy is a class at Hogwarts.”
“Not a very good one,” said Danny, “if you don’t know what an astronaut is. I think I’d die.”
“It’s a very good class. Hogwarts is the best wizarding school in Europe. And I know what outer space is. It’s the space up above the atmosphere, where the planets and stars are, and stuff.”
“Okay. I mean. I’m not trying to make you feel bad or anything,” reassured Danny, sensing that he had ruffled some feathers. “I’m just… an astronomy class should teach about astronauts. Astronauts are people who’ve been to space. Outer space.”
“That’s rubbish,” said Draco. “You can’t go to space.”
Danny refrained from informing Draco that he had, in fact, been to space. “Well, I want to go to space,” said Danny, “and other people have been there.”
“No one’s been to space,” said Draco. “Unless maybe someone apparated there by mistake, but how would you even do that?”
“I don’t know what apparating is,” said Danny. “Some kind of teleportation?”
Both of them stared at each other, each one probably at a loss for words regarding the other’s ignorance of things they themselves considered common knowledge.
“Yeah, more or less,” said Draco, finally. “But you can’t get to space. It’s impossible.”
“It isn’t. There are people up there right now,” said Danny. “On the International Space Station. Which is… it’s sort of a little house. In space.”
“There’s no air up there.”
“They bring the air with them.”
“Wouldn’t it explode?”
“They figured out how to make it so it wouldn’t explode. It’s very, um. Sturdy. Rigid. The space station is airtight.”
“And you’re saying that there are muggles in it. In space. Outer space. Right now.”
“As we speak. I mean, I guess some of them could be secret wizards, but considering your reaction, I’m doubting it.”
“Muggles. In space.”
“Yeah. We made it to the moon, too. But that was—”
“The moon?”
“Yeah?”
“In the sky?”
“That, uh.” He looked up, as if expecting to see the moon despite the thick cloud cover. “Yeah. The moon.”
“You’re telling me,” said Draco, in a hushed voice, “that there are muggles on the moon. Right now. As we speak.”
“No, that was before we were born,” said Danny.
“What.”
“Yeah, some people went, but it was really expensive, so they haven’t been back. Which I think is silly, because can you imagine the scientific advancements we could have made? The resources we could have brought back?”
“The moon.”
“You seem really hung up on this. Are you okay?”
“You- That- The moon. And muggles in space?”
“Yeah,” said Danny. He rubbed the back of his neck. “So, you see why I need to go back. I’m sure Hogwarts is great and all, but I really want to be an astronaut.”
“Can you see them through a telescope?”
“See what?”
“The muggles in space.”
“On a clear night, sure, if you know where to look.” Before the Accident (the Big One, the Unaliving, the Green Flash, the Knockoff Origin Story), Danny usually checked the internet for the times the ISS passed overhead. But he’d developed a ghost power that gave him a pretty good sense of where anything in the sky was, so long as he concentrated for a few minutes. “It orbits the Earth every ninety minutes or so, although it doesn’t always catch the light enough to see properly. You can actually see a lot of satellites.”
“There are more of these things?” hissed Draco.
“Not with people on them.”
“I’m getting my telescope,” declared Draco, starting to stride back to the house.
“We won’t be able to see anything now,” said Danny.
“It’s enchanted to see through cloud cover and ignore non-reflected sunlight. It’s top of the line.”
Danny had never wanted a physical object so much in his entire life.
“What? What? Magic can do that?”
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Hierarchy of Evidence
Science Literacy Lesson #2
Here’s the thing about science: it’s trying to prove itself wrong. All the time. And if it fails to prove a hypothesis wrong, then it concludes it must be getting closer to the truth.
Not that it has discovered the truth, just that it is closer. This is why important concepts in science are termed Theories, they are inviting you to test them, to challenge them, to prove them wrong. Calling something a Theory does not mean it’s unproven. The Theory of Evolution is on equal footing as the Theory of Gravity, but you don’t see many people jumping off rooftops because ‘Gravity is just a Theory!’
(Compare this to dogma that actively discourages questioning or challenging it)
But how we gather that evidence is subject to a hierarchy. Not all evidence is equal, not all ‘proof’ is valid and this information gets ranked. This is infuriating for science people talking to non-science people who don’t know why these things are ranked as they are.
So since it’s topical, and in some discussions it’s always topical, here’s one basic Hierarchy of Evidence in ascending order, with examples below the cut:
An anecdote (doesn’t really count tbh)
Expert Opinion
Case Study
Series of Case Studies
Case Control Studies
Randomized Controlled Trials
Double blind randomized controlled trials
Systemic reviews of those controlled trials
Details below the cut
Anecdote: An Anecdote is the personal experience of one person. It does not have enough case numbers behind it for statistical analysis (1 in 1000 odds still happen sometimes, does not mean it’s common) and often not enough detail to extrapolate onto the wider population. For example: A dog doing well on a particular type of food, one person winning tattslotto, one person attributing their survival of an illness to eating only fruit.
Expert Opinion: An expert opinion is the personal opinion of one person who is highly educated and well read on the topic, providing it is on the topic they are an expert in. For example, while I might provide an expert opinion on a general veterinary medicine topic, I wouldn’t be qualified to provide an expert opinion on the relative benefits of one chemotherapy agent versus another in feline lymphoma. You have to keep the scope in context. But this is just a statement, an opinion. It’s not backed up by experiments or data unless that opinion specifically references them in which case you’re really deferring to the experimental data, not the expert’s opinion. Experts are informed, but they don’t make reality. And expert opinion should change in the face of higher ranked evidence. For example: Immunology professor saying you should vaccinate your kids, 99% of scientists saying climate change is a real effect and serious problem
Case Study: Now we’re getting somewhere! Not far, but somewhere! A Case Study is kind of like an anecdote, except somebody has actually written it up in detail to share with the wider scientific community, and open it up to criticism. It’s not enough evidence on it’s own to usually form a conclusion, but it useful for things that are rare (eg endangered species, rare cancers) or very, very new when there hasn’t been time to do a more in depth study. For example, a case study about dog food causing morbidity in captive red pandas, case studies on an emerging condition.
Series of Case Studies: Similar to above, but where the case study might only have one data point, a series of case studies has multiple data points, all written up in detail. When patterns are playing out in multiple instances, it allows some trends to be guessed at, but the evidence provided is still so-so. You are still only observing and writing down what has happened, this is still not actually an experiment as you’d know it. For example, a case series of multiple rare cancers treated at the same hospital over a 10 year period.
Case Control Studies: More observations over larger numbers of subjects attempting to narrow down one factor. For example, you might take a group of people with lung cancer and compare them to a similar group of people matched for age and sex without lung cancer, and look for lifestyle or exposure differences, eg smoker status. Or looking at dogs and matching two groups for age/breed/sex and comparing illnesses with the age of desexing.
Randomized Controlled Trials: Finally we’re getting to the real experimenting! You have two groups, one gets the treatment/experimental variable (a drug, food, etc) and the other gets a placebo. Subjects get randomly assigned into each group and you look for statistical differences between the two groups. This is how most basic experiments are done.
Double Blind Randomized Controlled Trials: The good stuff! This is where the hard science is at! Double Blind means that not only are your subjects randomly assigned to different groups (the thing you are testing and placebo), but the subjects do not know which group they are in and the researchers do not know who is in which groups. This is to eliminate reporting bias. This might be done to test therapeutic applications of a medication, or pet food diet. It’s typically something you can administer and measure the results. A properly done Double Blind Randomized Controlled Trial is very strong evidence.
Systemic Reviews: What’s better than a DBRCT? Multiple Double Blind Randomized Controlled Trials that have had their results compared and analyzed together. For example, a systemic review of multiple pet feeding trials, or a systemic review of all treatment papers for a particular condition in the last 20 years.
Now you know what these things are and mean, it gives you an idea of how much faith to put into any given report. A case study? Interesting, might be worth a look but could go either way. Randomized controlled trial? Pretty good, probably useful data. Systemic reviews? We can have a lot of trust in conclusions from a thorough systemic review.
#science literacy#understanding science#experiments#science communication#please reblog with questions rather than send asks as it's easier to keep information in one place
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Hi Undine! I checked the advice masterlist and I don’t think I saw this topic on there (and I’m sorry if I missed it!)
What advice would you give for someone who has multiple scenarios in mind for the next event in their wip and can’t choose between one. I have a rough outline for my wip, and the chapters are generally planned out (but in like a very basic way) but I’m at a point where I can deviate a little creatively and I can’t decide between a few options for the next scene to write.
Write them all!
No, seriously. More on that later.
Before that, here are a series of steps that I would take if I was your situation in this order!
1) Really try to decide
Think about the implications each scene has for your story. Spend a few days ruminating over it! Sometimes all it needs is a little time to stew before you realize what the correct scenario is. You’ve probably done this already, but it’s a good step to keep in mind.
2) Leave it up to luck
Flip a coin, pull a piece of paper out of a hat, roll a die, anything luck-based will work here!
But Undine, I can’t leave up the plot of my story to random chance!
I hear ya! The point of leaving it up to luck isn’t to actually leave it up to luck, but to discover what your gut reaction to your result is.
When you flip a coin and you get heads, what is your instinctive feeling? Are you excited that you got the result that you were subconsciously hoping for? When you roll a 5 on a die, are you disappointed in your result and wished that you rolled something else instead? Do you feel compelled to lie about your result at all? Do you have to talk yourself into being satisfied with your result?
I’m a really indecisive person, and this is a technique that I use to gauge what sort of feelings I have for several options. It’s surprisingly useful — just remember to be honest with yourself!
3) Ask for someone’s input
Sometimes our writing is too personal to us, and it can be really difficult to look at it objectively. This is where a friend’s input can be really valuable! They might see something that you don’t. Maybe one scenario makes more sense than the other. Maybe one is something different from the rest of your story that is a nice departure and a change of pace. Maybe one scenario doesn’t make sense at all. They might be able to help you identify those.
For example, one time I was writing a mystery script for a school play. I didn’t know who the culprit was, I was just getting started just to see where it went. My mom read my draft and pointed out that there was one character that must be the culprit because they had the motive, the opportunity, and the means. I had no idea about it until she pointed it out to me, and subsequently redrafted it to make that character the culprit.
4) Analyze each scenario
Sit down with each scenario and figure out why you want to include it in the first place! Think of story-related things like how it would impact your characters, the significance of the scene, the symbolism/meaning behind it, the purpose it serves in your overall story, why you want to write it in the first place, etc. Think of personal writer things as well, like how difficult it would be for you to write it out, how much research you might need to do, how much joy it would bring you to write, etc.
A pros-and-cons list would also be good to make. Get out that yellow legal pad and draw a line down the middle. Evaluate the pros and cons of each scenario to help you make an informed decision.
5) Make a separate outline for each scenario
Let’s say that you’ve tried options 1-5 and you still can’t decide which one to go with. That’s okay! You can try making an outline of your book of what would happen if you went with each scenario.
Let’s say that you have five possible scenarios in mind. You would create five different outlines of what would happen if you picked each one. Sit down and figure out how each scenario would impact the rest of your story. Are there significant differences? Does one scenario lead to your preferred outcome, whether it be in the short-term or long-term? What is the significance of that particular scenario in the big picture of your entire outline? Are there any branching paths based off which scenario you choose?
6) Write them all out
Write out each scenario! Actually go through and draft each scenario and ask yourselves some questions:
Which did you enjoy writing the most? Did you finish writing them all out, or did you finish one but not the others? What felt the most natural? Do you have a preference for one scenario now that you’ve written it out? What are the differences between each scenario and how they played out? Which scenario has your characters at the most authentic?
Sometimes, actually writing it out is a different beast compared to planning, and it can be really illuminating.
7) Just pick one and hope for the best
Sometimes we can think in circles all day long and never come closer to an answer. In that case, what I would do is pick a random one (flip another coin!) and put it in my outline. Underneath, I would notate my other ideas so I don’t forget that there are other possibilities, and I would just move on with my outlining. If you realize that something needs to be changed, you can always go back and change it later. For now, you could try just picking one.
8) Move on with your writing process and see how you feel later
Personally, I find that outlining a story is incredibly different from writing one. In particular, the understanding of my story and my characters change when/as I write it out. Sometimes, it ends up completely different from what I originally intended. Lay your ideas to rest for now, and maybe try moving on with your outline and drafting. It’s possible that the answer will reveal itself later, when you have a better understanding of your story in a month or so.
Some other things to keep in mind:
Is it possible for you to combine some scenarios?
Is it possible to fit those events/scenarios in at a later point in your story?
You can change your story/outline anytime you want. It’s not going to be a mistake or a waste of time to settle for an idea now.
Trust your gut instincts!
Outlines can change. Drafts can change. Don’t be too caught up on feeling like you have to make a permanent decision right now.
Good luck!
Remember, all writing advice is subjective! So don’t take this too seriously. This is just one person’s opinion.
If you’d like to ask me for advice on writing or running a writeblr, please check out my Ask Guidelines and FAQ first.
Ask Guidelines | FAQ | Advice Masterlist
#writing#writeblr#writing advice#writing help#writing tips#undine answers stuff#undine gives advice#q#kaseylynnwriting
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hello anon!! okay, this is going to be a very long post, so buckle up. standard caveat: since i don’t know the specifics of your topic or discipline or situation, some of this will hopefully be relevant and some of it might not, so just grab what works for you and leave the rest! and if you have more specific questions that this general overview doesn’t touch on, feel free to send those in.
it sounds like you have a few different questions here:
How do I find and articulate my research question?
How do I effectively take notes on my background reading in the early stages, when I’m not sure yet what my argument is going to be?
How do I organize a long research project/paper? How do I conceptualize something that has so many moving parts & happens to be a genre (a thesis) that I’ve never written before?
How do I write something that long?
also I am not sure if by “diss” you mean a senior thesis, master’s thesis, or a doctoral dissertation, as I know US and non-US universities use different terminology! so I will kinda just respond to this as A Very Lengthy Research Paper.
my response here will focus mostly on that first question (how to find/articulate a research question), with some thoughts at the end about notetaking in the early stages of a big research project. I’m going to lay out a method I just used with my own students to help them articulate questions & generate possible lines of inquiry to follow. I have been calling it the ‘research tier’ activity/system but it’s a pretty basic way of mapping out possible directions for a project. I use some version of this for every big project I undertake - whether it’s academic work, planning a course syllabus, or writing fic.
I want to emphasize, before I start, that the “tier” map you construct is a LIVING document, not a set-in-stone plan that has to be finished before you begin. the goal is to get past the anxiety of the blank page by generating tons and tons of ideas and questions related to your central topic -- so that if you hit a dead end, you can trace your way back and follow a different line of inquiry. when i am working on a research project, i am continually updating this planning document (i’ll say more about that at the end, once you have a sense of what the tiers look like).
Those questions are geared towards my students, who are working more in social science-y disciplines and/or on projects that have clear connections to specific communities. If you are writing a more traditional humanities discipline, here are some other examples:
I’m interested in...
the romance novel as a genre
Virginia Woolf’s writings on nature/the environment
the cultural reception and impact of the TV show Will & Grace
what queer social life looked like in 1920s New York
play and playfulness in the college classroom (my current research project, which I’ll use as an example)
once you have some idea of your focus, you can begin generating questions related to that focus. “Tier 2″ begins to get slightly more specific, though you are still very much in “big picture” mode. here’s some sentence stems I give my students to help them generate tier 2 questions:
my students are doing research projects that are ideally supposed to develop out of their preexisting community involvements or commitments, so i give them this additional advice:
[note: if your thesis topic is in a social science-y discipline (or a humanities discipline that leans closer to the social sciences), you can probably use some of those ideas or prompts. if your thesis topic is more of a purely academic humanities-type topic (for instance, a literary studies thesis about a specific novel), not all of those will apply perfectly, but some will hopefully be useful still!]
here’s an example, again using my playfulness project. I’ll list the question and then below it, in italics, I’ll explain what ‘stirred up’ that question for me.
T2: What are some core preoccupations or big-picture questions I want to explore? What are some things I’ve noticed that I want to understand?
Core Question 1: Why are college classrooms so serious? Why is there so little playfulness in most college teaching? Why so little laughter, movement, fun?
Observing my friend’s kindergarten classes made me realize how much elementary educators rely on bright colors, movement, singing, playing imaginative games together, etc. to engage young learners’ imaginations, minds, and bodies. Why do we value that so much in elementary education, but stop considering it important in college classes? Do learners “age out” of a need for highly interactive, engaging learning? I suspect no... so that’s a hunch I can begin to follow.
Observing other college courses (and drawing on my own experience as an undergrad and grad student) made me realize how much educators rely on the same standard methods of teaching (lecturing with a discussion section; a version of Socratic seminar discussion that is primarily led by the professor). To me, these methods are antithetical to playfulness and tend to quash people’s ability or desire to playfully experiment, try things out, risk failure, etc. I wonder if the actual methods we use to teach content or to structure our classes are producing ‘serious’ classes, whether or not we personally as instructors want that to happen. That’s another hunch I could follow...
I’m thinking of a possible connection here to my past research on the origins of English literature as a discipline (in 1920s-30s England). One of the things that scholars often emphasize is how hard faculty had to work to transform English into a serious, rigorous, ‘legitimate’ discipline, akin to the hard sciences. That’s something that I think we still see today in the way people anxiously defend the value of a humanities education. I’m curious about whether the need to justify our existence as a discipline/field of study influences our methods of teaching college students. Do we banish playfulness from the classroom because it threatens that image of the humanities as a serious, rigorous discipline? That’s yet another hunch I could follow...
Core Question 2: I have a hunch that people learn better in playful environments. Is that true -- and if so, why? What is it about playfulness that enhances learning?
I’m a lifelong fangirl, and fandoms are creative environments where people are continually engaged in acts of imaginative play. I’ve observed and have experienced firsthand how these playful environments seem to encourage people to try new things, take creative risks, learn new skills even if they’re afraid they’ll be ‘bad’ at them, and commit huge amounts of time, energy, and passion to long-term creative projects that don’t make any money or ‘earn’ them a grade. I’m curious about how we might adapt the playful, passionate energy of fan spaces to college teaching.
In my own classrooms, I’ve noticed that students get so much more into the activity (and seem to internalize the content more deeply) when I frame it as an imaginative exercise, a roleplaying activity, or a game of some kind. Teaching the same content in a way that encourages playfulness seems to produce deeper engagement (and deeper learning?) than using the traditional methods of ‘serious’ teaching.
Core Question 3: Playfulness and shared laughter/fun seem to build social bonds (again, drawing on my experiences in fandom). Could shared imaginative play help students develop better social skills? Could it help build a sense of community in the classroom and strengthen students’ sense of belonging? This question feels especially urgent to me given the epidemic of self-reported loneliness, anxiety, and depression on college campuses.
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You can have lots more than 3 core questions/preoccupations! In fact, the more ideas you can generate at this stage the better. The idea isn’t to hone in on your research question (yet) but to generate as many possible paths you could take, so that you can begin evaluating which interest you most, or which seem like the most fruitful questions to explore/answer. Doing the idea-generating for Tier 2 should already begin to set you up for Tier 3 -- which involves articulating specific sub-questions you’ll need to answer to better understand or answer those core questions/preoccupations.
and then we’ll go ahead and fold in T4, as I tend to move back and forth between T3/T4 as I brainstorm.
I’ll just take one of my Tier 2 questions as an example, but again, you can/should do this for all of yours (or at least the ones that interest you most).
Core question: Playfulness and shared laughter/fun seem to build social bonds (again, drawing on my experiences in fandom). Could shared imaginative play help students develop better social skills? etc etc
T3 subquestions (with T4 “directions for inquiry” folded into the first one, so you can see an example):
-- SubQ1 Does play actually strengthen social bonds? If so, how? Are specific kinds of play better for this than others (ie, collaborative or cooperative play compared to competitive play)? With Tier 4 folded in:
Do a library database search to try to figure out where “play” research typically happens -- is it in psychology research? Neuroscience? Early childhood education?
Then begin searching for different keyword strings that might help me gather up initial sources. Some initial ideas: play + social bonding, play + social skills, play + social development, play + cooperation, play + friendship, play + mental health. (Typically finding a couple useful/relevant articles will help you generate better keywords -- as you can begin to see the kinds of terminology that researchers use to describe your topic.)
I could also maybe interview college students themselves, or design a survey - but that would depend on the type of research I want to do. Do I want to conduct my own original research study, or is my focus more on synthesizing existing research from different fields to construct an argument?
Could I find faculty or researchers who work on these topics, who might be able to direct me to specific resources or help me understand what kind of work has already been done on this topic? Maybe I can’t find someone who specifically researches playfulness, but an educational researcher whose work focuses on social-emotional learning would probably have a pretty good understanding of what features or pedagogical choices help create positive, affirming learning environments.
-- SQ2: Are college students lonely?
Are they reporting (or do they experience) higher rates of mental illness? What are the numbers on this?
What are some of the prevalent theories or hypotheses about why this is? Could social isolation or difficulty forming friendships be a possible contributing factor?
-- SQ3: Why are social bonds good for us - physically, mentally, emotionally?
-- SQ4: Do social bonds enhance learning? If so, how?
What if I looked to other non-academic learning environments (such as fandoms, team sports or group activities, etc where people are learning new skills in highly social settings) to make a case for playfulness in the college classroom? This isn’t direct 1:1 proof that “more playfulness in college classrooms = happier, more socially well-connected students,” but offering detailed descriptions of how those learning environments are structured might spark ideas for my audience (university instructors and administrators) or persuade them that playfulness has an important social-emotional role to play in college learning.
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Typically what ends up happening is I produce a huge, messy document (or fill a giant paper or whiteboard if I’m doing it by hand) that has tons and tons of different directions I might follow. usually, the initial process of creating this giant brainstorming document sparks lots of ideas for where to begin researching. then, as i go off and begin reading articles, those articles typically help flesh out my understanding of the core questions or concepts i’m interested in, or my understanding of what kind of research on this topic already exists vs. where the gaps are that my own work might be able to fill. that initial source-gathering phase of research will also usually spark new questions and sub-questions, which get added to my tier map.
having some kind of messy brainstorming map/plan also helps me read in a more focused way. instead of just opening a random article and skimming it without any clear sense of what i’m looking for, i’m now opening articles and reading them with a purpose -- i’m looking for answers to the specific questions i’ve articulated. so i can skim in a more focused way, looking for specific keywords that seem relevant, and i can also take notes in a more focused way, noting down key ideas that
having a question in mind can also help me figure out more quickly if the article is relevant to my research questions or not. for instance, let’s say i open an article about how playing competitive games in high school PE classes improve students’ self-reported moods. if i didn’t know what i was reading for, i might spend a lot of time on this article, trying to figure out if it was relevant to my research (it has the keywords, right? so maybe it’s relevant?). but if i am reading with a specific question in mind (“Do collaborative learning games help strengthen students’ sense of social connection?”) I can tell pretty quickly that this article is not going to be that useful, since it focuses on competitive physical games (probably not something I’ll integrate into an English class). so I can say with some confidence, “I probably don’t need to read this whole thing, but maybe I’ll check out their lit review section or their bibliography to see if the authors cite any other work on play/playfulness that might be more relevant to my specific questions.”
i think i’ve kinda started to answer your second question about notetaking here, too, so i will also say that in the early stages of a big research project, i am absolutely NOT taking detailed notes on any of the sources i find. my focus is much more on amassing a large pool of highly relevant sources that i know i’m going to want to go back to and read more deeply as my research questions come into sharper focus. this is because deep reading burns through a lot of time and energy, so i want to make sure i’m saving that deep reading energy for sources that are quite likely to be relevant to my project.
to figure out if a source is relevant, I often skim the abstract and introduction to figure out the core questions the article or chapter is seeking to answer. then I ask myself three questions:
Are the core questions of this article the same as (or very similar to) my core questions or subquestions? If so, mark this citation as HIGHLY relevant - I’m going to want to come back and read this source carefully, to see if it’s already suggested answers to the questions I’m asking.
Do the core questions of this article seem to resonate with my core questions, even if we’re not asking them in exactly the same way, or the author of this paper is applying them to a different field? If so, mark this citation as LIKELY relevant - it may not be a perfect 1:1 with my own questions, but that can sometimes spark exciting new ideas or ways of reframing my original questions. If not, toss it.
Do the questions this article is asking suggest new questions or lines of inquiry that I am interested in exploring? Sometimes an article will introduce me to a whole new area of research or a new array of questions I hadn’t even originally thought to explore. If that’s the case, I typically pencil those sub-questions into my brainstorming tier document and mark the source as LIKELY or HIGHLY relevant, depending on how excited i am about it.
OK I WILL CLOSE HERE FOR NOW as I have to get back to work, but I will say that when I taught my students this method, they were very confused by the initial explanation of it, but then when they went back and used the models to work through the tier brainstorming activity for themselves, they seemed to find it really useful. so if you are scratching your head, try doing a quick TIER 1 - TIER 2 - TIER 3 - TIER 4 map for your own research question to see if doing it yourself helps clarify. also: if you can’t get further than tier 2, it’s usually a sign that you need to do some more reading and freewriting about the questions that you’re curious about, or the gaps you’ve noticed in the scholarship, or the threads you’d like to follow. but you can do some of that background reading in a more focused way now, using your initial big questions to help guide your selection of background readings & give you a sense of purpose as you read.
#this research 'system' would be CHILLING to some of my hyper-organized academic friends#who are all about using highly structured systems for tagging sources and managing citations and so on#but it works well for my brain & for the way i think#which tends to be very associative and focused on generating connections#i cannot tell if this is helpful or not aha i feel like students often want me to give them a highly structured method#and my answer is usually just like#research is a creative process#and like any creative process there are probably some 'best practices' or helpful methods people can teach you#but you figure out your own way of doing it based on how your brain processes and organizes information & makes connections#i was going to add 'things get less messy in the later stages for me' to reassure you & my horrified hyperorganized friends aha#but that is just a lie#usually i am cutting up drafts and moving pieces around and mindmapping and doing visual representations of sections#right up until the polished final draft#research#mw
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2021 Reading Log, pt 17
This goes much faster when I’m on summer vacation.
81. Wasps by Eric R. Eaton. This is another lavishly illustrated book covering the natural history of a group of insects, in this case, the wasps. For the purposes of the book, “wasps” is taken to mean “all Hymenoptera that aren’t bees or ants”, so sawflies are covered here as well. There are chapters on ecology, behavior, life cycles, the usual, but also a chapter about the many mimics of wasps. The book isn’t perfect—the text is very small, there are a shocking number of proofreading errors, and the author engages in regular anthropomorphisms (referring to wasps as “heroes” and their predators as “villains” is the most notable). But it’s still got a lot of very good information in it, and is gorgeous.
82. Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein. This book is much breezier than one would expect from a book on economics. Or at least, than I would expect. The main thesis is that the value of money is built solely on trust, and when that trust wavers, bad things happen. I learned a lot about recent history from this book—why the European Union exists, the role of shadow banking in the 2008 Great Recession, and how exactly Bitcoin got to be what it is. True blue economists would probably find things to complain about its glossing over of nuances or oversimplifications (the way I am very picky about books on evolution), but I feel this is a good overview for the layperson.
83. The Madman’s Library by Edward Brooke-Hitchen. I didn’t recognize the name when Amazon recommended this book to me (I know, I know…), but it turns out that they wrote Fox Tossing, a book about people being Weird that I loved. And what do you know, this is another book about people being Weird that I loved. The topic is strange books, and it covers a lot of ground that my other readings have trod. Books made of human skin, grimoires, bestiaries, literary hoaxes. But it does so with aplomb and full color photographs and illustrations. It also covers books written on decidedly not book-like objects, very large and very small books, the books that have survived only as scraps of paper stuffed into a bishop’s miter, books written in cipher (both those decoded and not) and much more. This is a book written by a bibliophile for bibliophiles, and I had a blast with it.
83a. Swallow by Mary Cappello. I got about a quarter of the way through this before giving up. The topic is super interesting. It is simultaneously a biography of Chevalier Jackson, the eccentric doctor who pioneered the use of endoscopes, and a survey of the collection of foreign objects that he extracted from patients. Unfortunately, it is written in a very arch, “literary” style, and the digressions make up about as much of the book as the actual topic does. When the author got to filling two paragraphs with anagrams for Chevalier Jackson’s name, I knew I was done. Those of you with a higher tolerance for Freudian analysis and navel gazing might get something out of it, but I felt like I was wasting my time.
84. Don’t Put That in There! by Drs. Aaron E. Carroll and Rachel C. Vreeman. This is apparently the third book by this duo, busting medical myths and misconceptions. In this case, this is a collection all about sex myths. The book in terms of tone seems to be aimed at teenagers, and I feel like a lot of teens could get something out of this (it definitely covers a lot of questions and misconceptions I’ve heard teaching sex ed). It’s decidedly imperfect. It is highly heteronormative, and doesn’t even recognize that the gender binary is a thing, much less a thing many people live outside of. Some of the science has marched on—the authors come out in favor of the G-spot as a physical structure, and only think the clitoris is the external head and hood, not a large glandular organ (these two statements are related). But it’s not bad, and it’s very short. Got through this in an hour, which after slogging through Swallow was a pleasure.
85. Alien Invasions! edited by Michael Stein. This is a collection of short essays about aliens, UFOs and the like in pop culture, lavishly illustrated. The essays aren’t anything special—most of them are in the vein of “let me list a bunch of examples”, but the art is worth the price of admission. Covers to pulps and comic books, advertising art from movies and TV, movie stills and engravings; it’s all very pretty. This definitely isn’t the be all and end all of books about aliens, but it’s a quick read and again, very pretty.
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What about other ppl in the smp, like Eret, Niki, Jack? Do they go to Las Nevadas? Are Eret and Fundy still friends?
HEYO THANK YOU FOR ASKING MORE ABT THE AU BC I DEEPLY APPRECIATE IT <33 /g
tw: gambling, drinking, self-neglect, slight eating disorder, mentions of past violence
/dsmp /rp
i'd like to this this au is set in a period after wilbur's resurrection and dream's prison escape where the entire smp is like. well, we're fucked— time to get wasted now!
quackity would originally look down upon eret, puffy, h, and punz because of the entire monarchy fiasco, but after knowing how rich eret was, quackity would let them slide. they don't seem to be a threat of power anyway, so why should he care? i also think eret might've helped supplied las nevadas too, maybe just simple materials here and there thanks to fundy's requests.
fundy has talked to eret multiple times whenever he visits. eret is good at stopping themselves from getting too addicted to alcohol or gambling, so they would be sober or healthy enough for fundy to have conversations with. eret has even probably had sleepovers with fundy because eret is still genuinely concerned about his wellbeing, you know? because to eret, it feels odd that fundy doesn't seem as lively as he used to be, even if he is still quite enthusiastic when he works, it still isn't the same.
eret often asks fundy about family. i think that's the main thing they always talk about— family, and found family. eret has found a family with the knights he's hired and giving shelter to all of the ex-members of the eggpire. eret's main concern is fundy, and if he could ever forgive them for missing the adoption. and fundy doesn't really know actually, because he is still quite hurt about it, but he's definitely moved on. he still values eret as a good friend, and eret reciprocates, and i guess that's what matters to him.
but in terms of family, fundy doesn't really know if he wants to label anything as family due to his trust issues. he often vents to eret about these problems, especially in the earlier stages of las nevadas. he's scared that if he ever labels something as family, they'd just leave him anyway, so he prefers not having a family. but eret still insists its important for fundy to have some type of support system, but this is where fundy tends to change the topic, and eret can't do anything but hopelessly nod along.
but there's a time that definitely changed! there's a time eret did hangout with fundy, do a simple sleepover like old times, and they woke up once to quackity and schlatt entering fundy's room with a tray of food. eret asked them what the food was for, especially since this didn't happen last time eret was here, but quackity replies that he kind of got used to it out of habit, especially since fundy doesn't really notice that he skips meals every now and then.
and eret is kind of surprised they care?? in a good way of course, because they're all. oh, fundy HAS found a better family to care for him. quackity and schlatt bids eret a good day before leaving, and eret approaches the tray of food quietly. there's a note placed atop. on the note, there's a to-do list for fundy with simple things like “remember to eat” or “remember to take breaks” or “lessen your cigarette intake”, and on the back, there seems to be a long note left by quackity. eret didn't want to invade fundy's privacy too much, but they did remember glancing at a small note that said “you are loved. take care of yourself, and never forget that” written somewhere on the paper.
NOW FOR NIKI! niki does visit, she visits a LOT, and she loves the upbeat vibes of las nevadas, anything with popping colors and enthusiastic moods are such a turn on for her, and she just loves to stay there for multiple days on end. the syndicate would be often concerned about her wellbeing, but niki ensures she doesn't really get too drunk or gamble too much.
(the drinking statement is debatable because, surprisingly, niki has a high tolerance for alcohol, so she drinks a LOT. where was this when she was having her villain arc?)
she's honestly just happy to be there, and she just likes to dance and groove! there's a thrill in las nevadas she never really experienced much in her life, and she's happy she can basically vibe here without worrying about betrayal or death every five seconds.
on the dance floor, she has danced with a couple of people. the first one she does dance with accidentally is schlatt, who seems to be Very Awkward when it comes to dancing. he honestly wasn't even supposed to be there— niki thinks he might've lost a bet or something? but niki still tried to make do with what she was given.
the most interesting conversations niki has had in her life has got to be the ones she has on the dance floor. when it came to schlatt, he was mumbling a lot, very awkward and tense knowing the state of their relationship during the manberg era, but niki puts that aside. because there's no point on lingering on the past for too long— she's talked to puffy and the syndicate about this far too many times— so she grabs schlatt and twirls him around like nothing has happened. he never really got to apologize, but he did give niki a fun dance, and you know what? it was fun! so that's all that matters.
quackity was the second one she's danced with, and quackity is the opposite of schlatt. he was charming, enthusiastic, extremely extroverted, and niki definitely enjoyed it! but to niki, she knows quackity isn't always this upbeat, or this loud and obnoxiously in your face, so when a slower song plays, she asks quackity if he can just shuffle alongside her slowly and follow her mellow footsteps. he calms, and she calms, and the conversations had dwindled into something more familiar. after a certain while, quackity admits that he's missed this, he's missed being vulnerable, he's missed being genuine, he's missed being soft and laidback, so niki tells him thst he's allowed to be that way for the rest of the dance.
and last person she's danced with was fundy. and fundy, she's definitely talked with before the dance, but she also calls in eret to join them. they boogie to an upbeat rhythm, dancing as if this feeling of euphoria and happiness was something they've experienced all their lives. niki knows that, often, whenever they meet up, there's always something that reminds them of their past faults, so they never got to be the way they were before the wars. so now, niki tries her best to make it different. that fun they had when they pranked tommy in the past, or find foxes together, or build weird statues— she will try her best reincarnate those feelings of pure happiness through stupid dance moves and stupid jokes because she misses it, and she will try her best to fix the friendship so that it'll be same, perfect thing it once was.
jack is pretty complicated, because i don't know much about jack, but i'd say he is one of quackity's... less responsible business partners. knowing jack, fundy and schlatt try their best to not get quackity to jump on his ass because quackity often gets mad at the ridiculous deals and offers jack gives.
i'd say that jack is just... having a pretty rough time. fundy and schlatt denote that he's kind of lonely, and his demeanor is very similar to quackity's wherein he uses irritation and/charm to mask the hurt they experience. and quackity... does soften up to that. he knows what it's like to feel alone and be left alone by people out of nowhere, so quackity decides to give jack another kind of offer: jack transfers ownership of their hotel back to tommy, and quackity will give jack a job offer to work at las nevadas' hotel. in that way, quackity doesn't need to make multiple exchanges with jack's business; he just needs jack to work for him lmao
so yeah, it's kind of a lax job. the hotel isn't the most booked all the time, but jack does enjoy managing the front desk since quackity actually allows him to get mad at shitty customers lmao. jack doesn't stay there 24/7 of course—if he wants to leave, he can just depend on fundy's redstone to do the work—but he does like working there because nobody looks down upon him. he feels like he has something he can do that he can do well, and nobody is looking at him as if he was inferior. sure, quackity and him are still not on the best terms, but jack doesn't feel like he's being belittled at all.
i'd say jack and sam kind of are friends too? because while schlatt, quackity, and fundy have their own thing, sam and jack manage las nevadas more on the sidelines, but they relate at the fact that they just casually do their own thing in las nevadas. it doesn't feel too awful or violent or belittling— it just feels normal.
sometimes, jack would visit the bar right after it closes to just. drink and talk to sam about... well, anything, really. these talks would typically last through the day, and they're kinda just glad they have found someone to talk to about, well, anything. it's hard to find a feeling of normalcy in the dream smp, let alone a feeling of peace and serenity, so even if they find this chill ambiance in a bar or a casino, they both still revel in the feeling of peace. they're happy with it, so they'll do whatever they can to maintain it.
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I know you're not a self help blog, but do you have any tips regarding how to deal with procrastination? Like a have a very important examen coming in a week and I had the whole year to study for it. And guess what I DIDN'T. And I still don't and I'm gonna fail.
I think I have a problem...
Hi! I’m probably not the best person to ask, because I have a huge problem with procrastination too. Even with stuff I want to do! If there’s a task, I’m almost guaranteed to procrastinate.
It’s really hard not to procrastinate with stuff like what you’re describing; where you have a bunch of time so it’s easy to put things off for later. Trust me, I do this all the time. I’ll go “oh, that’s not until then, I’ll do it later!!” And then I forget about it, often subconsciously on purpose, and the “later” becomes the week or even night before.
First and foremost, break the task apart into smaller tasks!
It’s much easier to get something done if it’s not this huge thing looming over you. So instead of “study for exam”, which is big and overwhelming, and also vague—which makes it easy to ignore or not know where to start, break it down into “read chapter 1 of textbook”, or “read pages 10-15”. Once you’re done that, make it “read chapter 2” or “read pages 16-20”. And just keep doing this until you’ve studied everything you need to study.
This helped me a lot, because now I’m not freaking out about this huge thing that needs to get done, and “holy shit where do I start”. Because I have a starting point, and a roadmap of how I’m going to finish.
I find writing things down helps, because then it’s on paper and not just tucked away in your mind for you to forget. Bullet journals can help with this…
…but if you’re like me, that bullet journal will become useless because you’ll never open it. (Mine has not been touched for months lmao. And since I’m a major perfectionist, setting up pages is very tedious since I turn it into an art project. I’ll try again, but make it as simplistic as possible)
Currently what I have, is a sticky note wall. It’s just the section of wall right next to my desk, and I have little labels to sort things by topic to organize it. So I can just write down tasks that need to get done, slap it underneath the topic it falls under (so for example, your “study for exam” would fall under “school”), and it’s there, staring me in the face. This makes it harder to forget what you have to do.
You could also do this with a bulletin board, but I have one of those and I use it much less than sticky notes. Since it’s just so easy to slap a sticky note up and take it off when you’re done with it, without having to worry about pins lol. My bulletin board is mostly for long term things. But it really comes down to personal preference.
Additionally, I’ve heard people recommend setting yourself deadlines and writing them all down together. Make yourself a planner that you can slap up along with the sticky notes, with set dates that you should have parts of whatever it is you’re doing done by.
With studying, the tasks needed to complete could be page numbers, chapters, topics, etc. So your planner could be pages you need to have read by a certain date, for example.
This isn’t something I have implemented for myself yet, and I mostly do it with the sticky notes. So I’ll break the task down, and write the first little task on the sticky note, then when I complete that task I take it down and replace it with the next one. I find this less overwhelming than having everything laid out in front of me, because it sort of tricks me into feeling like there’s not as much work to be done if I’m just focusing on the smaller tasks instead of the large one. But I do think it would be helpful to have a list of things I need to get done and their deadlines in one place.
And for deadlines, since I don’t have them written down all in one place, I mostly just use personal goals. So I’ll set the goal of “I want to have this done by Tuesday next week” for example, and having that goal can be a bit of motivation.
Tbh this is a bit of a flimsy system though, since it’s not as set in stone as it would be in writing. Which is why I do have the goal of finding a system that works for me where I can have everything in one place. Making lists in a bullet journal worked for me, the only downfalls were my perfectionism and forgetting to actually use the bullet journal. So I’ll work on ways to fix that.
A channel that I’ve found helps with these sorts of problems is HowToADHD. I’m not sure if I have ADHD or not, since I’m going through the diagnosis process, but the tips are helpful anyways. And I do know that people who don’t have it use the channel as a resource, since you can take the tips that apply to you and utilize them. Here’s a video she did on procrastination! She even starts the video off noting that the tips are helpful to both people with and without ADHD. So it really is a helpful tool for anybody.
On that note; if procrastination is a big problem for you to the point that it’s interfering with your daily life, I would recommend seeking out professional help. Because there could be something going on executive dysfunction wise.
Tl;dr/short version of tips;
BREAK THE TASK DOWN INTO SMALLER TASKS. I can’t stress how helpful this has been for me. It gives you a place to start, and makes everything seem much less overwhelming.
Write stuff down!! It’ll help you remember that it’s something you need to get done.
Leave this written form somewhere you can see it! Don’t tuck it away in a drawer, because then you’re going to forget about it and there was no point to writing it down in the first place.
Set yourself deadlines, and write them down so they feel more real and motivate you to get the job done.
Use sticky notes as reminders of what you need to do.
Other options are bulletin boards and bullet journals/planners. Depends on personal preference
Have a list of everything you need to do all in one place (like the bullet journal or planner)
I really hope this wasn’t too all over the place, and that at least some of the advice helps! 💖
I understand what you’re going through, so I hope you can find something that works for you, because procrastination is a bitch to deal with. But there’s ways to manage it, and if the things I’ve suggested don’t work for you, there’s lots of YouTube channels or other resources online (I’m sure there’s even books) that can offer other solutions! Best of luck!! 💕
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Pairing: Spencer Reid x Reader
Warnings: Detailed descriptions of crime scenes, mentions of rape and sexual assault, murder. Just getting into the angst guys...
A/N: So I decided after like two people responded (thank you guys) to split the second part into two because it was so ridiculously long. You guys don’t even want to know how much I had to cut off this to end this at a place I felt comfortable. Rest assured, you’ll probably get the next part tomorrow. Remember to like, comment, reblog, message me, send me asks, and just do anything to feed my constant need for praise and attention from strangers. As always, thank you so much! I love you all and I hope you enjoy!
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[Part One]
“I can never figure out if I like local cases more because I get to sleep in my own bed every night we work the case, or if they make me more uncomfortable because they’re so close to home.”
Rossi glanced at Morgan, who cast his eyes to the review mirror as he spoke. Reid sat in the back, a little smile playing at the corners of his lips as he read something on his phone.
The youngest member of the BAU team had been uncharacteristically chipper over the last three weeks, constantly taking calls or responding to texts. Even when he started to ramble about something no one was really interested in listening to, the topics were about things that were of a happier nature. Things like a single grain of rice having five times more DNA than an entire human being has in their whole body, or that the term ‘nerd’ first showed up in print in the book, If I Ran the Zoo, by Dr. Seuss published in 1951.
He shoved the cell back into his pocket, looking up into Morgan’s eyes in the mirror. He knew that they knew that something was up, but he didn’t want to say anything until it got a little more serious. And it was rapidly going that way. Spencer had spent nearly every second of his free time with you, doing things like getting coffee or going back to the bookstore that just so happened to be forty minutes out of his way.
In fact, just last week you had come over to his house to have dinner and watch a movie. You begged him to watch The Princess Bride instead of some very obscure French movie that no normal person would actually own.
“I love all the new and intelligent things you show me, Spencer, but I want to show you a new and slightly less intelligent thing. Let me rub off on you for a change.”
You quoted the entire thing, your lips silently moving with every word spoken during the movie. Afterward, you confessed that you had read the book even more than you’d seen the movie and could probably quote it just as easily. He picked up a copy from the library this morning before coming into work. While he hadn’t had the chance to read it yet, or either of your own published works, he was determined to finish it before he saw you again.
It was only 493 pages, so it shouldn’t take him that long.
“What?” He blinked, his brows dipping dangerously close to those impossibly long lashes of his. Morgan looked back to the road, his own amusement twitching at his cheeks.
The car bumped over a dip in the road just before they pulled into the already packed driveway of the crime scene. Rossi shut the car off and Morgan pulled his sunglasses on before getting out of the car, but not without a teasing comment.
“Get your head in the game long enough to solve this case and you can go back to whatever has had your attention these last couple of weeks. Okay, kid?” The blush that colored his cheeks was the same shade as when he realized you were staring at him in awe that first time you met.
Inside, the mood of teasing and distractedness changed. Everyone focused while crime scene techs circled the room taking pictures and gathering every bit of tangible evidence they could possibly find.
The first victim, or by the looks of things, the last victim, was a male in his early to mid-forties. His salt and pepper hair was combed back and styled, his beard perfectly trimmed. Even in death his clothes were unrumpled, only the pool of blood-soaked into his khaki pants and maroon shirt ruined the look of an otherwise very put-together man.
He was slouched in a wooden chair pulled into the living room from the dining room table, his hands bound behind his back with three blue zip ties, his ankles bound to the legs of the chair exactly the same way.
“The victim is forty-four year old, Joseph Kyle. He’s a lawyer with Kyle & Anderson. Cause of death appears to be two gunshot wounds to the chest.”
The next victim was a woman. She wasn’t as put together as her husband, laying in a pool of her own blood on the kitchen floor. Bruises and cuts littered her arms and legs, massive handprints still marred the skin around her biceps. It went without asking that she had been sexually assaulted, her underwear hanging on the knob of a drawer and her skirt bunched around the top of her thighs.
“Synthia Kyle, forty. Stay at home mom. She was stabbed sixty-one times in the abdomen, chest, and thighs.”
The last three victims were children. Each in their own rooms, each tucked into bed and shot in the head execution-style. One look around the room and anyone would know that they were happy kids, smart and well-rounded, and loved.
“James, Massey, and Devan Kyle. Seventeen, fifteen, and ten. All shot in the head.”
For all the evidence that could be seen with their eyes; the brutal attack against the mother, the cold killing of the father, and the remorseful executions of the children, it shouldn’t have been so hard to form a profile.
“And where is the number?” Reid turned his whole body away from the little boy's room, the image of him lying in bed with his eyes closed and a bullet hole in his head was enough to turn the pits of his stomach against him.
The lead detective, a slight man with inky black curls and piercing blue eyes, led them into the dining room. The number ‘302’ was smeared across a painting hanging on the wall, the blood so thickly layered over the Botecelli copy that is dripped down and over the golden frame.
“At first glance, it would appear to be a family annihilator. His primary goal being the rape and torture of Synthia Kyle, and the rest of the family simply casualties of his rage, but just like the last three crimes, there is nothing even remotely similar in victimology or the killings.” Reid’s lips skewed to the side, crossing his arms and combing over every detail.
“Alison Crane was sexually assaulted as well.” Morgan offered the information up with skepticism, aware that, besides the numbers at every crime scene, it was the only thing that could be pulled from the two. Rossi shook his head, his eyes scanning the air as he thought.
“Alison Crane was kidnapped and beaten before she was found three days later on the Chesapeake Bay. Her wrists slashed. She was staged with remorse, a-a cloth laid over her eyes and her arms crossed over her chest. That couldn’t have been done by the same unsub.” Rossi looked over at Morgan because even still, they knew that it was the same guy because cut into the top of Alison’s arm had been the number nineteen.
It had taken Reid all of two seconds to realize they were page numbers when he’d seen the piece of paper that had been pinned to the second victim’s chest. Obviously torn from a book, the triangle scrap of paper had only had the number 85 printed on it.
And just as difficult as it had been to pin down a book during the Fisher King case, it felt as if it was ten thousand times harder to find the book being used now. All they had were page numbers and murders. They’d narrowed the list to crime novels, but there were still so many books on the list that even with Reid, it would take years to sift through them all.
Garcia has been sad to watch the young doctor leave her office in disappointment when she revealed her ability to narrow down books was still no good. Not that it was her fault since the lack of a central database for every book known to man, made it very frustrating for anyone that tried to narrow down a book based only on crime scenes. And this was still given the assumption that this book was actually published and not a story the unsub had written himself.
This would be the third homicide in this case, the first one done since the FBI had been asked to assist the DCPD. The crossing of victimology and the numbers on the victims had been enough for unit chief, Hugh Lowe to pick up his phone and request for the BAU to stop this man.
Other than the book revelation, and the geographical profile that Reid had come up with, there wasn’t much progress. It had only been two weeks since the death of the first victim and now their unsub’s body count had gone from two to seven.
A young woman kidnapped outside her dorm in Georgetown, held hostage, beaten, and raped for three days, then staged at the Chesapeake Bay with her wrists slashed and clean clothes on.
An older man was beaten in his home while his wife is away on business overseas, killed with a tire iron to the back of his head, stripped of his clothes, which sat folded beside his splayed out body, his ring finger cut off. His wedding ring had been on the clothes beside him but they couldn’t find the finger.
And now a family of five.
It was frustrating, to say the least, each agent so annoyed by the case that none of them spoke on the ride back to the BAU.
“So I don’t have the book, mon ami, but I do have a possible connection in victimology and a shortlist of possible suspects, or at the very least persons of interest,” Garcia said excitedly when all three glowering men came through the clear doors of the BAU. They each lifted their heads and eyebrows with piqued curiosity.
“My link is Georgetown. Alison was going there for a major in political science, Mr. Walters had been a chemistry teacher there before the death of his first wife ten years ago, and I just found out that our newest victims, Synthia and Joseph, met there in the spring of ‘88 as a senior and a freshman.” Garcia had to admit that their minds were quick to gather the information, turning it over in the cogs that constantly spin inside their brains, but her mind was faster.
“Did you-“
“Cross-reference Georgetown alumni with a list of crime novelists? And then cross-reference that list with people who lived in Spence’s comfort zone? ‘How did you know to do that Garcia?’ you may ask. Because I’m a genius. Quick, boys, follow me.” Her heels click in rapid succession as she leads the men into her office of computers, colorful do-dads, and pictures. When she takes a seat, Morgan leans directly over her shoulder, Reid standing just behind her, and Rossi stands just to the side of him.
The list that pops up is only four names, the tension that has been in all of their shoulders relaxes a little at the first stride in the case that they’ve made sense they started working it. Reid’s shoulders tense up again when he notices a familiar name that sits at the bottom of the list.
“This one, click on it.” He points to the line at the end and watches as Garcia moves her mouse over to the area he was pointing to and clicks to reveal a face he knows too well.
You smile back at him in your freshman year Georgetown photo, a set of bangs cut that you don’t have anymore. In the picture you seem impossibly young, your eyes full of excitement, although he knows that you aren’t that much younger than he is. Even still, for some reason, he half expects your smile to be missing teeth you seem so young.
“(Y/N) (Y/L/N), graduated from Georgetown in 2000 with a master's in criminology. She’s published two crime novels in the last two years. She doesn’t have too much of an eventful life; she isn’t married, has no children, pays all of her bills on time, has no detectable significant other. Mom is a detective with the Atlanta PD, Dad walked out before she was born, no siblings, nothing more than a couple speeding tickets against her.” Rossi pulls one of his hands from his folded arms, pointing at the picture with squinted eyes.
“I met her last year, very briefly, at a publishing party. We couldn’t have talked for more than ten seconds, but she seemed like a good kid. You think she’s our unsub?” Everyone looks to Reid, his expression is stone cold and unreadable.
Garcia almost wishes she hadn’t made the connection in the first place as she watches the muscle in his jaw tick, his eyes flying across the screen several times before he turned away from the group’s prying eyes. Nerves of a whole other kind had exploded inside him, forcing his hands to open and close like fluttering butterfly wings at his sides.
“I’m not sure. Just call her in for questioning.” He wants to say he doesn’t think it’s you, mostly because he doesn’t want it to be you. The thought that he could have invited a serial killer of this magnitude into his life, into the life of his team, it makes him even more nauseated than he had been earlier standing in the middle of a messy crime scene.
But when he runs to the library and finds both copies of your books, flipping to pages nineteen, eighty-five, and three hundred and two, he almost cries. On each page reads a word for word, detailed description of every murder that had happened in this case so far. The first girl even had the same name as the first victim.
By the time you make it to the BAU and you are escorted to the interrogation room, he’s read both books cover to cover. He keeps telling himself that there’s a chance you weren’t doing this, that you weren’t the killer, but it’s so hard to believe when you were the mind behind every murder.
As he looks at you from behind the one-way window pane, a mixture of anger and, strangely, hope has begun to swirl around his chest.
“You sure you don’t want to come in with me?” Prentiss says, looking back at the doctor as she reaches for the door. Spencer shakes his head, lips pursed and heart racing. He couldn’t go in their unbiased, willing to accept that you could be the unsub he’d been chasing for the last two weeks.
“Hi, I’m SSA Emily Prentiss with the BAU, nice to meet you, (Y/N).” She stretches her hand across the table and you return in kind, your shy smile stabbing into Reid’s heart like a knife.
“I’d like to say it is nice to meet you too, but I wish it were under other circumstances.” The chair across from you screeches on the floor as Emily pulls it out to sit in. She absentmindedly flicks her slick black hair over her shoulder before laying the files in front of her.
“Unfortunately, I’m always under circumstances like these, working at the BAU.”
“‘Bad guys don’t take days off,’ that’s what my mom used to say,” You glance at the file on the table, chewing the inside of your cheek like you were trying to keep yourself from saying anything more, “I was told I was needed to give my opinion on a case? Although, I’m not sure how I could be of much help. I just write.”
Spencer watches you push a piece of your hair behind your ear with a small chuckle, glancing at the window like you could see him behind it.
“You’re a published author of two books, not just any writer.” Prentiss is relaxed, letting the case file sit between you like a hook dangling between a fish and a fisherman. You keep looking down at it, curiosity eating away at your nerves the way it used to when your mother came home with a new case.
“Tell that to my mom, she’s still holding out on me joining law enforcement.” It’s a joke, but every profiler watching reads into it. It isn’t hard to fit it into a working profile, the unsub feels unappreciated in her skills as an author with the apparent disapproval her mother has over her career. To both appease her mother and stake her claim as a serious author, the unsub is killing the same way she’s written in her books.
“Why didn’t you? Join law enforcement, I mean. You’re obviously very intelligent, you had a masters from Georgetown at just seventeen, and you seem to have a pretty good grasp on the politics and procedures of law enforcement careers.” For just a moment, you consider the question and your answer to it, but Spencer can see the exact moment that it clicks in your mind on what exactly is going on.
Your entire body language changes; your shoulders curling in toward your body, the chewing of your cheek intensifying, your hands pulling back from their relaxed position on the table and tangling themselves into your lap.
“I’m not here as a possible expert witness, am I, Agent Prentiss?”
Emily responds by opening the file, at last, pushing the pictures of the crime scenes across the table for you to have a look at. Seven pictures splay out in front of you and it doesn’t take you long to register the familiarity behind them all. You have to swallow the bile in your mouth before you speak again.
“I’m a suspect.”
“You’re the only suspect.”
#spencer reid fluff#spencer reid x reader#spencer reid imagine#spencer reid x oc#spencer reid angst#spencer reid smut#spencer reid fanfiction#dr spencer reid#spencer reid#spencer reid imagines#spence reid#dr spence reid#criminal mind imagine#criminal minds#dr spencer reid x reader#spencer reid x y/n#spencer reid x you
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20 [Fanfic Writer] Questions Game
Thank you so much for tagging me, @lemony-snickers! This is tons of fun, I love answering these kinds of big questionnaires 😂💕 Also putting mine under a cut because there’s a lot of questions and I like to ramble.
Also gonna go ahead and just tag whoever wants to do this! 😅💕
1. How many works do you have on AO3?
As of August 27, 2021, I have a total of 77 works on my AO3!
2. What’s your total AO3 word count?
Funny enough, I was just looking at this, specifically, earlier today and kind of laughing about it. Right now, my total word count across all my works is 1,148,941 😬
3. How many fandoms have you written for, and what are they?
Apparently 12, but some of them I don’t really consider “big” in my fandom repertoire. Naruto is my greatest fandom with a total of 60 fics so far, followed by The Chronicles of Narnia and Rise of the Guardians. The rest are ones I either did crossover fics with or just did one-off little pieces with--The Incredibles, Tangled, Brave, How to Train Your Dragon, Arthurian Mythology, Disney Princesses, Fairy Tales and Related Fandoms, Back to the Future, and Frozen.
4. What are your Top Five fics by kudos?
The Scarecrow and The Bell (Naruto) - 470 kudos
The Day Kakashi’s Mask Slipped (Naruto) - 139 kudos
Sunflowers (Naruto) - 92 kudos
Sakumo the House Husband (Naruto) - 81 kudos
Someone to Lean On (Naruto) - 67 kudos
5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?
I always try to respond to comments, because I like to acknowledge when people respond to my work. I cherish comments like nobody’s business, especially when they’re kind and reactionary. I just really love seeing/hearing what people think of the way a story is progressing, or what they thought of a one-shot. Comments keep me going especially when it comes to longfic so I want to be able to let readers know that I do in fact see their comments, that I’m acknowledging what they’re saying, and that I appreciate them. Plus, it can be kind of fun to tease upcoming events in a fic through responses to people’s comments, too. Because I’m mean.
6. What fic have you written with the angstiest ending?
Definitely Hothouse (Rise of the Guardians/The Incredibles; Jack Frost x Violet Parr; American Horror Story AU). This was the first multi-chaptered fic I ever wrote to completion and I honestly cringe when I remember it exists both because it’s so poorly organized (and full of nasty plot holes) and because I just went ham on the gore factor. It definitely has a really bittersweet and heartbreaking ending to it, too.
7. What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?
I think I’ll definitely have to say Temptation. The story itself was kind of a ride, and it’s only the first installment in a series, but it follows the plot of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe but remixed due to the presence of an original character, but the ending is still roughly the same as the original: they defeat the evil, the Pevensies are all crowned kings and queens, happy days. Reading the last few paragraphs of the last chapter honestly still gets me all up in my feelings.
8. Do you write crossovers? If so, what is the craziest one you’ve written?
I used to be more of a crossover writer due to one of my main ships being a crossover ship. They weren’t super crazy, though, because they were both CGI-animated films. The craziest crossover I’ve ever written is an in-progress/unfinished multichapter piece, Kakashi, Enchanted, that sees our favorite Copy Ninja get kamui’d into the Disney princess dimension and has to help the likes of Snow White, Cinderella, and Rapunzel on his journey to find a way back to his own world. It’s a super weird premise but definitely one of my more lighthearted works and fun to revisit when I need to decompress.
9. Have you ever received hate on a fic?
I don’t think I’ve ever received hate so much as I’ve received criticism. The closest I ever got to hate on a fic, I think, was someone left an overly personal and mentally disturbed comment on a chapter of my main fic that made me convinced they needed to seek therapy and deal with their own personal issues rather than take it out on a fanfic about animated ninjas.
10. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?
Maybe 👀 I’m super vanilla when it comes to smut, though. I think the wildest thing I’ve ever written in smut is breeding kink.
11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?
Not that I know of, and I hope I never will.
12. Have you ever had a fic translated?
Not yet! I had someone ask to translate a one-shot of mine in Russian but I never got a response back when I laid out my terms and conditions.
13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?
I have not! I used to do paragraph-style roleplay which was kind of like cowriting fanfiction but writing is so personal and sacred to me that I don’t know if I could ever actually cowrite a fic with someone. I like brainstorming with other people, but writing for me is more of a deeply personal and independent endeavour.
14. What’s your all-time favorite ship?
Oh god, this is a tricky question because it depends on fandom. I absolutely love New Dream (Rapunzel x Eugene, Tangled) and have for the past ten years, and my love for them as only grown since watching Tangled: The Series/Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure. I don’t write or even really read a ton of fanfiction for them, though. I’m also still highly dedicated to my favorite crossover crackship, Frostfield (Jack Frost x Violet Parr, Rise of the Guardians/The Incredibles) and to this day, if you search for that ship on AO3, I am the sole provider of every single fic about them so far. I’m not as active with them as I used to be, but they got me through some really rough times back in the day and still mean so much to me. A lot of my favorite ships across fandoms, though, are honestly canon x OC ships of mine because I am a self-indulgent bitch who needs to project. So Peter Pevensie x Eilonwy (The Chronicles of Narnia) and Kakashi Hatake x Rei Natsuki (Naruto) are really important to me and I’ve poured so much of myself specifically into their stories. I think it’s safe to say Kakashi and Rei is my all-time favorite ship across all fandoms, though, just because of how much their story means to me. The Scarecrow and The Bell is my magnum opus, my pride and joy, and I’m sure it will be my biggest fandom footprint of my entire life. I’ve dedicated the past three years to this story and these characters and I intend to continue doing it until it no longer brings me joy (which I hope it always will). There’s just so much I could say about this story and Kakashi and Rei’s relationship but I don’t think we have enough time or space in this post for that 😅 Just know that they mean the world to me and I will always hold them in the highest regard as a beautifully messy, flawed, passionate, soulmate-y ship that I love with all of my heart 🥺
EDIT: I also feel obligated to tack on some of my absolute favorite Naruto ships because I may not have written for all of them (yet) but they still make me unbelievably happy or I find them really compelling and enjoy the idea of exploring them:
Naruhina is precious happy sunshine and The Last honestly felt like a wonderful Disney princess movie to me, it was so cute and the romance was so on-point, Naruhina just makes me so incredibly happy and I love them with all my heart.
MinaKushi also gets me all up in my feels and I adore them with every fiber of my being. Their romance also gave me Disney princess movie vibes which I love, their story is just so damn sweet as is their character dynamic and I am still so heartbroken that they never got to be a happy family with Naruto because you know what? It’s what they deserved!
SasuSaku is so compelling to me and I really feel like we were cheated out of seeing their relationship develop and evolve postwar in the same way The Last did for Naruhina. They’re my favorite angst ship and while I don’t think they were written that well in canon, I love the possibility and potential of them together and am excited to explore them more in-depth in my own writing.
NejiTen is just too cute, I really love the way Neji and Tenten’s personalities compliment each other? I don’t have much else to say about them except that I really love them together and think they have so much untapped potential that I also can’t wait to explore in more depth in my own writing.
15. What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?
Paper Hearts and Impromptu Bookmarks, probably. I love the premise of this story a lot and I have so many interesting ideas for it but at the same time, it also feels kind of cheap and cringey to me, in a way? It takes all of these ideas I probably would have had if I had been into Naruto when I was a kid and kind of compiles them all into one big story. Kakashi and Aiko’s relationship and story is still really important to me and I want to continue it someday but for right now, I just haven’t had the motivation or desire to write any more of it. I think I’m just so overwhelmingly preoccupied with writing Kakashi and Rei’s story that I can’t imagine writing any other Kakashi x OC fics right now.
16. What are your writing strengths?
I want to say that I’m really good at capturing complex emotion? I don’t know, I write a lot of angst and mental upheaval in my fics which can be really difficult to try and capture, but I think I do a decent enough job of it? And just writing difficult subjects in general. I think it’s really important to address difficult topics such as mental illness and relationship difficulties and everything but I also want to try and write those topics in a way that is both authentic to the experience while also still tasteful. I don’t want to drive readers away with heavy subject matter but rather present a situation that feels real and authentic while also still being digestible. I may not be doing a very good job of that during the current arc of my fic that I’m working on, but I’m trying haha
EDIT 2: I also want to add onto this to say that I’m really proud of my organizational techniques for writing longfic. It’s not necessarily a strength in terms of the prose itself but it’s something that’s taken me years to really get a grasp on and find a method that works perfectly for me and so far, it’s been extremely helpful and beneficial to me. I don’t know where I would be now as a writer without these essential tools in my pocket.
17. What are your writing weaknesses?
I feel like I do a really bad job of the “show, don’t tell” thing. It can be really hard to balance descriptive prose with straightforward writing that moves things along. I don’t want to dwell on mental dialogue to the point where you lose track of what’s going on, but I also don’t want my stuff to read like “Character A did xyz. Character B said abc. They went to 123″, whatever. Another thing I struggle with is sentence variation. I always fall into the same patterns when I’m writing prose and I get really self-conscious about it because I don’t want to sound repetitive or disrupt the flow of the writing. One of my favorite things about prose is focusing on the cadence of the words, I think it’s one of the most beautiful things about writing in general, but it can just be really difficult to get a good grip on that. I’ve been told in the past that I apparently have a really good grasp/control of the language or whatever but sometimes I just find that really hard to believe when I look at my work with such scrutiny. I think one of my biggest pet peeves with my own writing, too, is feeling like I start all of my sentences the same five different ways. I’ll read other people’s works and they’ll write sentences like “Glass-blue water lapped against the shores of a deserted beach as a lonely woman gazed off into the distance” and I can just never figure out how to realistically write sentences that start like that in the context of my prose and it drives me fucking crazy, like I’m definitely jealous 😅
18. What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?
I’ve never really thought much about it before, but I think there are pros and cons! For bilingual/multilingual readers, I think it can be a really enriching reading experience because they know what’s being said in both languages. For people who only know one language, however, unless a translation is provided, I feel like it can be really alienating. I think the best use of that for both worlds is using it as a means for miscommunication humor. Other than that, I think it can be a slippery slope that depends on what kind of reader you are and how it’s written.
19. What was the first fandom you wrote for?
The Chronicles of Narnia! My very first fanfiction was a Narnia fanfic that I barely remember except that it laid the basis for Temptation and my Narnia fanfic series as a whole. I never posted this first iteration anyway, but I remember it was 2008/2009 and I wrote a solid 80 pages (which was wild for me at the time) and had gotten halfway through remixing the events of Prince Caspian when my computer crashed and I lost absolutely everything. I’m still heartbroken that it’s gone forever, not because I’d want to go back and read it necessarily (since I’m sure it was actually hot garbage) but at least for nostalgia’s sake. Either way, like I said, this long-lost fic laid the basis for the very first fanfiction I ever posted, the first published (and never finished) iteration of Temptation back in 2011 on deviantART and the since-defunct Figment. I fell out of the fandom around 2012/2013 and left the story alone for a while before ultimately deciding to completely redux and rewrite the story when the fixation swung back around again between 2016 and 2018.
20. What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?
Despite the fact that it’s still in-progress, definitely The Scarecrow and The Bell. This fic just genuinely means so damn much to me and I will cherish it for the rest of my life because of how much it’s given me, how much love and passion and time and even parts of myself that I have poured into this, and also just how expansive of a story this is. Not only does it touch on some very dark and heavy topics, but I’ve also created so much of my own characters and meta for this story that it’s almost an entire universe in and of itself. I’ve just contributed so much additional world-building and created so many new OCs to fill important roles in this story and in Rei’s life, and they’ve all become so deeply important to me as they’ve developed further over the years. I’ve come up with so many interesting ideas for everyone and their lives, which are all slowly becoming so rich and varied. Not to mention that it’s my most popular fic to date as well as my longest fic at 632k and counting. I’ve really just genuinely poured so much of my heart and soul into this story, it’s my absolute favorite thing I’ve ever done and I really mean it when I say that I will cherish it for the rest of my life.
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Hello! I just found your yt channel (it's amazing) and watched your video on writing diversely. What an awesome video, I learnt and took away a lot from you and your thoughts, especially as a white writer. I am still however a little conflicted on one thing. Not just writing the characters as another race or gender or identity of any kind from the writer, but the actual main character. Would it automatically be offensive and destined for failure for a white author to write a black main protag?
Hi there! I’m happy you found the video helpful, thank you for watching! This is a link to the video if anyone reading this has not watched it.
To be honest, I think I explained this as concisely and accurately as I could in the video as it’s truly the thesis of the video itself. I don’t want to fully reiterate what I said in the video because I feel like I won’t be as accurate/coherent, so I urge you to rewatch the video and take care to look at the timestamps as that may clarify your particular question, first and foremost! Taking a look at some of the comments too might also be helpful.
Stay in your lane as a detrimental, albeit well-intentioned, mantra
As I say in the video, it’s not as easy as saying “white people can’t write XYZ main character” or “we can write whatever we want”, nor is it as easy as and saying “stay in your line” , which may inadvertently enforce the majority as publishing is majorly white (stats are in the video). I believe I did address main characters too in that video, but whatever I said about characters in general 100% applies to POV/main characters as I was rebutting the well-intentioned, but perhaps detrimental idea that it’s only appropriate for a marginalized POV character to be written by someone marginalized in the same way (IMO, long-term, this will cause an influx of white POV stories which is the opposite of the intention [people say “stay in your lane” will allow marginalized folks to represent themselves rather than have white people represent us] as the publishing industry a) is mostly white and b) only seems to care to actively publish white people. “Stay in your lane” may also inadvertently define the role a marginalized person should play in the writing industry [responsible for writing stories about their marginalization]).
Writing POC main characters = automatically offensive/destined to fail?
If you’re viewing or questioning if writing a POC MC is “automatically offensive” or “destined for failure” I really urge you to rewatch the video because this is covered quite extensively but particularly take a look at the “trade fear for empathy” section as this question in itself is laden in a black and white binary of right versus wrong. If you’re asking this question, it might be that you are lacking the empathy to understand what I’m saying in the video (which is okay! there are many others who I’ve further discussed with in the comments). Writing POC isn’t something that’s destined to fail just because you’re a white author IF you do your research, be respectful, write empathetically and craft well-rounded, complex people. If you’re thinking you might automatically fail in this department because you are a white person, I did mention in the video that you may not be ready to write diverse characters in the respectful, robust ways necessary because you may be viewing POC as a “pass or fail” system which is obviously not what we are. If you want to write a diverse POV character and you do your research, write empathetically, speak to those people from that community (with their consent) and be willing to adjust your representation with that feedback without getting defensive, I don’t see how this would be automatically offensive or destined for failure, just like anything else that requires research.
Disproportionate amounts of white versus POC writers being published
In terms of publication failure, white people are actually the ones being majorly represented to write marginalized stories (when they don’t share that marginalization), so you probably wouldn’t have a problem getting a POC-lead story published (not saying I think this is right) because publishers treat diversity as a quota/marketing tactic and IMO, don’t seem to actually care about representation on a structural level, but rather on a topical, superficial level (which is why my main point in that video is that publishers, not individual writers, need to be held accountable).
White writers accidentally “dehumanize” POC in a misguided attempt at being empathetic
I think some white people, (and I don’t exactly want to use this word because it is quite severe but illustrates what I mean) may accidentally “dehumanize” people of colour in worrying that whatever move they’re going to make is automatically going to offend us, when in reality, if you take the time, and put in the effort to research and get to know people of colour (from my comments, these worries often stem from white people who don’t know many people of colour IRL), you will see that yes, we are different from you and difference is good, but no, this difference does not make us an untouchable, unknowable species. I don’t mean to make this seem like an “I don’t see colour” or “the only race is the human race” argument, which would be harmful, but rather a reminder that people of colour are also human beings and as you would write a white character with empathy, integrity, and vigour, you should also do the same when writing characters of colour (I address this in more detail in the video).
Doing personal research in times of confusion
I understand that as a white person, thinking about and understanding these issues may not be particularly easy, and even after a nearly hour long video of me expressing these thoughts, I genuinely do understand why someone who is not affected by these issues daily may still struggle with grasping these concepts. That’s because anti-racism is not something you can accomplish by watching one video, or reading a few articles--it’s a lifelong commitment, and so that’s when you would take your privilege as a white person to do more digging before you ask questions to those who have to expel emotional labour to answer them for you (not saying I have any problem answering your question at all, but putting this out there because there are many well meaning white people who I’ve encountered in my comments that do ask me or other BIPOC questions before turning to other resources that wouldn’t require free labour). Take some time to ruminate with this info, and then do some digging of your own. If you haven’t checked out these, these are my favourite anti-racism resources, all of which are free to access (noted otherwise):
Jane Coaston - The Intersectionality wars
A pretty comprehensive place to start with Kimberle Crenshaw’s theory of Intersectionality
Peggy McIntosh - White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
Wonderful place to start in understanding white privilege for those who don’t understand the differences/nuances between race VS class VS gender privilege etc
Article that explores white privilege beyond McIntosh’s ideas
It’s really important that white people also learn the systemic ways in which they benefit from white privilege and not just the “bandaids are made in my skintone” examples (though those examples are often used first because they’re the easiest to understand for a white person who is affected by other intersections, i.e. class, sexuality, gender, who does not feel they are privileged in other ways i.e. race).
Documentary on white privilege (Jane Elliott’s Brown Eyes VS Blue Eyes experiment)
Angela Davis - How Does Change Happen?
bell hooks - Ending Domination: The Struggle Continues
Abena Busia - In Search of Chains Without Iron: On Sisterhood, History, and the Politics of Location
I was able to access this reading through my university but IMO it is a must-read, especially for non-POC who may not fully understand the privilege of whiteness.
Claire Heuchan - Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Racism in the Feminist Movement
**Absolute must-read: “The theory did not emerge in order to aid white women in their search for cookies – it was developed predominantly by Black feminists with a view to giving women of colour voice (Heuchan).”
Tamela J. Gordon - Why I’m giving up on intersectional feminism
Powerful perspective on Intersectionality and how it’s been used in white feminism
Jennifer L. Pozner - How to Talk About Racism, Sexism and Bigotry With Your Friends and Family
Really good place to start if you have loved ones in need of education.
Maria Lugones - Playfulness, “World”-Travelling, and Loving Perception
This is the absolute crux of my points in writing empathetically.
"The paper describes the experience of 'outsiders' to the mainstream of, for example, White/Anglo organization of life in the U.S. and stresses a particular feature of the outsider's existence: the outsider has necessarily acquired flexibility in shifting from the mainstream construction of life where she is constructed as an outsider to other constructions of life where she is more or less 'at home.' This flexibility is necessary for the outsider but it can also be willfully exercised by the outsider or by those who are at ease in the mainstream. I recommend this willful exercise which I call "world"-travelling and I also recommend that the willful exercise be animated by an attitude that I describe as playful" (Lugones 3).
^^^ For writers struggling with the prospect of diversity and trying to find a place to start in what I call in my video "letting go of fear and voraciously welcoming empathy" I highly recommend this article as it is a powerful account of travelling across each other's "worlds". Read it for free with a free JStor account or through your institution, like your public library.
How to BLACK: An Analysis of Black Cartoon Characters
A FANTASTIC video that is an absolute must-watch (covers writing empathetically, writing with care)
If you have not already, read through the sources I used to formulate and argue my thesis in my video (much more detailed than I could do in an hour!):
Corinne Duyvis (ownvoices creator) on # ownvoices
CCBC - "Publishing Statistics on Children's/YA Books about People of Color and First/Native Nations and by People of Color and First/Native Nations Authors and Illustrators"
Hannah Heath - "5 Problems Within the Own Voices Campaign (And How to Fix Them)"
Saadia Faruqi - "The Struggle Between Diversity and Own Voices"
Kat Rosenfield (Refinery29) - "What is # ownvoices doing to our books?"
Lee and Low - "Diversity Baseline Survey 2019 Results"
Vulture - "Who Gave You the Right To Tell That Story"
School Library Journal - "An Updated Look at Diversity in Children's Books"
TL;DR: if you’re more overcome with the fear of offending people (often grounded in white fragility) instead of making the active, albeit sometimes uncomfortable, decision to do the hard work necessary to empathetically represent someone outside of your marginalization in fiction, I don’t think you’re ready to write POC in the nuanced, complex, empathetic ways necessary for good representation, and I would encourage you do more independent anti-racist work. (Note that “you” is not individualistically aimed at the asker!!)
Questions like this don’t necessarily have a clear-cut answer, and that is essentially the point of my video (I know, not super helpful, but I hope that makes sense!).
Hope this helps!
--Rachel
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