#giselle gets too srs bsns

[gisellelx]

Digging into the Illustrated Guide to catch up on Day 10 of the Twilight Advent Calendar and re-reading SM's description that Carlisle "has a slight English accent from his youth"...

...and I need for the entire fandom to understand, before anybody else goes on trying to write this and heaven forbid anybody go on to try to act it (I'm looking at you, Peter F.) that a London accent from 1640 is a Texan accent to modern ears.

Carlisle did not sound like Colin Firth. He sounded like Matthew McConaughey. It's still sexy, but it ain't the same thing.

#twilight #carlisle cullen #linguistics #giselle gets too srs bsns #twilightadvent23

[gisellelx]

Opinion on Jalice x ocs

Okay, sorry asker (and I still have a bunch more things in my asks but this one just made me want to unleash). But sit down, because here is "Giselle gets too srs bsns about OCs."

Disclaimer: I want to be completely clear here. The absolute core of fanfic, IMO, the thing that makes it so much more valuable culturally than commercial fiction, and the thing that makes the world go round, is this: in fic, you get to write for yourself. You get to spin the story you want to see told, in whatever way pleases you most, with no interference from the commercial publishing industry, or readers' taste, or anything other than "I wanted to experience this story, so I wrote it." This is super rare. Writing for just the sake of it is totally misunderstood--with any other hobby, we wouldn't go, "Oh are you trying to become a professional pickleballer?" or "Are you planning to try out for symphonies on your ukulele?" But for some reason, writing confuses people--we don't imagine it as ever being done just for fun.

Fanfiction is for fun, and that's what makes it so subversive and incredible.

So if you want to write a story that is you in the story, or Jalice in space, or wolfpack ABO--you should do that. That is literally where all the value in fanfic comes from. We get to hedonistically write exactly the thing we most want; to spend time with the characters exactly the way we want to, and sometimes a few readers come with us, and sometimes more readers come with us, and sometimes lots of readers come with us. And that's the whole amazing thing of it. So nothing I say here should be construed as "Don't write OCs." If OC x Jalice is your jam, fucking write that because that is literally what this whole thing is for, and what makes it so valuable and what makes it so unique.

HOWEVER.

Characters exist because they add something to the story that otherwise wouldn't exist without them. This is all characters, "original" or not. So any time you write a character, the question to ask is, "Why is this character in the story? What do they add? What's missing if they aren't here?"

This is not how most people write OCs.

OCs are often written so that the writer can imagine some scenario that they can't see happening with canon. That scenario is often, "What if I was in the story?"

"I" is a very seductive person to put into a story. As I said above, the whole fun of fanfic is the ability to imagine exactly how we want the world to go, and adding ourselves to the story is a logical extension of that. But what becomes difficult about that is that when you write a story, your reader needs to care about all the major characters in the story. In fanfic, we get to shortcut a little because our readers are already invested in the canon characters (although I still think it is well worth it to act as though we don't have that buy-in and to develop the canon characters just as much) but for an OC? You've got to do a lot of heavy lifting to make the reader convinced that this character is someone we should care about achieving their goal.

If the OC is a self-insert, that's tough emotionally, because of course the author cares about achieving her imaginary goal, so it's easy to accidentally leave out of the writing the part where we convince the reader that it matters. Then readers are mad, and we as authors feel like we've stuck our heart out there and gotten skewered.

If the OC is not a self-insert, it still takes time and skill and practice to draw a character in such a way that the reader agrees they belong in the story. This is hard, period, but doubly hard in fanfiction because the reader already has expectations about where the edges of the world are. So if you introduce an extra character, you really have to sell them, in a way you do not if you are writing a novel that is 100% yours. The result is that a lot of OCs feel like they serve no purpose, and readers don't buy them, and they don't understand why they are there.

Characters need to advance the story. If they get a name, they need to advance the story. If they do not advance the story, they do not belong in the story. If the answer to "what does this character add to the story" is "I just like them," then they don't belong. The story should be different if that character was absent, or if that character was different. (Different rant for a different day but this is why I don't buy for a minute the argument that published fanfic has changed the story enough to warrant its publication.) If you write an OC, or even if you give serious time to a character who was just a side mention in canon, you must do that work of making their story and their perspective integral to the story you're trying to tell.

I actually love this about OCs and near-OCs. Because they have no grounding in canon, you can make them serve whatever purpose you need them to, and however you choose to characterize them is entirely up to you, which gives you a lot of writerly freedom. I put OCs or near-OCs in almost every one of my fics—even the short ones. Off the top of my head: Tony Mason in Ithaca Is Gorges, Elizabeth Bradshawe in Stregoni Benefici, Dierdre in "For a Season," Dorothy in Stregoni Benefici, and more. And that's nothing compared to the canon-mentioned characters I've given fuller life in my fanfic. The reason I do this is because that freedom lets me show something about the canon characters, or the canon situation, that is more easily revealed by another party. But the onus is on me, the writer, to make it clear to the reader why this character matters so much and to tell the story in such a way that the OC becomes a fully fleshed-out character, and the story is such that it seems inevitable that the OC would be a part of it.

The most effective OCs in fanfiction are ones which drive the story of the characters that most people came to fanfic to read about--the canon characters--in a way that feels intrinsic and real. That means a lot of legwork on the part of the writer to understand the OC, and to create them in a way that makes the reader identify with them and care about their role in the story, and in a burden that is additional due to the nature of fic itself--convince the reader that they belong in a story the reader is expecting to only consist of the canon characters.

This is hard. It's hard to do well, especially if you don't have a lot of experience writing, as many fanfic writers do not, and it's hard to receive negative feedback when and if people don't connect with the OC that you've imagined being such an amazing person. This difference in what the writer thinks they're doing (having some fun with a new person) and what the reader wants to read (a story that makes sense with all the characters on the page) leads to a disconnect, and that disconnect is the source of a lot of the "people don't like OCs" / "OCs are bad" discourse in fandom.

So. I don't really have an opinion on any given paring, Jalice or otherwise, or any given character, "x OC." I love a good OC; I think they can do a lot in fic that canon characters cannot. If you can sell it, I will read it. But the less clear it is that this character has, well, character, and the less clear it is why this character is necessary to the story--the more it's going to feel like the OC is some strange, authorial hand.

And that's a hard sell in fanfic, period. It's not just because there's an OC; it's because it's genuinely difficult to do.

(My tumblr title is based on the idea of characterization, and for me, exploring characterization is at the center of why I write fic. That approach not true of everyone, so apply grains of salt as appropriate.)

#characterization #writing #fanfic #asks #long post

[gisellelx]

thank u for ur post about fanfic, sometimes I feel bad that it's all I write and that it's less legitimate than fiction writing in general so it's nice to hear the appreciation

A very wise fandom friend of mine once pointed out that writing is the singular hobby that everyone expects to lead somewhere. In addition to writing fic, I enjoy photography, playing the piano, and quilting. But no one hears that I enjoy those last three things and thinks that obviously, my goal is to start a photography business, be a concert pianist, or start submitting to big art quilt shows.

If you enjoy writing, however, people immediately jump to "Oh! When will you write a novel and publish it?" It is somehow this weird hobby that people can't envision anyone ever doing just for fun. This was not helped by Twific fandom where filing the serial numbers became a bloodsport, resulting in the idea that anyone who didn't stop writing Twific to make time to write non-derivative romance novels or who didn't publish their uber popular fic was somehow inferior, baby, or still "practicing." Or even worse, that the only way to prove that fanfic was valuable was to get Simon and Schuster to pay you a 6 or 7 figure advance for it.

And to that last idea, please allow me to just say:

FUCK.

THAT.

The retelling of stories, the spin offs, the "what if this happened to this story instead” is literally where literature began. Oral narratives started thousands of years ago as the way humans made sense of the world and each other. As they were passed on, people added sections, or created a new narrative about a side character (hi, Aeneas). Any advanced schooling in literature and literary criticism will teach you that the concept of the author is a relatively modern one. In the beginning, there was no such thing as an author; there were only stories and the other stories which those stories begat. Fanfiction is the precursor of fiction, not the other way around. When you write fic, you are engaging in a millennia-old practice that is basically the foundation of what makes us human. I can't think of anything short of procreation that has more intrinsic value.

So. Use fic however you want to. Write only crack fic. Never learn to punctuate dialogue. Do nothing that resembles practice. Or do use it to prep for a career or a side hustle as a novelist: dive super deep and try to figure out complex plot structure and how to balance exposition and dialogue. Or use it to practice wordcraft more generally, which is a skill that benefits you no matter what you do. Use it to practice writing or reading a language that isn’t your first one. Use it just to meet people. Read in one fandom, write in another fandom. Post a bunch of super smutty, plotless fics, and then post a bunch of serious ones. Do what feels good, and what's fun, and if you aren't enjoying this hobby, for heaven's sake, quit it! It's a hobby. But it's a meaningful, useful, rewarding art and you should never feel bad for enjoying it. It need never take you anywhere at all to be worth your time to do now.

#fanfic #fandom meta #twilight fanfic #giselle gets too srs bsns #asks #writing #fandom

[gisellelx]

Point 2.

Let’s talk about indigenous ways of knowing for a second. Twilight invokes several different groups of indigenous people, which could have, had the author not been so blinded, made this an incredibly rich and cool supernatural story. There are of course the Quiluete, but there are also the Ticuna, in Kaure, and, based on the costume choices for Zafrina and compatriots, likely the Yanomami.

Now, a) I think part of this is the author’s own colorblind clueless racism. But b) I also think this is an issue of having everything in the story only exist to serve the romance. Because whenever anyone in this saga knows something, it is only relevant insofar as it’s relevant to the E&B love story. That’s actually true of everyone, not just the indigenous characters, but it’s a particularly egregious problem when you add race to the mix.

In both book and movie canon, Kaure knows what’s up. So why on earth are a couple of Cullens (Esme for sure, maybe A&J?) not immediately on the jet back to pick her brain? Just like with the story of the Third Wife. Bella gets some info, which she and/or Edward completely misinterpret, and then...they never seek additional help. Why? Likely because of course Kaure doesn’t actually know anything.

The idea that you can’t quite put the pieces together until one of the indigenous characters give you info comes up more than once. But those characters only exist as NPCs; there to tell you the princess isn’t in the castle. Their knowledge is never respected; their contributions are never taken seriously. And maaaybe Alice and Jasper could’ve helped with that but even then, we never see it...their interaction with Nahuel and Huilen is totally transactional. Oh Nessie will be okay? Yay, great, please go back to your country. Not “Oh my gosh tell us everything about what eternity is going to be like for our daughter.”

Again I think this is a writing problem more than a racist intent, but it manifests with racist impact and it behooves us to be aware of that.

#giselle watches the movies #giselle gets too srs bsns #twilight #twilight renaissance #bd1

[gisellelx]

Consider this ask a general prompt for any nerding you would like to do for us re: linguistic thoughts about various Cullens. Also: any particular headcanons of how they've influenced each other's speech in general? (I was going to say re: Edward emulating Carlisle but that might not be the most interesting example)

Okay commence much belated nerding out. Relevant post.

Under a cut because sorry, I went to town here. tl;dr--the Cullens sound different to each other, and their backgrounds and relationships have affected the way they sound over time. But they all can sound exactly how they need to any time they need to.

Here are two useful things we know about why people do or do not change the way they talk.

Communities of practice: this is a concept which comes from education but which has gotten adopted in several adjacent fields, including sociology and linguistics. Basically, the idea is, the way you talk will reflect the kinds of relationships you want to have with people around you, and how you want to draw lines separating your group from other groups. My easiest-to-understand example of this is that my friends from college athletic bands had some terms and inside practices which arose because of our shared experience of playing in those bands. We were in band twenty years ago, but if you're having drinks with a few other bandos and leave the bar, someone will go "ohhhhh see ya!" like the cheer we yell when someone gets put in the penalty box at a hockey game.

Convergence and accommodation: Speakers often try to sound like people they want to connect with in more than just practices and inside jokes. The more you want to connect with someone (combined with your personality), the more likely you are to adopt their style of speaking. This is in the short term, which is accommodation (you start to speak more slowly because the person you're speaking with speaks more slowly) or dialect convergence (over time your whole way of sounding starts to shift toward other people's.) Some evidence that extroverts do this faster, but it also depends on how desirable the connection is.

Convergence is probably more influential for the Cullens than CoP, although I imagine there are some CoP kinds of things that happen to vampires more broadly and the Cullens specifically. In particular, I suspect (and write) that the Cullens have lots of euphemisms for things: they talk about "mistakes" to avoid talking about murder, about "Royce" and "Charles" to avoid uttering the word rape, Edward's rebellion is called The Time or Edward's Sojourn (that's Carlisle).

The bigger question is, how would they sound and how would they naturally converge (or not!) based on their personalities and relationship.

So. You have the Cullens. Kind of a rough-and-tumble rundown of their varieties:

Carlisle: I headcanon Boston Brahmin . In the 1700s, the London accent was /r/-full, so Carlisle would've arrived to the US sounding more like a current-day American speaker than we associate now with British English (received pronunciation usually being the exported one). He would've hobknobbed with the educated elite on the eastern seaboard and picked up what they sounded like at the time. He loves being American--this is where he found his purpose and his family. So shifting toward that accent makes sense for him.

Esme: Lower middle class US midlands. The central Ohio accent is often perceived to be extremely neutral. It's not--there are some truly funky features--but people think it is, so there's not much reason to move away from it. She might have tried her hand at a transatlantic accent, but she slides back into her middle Ohioan often, because it's easy and it's not usually considered "bad" anywhere. She makes fun of the way Carlisle says rather. He teases her about how bag and egg are the same sound for her.

Edward: Northern Cities Shifted Chicago. If you've ever heard a Chicagoan pronounce the word Chicago, well, there you go. I realize this probably fucks with the gentle, sexy attempt-at-American accent delivered by Robert Pattinson. Edward was born too late to have transatlantic imposed on him, and so his accent was probably left to be.

Rosalie: Another reason they hate each other--they sound alike. Rosalie is on the other side of the Great Lakes, was born not that much later, and Rochester is another major source of Northern Cities Shift. So she and Edward sound...pretty much the same. They're both upper middle class/upper class and are picking up the prestige version of the NCVS.

Emmett: Appalachian. Pretty much enough said. The post I linked at the outset lays out a few things from Appalachian speech.

Jasper: East Texan. Texas is not general southern--there are a handful of features which make it notably different than say, Louisiana.

Alice: Upper class Mississippian. Now, this is somewhat indistinguishable to a northern American or non-American ear--maaaaybe you notice sort of "high class southern" but it's subtle. She's got a bunch of features of southern English, though, but the more prestigious versions of them. Not quite To Kill a Mockingbird--that's Alabama-- but that's not a bad place to start to hear it.

So that's where they're starting. Where do they end up?

Carlisle: sticks with Brahmin. The moment he arrived in the US means a lot to him, and so he defaults back to that first major change, when he adopted an American identity.

Edward: Probably goes without saying, but he sounds exactly like Carlisle. He shifted his default as soon as he was able, and his intense adoration of Carlisle means he converged on Carlisle's variety. He also picks up Carlisle's idiolect--particular phrases and verbal tics--again, because he wants to be like Carlisle in any way he can. "Oh my God will you quit; you're not Carlisle" is a phrase that gets uttered in annoyance often.

Esme: Keeps her central Ohio accent. She loves Carlisle more than anything, but there's nothing particularly stigmatized about her variety. So she keeps it. She's happy to be her own person.

Rosalie: Does not wish to be a part of this family and regrets her change. She certainly does not converge toward Carlisle's style, but the pressure of sounding anything like Edward, even if his dialect has shifted, is also grating. She brings her NCVS a little more toward Esme's Ohio variety over time.

Emmett: This man killed a bear* with his bare hands in the Smoky Mountains. He's real proud of being a mountain man and he sounds like one. He also has a healthy disdain for the upper-crustness of Carlisle and Rosalie and Edward and is determined to bring them back down to earth. Over time the most obvious parts of his dialect do fade--he doesn't use "a huntin'" very often, for instance. But he can shift into full on Appalachian on a dime and often does. It's fun for him.

Jasper: Stays East Texas. He's very proud of his cowboy identity, and is the least connected to the Cullen family as a community of practice. He can sound like whatever his paperwork says he does, but in default, he's still got the same Houston variety he's had for two centuries. I don't love darlin' darlin' Jasper in fic but I chalk that more up to writers learning how to have a light hand with dialect rather than it being something he fundamentally wouldn't say--he absolutely does say it. Also says bless your heart.

Alice: Biloxi is not that far from Houston, and she and Jasper, who are wound around each other, pick up each other's verbal mannerisms and reinforce subtle aspects of each other's gulf of Mexico accents. She both mellows Jasper's Texas English while also moving her own English toward his.

So in "default" mode, the Cullens sound a little different to each other. But there's no way a Twipire would somehow be unable to move perfectly and seamlessly between multiple English accents as they needed to. There's no reason to think that any of them showed up at Forks High School sounding like anything but exactly what their paperwork said their dialectal background ought to be.

*by the way this would've been a black bear, not a grizzly. I'm sure he loves grizzlies, but he wasn't fighting a grizzly in the Smokies. He probably got tangled up with a really mad mama bear. This is a pet peeve of mine, I admit.

#linguistics #twilight #accents #cullen family #carlisle cullen #esme cullen #edward cullen #rosalie hale #alice cullen #jasper hale #long post #giselle gets too srs bsns #tw: rape mention

[gisellelx]

"I like to think the fact that I personally scolded him about it before BD had an effect because it’s not quite as bad in BD." Dude you absolutely cannot drop that without further explanation. Story time, I beg you

Reference post

The story is somewhat boring? Understand first that I have no shame. If I like something, you’re either coming along with me, or we’re not talking. I am not shy; I possess only a small amount of tact, and I tend to call people out publicly as needed.

I read the books for the first time while I was in the beginning of grad school. Totally fell in love with the character of Carlisle; that was the end of that. That was the heyday of Twidom: BD had just come out, the first movie had just come out, Twilight was a Hall H event at San Diego Comic Con.

There was a separate company that did these little mini Twilight fancons in cities all over the country. The LA one would have Rob and Kristen, but the rest of them just had a string of support cast: Tinsel Korey was a common guest; Boo Boo Stewart as well; and Peter was at just about all of them.

Anyway, they came to my city in my third year of grad school, after Eclipse had come out and right when I was taking a TON of phonetics classes. Peter’s accent drove me up a motherfucking wall, so I decided to use my new knowledge and practice some skills and analyze it. I used acoustic analysis software to map out his entire vowel system as he produces it naturally and then took measurements of vowels from his performances in NM and EC (spoiler: they are wildly inconsistent). I also measured his use of /ɹ/, again, super inconsistent and also makes no sense—17th century London was a rhotic (r-full) English, and by the time he got to the US, the prestige variety was rhotic also.

So I stood in line for his autograph which was like $10 but I really paid $10 to yell at him. He took my book to autograph and I plunked down two analyses and went, “Do you have a dialect coach? Because they should be fired.” And then I told him about the rhoticity thing and showed him how his vowels were all over the fucking place. And he laughed and said thanks and I said, “I just want you to get my favorite character right” and he hugged me and we moved on to the next person in line.

But his performance in BD was markedly better. I’m sure he’s not wandering around like “Oh yeah, that one twenty-something woman from that one city; she gave me all this stuff.” But I like to think every time he had to produce a word with one of the worst vowels or an /ɹ/ sound, he caught himself up short and fixed it...a little.

#carlisle cullen #twilight #fan cons #asks #giselle gets too srs bsns

[gisellelx]

Had to take a break from binging to entertain my brother who was visiting from literally the other side of the earth and so I haven’t seen since 2019. Before I begin again, let me back up from the Cullens’ private jet (well done, very accurate) and hit on two points about Isle Esme. Point one.

We’re meant to believe that vampires have incredible reflexes and very fine-grained control. If this is the case, then even in the throes of sexual ecstasy, Eddie should be able to keep himself together. Realistically, canonically, he should actually be able to inhibit his natural sexual responses in the same way he can inhibit a human reflex like breathing. So:

A) this is just one more “men, you know them, they just can’t control it! You should feel flattered!” message, which in case this needs spelling out, is spelled R-A-P-E-C-U-L-T-U-R-E

B) this completely nullifies all the arguments about how Jacob could lose control around Bella and hurt her because hi, Edward can *also* lose control in a way that defies canon logic, which means that the whole thing about Jacob is probably not about him being a werewolf but just about him being brown

C) there’s a real long sordid history about that last trope of white men making white women afraid of the “untamed” sexuality of men of color. Begin with “Emmett Till” if you are new to that one.

#giselle watches the movies #too important not to note and get serious about #giselle gets too srs bsns #isle Esme #twilight #bd 1 #tw rape culture

[gisellelx]

I’m still seeing fans saying TL is a quarter or half Native American when there’s no evidence of this. Not even ethniccelebs.com says it

If he did a 23 &me ancestry test maybe then you would be on to something but he’s still a brown white man

I don't understand, tbh, how this has not been thoroughly debunked and am surprised to find renaissance fans, who are on the whole, I find, much more open to being critical of race, gender, class etc. issues than the people in my original fandom generation, who don't know this. So here is a fundamental truth: many, many, many mixed race people in the U.S. have some Native American ancestry in part because many, many Native women were raped. But that is very different than having a cultural affiliation with a tribe. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if there's some Potawatami or another midwestern tribe floating around if he did a 23&Me. But genes alone do not make you Native and to boot, it's a dangerous sidestep of Indigenous self-determination (just ask Elizabeth Warren) . Twilight actually could have, and should have, offered an opportunity to carefully take a specific Indigenous tribal culture and portray it with sensitivity and had the possibility of offering roles to Indigenous actors (even if they weren't able to cast entirely from the 700 or so enrolled Quileute, which, fair.) I don't think I need to rehash the roots of Mormon racism, nor the tenets of structural racism that led to Meyer's writing choices, but they are of course there, and then those same choices were exacerbated by casting choices in the movies. Hardwicke did not make the choice to cast the key leading man/foil/love triangle role as a Native actor and AFAIC that was a serious misuse of the platform this story had.

TL is a mixed kid from Michigan (just check out his vowels in "It's just a scary story" in movie one) . He was cast because he looked the part. When people yelled, rightfully, because a story which should have been a prime opportunity for Native representation in a major blockbuster instead cast this pretty white-adjacent guy, it wasn't about a DNA test. It was about one of the biggest opportunities for a community which is already completely sidelined in Hollywood being robbed of that opportunity. Look up who's playing the characters on the shows and movies you enjoy. Give your eyeballs and your box office take to the ones that are doing it right. Thoughtfully consume media that has the representation you want to see--and make sure it's not just "skin-deep," if you'll pardon the pun.

#taylor lautner #twilight #race #giselle gets too srs bsns

[gisellelx]

Got my third vaccine trial shot today! It's either the first shot of the live vaccine, or it's a shot of saline after two shots of live vaccine I had in February and March. I'll get a fourth shot in three weeks with the same of whatever I got today. Science is important. The scientific method is important. Data is important. Numbers are important. One major thing I've noticed over the last year is that lots of people are frightened by the scientific process. That at first the advice was, don't wear a mask, sanitize your groceries, six feet of distance is plenty. And then it became, wear a mask. Try to be outside. That's confusing. Those contradictions are bewildering. I get that, I really, really do. But they're a sign of just how fast we are doing science right now, not a sign that science is broken.

My undergraduate alma mater reported last October that researchers at their institution were publishing 400 papers a month about COVID.

400. A month. Admittedly, I did my undergrad at a major public university that is a research powerhouse, but let's just assume all the Ivys and public Ivys at a minimum are producing new knowledge at that rate. And universities that are less of a powerhouse are producing new research at a slightly lower rate. This is a mind. boggling. amount of new knowledge being produced literally every day. It means we're improving our understanding every single day in ways which look bewildering from the outside. And I understand why it's scary to be told in April "no you don't need a mask" and in July, "no you definitely need a mask and please don't take it off indoors" and in September "Right so we probably don't need to wipe down every table with Clorox." That's what the scientific method is, though. You make a guess. You test the guess. You get new knowledge. You test a new guess based on the new knowledge. Over and over and over. We know so much more about SARS-CoV-2 now than we did a year ago. This is nothing short of miraculous. Are scientists going to misstep here and there? You bet! Is that cause for mistrusting results? Nope. It's a sign that the process is working.

You know how fast the previous fastest vaccine was developed? FOUR YEARS. The first case of COVID-19 was discovered less than 12 months before the first vaccines went into arms. This is insane but not because it's bad. It's insane because it's amazing. It's scientists everywhere going, "What do we have to do to solve this problem" and then fucking solving it. The tl;dr: SCIENCE. IT WORKS, BITCHES. You can trust it. You can trust it precisely because sometimes it gets it wrong. You can trust it precisely because you get one instruction at one point and another instruction at another point. That's a sign that the process is working perfectly, not that it's broken.

Proud to be doing my part. And keep an eye out for the EU and FDA consideration of the Novavax vaccine and be like, "Oh hey this one fanficcer I know from tumblr helped with that..."

#covid #giselle gets too srs bsns #science #research #vaccines

[gisellelx]

For the writer's ask game: 16, 30, 36, 41?

Thanks @running-awayy! 💖

16.  How many drafts do you need until you’re satisfied with a project?

SO MANY. So, so many. This is one of those things that has gotten much worse over the years. I remember in high school and college, revision seemed so onerous but I had some teachers who really made us dig in deep and do it. And now it’s just a deep part of my process. I try to let a draft get down on paper without messing with it too much, but I always end up messing with it--at a bare minimum, I sit down and re-read what I wrote last, making some edits, before I start writing the next thing. I go to sleep and realize there’s a whole section missing. I’ve recently taken to slowing way down on fic for this reason. If a fic is being posted chapter by chapter as I write it, and I realize that whoops, no, four chapters back a character really needs see another a character do xyz in order to make this current scene make sense, I’m just stuck if it’s already posted. But if I’m sitting on the whole thing, I can go back and re-insert that scene, which is what I’m doing with my current WIP.  And once all of that is done when I’ve reached what most people would consider a final draft, I make three distinct passes on it. One is for cohesion--did I leave a character on one side of a room by mistake, which often happens as I’m revising and adding and subtracting big chunks. The second is for language--I’m looking for repetitive words, and for the rhythm of individual sentences, making sure the structure matches what I’m trying to do. The last pass is proofreading. So that’s three “final” drafts right there, to say nothing of however many came before it. 

30.  Favourite idea you haven’t started on yet

I answered this one in another one that was hiding while this was sitting (thanks for such fast asking!) so here’s another one I have in mind--I would really like to write a fic novel that is about the Cullens grappling with race ( @jessicanjpa has nudged me on this one). I can’t figure out exactly what the central conflict would look like, though, because they’re so fucking oblivious to it as characters. The closest I’ve come to it is in “Strange Fruit” and there are some hints of it in “Ordinary Time” as well, but that’s not canon-based. When I find a way in to that story I imagine I’ll feel compelled to write it. But it may well take me a long time to find the way in. I’ve seen it done many times in a very ham-fisted way, and I appreciate the effort, but before you have Carlisle and Edward and Jasper change, they have to have a reason to change. When I find that reason, I’ll write about it.

36.  Last sentence you wrote I’m working on two different scenes in this fic at once: 

“Pretty sure that if I had to be related to you, I’d have offed myself, too.”

41.  Any advice for new/beginning/young writers?

Learn craft! Read books and blog posts about writing. Try out different writing forms. Fanfic is such a great place to experiment because for most people, somebody is gonna read your stuff. Maybe only one person, but somebody. So you can try out different forms--does third person feel better? First person? Which tense? Try them out in different stories. Try writing a short fic where you use no adjectives. Try writing a fic from the perspective of an inanimate object. Do all the writing exercises you’d do in a creative writing class but post them on FFnet or tumblr or whatever. If you don’t know how to create a conflict, read about how other people do it.  Also read. Read more than just fanfic. In fact, if you really want to get good at writing, you have to read more books than fanfic. Fanfic has some particularities of the genre that don’t work or are absolutely nonexistent in non-derivative fiction and which will hold you back on creating really excellent fiction. For instance, learn how to get in and out of a flashback without putting it in italics. Not just because it will stop your work from looking ficcy but you’ll get a better sense for when you need to move around in time in a story. You’ll not just learn how to use the pluperfect tense, you’ll learn how to drive a story forward by going into the past (and when you don’t need to). Read the kinds of books that you want to write. Try out things that authors you read are doing. Notice when they do something that makes you stand up and notice the writing. Notice when a line just stays with you for weeks or longer--what is it about the language that did that?  And of course write a lot. Throw most of it out. Keep some of it. Show some of it to others. But keep doing it. It’s the only way to get better. 

(see I said I might go on forever. Whoops. Thank you! ) 

#ask #ask game #writer's ask #writing #fanfic #giselle gets too srs bsns

[gisellelx]

I believe resume will be taught to be racist towards people who aren’t white

The pragmatics of this ask suggest that this is maybe something the asker expects me to disagree with? 

Renesmee is (at this point in the timeline was) raised by extremely rich, pretty oblivious white people, some of whom have histories involving incredibly overtly racist actions, and none of whom grew up in a time which would’ve been conducive to starting to question the inherently racist structure of U.S. Society. 

Of course she would develop racist attitudes and no one would even notice. 

But here’s the thing I hope would happen, and certainly headcanon for my Kairos AU (Bella and Esme don’t survive BD and C & Ed end up together) which is that the fact that she is Gen Zer, with the ability to hop on Instagram and TikTok and tumblr and all these spaces where people her “age” are confronting white supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexism and other systemic societal ills would cause her to ask questions. I like the version of Renesmee who is a royal PITA to the rest of the Cullens even when it makes them uncomfortable. (@notquitetwilight ‘s shitpost Resentment Cullen Instagram is something I take as more than just a shitpost. I think it’s probably spot on--if you’ve never seen it, go find it.) I think that’s a plausible thing, and were this where I wanted to go in fic writing, I would love to explore what that tension is like. From a writing standpoint, that makes her a very useful character. If you try to impose anti-racist attitudes on the Cullens because you just want the story to be less racist, it feels very forced and the reader feels the heavy hand of the fic writer. This lends to a very preachy sounding fic (I’ve read several). 

Renesmee actually offers a really interesting twist to the narrative in that regard. She is a character who can grow and who would have some perfectly understandable reasons to develop attitudes which are at odds with those of the rest of her family. And that means she could be used as a character who helps shine a light on these highly problematic parts of the original story and could be used to change them in a way that doesn’t feel like the author smashing in with a heavy fist. There’s also the distinct possibility that she will end up in an interracial relationship. Not saying that plenty of probelmatic AF white people don’t end up in interracial relationships, but it can allow for growth on the part of the white partner, if that growth is allowed to happen.  It’s all the more reason Meyer needs to leave Jacob/Renesmee alone. If she writes them with her utter resistance to self-reflection about her own biases, none of this repair is possible. Ficcers have to do it; we’re the only ones who can.  Also this is a really good spot for me to tag @renegadepack and the Anti Racism Twilight Resource carrd--if you’ve read this far, you should think more about these questions. https://arrfortwilightfans.carrd.co/

#giselle gets too srs bsns #renesmee cullen #racism #twilight #kairos AU