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I've officially been published for the second time in a literary magazine! Amazon even officially lists me as an author. Unfortunately my firm commitment to online privacy means I can't tell you any more than that, so you'll just have to guess which of the many magazines distributed through Amazon I contributed to

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I love editing. One suggested change and I've already had to kill two darlings with more yet to come

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Now hold on there

no one:

the pfps in your notes when ur post goes viral:

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I’ve seen the Ursula K LeGuin quote about capitalism going around, but to really appreciate it you have to know the context.

The year is 2014. She has been given a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Awards. Neil Gaiman puts it on her neck in front of a crowd of booksellers who bankrolled the event, and it’s time to make a standard “thank you for this award, insert story here, something about diversity, blah blah blah” speech. She starts off doing just that, thanking her friends and fellow authors. All is well.

Then this old lady from Oregon looks her audience of executives dead in the eye, and says “Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.”

She rails against the reduction of her art to a commodity produced only for profit. She denounces publishers who overcharge libraries for their products and censor writers in favor of something “more profitable”. She specifically denounces Amazon and its business practices, knowing full well that her audience is filled with Amazon employees. And to cap it off, she warns them: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

Ursula K LeGuin got up in front of an audience of some of the most powerful people in publishing, was expected to give a trite and politically safe argument about literature, and instead told them directly “Your empire will fall. And I will help it along.”

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this should be a tweet but I don’t want to deal with people on Twitter. everyone stop having every character in your fiction talk like their goal is to get an A in therapy. 

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My cartoon for yesterday’s @guardian

 p.s. You can preorder my new book of cartoons REVENGE OF THE LIBRARIANS: http://tomgauld.com/comic-books-v2

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A teenager named Jirka took this photograph in the early 1980s during a severe lightning storm that left the majority of Czechoslovakia without power. The creature remained in place until the storm dissipated.

Images and text are © Max Lobdell, 2022.

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Listen, I’m not for a “TikTok is ruining literature” panic, and it’s FINE if you use tropes to describe your book, tropes are very useful, but I just.

I just run across a book claiming to be a dark retelling.

And the. The fucking summary. Reads. 

“You can expect ‘touch her and I’ll unalive you’ vibes.”

THIS IS A BOOK SUMMARY. ON GOODREADS. YOU DON’T GOTTA CENSURE ‘KILL’. THIS IS A MOTHERFUCKING DARK RETELLING AND YOU’RE THREATENING TO ‘UNALIVE’ SOMEONE?

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saw an ant on the bus today, what a horrible fate. moved an unfathomable distance from everything you've ever known because of forces you could never possibly understand. no matter how long you follow the pheromone trail you laid you'll never find your way home.

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"It's quite simple, you see. If I'd known the rules from the beginning, that is, before I "died", it would've been even simpler. But then again, I suppose that's why you don't tell us until after the fact."

"There's an old saying that it takes 10,000 hours to master any skill, or around 400 days of constant practice. Ordinary that'd be impossible for a human being to achieve in a single year, but I started with skills I already had some proficiency in, and you'd be surprised what we mortals are capable of under the right pressure. So it wasn't easy, but I was able to perfect a skill to the point where I'd be sure to win my next challenge with 2 months to spare."

"I thought about taking a break, but then I realized one skill wasn't enough. I was lucky to win my first challenge. I'd eliminated luck this time, but I knew you'd eventually rule that it had to be a different challenge each time. So I started on my second skill."

"It was after my third challenge that you finally added that rule. By that time I'd been able to successfully master two extra skills. In other words, I had enough different abilities to buy me at least two more years."

"There's another thing about mastering skills that most people don't have time to appreciate: the more you do it, the easier it gets. There's a lot more overlap than you'd expect between most things, and of course I picked up a lot of good practice habits. In other words, after learning three skills, I was a very quick study for the forth, and fifth, and sixth. By the time my two-year buffer was up, I'd mastered 3 more skills. And by the time those three were spent, I'd mastered 6 more, and so on and so on. No matter how many years past, no matter how many different challenges we played, my assorted skills only ever increased."

"And so here we are. Year 513. A whole 513 challenges, and I'm already prepared for 513 more. I don't even have to pick up new skills anymore, I've got so much time that as long as I practice my current skills as to not fuck up challenges in the meantime, I'll just pick up new skills over the course of living for centuries on end. Quite frankly, I am confident that I will never die."

"So, God of Death, old friend, here is my chosen challenge this year. Not a contest, but a test. Should you succeed, I will gladly die: find someone that could call themselves my equal."

The God of Death laughed, and as the man gazed upon them, thinking back to all the challenges they played, all the times they nearly gave him a run for his money, he felt something he hadn't felt in centuries: the feeling of fear.

Perspective was never his strongsuit, and there were more skills yet to master.

As the god of death, before a soul passes on, they may challenge you to a contest for one year of extra time. There is one soul that is on his 513th extra year, even after you added a rule that it has to be a different contest every time.

#writing

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does anyone have that unsettling oil painting of a dark window with a sheet leading out into the darkness? it did the rounds on tumblr a while ago and i need itttt

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Paintings by J-Edward-Neill

This artist on Instagram

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my dad likes to call the stretches of time where you’re not creating “dreaming periods” and says that they’re meant to allow you to absorb all of the beauty, life, and inspiration from the things around you so that when you’re able to create again, you will have fanned your spark back into a flame. sometimes its hard to see those moments as anything but stagnation, but he always says that they’re natural and healthy and needed—things that should be embraced rather than feared.

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Nothing like a big bowl of Cookies & Creme ice cream to celebrate publishing your first short story!

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Nothing like a big bowl of Cookies & Creme ice cream to celebrate publishing your first short story!

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In other news, guess who's officially a published author