rosalarian:

I spent ten years building up a following on Tumblr. I had 30k+ followers, great engagement, it helped my career thrive like nothing else. I could quit my day job and live off the fan base I’d accrued.

Then, their policies changed. Half my work was no longer allowed. People left the site in droves. I left too, for awhile. I came back to a ghost town. I still have 25k followers, but I don’t think more than 10% are active anymore. I’m followed by ghosts. Same with DeviantArt, although I was never quite as big there, and I’ve been gone so much longer.

This disallowed half of my work was never allowed on Facebook in the first place, or Instagram, but their algorithms are such that my stuff rarely makes it to anyone’s feeds, and if I post a link to where people could actually pay me for my content, it’s hidden unless I pay for it. Patreon swept my work away to a dark corner where no one could see it unless I personally guided them there. Twitch is so strict you can’t even show bare feet. The death of Google Reader means nobody follows RSS feeds anymore, so I can’t direct people to my own site.

So there’s Twitter I guess, where I can post whatever I want, but again, algorithms. But more than that, I don’t have the energy to build up a following once again on a site I don’t own that can delete my career on a whim. The thought of spending time jumping around through hoops for attention just to have it taken away again has stripped any motivation I had to try.

The internet has been gentrified. All the small cute houses and mom & pop shops have been shut down and replaced by big corporations that control everything. I’ve been making webcomics for twenty years, and at the start, the internet was a beautiful wild place. Everyone had a home page. It was like having a house and people came to visit you and you would visit other people in their houses. Now, we don’t visit each other in personal spaces anymore. It’s like we have to visit each other in the aisles of a megamart. Everything is clean and sanitized and the weirdos who made the internet what it was are no longer welcome. No space for freaks anymore.

People still ask me for advice on how to break into comics, and I don’t have any wisdom because I don’t recognize the internet anymore. I don’t feel comfortable working within its boundaries which seems to be getting smaller and smaller and smaller. None of the tools I used when I started exist anymore. They’ve been replaced by things I don’t know how to use. I don’t think I could break into comics today. 2002 had so few barriers compared to now. You might have started on Keenspace, but you could reach a point where you could break away to your own site and people would go to it. Now, you start on Webtoon or Patreon and I guess you just stay there? It feels so much like owning a hardware store for years and then having to go work as a cashier at the Home Depot that put you out of business. I’m looking at my career trajectory and it all points to being a Wal-Mart greeter with uncontrolled arthritis.

I don’t want to make “content,” I want to make comics, I want to make art, and I want to do it in a space that is mine. I’m not sure there’s a place for that anymore.

(via kittensartswriting)

jackdaw-kraai:

More writers should consider just not telling their readers all of shit. Just don’t tell them stuff. What’s that monster? Fuck if you’ll find out. How did that weird as hell landscape marker come to be? Wouldn’t you like to know. How does the magic work? Just believe it does, motherfucker.

Readers don’t need to know everything. In fact, I absolutely advocate for not telling them certain stuff. If the characters don’t know, neither do they. If the narrator is omniscient? Lol no they aren’t.

Is this necessary for every story? Probably not. There’s plenty of good stories you could write while explaining all of it. But leaving those gaps, leaving those holes, can bring a story to life. Sometimes things happen in life that just… happen. Fucked if anyone knows why. Sometimes information gets lost. Sometimes information is hidden. But even beyond that, it expands the narrative.

If you explain when and why and how the murder monster became a murder monster, well… that’s forever set in stone now. Now they know. But if you leave it blank, absent of explanation, any explanation… it becomes an unknown. It forces your audience to wonder. Makes them think. That, more than you might think, makes a story get into your audience’s head, and once you’re there, you can make some real impacts.

So yeah, tell a story. But sometimes? Don’t tell your readers something. Make them fill in the blanks themselves.

You know those optical illusions where your brain just straight up makes shit up to fill in the blanks?

I trust my readers to do that. Some things are too boring to really go into detail about and I know my readers will probably not care exactly how something happened. There was a time skip and now they’re somewhere else. Did they drive? did they catch a train? This is not important. An hour later they were meeting in a coffee shop. Right?

And I find I can scale that up a lot more than I thought I could. I used to agonise over exactly what job my character should have and how they got it in order to explain how they have the amount of money they have to live the lifestyle that they do… and then I realised that nobody cares and if I simply show how my characters live and what they worry about the readers will assume that it makes sense without me having to put in all of the details.

You trust that it makes sense to me. I will sketch the outline of all of the stuff that isn’t the actual plot (LMAO) or feelings and I trust that your very clever brain will fill in all of the gaps in a way that makes enough sense that you don’t have to think or care about it and can get back to the resolution of angst.

I think I learned a lot from fanfiction. Fanfiction can be so efficient because you can refer to events that happened in canon without having to go over them and you can keep the story quite focussed… Because your audience already knows what happened and how people died or were saved or whatever. But then you get into AUs (which i LOVE) and somehow it works to do… exactly the same thing? It doesn’t matter that the parents were obviously not mauled to death by werewolves in front of our protagonist in this mundane coffee shop au… but whatever. they died tragically and now our protagonist is sad but we know that soon they’re going to KISS and that’s what we’re here for.

And like… you can find the right balance to do that in original fiction too. Add enough of the pattern in and your readers, with their very clever pattern matching brains, will fill in the gaps in a way that makes sense without having to read all of the details. You can skip all of the boring details…

And you can skip enough of the scary details to make the horrifying thing even more horrifying.

You can skip enough of the mysterious details to make the intriguing thing even more intriguing.

In some ways the more details you put in the more complete the story feels… which can, paradoxically, make it feel like this is all there is in the world. If you describe half a dozen people at a party the room feels half full. If you drop the names of one or two people you’ve suddenly got a crowd. Leaving out details reminds your readers that the world is much bigger than what you’re actually showing them.

tomatomagica:

x

(via kk-maker)

lekendall:

Tamika Wood’s Birthday Party

Chapter Five: The Title of this Chapter is longer than the text that it contains

1 2 3 4 5

Audio for this chapter and lots more chapters available on my website.

Keep reading

this is still my favourite chapter I have ever written.

inkskinned:

i think one of the reasons glass onion is so fun is that it just… loves the audience back.

so many popular movies and shows these days thrive on a sort of bitter engagement with their fans - where the fans are dismissed as being stupid, annoying, and needlessly angry. we are constantly positioned as being less intelligent as the writers.

so much of “spoiler-free” movie-making relies on writers getting away with one twist in their work, regardless of if that twist was earned. the work doesn’t actually have any rewatch value or interesting writing - because they think “good writing” is about “pulling one over” on the audience. they don’t focus on making interesting characters or storylines or good endings - they focus on fooling you. glass onion, meanwhile, has faith that the audience has figured the ending out, and that we’ll watch anyway, because we love the characters.

so many adaptions of older works… kind of seem to hate the original work. they’re done without passion. they’re done almost as if checking off a box. so many of them openly mock the audience for enjoying the original, almost directly telling us that we are fools for ever having loved something.

but glass onion. loves the audience. it knows that many of the people watching are mystery-lovers. it is an homage that feels love towards the original works it references. it knows we also love those works; and instead of trying to disparage those works, it allows us to celebrate them.

one of my favorite things about it - and maybe why i found it so satisfying - is that this movie isn’t trying to tell you it’s the smartest, bestest, most-clever detective story. instead, it asks itself what is satisfying and exciting for the audience? and actually gives us that payoff. it’s bright, colorful, and fucking fun.

just… more of this please. i’m very bored of nihilism and grittiness and “shock value” writing. put the love back in. let us love unironically. have your work say i love you too. thank you for sharing this story.

(via laurenthemself)

lekendall:

Tamika Wood’s Birthday Party

Chapter Three: Rules, Written and Unwritten

Audio for this chapter (and lots more chapters!) available on my website.

1 2 3

Alan Sebastian

I’ve always done pretty well at school. Mostly it was because I didn’t have much else to do.

I didn’t really have real friends, before Scott. Just Michelle. But I did have imaginary ones.

I remember when I was five I had a a few of them and we’d play cars on the staircase of my house. They were all named Alan and we used middle names to tell each other apart. Alan Keith. Alan James. And me, Alan Sebastian.

I’ve always found it difficult to talk to people. I don’t know what they’ll say or do and it’s stressful for me. Everyone else seems to be working from a set of social rules I didn’t get the manual for.

Scott is unpredictable and impulsive but somehow it’s okay. He explains to me that nobody else really knows what’s going on either or what other people will say or do. They’re just making it up.

But school was okay. I had the rules written in a book. I made lists of things and ticked them off. I read a lot of books. I tried writing stories a few times but I don’t know that I ever showed anyone until I showed Scott.

“You’re good at everything,” he’d said. But he says that a lot.

When I was younger I sometimes assumed people knew everything that I did. So I waited for someone to tell me I was good at writing the way they told me I was good at science and encouraged me to do more of it. I always got good marks for creative writing in primary school but nobody ever encouraged me to write more. So I concluded that it wasn’t one of my strengths and stopped doing so much of it.

Looking back I think I think probably nobody ever even knew I was that interested.

People just assumed I’d keep doing maths and sciences. So that’s what I did.

(via lekendall)

lizzibennet:

lizzibennet:

thetellyvision:

lizzibennet:

lizzibennet:

lizzibennet:

lizzibennet:

lizzibennet:

my mom’s been telling me my entire life she and my dad met at a bar which BOOOO BORING but today she just casually mentions actually she placed a fuckin ad in the newspaper saying she was ‘a single lady ready to meet the one’ and he was the first to call her and they dated over the phone for like three months before they met n she was like “i was already pretty much in love with him because i adored his laugh on the phone” ????? What kinda 90s romcom bullshit

btw the first time they met in person apparently was because my grandpa fuckin uhhh died? and my dad called my mom inconsolable and she went over to console him and literally just kinda ?? never left???? ehakdhskdhskfjdkdh this bitch’s been telling me they very casually met at a bar can you beLEAF no wonder me and my brother were born fuckin drama queens

me: so you placed an ad? in the newspaper? telling men who were interested in fathering children a beautiful woman to call you? like a person advertising property they want to sell?

my mom, pokerfaced: yes that is exactly what i did

me: mom.

mom: it’s not that different from tinder!

me: you know i read a fanfic once where that was the exact plot of how the two characters met. except it was set in the nineteenth century!!!

mom:

mom: bet you thought it was hot

me: NOT THE POINT

apparently. when they had their very first date my dad mentioned his daughter (my sister on his side) and my mom was like :( because she really wanted children and he just patted her hand and was like “don’t worry! we’ll have children of our own.” HDLSHDSKDHDK THE AUDACITY OF THIS MAN? ON THEIR FIRST DATE??? HELLO?

me: so dad what did you think about mom’s ad in the newspaper

my dad, curt: it was cool i guess.

me:

me: did you not think it was weird at all? why did you call her specifically and not anyone else?

dad: no it was common back then. idk i liked the font she chose for the ad

my mom, from the kitchen: it was standard issue from the paper for the ads to look like that

dad: oh… guess it was fate then :)

me:

dad:

mom:

me: did you feel that? did you feel the breeze that just passed?

dad: yeah?

me: that was because mom just melted in the kitchen

mom, from the kitchen, voice clearly a little choked: NO I DID NOT

@lizzibennet

Does your mom like pina coladas And getting caught in the rain?

Hold on a sec i gotta google something

yeah this is funny

(via kk-maker)

casgirl:

(via kk-maker)

So I haven’t really used Tumblr for a long time (a long time) but I guess here I am! Hello!

I’m ephant on twitter. but not here. Because that’s someone else’s porn account. Oh well.

So I’ve also set up another tumblr blog for my webnovel Tamika Wood’s Birthday Party which is about queer neurodivergent people falling in love and having family drama and… idk stuff. It has at LEAST five readers from all across the world so you still have time to be cool and hip and have read it before it becomes some kind of worldwide sensation (please, god, do not let this happen). I’ve queued the first eleven chapters (all of part one) but of course you can read the whole story - as well as a related story set in the same world - on my website.

I’ll try and keep putting chapters in the queue and hopefully tumblr will catch up with the site at some point so you can follow the story on tumblr if that’s the way you like to follow things.

I don’t know that anyone who follows me here and cares about who I am doesn’t follow me at least somewhere else. So. You know. It’s me. Hi.

lekendall:

Audio version of this chapter and a lot more chapters available on my website.

Content Notes

Tamika Wood’s Birthday Party

Chapter One: Tamika Wood’s Birthday Party

Alan Sebastian

31 October 1998

I feel awkward. That’s true in general but even more true tonight because I’m at a party. I wasn’t even invited but Scott says it was a general invite and insisted that I go.

It’s Tamika Wood’s birthday party (Not a Halloween party. Not a costume party.) and I’m not friends with Tamika.

“She goes to our school! You know who she is.” Scott had said.

But I’m not even 100% sure I know which one is Tamika Wood and which one is Tiffany West because they’re always together and they both have brown hair. Also Scott dated both of them for a while although not at the same time. Scott has a lot of girlfriends but none of them last very long.

“I don’t know if she knows who I am,” I had protested.

But Scott had laughed and pushed me on the shoulder. “Everyone knows who you are!” he said.

And I didn’t know what to think about that but I kind of wanted to keep arguing with Scott in case he touched me again. I do not have a girlfriend and I do not want to have a girlfriend. Right now Scott does not have a girlfriend. Which is sort of a problem for me.

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