Writerly Ways

Another ways that will be short and rather pointless. Because I'm out of time. KNow why? My god damn online class shut down three days before I told it to. I CHANGED it to shut down Monday night. It shut down Friday night and I was gone all day yesterday so I had about 1001 panicked emails this morning.

So I fix it AGAIN and some get in there to take the test and then the fucking thing shuts off AGAIN after I set it all the way to the end of the 16th week semester. I've got stressed out students. I'm sending pissed off emails to IT and god knows if it'll shut off again. THen there are students going well I'll TRY to take it. You know what, you waited until the last fucking second to take your email so take it or not but if you don't....

So what I wanted to talk about was very simple. It's just getting hard and harder to publish. I've spoken of the publishing house woes and now there's something new on the self pubbers and other artists who use patreon and kickstarter. One of the ones I follow spoke of problems with patreon (I went back to get the post but their entire blog is gone). They mentioned it had to do with people being upset that 'adult content' was getting banned. I googled it but all I could find was an old kerfluffle about censorship (from last year) where they were banning racist stuff and were 'stepping on rights.' So I don't know what the issue is.

But I DO know what the issue is with Kickstarter. It's staunchly anti-union and you can read more here.. I have issues with this. It's going to be hard for me to give money to kickstart projects.

But that doesn't just hurt Kickstarter. It hurts the artists too. It's hard to know what to do in cases like this. A lot of authors, artists and musicians depend on both of these and it's not as simple as not buying Chick-fil-a's homophobe sandwiches and hurting a multimillion dollar company. Yeah you're hurting them but the people you want to support at the same time (and I'm already on the hurting end of that with my publishing house and people boycotting it). SIGH.

Not a lot of links this week but this one from Betty ties in to the what do you do conundrum.

How Should We Approach Problematic Authors? Let's face it, not every author is a good person. In the last few years Orson Scott Card and Marion Zimmer Bradley were outed as a homophobe and an enabler, if not actual practicioner of pedophilia respectfully. J.K. Rowling has made several disturbing transphobic tweets. H.P. Lovecraft was racist.

There's no one right answer here. Is Rowling speaking out of a place of ignorance? Is a tweet as bad as helping your husband rape young women? Probably not but I guess that would depend on what the tweet was. Orson has made it very clear how he feels about gay people and I can easily never read his crap again. Lovecraft was from another era so do we give him a pass? It's hard to say. I think this will depend on you as a person

PODCAST - 243 – Multiple POVs Revisited

Reconciling Character Choices With Your Plot

And from around the web

Maybe the Secret to Writing is Not Writing?

Crafting The Perfect Chapter

Selling to Non-Bookstore Retailers

My Five Favorite Books On Writing

Develop Your Story By Listening To Your Cast

Fic - Like Stone

I FINALLY finished putting up the polished chapters of Like Stone up on AO3. Oh I'd like to have a third time through but I need a break to come back with fresh eyes. (and no, still haven't used rahirah's edits because I need more damn hours in a day). It's far too long to post here. Ironically this sets up what I spent the early months of this year whining about: having a story in one spot and losing it. Well there are better methods of saving things these days so I'll risk it. If you want to read the story, it's here.

Story Title : Like Stone
Fandom: Angel: the Series/Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Summary - Twenty years after the battle with the First and the aftermath of Jasmine’s reign, life still isn’t easy for Buffy and Angel and their friends and family. Connor has been on the outside of his father’s life for years and isn’t particularly happy to be brought back in when Dawn shows up in L.A. with a case that requires his attention. But that is just the beginning of the badness threatening to swallow them all whole.

Warnings violence but nothing above what was on the shows

Characters: Connor, Angel, Wesley Wyndham-Pryce, Buffy Summers, Dawn Summers, Spike, Willow Rosenberg, Xander Harris, Charles Gunn, Kate Lockley, Lindsey McDonald, Lilah Morgan

Pairings: technically gen fic but does contain Buffy/Angel, mentions of Buffy/Spike, original pairings for Spike, Dawn, Willow and Xander, Lindsey/Kate, Gunn/Gwen, mentions of Connor/Kate, Connor/Faith and Connor/original character and a fling for Connor & Dawn.


Disclaimer - As always, Joss owns all characters. The only thing I own are the few OC’s you’ll see in here. Lyrics, poetry and prose will be marked appropriately so we’ll all know who owns them. In all cases, it’s not me.

Rating - R

Timeline – 20 years post series ending.

Author’s Note –Since this was started in in 2003, it was written before season five of Angel and before any of the comic book canon so it’s an alternative reality story (which is why Connor has a different last name. Origins hadn’t aired yet). I’m also amused that I predicted the return of the X-Files back then. I almost changed the show’s name here but decided to leave the show title as I had it back in 2003. Thanks to evil_little_dog and rahirah for betaing at least a part of this fan novel. And a big thanks to penaltywaltz for the two soundtracks and art for this. I love it and you need to check it out! You can find them here
Author’s Note #2 Things Andrew did in Dead Things (namely the attempted gang rape of Warren’s girlfriend and her murder) and other murder/attempted murders in canon, guaranteed this was not a character I liked because he never paid a price for that. There are scenes were some of the characters are equally not okay with him later in this story.

Link(s): AO3 & FFN (not yet updated there)