Ughbyss - Woof Woof, Said Cerberus

HELLO???????????!!!!!!

Before I was even a little girl, my father cut out my tongue. When I would cry, he would scream to silence me. So I have grown in silence, in the void between stars.

— Michelle Evans, from Just Another Dead Black Girl

Mum:hey -

Me, returning from a walk in the woods after still being unsuccesfull in getting abducted by the fair folk: I don’t wanna talk right now

“Whenever an actor tells me how I should feel about acting it takes me out of the equation as an audience member. What I remind myself of as an actor is that I’m here but it’s not really about me or my feelings about it, it’s about telling the director’s story…so it’s not my job to feel it, it’s the audience’s to feel it.” — ADAM DRIVER

I saw a post talking about how Terry Pratchett only wrote 400 words a day, how that goal helped him write literally dozens of books before he died. So I reduced my own daily word goal. I went down from 1,000 to 200. With that 800-word wall taken down, I’ve been writing more. “I won’t get on tumblr/watch TV/draw/read until I hit my word goal” used to be something I said as self-restraint. And when I inevitably couldn’t cough up four pages in one sitting, I felt like garbage, and the pleasurable hobbies I had planned on felt like I was cheating myself when I just gave up. Now it’s something I say because I just have to finish this scene, just have to round out this conversation, can’t stop now, because I’m enjoying myself, I’m having an amazing time writing. Something that hasn’t been true of my original works since middle school. 

And sometimes I think, “Well, two hundred is technically less than four hundred.” And I have to stop myself, because - I am writing half as much as Terry Pratchett. Terry fucking Pratchett, who not only published regularly up until his death, but published books that were consistently good. 

And this has also been an immense help as a writer with ADHD, because I don’t feel bad when I take a break from writing - two hundred words works up quick, after all. If I take a break at 150, I have a whole day to write 50 more words, and I’ve rarely written less than 200 words and not felt the need to keep writing because I need to tie up a loose end anyways. 

Yes, sometimes, I do not produce a single thing worth keeping in those two hundred words. But it’s much easier to edit two hundred words of bad writing than it is to edit no writing at all.

I was most excited for you to come

I majored in English lit in college and I absolutely believe all the fanfics I’ve read have more literary merit than most of the published fiction I’ve gotten through. Fanfic writers are brave and ballsy and laughing and weeping. And they hold your hand. There’s so much contact between writer and reader, it’s visceral. And I think fanfiction is in part a reaction against the shame of an outdated community of people who attach all these rules and regulations and bullshit to the act of writing that they actually just limit their own ability to tell stories. So conclusively--fuck them and keep scrolling through all the cherik you can handle on a Tuesday.

Someone: do you like to read books?

Me: * thinks about all the gay fanfic I read at all times *

Me: yes.

HELLO???????????!!!!!!

come to louisiana and buy your fingernail polish, funions, and hard liquor in any walgreens you come across. it's a cesspool down here. revel in it.