Sunday, February 8, 2015

Study notes: Feb 1-7, 2015: "6 Tips for Writing an Epistolary Novel" and others

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading this week: 
Homework for the future: 

"6 Tips for Writing an Epistolary Novel"
  • "It's not necessary to start every entry with 'Dear xx.'" 
  • "Though each entry is dated, we do not start and end each entry with 'Dear Leo' or 'Love, Stargirl'. This makes for much smoother reading, and also a cleaner format." 
  • "Remember that your main character is writing to one specific person." 
  • "When writing the novel, keep in mind that what has happened during that day and what your main character would tell the person that she's writing to may be completely different. Perhaps your main character would censor certain portions of the day, depending on which secondary characters she's writing to." 
  • "Because she didn't intend to send the letters, she also occasionally has a Q&A session with herself, taking on the role of Leo and Stargirl. Spinelli gives us a way to hear what Leo would think, through what Stargirl believes Leo would think." 
  • "Similarly, your main character should address the person they are writing to directly in their letters."
  • "Time gaps are important. There are times where your character is going to be so busy that they're not going to have time to write... Gaps in time tell a story, too, as well as lend realism to your novel." 
  • "Each letter has to adhere to a narrative arc... Like a chapter, each letter must advance the plot in some way." 
  • "It is okay for your character not to write any letters for a week if nothing happened in that week that pushes the plot forward." 
  • "If you're writing a contemporary novel, there are even more ways to keep in touch. Your character isn't going to send physical letters as often as she might email. And she'd probably text and call as well."

"How to Write Like a Mother#6@%*&"
  • The following is an interview between Elissa Bassist and Cheryl Strayed. All unsourced quotes are from Strayed. 
  • "Writing is hard for every last one of us-- straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig. You need to do the same... So write, Elissa Bassist. Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Write like a motherfucker." 
  • "Writing and revision are not two entirely different things, even though they demand slightly different things of us. One draft is your first best effort. The next draft is your next best effort, and so on. My process isn't just to spill everything onto the page and call it a first draft." 
  • Bassist: "Every day, I was sure I would not be able to write-- yet by the end of each day, I had written. Most of it was garbage, as if I had done the equivalent of typing into a trashcan... But then, there were days I left the cafe exhausted and exhilarated..."
  • "When it comes to getting to work, my trick is to conjure my inner-nun-with-a-ruler-in-hand and simply force myself to begin. Beginning is about three-quarters of the battle for me. Once I'm into the work, it's so much more interesting than anything happening on Facebook." 
  • "Success is a pile of shit somebody stacked up real high. It means nothing." 
  • "It's folly to measure your success in money or fame. Success in the arts can be measured only by your ability to say yes to this question: 'Did I do the work I needed to do, and did I do it like a motherfucker?'"
  • "It would help if your refocused what it is you're trying to be. Do you want to be famous, or do you want to be a great writer? Sometimes those two things are one and the same, but often they aren't." 
  • Bassist: "If I were tech-savvy enough to change my network name, I would change it to 'Humility/Surrender.'"
  • Bassist: "You asked me, 'Do you know what that is, sweat pea? To be humble?' I humbly did not know." 
  • "I think humility is about moving forward, doing the work, seeing what comes after you put the time in. It has to do with being ambitious about your writing, not about the accolades you hope your writing may someday receive. I return to this again and again, but I really do believe that keeping faith with the work itself has a wonderful way of keeping one's ego in check... It's the so-called 'corpse' pose. You're lying on your back, limbs relaxed, eyes closed. Humility is not about getting all tangled up with yourself. It's about surrender, receptivity, awareness, simplicity. Breathing in. Breathing out." 
  • Neil Casey: "Spend your days in love with what you're doing as much as fucking possible, an thank the stars for your chances to do that. Be nice and honest and brave and hopeful, and then let it go." 
  • "Get your ass down to the floor. Write so blazingly good that you can't be framed."
  • Bassist: "I've thought a lot about why I went to an online advice columnist to solve my personal problem. When I wrote to you, it was because I didn't believe in myself. Believing in myself hardly mattered at that point; what mattered was getting down and asking someone else to believe in me. This is what you give-- your faith. Once I had that, I could get to work, which to me meant two things. One, the easier part: writing. Two, the harder part: believing that believing in myself wasn't someone else's job." 

"Veitzu, Hve Soa Skal?"
  • "The act of sacrifice or making sacred by dedicating something of value to something or someone is a very noble and sacred act. When something is sacrificed to the God, Wights, Dwarves, or Disir, it is usually done seeking some type of divine favo to help them in a way that they are unable to help themselves. But there are other times when people have sacrificed to a particular God or Goddess just out of respect or appreciation for blessing their lives in some way. Then there is the sacrifice of self to self." 
  • "The main thing is depriving your body of what your body needs or exerting it in some way for a period of time. Some of the ways that could be done are by fasting, sleep deprivation, silence, pain, long periods of meditation and temperature discomfort. You could even use a combination of these things. Periods of time having to do with the numbers 3, 6, 9, or 12 and their derivatives have good results." 
  • "Most people think that it is the item that matters when a sacrifice is performed. It may be what everyone's attention is on, but that is not the case. How could anyone believe that the great powers could use an iron sword, a few gold pieces or even a corpse? The item being used is only a vessel for the energies being passed between the one performing the ceremony and the honored recipient." 
  • On runes: "Gebo is the magical exchange or sacrifice between two beings. Neuthiz is looked at by some as the accepted hardship with hope of receiving. Tiwaz is the accepted sacrifice for the benefit of others or for justice. Kenaz is one of the ways in which to sacrifice an item and make it holy... Eihwaz is used for 'hanging of the tree' for that is where and how you sacrifice yourself to yourself."
  • "Our ancestors believed in sacrifices so much that it became part of their daily life. From this holy act, spring forth two noble virtues-- hospitality and generosity."
  • "The murked [sic?] aspect of the Rune Gebo is giving away more that [sic] you should or over sacrificing. This is quite possible if you don't know exactly what you are doing. So the question can be looked at in two different way: 1) Do you know how to sacrifice? 2) If so, do you know how much to sacrifice?"

"Forget the Quantified Self"
  • "The 'Quantified Self' is a thrilling prospect for some: Massive datasets about oneself can be a new route to self-discovery. But for most of us, the idea of continuous self-tracking is a novelty that results in shallow insights." 
  • "For the Quantified Self movement to become truly useful, our gadgets will have to move beyond the novelty of gratuitous behavioral data, which we might call a 'first degree of meaning.' They'll have to address a second degree of meaning, where self-tracking helps motivate people toward self-improvement, and a third degree of meaning, where people can use data to make better choices in the moments when a decision is actually being made." 
  • "Imagine a future where self-tracking harnesses a whole population's data to identity patterns and make meaningful recommendations. Imagine a future where we can see into the data of people just like us, to help us live better, and where we willingly give up a bit of privacy in exchange for vast benefits." 
  • "People must be able to control the boundaries of how their data is shared, and the sample sets to which they're compared." 
  • "The Quantified Us hinges upon people making a choice to trade their personal data for access to broader swathes of information. That's a grass-roots type movement, and design's role should be to foster a sense of community and transparency." 

"How Flattr Works"
  • "You decide how big your total monthly budget is. Regardless of how many creators you will support, the total of your donations will be this budget." 
  • "To be able to give, you transfer money to your Flattr account. The budget you chose will be taken from your Flattr account each month, similar to how a pre-paid telephone card works."
  • "Whenever you read, watch and listen to content you want to support, you simply flattr it. Remember that you can flattr as many times you want during a month, as you will never exceed your chosen budget." 
  • "At the end of the month, we divide your budget into as many pieces as you made flattrs. For example, 25 flatters will divide your budget into 25 pieces. With a 10 euro budget, each piece is 40 cents." 

"Heywood Jabrony"
  • "There's nothing like a continuous ongoing storm vast enough to dwarf planets to really make a place inhospitable." 
  • "I literally could go back in time to the middle of the Somme Valley in 1914 and cheerfully proclaim 'This will just be a nice summer war!' and in 1919, as we travel to his place of exile, Kaiser Wilhelm will look me in the eye and you know what he'll say? You know what he'll find most pertinent to bring up, what he'll take the greatest issue with? He'll say 'Man you sure were dead wrong about Bronydom being a bellweather for the destigmatization of femininity, weren't you?'"
  • "Under patriarchy, qualities, recreational activities, colors, drinks, jobs, &c. &c. that are considered feminine are systematically devalued. For men and women alike, embracing Feminine Stuff is a sign of weakness, poor judgment, and even psychological problems. There's an important intersection here with queer theory, too, where the (mis)identification of men as queer based on feminine attributes can translate to actual violence perpetrated by other males." 
  • "When I present in a feminine way, people have (although not all that often, thankfully) reacted either by treating my actions as incomprehensibly weird and slightly disturbing, or, somewhat more insidiously, by reinterpreting my actions as masculine-- i.e. aggressively misidentifying my skirts as kilts." 
  • "Positioning the show as fundamentally feminist, and Bronydom as important from a feminist and queer theoretical perspective, was meant to both support the fandom as worthy of respect and consideration, uncover the unsavory origin of the backlash, and provide a counternarrative to other pop feminist analysis that fundamentally misunderstood the dynamics of the show itself. Later articles were similarly dedicated to uncovering the queer and feminist themes of the show in order to, well, essentially do what critical analysis is meant to do: shore up the value of a particular work from an artistic perspective." 
  • "Some folks within the fandom took recontextualization to an outrageous extreme, and the support walls-- the repeated mantra of Love and Tolerate-- that the fandom had created to deal with outside attacks transformed into a kind of sealed incubator where the oncoming blight could mature and grow strong." 
  • "Men's Right. It's become the central transmission point for a whole range of reactionary political blights on the 'Net. Dedicated to anti-feminism, male supremacy, and a twisted worldview where men must wrest power back from the evil matriarchy that ostensibly runs the Earth, Men's Rights, in combination with disaffected and alienated geeks and intellectuals, has helped drive an entitled backlash against women in male dominated spaces. The Brony fandom, already committed to accepting everyone, was a perfect vector for infection."
  • "Here's the thing about porn of My Little Pony. It's not remarkable. It's just not. I'm sorry, but it just isn't that exceptional. People have been making porn of children's media for actual literal centuries now. From Tijuana Bibles to the legal case of a large-scale Disney porn parody painting that I can't locate any information on at the moment (possibly because Google wants porn buried as deep as it can go, and Disney wants this case forgotten about) which helped assert the legality of pornographic parodies... to Rule 34 (which predated Bronydom by many years), to venerable comic writer and chaos magician Alan Moore's book of illustrated sex act performed by minors, Lost Girls, porn of media aimed at children is not new." 
  • "And yet, the debate on porn centers entirely on whether or not it's acceptable to create porn of a show aimed at children-- an objectively lost, hopeless, pointless cause-- aggressively pathologizing the act to an extreme degree that no other god damn fandom on the entire Internet is subjected to." 
  • "The dynamics of BDSM culture are far too complex to get into here, but there's a fundamental line between creating a fantasy... and convincing yourself that your fantasy has a one to one correspondence with everyone else's subjective reality." 
  • "Hasbro is not our friend. It is not the friend of Bronies, and it's not the friend of people who hate Bronies. It's a dangerous and powerful dragon in our midst, and Hasbro's erasure of Molestia from the face of the Internet represents not a victory over the forces of evil but that vast wurm shifting it weight and rolling over a hapless dwarf. The fact that the dwarf was gross, sexist, and prone to making rape jokes doesn't make me, as another dwarf in the treasure chamber, feel a lot better. Because any one of us that does fan works could be next. See the problem with the takedown of Molestia is that Hasbro took it down on copyright infringement grounds." 
  • "The methodology here sets a baaaad precedent for anyone involved in fandoms. It means that corporations like Hasbro are comfortable attacking and censoring thing that are off-message, even if legally they're transformative works and protected under Fair Use-- which this, like it or not, was. And even worse, Tumblr is willing to be utterly complicit in these takedowns." 
  • "The somewhat jokey idea that I've floated before about abandoning contemporary Geek culture and forming a new culture on the moon takes on a particular significance when applied to a series where one of the secondary characters was banished to the moon for a millennium."
  • "What is the Glorious Lunar Republic against? Let's modify the Celestia the Tyrant motif and say that we're against a particular maneneighfestation (god sorry) of Celestia dubbed Molestia. The Glorious Lunar Republic of Bronies and Pegasisters is opposed to the part of the fandom exemplified by that project... It is a republic that is Creative, Queer, Inclusive, Intersectional, and Feminist. It recognizes that sometimes to protect some you must cast others out from your midst. We are not in exile on the moon. The inhabitants of the low earth are exiled from us. We do not merely reflect the light of the sun-- we are not the mirror of Brony culture... We do not make deals with devils nor dragons." 
  • "We recognize both that the hatred directed towards us was born of the infectious disease that is the Patriarchy, and that resisting the disease means both taking on identities that vex Patriarchy, and lancing out the disease when it find[s] its way into our own veins." 

"Across the Sea of Faces"
  • "If you can convey the sensation of being a part of a crowd and isolated, rather than simply talking about the sensation of being alone... well, that's a powerful effect," 
  • "To share isolation is a paradox." 
  • "It's widely accepted that certain works can deconstruct the genre of which they are a part, exposing its dark underbelly and taking the logic of the genre to horrifying conclusions. The Wall is, among other things, a deconstruction of the entire rock genre, exposing the way in which the roar of the crowd and the charismatic figure of the rock star can combine to form a noxious, authoritarian dynamic." 
  • "Both songs only function because they're at once horrifying in their violence and compelling in their actual musicality. They must be engaging for their threat to seem real, for the draw of the despot to seem believable." 
  • "Each of these pieces, then, makes use of the roar of the crowd in subtly different ways, but each uses the sound to highlight gaps of association between individuals and masses. None of them are particularly optimistic about the ways in which those gaps might be filled-- one fills the gap with rage, another simply languishes in despair, and the last fills the void with a destructive, self-absorbed fantasy of autocratic power." 
  • "Any effect that can be introduced into a medium or genre can be modulated and manipulated by the savvy artist, precisely because these effects gain particular connotations that can be, with some work, upset and even reversed completely. When these games of reversal and overthrown expectations are played well, the results are deeply engaging." 
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