What do you think about albus dumbledore?do you believe he is borderline abusive
Not. Even. Remotely.
I should warn people that I have absolutely no chill on this subject. Dumbledore haters piss me the fuck off, because for the most part they clumsily glue tumblr style social justice style discourse over the Harry Potter story and ignore what actually happened in the books. And they tend to be the same people who hate JKR and aren’t shy in expressing it. Dumbledore hate makes me feel sick.
The fact that Dumbledore loved Harry very, very deeply leaks out of every pore of the text. You have to be willfully blind to miss it. He was in a horrific position: set this boy on the path to destroy Voldemort or let Voldemort win. You need to make bloodless choices in a position like that. You need to keep a certain distance, or emotion will make you screw up. As it did when Dumbledore didn’t give Harry as much information as he needed during OotP, and as Dumbledore admitted. He was flawed, he struggled, but he was ultimately incredibly strong.
He had no choice but to leave Harry with the Dursleys, because Harry needed Lily’s blood protection (which saved Harry’s life in the end). Additionally, knowing that Harry was destined to die and that he was going to have to usher him along that path made him want to keep an emotional distance. Which you cannot blame him for. He couldn’t let himself get attached. Love, for Dumbledore, always ended in disaster. And yet, once he met Harry and watched him, he couldn’t help himself. It says this right in the text and there’s no reason to think Dumbledore was faking it.
People call him cold, uncaring, but he was never cold with Harry. He was always gently supportive, he praised him when he succeeded, he counselled him when he was grieving. He let Harry learn on his own and make his own choices, because it was vital to Harry’s eventual task. Harry knew that in the end.
On another literary and thematic level, Harry’s relationship with Dumbledore is meant to evoke humanity’s relationship with God. God is meant to be all knowing and all powerful, he’s meant to love us, and yet we’re all destined to die and go through the agony of losing people we love along the way. We’re meant to be good people, to make the right choices, when God is distant, seemingly absent, and allows horrible suffering in the world. How do we come to terms with that?
I am not a religious person, so I can substitue fate or biology or nature or whatever forces govern the universe for “God” and it still works. It still poses the same questions, the same challenges.
And I know I’ll get hate for saying this. Because the discourse imposes this innacurate stereotype of “abusive manipulator” over Dumbledore and people jump from that to “Omg you’re supporting abuse if you don’t hate him!”
I’m honestly so scared by how many Americans I see who are going to vote third party in the election.
Listen you privileged fucks that’s exactly the same kind of bloody statement voting that got us more of the Tories here in Britain.
Take it from someone who knows; don’t fuck up your government by letting Trump win. I would let Hillary Clinton spit on me before I’d let that monster anywhere near the oval office.
when millennials were first heading into high school and college there was a huge trend in news stories about how stressed out our kids are, how their backs are getting messed up from carrying so many books, how they’re sleeping less and doing more school work, and how we should do more to help our kids have the childhoods we had because our kids are falling apart from stress and being forced to be more productive than kids should be. but then once millennials started hitting the workforce all the news was about how millennials are lazy and narcissistic and entitled lmao you were real concerned about us until you found out a 23 year old is more qualified to do your job than you
I work in a decent sized, local, indie bookstore. It’s a great job 99% of the time and a lot of our customers are pretty neat people. Any who, middle of the day this little old lady comes up. She’s lovably kooky. She effuses how much she loves the store and how she wishes she could spend more time in it but her husband is waiting in the car (OH! I BETTER BUY HIM SOME CHOCOLATE!), she piles a bunch of art supplies on the counter and then stops and tells me how my bangs are beautiful and remind her of the ocean (“Wooooosh” she says, making a wave gesture with her hand)
Ok. I think to myself. Awesomely happy, weird little old ladies are my favorite kind of customer. They’re thrilled about everything and they’re comfortably bananas. I can have a good time with this one. So we chat and it’s nice.
Then this kid, who’s been up my counter a few times to gather his school textbooks, comes up in line behind her (we’re connected to a major university in the city so we have a lot of harried students pass through). She turns around to him and, out of nowhere, demands that he put his textbooks on the counter. He’s confused but she explains that she’s going to buy his textbooks.
He goes sheetrock white. He refuses and adamantly insists that she can’t do that. It’s like, $400 worth of textbooks. She, this tiny old woman, bodily takes them out of her hands, throws them on the counter and turns to me with a intense stare and tells me to put them on her bill. The kid at this point is practically in tears. He’s confused and shocked and grateful. Then she turns to him and says “you need chocolate.” She starts grabbing handfuls of chocolates and putting them in her pile.
He keeps asking her “why are you doing this?” She responds “Do you like Harry Potter?“ and throws a copy of the new Cursed Child on the pile too.
Finally she’s done and I ring her up for a crazy amount of money. She pays and asks me to please give the kid a few bags for his stuff. While I’m bagging up her merchandise the kid hugs her. We’re both telling her how amazing she is and what an awesome thing she’s done. She turns to both of us and says probably one of the most profound, unscripted things I’ve ever had someone say:
“It’s important to be kind. You can’t know all the times that you’ve hurt people in tiny, significant ways. It’s easy to be cruel without meaning to be. There’s nothing you can do about that. But you can choose to be kind. Be kind.”
The kid thanks her again and leaves. I tell her again how awesome she is. She’s staring out the door after him and says to me: “My son is a homeless meth addict. I don’t know what I did. I see that boy and I see the man my son could have been if someone had chosen to be kind to him at just the right time.”
I’ve bagged up all her stuff and at this point am super awkward and feel like I should say something but I don’t know what. Then she turns to me and says: I wish I could have bangs like that but my darn hair is just too curly.“ And leaves.
And that is the story of the best customer I’ve ever had. Be kind to somebody today.
I’ve been reading a great deal about the beyond unreasonable cost for the current main brand of Epi-Pens. I’d like to offer an alternative to those who simply cannot or perhaps will not pay such an exorbitant amount. Have your doctor write out your prescription (Rx) for Adrenaclick but sign “Substitution Allowed”, have the pharmacy order the generic of it from Lineage Therapeutics.
The cost for these Epi-pens is $10 from Costco currently. Same pen, same medical chemical, but more reasonable price. Stay safe out there.
I hear you like mutant aus. I propose: Stranger Things Mutant Au
New system, kiddos: when I’m depressed,
I’m going to write mutant AUs, because mutant AUs are good. This is the decree. If you want to see a specific one, send me an
ask. Also, ha, spot my favorite character, because I’m a fucking unsubtle trainwreck of a writer.
No one has mutant abilities
at the beginning, you see. Mutants are
the stuff of comic books and stories, like Superman or magic or the
Demigorgon. So it’s four kids playing
Dungeons and Dragons and four teenagers trying to figure out how to game the system
enough to survive high school and a pair of adults fighting to keep their heads
above water, and they are all—for a given value—perfectly normal.
And then things start to happen.
And Eleven…well, she has a whole host of mutant powers, kickstarted by
the drugs her mother took or by the experiments done on her or by the Upside
Down. Telekinesis, radio wave
manipulation, dimensional travel—the whole gamut.
fandom is so weird you never know how old anyone is but you just kinda assume most of them are around your age until proven otherwise and then one day someone is talking about their 9 year old kid on your dash and another person is saying they just finished 10th grade. wild.
did anyone actually ever read those animorph books
just stared at the covers for a concerningly long amount of time before putting it back where i found it
me too
Same
Here are some of the spoilers you missed out on by not reading Animorphs:
Five children are forced to engage in guerilla warfare, espionage and repeated murder to protect their loved ones from alien parasites as they wait for the other, heroic aliens to finally arrive. When they do, the “good” aliens turn out to not give a shit about humans, caused the whole intergalactic war through their own shittiness and are willing to exterminate whole planets themselves to get at their hated enemies.
A child repeatedly experiences his intestines hanging out of his body while in various animal forms
A child is mentally tortured until broken and never gets better
A child in the form of a fly experiences getting splattered and smeared against a ceiling until his friends who are also flies at the time can peel his body off and take him somewhere he can transform back into a whole human before his insect mind fades completely
A child is shrunken and experiences having her eyeballs digested out of her head inside her friend’s stomach while she’s in the form of a tiny elephant
The heroes are forced to permanently imprison another child in the body of a rat because he knows too much and they abandon him on a tiny island with only other rats and garbage for company. Rumors circulate that the island is haunted but it’s actually his psychic screams reaching distant boaters.
A race of devastatingly powerful, violent aliens turn out to be mental toddlers who don’t know what they’re doing and are just bred to think they’re playing one big game before they’re killed at age three so they don’t learn the truth
An alien spends a few centuries hanging from the parasitic tentacle of a much bigger alien, surrounded by millions of rotting corpses attached to its other moon-spanning tendrils. They engage in mental warfare until one finally absorbs the other completely.
It turns out another seemingly “evil” alien race is simply driven to kill and eat everything in sight because it was separated from its original world where food was continuous and the entire specie’s life is the torture of perpetual starvation
A peaceful robot willingly removes its inhibition against violence to help in the war, only to slaughter a huge number of alien-controlled humans so gruesomely that nobody dares think about or speak of it again and it is the only thing left undescribed in a book series that already describes entrails getting torn out and skulls getting smashed
A child stays too long in the form of a flea and instead of turning back into a human, accidentally turns momentarily into one big, giant flea that can only writhe and moan because it shouldn’t exist and can’t live at that scale.
The kids discover Atlantis, then discover that Atlanteans are inbred mutants who paralyze any humans they find, dissect them alive to figure out how their organs work, then stuff the corpses as kitschy museum displays for their children.
An ordinary ant gets transformed into a human child. It has no idea what’s happening and is so overwhelmed by its huge new brain and sensory input that it can only scream until it dies
What. The. Fuck
From someone who recently read/finished this series, NONE OF THE ABOVE IS AN EXAGGERATION.
Everybody read some animorphs you know you wanna it’s right there
Go ahead and start on book one you’ll already get some juicy terror
Let’s not forget 5 of them are almost eaten alive by ants. For one of them, this happens twice though she doesn’t remember, because it happened in a weird aborted time line where they all die.
I would like to add that I am taking notes this time around and I discovered that the very first murder of a named character (it’s rather grisly, he gets eaten alive and his scraps snatched up by the above eternally-starving aliens, while the protagonists try not to get caught and murdered a handful of feet away) occurs less than 40 pages into the first book. Also, the first dismemberment happens less than four books in.
tall people: if we are walking together please take into consideration my tiny legs. i cant keep up with you. please think of my tiny legs i dont want to be jogging to keep up with your leisurely stroll you TITANS
Just get a pair of roller skates and hang on to my sleeve, we don’t have all day.
[Image: Patty Tolan and walking and hauling Jillian Holtzmann behind her on roller skates.]
i’m concerned about boys with mental illnesses and eating disorders and abusive relationships and sexual assault survivor stories and self-harming tendencies who never get the attention or care or help they need because all of those things “don’t happen to men” or because “all men are horrible monsters” and i just wanna say if you’re a boy and you’re struggling with something hard, your gender doesn’t diminish or dismiss your struggles or make them any less significant or difficult and i love you and i’m here for you
So apparently Target is selling small cards against humanity expansion packs! They have fantasy, WWE, etc. but most importantly…
the retail pack.
now look at this:
this says i get an instant 1$ rebate. and it’s on the inside. that mean i get a dollar back instantly! now just how exactly did they do that?
they put a dollar inside. a literal actual dollar. imagine my reaction when i saw a dollar inside of this little package, cause it was literally the first thing i saw.
When i saw the post that said they hid a card inside the lid of the ‘bigger blacker box’ i was a bit skeptical.
I am no longer skeptical.
the people that make this game are absolutely ridiculous.
(btw, the pack cost 4$. 3$ if you count the dollar you get back)
Always believe whatever Cards Against Humanity say when they tell you something about a pack. These are the people who sold literal Bullshit on Black Friday back in 2014.
…………………reblog this and say something nice about the person u reblogged it from because there’s too much hate on my dashboard right now and its making me upset so lets start a chain of love
me showing up to my 6 year old self:
hey kid wanna know the future
six year old me:
ok
current me:
in the year 2016 a reality tv star is running for president, you can play pokemon in real life with these commonplace tiny portable computer phones, and episode 7 came out and it has a girl jedi
All right, so, those of you who’ve been around long enough may or may not recall that my practice when I hit a round number of followers is to post some original writing (see: Methods of Inheritance and Sabbatical). And I’m coming up on 400, so I’ll be doing that again! But! I have…a lot of original fiction. A lot of original fiction. So I’m going to offer a list of options, and you lot can tell me which one you’d like to see! To vote, you can reply to this post or reblog it, or send me a message, although I’d prefer the ask box over a private message just because it’ll be easier to collate the answers that way. For the novels, obviously, you’d be getting an excerpt, probably 2-5 pages. Any short stories, though, you’d get all of.
Polaris:the revolutionary girlfriends with superpowers novel (as yet incomplete). Like. There’s more detail, obviously. But that’s pretty much what we’re dealing with there. There are a bunch of LGBT characters and a few superpowers and a revolution, thus: revolutionary girlfriends with superpowers novel. Tag is here if you want more detail.
Falls the Shadow: my best beloved novel about the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, led by Sam, the Horseman of Death and Antichrist. This one’s complete, but it is H E F T Y at 250K words. I’m editing it down. Tag is here, but no one asks me about it, so there’s not much there. First of a trilogy.
Battalion: the novel where angels happened and fucked everything up, and humans have been fucking them over in response for about 70 years (incomplete). Yep. That’s here, and there is exactly one post.
Stories From the Second War:a triad of short stories technically set in the FtS universe, about Heaven’s war against the Nephilim. Um…they’re dark. The Nephilim are monstrous. But I think they might be some of my favorite writing I’ve done. They are Tell All the Truth (But Tell It Slant) and To Fight Aloud, Is Very Brave (Uniforms of Snow), both from the perspective of the leader of the Nephilim, and The Stillness in the Air (Between Heaves of Storm), from the perspective of her hunting partner. I’d put all three on here as a set, because I think they work best that way.
Deorum (Of Gods): a short story I wrote for that writing class I hated. Jack, the main character, lives in a city populated partly by mortals and partly by the gods of the world’s pantheons–Idunn owns a coffee shop, Apollo teaches art at an elementary school, Ninkasi runs a bar, and dark things live in the woods. Jack attracts more gods than he’s strictly comfortable with, and they all seem to know him remarkably well…. I don’t know if it’s my best work in terms of quality, but I definitely think it’s up there as the most fun. This is about forty pages, so I’d have to post it piecemeal.
Reading the iliad is so crazy because like alexander the great was reading this story over 2000 years ago?? he probably wrote fanfiction about achilles and patroclus and told hephaestion his headcanons?? life is absurd
HE DID THO. HE ACTUALLY DID.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT WAS HELLA GAY AND WROTE GAY FANFICTION OF THE GAYEST PEOPLE IN ANCIENT GREECE.
I’m not even kidding. Achilles and Patriclus were hella gay Ancient Greek warriors; like the Illiad (the number one source for all things Greek) has half the book dedicated to their relationship.
Alexander the Great wrote 57 papers about them. HE WROTE 57 ESSAYS ON THEIR LOVE FOR EACH OTHER AND WHAT HE THOUGHT THEY WOULD DO IF THEY LIVED IN HIS TIME PERIOD.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT WROTE MODERN AU GAY FANFICTION
And it gets EVEN GAYER
He constantly refers to himself and his “guy pal” Hephaestion as having the same relationship as Achilles and Patroclus
He literally talks about how he and his best friend were like WELL KNOWN ANCIENT LOVERS.
Don’t think it can get gayer? THINK AGAIN
Alexander and Hephaestion visit the graves of Achilles and Patroclus and laid down flowers in honor for them, stripped naked, and ran a race in their honor. After words they SENT THEIR SERVANT AWAY TO SPEND THE NIGHT ALONE AT THE MEMORIAL.
This isn’t a myth, this is actual documented history. It’s all true. I don’t have sources because I learned about this a few years ago in my history class in college but google it I promise you.
Wow, 57 essays. Alexander must have had a lot of free time on his hands.
The reason you don’t have sources is that this didn’t happen.
I TOOK 15 MINUTES
Cartledge, Paul. Alexander the Great: The Hunt for a New Past. Woodstock, NY; New York: The Overlook Press, 2004
Wilcken, Ulrich, Alexander the Great, W. W. Norton & Company; Reissue edition (March 1997)
~follow for more soft historical homosexuality~
Alexander the Great lived in a time when travel was slow and he got to travel in a carriage, meaning he didn’t have to worry about controlling a horse. He had plenty of free time to read and write, there was little else to do on long carriage rides.
All right, so, those of you who’ve been around long enough may or may not recall that my practice when I hit a round number of followers is to post some original writing (see: Methods of Inheritance and Sabbatical). And I’m coming up on 400, so I’ll be doing that again! But! I have…a lot of original fiction. A lot of original fiction. So I’m going to offer a list of options, and you lot can tell me which one you’d like to see! To vote, you can reply to this post or reblog it, or send me a message, although I’d prefer the ask box over a private message just because it’ll be easier to collate the answers that way. For the novels, obviously, you’d be getting an excerpt, probably 2-5 pages. Any short stories, though, you’d get all of.
Polaris:the revolutionary girlfriends with superpowers novel (as yet incomplete). Like. There’s more detail, obviously. But that’s pretty much what we’re dealing with there. There are a bunch of LGBT characters and a few superpowers and a revolution, thus: revolutionary girlfriends with superpowers novel. Tag is here if you want more detail.
Falls the Shadow: my best beloved novel about the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, led by Sam, the Horseman of Death and Antichrist. This one’s complete, but it is H E F T Y at 250K words. I’m editing it down. Tag is here, but no one asks me about it, so there’s not much there. First of a trilogy.
Battalion: the novel where angels happened and fucked everything up, and humans have been fucking them over in response for about 70 years (incomplete). Yep. That’s here, and there is exactly one post.
Stories From the Second War:a triad of short stories technically set in the FtS universe, about Heaven’s war against the Nephilim. Um…they’re dark. The Nephilim are monstrous. But I think they might be some of my favorite writing I’ve done. They are Tell All the Truth (But Tell It Slant) and To Fight Aloud, Is Very Brave (Uniforms of Snow), both from the perspective of the leader of the Nephilim, and The Stillness in the Air (Between Heaves of Storm), from the perspective of her hunting partner. I’d put all three on here as a set, because I think they work best that way.
Deorum (Of Gods): a short story I wrote for that writing class I hated. Jack, the main character, lives in a city populated partly by mortals and partly by the gods of the world’s pantheons–Idunn owns a coffee shop, Apollo teaches art at an elementary school, Ninkasi runs a bar, and dark things live in the woods. Jack attracts more gods than he’s strictly comfortable with, and they all seem to know him remarkably well…. I don’t know if it’s my best work in terms of quality, but I definitely think it’s up there as the most fun. This is about forty pages, so I’d have to post it piecemeal.
In response to all those articles about talking to women with headphones…
Someone always says it, whenever it comes up: “I guess I’m just not allowed to talk to anyone any more!”
Well. Yes. It is my duty to inform you that we took a vote all us women and determined that you are not allowed to talk to anyone ever again.
This vote is legally binding.
Yes, of course, all women know each other, the way you always suspected. (Incidentally, so do Canadians. I’m just throwing that out there.) We went into the women’s room at the Applebee’s at the corner of 54 and all the others streamed in through the doors into that endless liminal space, a chain of humans stretching backward heavy skulled Neanderthal women laughing with New York socialites, Lucille Ball hand in hand with the Taung child. We sat around in the couches in the women’s room (I know you’ve always been suspicious of those couches) and chatted with each other in the secret female language that you always knew existed. Somebody set up a Playstation– the Empress Wu is ruthless at Mario Kart and Cleopatra never learned to lose and a woman who ruled an empire that fell when the Sea People came and left no trace can use the blue shell like a surgical instrument.
Eventually we took the vote. You had three defenders: your grandmother and your first-grade teacher and an Albanian nun who believes the best of everybody. Your mom abstained. It was duly recorded in the secret notebooks that have been kept under the couch in the Applebee’s since the beginning of recorded time. And then we went back to playing Mario Kart and Hoelun took off her bra and we didn’t think about you again except that I had to carry this message.
So anyway good luck with that it’s just as you always said it was. Hush now, no talking
All right, so, those of you who’ve been around long enough may or may not recall that my practice when I hit a round number of followers is to post some original writing (see: Methods of Inheritance and Sabbatical). And I’m coming up on 400, so I’ll be doing that again! But! I have…a lot of original fiction. A lot of original fiction. So I’m going to offer a list of options, and you lot can tell me which one you’d like to see! To vote, you can reply to this post or reblog it, or send me a message, although I’d prefer the ask box over a private message just because it’ll be easier to collate the answers that way. For the novels, obviously, you’d be getting an excerpt, probably 2-5 pages. Any short stories, though, you’d get all of.
Polaris:the revolutionary girlfriends with superpowers novel (as yet incomplete). Like. There’s more detail, obviously. But that’s pretty much what we’re dealing with there. There are a bunch of LGBT characters and a few superpowers and a revolution, thus: revolutionary girlfriends with superpowers novel. Tag is here if you want more detail.
Falls the Shadow: my best beloved novel about the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, led by Sam, the Horseman of Death and Antichrist. This one’s complete, but it is H E F T Y at 250K words. I’m editing it down. Tag is here, but no one asks me about it, so there’s not much there. First of a trilogy.
Battalion: the novel where angels happened and fucked everything up, and humans have been fucking them over in response for about 70 years (incomplete). Yep. That’s here, and there is exactly one post.
Stories From the Second War:a triad of short stories technically set in the FtS universe, about Heaven’s war against the Nephilim. Um…they’re dark. The Nephilim are monstrous. But I think they might be some of my favorite writing I’ve done. They are Tell All the Truth (But Tell It Slant) and To Fight Aloud, Is Very Brave (Uniforms of Snow), both from the perspective of the leader of the Nephilim, and The Stillness in the Air (Between Heaves of Storm), from the perspective of her hunting partner. I’d put all three on here as a set, because I think they work best that way.
Deorum (Of Gods): a short story I wrote for that writing class I hated. Jack, the main character, lives in a city populated partly by mortals and partly by the gods of the world’s pantheons–Idunn owns a coffee shop, Apollo teaches art at an elementary school, Ninkasi runs a bar, and dark things live in the woods. Jack attracts more gods than he’s strictly comfortable with, and they all seem to know him remarkably well…. I don’t know if it’s my best work in terms of quality, but I definitely think it’s up there as the most fun. This is about forty pages, so I’d have to post it piecemeal.
i met someone today and when i asked him if he was a dog person or a cat person he said he was a fish person. a fish person. he’s not even allergic to dogs or cats, he’s had no traumatizing experiences, he just doesn’t like dogs OR cats. he likes fish. what the fuck. what the actual fuck. who is this aquaman wanna-be hating on dogs AND cats what the fuck. who the fuck hates both of them? what, he’s gonna come home and be greeted by the excited gurgling of a fucking goldfish? that fish don’t love you man. that fish doesn’t even recognize you as a person. you’re just a food dispenser. he’s gonna die someday and that fish won’t mourn him. that fish won’t even know he’s gone. hating on dogs and cats. wehat the fuck. i’m never associating with that boy again. fish person. what the fukc.
i realized i posted this to the wrong blog but i’m still too pissed off to care. fucking fish person.
oooooh, i would love a exr shortie where e has to teach r how to dance and it's very frustrating and they feel thINGS, please?
*hides face* Oh my God, it’s been like a MONTH, I am so sorry, but HERE. There is dancing and feelings and kissing and Enjolras actually having a social life because Courfeyrac forces him to. Also, I seem to have a tendency to write ‘getting their shit together’ ficlets so if you want…not that, feel free to ask. And if you want the reverse of this where Grantaire teaches Enjolras to dance, it is here.
Enjolras
goes to clubs. It’s not especially
common knowledge, because he’s usually too busy, but whenever Courfeyrac feels
like it’s necessary, he’ll drag Enjolras out to a nightclub, pour a few shots
into him, and turn him loose for a few hours with instructions to not think too much. This time, it’s a group outing, all of Les
Amis laughing and tactile with alcohol, hands on arms and cheeks flushed with the
triumph of their latest protest.
Joly,
giggly with his second rum and coke, is the one to start the dancing, pushing
Musichetta and Bousset onto the dance floor ahead of him. The three of them fit together like puzzle
pieces, Musichetta’s petite body pressed back against Joly’s chest and
Bousset’s broad shoulders behind the pair of them. They’ve clearly done this before, because
Bousset and Musichetta know just how to move so that Joly can dance without
aggravating his limp. It’s fluid and
sensual, Musichetta’s head tipped back on Joly’s shoulder and her smile
dazzling up at her boys, and Enjolras feels the brief pause around him, the
rest of them caught up in the trio’s giddy joy.
“Aw,
they’re cute,” Cosette says, and Éponine smirks, finishes her scotch, and
pinches Marius hard in the side. He
yelps and flails—not a graceful man at the best of times, and less so with
alcohol—but gets the hint, shyly offering his hand to Cosette and letting her
tug him onto the floor. Éponine is still
snickering when she darts out herself, bouncing and coiling like a ribbon in
the dim club lights.
While you are worrying about whether beta readers will steal your ideas, there is a more genuine threat on the horizon.
When offered a publishing contract, please do all your research before you sign. There are a number of fakes and scammers out there, as well as good-intentioned amateurs that don’t know how to get your work to a wide audience. I won’t tell the heartbreaking stories here - there are too many.
Being published badly is worse than being never published.
It can destroy your career and your dreams.
The quick check is to google the publishing house name + scam or warning.
But, to be sure, check with these places first. They aren’t infallible (nothing is) but they can help you protect yourself. They are written and maintained by expereinced writers, editors, publishers and legal folks.
This is really important, so if you are a writer or have writer friends, or you are a writing blog, please reblog it.
Just to let you know, PublishAmerica changed their name to America Star Books.
HEAD’S UP, WRITER TYPES: THIS IS AN IMPORTANT PSA!
Also applies to many so-called freelance sites that are just content mills, and may not pay unless your work is used, even if the contract seems designed otherwise.
Listen, reading these is like legit reading horror stories. When it comes to publishing your writing, always, always, ALWAYS do your research. Not only will it help you avoid scams, but it will also be likely to help you land a much better fit for an agent/publisher/whatever. Knowing more is never going to hurt.
Omg!!! Thanks for the warning! Writers— reblog!
I’ve heard stories like this that are scarier than horror stories. This is an all time worst nightmare for a writer. Everyone reblog and make sure you keep your work safe!
okay, most of what i do re: harry potter is criticism, and hp is flawed in such a number of ways, but sometimes i just sit here and
i mean, you all have a comprehension of just how drastically harry potter changed literature, yeah? like. it revitalized it. it blew the literary scene apart. the new york times had to create a separate bestseller’s list for children’s lit just because harry potter existed. harry potter changed reading.
so many people on tumblr were born in the ’90s. when the first book came out, most of us couldn’t read. but we grew up in a world where everyone, everyone, everyone was reading harry potter, no matter how old they were; we grew up in a world where the most popular story in the entire world was a fantasy children’s book.
it’s sort of difficult to grasp, sometimes, the extent to which harry potter is not just a book. the extent to which what is basically a series of fun, interesting, and fairly good novels is such an enormous, enormous part of our lives, a cultural touchstone, a truly universal reference point, something so many people have shaped their lives around, a foundation for all of the stories we would read and watch for the rest of our lives— for so many of us, the first books we ever loved
the extent to which so many of us can’t call ourselves “fans” of harry potter, because it would like being a “fan” of, like, having lungs.
it’s not even about liking it or disliking it. it’s just a part of us.
So, on the subject of ‘things i finished a while back and needed to post,’ this is Part Two of this thing. It’s basically shippy nonsense and discussion of how Sarah Williams is a weird motherfucker.
“So who’s Sarah?”
Jonathan asked after they’d eaten dinner—just takeout, because they were both
feeling particularly lazy. He was toying
with the folded bit of notebook paper with Sarah’s number on it, curious, and
Nancy smiled as she dropped the last few dishes they’d used into the drying
rack. She padded over, barefoot with her
hair loose around her shoulders, and settled herself in his lap without so much
as an ‘as you please’. He wrapped his
arms around her snugly and tucked her back against his chest, his chin hooked
over her shoulder like a little boy.
“Sarah,” Nancy
said, reaching out to play with the paper herself, “is the girl who recited Der Erlkonig in its original
German. She’s a freshman and she’s…odd.”
Honestly if the fellowship had cellphones the #1 change would be Aragorn constantly complaining on the phone with arwen in the two towers like “they’re flirting again. Yes again. Literally I don’t even want to tell u what I walked in on yesterday but it involved gimli cleaning his axe in an inappropriate manner. And the worst bit is they still pretend like they hate each other my god. I’m gonna lose it I swear” while arwen is like “mhmm that’s nice dear”
About the Animorphs only being able to save one person in the first book and you feeling relieved about that: I was, for a good year or so, 98% sure the books were Real and trying to figure our where the local Yeerk pools were. I think the fact that the Animorphs so often lose and/or barely escape with their lives in the first few books (they don't have a real VICTORY until book 7) are what cemented it for me. It felt so much more honest than any fiction I'd been exposed to before that.
Oh my God YES. They…they basically don’t win for six books, and I had never seen that kind of track record in any books, let alone kids’ books. I mean, they get Ax out before the Yeerks can get to him, but even that…the only reason they survive that encounter is because the whales come and save them from being eaten by Visser Three, it is A VERY CLOSE CALL is my point here. And like, that’s upsetting, sure, yeah, very upsetting, the fate of the world is at stake and these THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLDS keep losing fights, but just…someone who was prepared to admit, straight-up, in a kids’ book that sometimes you lose and that’s just how it is? I was fucking blown away.
I am an adult, I cannot be flailing in a public ice cream store about these books, I have work to do.
That being said, NEVER HESITATE TO TALK TO ME ABOUT ANIMORPHS.
So turns out we’re doing a post for every single book. Literally why am I like this. Posts will be going here, feel free to block the tag. Spoilers, yadda, yadda.
Book 2: The Visitor
AKA “We get some seriously grim insight
on voluntary Controllers, the first bug morph, and probably the reason I hate
shrews”
