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Jesus Christ, lady, I hope your book has paragraphs!
Let's chop this up a bit.
...it's in a fantasy setting, it also has a coming of age aspect to it and takes place over about 6 years, and they age from 12-18. im thinking hard about how to write them right in their early ages, like 12-14, and i feel like i'm doing it wrong. i'm putting more focus on their character and specific personalities but i'm wondering if, as a girl, maybe i'm accidentally making them too “girly” and “soft.”
i like to make them enjoy the simple things in life, like exploring and enjoying nature, and they also like to talk about their feelings and their hurts. but is that a thing boys do? im trying to make them realistic but sometimes i forget that i was never a boy and i'll never know what it is like to be a boy. and to top it all off, it's a gay romance (it takes awhile though, so they're just friends in the beginning). it just happened to be that way, i wanted a romance that wasn't straight and i felt my story didn't fit two girls (again, there's a difference but idk what it is!)
... i just want these characters to feel real and not how i “think” they're supposed to be. i can't decide if gender is just a construct and it doesn't matter if they're a boy or a girl, or if their outlook on life IS different and they should be written differently. both? what mistakes should i avoid in writing male leads when i'm not a male?
"Have you tried adding reason and accountability?"
Nah, it's a good question. Writing any type of romance you haven't been in is obviously challenging. Writing the opposite s*x requires observation skills, reading and engaging with their work (a bitter pill for moids), and a healthy imagination. You also have to be able to set aside your preconceptions about how people should work, and your desire to fix them. For example, in this case it's not just that men usually don't talk about our feelings, or that we feel uncomfortable doing so. Often, we don't want to. How do these sorts of things affect a developing gay relationship?
But as usual, /r/writing offers reassurance instead of seriously engaging with an OP who wants real answers. Many also get bogged down making very important points about gender.
It's MY SETTING, and I get to pick the gender roles!!
Actual good advice to tell a story about boys erased in real time by genderslop.
In my fictional society, sexy women with big tits are expected to throw themselves at members of !bookworms and !writecel
Of course you can write a world with different social "rules." But the farther it diverges, the less it has to say about real people in our own world, and the more it has to say about the author's own desires and hangups. Might as well say some coomer's monster girl erotica is commentary about female gender roles.
This isn't actually out of nowhere because the full OP mentioned "The Song of Achilles," but lmao
Differentiate your characters from each other. Give them flaws. Let their differences and flaws produce tension. Two guys who are just soft and sensitive and slowly start touching peepees isn't a story. Even a hack writer would make one of them the emotional one and the other the moody, silent one or whatever.
A couple more people actually gave decent advice, like here, but of course low effort "You're perfect just the way you are!" advice is upvoted while interesting stuff is near the bottom.
As a straight man, I'll never understand this trend. If the men in your gay romance act like women, why make them men at all? Reading gay erotica should be a form of escapism where you can imagine loving relationships without having to deal with women. At least, that's why I read it.
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What's the worst book you've ever read, discounting self published crap?
I bought my mom Jo Watson's Among Others half a decade ago for mother's day.
I didn't know much about the industry so I thought that it winning the Hugo meant it had to be at least of decent quality. It was so bad that she said it had to read it too
300 pages of the most pretentious precious child crap
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Some screen caps, is cuckshit @BWC @houellebecq @manysuchcases
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However bad you think the book might be, it's worse pic.twitter.com/sgcRee1vqO
— Roman 🦅 (@goodhorsemen) May 3, 2024
- PlsNoCoal : robbed
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https://rdrama.net/post/191312/while-we-wait-for-the-fix
https://rdrama.net/post/191311
Thanks everyone for your patience! I have sacrificed my place amongst my fellow entrants to judge and along with assistance fellow volunteer judges @HeyMoon and @Ninjjer, we have finally finished what the fish could not and we're pleased to announce the winners of the rDrama Fanfiction Contest!
Winners:
1st place $15000mb - @Pibbles - Bardy's House of Horrors
2nd place $10000mb - @JoyceCarolOates - Garry's Anatomy
3rd place $5000mb - @SexyFartMan69 - C.A.R.P.
Honorable mentions $2000mb:
+ Funniest - @911roofer - 911ROOFER'S SUBMISSION
+ Most Erotic - @StarSix - A night with Marsey
+ Most Violent - @sealkey_kong - The Black Swan of Garland
+ Best Writing - @Lappland - Lappland's Submission
+ Best Unfinished - @Bruhfunny_Thrall - The Tyranny of King Antichud
+ Best Audio Version - @DWHITE___________DYNAMITE - Dwhite Dynamite's Submission
Thank you to everyone who participated! It was a pain in the butt to track down all the entries outside of the main thread so if I somehow missed yours and you failed to get a badge, DM me!
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!bookworms I decided to post the thread for once as @pbj has been busy hopefully touching grass
What are your thoughts?
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To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks and papers.
!bookworms !classics I'm reading Houellebecq Atomised as part of the bookclub
I also got my copy of Confessions of a Mask this week
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Too mystic for the IRA-types he postured as, too learnèd for the bumkins he would imitate, too effete to score, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature because someone from Ireland needed to win it, and his Prius was laden with the most pro-Ireland bumper stickers.
Lacking the lyricism or earthiness of Robert Burns, the erudition or cats of Eliot, the humor or bussy of Wilde, or even actual voice or coherence of Lady Gregory, Yeats makes up for this all by just sorta being a weird loser geek talking gibberish nobody cares about.
Truly, he is a man for all seasons. He is literally me.
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Weaving heedlessly through traffic, Pizzashill cursed the incompetent rightoids that polluted the streets of Eastern Oregon with their late-model F-150s and ridiculous, oversized SUVs. "The fools!" he thought, "do they have any idea how shitty their gas millage is in a vehicle like that?"
Cutting off another Ford Explorer, he inwardly congratulated himself again on his shrewd acquisition of such an economical vehicle: His off-white 2002 Honda Civic had only 220,000 miles and moderate rust damage; the entire purchase price had been less than the monthly payment would be on the Range Rover he'd just swerved in front of. "Psh," he thought to himself, "as though rightards could comprehend a concept as sophisticated as interest rates. Why, at 4.95% APR on a $100,000 SUV, that means every month they'd be pissing away almost..." here he performed some quick mental arithmetic "...a fuckload of money," he concluded, reflecting warmly once again on his prudence.
bzzz
The mobile phone on his dashboard – a refurbished Samsung Galaxy S6 with a Boost Mobile SIM card – vibrated to indicate a new message. No time to check it, he was almost there. Accelerating into the final turn, he yanked the wheel hard to the left, ignoring the angry horns of the other drivers. Centrifugal forces – "Imaginary, just like sexism," @pizzashill reminded himself – tossed his phone across the dashboard and hard into the window with a loud thonk.
bzzz
The phone buzzed again as it dropped into the passenger footwell.
Slowing as he approached the enormous warehouse looming in front of him, an ominous, windowless concrete structure, Pizzashill ignored the arrhythmic rattling from his car's exhaust system and casually brandished his blue staff ID badge (that's right, blue for management) at the RFID scanner to his left. With a cheerful beep and a green light, the scanner registered his arrival and the automated barrier lifted to allow him to pass. As always at this moment, Pizzashill felt a momentary flash of triumph, "The King is back, baby" he mused silently.
bzzz
Yet another notification sounded from the damp mat on the floor of the passenger footwell. He was progressing deliberately through the ranks of stationary vehicles, judging their owners for their fiscal profligacy while cursing them for their fortuitous parking. "If only they'd give managers a designated lot," he thought to himself, not for the first time, "It's outrageous that I have to compete for spaces with these wagies who answer to me."
bzzz
Again! What could possibly be so important? "I swear to god, if I have to to explain to Poj one more time how to reset the robot vacuum, I'll have a half a mind to – no, no, not that. Remember, she's only a woman. She's doing the best she can with her limited capacities," he reminded himself, gently steering his thoughts away from domestic violence. Finally, he found a spot between two large pickup trucks and brought the Honda to a halt.
Switching off the ignition, he fumbled for moment in the footwell to recover his phone and glanced at the screen. Three text messages and a voice memo, all from @Poj.
"hey a bunch of strange men in black SUVs are on our street" @7:53 am
"oh my god, I think they have guns." @7:54 am
"Pizza, it's the actual glowies, they say they have a warrant" @7:57 am.
His heart sank in his chest. "Shit," he thought, "I always knew this day might come." Steeling himself, he pressed play on the voice memo. Poj's panic-stricken voice filled the car's beige, lightly stained interior:
"Oh my god! oh my god! I hope you get this message. The FBI are here, they're everywhere! There's so many guys, they're searching everything! They've taken the ham stocks. They took the Pokémon cards. I tried to get them to keep the door shut so Pudding didn't escape and they said, 'Ma'am, you're lucky we don't confiscate that tubby cat as evidence, too.' What's going on, Pizza? I'm so scared right now! What should I do?"
"Shit (again)," he thought a second time. So this really was it. After everything he'd worked for, everything he'd built, this was how his empire would come crumbling down?
No. Not like this. Not a chance, he wasn't going down that easy. Not Pizzashill.
"Don't say anything," he texted back, "Tell them you want a lawyer. Remember, glowies are just IRL jannies. Remember what we talked about that one night? I love you, babe."
Like a gladiator preparing to enter the arena, knowing full well he had almost no chance of coming out alive, he suited up: steel toed boots for the warehouse floor, neon high-vis vest, blue ID badge clipped to his lanyard. He jiggled the sticky door handle of the Honda three times to get it to open, and stepped out into the crisp spring air.
He strode toward the entrance of the building with purpose. Pizzashill knew he had only one card left to play, but damned if those dumb feds hadn't just activated his trap card.
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I was writing dialogue for a very histrionic femcel adjacent character when it occurred to me that maybe I was misrepresenting what a character like that would sound like, because at the end of the day, it's moid hands typing what they think a foid like that would say. If only there was a way to clock gender just by text.
Then I remembered
https://app.readable.com/text/gender/
Would it be stupid to paste my dialogue and see if the website thinks a woman typed it?
So according to the website, whatever I vomited can pass as dialogue an actual woman might type.
Thanks to the peeps who share the results of that site analyzing content from /r/actuallesbians and stuff for giving me the idea. But I'm not sure if this is a good writing process. Would you use this to see if the foid you're writing actually sounds like a foid?
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The fricking ketamine must be working bc I'm reading for pleasure again
It's basically about this one cave which is the fricking origin of Ebola and Marburg (basically b-word butt Ebola).
It talks about trying to find the fricking source of the fricking diseases, what they do to the fricking body, the fricking terrifying spread and trying to figure out what the fricking heck was fricking going on in Africa basically.
I read half the fricking book yesterday and will probably finish it today. It's an easy read/brain candy. Highly recommend if you want to get absorbed into a fricking book since Netflix is fricking shit these days.