My favorite charity shop is where I found

I found a book called Great People of the Bible and how they lived with multiple pressed flowers inside.

Today I'll be visiting a bookstore that always has free books that they can't sell. Usually it's cookbooks, Christian self help, and dime novels.

What's you're coolest find?

Is this a big money making opportunity

Here's one example where he's making bank from both selling on Amazon and running a patreon.

It's basically him writing self insert fiction of him fricking anime monster girls and paying an artist to make artwork for books that make me neets feel

How can I make a bajillion dollars from this, please include clear instructions.

This post isn't me coping

This sounds dumb, but is true: As a kid, I grew up with a lot of violence. Men, in my family, school, but also on the street, were either utterly angry or utterly indifferent at all time. [...]

Due to this, I didn't really socialize with guys till I was an adult. And while I do know some "opposite examples" now, this shit is still bleeding in my writing. Like, I've been writing a script with around 5 main male characters. In general I treated them like every other character: Character, motivations etc. However, now a Beta-Reader informed me that they all sound needlessly aggressive. Like: Rude, cold and/or indifferent. Very strong in contrast to the female characters, who are very "normal", including empathy, kindness and "often sounding like the last wall between a full out massacre sometimes".

Now, obviously I don't want that. I live for four-dimensional characters. But looking through my other stories, I can def see a pattern: Men (if not the LI) are often villains. There are grumpy old men, shitty fathers, sociopathic Mafia bosses etc. "Positive" examples, are mostly just variations of 1.) My cousin (very nice, extroverted guy) and 2.) character-types I picked from other stories (e.g. "old man who is too invested in his grandson's love life")

Any advice? Cause at this rate, I'll paint a very, very bad picture and I hate it

"How can I make myself not hate men? I know! I'll talk to some Redditors!"

>Writing wish fulfillment romance scenarios while hating the opposite s*x

🤝

The thing that comes to my mind is to consume more stories with male characters that display the traits that you're looking to emulate in your own writing. [...] I can offer some movie recs: Before I Disappear (2014), Submarine (2010), and Stand By Me (1986) all explore I would say a more tender side of masculinity

Ever notice how their go to examples are never books?

OP:

Good point. I did get a lot of LI material from romance books. So maybe I can do the same that way. I'll the check out the suggestions!

No, don't do that. I love a good bodice ripper, they're my guilty pleasure, but you are not going to get an example of loving, normal men from them. They are always portrayed as a slightly aggressive "Alpha Male" type who gets extremely possessive of his love interest and has problems expressing feelings

You will NOT have a man who protects you. You WILL comfort your boyfriend when he comes home crying after work.

I have to offer a word of caution, here. Romance books give people a distorted ideas of a relationship the same way porn gives people distorted ideas of s*x. They're idealized or sensationalized because it's better for the person consuming the product, not because it's realistic or healthy.

Women be reading romance. That's basically the same as me edging in my goon cave for four hours every night.

If you wanted to, you could write the men as "normal" people, too. As people first, men second.

Novice writers when you explain to them that the opposite s*x are people

I try. That's the problem. I try, but in the end, there's something that just bleeds through. However, tbf, maybe this does speak of a deeper issue. Like, maybe I know logically that men are people (duh), but emotionally, there's still a part who does not believe it...? Idk.

Trust your instincts, sister

Some therapy wouldn't hurt. It's reflective of your experience, and not dealing with your past to a healthy degree is warping your ability to see men as anything other than what you experienced.

I am on the hunt for that, don't worry. I've had some therapy for 5 years, but I was just newly diagnosed with CPTSD last year. So rn I'm in this "in-between" of switching therapies.

Five years of therapy didn't work? Better give it another five years.

For the sake of providing advice I don't see here, you could try writing a character as a girl then just changing them to be a guy. It's unconventional, but it might help you eliminate your bias. Alternatively, make really mousey nerdy overly polite type guys who avoid aggression. We exist, lol.

Is this... the ick?

I'm not crazy, i promise, but you're going to think I am. If you're willing to go out on a limb, though, i think it'll help.

Now, people have said therapy and that's not a bad idea. It does sound like the unresolved trauma is causing problems, but we're not doctors so that's about as far as we can suggest with that.

What you should do is, like someone else suggested, find and consume media with more positive male figures.

Watch Bluey. I'm not kidding. It's about a little girl who is a dog and her dog family and Bandit is a good girl-dad. He's portrayed as a normal dad, in that he gets frustrated but he tries not to lose his cool.

I'm not kidding. It'll help.

I AM NOT CRAZY!

Without actually reading her work I can't evaluate it or try to psychoanalyze her.

What I can tell you is that Redditors are the last people you should ask about masculinity. Redditors are hardcore feminists to the exact extent that they believe feminism strips them of masculine responsibility. Once we get rid of toxic masculinity, women will finally throw themselves at timid scrawny nerds who cry once a week... Right?

It seems to me like the obvious advice is to portray male aggression honestly, while showing the neutral or positive ways it can be channeled. The Redditors instead are telling her to feminize her male characters, watch children's cartoons, and get (another five years of) therapy, sweaty.

Greetings dramacels

This will be the ping for /h/lit and book club members !bookworms.

You can start applying, then we will use it for literary related matters.

Special thanks to @24-7_ROCK_PEEPEE for the 1000 coins donation for the ping group.

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personally I think the problem is dahlite culture

Back in high school most of the book discussions were exclusively about explaining it to students who couldn't understand the material (included (parts of) The Oddesy, Anthem by Ayn Rand, The Cask of Amontillado and Telltale Heart, A Streetcar Named Desire, To Kill a Mockingbird, some satire of Victorian social standards that I can't remember the name of, and probably more I can't remember)

We also had to read A Separate Peace during the Summer and when classes started we had a week to discuss it and turn in a report on it.

I hated it, everyone else probably hated it, and the only thing discussed was how the two main characters were totes gay for each other (actually true). Then the next year we read The Great Gatsby, and discussion over it was relegated to talking about how the two main characters were totes gay for each other (also true)

To Kill a Mockingbird was pulled from the curriculum the year after my class read it b/c a student complained about the N word

So what were your school lit discussions like? Surface-level repetition of plot points or high-brow elucidating dialogues?

For the writers in here, what's the most embarrassing thing you've ever written?

I'll go first:

Back when I was a braindead teenager, I postponed my senior capstone for an entire semester.

I originally started designing a whole table top game. This would have included box art, a resource book with illustrations, tables, the whole 9 yards.

But I was laughed at by 3 fat they/thems when I presented that idea.

So I wrote an awful novella about lesbians going to prom in the last 2 weeks of the project. I admittedly hamed it up for extra points by padding out the plot with needless identity politics. But I got a B+ and multiple classmates said it was the best thing they'd ever read because it spoke to them as

Helmer: You are talking like a child. You understand nothing about the society you live in.

Nora: No I don't... I must try to discover who is right, society or me.

Off the top of my head, there's Ted's favorite book, Conrad's The Secret Agent (which gets my vote, because he makes fun of Twitter anarchists for larping). There's all the angsty shit Dostoevsky wrote. There's Roth's American Pastoral, which, if anything, is anti-. Then of course there's blue-pilled 1880s Norwegian feminism, or old-timey female Joker lit: Ibsen.

But what really is the angstiest piece of literature for edgy anarchists to read that's not shit? 1984 doesn't count, because Orwell was a boring socialist and it's peachy and redditty, unlike Brave New World. What Is to Be Done? doesn't count, because Nabokov and I say it's dreadful.

What would the gigabrained Joker actually carry under his arm as he assassinates John Lennon?

Thoughts on having a rdrama weekly book club?

We could have a nomination thread to propose the books, then a voting thread with the most upvoted proposals from the previous thread to decide it. Just an idea, I’m not a janny so I don’t know how to create voting threads, maybe the /h/lit mods can do it.

Anyways, if this happens I nominate The Iliad. I read it last year, but is one of those books I would read again, no problem, and is so dramatic and probably very fun to discuss

One I haven’t read yet, but would like to nominate is Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, is short and looks interesting (literal bugman lmao).

To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks, papers, etc.

I’m currently on Chapter 3 Part 2 of Lolita (page 166 of the annotated edition). I have no idea why people say this book is pedophilia apologia, or why some say the main character is “sympathetic”. Humbert Humbert is not just a perv, he’s a psychopath as well. He marries a woman he loathes solely so he could lust after his preteen daughter, he feels no remorse, guilt or sadness when she dies (I think he killed her, Charlotte’s death was way to convenient for it to be an accident), he kidnaps the girl, sexually abuses her and blackmails her by telling if she dares to turn him over to the police, she’ll end up in an orphanage and therefore is better off with him. There is nothing likable about this besides the fact he’s funny and witty. As for the witting, is absolutely beautiful, so many references, wordplay and french quotes, you can tell how great Nabokov was by making such a great book with a such a delicate subject as this.

What do we think of this fella? Never read his stuff but got 4 GoT books for $5 years back.

Part of the fiscally-left, socially-right movement. Join today!

I will likely be dead before an American writes something decent.

To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks, papers, etc.

I started Lolita this week, I’m currently on page 61. I have no idea why some people believe this is a p-do apologia, it took me only 10 pages to feel completely disgusted by Humbert Humbert, especially when he started talking about his “nymphets” . But as with Charles Kinbote, I have to say Humbert is a super funny narrator, the way he trashes Mrs Haze at every opportunity, so bitchy and so manipulative lmao, which makes him much scarier than Kinbote, who was unmistakably a schizo to everyone around him.

Sometimes I can’t believe Nabokov was Russian, his dominion over the English Language is quite impressive, even if he grew up in a trilingual environment, typical of the Russian aristocracy.