Rumbling into another linkdump - July-August(esque), 02019

Greetings! If you've joined for Write Every Day, what's in here is what I usually end up doing with my journal space, and can be safely skipped over. Or perused if you want, but there's usually a lot in here and it takes time to go through. What's in here is generally stuff pulled in from people on my Reading Page, annotated and commented, and then packaged into a big blob of post. There's not necessarily rhyme or reason, even when I try to put what I think are similar topics together. So, enjoy the show!

The live-action Little Mermaid movie will star Halle Bailey, making Ariel into a young black redheaded mermaid. (Which she has been before, on stage and such.) Which means more opportunities to have Black Mermaids and pride striping, courtesy Briana Lawrence and a mermaid with darker skin. (The entire Mermay sequence and even more are available on Marcus Williams' Twitter feed, and they're gorgeous!)

Unfortunately, it also means people start coming out of the woodwork to proclaim why it would be impossible for a black girl to be a mermaid, demanding refutation in the most scientifically accurate and profane way. And also, perhaps, a pointed point about perspective and whether choosing that particular place to stake your position might be ill-advised.

( There's plenty more to be had inside )

Lastly, they-as-singular has been around for centuries, and humans are really good at resolving ambiguities in language, so suck it up and use what pronouns a person says to use for them.

Using kindness as a life philosophy is nearly complete, and also really hard to achieve. We're talking Fred Rogers kinds of kindness here, not the kinds of kindnesses that would kill people because of warped views of their values as humans. For that, we have a story-sketch about what happens to people who believe firmly in their version of heaven, only for it to turn out to be exactly what they wanted by ysobel.

And finally, the most simple of truths - not all women are monoliths, and the White woman's experience is the world is vastly different than the Black woman's experience. Knowing the context helps make things understandable, and understanding means things like realizing solidarity and support is way more important and a signal of being helpful when your context is a Black woman who has been expected to go it alone, usually with a child, since they were children.

Write Every Day: 11 August 02019

Greetings! This is the Write Every Day Check-in post for 11 August 02019.

Today got a few things done. Most of it, though, was spent clearing out some tabs and then going to work on my WIP, which is very clearly taunting me about the compact (let's say something like 10k is "compact" in this case) story I had in mind, suggesting that it's going to be a lot more than that. Having written something in teh 23k range earlier this year, and then following it with an 18k sequel, I feel pretty confident that I can manage a big wordcount, but this one started (again!) with a simple idea and is making itself more complex every time I stare at it and add more to it.

Thankfully, I have a killer beta for this when it gets written out, which will make it better when I finally actually get through writing all of it!

Which is to say, between the projects of clearing out my tabs and writing on this WIP, I probably cleared close to 3000 words of my own writing (some of those words are link text and the thing I'm using as the conceit of this story and it's plot-driving abilities.) Which is a good Sunday, indeed.

( It's tally time! )