Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth. You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.
People aren’t either wicked or noble. They’re like chef’s salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.
baruyon:
Quick colour picture~~ Otters!!
Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
No one wants to be the person who is made fun of for caring too much about something, who treats in earnest a situation that everyone else considers absurd. Even in personal relationships, feeling too heavily invested while simultaneously understanding that the other person couldn’t be more detached is one of the most profound feelings of embarrassment we can experience. Because it isn’t simply the embarrassment of making a mistake or a poor choice, it’s a shame over the kind of human being you are and how you see the world around you. To be shamed for your sincerity is to be reminded that you are dependent on something which is not dependent on you — that you are, once again, vulnerable.
The editor of the Science Fiction Writers’ Association bulletin has resigned over an Internet backlash against sexism in the magazine.
allisonmoon:
The role of men in this conversation is definitely not to be a bunch of pouty shouty poo-poo faces who start yelling about how they’re oppressed too and something-something our-poor-penises. But you can swing too far the other way, too — the role of men in this conversation is also not to be the swooping swinging heroes who need to jump into the fray and save the Poor Widdle Women. Women are not our damsels in distress. We are not rescuing them from the onrushing train of sexism and misogyny (I’LL SAVE YOU FROM THE ANGRY OLD SCI-FI WRITER, LITTLE NELL). Our job is to facilitate the conversation and to foster a healthy, safe, kind environment. Our job is to signal boost and to cheerlead awesome women and, ultimately, to not be dicks about any of it. Can we just say that last part again? DON’T BE A DICK KAY? Kay.
“Like I said, diversity doesn’t just happen. It isn’t the natural evolution you’d like it to be — you don’t one day just step into strong female characters in your books and wonder how the fuck they got there. You write them in. You put them there as author. None of this bullshit of — “Well, only if it serves the story.” Hello, you’re the DEITY CONTROLLING THIS PLACE. It serves the story when you jolly well say it does. You write the story. It does not write you.”
ybb55:
Joseph Lorusso - Cafe Lovers
