pardon the egg salad stains

– small logic, 03/04/2025 | g.r.

I love all books but sometimes you read a book and you’re like so were all 21 thousand of you blindfolded and at gun point when you rated it 5 stars

hello fellow non-Black tumblr users. welcome to my saw trap. if you'd like to leave, please name one (1) Black woman author who is not Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Octavia Butler, or N.K. Jemisin. bonus points if she's published a book in the last five years.

posted this four hours ago and the notes are. genuinely dire.

special shoutout also to the people who mention Ta-Nehesi Coates and Tochi Onyebuchi who are both men

everyone is formally invited to stop misgendering Black nonbinary people any time btw. Janelle Monáe and Rivers Solomon and Akwaeke Emezi are not women.

Oh my god, I can't watch this.

Here, everyone, since you're having fun with list challenges recently, I made you something:

I've read most of these and can vouch for them being good. Go forth and read! You'll feel better for it.

I love tying in a topical meme to this lmao, but I do just want to point out real quick that Danielle L. McGuire, the author of At the Dark End of the Street, is white!

favourite things about first drafts:

Not only is this allowed but it's something i encourage all writers of any kind to play with! :D

The idea that all writers know what to say all the time and just splash fully-formed drafts out one word after the other is false. There are some who can do it, but i think most of us... can't. Which is why we need tricks like square bracket notes! They're not cheats or lazy writing or some other flavour of Not Allowed, but instead really really important tools that we should use as much as we need to.

Some of the most helpful tricks I've collected over the years are:

Basic rule though is that you do not have to get your writing perfect on the first try. This is where drafts come in. The way I see it is to treat each draft as a fresh start – I create/open a new document (well, new Scrivener file) and start over as if from scratch. Each draft gets a narrower focus than the last. This is my process, as an example:

I'll also rewrite my plot outline between each draft, too. The act of actually re-writing stuff is very helpful for making your brain think about it.

Drafting like this isn't for everyone, but realising that you can just bullshit your way through chunks of text was a massive game-changer for me. Some people will do a draft, then work on something else, then come back and do another draft, work on something else, etc. Some people's drafting process will look more like what I consider to be revisions. Do whatever works for you. Just remember that from the moment you first decide you Want to Write a Thing to the moment you hit "post" or "publish" or give your manuscript over to a publisher, you can keep making as many changes as you like in any way you like. (And if you go the querying to traditional publishing route, you'll probably get suggestions for, and have space/time to make, changes to the manuscript quite far into the process).

Yes!!

I don't believe I've ever met two writers who have exactly the same process. Every writer I've spoken to about the craft of writing has their own process, usually developed over years and years of practice and trying things out.

For example, I don't rewrite at all, that sounds horrendous, I just save-as to create a new draft. I also get the big structure stuff done in outlining, but I'm a weirdo who writes 20k word outlines. As mentioned above, I am one of those people who needs space between drafts--or at least, between rough draft and first revision. And I do my first revision on paper, always. The human brain processes screens and hardcopy differently! I write all over my printed rough draft, and then go back to the doc and apply those edits and anything else that occurs to me at the time, so my draft 2 is more sort of draft 2.5??

There's a lot more, obviously, and it's different between novels and short stories (I don't print short stories unless I'm really struggling). But I'm always experimenting with different ways to write, and sometimes they work and sometimes I get stranded and have to go back to the drawing board. Some people have a lot more hand writing in the prep stages, in notebooks or on index cards--I visited someone once whose dining room walls were covered in butcher paper and index cards with pushpins!

So if you're a newbie writer, experiment! Read about a bunch of different ways to get those words down! Try new things! Put notes and placeholders and such in your drafts, write by the seat of your pants, try out the whole in-depth outline thing, revise every paragraph before moving on to the next one, whatever works!!

Also please feel free to come talk to me about it! I love hearing about how people write.

bitches will hear a song and be like 'this makes me feel like i have a gaping hole in my chest' and then they put it on repeat. its me im bitches

Buffy, the later years.

this was like genuinely years ago On Here which is like 70 years in normal people time but I have never ever ever ever stopped thinking about when there was a post on my dash that just said something to the effect of "when's the last time you read a book by a Black woman?" and the notes were just. absolutely festering with people old enough to be on god's green internet openly admitting that they genuinely weren't sure if they had read a book by a Black women literally ever in their entire lives. and I think about that just constantly because it really is evident in the greater tumblrina culture.

an interesting thing you can do pretty easily is look at all of the books that have made the Tumblr end of year review going back to 2016. if you take a shot every time literally any author of color cracks the list, you might notice that you will not be taking very many shots.

everyone say thank you to terrance hayes for writing the same city

i am never not thinking about this line. how does he DO it good god.

the ladies call me the subjunctive mood the way I express desire, wishes, uncertainty, doubt and fear