Date: Saturday, March 8th, 2025 Time: 9 AM to 12 PM Pacific Time Where: Online, Zoom Classroom Price: $60 (live class), $50 (recording). A sliding scale payment is available for attendees who need financial assistance. Registration Deadline: Sunday, March 2nd, 2025

Every creative community includes a diverse spectrum of identities ranging from the privileged to the marginalized or oppressed. Many people who exist near the privileged end of the spectrum want to use said privilege to support their fellow creatives and marginalized communities through direct action or artistic endeavors. But, they may not know the best way to go about it.

Join authors Nisi Shawl and K. Tempest Bradford for a webinar that will empower would-be allies to support BIPOC and other marginalized creatives. With a lecture and a one-hour Q&A, you’ll get real-life examples and general guidance. By the end of the webinar, you’ll have a better understanding of how to be an ally and have resources to help creators walk their talk.

Details & Registration

Writing Community, please help us reach more writers by sharing this post here and on other socials and in email and in group chats and by carrier pigeon and via psychic messages (or travel through the astral plane, whichever works best). Thanks! 🥰

Just a quick note from your friendly neighborhood bookworm/indie author

if you use kindle for the majority of your library, they will be shutting down the function that allows you to download your files and transfer them via USB on the 26th of February. Which doesn't sound like a huge deal, but this also means that if a book is taken off Amazon for any reason—like it being banned—they can scrape it off your kindle as well. So maybe backup your library?

How to Download Your Kindle Books (with screenshots)

Black Panther (2018)

Anti-Fascist Queer Book Recommendations

Find these books and more queer reads:

Corvid Christmas tree. Simple, but beautiful.

@ktempestbradford

Oh this is 100% relevant to my interests!

Shared here today by Matthew Boroson on Facebook. Gaining inspiration from other authors is great. Lifting passages and avoiding giving credit isn’t.

Tanith Lee was the first woman to win the British Fantasy Award for best novel, for the second book of the Flat Earth series. She died in 2015. You can buy Tales From the Flat Earth here in paperback or here on Kindle.

Leaving a Cult and Dealing with Religious Trauma - Knitting Cult Lady

Ironically, this video crossed my feed yesterday shortly after I opened the NY Mag Gaiman article. In it, she talks about how getting out of a cult is a first step, but is not the end of what you need to heal. That there's a Decade of Deconstruction necessary to fully be present in and enjoy the new life you build for yourself.

It dovetails with some issues swirling within the ex-Scientology community right now that I'm sure are about to collide with the parts of the NYMag article about Gaiman's roots in Scientology and the traumas he has failed to deal with appropriately.

I'm not super deep in the ex-Sci community, though YouTube likes to suggest certain videos to me because I watched Leah Remini's show. In general, it seems that many of the younger people who left the cult and have chosen to be public are constantly beefing with the elders who've been out for years or decades. Most of these younger folks have YouTube channels, and they're playing out all their personal dramas there in public in ways that are deeply unhealthy. Every time I see or read about the newest development, all I can think is: They're acting the way Scientology taught them to act while maybe not realizing it.

Based off of what Danielle says in the video, they have not fully deconstructed, and appear not to realize they need to do so. They think that because they are Out, they are fine.

Narrator: They are not fine.

It makes me wonder how little deconstruction from Scientology Gaiman did. Makes me wonder if he did any. Because the high level of compartmentalization that appears to be going on with him feels very close to what we've heard people who left Scientology talk about needing to do to survive, and how those still in the cult engage in it.

This isn't constrained to Scientology. In the reading and watching I've done, it's a part of any high control group/cult. Which is why getting out involves more than just not believing, anymore, and physically escaping. There must also be deconstruction so that you don't carry these destructive ways of existing and relating to people out into the world.

This is in no way any kind of excuse or apologetic. In the end, Gaiman is responsible for the choices he made. He had the money to get help, he had friends and family and community to lean on, and even if the tools weren't all there when he was a young man, they've been available and talked about for many a year.

He learned all the wrong lessons from Hubbard.

The Vulture article is extremely good reporting and utterly devastating. But it is absolutely one of the most trigger-y pieces of non-fiction writing I have ever read, and would be so even if he hadn't been one of my instructors at Clarion UCSD. It includes specific, horrible details of sexual, emotional, physical, and financial abuse of women and children.

You probably don't need anyone to tell you this, but just in case you do: you do not have to read the article if doing so will cause you harm.

It is enough to know that the allegations are severe, well-sourced, and that behind the kindly, cultured facade was an entitled monster.

No matter what anyone says, you do not need to bear witness. You do not need to harm yourself to be aware. It will not undo the harm he did. Your emotional safety is also important.

Be gentle with yourself and others.

I have skimmed it and read almost the whole first section and everything above is the absolute truth. Do not subject yourself to this if it will harm you more than help you.

Also know that if you have suffered anything like this, my heart is with you. Many hearts are with you. Even if it seems like not, there are loads of people who are now clear-eyed about him and ready to support and hear you.

Thinking about the Holmes story where a blind girl goes to him and is like "My fiancé is missing and he kept telling me the week leading up to his disappearance that he would always love me and come back for me,were anything to happen so I think he knew he was in trouble and I love him so much and I'm going to wait for him but I'd like to find him faster,ya know?" And Holmes figures out that it was this girl's parents to scam her out of money she was owed from an estate which she gave to them because she was still living at home,which she wouldn't be if she ever married,so her step father PRETENDED TO DATE HER for MONTHS to keep her from ever getting engaged to a real person and when Holmes finds out he confronts this man and this man is like "Well,you caught me! But it wasn't illegal:) so:)" and Holmes is like "No,but it was sickening and cruel and if she had a brother or good male friend he should post you up and whip you but she doesn't." And the man is like "No,she doesn't." And does the Victorian version of sticking his tongue out and Holmes is like "Well,I guess I'll do then!" And HE PULLS OUT HIS HUNTING WHIP.

YES! ALWAYS THINKING ABOUT THIS ONE.

WHAT A KING.

Also the first case of Holmes deciding ‘Yeah, this vulnerable young woman is my sister/daughter now. No take backs.’

I wish more people remembered that Holmes is absolutely feral and ready to throw hands about real injustice and humanities cruelty rather than just thinking he's just a smart guy who likes being smug about how smart he is

Which is why I absolutely adored Jeremy Brett's portrayal of the man himself.

There's an episode where he's in a country pub and a local is being an asshole; Holmes goads the guy into clocking him, and then he tells everyone in the building "you all saw that, I did not throw the first punch!" And proceeds to demolish the guy.

I got to see a bunch of these while they were being repeated when I was a kiddo and he really was such a good Holmes <3

I remember reading this story as a kid and it is absolutely the one that made me look at bbc sherlock and go something is not right here

This is why Elementary is so much better as a modern Sherlock Holmes story

While Elementary! Sherlock can be abrasive, rude and arrogant at the same time right from the very first story the show gets across that he CARES and that helping people is something that he does because its what should be done and not just because he wants to show off how smart he is and make other people feel stupid

in the middle of reading nana visitor’s book on women in star trek and i’m in shambles . i’m in shambles

she details in chronological order the women casted in star trek, their individual experiences and hardships as well as their marks left on audiences

the section detailing her own experiences as kira as well as an actress had me very emotional,,, i never knew the amount of things she endured + the infinite love she has for her character really adds context for her incredible performance in ds9

Jerry Jordan

Illustration by Scarymaaze

hey my besties who live in red states: id like you to go out and vote anyway.

yeah, the electoral college means your vote doesn't count unless you win your state. it's a terrible undemocratic bullshit system. it's not going to change before this election,* so there isn't much point in complaining about it right now.

if you hold the belief that there's no point in voting because your voice will just be downed out by a chorus of bigotry- chances are other people in your state feel the same way. and because those people are not voting, it's impossible to know how many of you there are. the reason it's important to vote EVEN WHEN YOU KNOW YOU ARE GOING TO LOSE is to make this number public.

when the minority in a state still goes out to vote:

- other members of the minority party know they aren't alone in their state. this encourages MORE people to vote in the next election

- the majority candidates are forced to divert some of their campaign resources away from swing states to secure a state they were already going to win

- the minority candidates are encouraged to spend some time campaigning in your state instead of abandoning it as a lost cause

- assuming you also vote in local elections, the minority is more likely to win representatives in the house

- who knows there might be so many of you that you fucking flip it by mistake

there has been a 700% increase in new daily voter registrations in the few days since Biden dropped out of the race.

thousands of people are deciding, right now, that voting is worth it. some of them live in your state. there is going to be a spike in blue votes across the country. this election is going to have the youngest voter turnout in history. this is the best possible time to join them. join us.

what have you got to lose? one afternoon?

I want to remind everyone thinking their state is too red to flip that Georgia went blue in 2020. Georgia. A deep south state that has been red basically forever.

If Georgia can do it, you can too.

A groundswell of young Democratic voters could flip a US Senate seat in Texas. It could easily be the difference between keeping or losing Senate seats in Ohio, Michigan, and even Montana. It is going to be the reason why the House does or does not flip. I don’t care if you are in Mississippi, Alabama, Missouri, North Dakota, go out and vote.