Ink Pools

Gentle reminder that often creativity decides to hibernate for a bit.

It’s okay.  You’re not broken, you’re resting, and much like spring, creativity comes back.

In Art Therapy we call this incubating.

You’re incubating ideas. Like an egg. There’s stuff growing inside. Your ideas are collecting and culminating and melding, merging into something.

Don’t crack it open before it’s ready. Wait until you hear it tap tap tapping with its egg tooth. Then slowly help it from its shell bit by bit.

Be kind. Be gentle. We are all growing things tender and soft but capable of great power if given the time to grow and change.

I was ruminating on this a lot a few months ago, being so frustrated with feeling depleted with the interest to do the thing that usually gives me so much joy, comfort and connection. The thought I held onto was that creativity is the like the Wadden Sea. The ocean is gone and it looks like what’s left is boring, plain mud flats all the way to the horizon. But this is actually precious ground full of life and an important part of our ecosystem. So it is okay to cherish the plainness and muddiness of it. It is just part of the rhythm. The tide will be back soon again.

I think 90% of conspiracy theorists would be a lot happier if they just bit the bullet and got into creative writing

it's so fun in here you can make up all the aliens and funky-shaped planets you want without also inventing new ways to be antisemitic about it

that’s a hard yes

Controversial opinion but we need to apply anti-cringe culture shit to "edgy" art too. Like songs/poems/art/etc are not bad just because they're angry or sad or otherwise emotional and they're not bad for dark and violent. So much "edgy" stuff is just explorations of dark topics and/or mentally ill people working through shit via art.

Cringe culture isn't just bad when it's applied to positive expressions of emotion, it's also bad when applied to the angry and sad shit too. Let people be angry and sad in their art. It's fine.

I really have no patience for posts talking about "adults who only watch kids' cartoons," because, like...people accuse me of "only watching kids' cartoons," despite all evidence to the contrary. It doesn't matter how much I talk about other adult media I like, if I post too many things in a row about Steven Universe or The Dragon Prince or The Owl House, people come out of the goddamn woodwork to accuse me of "only watching kids' shows."

So I really can't take people seriously when they start talking about the supposed "problem" of "adults who only watch kids' shows." Are the "adults who only watch kids' cartoons" in the room with us right now, or are you basing your entire opinion of people solely on their fandom blog? Like, come on.

It makes me think of the couple years I spent volunteering in a school library. The librarian talked a lot about how it's hurtful to enforce "reading at grade-level" on every student with no nuance. Teachers would try to force their students to check out books "at proper grade-level," instead of letting students pick out whatever they wanted (even if it was "too easy"), and it resulted in a lot of students deciding books were boring, too hard, and only good for making them feel stupid. They started to hate reading entirely, because people constantly shut them down and told them they were stupid for not reading the right things. This was especially brutal on disabled students.

I personally apply the same philosophy to adults. You don't know what someone might struggle with, you don't know what someone's history is. You might think a piece of media is "too simple," but that's your experience and your opinion. People learn and grow and experience the world at different paces, and what seems to you like a "simplistic" piece of media may be the most complex, illuminating piece of media someone else has ever had the opportunity to experience. It doesn't make them "stupid" or "childish," and believing that it does is cruel and counterproductive. You cannot wield shame as a fucking cudgel if your goal is education, support, and helping people expand their horizons.

I don't think a culture of shame is helpful. I don't think a culture of "if you like 'childish' things, it means you're too stupid for anything else" is helpful. I don't think constantly making fun of children's media does anything other than demean people--and not just the people who enjoy it, but the people who make it, too.

hi, trans person here who does not plan on getting bottom surgery (or if I do, it will not be a conventional surgery), and i also write trans characters having sex.

implying that a trans person (or character) is "basically cis" when they get bottom surgery is an incredibly narrow and ignorant way to consider a transition goal that many trans people have. a trans person who gets All The Surgeries still has to take HRT, they'll still have experiences with transition and transphobia, their genitals will not look exactly the same as same as a cis person's (unless the character can use magic or advanced sci-fi tech, but i digress), and even less so if they are looking for a non-conventional bottom surgery like me. people often get bottom surgery so it's easier or possible at all for them to enjoy sex in their bodies, and depicting that is as much an expression of trans joy as writing a character putting on a binder or wearing make-up for the first time. it is a completely valid way to write a trans character, because there are trans HUMAN BEINGS, IN REAL LIFE who experience similar things.

however, there will always be trans people who do not want or can't afford bottom surgery who still want to have sex and enjoy having sex with their natal genitals. it's not wrong to depict that either, because it's the way a lot of trans people live. trans people without bottom dysphoria exist (hi), and sex with natal genitals is perfectly enjoyable. sometimes surgery is too expensive, recovery is too time consuming, medical complications are too risky, etc. so people make-do with what they have. OR, some trans people have sex with their natal genitals and get bottom surgery later, because they don't want to wait for bottom surgery (which can take YEARS on a waiting list to achieve) to enjoy sex. whether it be through different language surrounding sex and genitals, sex toys like strap-ons, or different methods of having sex like muffing, there's as many different ways for trans characters to have sex as there are trans people currently sucking and fucking in the real world.

writing trans sex can be complicated, because a lot of it is tied up in deeply felt emotions and dysphoria, and in fandom especially people project their personal desires and feelings onto their favorite characters. but as long as you write the character with the appropriate care and research, there is nothing wrong with writing a trans character with every surgery under the sun, no surgeries at all, only HRT, absolutely no medical intervention whatsoever, take your pick. i hope one day you can go back and write this character having explosive transgender sex with joy.

A Genie offers you one wish, and you modestly wish to have a very productive 2017. The genie misunderstands, and for the rest of your life, every 20:17 you become impossibly productive for just 60 seconds.

“Well, it was a nice day.” You kiss your sweetheart gently on the forehead and sigh as the last remaining seconds of 20:16 tick away. “See you at 8:18,” you say. 

Then it happens. Every ounce of fatigue or hunger leaves your body. The face of your beloved is perfectly still, their expression exactly the same. The ticking of the clock on the wall has stopped. Once again, it’s 20:17. 

You stretch your arms and walk to the table with the homework for the three doctorates you’re working on. The work is mentally stimulating and enjoyable, but it’s finished far too quickly. You check your pocket watch and see that not even one hundredth of a second has passed. 

You knew it was too soon to be able to see any movement on the watch, but you can never quite help yourself from looking early on every 20:17. Time to move on. 

You clean your home, do your budget, then go outside and fix a noise that your car was making earlier that afternoon. (Oh how you already miss afternoons.) Then you go back inside, boot up your computer (which magically speeds up to keep pace with you as long as you’re in contact with it) and check for any new orders. 

You’ve set up a website for the small business you started called “Magic Elf Services.” People in your area can pay a modest fee on your site to have different tasks and odd jobs done by “The Magic Elf” at 8:17pm every day. It was a little slow to get started, but word has spread and these days you have a steady stream of clients. 

The money that comes in from the business is nice, but you’re mostly grateful that it gives you a clear list of things to do. You print off your updated list of clients, step outside, and start making your way through the neighborhood with your to-do list. 

There’s the apartments down your street where several neighbors have hired you to tidy up, do the dishes, and mop the floors. You do the windows too, just to see if they notice. There’s the large house across town that paid the “Magic Elf” to clean out the gutters. After the first dozen jobs are done, you manage to stop looking at your pocket watch. 

As near as you’ve been able to determine in the past, 20:17 seems to last for approximately one normal year. But it’s not exact. For one thing, it’s hard to keep track of “time” when everything but you has crawled to an almost total standstill. For another thing, time seems to move differently depending on how “productive” your behavior is. One time you tried to spend all of 20:17 sitting at home in your pajamas, but that was getting you nowhere, so you eventually gave up and got busy. (Though you defiantly stayed in your pajamas the whole time.) 

During 20:17 your body doesn’t get tired, hungry, sick, or injured. You’re essentially tireless and immortal for the duration of the “minute.” So sleeping or eating away your boredom has never really worked for you. 

One of the houses on your list forgot to follow the instructions and leave a key for you to get in. At first you figure you’ll just send them an email telling them to pay more attention and that you’ll do the job tomorrow. Then you decide to go home, get your locksmith tools, and come back. 

After finishing up all the jobs on your list, you go into several other homes and small businesses in the area, performing tasks you hope they’ll find helpful, and leaving a hand-painted business card at each one. (The business cards don’t contain your real name just in case somebody thinks “The Magic Elf” should be subject to breaking and entering laws.) 

Speaking of laws, you head down to the local police station to pick up your case file. You’ve been in contact with a detective who’s been investigating corruption within their department, and your ability to investigate unseen and get in almost anywhere between the ticks of the clock has proven invaluable. You see that they’ve also added five missing person cases to your file this evening, which certainly raises your interest in the job. 

You make your way through town gathering evidence, and start making your way to the outskirts of town. Since you happen to be out that way (and you’ve already solved three of the five missing person cases) you decide to swing by the stone castle you’re building and do some more work there. 

The castle walls stand about 20 feet right now, but you know they’ll be much higher when you’re done. You’re far from any roads and pretty safely tucked away, so for now it’s your little secret. You’ve been excavating and moving all the rock yourself, which has been much easier than you first expected since your body doesn’t get tired or sore. You’ve also got a nice system of tunnels going underneath the castle, and you dig and build more of that network for a while. 

All that time spent underground has left you feeling rather lonely, so you walk back home to see the face of your sweetheart. Their facial expression has moved ever so slightly since you last saw them, which is a comfort to you. Looking at them gets your imagination going and makes you dream up a story you’d like to tell, so you sit on your couch, plug in your laptop, and write a book. 

After you finish editing the last chapter for the third time, you finally allow yourself to look at your pocket watch again. Three seconds have officially passed so far. 

It’s gonna be a long 20:17. 

Have we added this to the Tumblr Folk Tales masterlist yet?

That last comment put a big old smile on my face 😁

goddamn it.

Don't want to put this on the post itself for risk of derailing it, but that post the other day about Terry Pratchett's early work really stuck in my mind. OP had sent in an ask saying that they heard some of Pratchett's earlier works had problematic elements (not unusual for a male english writer in the 80s) and they weren't sure whether to go ahead with reading the work anyway.

What I really want to ask that person, or indeed all persons who are hesitating over whether or not to read problematic works or works by imperfect authors:

What are you worried about happening, if you read a work with problematic elements?

Because these are all different answers and some of them are more actionable than others

In terms of Terry Pratchett in case anyone is worried:

1)Hard to say? I don't recall anything hateful, but everyone has different things that might upset them. Please refer to #6 below while making your choice.

2)The man is dead, you aren't supporting anything of him.

3) Honestly, people will think badly of you for how you fold your napkin. Do not go through life with this mentality. Read, judge, and comment or not as you please. Be open to new information but do not be ashamed for actively exploring literature of all kinds. Never exposing yourself to ideas that might be 'bad' does not make you proof against them, it only makes you innocent to their expressions and less able to engage.

4)Terry's still dead. No worries here either way.

5) See #3 above. It is impossible to block out all exposure to negative thoughts and ideas in the world. Engaging with them via reading and discussion is actually probably your *safest* approach. Why? You are given the benefit of *time*. You can ingest, consider, cross-check, discuss, and evaluate a written work at your own pace. Compare this to a face-to-face discussion or argument where you need to make snap decisions at the moment(or feel the need to at least) Reading and considering works that may have takes you do not like gives you a chance to prepare yourself and consider your own position before encountering 'real world' versions. For example: I have read most of Ayn Rand's works. I think she's a hack, and objectivism is bunk, but I wanted to understand *her own* mindset when approaching these things, so I wasn't arguing against a straw man, and couldn't be tricked by bad-faith presentations/interpretation or by falling into pit traps of my own ignorance.

6) MOST importantly- Terry Pratchet was at his core a good and kind man. You can see this though the body of his work, his commentary, and the legacy he left behind. If there is something problematic in his works, it was indeed very much a 'product of the times' most likely. You might even find he changed and reversed his opinions, or considered that particular element to be poorly done at a later point in his life. There's something very invaluable here. Good people still bungle things, good people still have blind spots. Good people are still partially a product of their environment. Good people aren't some magical thing fully formed and unchanging throughout their lives. Good people are just...people trying to bring good into the world. They're still people.

Terry Pratchett is a gem, and not reading him because of some particular thing(no idea what the thing is in this case) will have you missing out on heaps of insightful, scathing, and healthy commentary. You will miss out on books that approach very nasty and complex issues both soberly and with enough humor to take some of the weight off of this initial exposure and allow more to access it.

tl;dr: Read Terry Pratchett

I have another comment on another long-circulating post on tumblr which goes something like, "In the past as in the present, there have always been people who who were even then fighting for a more just accord with their fellow man, and there have always been people who let their greeds and hatreds rule them to excess. The goal of classics education is to teach you how to tell the difference, in the past as of today."

It is so very much more important to be able to tell the difference -- in the past, in the present, and in the future -- between a person who wants to make the world a better place and help his fellow man, even if they do so using idioms or ideas that are outdated and offensive to us now, and a person who actively and willingly spreads hate and fear and malice.

The more you rely on the standards of current, modern, western-hemisphere, english-language social mores to tell you What Is Good and What Is Evil, the more you reject learning about people and art of the past because they're Problematic, the more you close yourself off to humanity, the less you will be able to understand this difference.

When the language and the mores and the practices change again, and leave your current understanding behind -- will you be able to tell the difference?

Being locked into the social mores and language of Today with the idea that they are the Only Way Of Being Good will actually trap you into being cruel when the world turns and Today becomes Tomorrow and there are new fronts in the fight for justice. We see this now, with certain Boomers who were at the forefront of social justice movements in their day and so see themselves as Inherently Good People Who Can Never Be Bad, and so don't question or update their outdated beliefs and languages and unconscious biases.

There is no cheat code to bring a Good Person. There is no medal you can win, no amount of Goodness Points you can be awarded that means you never have to question yourself and your beliefs, that means you never have adapt and adjust your behavior and your language when you realize you were doing harm.

The corollary to that is that you must understand and accept that you are certainly doing harm right now, without realizing it. Years from now you will look back on yourself of today and wince. And that doesn't make you a Bad Person, it means you did your best in a profoundly unjust society and you grew and changed and learned better. Just like many creators we look back on today.

And the only alternative to this is to be the kind of person that never examines it updates your views and does harm without caring because they think of themselves as an Inherently Good Person Who Couldn't Do Wrong. And we've seen what that kind of thinking does, too.

in one of the servers I'm in, we've been discussing looking back at your old art, and a couple people mentioned that getting compliments on their old art makes them feel like their artistic growth isn't as evident to other people as it is to them, or like they havent improved as much as they thought for people to still be complimenting their old work

but it's really not like that! Your personal perception of your art is inherently going to be very different to the audience. This is how i explained it in there & i thought i'd share it here as well:

A compliment on your old art doesn't undermine the growth in your new art, it's just admiring the qualities of your work that were already there!

Our art can change direction, our grasp of the fundamentals can get stronger, and this means our personal standards will always go up and the choices we would make creating a piece change, so when you as the creator look back on your old art, you're hit with a lot of "oof, I'd do x and y and z differently now".

But your audience doesn't have any of those hangups, to them youve drawn some good art, and when they look at your current art, you're making even stronger art, and both of them are worth admiring.

not that any of this makes it any less psychic damage inducing to look at your own old art LOL but putting yourself in the shoes of the audience and looking at it for what it is rather than how well it reaches your current standards can still help a little with that

ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh (clutches my head and remembers that poem about All my dead friends and the frightening door

“all my dead friends” by marie howe

so oooo many people in so many fandoms are holding themselves back from the art they want to create because they fear The Discourse and it's the most depressing thing ever like PLEASE stop clipping your own wings and create whatever art you want to. whyyy do we have to live in a panopticon it's so frustrating just make whatever!! be free!!!!!!

Well written fiction is by definition going to be edgy and problematic but not for the reasons you think; it's because in order to present a compelling argument for or against something you also have to present a case for the other side. If you're willing to strawman the opposing case the book will not be very good

favorite tweets

@canisalbus this was too perfect to not tag you