smmmooooooch
This is so gorgeous! I can’t stop looking at their lips. What a beautifully drawn kiss. ❤️
I found the poster in a better quallity - 2400x3612! :)
They’re cuddling! Warms my shippy little heart. *chinhands*
How do you know when to give up on a manuscript?
I've been querying a while and got no bites. It might be my query letter, it might be the writing itself, but it's been through a lot of betas and edits now and though I still think it's good, it doesn't seem like it's good enough.
Also, how do I give up on this manuscript?
Write the next one. (Don't give up on this one. When you've written the next one you may be good enough to see what needs to be fixed in the one you're on. But write the next one.)
Humbly adding my 2 cents as a new writer fresh from the trenches:
It helped me a lot to have a concrete number of agents to query before moving on to plan B. I think I settled on 80, rather arbitrarily. It made the process feel more manageable, less depressingly nebulous.
And speaking of plan B, if you’re not already doing so, you might consider submitting directly to smaller/independent traditional presses that take unagented work! A lot of agents are very trend-focused and averse to taking risks, but publishers are sometimes more open to considering things that most agents won’t. That’s what happened for me, and so far I am delighted with how it’s working out.
Good luck OP, and I hope you find your yes soon!
“In 1984, when Ruth Coker Burks was 25 and a young mother living in Arkansas, she would often visit a hospital to care for a friend with cancer.
During one visit, Ruth noticed the nurses would draw straws, afraid to go into one room, its door sealed by a big red bag. She asked why and the nurses told her the patient had AIDS.
On a repeat visit, and seeing the big red bag on the door, Ruth decided to disregard the warnings and sneaked into the room.
In the bed was a skeletal young man, who told Ruth he wanted to see his mother before he died. She left the room and told the nurses, who said, “Honey, his mother’s not coming. He’s been here six weeks. Nobody’s coming!”
Ruth called his mother anyway, who refused to come visit her son, who she described as a “sinner” and already dead to her, and that she wouldn’t even claim his body when he died.
“I went back in his room and when I walked in, he said, “Oh, momma. I knew you’d come”, and then he lifted his hand. And what was I going to do? So I took his hand. I said, “I’m here, honey. I’m here”, Ruth later recounted.
Ruth pulled a chair to his bedside, talked to him
and held his hand until he died 13 hours later.
After finally finding a funeral home that would his body, and paying for the cremation out of her own savings, Ruth buried his ashes on her family’s large plot.
After this first encounter, Ruth cared for other patients. She would take them to appointments, obtain medications, apply for assistance, and even kept supplies of AIDS medications on hand, as some pharmacies would not carry them.
Ruth’s work soon became well known in the city and she received financial assistance from gay bars, “They would twirl up a drag show on Saturday night and here’d come the money. That’s how we’d buy medicine, that’s how we’d pay rent. If it hadn’t been for the drag queens, I don’t know what we would have done”, Ruth said.
Over the next 30 years, Ruth cared for over 1,000 people and buried more than 40 on her family’s plot most of whom were gay men whose families would not claim their ashes.
For this, Ruth has been nicknamed the ‘Cemetery Angel’.”— by Ra-Ey Saley
She’s 60 now, she’s still doing activist and advocacy work, and working on a memoir.
my favorite thing about this story is that ruth had inherited a large family graveyard and never really knew wtf she was going to do w dozens and dozens of empty grave plots but then the AIDS crisis happened and she realized what she could do with it
When Burks was a girl, she said, her mother got in a final, epic row with Burks’ uncle. To make sure he and his branch of the family tree would never lie in the same dirt as the rest of them, Burks said, her mother quietly bought every available grave space in the cemetery: 262 plots. They visited the cemetery most Sundays after church when she was young, Burks said, and her mother would often sarcastically remark on her holdings, looking out over the cemetery and telling her daughter: “Someday, all of this is going to be yours.”
“I always wondered what I was going to do with a cemetery,” she said. “Who knew there’d come a time when people didn’t want to bury their children?”
(x)
Articles:
- Ruth Coker Burks, the cemetery angel: https://arktimes.com/news/cover-stories/2015/01/08/ruth-coker-burks-the-cemetery-angel
- Caring For AIDS Patients, ‘When No One Else Would: https://www.npr.org/2014/12/05/368530521/caring-for-aids-patients-when-no-one-else-would
And a final quote from the first article:
She hasn’t been back to Files Cemetery since her stroke. While she made sure it was kept up back when she lived in Hot Springs, it appeared to have been let go a bit when the reporter visited in late December, some of the tombstones pushed over and broken, the snag of a dead oak left to rot among the graves. Even without knowing the story of the place, it might have been downright spooky if not for the constant stream of traffic cruising by at 10 miles an hour over the speed limit.
Before she’s gone, she said, she’d like to see a memorial erected in the cemetery. Something to tell people the story. A plaque. A stone. A listing of the names of the unremembered dead that lie there.
“Someday,” she said, “I’d love to get a monument that says: This is what happened. In 1984, it started. They just kept coming and coming. And they knew they would be remembered, loved and taken care of, and that someone would say a kind word over them when they died.”
Hi, Neil! I just wanted to say thanks for telling us to believe in our stories, and for being so encouraging to new writers in general. Your advice helped give me the confidence to write my story and put it out there. My first novel has found a publisher and will be coming out next year. It still doesn’t feel quite real to me, but here we are!
I'm so proud of you!
Wahoo, Leigh!! Congratulations!
Thank you! 😄
Lmk when it comes out, I want a first edition! ❤️
Will do!!
Hi, Neil! I just wanted to say thanks for telling us to believe in our stories, and for being so encouraging to new writers in general. Your advice helped give me the confidence to write my story and put it out there. My first novel has found a publisher and will be coming out next year. It still doesn’t feel quite real to me, but here we are!
I'm so proud of you!
Wahoo, Leigh!! Congratulations!
Thank you! 😄
Hi, Neil! I just wanted to say thanks for telling us to believe in our stories, and for being so encouraging to new writers in general. Your advice helped give me the confidence to write my story and put it out there. My first novel has found a publisher and will be coming out next year. It still doesn’t feel quite real to me, but here we are!
I'm so proud of you!
I am exanimate, I have been inconveniently discorporated
(Also, did I mention that I wrote a novel and it’s getting published?!)
Here’s a character I’ve had rattling around in the back of my brain for a while. She’s a private detective. I think her name is Myrt.
I love her
let's Captain Kirk an AI!
This link has been going around: a Redditor and their friends "suspected that Sudowrites as well as other AI-Writing Assistants using GPT-3 might be scraping using AO3 as a 'learning dataset' as it is one of the largest and most accessible text archives."
So I've seen people joking around about writing the dirtiest a/b/o fic they can because then SudoWrites will "learn" to write that.
Except: a) SudoWrites already did that (see link above) and b) all that will do is make SudoWrites better at writing porn. It will only make SudoWrites more convincing as a writer and as an intelligence.
But. What if we write stories ALL IN CAPS? With weird grammar? Write from the POV of the Hulk! Or Cookie Monster! Or Doctor Doom! (@wotwotleigh-prime and I are actually doing this right now.)
What if we write stories backwards? Not just structured backwards, but with every sentence or word in reverse chronological order?
What if we write stories disemvowelled?
I get it, you don't want a bunch of trollfic clogging up your tags, but if you tag it "sudowrites", people can easily exclude that tag from searches.
This is trolling for the greater good. Join me, comrades.
Join us! SHITPOST FOR GREAT JUSTICE!
why do only children's and fantasy books have illustrations. what crime did other readers commit that the industry decided we weren't worthy of lil drawings
pros of illustrating adult/literary fiction:
- more employment for illustrators
- cool abstract art that conveys vibes
- i like picture
cons:
- ????
-
God yes, what happened??? Adult lit used to be illustrated! I went absolutely feral a few years ago when I realized that most of the Jeeves books and stories, up until the mid 1940s or so, were originally illustrated. Why did this stop????
Oh sick this photography book I ordered came with free snacks
I first discovered these several years ago when I got a package and, to my horror, my cat just went fucking ham on the packing peanuts the instant I opened the box. He managed to scarf down several before I dragged him away. I didn’t realize quite what I was dealing with until I pulled one out of his mouth and saw how it was dissolving on contact with his saliva.
Las serpientes son pajitas grandes
Very cute! Snakes can drink water in a more normal-looking way - but the cup setup is a little awkward, and anyway lots of snakes like to be a bit silly with it! I have several who like to drink water exclusively with their heads resting on the bottom of their water bowls!
Good Omens fandom, you know what to do.
If you're reading Mike and Psmith and found it weird that Edwardian kids apparently have torches/flashlights, you are absolutely right. In the original text, it's candles, which is why having jugs of water on hand is important to Psmith's plan for fending off nighttime invaders.
The references to torches are the result of some revisions to the text when it was republished as Mike and Psmith in the 1950s. The publisher evidently wanted to update the story, but only sporadically? in things like torches and yo-yos and references to real-world athletes who weren't even born yet when the book originally appeared. Everything else remains Edwardian.
You might call this the first attempt at a Psmith modern AU, except they failed to fully commit to it.
New writing project, new OCs to play around with! I’m still trying to stop hyperfixating on the last ones, though. Sigh.
Bertie….
I love this passage for many reasons (including the obvious), but part of it is the larger context of how Bertie feels about the exhibit he and Biffy are about to go into. It’s some kind of “Hall of Beauties” thing where models are posing like statues in these little historical tableaux, inside glass tanks. I’m guessing this was a real thing featured at county fairs/carnivals of the day. Bertie is creeped out by it, he finds it unsettling; I get the impression he doesn’t like how dehumanizing it is. It’s just an interesting character moment IMO.
Here are some very cartoony versions of my little guys and the ornery specter that haunts them. I’m still trying to figure out how to draw these two. I finished my novel but they will not leave me alone.