The Male Hysteric

So I have been working on the novel again, have managed to finish another notebook again and have finished transcribing from it. Currently after three notebooks (with a significant amount of discarded work, let's be honest), the novel is sitting at a cool 85,000 words.

I went to a writing group today with writers I met at the convention I went to last month. I am not sure what I will get out of it but they seemed really into the pitch of the novel I was working on and have put on pause because it's depressing so I guess I have to actually get back into writing it. It always makes me feel a bit strange when people are into my description because like... oh no... now they have expectations... what if it doesn't hold up?

In other news I've gotten through the point through a lot of therapy and being away from my family of origin of being able to feel how much my body tenses up and stresses out almost whenever I'm on social media. I do feel like to an extent that I need to keep up with some things but I have been trying to wind down my usage, and am trying to just keep up with other things I like. I feel like I will be less lonely if I actually listen to all the audiobooks I have, etc.

I've also been getting into vaporwave around 10 years too late, but I think it probably took that long for me to understand it, haha. What's so interesting is that you can't buy most vaporwave. It really does make it feel less real, like vapor. If you have some favorite vaporwave I'd appreciate recs.

I've published a minizine! It's called GET OFF YOUR PHONE and GET ON YOUR COMPUTER, and is about how mobile internet and social media have made the internet less enjoyable. You can find it for pay-what-you-want on my ko-fi or a free download on my website.

So I was reading an interesting discussion started by a user on BlueSky that begins:

Share a thought about writing some may find controversial?

Outliers aside, I think the quality of any text is roughly proportional to the amount of time its author is plugged online, especially in social media.

And goes on to explain some things that I've noticed as well about some recent books, though I'm not really sure I agree with the conclusion. I do think as a society we've been wrestling really hard with what is "real life" and whether or not the online can be considered "real life", and the denial that it is "real life" has actually been to our detriment in many ways when it comes to understanding how our society has gotten to the dark place where it is now.

I think maybe more of the problem than what this user is saying, rather than that these people lack experience outside of online forums -- maybe they do, or maybe they don't, I don't actually think that's the issue -- is that they are no longer keeping these behaviors siloed to online forums, which is a different matter. I think there is very much a faux pas of bringing the online into real life that is breaking down and some people are more comfortable with it and some people find it "cringe", to use an online word, while others who have never been very online have no idea what is going on because they have no idea the depths of depravity that the first two have experienced. I think in a lot of these cases these people are writing to a microculture, which would be fine, but maybe they don't understand how big or how small this microculture is because the internet has a way of obscuring numbers of these very basic things. The experience of not knowing how many people you are talking to would be rich to plunge the depths of, but it's kind of ignored... because we don't know, and there's a profit/political motive to keep us from knowing, in the form of bots.



But there's also the factor that due to the idea of these norms being siloed and their breakdown is that it kind of seems like maybe these writers do not know how to code-switch, or, possibly moreso, even think that code-switching is somehow immoral. If you read enough books and you read enough fanfiction, you begin to see that the way these two types of prose are written is slightly different, that they exist in different registers, and when you read an original novel that was previously fanfiction with the "fan" part scrubbed off, the register still remains and it's obvious to anyone familiar with it. Blogging is not the same type of writing as what you read in a novel, or what you read in a nonfiction book, either. Posting adeptly on a microblogging site is its own skill, and arguing online is yet another, though one of debatable value. And yet there are many writers who seem to be unable to switch between these forms of writing, and as this OP says, all their writing sounds like you're reading screeds from their blogs. Rather than respecting these different forms of writing as their own art forms, being able to change how you write from one form of media to another becomes dishonest.

And I think this might really be the crux of the matter. So much of this is about how annoyed even queer readers are that certain writers will transplant up-to-the-second overly-online queer microdiscourse into novels set three hundred years ago, or on another planet, or in an alternate universe inhabited strictly with fairies and unicorns. It doesn't make any sense, it destroys suspension of disbelief, and makes the story more difficult to read. However, the writer probably feels that to not include this would be dishonest, somehow, or otherwise morally bad. The piece is meant to be instructive, or an honest display of themselves and their writing identity, or something, meaning that the code-switch cannot happen. The friction between the two sets of norms cannot be smoothed out.

So I guess what I'm saying is that to navigate this skillfully in the way the OP thinks is better, one has to be, in online parlance, a norm-understander, at the very least, rather than it having to do specifically with how terminally online one is. I mean, I guess being terminally online does erode one's ability to understand outside norms, or people who are terminally online generally did not have a great understanding of outside norms to begin with, but I don't think it's quite as one-to-one as suggested.

I don't know, it's hard to formulate all of my thoughts on this. There's a lot. It's getting late.

I am still working on the same novel, but I guess since the election and the direction the country is going, I am wondering what or how this work will be distributed, if I have the chance to distribute at all. I still have dreams of trad pub but a lot of that is because, well, I would like a professional clean-up to work with me, of course, and also the covers and whatever are so much nicer than POD and whatever. But, you know. I don't know. It's hard to say anymore.

I was reading a book that was apparently published in 2023 and it makes me think about how basic the understanding of most non-cis people are in fiction even though like, the portrayal was not offensive or clearly wrong. And how you get things like in Arcane the implications of say Viktor being transcoded in various ways but had the narrative made him explicitly trans, the narrative would have inevitably diminished him, and it's not just because the show has worldwide release. It's just... frustrating. I don't know.

I should write harder, I should post about the last two books I read, etc. I think it is easy to get lost in crafting because it's so much easier than the other things I do on my brain. But the other stuff is worth doing BECAUSE it's hard, etc.

TW: sex, sexual assault, sort of

So often discussion of erotic fiction and such online these days has such a puritanical bent. There is so much interrogation and assertion of ravishment fantasies (sometimes 'rape fantasies', but I prefer the other term) and their moral purity or use as a 'coping mechanism' for specific instances sexual assault to the point that it ends up with harassing specific authors to either talk about their sexual assaults or face ostracism for writing something 'immoral.'

The conventional wisdom is that ravishment fantasies are the product of a puritanical society that disallows sex for pleasure and therefore it must be 'taken' by force, which as a naive explanation makes sense until you realize on surveys and such that people who are more open about and in-touch with their sexuality are more likely to have ravishment fantasies. This might be reporting bias (someone more open about it is more likely to report it on a survey, though various techniques try for accuracy), but there's another explanation, in that ravishment fantasies are more about desires that would conventionally be considered 'pre-sexual' are being expressed through sexual ones... which makes more sense with the finding that people who had to go through serious medical procedures as children are more likely to be into masochism because of an early connection between care and pain.

This starts to make even more sense with common kinks of transgender people that tend to mix gendered desires with degradation, in force-feminization for transfemmes and omegaverse for transmascs, as these two things also become connected at a very young age for trans people. Everything is about sex except sex is about power, etc. I remember trying to describe ASMR to a friend who didn't get it, and after a while she admitted "it still sounds like a sex thing." But it was less that ASMR was a sex thing and that sex was an ASMR thing.

Taken this way ravishment as a fantasy becomes very difficult to pin down to something specific by the time one is interviewing about them -- things like receiving force + care are extremely early experiences and while one could possibly look at attachment styles and ravishment fantasies, even those could be modified significantly between birth and taking a survey as an undergrad, as how this data is usually collected.

I don't know, I'm not a psychologist.

Apparently there is another fanfic purge of unseemly naughty-type fics going on on Wattpad. However, this one is made worse because apparently what's happening this time is an AI tool is flagging and shadowbanning anything that could be potentially naughty until it is reviewed by a human, at which point it will either be allowed back up or purged. So it's like last time, only even MORE automated.

Anyway, back up your work if it's on Wattpad, I guess. From the AO3 reddit, AO3 users are concerned about an influx from Wattpad going against etiquette and flooding the place with placeholder fics, harassment over 'immoral' stories, etc., so if you're on AO3, be prepared for that, too.

I feel like an insane person. I have like 70,000 words and I want to rewrite the entire book. Maybe with an outline this time.

I know I need to type everything up so I can use it later but still ahghghghghghg this is so painful.

Thinking about the novel I realize I am at a turning point of it where, perhaps, it will just quickly go toward the end, or maybe it will be significantly longer. But I guess also as I got to a significantly cathartic point in the narrative, maybe I don't have the energy to go forward anymore, and I need to think about if things are worth it to my 'audience,' if this is even something that has an audience or a future, I don't know. I have other ideas that are half-baked that feel like they will definitely have more broad appeal than the WIP, but abandoning current stuff for stuff that there's not much of is a recipe for disaster.

It was weird. The housekeeper was asking me about writing like I actually knew anything and I didn't know what to tell her because despite all the shuffling I do I don't actually get any writing out and submitted or anywhere to read. Almost like it's not for other people at all, yet I spend so, so much time on it. I don't know. I feel bad.

It occurs to me that whenever women who are sick of "men writing women" attempt to reverse it and write about men the way men write about women, the way they write is identical to how transgender men are written about. See this example posted to Reddit:





It's hard to explain how infuriating it is that whenever there are any transmasculine complaints about anything, it's always framed as a vicious hatred of women for... telling them that these sorts of shallow things they think 'gets back at the patriarchy' somehow is stuff they already do to us all the time. The worst offense there is is really telling people their fun isn't funny, huh.