elumish

[elumish]

Years and years ago, I read a book on cryptography that I picked up because it looked interesting--and it was!

But there was a side anecdote in there that stayed with me for more general purposes.

The author was describing a cryptography class that they had taken back in college where the professor was demonstrating the process of "reversibility", which is a principle that most codes depend on. Specifically, it should be easy to encode, and very hard to decode without the key--it is hard to reverse the process.

So he had an example code that he used for his class to demonstrate this, a variation on the Book Code, where the encoded text would be a series of phone numbers.

The key to the code was that phone books are sorted alphabetically, so you could encode the text easily--picking phone numbers from the appropriate alphabetical sections to use ahead of time would be easy. But since phone books were sorted alphabetically, not numerically, it would be nearly impossible to reverse the code without exhaustively searching the phone book for each string of numbers and seeing what name it was tied to.

Nowadays, defeating this would be child's play, given computerized databases, but back in the 80s and 90s, this would have been a good code... at least, until one of the students raised their hand and asked, "Why not just call the phone numbers and ask who lives there?"

The professor apparently was dumbfounded.

He had never considered that question. As a result, his cipher, which seemed to be nearly unbreakable to him, had such an obvious flaw, because he was the sort of person who could never coldcall someone to ask that sort of thing!

In the crypto book, the author went on to use this story as an example of why security systems should not be tested by the designer (because of course the security system is ready for everything they thought of, by definition), but for me, as a writer, it stuck with me for a different reason.

It's worth talking out your story plot with other people just to see if there's a "Why not just call the phone numbers?" obvious plot hole that you've missed, because of your singular perspective as a person. Especially if you're writing the sort of plot where you have people trying to outsmart each other.

#plot

[elumish]

if you give “stupid” characters rural/southern accents i don’t like you and if you give “smart” characters rural/southern accents but it’s a punchline i don’t like you even more

#representation #dialogue #accents

[elumish]

I think some people get so caught up in a mindset that all moderation is terrible for fandom that they run headlong into the paradox of tolerance and side with the neo-nazis.

If you try to make a group equally and unreservedly welcoming to everybody, especially by saying that no content can ever be removed and that criticism is antithetical to the group norms, you by definition make the group unsafe for marginalized people.

Black fans are inherently less safe in a group that is tolerant of racists or of racist content. Disabled people are inherently less safe in a group that is tolerant of ableism or ableist content. Jewish people are inherently less safe in a group that is tolerant of antisemitism or antisemitic content.

And so there is no value neutral moderation decision--not even "everything and everyone is allowed without question or comment." You are making a choice as to who you want to prioritize in your community, and marginalized people are the ones who lose when you maintain the status quo.

#ethical writing #fandom

[elumish]

I was recently reading a book (Mirror Image by Sandra Brown) which was published in 1990, and it was about a big/rich Democrat family in Texas, and the book is just casually openly homophobic.

There are no gay characters, at least as far as I got (I DNF'd it for a number of reasons), but people were just using homophobic slurs right and left and wondering (in a homophobic way) whether certain people were gay.

And, to be clear, gayness was entirely irrelevant to the book. There are no gay people in it. There is no gay scandal. Gay characters or even the concept of gayness is irrelevant to the book.

This is just, clearly, how the characters talked. This is how they thought. This is the way they interacted with the world. An assertive woman might be referred to as a dyke, a man they didn't trust or who wasn't actively trying to have sex with a woman might be referred to as a fag.

These weren't the villains, either. This is how the love interest talked. This is how the people around him talked. This is just how people acted in the book.

In the mid-2000s, I remember kids at school calling each other gay as an insult. It didn't even necessarily mean gay to them--it meant stupid. It was a generic insult as much as it was a slur.

I didn't know a single person who was out in my public high school in a blue state. No member of my high school graduating class in 2013 was openly queer.

It's still astonishing to me how fast things have changed. But it also makes me very conscious of how disconnected many people even five years younger than me are from this history.

I've read fanfiction where two men get married in 2000. I've read many, many fanfics set in the 2000s where gay servicemembers are totally out. I've read stories where people treat the idea of being in the closet as being ashamed of their partner, where coming out is always the best, safest option. It always just seems odd to me.

So if you follow me (and aren't just stopping by because you saw one of my funney viralposts), you probably know that I've been writing a bunch of fanfiction for Stranger Things, which is set in rural Indiana in the early- to mid-eighties. I've been working on an AU where (among other things) Robin, a character confirmed queer in canon, gets integrated into a friend group made up of a number of main characters. And I got a comment that has been following me around in the back of my mind for a while. Amidst fairly usual talk about the show and the AU and what happens next, the commenter asked, apparently in genuine confusion, "why wouldn't Robin just come out to the rest of the group yet? They would be okay with it."

I did kind of assume, for a second or two, that this was a classic case of somebody confusing what the character knows with what the author/audience knows. But the more I think about it, the more I feel like it embodies a real generational shift in thinking that I hadn't even managed to fully comprehend until this comment threw it into sharp perspective.

Because, my knee-jerk reaction was to reply to the comment, "She hasn't come out to these people she's only sort-of known for less than a year because it's rural Indiana. In the nineteen-eighties." and let that speak for itself. Because for me and my peers, that would speak for itself. That would be an easy and obvious leap of logic. Because I grew up in a world where you assumed, until proven otherwise, that the general society and everyone around you was homophobic. That it was unsafe to be known to be queer, and to deliberately out yourself required intention and forethought and courage, because you would get negative reactions and you had to be prepared for the fallout. Not from everybody! There were always exceptions! But they were exceptions. And this wasn't something you consciously decided, it wasn't an individual choice, it wasn't an individual response to trauma, it wasn't individual. It was everybody. It was baked in, and you didn't question it because it was so inherently, demonstrably obvious. It was Just The Way The World Is. Everybody can safely be assumed to be homophobic until proven otherwise.

And what this comment really clarified for me, but I've seen in a million tiny clashing assumptions and disconnects and confusions I've run into with The Kids These Days, is that a lot of them have grown up into a world that is...the opposite. There are a lot of queer kids out there who are assuming, by default, that everybody is not homophobic, until proven otherwise. And by and large, the world is not punishing them harshly for making that assumption, the way it once would have.

The whole entire world I knew changed, somehow, very slowly and then all at once. And yes, it does make me feel like a complete space alien just arrived to Earth some days. But also, it makes me feel very hopeful. This is what we wanted for ourselves when we were young and raw and angrily shoving ourselves in everyone's faces to dare them to prove themselves the exception, and this is what I want for The Kids These Days.

(But also please, please, Kids These Days, do try to remember that it has only been this way since extremely recently, and no it is not crazy or pathetic or irrational or whatever to still want to protect yourself and be choosy about who you share important parts of yourself with.)

#homophobia

[elumish]

I have limited work to do this evening for what is likely to be one of the only times over the next couple weeks, so let's all play a game called "elumish works on her fanfic WIPs and everyone encourages her while politely ignoring the fact that she is super behind on updating all of them".

#elumish blogs #you don't actually need to encourage me #though i do love encouragement #also if anyone has any suggestions on marketing a book without outing myself as the author of it on this blog

[elumish]

Anyone have any recommendations for contemporary American political romantic suspense novels (more Tal Bauer than Casey McQuiston, though it doesn't need to be gay)?

#book recs #elumish asks

[elumish]

I just have to say: sometimes you can really tell when an author is being smug or self-righteous in a story.

#elumish blogs

[elumish]

Anyone have any recommendations for contemporary American political romantic suspense novels (more Tal Bauer than Casey McQuiston, though it doesn't need to be gay)?

#book recs #elumish asks

[elumish]

Source @ X

ID: tweets from @boulevarddouble:

okay SO. Just FYI i have an insider contact and i asked him about this new google drive nsfw scare.

backing up is never a bad idea.

99% of people will be unaffected, and this is NOT a crackdown on having nsfw content on gdrive

"What I think has happened is that drive has made several updates to its spam/abuse filtering and one of the focuses is trying to catch spammers who share explicit things in docs with random emails. Which is good in theory, but has the potential to hit false positives."

his recommendation is to keep NSFW words out of your doc titles and instead of sharing the "open link", share directly with you beta's email addresses.

It is also more likely to flag up explicit images, though that is less likely to be a fic problem.

/end ID

#google docs

[elumish]

I say this entirely as someone who uses Google Docs and just spent like 15 minutes scouring their TOS (and not a lawyer or someone who has any context or information on that specific case):

From what I can tell, Google Docs falls under two connected TOS: the Google TOS and Google Drive TOS. Google seems to largely have one overall TOS and then point to more specific ones as needed, which is what's happening here.

Google Docs also falls under Google's Abuse Program Policies & Enforcement, which also covers Drive, Sheets, Forms, and Sites. This is what is cited in the screenshots.

The specific policy that seems to be in play here is the Sexually Explicit Material policy:

Do not distribute content that contains sexually explicit material, such as nudity, graphic sex acts, and pornographic material. This includes driving traffic to commercial pornography sites. We allow nudity for educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic purposes.

There are three things that I noted in this language:

The language kind of implies it's talking about video/art, but it doesn't explicitly say it, so the policy looks like it can cover text

They use the word "distribute." This is distinct from some of the other policies (e.g., Violence and Gore) where they use "store and distribute." I would read this to mean that simply having sexually explicit material is not against policy--but that's just my reading of it, not something that's explicitly stated

There is an exception for educational, documentary, scientific, and artistic purposes. I would broadly read this to include novels/fiction--but again, that's just my reading of it, and I don't enforce these policies

All of this to say is that the policy is pretty broad, likely intentionally, but that images are likely more of an issue than text, and that sharing is what seems to be against the rules, rather than simply storing/writing it.

If anyone has any additional details on this (or disagrees with my reading of it), please share.

FYI I just came across a thread on twitter which says that an author shared on google docs an explicit story with a friend for beta reading and google removed the file due to violation of TOS (apparently it has been updated where you are not allowed to share anything with sexual content). Not sure if it’s just this instance or if it’s going to become a widespread thing but if you guys write in google docs MAKE BACK UPS!!

(Instagram link to the screenshots)

Edit: also wanted to add that it seems that Microsoft word has the same language in their TOS so onedrive is not a safe alternative!

#google docs

[elumish]

At some point I will write about the trend of having what I think of as the "liberal conservative" or "progressive fascist" stories--stories that both have or champion ostensibly liberal or progressive things (they're gay! go women's rights! etc.) while also espousing right-wing or even white nationalist or fascist viewpoints (we're only discriminatory against this group of people joining our community because they refuse to assimilate and keep trying to change things! democracy is bad because it's slow and inefficient and would be better as a dictatorship as long as the right person was in charge! etc.)

#media criticism

[elumish]

Any resources for ancient Egyptian fashion? Or general, this is how you should draw them. I see a lot of those guides for drawing black people

Alas, I do not. Any suggestions?

#elumish answers #fashion #ancient egypt

[elumish]

There's this very specific type of cop character who is The Main Character, who is clearly supposed to be at least somewhat liberal, who is a woman or who supports women, who is openly cool with gay people, who ostensibly isn't racist and even gets mad at other cops who are openly racist, who has also committed somewhere between a little and a lot of police brutality and/or other crimes.

And somehow the reader is always supposed to oppose those crimes being investigated because they are the Main Character, and they're supposd to believe that the character is a Good Person and a Good Cop.

#copaganda

[elumish]

One of my biggest struggles with a lot of gay (male) original fiction is that it's often very progressive with what women exist (the head of the Secret Service is a Black woman! the Attorney General is a woman! this other leadership position is a queer woman!) but it still doesn't actually...include the women.

They show up, sure. They'll be a member of random one-off conversations. They'll cheerlead the gay men. But they have very little actual screentime, which means that they have very little characterization. They don't matter that much to the story, any more than women matter to the story in many other (straight) male-focused stories.

And so ultimately that progressivism ends up feeling more like tokenism, like the author didn't want to be accused of not including women at all.

#representation

[elumish]

Issues I've Seen In Recent Books I've Read (Part 1)

In no particular order:

Contrived explanations for things both characters would know. I was reading a book recently where a character who worked for the CIA asked another character for the CIA if the CIA used to torture people, which then briefly turned into an explainer about the CIA's history of torture and why it was bad. The issue here is that the fact that the CIA used to torture people is common knowledge (presumably especially for people who work there), and it just feels like a hamfisted way of explaining it to the reader.

Every character having the same reaction to the same thing. In that same book series, every time any character came out to anyone (and this was a gay book series, so it happened a lot), the character who they came out to said some version of, almost verbatim, "Thank you for entrusting me with that." Not every character is going to have the same literal reaction to something, and this is a great way to show characterization--how does this character react, rather than how does every character react?

Characters accepting things too quickly. Sexual awakenings took five minutes and single therapy sessions were enough to entirely rewrite characters' mindsets on core issues of their identity and how they're living their lives, which is a quick and handy way of speeding things up in writing but begins to strain credulity for the reader pretty quickly.

Forgotten injuries until they become necessary. In a different series, I see a common issue that authors have when they write an injured character: they ignore the injury unless it's plot relevant. An aggressive and traumatizing injury to an arm wasn't mentioned for long swaths of time, including whether it hurt--until a different character would see it. It was mentioned that it was getting infected--but nothing ever came of that. Injuries are often treated as ignorable unless Something Happens, while in real life they tend to be noticeable more continuously.

#writing

[elumish]

Since I think I poorly phrased that question, I should clarify: the dialogue was relatively straightforward. The person said that the narration was too verbose for the kind of dialogue she was using.

I think my general point still stands--if the reader was feeling a disconnect between the narration and the dialogue, that is something to look into in your story. You can decide that you disagree with the feedback! But it's still worth considering.

Are you intentionally writing the narration is more verbose than the dialogue? Is the character code switching or otherwise moderating their dialogue to intentionally misalign with how they generally think?

You are absolutely allowed to have dialogue and first person narration that feel different--but a reader is telling you that they feel misaligned, and that's worth listening to (even if in the end you never end up changing anything).

#elumish answers #dialogue #narration #word choice

[elumish]

Hi, asking because I recently got some feedback on my writing that I'm not sure how to process:

So I read a group a snippet from my manuscript in beta, and one person gave me some light criticism about the narrator. The book is close first person from the POV of a college-aged bookworm, though that scene doesn't really focus on her book reading or education. This person told me that my use of words like "verdant" or "penultimate" didn't fit with her dialogue in the moment. I got a bit defensive and clarified that she is established as well-read, so he let it go. (He also questioned why characters in 1945 were drinking Champagne out of coupes and not flutes, granted.) But that did send me on a bit of an anxiety spiral, so I have to ask... When is fancy language too much?

I genuinely don't know. I use words like "perchance" and "superfluous" and "ergo" in my daily conversations; I'm just naturally wordy. And people have told me as a kid to tone with the language because it makes me sound pretentious. It might just be me being autistic and not understanding conversational mores, but it does make one worry.

How do you tone down fancy language when it comes naturally to you? Or am I just needlessly worrying?

I know that this isn't exactly the question that you're asking, but it seems to me that there are two issues here: is using "fancy" language something that must be toned down in writing and if so how, and did the language the character was using match the context in which they were speaking?

To answer the first one, which seems to be your question, language like that isn't inherently bad if it's the language that the character would use. You are allowed to make specific linguistic choices for your character, and it seems like you're doing that here. But if you feel like you want/need to, I would look at other dialogue and listen to poeple speak. What words are they using in place of words like perchance or ergo? How are they phrasing things instead?

You probably need to do this anyway--unless all of your characters have the same background/education/etc (and honestly even then), they won't all be speaking the same way, so you should be varying your dialogue.

But now for the other part: from your description (and obviously you know better than I do), it seems like the comment isn't necessarily "I don't know if this character would ever use these words" as "there feels like a mismatch between this specific word choice and the broader dialogue in this scene."

And that is absolutely an idea worth looking into. You may ultimately decide that you disagree, but I wouldn't dismiss off-hand the idea that the reader is feeling cognitive dissonance when reading dialogue. That's the sort of thing that will jar a reader out of your story, which you generally want to avoid.

What is it that makes the reader feel like there's a mismatch? Is the dialogue otherwise crude or rough? Is everyone else using very different linguistic patterns? Is the character having an emotional outpouring that may feel academic to the reader because of the longer/more "well-educated" word choice?

These are all points that are valid and worth looking into.

I also just want to say--I wouldn't extrapolate a beta reader getting a historical fact about champagne consumption wrong out to them not having any worthy comments. I totally understand getting defensive about your work (I think ever writer does) but dismissing them out of hand because of a random factual error does you no favors.

#elumish answers #dialogue #word choice