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RandomDent @literature.cafe
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Comments 29
Welcome to Short Stories!
  • For the new year, I'm going to try a thing based on a Ray Bradbury quote:

    The best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a hell of a lot of short stories. If you can write one short story a week—it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can’t be done. At the end of 30 weeks or 40 weeks or at the end of the year, all of a sudden a story will come that’s just wonderful.

    So far I've only got half of one 'cause it's the first week of January, but I'm going to see how far I can get with it.

  • Do you ever write characters before a story?
  • No, not really. They're all in kind of different states of completeness, if that makes any sense. Some don't have names or faces yet, that sort of thing. But I tend to just leave them alone until I need them, then they start to become more concrete depending on the story.

  • Why do people buy kindles instead of just reading books on their tablets or phones?
  • I was the same, I didn't really see the point of them until I tried out my sister's eBook reader. Then I was sold!

    Also, while I still prefer physical books, I can't deny that it's nice to just be able to carry my entire library around in a bag.

  • Update from Scholastic
  • I can appreciate that they're in a somewhat difficult position, with the law on one side and what's morally right on the other side, but also this is exactly the sort of scenario where everyone needs to band together to demonstrate that an unjust law won't fly, and IMO trying to weasel out of it with a half-measure is just appeasing the wrong side.

    In an ideal world all the libraries, schools and publishing companies would just ignore this and carry whatever books they see fit, and give the legislators a choice to either back off or go after them all at the same time.

  • Share your favourite quotes and thoughts about Discworld
  • "There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is."

    "It’s a lot more complicated than that -"

    "No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”

  • Library bomb threats prompt closings citywide, special police attention (Chicago)
  • It really is a "give an inch, take a mile" kind of thing. Like as a society we're already ridiculously generous to religious people - every city has multiple, un-taxed, absurdly opulent buildings for them to use as much as they want to do whatever they like in, plus there are huge networks of religious schools that get tax-payer funding as well, and they're still out in the streets preaching and interfering with almost every other aspect of existence - shutting down libraries, getting films banned or altered, messing with politics etc. It's ludicrous IMO.

  • Are there any tropes in some books you just can’t get enough of?
  • For the show, the beginning of the 2005 revival is probably a good place to start! The first couple of seasons are probably a bit dated now but still good, and they treat it as kind of a soft reboot because it had had been off the air for ~15 years at that point so it's designed for new viewers to drop in without having to know all the backstory and stuff.

    As for the books I have no idea lol. There are quite a lot of those IIRC.

  • Are there any tropes in some books you just can’t get enough of?
  • Doctor Who is good for the second one too, that's basically the Doctor's whole deal that they never carry a weapon and just try to talk their way through everything. Although they will fuck someone up if they get pushed too far lol.