Lady @Lady@cat.family

as a romance author i think you will develop so much faster and better today studying Twilight and like, a handful of good anime than you will studying like 99% of contemporary popular romance literature

i don’t LIKE that this is the case, i just think that it is

i mean i think it could be better obviously and i have some notable disagreements with choices it made in story structure but it walked so that somebody else could run

like, in my generation there was Harry Potter, right, which people loved because of its worldbuilding and the richness and mystery and magic of it all, and the plot and gradual development of the story over the course of their childhoods and there’s so MUCH to it—but the writing is mostly worthless and nobody is seriously out here like “i’m trying to copy J.K. Rowling’s Literary Style” unless they’re intentionally doing a parody (i hope)

and then there was Twilight, which is a completely garbage story built on entirely unbelievable premises which somehow manages to work anyway because the writing is actually really fucking good

i also think Twilight was a notable contribution to the English canon but that is neither here nor there

i should qualify that i am talking about fiction here; the critical theorists have made several notable literary contributions to English nonfiction in the past decades ;P

there is postwar literature in the English language which i feel has value, but it’s all genre fiction and i think the value is largely something other than its mastery of the literary art

i was explaining that my writing style is heavily influenced by the Edwardian period because that was the latest stuff one could find on Project Gutenberg when i was in high school, and bea was like “you couldn’t have just pirated something newer??” lol

there’s something charming about dropping a line of dialogue like “Perfectly normal, non-traumatized thing to say” in the midst of some faux‐Edwardian pre‐modernist prose

honestly my favourite thing about my writing style being kinda oldfashioned is when it combines with very contemporary phrasings or tropes

obviously not a novel with that timeline lol

fr i’m not doing NaNo but i do have a story i would like to get a first and maybe second draft of done this month

you can’t observe NaNoWriMo if you don’t observe November

@konrad this isn't exactly what you're asking, but it is important to consider: one big structural priority to think about from the outset with ANY instance is “how quickly can we respond in times of crisis”

a common failing of democratically-oriented instances is that when something controversial happens (e.g. a user says something which is patently bad but not an obvious violation of the code of conduct) the amount of Process required for action leads to an external appearance of inaction to the rest of the fediverse. this is a problem because even if appropriate steps are eventually made, by that time other instance admins may have gotten tired of waiting and permanently severed federation. it's very important to be able to respond to issues in a timely manner, and that means having a person (who could be elected!) with the authority to make immediate judgment calls on difficult cases.

you absolutely do not want to be caught in this situation without having established a plan for dealing with it. the reason why most fedi instances are not democratically-structured is because being both democratic AND responsive is a really tough nut to crack.