you won't make yourself a name if you follow the rules

I go to rinse out my ice cream bowl and I get the perfect way to open the rewrite of my story. I come back to the keyboard and wut r werds. :(

*reviews instructor comments on "Connect the Dots"*

*opens new Scrivener tab to revise "Connect the Dots"*

*stares at blank page*

*idly wonders whether professor would have pointed out that the bad guys need to be at least a little sympathetic too if it were not true that both professor and bad guys are white men*

Holy shit Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" is actually not a downer. I mean, it's not a pleasant read: the narrator is viciously ableist and casually racist (though it is vintage 1983 and I'm not sure of when that falls with respect to the evolution of terminology to describe PoC in general and black people in specific). But he's less ableist at the end of the story than he is at the start. Robert, who's described hella lots more often as "the blind man" than as "Robert", does most of the work to accomplish this, and the narrator does not much work at all. But, like. A small victory, hard fought for, is still a victory, and the story is not a downer.

I HAVE A STORY DRAAAAFT WOOT WOOT

Things the current Advanced Fiction Writing assignments are encouraging me to do: succumb to my tendency to endlessly fix the first bit and never write the second. :(

...if next writing assignment is "one paragraph", I'm doing "one sentence" just to make a point to my classmates. Not a run-on sentence, either! Like maybe just:

"Who died and made you queen?" Carol muttered, and too late realized Sandy wasn't out of earshot.

Because them some LONG paragraphs my classmates are producing.

Observation inspired by lecture video: It is easier to create a believable story within a dominant culture than a non-dominant one. Especially if the intended audience is the dominant culture. Professor Larison was talking about how "we've all been there" with the details of the picnic scene in the Flagstaff story, but stories like NK Jemisin's "The Effluent Engine", we really, really have not all been there. Jemisin's protagonist's experience of racism is not common to all of Jemisin's audience, in particular the white parts of said audience. Jemisin also has an uphill battle in that she's writing speculative, not realistic, fiction ("The Effluent Engine" is specifically alt-history steampunk). Prof. Larison says to write to convince the most skeptical reader; in the case of a speculative fiction writer, that most skeptical reader is guaranteed to not be a speculative fiction reader. It seems to me that these are similar, though orthogonal, problems.

There is something fundamentally unfair about this.