ljwrites

ljwrites , 20 days ago

@eliotedits The Overflowing Margin Notes From Hell. @edibuddies @writers

ljwrites , 3 months ago

@stevesebban Frankenstein is not a "rewrite" of the Golem of Prague, and saying so erases both Mary Shelley's contribution and the distinctive Jewishness of the golem story. The golem was built not by scientifically-explained means but by a Rabb Loew's religious/ritual power to protect the Jewish community from pogrom, putting it in the long tradition of myth and religious fable. Frankenstein's eponymous protagonist on the other hand is a scientist, and explicitly disavows mystical methods like alchemy before applying his study of chemistry and other scientific fields to the creation of the Creature. It is this aspect that makes the work science fiction, not the creation of an artificial being. The two stories have very little in common other than an artificial animated construct that goes out of control--different materials, different methods, plots, motivations, endings, etc. @NickEast @macmanx @sciencefiction @writers @writingcommunity @writing

ljwrites , 3 months ago

@stevesebban Lol hit a nerve with what--by being sexist and wrong on the internet? Too many others have that distinction for you to stand out in particular, I'm afraid.

It's Jewish people who have been pointing out that the Golem is a distinctly Jewish tale, and to say it's basically the same thing as Frankenstein erases that aspect even if you're Jewish yourself. And on that note, have a good rest of your life 👋 @sciencefiction @writers @writingcommunity @writing

ljwrites , 3 months ago

@stevesebban Lol hit a nerve with what--by being sexist and wrong on the internet? Too many others have that distinction for you to stand out in particular, I'm afraid. Congratulations for being wrong about the meaning of "cultural appropriation" among many, many other things and have a good rest of your life. @sciencefiction @writers @writingcommunity @writing

ljwrites , 3 months ago

Also:

Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus - published in 1818
The first written account of The Golem of Prague - published in 1834

According to the person who claimed Frankenstein is a rewriting of The Golem of Prague, evidently Mary Shelley didn't just write science fiction--she lived it, by "rewriting" a story that hadn't been written down yet.

(h/t @CatFoxBirdLady for pointing this out!)

@writers @writingcommunity @writing

ljwrites OP , 4 months ago

@SJohnRoss @writers That's a really salient distinction between prose fiction and creative writing, with the latter of course being a broader category than the former. Arguably much of the work of creating tabletop games, worlds, and campaigns is creative writing outside of prose fiction.

ljwrites OP , 4 months ago

@SJohnRoss @writers A tenth?! Omg 😭 And there are those who'd like to slash it even farther by using generative quote-unquote AI...

ljwrites , 4 months ago

@amyfou @linguistics Today I'll be attending a conference on East Asian language groups (Korean, Juran, Japanese etc.) using Chinese characters to write down their own languages, so that's going to be a stimulating way to celebrate! :D

ljwrites , 4 months ago

@mythologymonday @folklore This is the Korean folktale of the Tiger and the Gotgam, gotgam being a dried persimmon treat stored for the winter. It is extra sweet from the drying process, like a raisin in comparison to a grape.

One winter, a tiger went down from its mountain to a village and was nosing around houses looking for a meal when it overheard a human mother trying to soothe a crying child. The mother in the home, unaware of the predator's presence, told the child, "A tiger is here, stop crying" to scare the child into being quiet, to no avail. The mother then said, "Look at this gotgam, stop crying" to appease her offspring, and the child stopped immediately at the sight of the treat. The tiger thought to itself, 'This gotgam beast is scarier than I am!'

At that moment an ox thief entered the yard and, mistaking the tiger for an ox, climbed onto its back. Tiger, believing the dreaded gotgam was literally upon it, ran off at full speed. At dawn the ox thief, realizing he was riding a tiger, jumped off and the tiger ran on and on, frightened but relieved to have survived the scourge of gotgam.

ljwrites OP , 6 months ago

@tmmahaff Thank you! Once I found out about these lesbian palace spies (who were by and large from the indentured and other working classes) I couldn't rest until I imagined what some of their stories might have been like. @writers

ljwrites , 6 months ago

@NickEast as the novelist Frank Norris said, I "[d]on't like to write, but like having written." There are works I want to read but don't exist yet, as Toni Morrison put it, so writing is a grim necessity to make them exist. Kind of like how I love my kid but did not enjoy the whole gestation & delivery process, and adoption would have been at least as onerous. Sometimes transcendant things take painful paths into reality, and writing is like that for me.

@writers @writingcommunity @writing

ljwrites , 7 months ago

@emma Yeah experiences differ so widely, from "realized the second they missed their first period, possibly even before" to "did not realize until literally in labor." Both are rare extremes and most fall somewhere in between. Those closer to the latter likely have more irregular periods and may have had spotting/showing throughout pregnancy that could pass for their "normal" periods.

I was closer to the more aware end of things, something like the timeline @drinkswriter posited because there was a "tingling" in my uterus about a month after my last period that definitely did not feel like business as usual. I was 36 and actively trying, though--that tingling has since evolved into a robust 7-year-old boy. I also had the benefit of an at-home pregnancy test, then an obgyn visit, that confirmed my spidey senses. If I were a teenager who was less experienced in my body senses and were invested in denying the consequences of fooling around, with no easy access to medical technology for confirmation, the first signs were subtle enough to ignore.

An additional consideration, given the time period, nutrition an so on, is that the girl in question might just barely have begun to get a cycle. That would make things even more irregular, and she would have less knowledge of what a normal cycle looks like for her. @writers

ljwrites OP , 8 months ago

@writers I did this twice for short stories, once with a trans woman who does her best to live as a man for a while and I didn't want to use he/him pronouns. Another time was with a nonbinary lesbian protagonist in ancient Southeast Asia whose pronouns could have been they/them in a modern English-speaking context, but first person was simply easier.

ljwrites OP , 9 months ago

@CatFoxBirdLady @writers That's the dream, never having to hide it! I never actively concealed anything, exactly, but I did have to present in a certain way and it never quite fit. No longer a problem in my freelance job, fortunately.