okay i’ve performed several tasks.

I think that trans people should aggressively adopt the phrase "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" until it is literally ours forever and the cis can have it back on a provisional basis.

Renewed mine this weekend. Setting up the account took the most time. www.cnet.com/tech/service...

Been thinking about this for a few days bc I was in the middle of it happening to me. 😂 Just finished Rakesfall & I thought I knew what was happening then somewhere maybe 75% in I no longer knew up from down. It's a beautiful book that I won't understand unless I read it again, which I never do

Excellent thread w/ practical advice on taking antihistamines as COVID prevention, to help with side effects post-COVID vax, & to take during an active COVID infection to prevent long COVID. With science to back it up. (Long, you may want to seek out the last post in thread to properly read it.)

Virginia state elections are November 4th. Virginia is our opening electoral salvo against the administration--a place where control of the State House of Delegates was decided in 2023 by just 975 votes. If you can, please join us in contributing. www.grapevine.org/giving-circl...

The world is a blurred version of itself— marred, lovely, and flawed. It is enough. -Jane Hirshfield, from ‘Autumn Quince’

forgot my book at home and i am le sad

Hey if you cancelled a bunch of services and are going “now what”, can I recommend an audiobook and fiber art combo. Good for your brain, good for your hands, you get something squishy at the end! There’s no downside. None at all. You’re absolutely not going to go into yarn debt. Haha.

vis-a-vis A Stranger in Olondria: I have a few vague thoughts, but they must percolate. I am especially meditating on the scene where they stop for the night in a desolate farmhouse where there are only three girls, one of whom has been terribly scarred by smallpox.

I mosly read fantasy and scifi, I'm extremely used to being utterly confused, especially at first. Sometimes it's too much and I truly don't get what's going on /at all/ and that's a DNF, but some confusion as a treat is fine. It usually clears up later.

a perfect distillation of H. Bosch’s anachronistic patronage of Blorbo From My Shows

Hieronymus Bosch: All About The Weird Little Guys

Like most things with writing it comes down to intention, imo - purposefully confusing a reader can be effective storytelling if it's part of the narrative; doing so without intent/reason comes off as sloppy writing.

I've been thinking about this a lot in my new book. It's pretty dense with Fantasy Worldbuilding, so I'm adding some intentional anchors for the reader - mostly because if they're too lost, they'll miss the emotional significance of some details

I have a pretty high tolerance for this IF the world/story is still vivid and interesting, even when I don't have complete context for it. If I feel like the author is leading me around in a maze with a blindfold on and there's nothing to latch on to, I'll usually bounce unless they're very skillful

one (very mild) irony about me starting this conversation about confusing/mysterious fiction is that while a certain bewilderingly layered experience is something I seek out as a reader, as a writer I’m trying for something much more direct.

Reskeeting one last time because the race is tomorrow & this is your last chance to donate to help save more lives from ovarian cancer. Reskeets & small donations to help my team reach our fundraising goal are much appreciated!

I encountered a brilliant example of this while beta-reading the other day. The author was holding back some big, structural pieces for chapters, and also holding back details for sentences or paragraphs. The strucutral pieces I could stand because of all of the promises kept in the delayed details.

It doesn’t. I don’t mind not knowing what every word or allusion means, or little moments that don’t immediately seem to fit into the whole. If the prose is skillful and if I find at least one character interesting, I happily follow the vibes.

Usually it irks me and can lead to DNFing but I do my best to follow along, figure out what I can from info given and skim over stuff that doesn't make sense, hoping it will later. One of the reasons I fell HARD for The Locked Tomb series is how it rewards your perseverance for finishing each book ❤️

I love books that throw me into the deep end of the world building. Yoon Ha Lee, Doris Pischeria... (hope I spelled that right) Both with some complex world building right at the start, oft-times. Love it.

When you've got cognitive dysfunction (ME/CFS in my case) you just have to live with it. I'm fond of novel series, and a lot of those are mysteries. I have to put up with rarely having a clue what's going on with the mystery, I just read them for the characters and so forth.

I feel like I have less patience with this than I used to, I am about a third of the way through an older fantasy novel (2007) I won't name and it's been a relentless onslaught of contextless invented proper nouns, I am piecing things together but I don't really feel like the effect added much here?

I must have tried to read Gardens of the Moon a dozen times before I finally accepted that I didn’t need to understand it to enjoy it and that it would make sense eventually. It did, and Malazan Book of the Fallen became one of my favorite series of all time.

People make fun of "the wargleblasters were set to nullify and that could only mean one thing: beans." Style, but I'll put up with it if you tell me in the next sentence what that means to the emotional arc of the protagonist. But I won't put up with it if you refuse to tell me why I should care.

But if the problem is on a sentence and paragraph level I do not know what is going on, as a function of style, I am unlikely to persist. I need to be able to follow SOMETHING. I sometimes have this problem with translated works, but also with some of the "glassy" prose in short venue spec.

And to a point my mutual made - I often find I don't know what's going on in books! and that's not a bad thing, it encourages me to look a little harder at the text for bits I missed or read voraciously until I receive a clue

Meet, but we are slowly revealed that information over the course of the story. That is a choice the writer made to do something mysterious

And come back to the conversation pages later to the point I forgot characters were interacting. I didn't know what was going on because of poor choices on the part of the writer. Compare a story in which we are presented a bunch of puzzle pieces but not given any clear idea of where the edges

I think there's a difference between "I don't know what's going on because the writer has intentionally obscured things" and "I don't know what's going on because the writer is doing a bad job at writing." I read a book recently where the writer would go off on unrelated tangents mid conversation

While reading Shakespeare I understand roughly 32% of what’s being said, but I get the gist of it.

If it's for a scene or two, then whatever. If the entire book is like that, I'm probably going to get really irritated. There are exceptions, of course. There's a reason I call The Book of the New Sun the most confusing book that I enjoyed reading.

I don't mind not understanding what's going on in a book so long as I trust that the author does know. If a book confuses me, and I feel the author is confused, too, then I'm tossing it at the wall.

As a Gene Wolfe sicko I get more disappointed if I'm not expected to start picking up contextual clues from an addled narrator in the first two pages

I like when a work is written from within itself, which is to say if it starts explaining shit to me right away it doesn’t feel like I am encountering a story, a person, a history, but am about to watch someone smash action figures together

I just finished a book, the first in a Korean quartet, where the entire purpose of the main quest was never explained at any point, and it bothered me except I also kind of really liked the story and the characters anyway? So it kind of depends

I'm so pleased to see quite a few people recommend RAKESFALL in response to this. Unsurprisingly this is my favourite kind of book—the kind of book which is normally recommended with caveats like "this book is not for everybody"

Honestly, if in fiction the problem is my own ignorance (set in a culture or tradition I know little about) I assume I am the problem and put it down until I've googled a bit. I find the sociological experience of learning new (including fictitious) cultures enjoyable. >

If I'm not getting it, there's probably a reason - I'm not the right audience, I'm focused on the wrong details, I'm missing subtext, my brainfog is dense. The woosh of things going over my head is real. I usually don't go back and reread, though I might check out other's commentary if I see it.

It depends how long it lasts into the story. If I don’t understand what’s happening by the first quarter, I’ll either reread it or go on to the next book in my list.

Not understanding what’s going on is the main thing I look for in a book. All I ask for from a book is that I am confused. Nothing else is worth reading.

I'll be honest here, at this point I'm a rather picky reader. I expect to be confused for me to really get invested in a novel. If I'm not, I'm probably bored and daydreaming about something weirder. Some of my favorites are Ice by Anna Kavan, Lime Twig by John Hawkes, Rakesfall, etc.

If the prose is good enough that I'm confident it's not obscuring anything unintentionally, I can tolerate any amount of confusion or failure to understand, because I'm comfident I'll understand when the writer needs me to.

Been seeing this one a lot and thinking about it, and I've realized what I was having trouble articulating to myself. Not understanding: fantastic, fine, no problem. Not knowing what's happening, like unclear action or blocking: instant risk of dnf. 1/2

I recently finished a reread of The Locked Tomb and finally understood a lot of what sailed right over my head on first read. (One caveat: I do enjoy these books but your enjoyment will depend on your tolerance for terminally online humor)

This depends a lot on how entertaining I find the author's prose or how easily I can connect to the characters. I don't mind not knowing where I'm going so long as I'm enjoying the journey. Rapid character shifts + dense prose + inscrutable plot? This book is not for me.

I will tolerate absolute inconsistency from chapter to chapter - from page to page - if the prose is good. I am Ride or Die for Gene Wolfe, and he's already dead so I'm gonna keep riding.

I literally quit reading Howl’s Moving Castle because there’s a whole section where I had no clue where anyone was like physically

I usually backtrack a couple of pages to try to figure out what I missed. And if I can't find it, then I go back to where I left off & continue reading. I assume I'll just figure it out as I go along, at some point - or I'll catch it the next time I read the book.