Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #inthewatchfulcity
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*grins* read InTheWatchful.City 
you want bonus prompts? YOU GOT BONUS PROMPTS (though for both challenges anima isnāt like, super visible, but Ʀ is on there)
book cover art by kuri huang, audiobook cover art by anni roenkae
my aunt paid me as much as I make in a week at my dayjob for driving 200 miles today so I am promptly going to blow a good amount of it on MUSIC TO WATCH!!!!!!
itās absolutely nuts that I can look at the waveform and see the waveforms that are compositing into it
the more I watch the waveforms the more I understand what Iām seeing
so many anime and jrpg are about understanding that people just have different natures and your goal is to optimize your skills in accordance with your nature, whereas a lot of western narratives are about overcoming your nature to become an exception
my wild theory is: the concept of acting despite original sin creates a narrative expectation of transgressing boundaries in western narratives, but zen & taoist principles like ē”ēŗ are about maximizing the space utilized within boundaries, like in east asian cultivation stories
I mean, one isnāt necessarily narratively better than the other, and in fact I actually allude to this dichotomy in #InTheWatchfulCity
are you secure, or are you pigeonholed?
are you free, or are you in precarity?
are you secure, or are you pigeonholed?
are you free, or are you in precarity?
cole cassidy of overwatch is latino
I justā¦ let me have one (1) single representation of a latino/asian couple that is the most popular couple in a fandom. just one.
y'all I updated my royalty dashboard for #InTheWatchfulCity and... would you look at that. selling my paperback directly is now earning me more royalties than what I am getting through tordotcom š„²
explore the dashboard: s.qiouyi.lu/royalties/in-tā¦
cc @BoundGalaxy!! updated dashboard with some new info!
all these genre stories written by native anglophones being like āwhat if *jazz hands* only one third-person pronounā and my sinophone ass being like āwhat if *conspiracy.gif* only one third-person pronoun, so we keep mixing up all these gendered ones, because there is no genderā
I keep agonizing over what pronoun(s) my protagonist in #RazingBabel uses before I realized there was a chinese auntie in me being like āHE, SHE, YOU KNOW WHAT I MEANT, IN CHINESE ITāS ALL TA OK??ā
anyway, I enjoyed seeing the ways people's brains glitched on the page after reading #InTheWatchfulCity by seeing the way people used alternate forms of the neopronouns in reviews, my linguist brain is like "ok what linguistic paradigm are they attempting to follow for this"
wordpress has a native import tool for tumblr and itās been pretty great to go through my old ones actually, a lot of the aesthetics I built up there made it into #InTheWatchfulCity
all this twitter flight made me realize I can import my social media into my actual site and have years and years and years of Brain available. yāall there will be SO many rabbit holes for you to go down
Iāve been š¤ about the import being scraping because itās like, ultimately this is everything thatās gone into my imagination and itās either leave my imagination on some corporate site that can go down, or save it in my archive since itās already all public
me: I swear to god this next book will be more straightforward and less experimental than #InTheWatchfulCity
also me: hmm, AS I LAY DYING feels like a solid comp title for #RazingBabel
also me: hmm, AS I LAY DYING feels like a solid comp title for #RazingBabel
AS I LAY DYING meets PRINCESS MONONOKE in this expansive secondary world tale of linguistic dissimilation #RazingBabel
#InTheWatchfulCity : biocyberpunk :: #RazingBabel : solardieselpunk
unlearning eurocentrism and white supremacy by deliberately flouting the norms and āconventional wisdomā of writing advice
not one response to the OP has called out any kind of sociopolitical aspect to writing; instead thereās a lot of hypercorrection like āshow, donāt tellā and ādonāt use is/wasā and ādonāt overexplainā
none of that will CREATE emotional impact and resonance without a framework
none of that will CREATE emotional impact and resonance without a framework
hereās a course I just published that establishes a writing framework that DOESNāT rely on parroting eurocentric writing advice (much of which, I must remind people, stems from CIA anti-communist efforts of building āamerican literatureā): s.qiouyi.lu/courses/subjecā¦
ahaha omfg no no wait, wait
if big brother is the dystopian surveillance narrative
then #InTheWatchfulCity is big sister
if big brother is the dystopian surveillance narrative
then #InTheWatchfulCity is big sister
is it a dystopia? is it a utopia? who knows. but it has a lot of Feelings and Tenderness about being a guardian
ćå§å§ę£åØč§åÆä½ ć
the sheer fucking cosmic horror of knowing that I live on an actual alternate timeline. that there is an actual point of divergence for me
in 2017 I visited china as part of a multinational SF writer delegation to see chinaās emerging facial recognition technology, which the company was trialing as part of a payment system, but the government having access to photos from IDs for recognition was already established
since then, the CEO of that company has disappeared after criticizing government regulators (he appears to be alive, but who knows how accurate that is), a new genocide campaign began, and facial recognition is now used to surveil peopleās every movement during forced isolation
really solidifying my theory that understanding chinese anaphora and pronoun scope is how I successfully use and teach neopronouns in english, a language that assumes āpronounsā is a closed class that canāt be added to
tired: pronouns are a closed lexical class. you canāt add to them
wired: pronouns are merely a means to reference, and anything can be used as the short name of that reference
wired: pronouns are merely a means to reference, and anything can be used as the short name of that reference
bless being on tumblr at the peak of bun/bunself and bo/bot/botself and similar neopronoun explosion for giving me, a linguist, incredibly ample data to work with to support my theory
and bless resources like @PronounsPage that list further supporting data such as emoji pronouns
and bless resources like @PronounsPage that list further supporting data such as emoji pronouns
I am HOLLERING, youāre telling me an entire fandom is going around harshing on people for āincestā when they DONāT EVEN UNDERSTAND å
å¼
SCREAMING
yāall this is the equivalent of calling a ship incest because either of them calls the other ābroā I am DYING
SCREAMING
yāall this is the equivalent of calling a ship incest because either of them calls the other ābroā I am DYING
two characters: youāre my bro, bro. like, bro, how could I ever treat my bro with anything less than the utmost respect, bro??
if the characters are white: āwow look at their bromance, so broā
if the characters are chinese: āthis must be some mystical asian incest dynamicā
if the characters are white: āwow look at their bromance, so broā
if the characters are chinese: āthis must be some mystical asian incest dynamicā
explanation and context for the whole thread I am just DEAD!!!
I love creating hybrid -punk styles; I love dieselpunk but I think summarizing it as āthe grittier cousin of steampunkā and centering it on nazis and war robs the subgenre of so much potential, which I am excited to explore via solardiesepunk
as alt history steampunk tends to be set in early to mid industrialization efforts, and dieselpunk is typically already industrialized or post-industrial, and a key frequently unexamined factor in both -punks is colonialism & imperialism
similarly I think it does dieselpunk a disservice to focus on fossil fuel diesel, when ādieselā is actually a mode of combustion that doesnāt require fossil fuels at all, itās a method not a type of fuel
I love that I can expand my introduction to neopronouns course with excerpts from #InTheWatchfulCity š„²
adding a comparison table for clarity for high-context worldbuilding vs. low-context worldbuilding to expand the context for this framework, which! includes! not āshow donāt tellā but āshow AND tell, this is what you would accomplish using each tool, neither is good nor badā
āshow donāt tellā is the quickest way to make my eyeballs roll straight out of my head, is it completely lost on people that the skill is called storyTELLing, they are modes not value judgments
the wildest thing is how people consider wildfires separate from āhuman-caused emissions,ā as if a solid chunk of the wildfires arenāt caused by human error and behavior!!!
I find it very puzzling that (inshallah) we havenāt had a major fire this season in SoCal, but hopefully people learned a thing about fire management after 2020 and thatās whatās caused the quiet season, because a shitton of these fires are not natural fire cycle fires
while itās true that forests regularly burn and that some species even need the heat of a wildfire to trigger germination (was not making up that detail in #InTheWatchfulCity!), iirc 2020 was largely caused by poorly maintained energy grids setting fires, thatās 100% human error
I only have headphones for politeness reasons; my preferred way of listening to music is feeling it through my feetāahaha oh god, 16 years later I understand why I, a stubborn earth-element taurus & metal ram, gravitated so much to toph, esp bc she too was sheltered & disabled
ahahaha omg all the fic I wrote about toph was about inaccessibility and access intimacy š¤¦š»āāļø I have not changed
the reason why ābeing yourself so wholly thereās still a you no matter what form you holdā is such a strong theme in #InTheWatchfulCity is bc chronic mental illness makes you forget youāre a person under all that, thatās why Iāve been delighting in rediscovering my personality
this is exactly why I keep insisting that white people (1) have ethnic identities, (2) have heritages, and (3) have cultural contexts, because acting like white people are a default unmarked state with āno cultureā actively enables cultural appropriation and coloniality
in fact this is a very big part of why I wrote #InTheWatchfulCity, because after a lifetime of white peoples (stet autocorrect, thank you) telling me they have āno cultureā while I simultaneously have to learn white sociocultural and discourse norms to survive,
I decided to write nearly 40,000 words saying āLISTEN PAL, YOU HAVE A LIFE STORY TOO, WE ALL DO, WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOUāRE LESS INTERESTING THAN THIS MINORITY REPORT DUDE, Ć THINKS ĆR LIFE IS UTTERLY BORING TOO, BUT ITāS ALL ABOUT C O N T R A S T AND P L U R A L I T Yā
Iām so tired of ādiversity,ā I just want to call it āscopeā from now on, because if your scope is intentionally broad then itāll usually be diverse, but diversity does not necessarily indicate a broad scope, and āscopeā can specifically address systemic exclusion
you can add ādiversityā all fucking day but if your scope is āwe want to hear from rich first-world anglophonesā then itās not true diversity
and people will be so busy diversifying broken institutions that they never stop to think, āwhat is the actual scope of this institution, how have we defined constituents and audience, and how does this definition exclude people and/or increase barriers; how can we broaden scopeā
are we at a point where I can now talk publicly about how harmful an experience clarion west was to me, or will I get canceled again? :)
one obstacle to critiquing clarion west is the sheer ostracization that happens if you publicly say something negative about the program, as I have personally experienced
the individuals involved in clarion west are perfectly fine people, but as a program, itās really just an expensive way to haze yourself into a professional network
my writing process is super unreliable and I canāt force words to happenāso I canāt be a write every day personābut the flip side is that I write extremely clean drafts
the only differences btwn the manuscript I turned in & the published #InTheWatchfulCity are: one section of poetry cut (about 20ā30 lines), one line added to āa death made manifold,ā and two lines added to āas dark as hungerā; thatās all it took to address editor feedback
actually no, I think that was between second draft and finalābetween first and second, there was a narrative prose portion from anima that became the verse portion, and I added about one paragraph of worldbuilding for the Hub and rearranged a few other paragraphs
working in the foothills of a big mountain range is so great, especially on foggy days when I drive toward peaks shrouded with clouds, feels very epic fantasy novel
#EverythingEverywhereAllAtOnce is the first thing that has visually represented what it feels like to navigate the world with my ADHD brain: I constantly have a parallel track that takes my physical surroundings and refracts them into secondary worlds I then write in
pretty much every detail in #InTheWatchfulCityāand my writing in generalāis something I have observed IRL before; very little of it is completely made up
another year in which I remember, once more, that I am not living in this timeline
this headcanon casting came about roughly ten years ago on tumblr when I first started exploring āokay, but what if instead of dark-skinned characters always being evil in movies & TV, what if the evil character is light-skinned and the good character is dark-skinned, on purposeā
once my brain landed on āthen daniel henney and sendhil ramamurthyā then it was as if I were launched by NASA via catapult into the atmosphere as a satellite and I have never stopped nyooming since
