I wish there was a way to go "woah hold up, this book thing is harmful, could we not, please" without immediately making every marginalized #ownvoices author panic that they'll be cancelled for vastly smaller offences than the one we are actually talking about. But there actually isn't one at this point in time, I think, for a lot of reasons.

Like, #ownvoices authors *do* get held to a higher standard than random privileged people and held over the coals for much smaller mistakes. That's not in our imaginations.

I keep thinking about those tweets that went around a few weeks ago. The ones stating incredulity that fans of stories where plucky rebels beat oppressive regimes - Star Wars, Harry Potter, Hunger Games etc - could fail to support real life rebels like BLM.

I have a thread. There's been a weirdly polarized debate that's been playing out in fandom spaces for years now about the effect fiction has on reality.

To some extent I think the really polarized stances are both strawmen, but they're the ones that keep coming up in my feed.

Lately a lot of people have told me in different context how they appreciate the compassion I show for my characters, even the "unlikable" ones.

So I want to thread a bit about how I do that. It's a learned skill, and I was not always any good at it. I should mention first of all that thinking of this in terms of "compassion" is strange for me, because that's not how I think of it or what I call it in my head, and it took me a long time to understand what people were referring to when they said they saw this in my writing.

[cn:sw] Hi tweeps! I'm sick today, but not too sick to watch RETURN OF THE JEDI.

Unpopular opinion: This is my favourite of the Original Trilogy. Always has been. [cn:sw] Several reasons why RETURN OF THE JEDI is my favourite, but they can be boiled down to two.

First: especially as a kid, I was all about the creatures, monsters, aliens. And boy does Episode VI deliver. :D

Ok, a friend of mine just got a novel rejection saying that their #ownvoices autistic protagonist wasn't "autistic enough."

The editor's basis for saying this was that they, the editor, had been watching the show "Atypical."

Buckle up: I am going to talk about this AT LENGTH. In this thread, if you are NT, I am going to explain several reasons why you SHOULD NOT EVER judge if a character is "autistic enough" by how well they match autistic characters on TV. Any TV.

Then when I am done with that I will suggest some things you can do instead.

Today I feel like making a thread on the topic of HOW TO DETECT CURB CUTS.

A.k.a. "I'm able-bodied. This thing is for disabled people. Can I use it?"

The answer is not always no! You can often figure it out by asking yourself just 2 additional questions. First, some background - the "curb cut" effect is a well known effect in which something is designed to help disabled people but turns out to help other people too.

Curb cuts are those places on street corners where the sidewalk curb slopes gently down to the street.