When I see young survivors of abuse and sexual violence writing death threats to other young people for writing the ‘wrong’ sort of slash fiction and engaging in other sorts of online violence in the name of making everyone have only unproblematic sexual experiences, I don’t see a coping mechanism or a teenage phase that they will grow out of.
I see abuse survivors translating their trauma into ‘I’m hurting so I get to hurt people’ and ‘I feel pain so I am right’. Taking the first step towards becoming abusers themselves. I see a very dangerous process that could be deadly if it isn’t interrupted.
And I can’t brush off this
sex-is-bad-conservatism-dressed-up-as-caring-about-victims bullshit
as something that is just online, far from me. It may have its origins in American puritanism, but it can take root much closer to my home quite easily because our social justice cultures are very Americanized.
Whatever is happening on Tumblr generally rears its ugly head in my local activist community about two years later. Because surprise surprise, the same
traumatized young people eager to lash out at others to feel better
about themselves exist in my community too and they have Tumblr
accounts.
These horrific, sexist, racist paragraphs – screenshotted and shared for posterity by James Smythe, to whom we are all indebted – are the work of one Liam O’Flynn, a writer and English teacher. Evidently, they come from his book Writing With Stardust: the Ultimate Descriptive Guide for students, parents, teachers, and lovers of English, and are intended as examples of good writing.
UM.
Dear white male writers: DO NOT DO THIS SHIT. IT IS SUPER GROSS AND FETISHISTIC AND ALSO TERRIBLE WRITING. THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS.
Like I just. “Her virility-brown eyes -” WHAT DOES THIS EVEN MEAN? How can you have an “Amazonian figure”ON a “wafer-thin body” when “figure” is a word that describe’s a body’s shape, and Amazonian means pretty much the DIRECT FUCKING OPPOSITE of “wafer-thin” in the first place?
What the shitting fuck does ANY of this mean, apart from “I am only nebulously familiar with the concept of women and completely at a loss if I can’t compare their various bodyparts to jewels, animals and footstuffs”?
STOP
GO TO WRITING JAIL
GO DIRECTLY TO WRITING JAIL, DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT $200
tag yourself i’m the two beryl-green jewels in the snow
if her ears frame her nose do they like, grow directly beside her nose? how does she see from them?
*facepalm*
“
Writing With Stardust: the Ultimate Descriptive Guide for students, parents, teachers, and lovers of English
“
lovers of english
oh my goddddddd
i can’t get over this fucking post
“I loved her nebulous, eden-green eyes which were a-sparkle with the ‘joie de vivre’. They were like two beryl-green jewels melted onto snow.”
1. what the fuck is joie de vivre
2. melted jewels?
3. beryl green
eden green:
WHICH ONE IS ITTTTTTTTT
@laughlikesomethingbroken “Joie de vivre” is a French phrase that literally translates to “joy of living”, while it IS one of those phrases that gets used in English in this context it is SO EXTRA AND UNNECESSARY OH MY GOD. Don’t use French to make yourself sound sophisticated when you’re NOT
I don’t know where to even START. Curvilinear waist? Sugar candy-sweet? What the FUCK are seraph’s ears? Voguish clothes? What the everloving fuck is “constellation blue” supposed to mean??? Like forget the objectification, this writing is horrifying enough before we even get to the embedded sexism
seraph’s ears are ears that you can’t see bc they’re hidden behind her 6 wings
Oyster white teeth?
holy purple prose batman
Female writers do this too. Have you read a Mills and Boon novel? Have you read high school girls’ yaoi fanfics?
Uh oh, we were focusing too much on how a grown man is selling this shit and not enough shitting on teenage girls. Egalitarians here to put an end to that shit.
Guess what? I’ve read A LOT of Harlequin novels and a LOT of fanfic and I have never ever seen anything this horrible at description.
Also, none of those stories were trying to hold themselves up as high examples of the craft
You guys here is the description of the book on Amazon.
If this is the description I cannot think how bad the inside is.
I never ever want to hear anyone make fun of fanfic writers again
NEVER EVER
Lord god almighty. I’ve been feeling really down about my writing lately, but this is a confidence boost. 8I
A lot of people already condemn and calling this teacher a bitch/monster on the comment/reblog, not knowing the whole story. It was actually the TEACHER who drew the beautiful art on the blackboard, and the teacher is a HE, he’s an accomplished artist who was trying to teach his students about the beauty of art and however changing it is. He will draw any arts by request from his students, the students will take some pictures, and then he erases it from the board, and make new ones. He’s not a monster. He’s actually trying to spark the students’ interest in art. Funny how a simple pic without context enrages people – and the people refusing to look beyond the story.
You can follow his artworks on Twitter @hamacream where he always posts/tweet his arts.
anti-sjw: why?? am I triggering your delicate tattoo artist sensibilities?? trigger warning: waving arms and logic! you mad bro? huh, you ma – ow ow ow that’s not what the tat is supposed to look like.
as a tattooist please beleive me when i say that i have tattooed this guy before.
i know its satire, but like. you’re not even wrong.
this is both the most enlightening and the saddest addition to my post.
i was exaggerating the best i could, and it turns out to be real. i’m so sorry for you.
If you are a romance writer with the word “Cocky” in one of your titles, and you’ve received a takedown notice from author Faleena Hopkins, please check out this Twitter link on this bullshit.
Have you heard yet? (possibly, it’s all over my FB and twitter)
Oh look,
Faleena is back at her bullshit. One of my friends had her work removed from Amazon and was issued a copyright notice from Hopkins because their plots were “too similar”. The similarities where that their man characters drank red wine, and featured vampires.
She’s on my shitlist for authors to never rec or review.
Blacklist this author.
Also, if you publish with a non-US publisher, she can’t touch you.
I’d also like to add that the owner of a certain author group on Facebook deleted someone else’s post about the trademark issue, and then Faleena was encouraged by the mods to tell “her side of the story” but she turned off commenting on the post, and then one of the mods wrote vague posts ranting about people PMing him for liking Faleena’s post so now he’s blocking people who disagree with him, and they turned off posting for the rest of the weekend.
Let me know if you want me to post the screenshots.
Post them, this woman and anyone that side with her need to be publicly shown as the scum they are. This whole trademark thing is bullshit, she’s taking advantage of it, so I imagine her books are not very good.
@thebibliosphere and @caitlynlynch, can you please reblog if you feel comfortable? Below I have screenshots about how some of Faleena’s author friends have reacted:
Michael Anderle created the Facebook group 20BooksTo50k and his friend Craig Martelle is one of the mods. A post about the trademark issue went up a few days ago, and this is what happened:
Then Faleena Hopkins went on with her BS excuse on several FB groups, you can find them on Twitter, and it’s too long for me to bother posting on here, but when someone commented that she shouldn’t bring it up in the group, she said that the mods urged to show her side of things.
Now I wanted to brush this off and pass it off as her lying, but then:
Craig Martelle has to start acting like your average rich straight white male who gets criticized. Then he went on to do this:
Now you see, Faleena Hopkins was a guest speaker at the 20Books conference last year, and I’ve heard that she’s a friend of theirs. If they keep her on, I completely understand. That’s the only conference invite she’ll ever get again, and they’re just looking out for their friend.
However, being a whiny tantrum stomping little child on a FB group is just unnecessary. Own up to your fake rules:
Faleena Hopkins was going after other authors after she trademarked a common word. There’s no defending that, and they’re shutting down all conversation about it except for her side of the story and booting people from the FB group. Sucks for them because all the other writing groups are talking about it and mocking them for their reaction to all the bad press Faleena is getting.
Also, shame on them for deleting important indie information the original trademark post had and refusing to let people talk about it while vague posting rants about it. But what else do you expect from rich straight white men, who aren’t really oppressed like a good portion of the romance industry is, that have to face valid criticism?
The RWA and one or more Big 5 Trad Pubs are involved now. There’s a time to stand up for your friend, and there’s a time to let them know the consequences of their actions.
Reblogging for information, because this is some fucked-up shit.
Also a case study in How Not To Get Ahead As An Author.
I honestly think the only thing Faleena Hopkins can do now is go dark, start a new pen name, and never show her face at any conferences in case someone connects the two. Otherwise she’s going to find herself standing alone in the corner a lot.
I never like excluding people from the table, but in this instance Faleena Hopkins can’t sit with us. There’s no room at the table for this bullshit.
For extra bullshit, it turns out that the font she used for the Cocky that she got the wordmark on? Specifically is not licensed for that use. You cannot legally get a wordmark for anything using that font.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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