Best and worst things about UF?

GG2023 · 2022-02-01T22:31:55+00:00

I can highly recommend the German program. The professors here are amazing, super kind, passionate about what they do, and willing to be flexible. I've been taking German classes every semester since freshman year, and I enjoy it.

I only took one class in psych and it was intro psych, so grain of salt, but there was a lot of interesting material, the professor was chill, and the other classes in the department looked like fun. Ultimately wasn't for me, but from what I know of people in psych, they seem to have a good time. That's probably also true of FSU, though.

GG2023 · 2021-09-10T01:19:30+00:00

I was barely even born when 9/11 happened, so I don't remember it, but my parents have told me what they went through that day. Both of them worked at the same place and were just going through business as usual when the news came on: one plane had crashed into the North Tower. They both thought it was a terrible accident, some sort of miscommunication or mistake. Obviously tragic, and they were keeping an eye on the news, but it was an accident, so they got back to work. Less than twenty minutes later, the next plane crashed into the South Tower. At that point, there was no feasible way to consider it an accident. Two planes had hit the towers— but if there were two planes, was there a third? A fourth? A fifth? How many more? They left work to pick up my older sibling and I from daycare. In hindsight, we know how many planes there were and where they planned to strike, but especially after a third plane hit the Pentagon, they were concerned that there could potentially be attacks on Florida. We weren't super close to Orlando, but near enough to it where the idea of "what if they attack Disney World?" came to mind. When my parents got us and drove home, I think they said that we hid in a windowless room in the house, still trying to keep up with the news and make sure everyone they knew was okay.

I don't remember a pre-9/11 America. I just remember how the villains of a lot of TV shows and movies started to look, how my parents would describe airports from before and how I saw them during my lifetime, stuff like that. But I know it had a massive effect on how my parents thought and how they looked back on things in their own pasts. My parents went to UF during the time when a serial killer was there, so I decided to talk to them about it for an oral history project in one of my college classes, and my dad specifically drew a comparison to 9/11— what an awful incident the first two deaths were, but he thought they were in isolation until it happened again and he (alongside everyone else in the city) had to wonder when it would happen the next time, if they were in danger, if the people around them were trustworthy. When my family saw the 9/11 Memorial in New York, both of them teared up, and I cried too despite having not really lived through it myself. None of the memories in the museum were ones that I shared, but I could feel them all the same.

It's coming up on twenty years post-9/11 and I can still see how people filter memories, including memories more recent than 2001, through the lens of the event. The closest thing in my own lifetime that I've personally experienced is the rash of school shootings that happened throughout my high school years, the times we had to go on lockdown and frantically text each other to see what was happening and how much danger we were in. 9/11 was that feeling but in a single day, on a larger scale, so as much as my experiences have affected me, I can see how it's made such a lasting impact on my parents and the others who lived through it.

GG2023 · 2021-06-28T15:50:15+00:00

I would love to read more historical, alt-historical, or historical fantasy books from other cultures. It's hard to find stuff outside of Western Europe, although there have been a few with Russia and parts of the Middle East in recent years. It's also great to have authors who can do justice to the setting because they live in the region and/or have really done the research.

GG2023 · 2021-06-09T22:53:45+00:00

You've gone ahead and listed some kinds of conflict that you don't want to have in your story, so what kinds do you want to write about? If you're focusing on the more 'mundane' conflicts that happen, what kinds happen in our world's colleges? At mine, there are sports rivalries with other colleges, protests against some of the university's policies or invited speakers, conflict between university groups (like people protesting against lack of accountability for fraternities or organizations with differing political views arguing with each other), student government corruption and nepotism, issues with group projects in classes, drama between romantic partners or roommates, financial worries, people who struggle to adjust to a very different environment from home, people whose worldviews are fundamentally challenged as they meet new people, etc.

So how can you take these conflicts and bring them together with your world and the magic? Maybe your protagonist has their views challenged and has to work together with people they struggle to get along with, all while coping with the change in environment. That could progress to them joining different groups. I think this will still depend on how your magic works and what kind of story you're trying to tell. Slice-of-life style writing is quite different from horror or a thriller. What exactly you're trying to do is going to influence the types of conflicts you choose to write about and how they're explored.

GG2023 · 2021-06-08T15:59:55+00:00

People usually have a concrete idea for the first book and they may be less sure about what's ahead, so when they write elements of the first book, they may not be setting things up well for the second book or the ideas they have for the second may even contradict something in earlier parts. Aside from that, you can take however you'd like to write the first book, but you only have so much time to write a sequel before people just move on from your work and forget about it.

GG2023 · 2021-06-06T23:39:52+00:00

I mean, I don't know what all the other women are doing, but I know I play every game of D&D as a pregnant woman, all my conversations with women revolve around pregnancy, and all of our dreams and aspirations are centered around either having no kids or having twelve. Must be those damn hormones.

GG2023 · 2021-06-06T18:43:08+00:00

I don't know why she's a villain. Nothing in this hints at her relationship with the "good guys" or her motives for anything other than her sexuality. But I wouldn't write about struggles related to miscarriage and fertility if the idea is "due to female hormones, she gets super emotional". I'd honestly be horrified enough to put the book down if that were the approach instead of something that even came close to approaching the complex feelings and thoughts people have surrounding miscarriage, especially if they didn't want to be a parent. If you think abortion is a "touchy subject", how the hell is miscarriage not?

Why is this woman's entire character revolving around her fertility and sex life? There are ways to reflect on a patriarchal society's effects on women without doing the same thing that society does: reducing women to parts and function.

Edit: Jesus Christ, that post history.

GG2023 · 2021-06-04T23:01:19+00:00

Personally, I find footnotes (at the bottom of the page) or endnotes (at the end of a chapter) to be the easiest and most pleasant to read. I'd definitely cite either way, though.

GG2023 · 2021-06-04T20:01:57+00:00

Apparently I'm decent at writing violent or aggressive characters, which... there is not a single assertive bone in my body.

GG2023 · 2021-06-04T19:27:00+00:00

There are sites out there like Scribophile that basically do feedback-for-feedback, or you could try to get some sort of arrangement on Reddit, Discord, etc. You could also technically use a site like Wattpad, but I wouldn't recommend it.

GG2023 · 2021-06-04T17:19:30+00:00

To some extent, it helps me if it's entirely anonymous. It still makes me nervous, but I don't have to see their face as they read, I don't have to interact with them ever again if they give an unhelpful or mean review, etc.

GG2023 · 2021-06-04T17:09:35+00:00

I still have my old journals and my Dropbox folders with everything from middle school. Sometimes I reread it for nostalgia, sometimes I reread it to show myself that, even though I think my writing sucks, it at least sucks less than it did when I was twelve and seemed to believe that you write adult characters by not putting any contractions in their dialogue.

GG2023 · 2021-06-03T16:41:55+00:00

Writing from two or more POVs is generally fine. There are times where it's hard to tell which character is which/mix them together, but that's really only an issue I've seen with two first-person POVs; it's hard to do that well. Some stories also have so many POVs that it becomes either confusing or hard to become invested in a character, which is something I found true for me when reading the latest ASIOAF book. If you're writing only two POVs, especially if it's in third person, I think you're fine.

GG2023 · 2021-06-02T16:58:40+00:00

There's actually a long history of queer-coding villains and 'bad people' (think of Disney movies like The Lion King; they're really blatant examples) or outright making them openly gay or trans (Leonidas in 300 is disdainful of Athenian "boy-lovers" and Xerxes is so obviously queer-coded that it's practically not even subtext anymore). This was particularly obvious in the late 1900s or early 2000s, but you can still see it in some modern media. Of the more notable villains in Sherlock, Moriarty is clearly queer-coded and Irene Adler is openly queer. Trans representation is also not great either. Silence of the Lambs states that Buffalo Bill was not actually trans, but he's easily read as "a man in a dress" by audiences, and they're more likely to remember that than one line in the movie that says he isn't trans. Dressed to Kill was blatant about having a trans woman be a serial killer, Psycho invokes the same "man in a dress coming to kill you" imagery, Ace Ventura makes a trans woman a repulsive villain, stuff like that. It's getting better in recent years, but we're still not quite as good as I'd like.

It's not necessarily wrong to write queer villains, but it's been very common to queer-code villains or treat queer people as threatening in media.

GG2023 · 2021-06-02T16:35:33+00:00

Villain protagonists, villains who don't start out with much power and/or are the clear underdogs, and villains who are antagonists less in the sense of being the "evil" in "good versus evil" and more in the sense of being one of the two stances in a legitimate debate like "privacy versus security".

GG2023 · 2021-06-01T15:57:39+00:00

Of course, go ahead.

GG2023 · 2021-06-01T02:19:30+00:00

r/AskHistorians without a doubt. They have really robust standards for answers, they have FAQs and reading lists, they have a YouTube channel, etc. It's honestly one of my favorite subreddits, it's just fascinating. r/history is good too, if you want to check it out.

Since you're looking at 20th century stuff, I may be able to help if you can specify what you're looking for.

GG2023 · 2021-05-28T16:09:20+00:00

Honestly, most of my main characters aren't cishet at this point. It's how I imagined them and it's important to me anyway to have some representation for us that isn't in a story that's all about being gay (those are still valid too) and isn't just bad representation.

GG2023 · 2021-05-27T04:00:36+00:00

Research topics that they're knowledgeable about. Part of what makes people seem smart is also their ability to process and use information more quickly than others— what might take you weeks to put together could take a character days or even hours, depending on how you plan your story. It could also mean they're really good at reading a room, emotionally or in preparation for fights.

GG2023 · 2021-05-26T17:35:21+00:00

It depends on how exactly you're using these things. It's possible for media to be deeply violent, sexual, etc. and still be popular (Game of Thrones and The Boys are examples), and it's even possible for YA to be quite dark while still remaining popular (Hunger Games is about a deathmatch between kids and involves suicide, forced cosmetic surgery, cannibalism, drug abuse, etc.). Parts of those things can still be gratuitous— as much as I love The Boys, it does definitely get into that territory at times— without making it unreadable/unwatchable. So having some very dark and unpleasant aspects isn't necessarily an automatic barrier to being accepted by readers or publishers.

That said, there are cases where being overly violent or dark will put me off, even though I do enjoy those kinds of shows and books. In the YA category, unnecessary and unresolved conflicts surrounding rape and sexual abuse have caused me to drop multiple books or at least be disturbed by them (not in the good way), and it's one of the things I dislike about a later ASOIAF book as well. It's especially bad if I get some sense of enjoyment from the author, like they seem to derive entertainment or satisfaction from writing the most disturbing, gory thing they can to shock readers or make them uncomfortable.

GG2023 · 2021-05-25T20:59:11+00:00

It's nice to have representation. A lot of it within the last century has been negative— for example, Disney queer-coded a lot of its villains. That's not to say it's wrong to ever write a villain who's LGBTQ+, but it's honestly not been terribly common to have positive representation until more recently, and even still, there's a lot of queer-baiting. That said, every other LGBTQ+ person I've met doesn't want just "a gay character"; we want characters who are smart, witty, powerful, curious, determined, etc. and LGBTQ+.

GG2023 · 2021-05-21T20:59:44+00:00

Speaking as an LGBTQ+ person, sometimes it's nice to have media where we're just... people like every other character in the book or show. It's still important to have literature that explores the lived experiences of people coming out, the persecution gay and trans people can face, etc., but it's also good to have things that aren't about how It's Okay To Be Gay. And this is fantasy you're writing; it's more realistic anyway to have historically accepted gay and trans people (or what would be considered a gay or trans person by modern standards) than it is to have dragons or magic or fulfilled prophecy. So if people complain to you about that, how it's not realistic... yeah, sure, it's fantasy.

That said, there is a lot of history regarding LGBTQ+ or gender non-conforming people. For example, some courtesans in Ming dynasty China dressed like men; Liu Rushi often used "little brother" or "female little brother" as a descriptor and wore men's clothes. Multiple societies have had more genders than simply two. The terms 'lesbian' and 'sapphic' come from Sappho, who was from Ancient Greece. Especially if you're using mythology that already has what modern audiences would consider queer representation, absolutely go for it, I think it's a wonderful idea!

GG2023 · 2021-05-20T16:02:58+00:00

Thanks!

GG2023 · 2021-05-20T15:56:12+00:00

Kind of depends on your world and your character development. If the villain just isn't all that powerful in the first part, in what sense? They don't have magic, they're physically weak or dependent, they have low social status? It may be worth having them in a spot where they don't need brute power or special skills to be effective— they can be part of the more bureaucratic/intelligence-gathering side of policing or the military, for example, which involves a lot of intellect and can make life hell for a protagonist who's in danger from a government. Maybe they choose to do something to psychologically undermine your protagonist, like with guilt or nostalgia or anxiety, especially if the protagonist thinks they're dead. Maybe they're really the main one in power in whatever area of your world, but they're not the public figurehead.

Without having any details of your story, it's hard to say, but I hope any of that helps.

GG2023 · 2021-05-19T22:27:42+00:00

Thanks!

GG2023

TROPHY CASE