horror noir take on the white lotus you might say. if one were in a pitch meeting with a bunch of vapid white dudes in suits. those meetings man. the fucking worst. like waiting for Godot but the dialogue sucks ass. and my last round of circle jerks in LA was '07 or so. fuck knows what its like now in the age of diversity. don't know about you guys but my gay black brown brothers and sisters they all say the same or the ones who grew up in the real world do that is. but it is something that must be talked about when writing or casting a novel or story that has more than say three characters. if they're all white that's a problem but if they're too perfectly diverse then you have that recent episode of South Park the alt universe where everybody but Cartman has been swapped out for an ethnically diverse female. I've heard of two or three novels getting canceled by sensitivity readers over the whole lived experience conundrum. and don't get me started on the rampant Mary Sue problem. I've been working on an essay of sorts one of those frankenfiction hybrid pieces called the black elf problem talking about nonsensical casting that I'm thinking I may post here first. in fact may start doing that with all the shit that may kick up a shit storm maybe run that stuff by the family first and hopefully spare myself suicide by twitter. or threads or whatever.
fade.
For anyone currently involved with, working on, or having to do with the 9 story Hotel project. We are in the process of migrating the bulk of the work and community surrounding the Hotel to Discord from The Locals, since the Locals is harder to navigate even than Discord, I would suggest you join up. The server is fully populated and set-up for work, talk, and collaboration.
This is the discord invite, it is good for the next seven days, after which I will probably post another one:
Let's see if I'm not as dumb as I think I am. This is the Google doc link for FRACTALS, the Delphine and Balthazar story.
Little iffy on the first section. I think it's good for characterization and to set up some of the relationships, but maybe it could be streamlined or brought into the main narrative. Feels slightly more like the opening of a novel than a story but I'll let others weigh in.
Hope y'all dig it!
EDIT: I was talking with another writer and wanted to clarify something I should've mentioned above. (Trying to avoid spoilers.) The ending of this is purposely ambiguous, in that another writer could pick up with the next story from another character's point of view, Delphine could achieve either of the possible goals (or none of them), or anything in between. And it's kind of subject to change based on what the next story is or what the overall project needs from these characters. TL;DR: If the ending doesn't quite land with the project from a 30k-foot view, no worries, we ...
Newest Althea story, AKA The Room With the Teeth
https://open.substack.com/pub/cjstockton/p/biting-down?r=1ck2p&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
