I turned 67 last week - so ridiculously old - and I write plays.
I wrote my first play in High School and since then I've written translations and adaptations, full length plays, one act plays, revue sketches, children's plays, a children's opera libretto and the odd short story.
I mainly do it for my own amusement, but every so often I promote it.
Recently I finished a project and am now wrestling with the start of something new.
When I first saw content warnings, I didn’t like them much.
Art is often intentionally challenging, but not necessarily bluntly so. I was concerned that content warnings would distort by strictly reducing topics that a writer might handle with sensitivity to their sharpest, most off-putting edge.
As time went by, I understood 1) it’s healthy to be able to enjoy entertainment without fear;
Content warnings build trust.
The writer says to the reader, I trust you to know what’s right for you.
When handled well—for example, including page numbers so a reader can skip select pages rather than opting out of the book, or presented as a note at the beginning of a book stating that content warnings are included at the back of the book—they can be a gift.
#WritersCoffeeClub Introduce yourself and/or update us on your writing journey since your last intro
I’m Emma. A Cornish writer who enjoys sea swimming so much I should be a mermaid. 🧜♀️
I’ve almost completed my 2nd draft of Guesthouse For The Lost And Found, a portal fantasy heavy on folklore and fairytales with a bit of murder mystery thrown in and wrapped up with humour.
If you like Discworld or Rivers of London, you might enjoy my writing.
As a translator I am lucky that the buck stops with the author/ editor of the originals. So I have no problem with a rich old fool marrying a horse, nor with a bride's mother shouting her sex advice through the door to the bridal couple (who are in fact trying on tight shoes).
There are 3 books (Origins, Marathon, and Labyrinth, last is ongoing), links are pinned on my feed. First is a space road trip that runs into a conspiracy, second is sort of like the game "FTL: Faster Than Light", third is essentially a space dungeon crawl with cosmic horror elements.
As my books are free webnovels in a genre that is rare nowadays, I am desperate for publicity! Check them out if you like hard sci-fi!
#WritersCoffeeClub 3/6: Should books include a content warning?
I haven’t included content warnings in any of my books. I would do so if they included graphic violence or explicit sex, but I don’t tend to do that anyway. The question, of course, is where you draw the line. I do have same-sex (FF) intimacy, and if someone is offended by that, I feed that’s their problem. I’m not inclined to pander to prejudice. #books#writing#TheShatteredMoon
Seriously, it depends on the audience and the story. Some stuff is full camera on. Others is fade to black. Some things the intimacy is important, even if the story isn't NSFW, and even in adult stories sometimes you don't need to focus on stuff because the action (hurrhurr) is elsewhere.
(And if you're wondering, I publish the adult stuff under a different name. It's not hard to find or figure out, but I don't link the mostly-all-ages stuff and the porn)
I grew up in the 70s/80s, and there was a wealth of shit I shouldn't have read ^_^, but that's not why I put warnings at the start of my books.
Landmines are a problem. These readers decry problematic themes and make finding them a personal issue. They don't comprehend the notion of 'I shouldn't read this' and process their exposure as: 'You shouldn't write this,' so my warnings are solely for them.
Be it lovers entwined, a refection on someone's death, a mental break down, or that quiet moment two people understand a relationship is over.
If we're being coy and really mean "two people fucking" then I don't.
Erotica isn't in my wheel house.
Absolutely no shade to those that write erotica.
They serve a valuable function, though “should” is a strong word. In one way, it’s a personal preference — I see more content warnings in author notes than from the publisher, which implies to me that the publisher is neither enforcing content warnings nor preventing them. And obviously self-published authors (like myself) make the decision for themselves, both to include them or not, and where to draw the line.
BUT if the author/publisher doesn’t provide them, it’s almost certain that reviewers will. Some reviewers just list them to help out other readers. But some get very annoyed that they had to find out for themselves.
I also suspect it’s generational ie younger authors are more likely to do it, for their younger (but still adult) audience. I think it comes from losing the unspoken cues (imprint, genre, cover style, blurb etc) from traditional publishing that told us what to expect, due to the rise of genre-busting self-publishing, and also a more general blurring of genre lines, combined with the culture of fanfic, where thorough warnings are expected as a community-driven convention.
And I also think it is a bit muddled, as any big and self-determined umbrella term is likely to become. It can be “warning: contains graphic violence” or it can be “warning: only-one-bed trope alert!!!” And that’s ok but it might undermine the serious content warnings for the readers who need them. But I think readers have become used to parsing CWs for themselves.
If this is with regard to sex scenes: I'm not afraid of that, but it has to fit the story. Some stories are fade-to-black, some more explicit. The most explicit feature the incubi twins and their companions.
In general, I shy away much more from explicit violence (which you'll find nowhere in any of my stories).
If this refers to other types of intimacy: heck yeah. I got them, loads of them.
Books already contain content warnings by how they are categorised, their cover images, blurb, etc. Adult, Young Adult, Children's, Romance, etc.
This is where the author can give the reader a good idea as to what's inside. If you feel the need for anything more specific, you probably haven't written your back cover (or web-page description) properly, or you need to find a better cover image.
#writerscoffeeclub Jun 1. Intro and update: Introduce yourself and/or update us on your writing journey since your last intro.
Hello! I'm a passionate writer using two different pen names, avid reader, and tiny publisher. Stories are what make my life special to me.
And the update is: #OdysseyToThePromisedLand is live! And free for a few days on Kindle!
If you want to read, this link will take you to your respective store:
#writerscoffeeclub 3 June: Should books contain a content warning?
(somehow missed yesterday, but this is important).
I never did that before I entered the English market. But I put a content note on #OdysseyToThePromisedLand. I realized that there are some things in it that might be disturbing, so I'm warning.
Should is the right word. Sometimes, however, I feel like it has to do with respect for the reader.
A) One character bushing another person's hair. They end up in a pillow fight.
B) The narrator dealing with the LI having a meltdown over the narrator only giving them compliments on their looks.
C) LI gives the narrator permission to call them by a personal nickname.
I often find in close intimate conversations one character will find they no longer have words to say what they want. So I end up using ellipses. I also use ellipses to show how characters start saying something and then editing what they want to say. "you should... we should.
If you mean sex, it's just another action scene. There may also be intimate portions of the scene.
For certain things, yes. I plan to include one in my next book, which deals with pregnancy loss. But I think they need to be specific, not just 'this book contains mature themes' which is pretty useless as far as it goes. I plan to put the notice in the front and the actual content warning on the final page so no one who doesn't want to gets accidentally spoiled.
I signed with a new agent and spent the last 5 months on a major restructure of a maximalist ecofiction novel imperfectly disguised as a contemporary workplace comedy. #WIP Hollywood has taken over casting for a televised mission to Mars. It’s back up to over 400 pages and my agent is going to be so mad when I finally turn in this draft. Just need to untangle the final 50 pages, which is why I’m playing here. Procrastination is part of the process.
No regrets. Though I do feel a little bit like a sucker trying to write for traditional publishing again. I’ve been here, I know what it’s like, but I put my foot right in the trap again and am hoping it doesn’t snap shut this time, even though I know that’s what the trap is designed to do. So… ask me in a few months if I have regrets.
I struggled a lot with how to approach content warnings for Weird Fishes. I ended up going with this Author’s Note and including a list of potential sensitive subject matter in the back.
I am Max, a hard sci-fi fan and amateur writer. Since 2 years ago or so, I have been making my own constructed world and novel series to go with it. It is semi-optimistic, a contrast to the recent flood of doomer sf, but mostly respects science and puts a lot of effort to worldbuilding and "realistic" alien designs. In effect the setting is a modernized and science-ized space-opera, though the books have somewhat unusual premises for this kind of sf.
I just write them? I write historical romance, and most of my novels contain explicit love scenes. They can be part of the character arc; they're always part of the relationship arc - each scene reveals something new about the relationship and / or pushes the relationship forward.
I choreograph love scenes before I start writing them, and they're often among the first scenes I finish when I'm working on a new story.