David Alex Lamb

Back in April 2019 I summarized the ABCD approach to beta reading that Mary Robinette Kowal taught me (probably in her Patreon livestream writing class), wherein readers limit themselves to describing their reactions, not diagnosing problems or prescribing solutions. The reader categorizes their comments as

• A(wesome): Examples: a great turn of phrase; a wonderful reveal; definitely keep this bit.
• B(ored): Examples: infodump or description went on too long; I’ve lost interest in the character; the plot isn’t advancing.
• C(onfused): Examples: I don’t understand what is going on here; this passage contradicts that one; who is talking here?
• D(isbelief): Examples: The character wouldn’t do that based on what we’ve seen so far; nobody sane would bring a slug-thrower on a spaceship.

One of my fellow Writing Excuses Retreat alumni added an “E(xpectaton)” for things like: at this point I expect that thus-and-so will eventually happen; I take this as a promise to readers that such-and-such.

I’ve been applying this method for a while, and think I need one more: “F(lung) out of the narrative.” It’s kind of a catch-all for anything that didn’t fit under one of the other categories: a micro- or macro-aggression; a squicky piece of prose; a sudden unforeshadowed change in tone.

Avoiding prescription turns out to be harder for a lot of people than I originally expected. For example, “I don’t know who is talking here” is an unarguable Confused reaction; “add a dialogue tag” (e.g. “[name] said”) is a debatable prescription (one could make the speaking style more distinctive, or one could add an action that used the speaker’s name instead of just a tag, e.g. “[name] shifted uneasily in his chair”).

To get us both “on the same page”, when I ask somebody to beta read for me, or when they ask me to read for them, I plan to send them a link to this post. I hope this proves useful to others. I also recommend viewing MRK’s video from several years ago that started me off in this direction; it includes guidance on receiving feedback as well as giving it. There’s also her more recent infographic (originally found on the possibly dying birdsite).

I am writing this in November 2022, during the great Flight From the Birdsite; I haven’t fled (yet) but decided it was wise to claim my own handle somewhere on Mastodon, one of the proposed alternatives (find me at @davidalexlamb@universeodon.com). My nature as a scholar led me to collect and organize a lot of links I found this month concerning my potential new social media home.

One of the first thing to understand about Mastodon before you even begin to start trying to use it is that it is “federated,” meaning there are a lot of different ‘instances’ (that is, what most people call ‘servers’) instead of one massive central one. This has a lot of implications for your experience. Content moderation practice, and kicking out problematic users, is entirely up to the local system administrators and their content moderation team (if they have one). So when someone talks about their experiences with the service, bear in mind that your mileage may vary depending on the instance you chose. For example:

• You can follow people on other instances, but your choice does matter because of the Local timeline, which is just the people on your own instance. Some smaller instances cater to particular communities, so Local might be worth following in its entirety. For example, wandering.shop aims at the speculative fiction community (and hosts several writers I follow); universeodon.com wants to attract people ‘who view the universe through wonder.’
• Your choice of instance needn’t be permanent; you can migrate. There are a lot of small instances in the fediverse.
• Many instances purge media attachments after some time, which could be as short as a week. So don’t look at Mastodon as an archive. Archive.Org may be trying to set up something for this purpose, but that isn’t clear as of this writing. Your local instance may preserve local media longer than it preserves that from other instances.
• Your instance could choose to block everything from some other instance it considers problematic – such as being a source of too many abusive posts. Or vice versa. This means you could lose access to people you’ve been following, through no fault of either of you (other than a forced “guilt by association” ruling for picking your particular instance).

Before you start, you should consider what Twitter user @rahaeli, one of the founding members of the LiveJournal Trust and Safety team (who knows more about the Internet than all but a small fraction of us) considers a bare minimum for signing up for a new service. She doesn’t currently think Mastodon meets these minimum standards, though that could depend on the instance you’re considering.

The first things to look at are a FAQ and five guides on joining and using Mastodon. There are also several things I discovered by reading other posts, which might be worth pointing out even if you’ve read the guides:

• Mastodon is designed to resist posts going viral.
• You can use debirdify to transport your follow and block lists from the birdsite via a CSV file.
• Since you’re not flooded with ads, you can afford to follow more people and more hashtags than on some other social networks.
• There are several mechanisms for dealing with unwanted content. Some things work differently from what you might be used to. For example, you can mute someone for minutes, hours, or days, instead of permanently (at least, from the web browser interface).
• For accessibility reasons, to be kind to people who use screenreaders:
  • Put hashtags at the ends of posts instead of in the middle, so the reader doesn’t pronounce “hashtag” every time. I violated this rule on my introductory post, because I wanted to fit a lot into the 500 character limit, but I am trying to do better now.
  • Use ALT text for all your images. There is a bot that will remind you if you follow it: @PleaseCaption@botsin.space.
  • Use CamelCase for hashtags (that is, capitalize each word in a multi-word tag).
• Sometimes people use the Content Warning (CW) mechanism as a Content Wrapper, to hide looong posts or those the writer expects have a limited audience.
• Direct Messages on Mastodon aren’t private, and mentioning someone adds them to the conversation.

There is controversy about Content Warnings, in that some people from marginalized communities want to be able to express their experiences without having to hide them behind a CW, and others from the same communities want people to use CWs so they can choose when to deal with what is a constant issue in their lives. I have no insight into how to resolve this. Complicating this issue is that some un-marginalized people police CWs to protect their own fragility, which seems to me constitutes harassment. If somebody posts to a hashtag you follow with content you don’t like, you can mute or block them.

Running Your Own Instance

If you’re a techie, it might appear to be relatively easy to set up and run an instance. It may or may not be easy to set up (my tech skills have declined over the years, so it’s harder for me to judge), but it’s not easy to run, for socio-legal reasons rather than technical ones.

Most of the issues boil down to one thing: Content moderation, which is a lot more fraught than Some People think. You absolutely need to read Twitter user @rahaeli’s journal entry about legal liability for social media sites. A Mastodon mod with 5 years’ experience posted a guide to running a Mastodon instance that talks about some of the same issues. It’s not at all clear what fraction of instance admins are aware of all of this, but for several years Mastodon has had proposed workflow for DMCA takedowns, which is only one of many issues you need to be aware of.

Conclusion

So far I’m happy with Mastodon. The total lack of ‘promoted tweets’ and ads is refreshing, and the lack of Quote Tweet means I see a lot less expression of outrage over stuff I’d rather not see. Like most Twitter migrants, my collection of followers has collapsed, but I have plenty of friends to follow; my tolerance for volume is relatively low because I really, really want to read (or at least skim) every post. For example, I am currently following #WritingCommununity, which I couldn’t cope with on Twitter.

Last February I took a Writing The Other course on character arcs; I was ill at the time, and couldn’t deal with a live session, so in June I was slowly working through the videos amidst all the other pressures in my life for the previous three and a half months. Stant Litore put together a fascinating series that combined lessons from two of his books, Write Characters Your Readers Won’t Forget, and Write Worlds Your Readers Won’t Forget, and unified the two by focusing on how elements of the world you build put pressures on your characters that influence the choices they make.

I reached the point in the Sunday morning lecture where Litore went on a slight tangent to talk about a short story by Jorge Borges that was at once an homage to and critique of H.P. Lovecraft, a very influential “father” of the cosmic horror genre. Almost all of Borges’ 4-page story hit the reader with classic Lovecraftian elements: a strange house, the viewpoint character fearfully but compulsively exploring it, finding furniture that wouldn’t suit a humanoid body, his growing fear as the strangeness increases, the terror when he hears sounds of the owner returning. In the last line, though, the protagonist chose to face the strangeness without closing his eyes. Litore’s telling was gripping, and made a strong point about the power of focusing on character choices in our writing.

But to me, it was equally powerful in understanding Lovecraft himself, which was probably part of Borges’ intent. A key element of cosmic horror is strangeness the mind cannot comprehend; Lovecraft’s characters usually die or go mad when exposed to creatures beyond time and space. People used to celebrate his contributions to the genre, but these days my writer acquaintances are more likely to recommend August Derleth or more modern writers for a specific reason: Lovecraft was intensely racist.

The lesson I took from this was that both his powerful stories and his racism stemmed from intense xenophobia, fear of the other. Cosmic strangeness for him led to horror because people significantly different from him were frightening. Borges pointed out that horror need not be the only reaction to the unfamiliar.

People sometimes use their writing to explore their own issues, their own traumas, their own fears. We can hope that the exercise might lead us to write powerful stories, but also to personal growth and perhaps even closure. Lovecraft managed the first, but utterly failed at the second.

Let’s all try to do better.

Today, June 18, is Autistic Pride Day, when those of us who identify as autistic celebrate our neurodiversity. This plus a recent conversation about ‘labels’ caused me to reflect on several things about autism that I feel like sharing.

First, there are aspects of my autism that I genuinely celebrate and think others should, too. Hyperfocus (except for the extreme versions) can give high productivity but also a kind of “high” similar to being in flow state. Attention to detail (while not especially intense in my case) leads to increased effectiveness in some kinds of activities. Lack of interest in (and limited understanding of) social dominance games means I have no inclination to play office politics. Literal-mindedness can be a source of conscious humour when I am aware of it in the moment, and leads me to default to taking people at their word (often a good thing, sometimes a bad, but on balance something I am content with).

Second, I used the phrase “identify as autistic.” I had the bureaucratic advantage of a diagnosis, which is one piece of the leverage one might need to get workplace accommodations. But the difficulty of gaining access to formal diagnoses (especially as an adult) means that many people know they are autistic but can’t get formal blessing. Self-diagnosis needs to be taken seriously.

Third, there are caveats to that. The psychiatrist who has been helping me navigate my workplace accommodations, among other things, happened to mention that a large fraction of the population now say they are autistic. I’ve heard many people say “autism is a spectrum, and we’re all on it.” For me the issues with that are:

• It’s not really a spectrum, it’s a collection of different aspects of personality and ability, of neurodiversity.
• People experience their autism in their own way. If you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person.
• If you have a few elements of the classic cluster of visible behaviours, it makes sense to say you’re autistic, but there is a vast difference between symptoms society accepts, those it considers quirky, and those it disparages as ‘disorder.’
• I am certain I have met people who are using ‘autism’ as an excuse for bad social behaviour.

Fourth, I do consider some ‘symptoms,’ but by no means all, as impairments. Inability to speak (which happens to me occasionally) is an impairment. It becomes a disability when society generally won’t accommodate it (I’m a fan of the social model of disability). Plenty of nonverbal autistics can communicate just fine with assistive technologies, and can be as articulate as anyone once they learn to sign or type. Society needs to learn to make accessibility a core human right.

Happy Autisic Pride Day!