First Cup of Coffee – September 25, 2020

6 Replies to “First Cup of Coffee – September 25, 2020”

1. If ans has been added to your custom dictionary (so it no longer flags it as misspelled) you’d have to delete it first. I don’t know of any options to add words to autocorrect but you could set up a shortcut so that every time you type “space a n s space” it would change it to “and”. But it depends on which keyboard you are using within android.

   I am with you on “clean”. If you can simply remove the sex scenes you write with no ther changes to the story, then you are not writing them correctly.

   One other thing about “clean” in a fantasy setting is we already have to deal with fellow readers (mostly men) who don’t want kissing cooties in thier stories and think books with consensual sex are already lesser to begin with. If I had a nickel for all the times I have been told I don’t read “real” fantasy… /rant

   I simply won’t read authors who write two versions of all thier books. Or authors who label tyemselves/their books as smart or not your mother’s romance. And such.

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   1. That’s an excellent point about the kissing cooties in fantasy – and this does feel like pandering to that. Spare me the “real fantasy” nonsense. Amen to all of this!

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2. I actively avoid “clean” books because A. it always struck me as another word for Christian values (barf) and B. I want sex scenes in all the different flavors available, the more explicit and “deviant” the better. I have actually bought books by unknown authors for no other reason than a reviewer wrote (with great disgust) that there was too much explicit sex. Nothing piques my interest faster lol!

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   1. This is why you are my tribe!

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3. While I agree that “clean” *can* be used in bad ways, and certainly that author seemed awful, I’m curious as to what alternative word(s) you would suggest be used instead? Some of us really don’t want to read books with sex in them, and I feel like it’s a different kind of exclusion to say that there shouldn’t be *any* way to mark whether books are or aren’t “safe” for those readers… asexuality is the A of LGBTIA+, after all.

   There’s an SFF magazine that specializes in “clean” short stories, and this is how they define “not clean”:
   “Stories with graphic violence
   Stories with mature sexual themes
   Stories with profanity or vulgarity. We want a broad, family-friendly audience; think original Lord of the Rings trilogy or Star Wars.
   Stories featuring or glorifying illegal drug use
   Stories with graphic child abuse or glorifying child abuse in any way”

   I know they’ve been asked and have said that lgbtia+ stories are welcome there, as long as they don’t include sex. I haven’t read the magazine myself though, so don’t know whether or not they actually show up, or how often.

   And while the sex in your stories is usually relevant to the story, I’ve seen quite a few books where that is not the case, particularly in the Romance genre.

   I’m looking forward to reading The Ippos King!

   I love mysteries, but I don’t like Sherlock Holmes. In fact, I don’t think they should even count as mysteries, because they are usually “solved” by Holmes having information that was withheld from the reader/not realistic conclusions. All Sherlock Holmes is is a case study of a drug-addicted sociopath. Some of the adaptations are okay though.

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   1. Funny assessment of Sherlock Holmes! I totally agree about the information being withheld.

      I guess I think there’s not one term that encompasses everything. Why can’t we have lists like the one you show?

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