Writing

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What are you reading for intl affairs? I really like RFE and The Moscow Times but always like new sources. Not too keen on anything that’s suffocatingly left wing (for a start I tend to find very left wing blogs to be pompously intellectual and impenetrable to the laywoman with a very basic grasp of economic/political systems), but something that’s equally not just ““neutrally”” centrist/offering up the reductive vision of the world in which Macron is god, Putin is Satan and Navalny is a completely unproblematic challenger to Putin whose aggressively nationalist tendencies should go unchallenged.

Can’t remember where I saw it but the worst take I’ve ever seen in tryhard alternative perceptions was that all criticism of North Korea is racist and it’s actually pretty great there. (It was more nuancedly delusional than that iirc.)

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People who can do that are cool and amazing but I don’t see those roles as primarily writing as such, just being a reporter out there doing that kind of shit is a bunch of skills (and a whole personality type) in itself, writing is secondary and it’s very rare people can do both (the best journalist who came out my course couldn’t write for shit, but now he makes amazing documentaries in far flung war zones).

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Most of what I read is suffocatingly leftwing tbh, but it’s not overly intellectualized, it more pushes back against particular narratives when they start forming in the mainstream news. I’m terrible with economics so I find the more technical Brexit stuff pretty tedious and dull at times even though I know it’s important :flushed:.

Alternet is definitely suffocatingly left wing, but they’re generally spot on, if sometimes a bit too pro-Assad wrt Syria (“We aren’t saying Assad is a nice guy, but…”) It’s like, guys, you can say everyone but the civilians are shitbags in that war, it’s not a crime. Anyway, it does have some good articles about South America and the Middle East on there.

Al Jazeera is good but I try to bear in mind it is a Qatar-funded organization, so while its coverage of SA, Africa, Asia and Europe is good, when it covers Syria, Iran, etc, there’s a definite agenda there.

Shadowproof, Electronic Intifada, both massively biased but I don’t mind.

TBH I also follow lots of individual journalists on Twitter. Rania Khalek, Lily Lynch, Mark Ames, Amal Saad (well she’s an academic but an expert on Hezbollah and the Palestinian struggle), Taibbi, Mehdi Hassan, Max Blumenthal, Luke Savage, Adam Johnson for media analysis, etc.

Ames did an episode of Unauthorized Disclosure with Khalek where he broke down Russia post-1990 and explained how Putin thinks, how he rose to power, how the oligarchs plundered the country with America’s backing, why this happened and why this made so many Russians distrustful of America even if they don’t care for Putin, etc. It helped me understand a lot about post-Soviet history.

I see this on tankie twitter all the time, it’s really weird but pretty funny. Reminds me of those pro-Assad “Lion of Damascus” memes (although that’s just weird).

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I think certain journalists can do it and retain their credibility, like Lily Lynch and Yasha Levine (@TheBarbieMovie2023 he’s good for Ukraine stuff) others just come across as though Orwell ate their brains, and now they kind of dream of covering a horrible war in eastern Europe while high on smack and sleeping around with the locals.

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This is exactly the sort of thing I want to be learning about. Cheers!!

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I really like the idea above of a board for writing and would really like it expanded to cover all artistic or ‘creative’ things people are doing (maybe not music cause we’re a music website already? Or maybe, also music) where people can help each other and offer advice and feedback. Can that happen?

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When I’ve had writing published it’s always been under a pseudonym (or “pen name”, if you like).

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I would be really up for a dis writing group. There was something connected to old dis where we would write a short story every week on a named topic. Bloody LOVED that because it forced me to commit and make time to write every week. Bloody love writing but it’s so hard to make time for it if you don’t have a deadline or a commitment to fill.

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This one, but it didn’t used to be on tumbler http://writeinforwritingssake-blog.tumblr.com/

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Ooh, I like this idea very very much

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I could be up for that. Wouldn’t be able to commit to a story every week (as I’d never get anything else written) but would definitely contribute here and there.

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65

Hi.

My favourite way of writing over th last few years is to keep a journal loosely based on place (place writing is the MA I’m doing) then at the end of the year I go back through it and make a best of essay. I write on Evernote so it’s easy to pull it all together and find it. It’s not exactly a fast way to write but it gives me plenty of distance to go back and edit.

What do you find yourself writing about?

I’m relaunching my website in the new year and there’ll be space for those kind of creative non fiction journals as I found that I was feeling a bit silly about writing all that stuff and then just keeping it secret but equally unsure about publishing it, so it’ll kind of sit quietly alongside my more journalistic type stuff that people actually read.

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66

Let’s do a writing/podcast project!

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I’d be well into that

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68

Oh christ I didn’t realise that was still up. I wrote some god awful stuff for that. Ugh.

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I love writing, always have. Write about anything and everything all the time. I’m a total idiot when it comes to grammar etc. don’t care, gonna do it anyway.

Done a lot of music writing (oh hello DiS) but heart’s not in it anymore, can’t be fucked to talk about a bunch of people making music all of the time.

So I started my own little blog of just writing shit whenever I felt like it that doesn’t have to have meaning or focus, and I love it. Looking forward to having more time to dedicate to writing shit when I’m in NL, too many nearly-finished drafts in there at the moment.

In conclusion: Just fucking write, writing is great.

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A lot of the early posts seem to have disappeared (my ‘Tropical Fish Shop Ownership’ story is no more :disappointed_relieved: ) we never used anything but first names I think, so plausible deniability is ours!

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Yes! With everyone talking about short stories they never finished I thought about doing a zine of unfinished short stories. But idk if it would be worth reading or if people would actually want to contribute to it for fear of their story being shit or someone stealing their idea and finishing it off so your idea is probably better

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Nah, a short story needs an ending and also needs a lot of editing. I can’t really see an unfinished zine being any fun to read at all!

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How about a thing for your journal stuff? Monthly or summat?