Jesus Christ, lady, I hope your book has paragraphs!

Let's chop this up a bit.

...it's in a fantasy setting, it also has a coming of age aspect to it and takes place over about 6 years, and they age from 12-18. im thinking hard about how to write them right in their early ages, like 12-14, and i feel like i'm doing it wrong. i'm putting more focus on their character and specific personalities but i'm wondering if, as a girl, maybe i'm accidentally making them too “girly” and “soft.”

i like to make them enjoy the simple things in life, like exploring and enjoying nature, and they also like to talk about their feelings and their hurts. but is that a thing boys do? im trying to make them realistic but sometimes i forget that i was never a boy and i'll never know what it is like to be a boy. and to top it all off, it's a gay romance (it takes awhile though, so they're just friends in the beginning). it just happened to be that way, i wanted a romance that wasn't straight and i felt my story didn't fit two girls (again, there's a difference but idk what it is!)

... i just want these characters to feel real and not how i “think” they're supposed to be. i can't decide if gender is just a construct and it doesn't matter if they're a boy or a girl, or if their outlook on life IS different and they should be written differently. both? what mistakes should i avoid in writing male leads when i'm not a male?

"Have you tried adding reason and accountability?"

Nah, it's a good question. Writing any type of romance you haven't been in is obviously challenging. Writing the opposite s*x requires observation skills, reading and engaging with their work (a bitter pill for moids), and a healthy imagination. You also have to be able to set aside your preconceptions about how people should work, and your desire to fix them. For example, in this case it's not just that men usually don't talk about our feelings, or that we feel uncomfortable doing so. Often, we don't want to. How do these sorts of things affect a developing gay relationship?

But as usual, /r/writing offers reassurance instead of seriously engaging with an OP who wants real answers. Many also get bogged down making very important points about gender.

It being a fantasy setting changes the answer. Boys/girls/men/women tend to be different but a lot of that is a result of the cultural environment in which they were raised. The jury is still out in exactly what elements are genetic vs environmental. But that largely doesn't matter because environment shapes how behavioural genetics do or do not manifest anyway.

Since this is your setting, gender roles and attitudes can realistically be whatever you want. If you even wanted to aim for realism in the first place. If you want boys to be soft in your setting then they are.

It's MY SETTING, and I get to pick the gender roles!!

If you were writing about two average adolescent boys growing up in Anywhere, USA, I'd say it's pretty unlikely they'd talk deeply about their feelings. Many of us aren't even taught to be aware of our feelings. There are exceptions, of course. But typically, they'd probably mull things over in the privacy of their own heads while doing some other shared activity, like dropping bigger and bigger rocks into a lake, throwing dirt clods at a hornet's nest, or building the coolest tree fort ever.

But this is learned behavior, and gender totally is a social construct. You get to decide what being "male" means in your fantasy world, and whether or not you want to make it analogous to modern western, Judeo-Christian culture.

Actual good advice to tell a story about boys erased in real time by genderslop.

Depends on what your fictional society expects of them and if your fictional society has gender roles they are expected to conform to.

In my fictional society, sexy women with big tits are expected to throw themselves at members of !bookworms and !writecel

Of course you can write a world with different social "rules." But the farther it diverges, the less it has to say about real people in our own world, and the more it has to say about the author's own desires and hangups. Might as well say some coomer's monster girl erotica is commentary about female gender roles.

Given your inspiration, I recommend you research homosexuality and pedecrasty in Sparta and Thebes. I'd also suggest looking at Afghan's Bacha Posh to explore the notion of gender vs construct.

This isn't actually out of nowhere because the full OP mentioned "The Song of Achilles," but lmao

... When writing either gender, it's easy to make characters unbelievably confident or strong in their emotions, knowledge, or physical abilities. Making a teen male emotionally literate stops you having a weakness to their character that would otherwise ring true.

Differentiate your characters from each other. Give them flaws. Let their differences and flaws produce tension. Two guys who are just soft and sensitive and slowly start touching peepees isn't a story. Even a hack writer would make one of them the emotional one and the other the moody, silent one or whatever.

A couple more people actually gave decent advice, like here, but of course low effort "You're perfect just the way you are!" advice is upvoted while interesting stuff is near the bottom.

As a straight man, I'll never understand this trend. If the men in your gay romance act like women, why make them men at all? Reading gay erotica should be a form of escapism where you can imagine loving relationships without having to deal with women. At least, that's why I read it.

NPR talked about it

https://www.npr.org/2024/05/14/1250912188/honor-levy-my-first-book-short-stories-review

Here's a choice excerpt I randomly scrolled to in the epub

He felt like he was dying, smothered by xenoestrogenic alienation, forced domestication, a lowering of testosterone, depopulation, doom, the sun setting for the last time ever, a great ugliness, the end of history flashing before his eyes. Withered Wojak. Pink Wojak with bleeding eyes. </3. Cope or rope. He felt western civilization falling and bile rising in his throat, a microwaved McFlurry of remorse and half-digested animal proteins. He felt himself falling out of love. Falling to his knees in a Walmart. A poison arrow in his chest. MRNA mode. Blood of the Lernaean Hydra mode. Ow. Wow. Passions inflamed the middle layer of his heart's wall. Myocarditis. Oneitis. It's So Over, said his sinking swollen heart. The drywall called out to his fists. He punched the keyboard instead, kjbvkdesvdsbjvjkwbdvb jkldesblkdf. . . . Why would you ask that??? Ur a dumb slut . . . Just another whore. . . . . . . . . No. . . . . . No. . . . . . I said I wanted a tradwife not a tard wife . . . roastie . . . whore . . . I hate you . . . I hate you I hate you. Just before he hit send, it hit him, something sent from the beyond, a burning white light, a growing echo of music, the opening notes of MGMT's “Little Dark Age.” And then it began: images flashing, hyperspeed through his mind, the Intertwined Lovers of Valdaro skeletons in their Neolithic tomb, huddled face-to-face with their arms and legs intertwined in an eternal embrace, Orpheus and Eurydice in the underworld, every pair of lovers ever intertwined in eternal embrace, Odysseus and Penelope, Eloise and Abelard, Adam and Eve, Bella and Edward. At ever-accelerating nightcore speed, he saw nights and days, battles and births, blood, so much blood, beating hearts, cells dividing, code being written, oceans rising, blooming flowers, dying crops, the great flood, continental drift, the universe expanding, poetry, pain, the big bang, empires rising and falling, the birth of his ancestors, the death of his great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren, all of the ends and the beginnings beginning and ending and beginning and ending and beginning and ending infinitely. He saw what Life is, and what Death signifies, and why Love is stronger than both. He saw a loop, a shining circle. He saw the way forward as he looked back. He hit the backspace button as he RETVRNed from this infinite space to his body, to his bedroom, to now. He understood now. No no i want you, he replied. Sorry for the late reply I was away from my keyboard. It wasn't a lie. He had been somewhere else. He wanted to reach through the black glass, through all the 0s and 1s, through the mess of wires under the ocean, through the cloud, to grab her, take her in his big gym arms and hold her, be one. He wanted her now as she was: messy and pure, bone of his bones, flesh of his flesh, this thing to be called woman. He'd reach through the wall before she hit it. He had to. It was a love story, it all was, everything is, and always has been.

!bookworms I decided to post the thread for once as @pbj has been busy hopefully touching grass

What are your thoughts?

@neoconshill

What's the worst book you've ever read, discounting self published crap?

I bought my mom Jo Watson's Among Others half a decade ago for mother's day.

I didn't know much about the industry so I thought that it winning the Hugo meant it had to be at least of decent quality. It was so bad that she said it had to read it too

300 pages of the most pretentious precious child crap

>1984

!macacos

https://twitter.com/zadokq244514/status/1789091241097138321

To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks and papers.

!bookworms !classics I'm reading Houellebecq Atomised as part of the bookclub

I also got my copy of Confessions of a Mask this week

!bookworms !kino

https://lithub.com/how-did-reactionary-french-novelist-michel-houellebecq-end-up-in-a-dutch-arthouse-porn/

>“His wife spent a month arranging the prostitutes in advance”

>“Who will lay with the famous writer out of curiosity”

Some screen caps, is cuckshit @BWC @houellebecq @manysuchcases

For me it was this one

However bad you think the book might be, it's worse pic.twitter.com/sgcRee1vqO

— Roman 🦅 (@goodhorsemen) May 3, 2024

!bookworms

Weaving heedlessly through traffic, Pizzashill cursed the incompetent rightoids that polluted the streets of Eastern Oregon with their late-model F-150s and ridiculous, oversized SUVs. "The fools!" he thought, "do they have any idea how shitty their gas millage is in a vehicle like that?"

Cutting off another Ford Explorer, he inwardly congratulated himself again on his shrewd acquisition of such an economical vehicle: His off-white 2002 Honda Civic had only 220,000 miles and moderate rust damage; the entire purchase price had been less than the monthly payment would be on the Range Rover he'd just swerved in front of. "Psh," he thought to himself, "as though rightards could comprehend a concept as sophisticated as interest rates. Why, at 4.95% APR on a $100,000 SUV, that means every month they'd be pissing away almost..." here he performed some quick mental arithmetic "...a fuckload of money," he concluded, reflecting warmly once again on his prudence.

bzzz

The mobile phone on his dashboard – a refurbished Samsung Galaxy S6 with a Boost Mobile SIM card – vibrated to indicate a new message. No time to check it, he was almost there. Accelerating into the final turn, he yanked the wheel hard to the left, ignoring the angry horns of the other drivers. Centrifugal forces – "Imaginary, just like sexism," @pizzashill reminded himself – tossed his phone across the dashboard and hard into the window with a loud thonk.

bzzz

The phone buzzed again as it dropped into the passenger footwell.

Slowing as he approached the enormous warehouse looming in front of him, an ominous, windowless concrete structure, Pizzashill ignored the arrhythmic rattling from his car's exhaust system and casually brandished his blue staff ID badge (that's right, blue for management) at the RFID scanner to his left. With a cheerful beep and a green light, the scanner registered his arrival and the automated barrier lifted to allow him to pass. As always at this moment, Pizzashill felt a momentary flash of triumph, "The King is back, baby" he mused silently.

bzzz

Yet another notification sounded from the damp mat on the floor of the passenger footwell. He was progressing deliberately through the ranks of stationary vehicles, judging their owners for their fiscal profligacy while cursing them for their fortuitous parking. "If only they'd give managers a designated lot," he thought to himself, not for the first time, "It's outrageous that I have to compete for spaces with these wagies who answer to me."

bzzz

Again! What could possibly be so important? "I swear to god, if I have to to explain to Poj one more time how to reset the robot vacuum, I'll have a half a mind to – no, no, not that. Remember, she's only a woman. She's doing the best she can with her limited capacities," he reminded himself, gently steering his thoughts away from domestic violence. Finally, he found a spot between two large pickup trucks and brought the Honda to a halt.

Switching off the ignition, he fumbled for moment in the footwell to recover his phone and glanced at the screen. Three text messages and a voice memo, all from @Poj.

"hey a bunch of strange men in black SUVs are on our street" @7:53 am

"oh my god, I think they have guns." @7:54 am

"Pizza, it's the actual glowies, they say they have a warrant" @7:57 am.

His heart sank in his chest. "Shit," he thought, "I always knew this day might come." Steeling himself, he pressed play on the voice memo. Poj's panic-stricken voice filled the car's beige, lightly stained interior:

"Oh my god! oh my god! I hope you get this message. The FBI are here, they're everywhere! There's so many guys, they're searching everything! They've taken the ham stocks. They took the Pokémon cards. I tried to get them to keep the door shut so Pudding didn't escape and they said, 'Ma'am, you're lucky we don't confiscate that tubby cat as evidence, too.' What's going on, Pizza? I'm so scared right now! What should I do?"

"Shit (again)," he thought a second time. So this really was it. After everything he'd worked for, everything he'd built, this was how his empire would come crumbling down?

No. Not like this. Not a chance, he wasn't going down that easy. Not Pizzashill.

"Don't say anything," he texted back, "Tell them you want a lawyer. Remember, glowies are just IRL jannies. Remember what we talked about that one night? I love you, babe."

Like a gladiator preparing to enter the arena, knowing full well he had almost no chance of coming out alive, he suited up: steel toed boots for the warehouse floor, neon high-vis vest, blue ID badge clipped to his lanyard. He jiggled the sticky door handle of the Honda three times to get it to open, and stepped out into the crisp spring air.

He strode toward the entrance of the building with purpose. Pizzashill knew he had only one card left to play, but damned if those dumb feds hadn't just activated his trap card.

I always see people on plebbit shilling their books on different writing subs for their stuff on personal sites / amazon / royal road. Even on non writing subs and people eat it up.

idk I'd feel cringe and weird shilling that but is that just me? Is it normal to accept it and do it as well? Is it autism??? (yes)

To discuss your weekly readings of books, textbooks and papers.

!bookworms

I ordered Yukio Mishima's “the sailor who fell from grace with the sea”, it arrived today

>Hates journoids (assuming he agrees with the man in the golden breastplate, Denadhach)

>Hates bongs (see: literally anywhere)

>Talked a lot of shit in his 73 years, but was patently too much of a kitty to ever do anything but make rhymy words, and everyone knew it

>Kissless incel for most of his life because he suffered crippling oneitis (Maud Gonne was more into patriotic chads who needlessly killed themselves for paltry Ireland)

>Schizophrenic mystic: 95% of his poems blather esoteric nonsense about perning gyres and fairies and incarnate spirits. Remaining 5% is historical cuck fiction (honestly, if a poem makes sense, then it's probably about whores having s*x while he sits in the cuck box)

>Lifelong coomer who was only spurred on to continue writing or living so as to look at young girls

Too mystic for the IRA-types he postured as, too learnèd for the bumkins he would imitate, too effete to score, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature because someone from Ireland needed to win it, and his Prius was laden with the most pro-Ireland bumper stickers.

Lacking the lyricism or earthiness of Robert Burns, the erudition or cats of Eliot, the humor or bussy of Wilde, or even actual voice or coherence of Lady Gregory, Yeats makes up for this all by just sorta being a weird loser geek talking gibberish nobody cares about.

Truly, he is a man for all seasons. He is literally me.