[Link] One More Vital Reason Why Community Gives Me Hope

by Charlie Jane

Hi! I wrote a book a few years ago called Never Say You Can't Survive, about using creative writing to get through hard times. I believe that the act of making up stories, creating imaginary friends, getting lost in the fictional worlds you create, can help you make it through some really scary shit.

In fact, I'm here in one piece right now because I've been writing a ton of utterly bizonktastic fiction and comics. I wrote a whole young adult trilogy about queer teenagers fighting space fascists! And I co-created a trans superhero named Escapade for Marvel Comics, and basically I've been goofing around.

A copy of one of my books. I scribbled "Keep daydreaming. Daydreaming is important, serious WORK!!!" And I drew a silly cat picture. Over that is written DAYDREAMING IS THE OPPOSITE OF DOOMSCROLLING

Lately when I sign books for people, I often write the same phrase: "Keep daydreaming. Daydreaming is important, serious WORK." And I usually add a terrible cat picture.    

My motto these days is that daydreaming is the opposite of doomscrolling. So I absolutely believe creativity can save us — and help us save each other. And yet, nothing could have prepared me for the time we're living through right now.

My books are banned in a handful of places, and trans healthcare is becoming illegal in even more places. You honestly can't know what this feels like, until it happens to you. My words and my body are both outlawed.

And I'm bombarded with rhetoric about how my very existence is dangerous. Seeing this image of a dumpster full of queer books outside New College in Florida felt like a slow kick in the solar plexus.

Read the full article: https://buttondown.com/charliejane

Motivational Mondays -- Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

By Neil Gaiman

It’s important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of members’ interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. I’m going to tell you that libraries are important. I’m going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. I’m going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.

And I am biased, obviously and enormously: I’m an author, often an author of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For about 30 years I have been earning my living through my words, mostly by making things up and writing them down. It is obviously in my interest for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and help foster a love of reading and places in which reading can occur.

So I’m biased as a writer. But I am much, much more biased as a reader. And I am even more biased as a British citizen.

And I’m here giving this talk tonight, under the auspices of the Reading Agency: a charity whose mission is to give everyone an equal chance in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers. Which supports literacy programs, and libraries and individuals and nakedly and wantonly encourages the act of reading. Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read.

And it’s that change, and that act of reading that I’m here to talk about tonight. I want to talk about what reading does. What it’s good for.

Read the full article: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming

#MotivationalMonday -- Joyce Carol Oates' Daydreams