Hurt-Comfort Bingo Card

[ysabetwordsmith]

Below is my card for hc_bingo. This fest encourages the creation of boundary-pushing material that explores what happens when things go horribly wrong and people actually care about each other. Remember, things always go wrong; what matters is how you deal with that. Some of the content may be NSFW. Read the FAQ and rules here. The signup post is here.

I thought this might be an effective way to attract some new readers. It's also useful for developing some of my more danger-prone series.  I said I'd be happy to take the supernatural stuff that some other folks wanted to avoid, and look at all the goodies I got!  Funny how the characters who didn't blink at my Kink Bingo card are now edging away from me. I wonder who will throw whom to the bears first in hopes of escaping intact.

And, shiny new idea! People are starting to show interest in specific prompts as the new cards have gone up. If you'd like to sponsor a particular square, especially if you have an idea for what character, series, or situation it would fit -- talk to me and we'll work something out.  I'll still post some of the fills for free, because I'm using this to attract new readers; but if it brings in money, that means I can do more of it.  That's part of why I'm crossing some of the bingo prompts with other projects, such as the Poetry Fishbowl.

Underlined prompts have been filled.

B column
I column
N column
G column 
O column

nervous breakdown	loss of voice	alien abduction	sacrifice	apocalypse
tyranny / rebellion	trust issues	hostile climate	stranded / survival scenario	motion sickness
telepathic trauma	drowning	WILD CARD	bites	rape / non-con
pneumonia	deprogramming	unexpected consequences of planned soulbonding	planet destruction	hostages
forced soulbonding	slaves	amnesia	restrained	panic attacks

Comments

[moonvoice]

Oooo, very interesting bingo card! I've also signed up myself (I'm not sure if I *can* actually produce a bingo, since this is the first time I've signed up and my plate is full - as I imagine yours is! But I'll give it a shot.) :D

Go for it!

[ysabetwordsmith]

I'm glad you signed up! I've been inspiring a lot of people, which is awesome. It doesn't hurt anything to try, even if you don't reach bingo.

Size matters; the different fests have different requirements and the first one I did was cottoncandy_bingo where they didn't hold poetry to the same standard as fiction. One of the new ones has a 500-word minimum on fanfic so I need to ask if that applies to poetry. Some have size minimums on art and stuff too. Others don't. But that flexibility in CCB is part of why I made blackout there.

You might look at these things and ask yourself if there are any goals you might meet by doing the fest. For the first one, I was hoping to find some new readers, and got a couple so far; and to flesh out some of my lighter series, which I did.

Then when I got the kink card, I was thinking about continuing along similar lines with goals, but probably not doing as many squares. I marked the easy squares and had plenty. And then my brain, which is a very writerly brain, started poking at the "not my kink" squares and going "Hmm, if I turned this sideways and shoved it through a temporospatial anomaly, that would make an interesting story." This is really valuable to me, because most of my writing limits are either out of sight or things I don't want to mess with. Finding places where I could actually push safely was quite a valuable discovery. So that makes that fest really useful for me, which means I'll probably write more for it than I originally planned.

[raze]

Awesome - I can't wait to see what you do with these (I do not always comment, especially when I am new to someone's journal - but I always read). And of course, when I read more about this, I couldn't resist; signed up today! Basically all of my novels focus around a whole lot of hurt and a whole lot of love, after all. Plus some of these would make great prompts for October's horror-writing theme.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> Awesome - I can't wait to see what you do with these <<

Thank you!

>>I do not always comment, especially when I am new to someone's journal - but I always read.<<

That's fine. Lurking before posting is a good way to get a feel for local custom, so as not to annoy people. I'm pretty tolerant of most things though, and I expect my audience to behave like decent people.

>>And of course, when I read more about this, I couldn't resist; signed up today!<<

Yay! I've just been pulling all kinds of folks into these fests. It's exciting.

>> Basically all of my novels focus around a whole lot of hurt and a whole lot of love, after all. <<

I'm pretty heavily into that myself. I consider Tolkien the grand master of H/C and he's one of my prevailing influences. If you give people periodic relief, you can push them quite a lot farther, which rule holds both for characters and for readers.

>>Plus some of these would make great prompts for October's horror-writing theme.<<

Yeah, I'm hoping for good crossover with my "demons" theme on Tuesday.

[catherineldf]

Wow. I've seen some of these in sundry works but...motion sickness? Given the other options, that would be a lot of queasiness.

Well...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I've taken to brainstorming creative interpretations. I'm more likely to throw someone through a magical gate or shut off the gravity than just put them in a car. So the symptoms aren't necessarily identical.

[sammason.livejournal.com]

This is excellent! You'd be v welcome to post it on friendly_crips if you want to. I own that comm and run it with the lovely mrs_tribble. We welcome everybody who isn't a troll or a bot, and you don't have to be disabled to join us.

Thank you!

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

I appreciate the tip! I put friendly_crips on my watchlist for LJ, and clicked "join" ... which didn't go through immediately, so may be on moderation or just glitchy. I write and link intermittently on these topics. A lot of folks in my audience are interested in some way too.

I don't watch my LJ friendfeed as closely as I used to, but you are welcome to share any of my posts that look relevant to your community. I have quite a lot of canonical disabled characters. To get things started, I'll make an introductory post about some of them.

Re: Thank you!

[sammason.livejournal.com]

I've now seen your 'join request' and immediately approved it. The comm is set to ask people to 'request membership' so that mrs_tribble and I can check that the would-be comm member is a real person. We did get targetted by one bot a while ago.

What are canonical disabled characters? Do you mean that you have DID? If so, you're not the only one in friendly_crips.

Re: Thank you!

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

>>I've now seen your 'join request' and immediately approved it.<<

Thank you!

Yes, some communities need the extra protection from bots or trolls. I've run Pagan lists, so I know how it goes.

>>What are canonical disabled characters?<<

They are characters who appear with a handicap in the original movie, television show, book, or other official canon; for example, Charles Xavier in X-men uses a wheelchair and relies on his telepathy to make him a superhero. This is an important distinction because fanfic often alters major character traits, creating new disabilities or removing canonical ones. Some readers have very strong opinions about all of that stuff, and if you cross both disability awareness and fanfic circles, you'll see arguments, some of them nasty. I don't mind people playing with character traits in fanfic, but I think it is valuable to distinguish canonical disabilities because that has impact on visibility within a culturally respected context. Fewer people realize the influence of fanfic.

>> Do you mean that you have DID? <<

Spell out the acronym for me?

Re: Thank you!

[sammason.livejournal.com]

Dissociative Identity Disorder. I hope it's not offensive to equate this with Multiple Personality Disorder: I think MPD was the old name for what is now called DID.

Thanks for explaining about canonical disabled characters. I'm not fannish but several members of friendly_crips are.

Re: Thank you!

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

>>Dissociative Identity Disorder. I hope it's not offensive to equate this with Multiple Personality Disorder: I think MPD was the old name for what is now called DID.<<

Ah, okay. I'm familiar with that, then. It's just that my awareness of it is a great deal wider than the official version. I have friends who are multiples. So from my perspective ...

1) If a trait causes significant difficulty in a person's life, it qualifies as a malfunction. If it's outside the ordinary but does NOT cause intrinsic problems (and problems caused by other people's intolerance DO NOT count) then it's a normal variation, not a malfunction.

2) It matters whether or not memories are shared across personality shifts, whether those shifts yield better or worse results than not shifting, and whether the personality structure is innate or acquired. That is: having multiple personalities within a single body is not necessarily a problem, but having them disassociated from each other usually is. Somebody born with a nonstandard personality structure may be fine. Somebody whose personality got smashed into shards by an abuser is usually not going to come out of that in good working order. The mental health care industry has a more limited view of personality variation because almost all the personalities of any kind that they see are broken. They made the same mistake with homosexual people for decades. So remember rule #1.

3) Then there are people in touch with entities that happen not to be wearing bodies on the material plane. Some of that is socially acceptable in this culture and some of it is not. I chuck out all that cultural judgement and refer to rule #1 regarding problems and functionality. I'm also prone to empirical testing to see which entities can be pretty reliably identified as separate individuals tangent to a contact person, rather than personalities with a system of related minds.

Re: Thank you!

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

For my part, I have what I call a faceted or aspected personality. Different sides of me have their own skills, habits, vocabularies, and dress modes. My professional mode, for instance, has a more genteel way of handling offenses. I can switch modes deliberately and somewhat reliably, and it's useful. Everything is connected at the edges, so memories maintain; but they're state-dependent memories so crossing those boundaries is more of a challenge. Oh, and my linguistic ability depends utterly on that: learning a new language generates a native speaker inside my head, and they insist on a native-language name. Other than that, modes of address may shift a bit but most of me goes by the same conglomerate of names.

Then there are those things not part of my own personality -- nature spirits, deities, a very few of my story characters, etc. If I can alter the course of events by treating a given entity as real, then for me that counts as real for non-locally-physical values of "real." (One of my cultures actually has a saying for that: "Some things are true but not real, and some things are real but not true.") I'm too much of an empiricist to ignore useful things just because someone else insists on parameters that do not match my observed data. Entities are subjected to the same standards of decency as the human company I keep, which means if they act like jerks I refuse to spend time with them. I have also learned to warn people that if they spend time around me, they may encounter aspects of reality or other earthshaking concepts that are new to them. (That's why I have the warning sign about how my writing may cause permanent damage to narrow minds.)

This stuff works for me, but it's not quite the way most humans work. Since it lets me do some things that most people can't, I'm not willing to trade it away for the approval of people who, let's face it, have a kazillion other reasons to hate me and are never going to approve of me no matter how much of my nature I tried to hack off in hopes of fitting into the glass slipper. So I be myself, and spend time with people who can deal with that, and in return I compensate for other people's quirks. And that's fundamental to my definition of civilization, which is also not terrifically popular in the mainstream but has contributed to the development of a truly awesome audience online.

>>Thanks for explaining about canonical disabled characters.<<

It pops up in some other community discussions. Dreamwidth actually has an Access_fandom community. We once did a theme on disabled characters in the Crowdfunding Creative Jam, and for that I made a list of resources. A couple of the links go to lists of canonically disabled characters. I've heard that some of the communities have bigger lists of them too.

[zeeth_kyrah]

If you do fill the center right box, I'd like to see something that isn't rape per se.

Hmm...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

Possibly. Thing is, I already have rape established as a motif in Paladins, and dealing with the aftermath of that is a running thread in the series. So that's right where my thoughts went for that prompt.

Are you thinking about sponsoring something outside the ordinary for this prompt? If so, I'd consider exploring other alternatives. Some prompts immediately gave me specific ideas, while others didn't; but I'm willing to be flexible if other folks are attached to something. I've been putting up some bingo poems for sale, but haven't really pitched the cards to my audience, although I did make sure some of my regular donors heard about cards of topical interest to them personally. The idea of "would you like to sponsor a square" ... just occurred to me.