I think agenttremble made a really good point. I think the white community often assumes that blackness lends a heightened consciousness to racial issues, but that isn’t necessarily the case. You have no way of knowing whether she’s “behind” her fellow biracial teens in racial awareness or whether this is something…

31 here. You’ll figure it out. My advice is to figure out what motivates you. Do you like rewards? Set reasonable goals and give yourself a small reward after achieving each one. Do you like seeing progress? Start with the easiest stuff first to build momentum. Do you have problems with procrastination? Make…

Thank you, this is exactly the kind of response I was hoping for — I had no sense of how common/weird these notes were. Thanks for adding your professional insight!

Absolutely. I just have no idea what the norm is. I’m on board with her calling him out, I just want the insider perspective on how out of bounds this is. Like, I could see a casting call saying, “Character is tough, sexy, and tomboyish; please dress appropriately,” or “casual wardrobe preferred” or “Character Elle…

I have never been in so much as a school play, but if I was auditioning for a role and someone sent me not just the scenes but the entire script, I would read that thing cover to cover. Seems like basic professionalism to me.

My answers, in reverse order:

I don’t know enough about acting as a profession to be properly grossed out by this. Is this a note for how female actors should dress while they’re reading the script at the audition? Do people normally give wardrobe notes to A-level actors? I want to be suitably enraged but I don’t understand what’s happening here.

Thanks for the reply! I’ve quit a major job once already to live abroad for a year and write and it was the best choice I ever made. Now I’m gearing up for round two, but I don’t want to keep hopping back into full-time 9-5 work whenever my savings run out; I want to leave that behind for good. I’ve been thinking that…

Actually, I run the place, I’m home by noon every day, and I have all the time in the world to work on my marginally successful fantasy series.

My preemptive response to all of these:

While it may seem likely in the books, the show has virtually never shown Jon Snow warging into Ghost, and if this is what has happens it will effectively come out of left field for TV viewers. [...] Besides, it seems unlikely that the book and the show would have different solutions to this massive event, although…

A while ago someone found & published GRRM’s initial pitch letter for the series. It included a description of Arya & Jon having a passionate love affair and Tyrion falling helplessly in love with Arya, leading to a deadly showdown between him & Jon.

I’m pretty sure the OP means “number of sexual partners”, if that clarifies it. ;)

Oh! Thanks for that info. I have friends who would fit that description, so good to know!

In my college, we had a traditionally black full-ride scholarship that dozens of students received every year, and they always brought the rewardees to campus in the spring for a carnival to entice them to come. While I was a student there, the college was forced to open the scholarship to applicants of all…

No matter how strongly you suspect someone is lying, the social contract dictates that you can’t say so, so you end up acting like you believe the lies just to be polite. And, meanwhile, you’re fully aware that you’re being manipulated and you resent it. [..] But, I don’t know, trying to get us to pity her feels like…

I once gave an “interview” where I just wrote a thing about myself and someone published it. A busy/lazy reporter at a laid-back publication might just have let her write her own bio. It really reads like her own language — her “raw talent” is “undeniable”, she’s a “rainbow”, there’s that weird swastika transition to…

She went to Howard on a full financial scholarship.

Go big or go home. She’s like the Dos Equis Man of compulsive lying.

“Coming from a trans-racial family that has hop-scotched to a variety of racial-tension areas, I have seen racial hatred in many forms,” she says.