I’ve been thinking a lot about accessibility, and inclusion, lately, especially because events like Global Accessibility Awareness Day and White Cane Day and all the other events that are supposed to be for the advancement of Blind and Disabled people just, well, don’t do anything to make friends of mine aware of my challenges.

I’m sometimes afraid of the non-disabled friend circle because it is a place where I’m supposed to educate rather than gossip about how hot some guy is as he’s talking to his phone across the way or gushing about the new ice cream that I absolutely have to devour at local LGBT+ bookstores. Despite my many decades of educating, though, many people still, to this day, don’t have to learn. They love to be educated all day, but if they can be educated about describing their social media pictures, for example, without actually learning the value of it and improving automatically or after a mistake, my disability accommodations are not their problem they have to correct. They are mine. I, as the disabled person, have to constantly remind my well-meaning friends and partners again, and again, and again, and again, to remember that I have disabilities, and these disabilities can’t be erased.

I use educating deliberately. Education, in my mind, anyway, has morphed into explaining repeatedly without different results. Education is the endless loop I constantly play while I’m still on this earth. Education is different from explaining, in my view, because when I’m explaining an aspect of my world to someone VS. just educating them, there’s a level of interest and willingness when I’m explaining something to an eager ally. If I’m explaining something to someone, I know they want to meet me halfway. If I’m explaining something to someone, they’ve tried to listen, unlike situations when I’m placed in an educating box. Educating, in general, has made me honestly tired of days like Global Accessibility Awareness Day, White Cane Day, or National Guide Dog Day.

These events are rooted in what appears to be acceptances, at first. If someone knows about Disabilities and Disabled people, then they will just strive to do better, and strive to discriminate against us less. Maybe far into the future the attitude of Disabled people, including Blind people, will shift. As of today, though, these campaigns aren’t really helping my life. Inclusion is helping my life, not these awareness campaigns.

Every year, these campaigns, and campaigns like them, are constantly touted and celebrated. These campaigns give everybody a hall pass to be educated about accessibility without stepping into our world. As long as people are educated about screen readers for example, they never have to use one, until the day they do have to use one because they are suddenly a part of the Blind community.

Individuals and corporations love education about disability because it also gives them opportunities to be passive about their inclusion. I can’t tell you how many websites and apps say they fully welcome disabled people and yet, their forms for registrations are never accessible, their restaurant menus are scanned images that a screen reader can’t read, or their social media registrations all have captchas that are inaccessible to multiple disabilities.

It’s more than likely they simply don’t know any better. That’s fine if they don’t know any better. Dialog can happen. People can learn. People can understand. I refuse to believe people just won’t get it. I fully believe people get it and people start to understand, day by day, with more interaction with a Blind person. At some point, though, we have to start asking ourselves is accessibility education honestly doing its job. I think it’s a very valid question to ask ourselves.

Two very valid questions I ask myself daily are, Are these awareness campaigns doing anything? Why aren’t these campaigns working?

It’s made me compare and contrast accessibility and inclusion. It’s also made me start wishing for more open discrimination if you’re going to only commit to being accessible and not inclusive.

Part 2, openly discriminate against me.

I was browsing a website the other day and their accessibility statement was full of everything we know and love. Platitudes about how they strive to make the website as accessible as possible. I’m deliberately not linking to a specific website because, honestly, there’s a billion of them out there. Pick one, read their accessibility statement. After reading the accessibility statement, try to register for the website without properly labeled edit fields.

The above happened to me so many times I actually wished companies would actually just come out and say that they didn’t do any testing on accessibility at all, and we honestly don’t want to have people shop here but the law is making us do it anyway. With that kind of open discrimination, I at least know where I stand. I know how far I will get. I’m not tricked into a false sense of inclusion. If there was more open discrimination, that, ironically, would give me the agency to take my money, and my attention, somewhere else more inclusive.

If you’re willing to learn every day, and to be inclusive tomorrow, that’s one thing. I don’t mind explaining how we can be more inclusive tomorrow. If you honestly don’t care that your services or software are not accessible, I actually wish more individuals and corporations would openly say that. I wish more open discrimination was encouraged under these circumstances because it would give me the agency to not waste my time trying out a service or software.

With accessibility promises, such as those found on Global Accessibility Awareness Day, it’s teasing people like me into believing that you will be inclusive tomorrow and not just accessible today, but after the promises, there’s a whole world of disappointment and frustration because your promise was just that, a promise without action.

Part 3, learn.

I’d like to end this by illustrating an inclusive experience vs. an accessible experience. One of my favorite author friends, Joseph Anthony Rulli, invited me to a table reading for his play. This table reading was the same for everybody, sighted and blind. For once, everybody had to listen to the words on the page and not rely on visual happenings. They were experiencing the play as I would experience the play with audio description. Joseph Rulli had an inclusive experience. Nothing was tacked on or fixed after the fact. I didn’t need a Disability Dongle. I could just be there and listen to the table reading just like everyone else.

By contrast, I tried to go to a movie in person a week later. The movie was supposed to have audio description. The theater said it cared about accessibility. Nobody knew how to use the audio description device. Nobody knew what the audio description was. Nobody knew that audio description is necessary for me to participate in culture. I spent my entire time educating the managers, staff, and otherwise, instead of enjoying myself. When actions didn’t speak louder than words, I felt excluded.

It’s easy to forget. We all forget. I forget to describe my own images sometimes, as I’m sure you do. We’re all human and that’s what makes us, well, special, but even if I forget today, I’ll always remember to do better tomorrow. I’ll always remember to learn tomorrow and to take the time to understand what I don’t know. My challenge to everyone, on this awareness day and all others, is to understand what Disabled people must go through by listening to our debates. Read our social media rants. Learn how to create and use tools we use daily. Go beyond education and immerse yourself in our world. Learn from us. Learn what it’s like to be trapped in an inaccessible world and figure out how you’d navigate it if you had no other choice.

Updates on how you can help are below the main content.

begin main content.

I am on strike, and I fully support the 2023 Writers strike that was called by the WGA

Read the initial Strike announcement here

For a solid breakdown of the strike, read this.

In short, this means I’ve stopped all writing, selling, options, and negotiations involving my scripts and screenplays. I’ve stopped all script and sensitivity consultations for all production companies. I’ve stopped all negotiations of my scripts for podcasts and all screenplays.

Unfortunately, before the strike was called, some fiction podcast scripts were already in production of a few of my scripts. I’ll do everything I can to stop the production of these sold scripts.

These are hard times for everybody, but the streaming industry has allowed executives to take advantage of all writers in so many ways that weren’t possible before. We are striking because exploitation needs to be halted. I can’t even begin to outline all the ways, but it’s multiple companies taking advantage of writers, deducting pays as profits continue to rise. The demands are bigger because there is more to lose.

Unfortunately, executives and production companies have a backlog, thanks to how streaming works, but there will still be impacts, as there should be.

This strike is to hurt countless production companies and executives that take advantage of writers, underpay writers, and devalue the writing process by making sure we do not get paid what we are worth.

Even though this strike is to punish companies and corporations, In my humble opinion, all fans should be inconvenienced by this strike as well. They should feel the pain of not having new content, because I believe they don’t fully understand how badly writers are abused and how critical writers are to their favorite TV shows, movies, and fiction podcasts as well as other media.

Perhaps fans will take the time and learn the ingrained devaluing of writers that constantly plagues society and how they can do their parts to treat writers better.

If you’d like to support me during this strike, support me here.

Treat writers better. Pay writers. Pay us good money because we deserve it, and because we do great work. Without writers, you wouldn’t have the Golden Girls or other shows. You wouldn’t have the Bright Sessions or other epic fiction podcasts. If there are no writers, you don’t get new shows.

In addition to participating, I stand in full solidarity, and will not cross any virtual or in person picket lines. I can assure you that I will monitor this closely and attend virtual protests and will participate in even more virtual campaigns.

Treat writers better. Pay writers. What else can I say? Pay writers. Pay writers. Pay writers! Pay writers! PAY, WRITERS!

Resources.

Contact me to share other direct mutual aid resources

• Financial and social services for writers
• FAQ containing resources for WGA members.
• Financial aid form for WGA West.
• Financial aid for WGA East

I’ve got a confession to make. I’ve been writing FanFiction for years and have amassed quite a following. This isn’t the post where I reveal who I am on Archive of Our Own, but, yes, I do write there and have been doing so for years now.

Some have guessed I was the writer of My Immortal, the best FanFiction ever created, in my humble opinion. I can assure you that I’m not that clever, nor am I that funny.

Side Note, The Wiki entry has some amazing dramatic readings of My Immortal. Find all My Immortal related pages here.

I’d like to compare my private writing with my public writing and kind of illustrate why I write where nobody knows who they’re really praising. Of course, if you eyeball enough stories, unfortunately, my style gives it away. Editors and readers, I know in real life have assumed it was me, and, of course, they were right but other friends have talked about me in third person, exclaiming how this writer is amazing on AO3 without knowing it was me at all.

In this wave of marketing sludge, buried deep under hype where all kinds of technology will innovate our lives and will, well, something, the best compliment I could have ever received is after hearing people talk about me in the third person, forcing me to read work I created myself, it’s a humble feeling.

I’ve been thinking about audiences and writing. I, of course, know I’m writing for an audience when I write books or novellas or similar. But on AO3, I can just create worlds and backstories to side characters and force people to reconcile with this thing I’ve created, rather than mistakes I’ve made or my opinions or, well, my looks. It’s a kind of power that few writers get to experience. Publishers dictate how public we are. Contrary to popular belief, we lose the right to privacy in many eyes because we put art out into the world. It all goes back to this constant devaluing of writers and devaluing art. Our agency is always removed when it comes to marketing and publicity because, well, it’s all part of the game.

Don’t get me wrong. There are certain aspects of the game I like. Interviews, for one thing, when I publish something public, like, through a publisher of some kind. I like collaborating with a team. I like collaborating with people to bring my creation to life and getting it into people’s hands,

But I don’t know why I enjoy this whole other side of FanFiction marketing more. It’s purely word of mouth. It’s all emotions about the story, good or bad. The debates are about the stories rather than the brand. Of course, some drama happens within Fandom spaces, but, for the most part, it’s that separation of writer and brand I really like.

Publicly, I must be a brand, as much as I absolutely hate that word. Any problematic thing I do is at once attached to my brand without chances for redemption. In the Fandom community, it’s just me and my fantasies, and people loving my fantasies.

It isn’t just publishers that have willingly forced us to give up our agency. I’d argue readers had a part to play as well. Certainly not as much as publishers, but, again, society still daily devalues writers. In societies eyes, we don’t deserve any ounce of privatization because we’re forced to be brands instead of authors. Instead of the publisher doing what they are supposed to do and promoting our books and marketing our books, the responsibility has been shifted to writers. Indie publishers are guilty of this abuse too. They claim they don’t have marketing budgets. While true, they can still do things like talk about books from their backlists for releases more than four years ago. Indie publishers can engage in unique ways if they want, but they also force writers to become brands. This is why I adore my private corner of the web, where I don’t have to be a brand, I can just indulge in my fantasies and publish my fantasies and possibly aid someone else through my angst and happy endings.

You might ask, why not just publish stuff under a pen name. The problem is, I’m really not smart enough to keep a professional pen name going. I guess I could start writing under the pen name mister WaggleNose, but then, ah yes. Taxes will come around. People will inquire if I know my pen name. It will get very convoluted, very fast. And, Let’s be real, I’m too egotistical to stay professionally hidden forever.

That being said, FanFiction isn’t a joke, nor should it be taken as one. In fact, it’s been the best free writing class I’ve ever attended. It’s helped me improve my spelling, well, somewhat. It’s helped me become a much better critique partner. It’s helped me become a better development editor. It’s even helped me when reading criticism. While I’m the most thin skinned person you could ever meet online, no, seriously, I fume at other people’s social media posts and book reviews of books I’ve fucking loved to death then wished they’d get crushed under an avalanche of ice cream cones, unable to escape the wrath of yummy Rocky Roads, as they beg for relief under a mountain of gooey chocolate and vanilla.

I started writing FanFiction because I want to have a space where I don’t have to be a brand, where I can just make stuff and have people hate it without hating me, if that makes any sense. Again, no, I’m not the My Immortal author.

My audience is far bigger in Fandom than in real life. Maybe one day, I’ll reveal myself. That won’t be today. There’s an aspect of FanFiction I can’t get enough of and that’s the aspect that things you’re supposed to do as a writer usually don’t apply. I, for one, actually love reading author avatars and author inserts in stories because I love understanding how a fellow Disabled or other marginalized person would navigate this world. Oh sure, there are always going to be negative reviews, but still, because there’s no career expectations, publishing doesn’t carry weight like it does when you’re publishing outside Fandom.

FanFiction allows me to wrench back my privatization and just create whatever. I’m a writer on AO3, not a brand. Readers can’t force themselves into my space because they know who I am, so, therefore, they just automatically assume that they know my name, Robert Kingett, they believe they deserve full access to me. I don’t know how publishing trained readers to think we’re brands instead of authors, but it was very clever. If we’re brands, then any failure we have is our fault. It isn’t the fault of our publisher that has bucket loads more money than we will see in our lifetime. We’re just bad at marketing. We suck at making connections. It’s all our fault.

On AO3, it’s just our existence we’re responsible for. There’re no expectations at all. That’s what I like best about the Fandom space. It’s a community many will never be able to understand. We’re supporting each other and, yes, sometimes getting sucked into drama, but overall, we’re populating the space with our words rather than things we should hype.

Of course, I’ll never stop publishing professionally. I’m too narcissistic and egotistical! Just kidding, or am I? I can do both. Of course, this is why my FanFiction takes a backseat sometimes but I’m glad I dove into FanFiction. It’s the best writing class I could ever take. You should try it. You’ll be surprised.

Updates are at the bottom.

I know, I’ve already written about so called AI, which isn’t really intelligent, before, but I’m in a mood, so buckle up for another rant.

I’ve been thinking a lot about content and consumption lately. Partly because, thanks to large language models other people are calling AI, I’ve been logging off the internet and eating older media more. It’s a fascinating time machine. I’ve been eating a lot of fiction podcasts. I’ve been reading a lot of Disability fiction on Archive of Our Own. I know I’m not doing the productive thing in society’s eyes. More importantly, I’ve realized I’m starting to avoid the internet more. What prompted me to log off more started with a simple Google search.

I searched for something on Google. Read a few articles, soon realized they were generated articles instead of written articles, tried to find some useful help to my query, discovered more generated articles, skimmed generated articles, sighed because these generated articles were flooding the top of multiple search engines, and then finally just said, fuck it, then listened to the original Star Wars audio drama after logging off the internet.

Many people enjoy rolling their eyes at people that consume media, but don’t engage with it. But, like, I’m tired and don’t want to examine how this peace of media is misogynistic or ableist. I guess you could say that’s my main state of mind these days. I’m just tired. I’m exhausted by trying to understand generated text and or generated voices. I’ve enjoyed just appreciating works by humans instead of trying to decode stuff. I’ve even tried to read some generated fiction, written or narrated, and, as you can imagine, I’m never enjoying the work. I’m decoding it. I’m like a flawed computer that can’t compute what generated garbage is in front of me, so the best thing I can do is just, well, log off.

In fact, I believe that’s the best way to make generated work fade away. I know it’s easier said than done, but the minute you know work is generated instead of created, just close the browser without leaving a comment or anything. Don’t leave an angry screed. That’s what the generator wants. They want reactions to their Word Roombas, written or narrated. I’ve never left a comment on a generated work and never will.

As to all who are wondering how I can tell it’s generated? Trust me, it’s beyond easy to spot, even if you human edit it later.

My last post on the subject, unfortunately, played into the hype a little bit. In an epic series by Our Opinions Are Correct, they correctly point out that the hype is also fueled by, you guessed it, fearing humans will go extinct and be replaced by robots. Later in the series, they correctly examine how Silicon Valley doesn’t understand Science Fiction.

While my last post was all, we should cherish humans, I’d like to examine some more thoughts about what the internet will be like with a flood of generated content.

I often hear from a lot of people now that they will, mostly, go back and read or watch older stuff they’ve appreciated because new choices are overwhelming. That’s how I feel about content these days. I don’t know why but I find that trying new books is far easier than trying new movies or TV shows. Maybe that’s because I’m a book lover. I also try a lot of fiction podcasts. But, like I said, I am more cautious and pickier online these days because generated content exhausts me to the point where, again, I say, fuck it, then just log off.

Perhaps if I’m logging off again, maybe others will start logging off too? Maybe other people will write, offline, enjoying their fantasies where no generative model can scrape their words. Maybe others will log off and then call that person they were always too busy for because social media is a full time job.

No, seriously, social media is a full time job, and now, since large language models are flooding social media, I’ve found myself sighing and, once again, saying fuck it and logging off and absorbing human media more, no matter how problematic it is.

I can’t adequately describe what I’m feeling. Maybe this is how the previous generations felt when the internet sprang onto the scene. Overwhelmed, tired, and just feeling powerless in a world that always wants to innovate without aiding.

Of course, thousands of Blind people disagree with me. They think large language models will be brilliant for the internet because we won’t have to navigate complicated webpages. We can have a machine fetch the content for us. Usually, I find the answers never fully satisfy me, so I end up browsing the internet anyway, going down deep fandom rabbit holes and much more.

Back to me logging off and consuming more. I don’t think I’m consuming. Others will disagree, but I believe I’m appreciating art. I’m leaving reviews on art I enjoy. I personally reach out to more writers to express how much I’ve enjoyed their story. It’s a vast difference from the sense of insurmountable boredom when I come across generated content. I know I can’t change the world, but I can do my part to make sure that these generators don’t get any part of my emotions. In fact, they won’t get feedback from me at all. Of course, it’s never about the act of creating for these generators, so they are probably not bothered by my silence, but I wonder how the internet will split if this keeps up.

Here’s my predictions. The internet will split into two factions. An alcove of artists creating and sharing and experiencing, vs. The information super highway where everything is there to consume, consume, consume! I know where I’m headed. It’s going to be my artist alcove with others. Because, like I said before, generated content sucks, and beyond boring.

Some small updates.

Enough about my thoughts, though! What am I up to?

1. I’m on the hunt for a producer to take my screenplays and fiction podcast scripts. I’ve completed a bunch of scripts lately but haven’t found a home for any of them yet.
2. I’m trying some romance audiobooks by Audible studios and really enjoying them!
3. I’m pitching two romance novellas I wrote last year. No bites yet but I’ve been doing a lot of pitching previous things I’ve written.
4. Creating more audio described content.
5. Writing Fanfiction. It’s private, and hidden, though. I just needed a space where I can write where my name isn’t attached to a thing.

I love Markdown. I love it so much that I’ve adapted my whole workflow around it! From writing fiction podcast scripts to drafting blog posts, it’s just pure plain text, and I love it because it’s so portable and universal.

I wanted to write Markdown manuscripts and then convert them to Shun format industry standard documents. In short, I’ve figured out how to do it, but it’s a very involved process. If just opening up Word or otherwise works for you, do that. Seriously, don’t try to adopt this workflow unless you really, really, love writing in Markdown as much as I do.

Because I’m a Windows user, the below is going to be Windows centric.

I write all my stuff in Markdown and then convert it to other formats using Pandoc. This way, my work is very portable, and I don’t have to transfer every single Macro to new computers. Text files are much smaller than document files so they don’t take up space in my cloud drives.

The below, though, will definitely take some time to set up. It requires you being comfortable with using the command line and downloading things from the internet and installing programs, as well as working with styles and editing styles in Microsoft Word.

JAWS tutorials for Microsoft Office are here

NVDA tutorials for Word are here

For the command line, we’re going to use PowerShell for this because it’s more versatile.

If you’d rather use templates for Word instead, Shun made templates and I made modern versions of his templates for Word

Let’s get started!

Downloading Pandoc.

Download Pandoc for your operating system and install it.

After you install Pandoc, restart your computer. Now, you should be good to go.

Now, we’re going to split this up into two sections. A DIY template that you create, that you can use anywhere, and a preconfigured script someone else made. The DIY method is good for those that don’t want to rely on third party developers.

DIY manuscript conversion.

This method requires a lot of setting up, but it’s going to be worth it in the end. You will only need to set this up once. After you set it up, you can just make copies of your reference document.

The below will convert your manuscript into Docx format. Everyone I know uses Docx so I haven’t figured out templates in LibreOffice yet.

This other tutorial has reference files for LibreOffice

First, get acquainted with Pandocs commands with this getting started page. All commands start with -Pandoc, and are usually one line for this tutorial.

The first thing we’re going to need to do is make a template. When exporting into a Word format, Pandoc references templates so it knows how to style your outputs.

It can’t reference any random template, though. It needs to reference a template based on its structure. This is why we need to make our own template.

Making your own Pandoc reference template.

After opening up powershell, navigate to where your Pandoc installation is or any directory where you want to store templates. To navigate to a directory, you’d do something like this,

CD C:/users\YourUSERNAME\downloads

Alternatively, you can open up a powershell window at any location from Windows explorer.

To open powershell at any location, navigate to the folder you want to store your templates and manuscripts in. It works best if everything is in one folder, but we’ll worry about that later.

In the address bar, type,

Powershell

And hit enter. No spaces should be between power, and shell.

Now that powershell is open where you want to have it, Let’s make a reference document.

Making a reference document.

To make a reference document, you’d type,

pandoc -o refdoc.docx --print-default-data-file reference.docx

To make a LibreOffice reference document,

pandoc -o refdoc.odt --print-default-data-file reference.odt

I don’t know how to edit styles in LibreOffice so the following is going to be for Microsoft Word users.

After your reference document is created, open up your reference document in Word.

Use this guide to edit the, first paragraph style, and the, body text style, styles so that the  line spacing is double, first line is indented 0.5 inches, and the font is 12 PT, Times New Roman.

After editing the styles, save your edited reference document.

Move, or copy, the edited reference document to the same folder as your manuscript.

Now you have all files where you need them, we’re going to convert Markdown to Shun Manuscript format.

With your manuscript all in one text file or Markdown file, use the below command to convert your manuscript.

pandoc -s ManuscriptName.md --reference-doc= refdoc.docx --output manuscript.docx

If you don’t want to specify a reference document every time, we need to make Pandoc use our modified reference template as the default template.

Changing default reference template for our DIY conversion.

Navigate to where your Pandoc is installed.

In the address bar, type, powershell, and press enter.

next, we make our reference document.

pandoc -o custom-reference.docx --print-default-data-file reference.docx

edit the styles like before, making sure to change the body text style, and the first paragraph style, to 12 PT font, Times New Roman, Double line spacing, with the first line indented 0.5 inches.

After all styles are edited, save and close your reference document.

Now, you won’t need to specify the reference document every time, so your command will look like this,

pandoc -s ManuscriptName.md --output manuscript.docx

Below, I’ll show you how to convert and merge multiple files with our modified reference template.

Merging multiple files with your DIY template.

The easiest way I’ve found of doing this is to put your custom reference document in the data directory so that Pandoc uses the document every time it converts to Docx.

Navigate to where your Pandoc is installed.

In the address bar, type, powershell, and press enter.

next, we make our reference document.

pandoc -o custom-reference.docx --print-default-data-file reference.docx

edit the styles like before, making sure to change the body text style, and the first paragraph style, to 12 PT font, Times New Roman, Double line spacing, with the first line indented 0.5 inches.

After all styles are edited, save and close your reference document.

Now you can merge multiple files without having to specify a reference document every time.

If you want to split your chapters up into separate files, you need to specify each input file name, in order, so that it will merge all the files into one document.

Let’s say you have a folder called Book. Inside of that folder, you have text files.

Make sure you specify each text file in the command. For example,

pandoc -s -o Book.docx ch1.md ch2.md ch3.md ch4.md ch5.md

Converting multiple files into Markdown.

Just in case you wanted to convert a directory of Docx files to Markdown, use the below command after navigating to the directory containing the files in power shell.

gci -r -i *.docx |foreach{$md=$_.directoryname+"\"+$_.basename+".md";pandoc -f docx --wrap=none -s $_.name -o $md}

The above will make Markdown versions of your Docx files. It won’t merge all of them though, only make an MD version of your Docx files in the folder.

Now, onto a script that will do all this for you!

Using a script.

This Pandoc script will do all the hard work for you!

First, download the latest script from this page.

To download the script, expand the, code, button, then click download as zip or download Master.

Extract the folder to a folder where you’ll remember it.

Open up powershell and then navigate to this folder, the unzipped script folder.

Alternatively, you can navigate there using Windows Explorer. Navigate to the folder and then type, powershell, in the address bar.

Inside this folder, you can make folders called work, or BookDraft, all one word, or anything you want. The simplest thing to do is just use the test folder to store your manuscripts and short stories.

Inside the test folder, you’ll find a short folder and long folder.

Go into each folder, open up each first MD file in notepad, and edit the YAML data at the top. You’ll only need to do this once. Change all contact information to your own contact information.

After you change your contact information and delete the sample text below the YAML data, save the documents and then close the files after deleting all the sample text below the YAML data.

Now, all you need is the below commands. You can even split your book up into separate documents and merge them all with one command.

All of the below commands will output your output files to your desktop.

To convert single files, you’d use the command below, making sure to tell Pandoc where your manuscript file is.

If you wrote everything in one long file, use the below command, replacing name’s as needed.

.\bin\md2short.ps1 -overwrite -modern -output $env:USERPROFILE/Desktop/Book.docx './test/long/Book.md'

If you created a short story, use the below command, replacing name’s as needed.

.\bin\md2short.ps1 -overwrite -modern -output $env:USERPROFILE/Desktop/ShortStory.docx './test/short/story.md'

With this script, you can merge all files in a folder in order. When saving files to a folder, or renaming files, make sure to save the files with sequential numbers. Like this,

001 intro.

002 Start.

003 END.

The important thing is to have the numbers at the beginning the same length, and make sure they are in sequential order.

After all chapters have name’s in sequential order, use the below code.

.\bin\md2long.ps1 -overwrite -modern -output $env:USERPROFILE/Desktop/Book.docx './test/long/*.md'

Some notes about writing manuscripts in Markdown.

Your chapters are going to be headings, so, if you want to make a new chapter heading, you’d just write, either,

# Chapter 1

Or,

## chapter two.

To automatically convert “dumb” quotes into “smart” quotes, as well as turning fake em-dashes – the kind made with two hyphens – into real em-dashes (—), and turning three periods (…) into ellipse, add the below to any of the above commands for outputting books and other documents,

--smart

I hope this helped someone! It can take a lot to set up, but when you do get it set up, you can just write in plain text, and convert it to a beautiful, formatted, document in seconds!

I have a confession to make. I used to devalue romance. I used to be among those that believed romance wasn’t actual literature. That changed, of course, and now, you could say I’m the biggest romance fan ever. At least, in my head anyway. I know there’s tons of other romance fans out there in RomanceLandia, but sometimes, when I’m reading a romance book, I sometimes think they were written especially for me, even though I’m, ironically, probably out of the target audience for most romance books.

I’m a gay, white, blind, male that still doesn’t have a stable partner. I don’t date anymore, instead, I write letters to prisoners. People tell me I’m old now  when I felt old at twelve. I can’t stand generational marketing. For example, this book has wonderful Gen alpha swordplay! I can’t stand the generational nicknames and identifiers, and, honestly, there’s just something about generational hype that really bugs me. I mean, really. Makes me grind my teeth and shake my fist at the sky yelling about marketing language. Maybe this is what it feels like to be old, older than my old soul age of sixteen? I don’t know and honestly, I think it’s all tied to ageism anyway.

I have a lot of thoughts about ageism, of course, about how we spit on the elders and think the younger people are supposed to automatically change the world. Perhaps I’m just not in the right time period, but I honestly can’t stand people putting an emphasis on age, of any age. Old, young, your twisted version of old and young, all of the above. This is probably why I’ve become the biggest fan of romance books, ever. Humans are timeless, no matter what generation they are in.

Back when I was younger, I devalued romance. The stories were predictable, I thought, so the stories didn’t hold as much value as other stories. I, of course, was wrong, but I’d like to stop and let you know the societal pressure I was under to think that way in the first place.

Perhaps it’s because romance is seen as women work, that it’s automatically of lesser value. I’m sure both cis women and Trans women are equally mocked in different ways for writing romance. Our society just doesn’t like women, of any kind, so when a genre used to be dominated by straight white women, well, misogyny can still happen to straight white women. They are not shielded from societies shortsightedness or unwillingness to listen.

I was constantly fed the notion of humans are predictable and shallow, and so stories about love and humans are just as vapid and meaningless because they are not imaginative. In fact, it echoes the anti-human thinking that goes on today with AI. In societies mind, beauty and love and, yes, even sex, are not worth it because these are all human things, and humans are flawed beyond reproach and should just die already.

I’ve written about my thoughts on AI so I don’t want to hash that out again, but when I gave romance a chance, that’s when my perceptions opened up. That’s when my understanding opened up.

After catching COVID-19, even though I took a billion steps to avoid it, I wanted to gaze into the hearts and minds of some of these authors. What better way to understand them then read their wish fulfillment, hopes, and dreams, in their romance novels. I was over the science fiction genre for a while. I wasn’t really in the mood to have something parotid back at me through a dystopian lens or some deep commentary about life and death and AI and more. My needs shifted. I wanted wish fulfillment more, not knowing that I’d run head first into understanding humans by reading their wishes, fantasies, and wish fulfillment.

There’re all kinds of subgenres in romance. There’s historical romance. There’s fantasy romance. There’s mystery romance and contemporary romance and more. All romance stories, though, have common threads, or conventions. The story must be about relationships. The story must have, either, a happily ever after ending, or a happy for now, ending.

If I knew how a book was going to end, I thought, unknowingly, what was the point of reading it?

On a whim, I tried romances by Black writers first because it’s good to read outside of my lived experience. One author I quickly gravitated to is an author I deeply adore today. Kennedy Ryan.

Kennedy wrote tons of books, but I got sucked in with the Grip series and the Hoops series. The Grip series especially spoke to me in a way no other romance series had at the time. It told me that it’s okay that we don’t know everything about injustices, the important thing is that we become better people than we were yesterday. It helped me understand what someone might desire from me, as a person. It helped me question what I really want out of human relationships. Do I just want understanding, or do I want to be with someone that will encourage me, and help me learn and listen more every day?

I soon devoured every book Kennedy Ryan ever wrote, and I’ll continue to devour her books. I also started branching out to other kinds of romances, like romances with Disabled characters. The next book I fell in love within RomanceLandia was Jeremiah, by Jayce Ellis.

As I devoured more romance books, I started to actively find books with Disabled characters in them, if only to see what people thought our happy endings could look like.

I felt touched in a way I couldn’t describe. Authors spoke to me through their romance books about love. These books might be predictable to some, but I’ve found a much deeper examination of my own desires as I continue to read romance books. Reading romance books helped me understand my needs as a Disabled person seeing partners or lifetime companions. Reading what makes these authors feel and wish helped me to understand that, sometimes, the world is imperfect. People make mistakes. People say the wrong things. People don’t always do the right thing, but it’s always good to stop and listen to someone’s else’s hopes and dreams because they will help you sharpen your own.

I’ve been in a romance bubble this past year and I don’t think it’s going to end any time soon. That’s not a bad thing though. The world is bad, sometimes. More times than not, these days, I want to enjoy someone else’s happiness. I want to enjoy someone’s wish fulfillment or tributes or winks and nods. I want to enjoy what makes an author feel sexy. I want to enjoy all the human elements I can enjoy while I’m alive, because it will help me listen more, and it will help me really assess what’s important in my loved ones lives.

So, with that being said, I guess I’ll end this by saying thank you, Kennedy Ryan, and thank you all other romance writers out there that help us listen through happy endings. Thank you for telling me that I’m not alone. Thank you for reminding me that, eventually, everybody has joy in their lives. Keep writing joy. Keep writing sex scenes. Keep writing wish fulfillment. Keep reminding quiet readers like me that it’s groovy to enjoy each other’s joy. Just, thank you, and keep reminding us of joy, even when things are fine.

Aside from writing a bunch of books and short stories, I also write fiction podcast scripts. Luckily, the fiction podcast space isn’t so rigid as other industries, but still, there’s a few conventions I stick to in order to make everybody happy.

I write all of my fiction podcast scripts in Fountain. It’s free, portable, literally, and can be converted to almost anything, even Word files.

Sidebar, [try the Audio Drama directory or the Fiction Podcast directory.

This isn’t going to be a guide on Fountain. The Fountain syntax is the best place to learn how to write in Fountain. This is a testimonial as to what I do after the writing process.

Because I’m blind, writing in plain text and then formatting it later is the best workflow. If you’re a visual learner, fountain isn’t the best thing for you. It’s plain text with special characters.

You can write text with any program, on any device, so why not take advantage of that portability?

The challenging bit comes in after I’ve written a fully-fledged script.

I write in LibreOffice and even Word with some special autocorrect keys set up. For example, if I type, BBL, it transforms into, “I’ll be back later.”

I’ve added a bunch of autocorrect entries to help with capitalization and dashes and similar, so, for example, if I type, EXT/, it transforms into EXT. LOCATION – TIME and it does it in all caps.

The script is the easy part. I just open my program of choice and start typing.

When I’m all done, I make sure to save it as a .fountain extension.

It’s the formatting and submitting process that’s the most time consuming, but even that can be streamlined a bit, especially in my case.

I don’t write in online editors like Google Docs because I’ve found it to be very slow and clunky, plus, it doesn’t have a robust autocorrect system the way Word and Office do. Their autocorrect system is very basic and most of the time doesn’t even work.

But Let’s get to the meat of this post, the formatting and conversion!

Formatting a script using Pandoc and other tools.

Even though Fountain is very portable, not every podcast producer I’ve worked with could open Fountain files or even work with Fountain files, so I needed a way to convert the Fountain file into Word format.

There’s a fantastic open source tool to convert Fountain into HTML and PDF but it doesn’t support converting to Docx format. Plus, even if Word can open PDF files, it just isn’t a solution for everybody. PDF doesn’t work well with screen readers unless tagged, and, this is just my personal opinion, it’s very clunky, bulky, and, ironically isn’t all that portable in my opinion. I like lightweight documents and lightweight workflows and PDF just doesn’t cut it for me.

That being said, if your producer wants a PDF file, Wrapped will be everything you need and you can stop reading!

If you need a way to convert Fountain into Word, Pandoc can do this with a custom interpreter.

First, you need to get Pandoc for your operating system and install it.

Pandoc can convert a whole bunch of things, so I’d encourage reading the user’s guide to Pandoc if you want to explore other capabilities.

Then, you need to download this custom interpreter for Pandoc to convert Fountain to Docx files.

If you don’t know how to download github repositories, expand the code, button, and then click on download as Zip.

Unzip the file, and then make sure to put your script into the unzipped folder.

Using Pandoc, navigate to where you unzipped the custom interpreter that also contains your script file.

Run this command, replacing the input and output file names as needed.

pandoc -f fountain.lua --reference-doc fountain-ref.docx sample.fountain -o sample.docx

One thing to know about the instructions, I don’t know why, but they didn’t work unless everything was on one line for me.

For example, the Windows code only works if you have it on one line, like this.

pandoc -f fountain.lua --reference-doc fountain-ref.docx sample.fountain -o sample.docx

That’s it! While it’s not as quick or fluid as sending over a Fountain file directly, this will make sure your scripts look fabulous while writing everything in plain text.

Let’s talk about how that Mr. Beast video is ableism.

On its face, the title sounds inspirational, right? 1,000 Blind People See For The First Time. I mean, who wouldn’t get all mushy and feel good about that. But, now with that video title, and with your feel good smile, let’s think about why you feel inspired that someone got rid of their disability.

Is it because you want those poor, helpless blind people, to experience the world the way you experience it? My question to you is, what is better about having vision? I mean, having vision is all you know, right? You don’t know what it’s like to live in a culture without vision. Do you automatically think your way of living is better than mine because you can see?

If you don’t think that, then why did you feel inspired when you saw that title?

To feel inspired, you have to believe that someone will finally get the chance to be fixed so they can experience the same world as you. To you, you probably believe we are missing something. You probably think my life isn’t complete. But it is, you see. It’s actually very rich!

Ask any one of my friends. They will introduce me with one of many variations, some of which include,

I know this funny blind guy.

I know this goofy guy, but he’s really sweet.

I know this cute white person, he’s really smart… etc.

The people in the video shouldn’t be criticized. While I wouldn’t want to erase my blindness completely, that was their choice, and their choice alone to cure themselves. Basically, you do you, fellow blind people, and I’ll continue to do me.

But just think about how this would sound if I said something like,

being gay sucks. You should cure your homosexuality.

being Black sucks. You should cure yourself of your blackness.

More importantly, let’s turn it on cis women.

Being a cis woman sucks. You should cure your genetics.

Now, let’s drill down to what that indirectly says.

You, as a sighted person, wanting everybody to be cured of the thing that makes us who we are is positioning you as the superior one. By parading the video around, you want us to believe that you are superior to us because you can see.

It’s all about moral high ground. By constantly gushing over the video of blind people curing themselves, you are psychologically positioning yourself to believe that your life will always be better than mine, while completely disregarding my happiness.

It keeps trying to convince everyone that you are morally superior to me, and every other Disabled person that exists.

As for the cure bit? Well, like I said, I personally wouldn’t want to be cured. I actually don’t want my blindness erased, because if it were erased, I’d miss out on some really wonderful blind culture.

But let’s say I did wanna be cured of my blindness. The only person that gets to make that choice is me. You don’t have the wisdom to dictate which world is better, the blindness world and the sighted world, because you know only one world. You don’t know what it’s like to be in the blind community, to go to conventions and bond over Braille codes and blindness tech and blindness jokes. That world is outside of your vision. I’m peaceful in my blindness world.

Sure, there are days when I am frustrated that I can’t drive like others can, but then I realize that traveling walkable cities and meeting kind people on the sidewalk is just as epic.

To my fellow Blind people,

It’s okay to be frustrated about your disability. It’s okay to be frustrated that you have to realize, again, that this world wasn’t built for you. You don’t need to bow down to an outsiders whims of who you are. You get to make that choice, alone, nobody else can, and should, dictate how they think you should live on this earth. That is ableism. Taking away our agency because they believe that our bodies are broken, when, sometimes, maybe it’s their perceptions that need fixing instead of our bodies.

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I’ve been thinking about the day I become out of touch with society. I’ve been thinking a lot about the day where I wouldn’t want AI tech things to progress the way they are progressing because I believe it’s worse than the status quo. Perhaps I’m out of touch with the AI progress everybody seems to love, already. So, where does that leave me? Am I already a luddite? Is that such a bad thing to be a luddite, if the progress seems to be less about innovation, and rather, about maximizing profits?

At the time I write this, I’ve lived through catching COVID-19, even though I took about a billion measures to avoid catching it. My age doesn’t really matter, because, well, as We’ve established, I’m already out of touch with the current AI enthusiasm.

It’s ironic, but when I was younger, I was the most enthusiastic person you could ever find about technology. I’d be the first to try something new, to tinker with it, to figure out how it worked. Now that I’m older, I guess I care more about the motive behind the technology more than about the particular technology itself. Recently, TTS and AI has gained new footholds in culture. AI is generating art and stories, and, even more audiobooks are being narrated by TTS instead of humans.

I don’t know where to even start because I’m just going to tell you right now. I don’t like where AI enthusiasm is headed. I don’t believe that this rush to usher in AI generated content is to improve our lives in any way. Perhaps I just don’t get it, but I struggle to comprehend how something like AI generated art, of any kind, will enhance our lives. Then again, I probably sound like the same exact people that whined about the growing popularity of cars and computers before I was born.

As I write this, TTS, text to speech, and, by extension, AI, Artificial Intelligence, is a buzzword. It’s something to get excited about. The reason we should all be excited is because it’s going to allow people to be productive like never before.

As far as I can tell, AI or even TTS wasn’t all that interesting until 2023. Sure, there have been some attempts in the past to make AI cool, but I guess 2023 is when people just decided it was cool to have AI grow and prosper.

As a blind man, I live with TTS every day. It’s on my computer. It’s all around my house. Perhaps that’s why I’m so underwhelmed by TTS audiobooks because I live with TTS every day. I know the speech synthesizers that publishers are using to create TTS generated audiobooks. It does continuously amuse me, though, when people say AI audiobooks instead of TTS audiobooks. When a synthesizer is reading a book, the technology isn’t doing anything, well, intelligent. It’s just interpreting the words it sees into speech. So, from here on out, I’ll say TTS audiobooks because that’s what these are. TTS audiobooks instead of AI audiobooks.

Currently, tech companies that are not publishers, and even some publishers, are dying to become publishers of TTS audiobooks. The hype is so strong that Apple even has a whole page dedicated to TTS audiobooks.

I couldn’t even muster up the energy to willingly try a TTS audiobook made by Apple. Of course, if there’s no other version, then I’ll just deal with it, but I haven’t willingly sought out a TTS generated audiobook by these companies and probably never will. My mind raced to the fabulous audiobook talent that’s going to be let go as a result of this push. Then again, the goal is to avoid paying humans. Instead of a race to devaluing artists, which is still a daily happening, it’s become a way for other people to devalue humans on top of artists.

Even today, AI tools are created on exploitation.

The prevailing thought will soon become, why should I pay a human? Why should I ensure that a human can eat and live, when I have a machine that will never unionize, that will never talk back, that will never strive for civil rights in my lifetime? Humans will soon become a hassle, because humans will become old technology with obsolete flesh and blood and caring hearts.

AI generated fiction is just as vapid to me. I read this children’s book created by AI, and I just don’t get the enthusiasm. I don’t understand the appreciation. I just don’t get it. I don’t understand what a machine can create in fiction work that’s better than humans?

Publishers also keep doing shady stuff with AI.

Interestingly enough, I do think AI generated art can allow for blind people like me to become a painter easier, but I keep coming back to an eventual confusion over art, and books, as well as fiction, that’s entirely created by AI.

TTS audiobooks are not new. With this enthusiasm for TTS audiobooks by tech companies, at least we’ll get some nonfiction and fiction titles that were never narrated before due to cost. But, again, what if the nonfiction book in question has a lot of charts and graphs? What if the names are in a unique dialect. A human would consult and check for that and work out how to read that chart or graph out loud.

I keep coming back to confusion over enthusiasm for AI generated fiction. There’s even a whole website dedicated to AI produced literature, as an example, with five star reviews of some of the titles. I guess if you’re looking for entertainment, there will be no shortage of it.

McDonalds fiction to maximize profits is almost here. It’s going to be productivity like no one has ever seen before and I just can’t get even a tiny bit excited about it.

I’m not alone. Plenty of audiobook narrators and readers have voiced their displeasure over TTS narrated audiobooks, and, as has been pointed out to me many times, it’s going to become even more a thing in the future so we all might as well get used to it. It’s not stopping anytime soon. Because it’s only going to increase, and not decrease, I was beyond please narrators are strategizing.

Many believe that this is the best thing to happen because, well, now, we can finally start to have a conversation about universal basic income. I don’t believe, for one second, that people are going to take universal basic income seriously because AI is taking their jobs away.

It’s not just universal basic income that has people excited. I’ve seen some argue that AI generated content can finally pave the way for people to break into an industry they couldn’t get into, because the technology will take all the hassle out of query letters, plotting, outlining, and summary writing. In fact, writers use AI to draft their outlines and literary agent query letters. I guess why I don’t have a problem with that is you’re using the AI to help you create your own work. The AI isn’t generating content for you and then you call it a day without human input, you’re just building something with the assistance of AI.

That being said, AI has it’s uses. Every day, we interact with some form of artificial intelligence. Every time you dictate text with your phone, that’s artificial intelligence. Every time you have a computer translate words for you, that’s artificial intelligence. If I’m perfectly fine with these things, why do I bulk at AI generated content if we’re already halfway there?

I guess, for me, it’s about what this current push for AI is supposed to do. Sure, AI can help disabled people be productive in ways that we would never have been productive before, like the dyslexic that used AI to make sure all his emails were spelled correctly, but for me, that’s just a small drop in the bucket to eventually justify using AI over disabled humans, and, then, we would be back to square one.

AI might not be best, now, but it continues to get better by the day. AI used to be terrible at chess. That changed as it became smarter. It’s going to continue to get smarter until, well, until it can impersonate a human.

The first narrators that are gonna be expunged or passed on is marginalized narrators, to boot. As companies continue to look for ways to cut costs and maximize profits, making an AI voice that doesn’t demand equal rights will be the cats meow for many in, and out, of the publishing industry.

Indie authors, and low income authors, though, will have more opportunities to get their work into multiple formats. Fiction podcasts are fabulous examples of content you can make on a budget, though, without using TTS voice actors.

On the accessibility side of this whole debate, I won’t lie, AI helps me navigate the web. Every time someone doesn’t label a button or describe an image, AI is there to guess at how to present the information to me. Still, when a human puts care and craft into making an accessible, and inclusive, experience, it’s a joy to have this inclusive experience! I feel things, good things, when I cycle through someone’s hard work to see thought put into crafting a design. I feel love when a human writes a tender scene in a romance novel. I feel joy when an author shows me their hope for the world through one of their uplifting stories. I like feeling these emotions, given to me by the human artists or writer or designer. With AI generated content, I feel, there will always be something missing, and, I guess, when you really come right out and say it, I’m afraid that I’m going to know what I’ve lost when consuming AI art or AI books.

As you can tell, I’m torn. Most importantly, I’m confused. Does caring about humans and their jobs mean I’m just out of touch with the cool hip kids that love AI generated content? Does the fact I enjoy LeVar Burton reading to me every week mean that I’m just not down with progress? Sure, someone could argue that someone could recreate LeVar Burton in AI, and I will never lose him, but, I fear if they did that, I fear that they will take away what LeVar Burton means to me, as a person, and someone I appreciate, even though he’ll never know I exist. If someone were to approach me after he passes away and says, I’ve created an AI of LeVar Burton, now you can never lose him, will that act alone make me stop caring about LeVar Burton because I’ll have a machine voice that will never die in my ear.

I’ve never really thought about appreciation until today. There’s a reason why I continue to read human narrated audiobooks over TTS audiobooks, and that reason boils down to appreciation. I love the way Ace Bentley describes tender scenes in his romance books. I love the way Jakobi Diem brings affectionate scenes to life in his narration. These are people I’ve never met, and, as I continue listening to more human narrated books, there will definitely be many more narrators I appreciate. I enjoy the feeling of appreciating others. It reminds me that we all have something to give each other without ever meeting anyone face to face.

While it’s true humans have to input things into TTS and AI to make the machine do things, there’s a deeper appreciation when I read a book written by a human or narrated by a human. I want to keep appreciating human content, and enjoying human content, because humans, in all our flaws and complications, make everything worth it, in the end.

It’s been a few years since I’ve started writing to prisoners.

as I’m comparing the letters I get from my friends inside prisons, to the messages I’ve received on a few dating sites, I’m appreciating letters far more than I initially thought.

I began writing to prisoners because I became very tired of the dating scene. No matter what dating app I try, or no matter what dating service I try to use, I’m always going to be at a disadvantage because of the disabilities, socially and technologically. Apps won’t be accessible. People won’t reveal aspects of themselves because they always just tell me to look at pictures or to send them pictures without really communicating via text. Websites won’t be designed with accessibility in mind, even having unlabeled edit fields and unlabeled buttons.

I decided to find an avenue where we wouldn’t be starting out with pictures. I figured that people inside prisons would be the least judgmental because we had a societal commonality, even if it wasn’t apparent. Society, as a whole, looks down on both the disabled and prisoners. While things are still getting better, the initial judgment will always still be there, influencing thoughts and making people have pre conceived notions about our worth and value.

Of course, I’m not naive. I know that inmates will want to see me eventually and will eventually want to talk to me on the phone and have video visits, but we’re still starting off with letters. For once, we’re starting off from the same place. They don’t have an advantage over me, and they can’t just send me back a quick one liner about my naked body, expecting a reply. With a letter, they’re forced to put more thought into the letter. Otherwise, the pen pal relationship will fizzle out faster than you can blink.

I’ve cultivated many long lasting relationships with my pen pals in prison. By the time we get to the phone call stage, we’re already established through stories and letters. We’re not starting off from a sea of unknown profile pictures and an awkward first meeting. We’re building textual chemistry end we’re building a connection through thoughts and questions. This, I can promise you, is way more awesome than it sounds.

Also, as a cheeky aside, writing to inmates is far cheaper than paying for dating websites. It’s not free, but I can guarantee you the amount you pay to email, or write to, inmates will be far cheaper than a subscription to a dating app that could go well over $100.

Whenever I’d go on dates, the dates would be a quick, hurried, want to meet at my place, your place, or a public place? I don’t know why people want to rush and get it over with and not slow down and talk to each other for a few weeks, a month, or more before going out, but I started to see dating as a giant waste of money. Between the subscription I was paying on the dating sites, and the cab rides to and from, and, in some cases, food and tickets, I’d end up spending $150 or more per date if you count the dating service subscription. Even after telling people, I was broke, very few offered to cover the cab rides or food or tickets. Plus, with me having disabilities, my energy would be completely whipped after the date, but mister date would be hot and Horney, leaving me feeling obligated and out of place when all I want to do after a date is sleep and ruminate on it the next day, perhaps over a keyboard or a phone call with one of my close friends.

Even though all the men would tell me how hot I was, I began to wonder if I’m too disabled for normal dating. I just couldn’t keep dating the normal way, trying out people as if they were interesting slot machines. Most aggravatingly, that date money could have been spent to pay my bills or get food.

I finally just decided to jump in and write to prisoners after closing my dating accounts. I don’t know where I heard about writing to inmates, I think I just stumbled upon it, watched some very interesting YouTube videos about writing to prisoners, and then I set off to try this new text based venture.

It’s been far more rewarding than I initially thought. Some relationships are friends. Some are deeper. All lasted for many years, and I don’t foresee this stopping anytime soon.

Of course, naturally, there’ve been people that just don’t click with me, or I don’t click with them, but that’s fine. Even as we part ways, our letters have been far more detailed than a simple, hey! On an app or website.

I’ve got friends inside walls from all walks of life. Trans men and women, straight men and women, non-binary people, the list is endless. I’ve talked on the phone and have visited, virtually, with many of them. Even so, the bulk of my correspondents have been through letter writing because of my very busy schedule.

I honestly wouldn’t trade these connections for an in person connection. Is it all sunshine and roses? No. It’s definitely not all sunshine and roses, but I’m getting so much education from these letters, it’s overshadowing any education I’ve learned online about social justice and the human condition.

Many have even said they’d be more than willing to keep in touch with me after they are released. Not all people want to keep in touch after they are released, and that’s perfectly fine. The point is, we’ve made an impact on each other, and that’s far more valuable education than I could have ever thought possible.

I’ll explain how I write to prisoners as a Blind man, but first, I asked one of my pen pals if he’d be willing to briefly talk about what he gets out of these letters. He eagerly said he’d love to share.

As a black man, Robert and I conversate every month. His letters are showing me that even though he might be white, and I am black, I can learn a lot from a white man! In all seriousness, it’s taught me about intersectionality and humans. At the end of the day, we can look past the racialism of society and learn to listen to each other. Listening is the best education in the world. We’re not the best allies to each other, but it’s not about perfectly dismantling injustices. As we understand each other, those injustices will topple, little by little. I always look forward to Robert’s letters every month.

How I write to prisoners as a blind man.

Because I use a screen reader, I do this a bit differently than most people.

Most people get a PO Box and just have the letters come through there. I took a different route with sending and receiving mail.

The first step was to find a prisoner to write to. The most accessible, for me, has been Write a Prisoner.

The online services to send emails to prisoners are hit and miss when it comes to accessibility, so you can’t be a beginning screen reader user wanting to do this. you’ll need to take some time and really brush up on your screen reader training to make some of these solutions work for you.

Prisoners can email you, and that’s the most accessible way to receive messages. JPay and Corrlinks are pretty accessible, with a few hiccups. Some buttons and edit fields are not labeled, but you can kind of guess what the buttons and links do after looking at the properly labeled elements around them. Securus eMessaging isn’t very accessible on the desktop, yet. I hope that will change soon. The Securus mobile apps are better than expected but still not perfect.

When it comes to writing letters through the mail, I use a service called JMail. JMail will print and ship your letter for you if the inmate can’t email.

For receiving mail, I use US Global Mail, which is a service that scans all your snail mail and sends you a PDF of scanned items upon request. You can deposit paper checks remotely, have mail forwarded if desired, and more. I use it for all my mail needs and haven’t touched snail mail in years. It can also handle and forward packages, as well.

Once I get letters in my mailbox on US Global, I open the PDF’s in Google Docs. Google automatically does OCR on the document, and I just read it as if it were an email.

Phone calls vary by prison to prison, so ask your pen pal how they can call you. You can’t call them. Video visits also vary by prison to prison.

There are large portions of the services that could be easier to use but I don’t know if accessibility will ever be a priority for these technology companies. All the same, though,

I write to prisoners, ultimately, because it’s a far better way to get to know somebody than just trying out a bunch of dating apps. It’s broadened my horizons, and I’ve also listened to some really heartbreaking, but educational, stories. I encourage you to try it. You might be surprised at the connections you make.

If you’d like to use my affiliate code to make a US Global Mail account, use the following code.

ROBERT-KZVSQ6NE.VNE

Sometimes, the internet surprises me. While I typically find people that use social media unquestionably toxic, sometimes, the internet surprises me with something genuinely fun.

I saw a post floating around that read, here’s seven books to get to know be by. The point is to have the books reveal aspects of someone’s personality while revealing other things about the person through, well, reading the books.

It looked genuinely fun. This, more than anything, shocked me. I’ve written, numerous times before, about how I hate social media and believe people should learn how to email or text message someone again. All the same, this looked fun, so I figured I’d make a blog post detailing books to get to know me by.

All of the below books reveal some aspect of how I think and feel. I’m not telling you which bits are in which book, that would be too easy!

Aside from the books by me and short stories by me, the below books reveal a lot about me.

The list of books.

Sick Kids in Love

Hannah Moskowitz (Author)

Isabel has one rule: no dating.
It’s easier–
It’s safer–
It’s better–
–for the other person.
She’s got issues. She’s got secrets. She’s got rheumatoid arthritis.
But then she meets another sick kid.
He’s got a chronic illness Isabel’s never heard of, something she can’t even pronounce. He understands what it means to be sick. He understands her more than her healthy friends. He understands her more than her own father who’s a doctor.
He’s gorgeous, fun, and foul-mouthed. And totally into her.
Isabel has one rule: no dating.
It’s complicated–
It’s dangerous–
It’s never felt better–
–to consider breaking that rule for him.

The Schwa by Neal Shusterman.

They say his clothes blend into the background, no matter where he stands. They say a lot of things about the Schwa, but one thing’s for sure: no one ever noticed him. Except me. My name is Antsy Bonano-and I was the one who realized the Schwa was “functionally invisible” and used him to make some big bucks. But I was also the one who caused him more grief than a friend should. So if you all just shut up and listen, I’ll tell you everything there is to know about the Schwa, from how he got his name, to what really happened with his mom. I’ll spill everything. Unless, of course, “the Schwa Effect” wipes him out of my brain before I’m done…

Bruiser by Neal Shusterman.

TENNYSON: 
Don’t get me started on The Bruiser. He was voted “Most Likely to Get the Death Penalty” by the entire school. He’s the kid no one knows, no one talks to, and everyone hears disturbing rumors about. So why is my sister, Brontë dating him? One of these days she’s going to take in the wrong stray dog, and it’s not going to end well.
BRONTË:
My brother has no right to talk about Brewster that way — no right to threaten him. There’s a reason why Brewster can’t have friends — why he can’t care about too many people.  Because when he cares about you, things start to happen. Impossible things that can’t be explained. I know because they’re happening to me.
BREWSTER:
Stealer of screams and thief of anguish,  I am a criminal, but you can’t see it, blinded by your own relief as my body becomes a battlefield in a war that can’t be won.  Will I be the bullet that ends your pain, or will you end mine?
Award-winning author Neal Shusterman has crafted a chilling and unforgettable novel about the power of unconditional friendship, the complex gear work of a family, and the sacrifices we endure for the people we love.

Shooter by Walter Dean Myers.

Cameron: “Deep inside, you know that whoever gets up in your face gets there because he knows you’re nothing, and he knows that you know it too.”
Carla: “What I’m trying to do is to get by, not even get over, just get by.”
Leonard: “I have bought a gaw-juss weapon. It lies beneath my bed like a secret lover, quiet, powerful, waiting to work its magic.”
Statement of Fact: 17-year-old white male found dead in the aftermath of a shooting incident at Madison High School in Harrison County.
Conclusion: Death by self-inflicted wound.

Sleeping Freshman Never Lie by David Lubar.

Starting high school is never easy. Seniors take your lunch money. Girls you’ve known forever are suddenly beautiful and unattainable. And you can never get enough sleep. Could there be a worse time for Scott’s mother to announce she’s pregnant? Scott decides high school would be a lot less overwhelming if it came with a survival manual, so he begins to write down tips for his new sibling. Meanwhile, he’s trying his best to capture the attention of Julia, the freshman goddess. In the process, Scott manages to become involved in nearly everything the school has to offer. So while he tries to find his place in the confusing world of high school, win Julia’s heart, and keep his sanity, Scott will be recording all the details for his sibling’s—and your—enjoyment.

The Autumn Balloon by Kenny Porpora

Every autumn, Kenny Porpora would watch his heartbroken mother scribble messages on balloons and release them into the sky above Long Island, one for each family member they’d lost to addiction. As the number of balloons grew, his mother fell deeper into alcoholism, drinking away her sorrows every night in front of the television, where her love of Regis Philbin provided a respite from the sadness around her.
When their house was foreclosed upon, Kenny’s mother absconded with him and his beloved dog and fled for the Arizona desert, joining her heroin-addicted brother on a quixotic search for a better life. What followed was an outlaw adolescence spent in constant upheaval surrounded by bizarre characters and drug-addicted souls.
In the wake of unspeakable loss, Kenny convinced a college to take a chance on him, and turned to the mentors, writers, and poets he found to rebuild the family he lost, and eventually graduated from the Ivy League with a new life.
Porpora’s memoir is the story of a deeply dysfunctional but loving family, and follows his life from the chaos of his youth to his triumphs in the Ivy League. At times darkly comic, at times elegiac, The Autumn Balloon is a beautifully written testament to the irreplaceable bonds of family, even under the most trying circumstances, and one that marks the debut of an exciting new writer.

The Misfits by James Howe.

Kids who get called the worst names oftentimes find each other. That’s how it was with us. Skeezie Tookis and Addie Carle and Joe Bunch and me. We call ourselves the Gang of Five, but there are only four of us. We do it to keep people on their toes. Make ’em wonder. Or maybe we do it because we figure that there’s one more kid out there who’s going to need a gang to be a part of. A misfit, like us.
Skeezie, Addie, Joe, and Bobby—they’ve been friends forever. They laugh together, have lunch together, and get together once a week at the Candy Kitchen to eat ice cream and talk about important issues. Life isn’t always fair, but at least they have each other—and all they really want to do is survive the seventh grade.
That turns out to be more of a challenge than any of them had anticipated. Starting with Addie’s refusal to say the Pledge of Allegiance and her insistence on creating a new political party to run for student council, the Gang of Five is in for the ride of their lives. Along the way they will learn about politics and popularity, love and loss, and what it means to be a misfit. After years of getting by, they are given the chance to stand up and be seen—not as the one-word jokes their classmates have tried to reduce them to, but as the full, complicated human beings they are just beginning to discover they truly are.

Bunnicula: A Rabbit-Tale of Mystery.

BEWARE THE HARE! 
Is he or isn’t he a vampire? 
Before it’s too late, Harold the dog and Chester the cat must find out the truth about the newest pet in the Monroe household: a suspicious-looking bunny with unusual habits…and fangs!

Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli.

Sixteen-year-old and not-so-openly gay Simon Spier prefers to save his drama for the school musical. But when an email falls into the wrong hands, his secret is at risk of being thrust into the spotlight. Now change-averse Simon has to find a way to step out of his comfort zone before he’s pushed out—without alienating his friends, compromising himself, or fumbling a shot at happiness with the most confusing, adorable guy he’s never met.

The Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket.

In the tradition of great storytellers, from Dickens to Dahl, comes an exquisitely dark comedy that is both literary and irreverent, hilarious and deftly crafted. Never before has a tale of three likeable and unfortunate children been quite so enchanting, or quite so uproariously unhappy. 
Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire are intelligent children. They are charming, and resourceful, and have pleasant facial features. Unfortunately, they are exceptionally unlucky.
In the first two books alone, the three youngsters encounter a greedy and repulsive villain, itchy clothing, a disastrous fire, a plot to steal their fortune, a lumpy bed, a deadly serpent, a large brass reading lamp, a long knife, and a terrible odor.

Airhead by Meg Cabot.

No one cares what’s inside.
EM WATTS IS GONE.
Emerson Watts didn’t even want to go to the new SoHo Stark Megastore grand opening. But someone needed to look out for her sister Frida, whose crush, British heartthrob Gabriel Luna, would be singing and signing autographs there—along with the newly appointed Face of Stark, teen supermodel sensation Nikki Howard.
How was Em to know that disaster would strike, changing her—and life as she’d known it—forever? One devastating accident later, and Em Watts, always the tomboy, never the party princess, is no longer herself. Literally.
Now getting her best friend Christopher to notice that she’s actually a girl is the least of Em’s problems.
But what Em’s pretty sure she’ll never be able to accept might just turn out to be the one thing that’s going to make her dream come true.
NIKKI HOWARD IS HERE TO STAY
It’s what’s outside that matters.

Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs.

This is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her psychiatrist, a dead-ringer for Santa and a lunatic in the bargain. Suddenly, at age twelve, Augusten Burroughs found himself living in a dilapidated Victorian in perfect squalor. The doctor’s bizarre family, a few patients, and a pedophile living in the backyard shed completed the tableau. Here, there were no rules, there was no school. The Christmas tree stayed up until summer, and Valium was eaten like Pez. And when things got dull, there was always the vintage electroshock therapy machine under the stairs. It is at turns foul and harrowing, compelling and maniacally funny, but above all, it chronicles an ordinary boy’s survival under the most extraordinary circumstances.

Real Life by Brandon Taylor.

Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends–some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community.

I wrote audio description for a wide array of media.

]The Audio Description Network Alliance captured some of my portfolio,](https://theadna.org/robert-kingett-writer/) but I primarily worked with Social Audio Description but the below can serve as a portfolio of past AD highlights.

Netflix.

1. Fearless
2. “Tiffany Haddish Presents: They Ready Season 2”
3. “Brian Regan: On the Rocks”
4. “Adventure Beasts”

NewDay trailers

I wrote the audio description scripts for the below trailers.

Fireburn the Documentary (2.5 minutes). Written by Robert Kingett, edited by Cheryl Green, and narrated by Barbara. Audio edited by Cheryl Green.

My Dear Children (2.5 minutes). Written by Robert Kingett. Edited and narrated by Cheryl Green. Audio edited by Cheryl.

The Shrimp (3 minutes). Written by Robert Kingett. Edited by Kensuke. Narrated by Kaitlin Walsh. Audio edited by Kensuke.

Tender (1 minute). Written by Robert Kingett. Edited by Cheryl Green. Narrated by Miss Star Amerasu. Audio edited by Kensuke Nakamura.

Sins Invalid (2.75 minutes). Written by Robert Kingett and Cheryl Green. QC by Nefertiti Matos Olivares. Narrated by Nefertiti Matos Olivares. Audio edited by Thomas Reid.

Whenever I see writers talking about publishing, they always seem to lay out two pathways. Consistently, the prevailing wisdom in publishing is that there are only two pathways and nothing else. Either, you go traditional publishing, or you self-publish. Obviously, there’s more than one way to have a literary agent, and I’d like to highlight a publishing avenue nobody is talking about with an agent.

This is especially on my mind today because, for now, these two publishers can’t consolidate, yet. I’m sure bigger publishers will consolidate in the future.

First, Let’s back up and examine some incorrect assumptions writers have about literary agents. The most common one I hear is that agents are gatekeepers. It’s better to think of literary agents as author advocates, not gatekeepers. Agents can fight for you to get more money. That’s their job, after all, is to sell your book, and make sure you’re getting the rates you deserve. If they’re not advocating for you, then they are just not a good literary agent, period.

While it’s true that an agent is supposed to sell your book to an editor, there’s a whole lot more things agents do, however, from contract negotiation to keeping track of your royalties, to acting as your literary contact for blurbs. You and your agent are a team. The better you do in your career, the more money they make in return. The both of you are meant to be a team and this includes working together on planning places to submit.

Even though agents will have their contacts already, it doesn’t hurt to keep a spreadsheet of smaller, independent publishers to try. If they’re an amazing literary agent, they won’t have contacts in just the big publishers. They’ll have a roster of contacts at indie, or independent, publishers as well.

There’s a publishing avenue that I haven’t seen getting talked about before, but it’s an avenue that could benefit a lot of writers. You can still have a literary agent and publish with a small, or indie, press.

An indie, or small, press is usually exactly what it says in the term, small press. Independent presses are publishers that have a very small team, and not a lot of budgeting to toss at you or your agent, but indie publishers can be a fabulous way to develop some very strong networking ties in the future.

Independent presses won’t have the marketing budget bigger publishers have. Some won’t have any marketing budget at all. Independent presses, though, will still edit your book, still design the cover for you, and still provide sensitivity readers if needed all for free. You just have to meet deadlines and turn in the product you promised, just like with bigger publishers.

Because independent presses don’t make a lot of money, your advances won’t be very high. In most cases, you won’t get an advance. My agent has advocated for an advance every time I’ve worked with a small publisher, though, so they can still give out advances, just don’t expect the advances to be equal to the bigger publishers.

Even though independent presses might not have the marketing budgets found at bigger publishers, there’s a lot of other benefits working with a small or indie press.

One of the biggest benefits is an ongoing relationship. People that usually run small presses love writers like you, so they’d keep you in mind for possible editing work or sensitivity reading work. In fact, one of the publishers I’ve published with hired me as a sensitivity reader several times after publishing books by me.

Another benefit is that you get the chance to have more control. While they’ll still design the cover and edit your book and distribute the book, you get more opportunities to have an input on how you want your cover, royalty statements, and more. Your agent will also have a much easier time communicating with an independent press because they are a small team so don’t get shuffled around as much.

You have publishing professionals ready to answer questions. I’m sure You’ve heard the expression small but mighty? Indie presses are a fabulous resource to try some new books and some new authors as well. More importantly, though, it gives you the opportunity of working with a skilled professional team without having to do everything yourself and it gives your agent the chance to build their lists while you work with a team to get your book published.

Because indie presses are a small team, they’d be more than happy to slow down and walk you through publishing matters. They’re also more than willing to promote you on their social media accounts because they work with fewer authors.

Literary agents won’t make as much money submitting to indie publishers, but they will still be more than willing to be what they signed up for, to sell your book and to be your advocate.

Even though you do get to have more control, the best thing about indie publishers is that they work with you to publish your book, so you don’t have to publish on your own.

It’s important that your agent be present for all meetings, even if the editor seems friendly. After all, they are still a publisher, and you wouldn’t want to be caught off guard by an addition to a contract or similar. You also want the best deal for your book. An agent is your advocate. They don’t work for the publisher, the agent works for you.

Before going on submission with your book, consider telling your agent about some independent presses you’d like them to pitch. You don’t have to just aim for the bigger publishers, nor do you have to self-publish or give up your agent. Small publishers are a fabulous alternative for you and your agent. don’t discount them because they are independent publishers.

Below, you’ll find links that can help find independent publishers.

Publisher directories.

• Agent Query’s list of indie publishers.
• Query Tracker list of publishers.
  *Submission grinder finds magazines and publishers.
• Indie publishers from poets and writers, always updating.
• Directory from Publishers Archive.

This is a post just to get all the subscription links working.

Before I worked in the audio description industry and joined an audio description collective, I consumed audio description daily.

For those not familiar with audio description, it’s painting a picture with words for those that are unable to look at a screen, including Blind and visually impaired people.

There are many samples you can watch to get a sense of how audio description works. It’s painting a picture between natural pauses in the soundtrack of a production. It’s also great for podcasts and radio listeners, too. Audio description can benefit so many people, including sighted people that are unable to look at a screen because they are busy or because they are listening to an audio only podcast.

Audio description is very different from closed captioning. It’s an art as well as a science. It isn’t just about interpreting what someone sees, it’s crafting a visual interpretation to go along with the ebb and flow of the scene as well as the whole production. Up until now, Blind and visually impaired people rarely had opportunities to shape and craft audio description. That’s changing.

Blind and visually impaired people are audio description narrators, engineers, Quality Control specialists, people that are basically script editors that make sure the script makes sense to the intended audience, and writers. Blind and visually impaired people are getting involved in the making of audio description. I’m here to talk about some tips I’ve learned as a Blind audio description writer.

For a brief rundown of my audio description work, check out my work with Social Audio Description or see my work on other films and TV shows including those found on popular streaming services.

My process for writing audio description is very involved. I first watch the production several times taking copious amounts of notes on sounds I hear as well as key sounds conveyed by the production. Key sounds could include music tempo, noticeable background sounds, the cadence of the music for a particular scene, and more. If a script is available, I read the full script before watching the production.

I take down timestamps and other key factors into a notepad. I then pull from a diverse roster of assistants I handpicked for this particular task. These people are different races, genders, sexualities, and otherwise. It’s important for me to get at least four differing perspectives on a scene or production. I’ll sometimes use Aira when none of my assistants are available, but I lean on my assistants first. They know me better. They know, generally, what I’m looking for and they have a more general idea of how I’m going to ask the dozens upon dozens of questions I’ve prepared ahead of time.

I ask my assistants these questions I’ve crafted based on the sounds I hear, the accents I hear, the background noises I hear, and otherwise. I don’t let just any random person be my audio description assistant. I want my audio description assistants to have some key skills in place before I begin.

Some of my criteria for audio description assistants are,

They have to read a lot. This helps with explaining what they mean if something is unclear. They don’t need to be writers in order to internalize how to drill down and describe a scene. As people read books, they pick up phrases and that helps them expand upon concepts and descriptions.

They need to know film terms. I like using film terms in my audio description and I want someone that knows what a cut is, and I want someone that knows what a fade in is versus a cut to a scene.

They need to work in the fashion industry or at least love fashion. I want someone that can tell me the difference between a floral print dress versus a knee-high skirt.

For syncing up videos, I use Zoom’s share feature. I use Media Player Classic to get timestamps for videos. If MPC isn’t working for any reason, I will switch to VLC Media Player.

I write my scripts in Google Docs or Microsoft Word with timecodes.

After all the questions are answered to my satisfaction, I’ll sometimes call Aira if I want to have an outside opinion, but usually, my team at Social Audio Description is more than willing to jump in to be that one outside pair of eyes, to ensure my notes align with someone that isn’t close to the production.

My team at Social Audio Description is also more than willing to be my audio description assistants for SADC projects when my usual roster is in short supply.

After all notes are complete, I then just write the audio description script. That’s it. There’s nothing more to it. My writing background helps a lot with this task. It sure does come in handy when I need to reach for a verb or an adjective that’s one syllable.

Even though my writing background helps me immensely with this task there are several things I’ve had to learn as an audio description writer. I’d like to lay down some tips and tricks I’ve learned in the hopes that these tips and tricks help you in the future.

Read your audio description script out loud.

I’ve done this a few times before sending it off to the narrator. I’ve read my own scripts out loud to myself several times to ensure the timing fits.

Sometimes, one word is better than two.

If possible, and if you’re crunched for time, one word that appears to be a longer word might fit better than the two shorter words you were initially going for.

Don’t try to imagine your narrator.

When I was starting out, I’d keep trying to envision the narrator before writing. I’d imagine a narrator’s voice before even beginning to write and that left me thinking I should write less because I believed my imaginary narrator would speak slowly. Try not to worry about the narrator. It isn’t your job to worry about how the narrator will sound. Be cognizant of the complicated words you’re giving them, but they have their own part to play. You should write to your satisfaction first. If adjustments need to be made later based on the narrator, that’s far easier to do than adding to your script because you were imagining a narrator and not writing enough.

Don’t be afraid to use a thesaurus.

I use many tools at my disposal. I have a Word of the Day alert sent to me every morning through my smart speakers. My biggest tool when reaching for a word is an online tool called WordHippo. It helps in my fiction writing too. WordHippo takes some getting used to with a screen reader but it’s well worth it. I love this tool and use it daily to craft my writing.

My audio description is a little bit more literary than most, but that’s okay. My voice is my own voice, and I think that’s perfectly fine. I have my own writing style and that’s perfectly fine. This brings me to my last tip.

Don’t try to hide your writing voice.

People will try to tell you that audio description shouldn’t be novelized or subjective. Films and other kinds of art will never be objective, so why should you try and hide your writing voice? Of course, audio description isn’t a novel, but don’t be afraid to inject some of your personality into your audio description scripts. If you want to novelize by using adjectives like beseechingly, angrily, furiously, ghastly, go for it. Your goal isn’t to please everybody. your goal is to provide audio description that’s true to you. You’re providing a service, yes, but your script is your script, and people are free to like it or hate it. Diversity in audio description is never a bad thing. Obviously, remember who you’re providing a service for, though. This service isn’t for you exclusively. It’s for your Blind and visually impaired audience but you can make your scripts your own way. People are free to have their beloved audio description writers and their most hated. That’s what advances conversations. Advancing dialog is always a good thing.

Before I begin, I’m going to be linking to a lot of books, so make sure you have the library extension installed! It will help you save your wallet and find these books at libraries near you.

Sometimes, a tragic event can leave you evaluating your whole presence on this earth. Unfortunately, after almost three years of COVID free life, I contracted COVID—19.

I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy! The short version is that I’m coming around, with a lot of support and members of my Found Family watching over me.

While I was in quarantine, it gave me a lot of time to look back at the previous fiction I’ve written and really try to determine the kind of fiction I want to write.

For the longest time, I’ve been avoiding romance because I didn’t believe I could write romance. I didn’t think I’d do well in romance. But, after a closer examination by my beta readers, romance seems to be the genre I’m just naturally comfortable with.

It’s ironic, but I didn’t read a lot of romance. I read a lot of YA which had a romance element in it, but I didn’t read anything in the romance genre hardly. So, I figured the best thing to do would be to try some romance.

I found many M/M titles that captured my interest, but I wanted to try some minority romance writers. I started off by reading this audiobook roundup of romance titles.

One author I seem to be enjoying a lot is Kennedy Ryan. Her Grip series )alternative link Grip series on Audible) snagged me from the moment I finished, Flow.

I have yet to try her Hoops series, but I’ll get there. I first want to explore some romance books featuring Disabled characters. Speaking of Disabled characters,

Back in 2018, I published my first romance story called A Deserving Conference. It could be classified as dark romance, but it does have a HFN ending. Happy for now.

I’ve taken A Deserving Conference and I am now expanding it. I’m also taking Pointy Chances, found in Community of Magic Pens, and expanding that as well into its own book.

As I continue to read more romance, I’m noticing that not many romance books feature Blind characters, let alone disabled characters. It’s going to be especially challenging for me because I’m actually very new to the genre and don’t particularly like writing sex scenes due to my own trauma, but I hope that you’ll be willing to come along this journey with me.

If you’d like to support my work in the meantime, you can donate to me in a variety of ways. I’d also encourage you to sign up to my mailing list or join my street team.

Thanks for reading! Back to feeling lovely with all my book boyfriends!

A type of access in the publishing industry began swimming around my brain for the past week and I wanted to highlight why there should be more of it.

It began when I was recommending a book to a sighted friend. They wanted some book recommendations. I recommended some books, they tried the books, then they reported back,

“These were hard for me to read because of my reading struggles.”

I suggested audio books, but the words used were still too complex. I began looking for a plain language version of the book but couldn’t find any.

Plain language writing is a writing practice that broadens readership. When content creators write in plain language, a variety of ages, education levels, and disabilities can understand your content.

People that are also learning English as a second language can benefit from a plain language version of your books.

Even though there are children’s books that are already in plain language by default, making a plain language version of your adult book will allow a broader readership to enjoy your work.

Plain language can also help in time crunches. In some cases, people might be working all day and might not have the mental strength to process your writing.

People might not have the time to read lengthy sentences or define hard words.

Sadly, I wasn’t able to find a lot of plain language versions of books. Alice Wong, a fellow disabled writer, was the only writer I could find offering plain language versions of books.

Audio books are not for everybody. People could have auditory processing troubles. People could have other disabilities that prevent them from listening to books.

Publishers can drastically increase readership if they offer plain language versions of their titles.

If you’re a traditionally published author and you want publishers to consider making a plain language version of your book, talk to your agent about putting that in the contract. Access is love!

If you’re a self-published author or hybrid author, you’d have to hire a freelance plain language writer. I wasn’t able to find any for creative writing.

Below, you can find examples of plain language versions of books.

Plain language books.

• Year of the Tiger
• Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century

The below comic was a collaboration with A Day in the Life of a PWD, Person With a Disability.

They created the comic. I just provided the frame ideas and dialog.

Read the comic below or read the comic on Facebook.

Comic description.

COMIC STRIP

A Day in the Life of a PWD, Person With a Disability

Frame 1:

A blind man who uses a white cane is sitting in a living room with three friends. MAN: Hey, could someone pass me some chips?

Frame 2:

FRIEND: Sure, man, here ya go

The friend tosses a bag of chips across the room. It sails past the man’s head. The other two friends look stunned.

Frame 3:

FRIEND: Aw, man! Sorry. Sometimes I forget you’re blind

Exasperated, the man rolls his eyes, and the other two stare at the friend in awkward silence

This originally appeared in Bold Blind Beauty in June 2020. The website appears to have shut down so I am printing this essay here.

Born A Miracle

I’ve always been somewhat of a miracle baby, or person, I guess you could say now. I fully embrace it, though, and yes, even the inspirational label that gets placed on me sometimes. I embrace it all because I just simply don’t have time to quibble over a slightly incorrect label.

My miracle journey started in 1989 where I was a premature baby. It’s so wild, because my birth certificate says six ounces. I was born in September. I have no idea when I was actually supposed to be born, but I came out defying all odds from the beginning.

I was born with Retinopathy of prematurity (ROP), as well as cerebral palsy. I wasn’t supposed to walk. I wasn’t supposed to talk either. My mobility was supposed to be very limited throughout my whole life. And, to a certain extent, that’s true now that I’m older, but back then, I did walk, and I did talk. I overcame so much at such a young age. I still had communication issues though. I stammered badly as a kid and still do. Which, ironically, is why I enjoy and embrace writing so feverishly.

On His Terms

I was born in New York but grew up in Saint Augustine FL. I attended the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind and that’s how my path to adaptive technology and accessibility consulting came to be, but more on that later. I’m probably one of the very few kids that actively refused mainstream school. I rejected it firmly. I hated the thought of attending a mainstream school. I knew I was getting the adaptive technology and mobility training that would help me later on in life. I didn’t want to waste my time advocating for everything under the sun. I knew that advocacy would come later, certainly, in college, so I wanted my high school to be as painless and as inclusive to my visual impairment as humanly possible and I just didn’t see that in a mainstream school.

I knew that society saw me as another worldly being that wasn’t worth nurturing as a disabled person, so I perceived mainstream school to just be an academic hassle. It probably would have done wonders for my social life, but I didn’t care about having an active social life when I was younger. I also didn’t want to be around sighted people unless it was on my own terms because, I believed, that my academics would suffer because I’d be trying to develop social justifications. I thought my energy would be wiped because I’d have to constantly demonstrate to sighted people that I’m worthy of existing and taken seriously. At a blind school, disabilities didn’t factor into my acceptance so I could focus on my education without worrying about social norms or fitting in.

Another reason why a big part of that unwillingness to fight for a mainstream education was so strong is because I was getting a very accessible education. I also was just trying to get through the day, and to my eventual long-term goal of becoming influential. Even if it was silent influence, I wanted to actively chip away at the social barriers disabled people face on a daily basis.

From Scrapper To Success

My home life wasn’t that great. I was abused, both physically, mentally, emotionally, and otherwise. My mother, who was a single parent, didn’t know how to deal with her own daemons so she took them out on me. She was a heavy drinker and, yes, there would be beatings. I often went hungry, so I absolutely empathize with someone when they tell people they don’t know what real hunger feels like. People will never fully grasp it, I realized, so I just had to survive. Get out. Become as successful as I could possibly be and hope I make a small difference in the world, even if it’s educating someone about blindness or starts a chain reaction that makes things more accessible for many in my generation and beyond.

I developed a strong sense of advocacy in my teen years. I’ve never been good at giving a punchy media bite that goes viral or gets people talking. I knew I’d never be in the spotlight however, I knew my strength was in planning and strategic implementations. Oh, and trickle-down advocacy—chain reaction advocacy, as I call it.

I’m very career-driven, and very focused, which is probably why I’m still single. I’m very proudly gay and or queer. I use those words interchangeably to describe my sexuality. I’m definitely not bisexual though, I’m very much gay. But, often, the men I’m attracted to are sighted and have no idea how to keep up with my career drive. That’s something that will, eventually, slow down I’m sure as I get even older, but for now, I’m very focused. I find the idea of romance and love is just something that I will find when it finds me, and grabs hold of me. That’s ironic because I’m an extremely romantic person. I’m very empathetic but extremely strong, personality-wise. I guess you could say I’m a mashup of imperfections that changes people’s lives in small ways.

The Path To Journalism

My advocacy started when I created the first-ever newspaper for the blind at FSDB. That proved to me that I could give people chances and opportunities if I just kept being persistent. As a result, well, I’m Very forward-thinking and I’m a proud feminist and trans ally. I knew I had the power to change lives through journalism and fiction, so I began writing. Fiction, advocacy journeys, telling people’s stories. I find that very few people have media literacy skills. I read, constantly. I even read mainstream news everybody likes to rag on so much, but again, very few people just simply don’t know how the media works in general, which is why I don’t get into small fights online about mainstream media and agendas and biases and otherwise. It’s all trite ignorance and a complete waste of my time.

My writing eventually created the Accessible Netflix Project, which actually got Netflix to provide audio description platform-wide wherever possible. This was a huge accomplishment, but my work isn’t over with. My real love is books. Especially diverse books, and audiobooks, and the publishing industry. I’m working to eventually make it so that seeing blindness in fiction is common while continuing to be a very strong ally to my fellow minorities.

Unicorns, Cookies & Education

I always find it really weird when someone asks me what my hobbies are. My hobbies are extremely plain and ordinary. Like, who doesn’t like listening to music and watching TV shows with audio description? I know a few people who don’t like reading, but I just imagine them as very confused unicorns and continue loving books and literature. I read, certainly. I watch very dark comedy. I listen to boy bands. I steal rainbow tinged cookies from unsuspecting glittering cats in my spare time. I’m so done with being normal. It’s overrated. 

Ironically speaking, my career path has never been regular, either. I dropped out of college, published several books, wrote short stories, wrote nonfiction that makes people laugh, did accessibility consulting, and, finally, wear a lot of other hats as well.

I’d like to take this opportunity to tell all the readers to stay in school. Seriously. I think education is the most important facet in someone’s life. Encourage reading. Encourage creativity, because that’s what truly makes the world go round.

This page holds my entire Mortified archive, from latest appearance to earliest appearance.

2022 show.

In the 2022 show, I read an essay I wrote in the third grade about making the world better and how to get old people to pay taxes.

Watch the 2022 reading

Below, you will find all other episodes of the podcast featuring me.

Episode 170: My Mom Wants My Teacher!?

This episode of the Mortified podcast features a journal Robert Kingett wrote in the seventh grade.

What happens when a boy fears his mom may have the hots for his teacher?

• 170 webpage
• Download 170 MP3 directly

Episode 118.

In this episode, I write a very precocious letter to Santa Clause.

• 118 webpage.
• Download 118 as an MP3.

Currently reading Answers in the Pages by David Levithan.

For weeks, I’ve been trying to think of a topic to write about and examine. I’ve been trying to find a broad topic that I could do research on and write about, somehow tie it into publishing and my thoughts on how we could make publishing better after examining this issue, but I just didn’t have it in me this month, or for a while, if I’m being honest. What I’ve been doing is reading every book banned, or challenged, starting in 1990 and really stopping to languish in the power books have and why people fear that power.

I can’t begin to tell you why people fear books. Book banning’s have existed long before I was born in the United States, usually starting at schools and branching out to public libraries afterwards.

Many kinds of books have been challenged or banned long before I was born. Long time readers should know my stance on problematic works. Personally, I read every single problematic book I can get my hands on. I read every single ableist, queerphobic, homophobic, bigoted book I can get my hands on, no matter how problematic it is or no matter how hateful it is. I actively choose what to promote and not promote, though. Sharing the work is up to me to share online or not, but make no mistake, the second I hear that a book has been challenged or banned, I immediately place a hold request for it at my many libraries I pay yearly to access out of state if it’s not at my local library. I’m reading any banned or challenged book, period.

I, of course, have my own reasonings for reading every single challenged or banned book in existence. Reading is resistance. Reading is powerful. Reading is a form of knowledge. People fear that knowledge, whether it’s progressive or problematic knowledge. Either way, no one, on any political side, gets to dictate what knowledge we can obtain. There’s a power in actively learning about and examining problematic thoughts and beliefs. I read all kinds of books because I want to become a better person. I want to break down my own privileges through listening to many scholars and writers tell me about how they view the world. I’d like to be the master of my own knowledge. Right now, in my country, book banning’s are increasing in a way I’ve never seen before in my lifetime.

The current wave of book bans is sweeping the United States in droves. Many people are actively trying to ban books by Black writers and LGBT+ writers, citing racial division and racism as the reasoning for the bans, ignoring the fact that a Black or brown person speaking about their experience with racism isn’t comparable to a white author feeling uncomfortable.

It’s not just schools and school libraries that people are targeting. Many people are targeting booksellers like Barns and Noble. Many officials across states are quickly banning books by POC authors and LGBT+ authors, many with Disabilities.

Another banning tactic is state lawyers suing authors and Publishers for publishing POC or LGBT+ books

Books are being banned and challenged so frequently that over 13,000 Young Adult and Children authors signed an open letter saying stop the book bans.

The books challenged in the above links eventually lead to book bans. Other booksellers won’t carry the books, creating a silencing chain effect.

It’s worth noting that book challenges and book bans are not the same thing. While a challenge might lead to a ban, a book challenge is a way for alternative literature to take it’s place in a curriculum or classroom. A book ban completely removes the work from access permanently. While I do read every challenged book as well as every banned book, there are some reasons why someone might want a book challenged. For example, rather than having a teacher do an English lesson on the racism of Shakespeare, a parent of a Black child might want a book centered that more positively highlights the Black and brown experience. By replacing the work with a more empowering work, the curriculum isn’t focused on the negative racism alone and centering it. By replacing Shakespeare with a positive portrayal of a Black or Brown story, you’re still dismantling racism, just in a different way.

While I’ll still read every challenged book, even problematic works, I can appreciate why someone might want the books in a classroom changed. This can work the opposite way as well, though, a white parent might challenge a book because they could feel it promotes white hate and bigotry towards whites. That’s, ultimately, why I generally don’t support challenging books independent of teacher decisions. It’s an equal opportunity to silence whatever people want to silence, wrongly or rightly, privileged or underrepresented. Challenging a book can give the privileged white man the power to remove a BIPOC author from a classroom, just as a BIPOC mother can select a better book to talk about racism. There’s clearly a privilege dynamic here but book challenges don’t lend minorities the upper hand. And, more cheekily, kids are going to read that challenged book anyway outside of school. The better move is to openly talk about problematic works and help people understand how to dismantle privileges. Book bans are a different beast altogether and are on a meteoric rise.

I’ve been wondering why so many people fear knowledge and fear letting kids grow their own knowledge and ask their own tough questions. Why are parents so afraid of letting kids explore themselves, the world, and each other? I personally don’t know. I’ll never know.

Parents are targeting schools and school libraries across the entire United States. This current ban wave, in my current timeline anyway, is focused on banning, not challenging, but banning BIPOC voices and LGBT+ voices. Parents are also targeting eBook platforms such as Overdrive and banning the app off tablets and school computers, and off personal devices.

I’m not sure why parents are so afraid of kids stepping outside of their world and learning about someone else’s life and world, but I do know that reading, and writing, is a form of resistance. It’s resistance that both readers and writers should continue to promote. If a book is banned in your county, host a banned book club. Buy a banned book for an LGBT+ loved one in your life that’s just had their representation completely removed from shelves. Buy a banned book for a Black or brown friend of yours that’s been dying to read that banned book. Start organizing banned book meetups and banned book clubs.

The reason why I love reading and writing is because it’s a window into a different world. It allows me to connect with someone that is Black in a way I never thought possible. It allows me to understand and empathize with women and get a better sense of their struggles and thoughts and opinions. Reading books allow me to broaden my world without leaving my bed. Writing and reading are my process of breaking down the injustices of the world and examining them. Reading and writing allow me to ask myself, now that I’ve seen this injustice first hand, how can I make the world better.

Progress isn’t just about someone learning about their privilege. It takes time to dismantle injustices, personal or systemic. Books, and, by extension, writers, allow me to compare and connect with experiences I’ve never faced. That kind of knowledge can lead to a very powerful dismantling of privilege. Even if it’s not rapid systemic change, it trickles down, like a never-ending waterfall. Quiet, but not stopping for anyone or anybody. Eventually, that singular waterfall will pool out into a vast ocean of knowledge where all of us can bask in an expanse that’s bigger and brighter than we could have imagined.

Donate to me if you enjoy the below guide!

I finally did it. I deleted Twitter completely. I requested my data](https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/accessing-your-twitter-data), move completely to the Fediverse, and checked to see who I follow is on the Fediverse at large. Shockingly, more than half my followers and almost all of my friends have made the switch.

I started using social media less a few years ago anyway, so this wasn’t a big change. In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter for a lump sum of money I will never have, which is why I’ve moved platforms completely. Even if you don’t have a Mastodon account, you can still follow me on Mastodon via RSS feed.

My decisions to move completely hinged on the fact that Musk will soon own my data. What’s even more upsetting is the things that have festered after the purchase, and the lack of content moderation he plans to take with the platform. Even so, that’s a glimpse of a whole lot of mess that will be arriving soon and I wanted to get off this train before it becomes a hate filled wreck.

I could go on and on about why I believe Twitter will, no longer, be a safe space for Disabled users ever again, but that will take up an additional blog post of it’s own to fully flesh it all out. In short, it’s never going to be a safe space for you as a Disabled writer again. like I said, I wanted off this Twitter wreck, now. Instead, I’d rather talk about the benefits of Mastodon for writers.

An overview of the Fediverse.

To understand Mastodon and how it works, you should know that even though it’s a different platform, it still operates like Twitter. It’s a social media platform that allows users to post short status messages up to 500 characters or more depending on where you sign up. You can follow users, direct message them, reply to posts, and post media such as images and videos as well as audio clips.

Mastodon is one small part of a connected software ecosystem called the Fediverse. Think of the Fediverse like a bridge that connects multiple platforms together by a protocol called Activity Pub.

If you’re interested in reading the history of Mastodon/Fediverse, this timeline is a good start.

Mastodon is the Twitter of the Fediverse. Mastodon operates on decentralized technology. This means, for example, you can join any kind of Mastodon server you want and still talk to a global network. There’s a ton of open servers to choose from. It’s much like email. When you sign up for an email address, you get the ability to talk to anybody with an email address. The Fediverse operates the same way. You can interact with anybody on the Fediverse.

For instance, I can talk to anybody on Friendica, Facebook alternative, Write Freely, Medium alternative, Bookwyrm, Goodreads alternative, PeerTube, YouTube alternative, or PixelFed, Instagram alternative, and more services different than Mastodon. Anybody can follow and talk to me no matter where I am at in the Fediverse.

Back to Mastodon, Mastodon servers, known as instances, are like independently grown towns. You can join a town, and that town can talk to other towns, but each town has their own rules if you’d like to become a member of the town, or instance. You can try a Hometown instance with more features and characters. There’s instances for a number of topics, from books to craftsThere are many more instances to browse and join. If you don’t like an instance, you can always move to a different instance and still talk to everybody else. You don’t have to stay on one instance.

If you post publicly, others will see your posts through a process called Federation. If an instance federates with your instance, then your message will show up on any instance that federates, or links with, your instance. If an instance chooses not to federate with another instance for any reason, your posts will not show up to their users.

To mention users on instances different from yours, you would include their complete handle, including, domain, in a post. It’s like email.

For example, to mention me on any instance, you would write, including the beginning @ sign, @weirdwriter@micro.blog.

Some instances have closed registrations to keep hateful people out. Others have open instances. Even if you can’t find an open instance, you can still follow people via RSS with a lot of apps.

If you’re a writer looking for a new home, Mastodon is perfect for you if you like to connect with interesting people and make new friends. Below, I have included some guides to Mastodon and some instances designed for writers.

Before you pick an instance, it’s worth noting their rules and how often they federate, or connect with, other instances. If you’d like a bigger audience, try picking an instance that doesn’t block a lot of instances. If you’d like more of an insular community, and are not looking for a big audience, pick an instance that doesn’t federate with a lot of servers and blocks a lot of instances. It’s all up to you! If you join an instance and then later decide to move to a new instance, you can migrate your account and move your followers with you.

Below, you’ll find guides and a few instances for writers and bookish people.

Instances with mods and admins of color can be found here

server directories.

Aside from many instances across the Fedi and below, Hometown instances are here The Dragons Cave is ran by Blind people

1. Servers by topic
   Servers by country/regions and servers by languages
2. Fediverse party. Curates many specialty instances across the Fedi.
3. Wiki instance directory on Join Fediverse
4. 1. Join Mastodon. Displays many general and niche instances.

Directories of users.

1. Directory that’s opt in through hashtags
2. Community Trunk
3. A more targeted directory of users
4. Users that describe and caption media
5. Accessibility people from Trunk Community directory
6. Blogs on the Fediverse
7. Book accounts on the Fediverse.
8. Accessibility directory with active users
9. Other directory of authors and writers

Guides.

1. Getting started from Fedi Tips
2. Join Fediverse Wiki has guides as well as directories.
3. Fedi Tips accessibility guide
4. Screen reader guide to Mastodon.
5. modern guide that includes a directory of writers
6. A very lengthy guide to Mastodon.

Apps.

These apps have been tested, and work very well with screen readers and other adaptive technology. You can try other third party apps here.

1. TW Blue Windows.
2. Tusker iOS
3. Tweesecake offers Mastodon support. Mastodon documentation for Tweesecake is here.
4. Semaphore. Web based app.
5. Toot. iOS.
6. Mercury. iOS
7. Metatext. iOS.
8. Tusky. Android. Also get Tusky on F-Droid

Instances to note.

In addition to the [Mastodon instances]https://fedi.garden/) and below, Hometown instances are here The Dragons Cave is ran by Blind people

Also, Instances with mods and admins of color

1. Instances by Fedi Garden
2. Bookwyrm instances. Not Mastodon but I love Goodreads alternatives

This event has passed. ASL and captions were provided for this event.

Old information

This virtual event will have captions and ASL interpreters.

Event page.

RSVP here.

Disabled Blind author Robert Kingett will give a lecture over Zoom about how to support writers without sacrificing finances, including tips on using the library, promoting it forward as a writer, and other ways to support fellow writers if you’re low-income. He’ll also talk about how to hire sensitivity readers on a budget.