SLASH'S PROFILE

I think there's a few things to break down here!

If you're worried about confusion, I think you have to determine the main focus of your story, or character arc, or chapter. If it's a serious story with a theme like "a small lie can grow out of control and harm people", then you should use that to determine a matching tone: painful, uncontrolled, scary. That doesn't mean you can't have moments of levity - you need some humor to make the dark parts hit even stronger - but it's good to keep in mind what your intent is. You should also keep that intent in mind while writing, so you don't accidentally undercut your own theme (in this example, have characters lie casually with no repercussion or even mention; if you do so you should at least be aware of how that affects your main theme).

I think that mistakes will come up in writing, that will either undercut your tone or theme, or undercut your characters, or end up being incredibly insulting, or feel cheap. These things will definitely happen, and the best you can do is own them, study them, and avoid them in the future. No one produces flawless work, and as long as you're moving forward and trying to improve, it's okay.

I also think it's very important to recognize that you as an author are separate from your characters and writings, to an extent. Your personal thoughts and beliefs can be displayed in your writing, but that doesn't mean your writing is you. You can write a story with a happy, perfect ending, even if it doesn't reflect the world you live in or your general beliefs on optimism. You can write a selfish, evil character who is never punished for their actions, and that doesn't mean you believe evil is a good thing.

All stories aren't meant to be Aesop fables, or realistic depictions of the known world, and not all characters fall neatly into good or evil, and - at least in fiction - your writing doesn't necessarily reflect your beliefs in a simplistic "this is Right and this is Wrong" fashion. Just do your best to write intelligently and keep in mind what your overall plan and design are as you go. If you write a character doing evil, make sure you know why they're doing evil, from both their point of view AND yours.

alright gamers u can sit down now

Voter fraud is another one of those issues that comes up in panicked discussion way more often than it occurs in real life. People make a big deal about it as a method of attacking the other party, but the relevance is measurably rare in practice.

author=kentona
it still blows my mind that the USA doesn't have a non-partisan body in charge of elections. Canada has Elections Canada. The rest of the democratic world has figured it out. My take is that there is a lot of false pride in "American Exceptionalism" that collectively blinds them to potentially better alternatives to systems they came up with themselves.

There's definitely a lot of that sentiment in America, and to be fair to the general populace, both major parties have a vested interest in keeping our electoral system as-is. They often work together to quash any changes that could create more competition to the two-party system.

I was excited to see that British Columbia was voting on altering their voting system from First-Past-The-Post to something less one-sided (like adding secondary votes or proportional representation). It's a pipe dream, but I'd love to see something as simple as secondary votes added to Presidential / Congressional election ballots.

That's fair; it certainly wouldn't be good if it meant a lot less regular events. I guess I'm more thinking of a long-term commitment to inspire you to participate and keep you motivated! But I guess gamepages might be enough for that.

Sure, what the hell. Let's do this!