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So... I found this and now it keeps coming to mind. You hear about "life-changing writing advice" all the time and usually its really not—but honestly this is it man.

I'm going to try it.

https://www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/727841287119814656/ehh-generally-they-were-like-ask-specifics-about Can you expand on writer’s block not being real?

--

Sure!

I think everyone who's ever made art has hit points where it's hard to go on making art or where a particular project isn't moving. So from that perspective, sure, a version of it is real...

But there's a particular version of it that's what a lot of people mean where you're A Writer™ and then the magic inspiration gnomes come and steal your inspiration juice. This is mostly nonsense, and quite a few author types who've actually finished long projects will tell you so.

When you sit down to a blank page and it stubbornly stays blank like your head, that's a symptom of something... and the something in question is often either depression and overwhelmed feelings that are taking over your whole life or an entirely correct instinct that your project is flawed and the next step is not writing that next scene.

Many people try to be pantsers instead of planners, get maybe a quarter into a project, and then choke. It's because they started with the kind of concept that requires planning, but they haven't planned. If your plot revolves around the characters eventually learning the meaning of life, you'd damn well better start with what you, the author, think that meaning is and work backwards. Same if your characters are solving a twisty mystery or complicated thriller conspiracy: you will not come up with a genius idea that ties everything together just by writing by the seat of your pants. If you don't go in with the ending in mind and some waypoints to write towards, you're going to choke. This is exceptionally common in grandiose fic concepts that are like "What if this true blue hero were a viiiiillain, oooooh!" where it's neat, but 99% of the point is showing us the work of getting from A to B. People write the prologue showing us the big concept and then flash back to how it all started... and then stop.

I see it a lot in projects that start with a character sheet for RP. Yeah, for RP itself, noodling along and figuring out what X would do in situation Y is great fun... but for many longfic/novel plot types, you will not arrive at a workable plot this way. You'll end up with a mess that can, at best, be used as brainstorming and completely rewritten from the ground up, using only key cool images or character observations. There are authors that start from individual characters and then see where they go. In my experience, they don't tend to be working in the genres that fic fandom types tend to want to work in. It's also something that often takes a lot more experience and skill than starting with a basic plot outline, and inexperienced writers often overreach.

It's not writer's block. It's a project that needs to be taken out back like Old Yeller.

Even the salvageable projects that are making you pause usually have some other issue like you not being clear on the central emotional themes even if you've outlined some factual plot. Or you've demanded that your characters do a particular thing for plot convenience, but you know deep down that it doesn't ring true. You can't write the next scene because there is no next scene. You need to rework the forced part till the rest can make sense.

And even more common than any of the above is people thinking that just because Danielle Steel sits down every morning and writes for eight hours, that means they can and should with no warm up or experience. Trying to force yourself to be a type of writer you're not—majorly overdoing it on any work, in fact—just leads to burnout and inability to function.

in almost every other children's book where the main heroine is swept away to a land of whimsy she's shown having a lovely time; braving dangers occasionally, trying to find her way home, sure, but ultimately delighting in the magic around her. meanwhile alice spends her entire time in wonderland like

Trying to brainstorm story concepts for the thesis film and all I know is I'm making the mother the perspective character and it's gonna be interesting

Did I daydream this, or was there a website for writers with like. A ridiculous quantity of descriptive aid. Like I remember clicking on " inside a cinema " or something like that. Then, BAM. Here's a list of smell and sounds. I can't remember it for the life of me, but if someone else can, help a bitch out <3

Yay, unsolicited advice time! Or, not really advice, more like miscellaneous tips and tricks, because if there's one thing eight years of martial arts has equipped me to write, it's fight scenes.

.

Fun things to add to a fight scene (hand to hand edition)

It's not uncommon for two people to kick at the same time and smack their shins together, or for one person to block a kick with their shin. This is called a shin lock and it HURTS like a BITCH. You can be limping for the rest of the fight if you do it hard enough.

If your character is mean and short, they can block kicks with the tip of their elbow, which hurts the other guy a lot more and them a lot less

Headbutts are a quick way to give yourself a concussion

If a character has had many concussions, they will be easier to knock out. This is called glass jaw.

Bad places to get hit that aren't the groin: solar plexus, liver, back of the head, side of the thigh (a lot of leg kicks aim for this because if it connects, your opponent will be limping)

Give your character a fighting style. It helps establish their personality and physicality. Are they a grappler? Do they prefer kicks or fighting up close? How well trained are they?

Your scalp bleeds a lot and this can get in your eyes, blinding you

If you get hit in the nose, your eyes water

Adrenaline's a hell of a drug. Most of the time, you're not going to know how badly you've been hurt until after the fact

Even with good technique, it's really easy to break toes and fingers

Blocking hurts, dodging doesn't

.

Just thought these might be useful! If you want a more comprehensive guide or a weapons edition, feel free to ask. If you want, write how your characters fight in the comments!

Have a bitchin day <3

On characters...

So, I love writing characters and also love giving advice to people who want to have more interesting characters in their stories.

I happened to remember something about a character I'm currently writing for and wanted to share it.

So, I sometimes write "test stories" for characters to test their personalities, roles in the story, appearance, and even their conflicts. I totally forgot I did this with one character where I pretty much wrote a fanfiction for him before using him in the main story he's in now.

What that did was allow me to pick how I wanted him to be and solidify that before putting him in the main story. Essentially, that story is the exact same and his role is the same also; but writing the fanfiction allowed me to explore parts of him I'd never do in the actual story.

So, if you're ever struggling on making a character in any sense, try this!

i love finding poetry in the mundane, and yesterday i stumbled upon something that just hits that spot

So, my partner has an old phone- It served them for many years now, but it has one issue: Charging it is hard. Their current charger is hanging on by a thread (literally), and can barely do its job. The phone and the charger came together: They've never used another charger for said phone.

Now, they've tried to replace the charging cord several times. But it doesn't matter how much they've searched what damned specific charger the phone uses, none of them work. They finally decided to bring it to a phone shop and ask what should they use.

The guy at the shop looked at the phone for a bit, and explained: "The port itself is broken. The charger you have works with this phone because they've mutually broken each other into the same shape, in a way that no other charger is shaped. The port itself has corroded in a way that only accepts the charger that shaped it like that in the first place."

And while this is of course a frustrating situation for my partner, I feel like there's a metaphor here. I could write a goddamn story about this. These two half-broken old things have been together for so long they've destroyed each other in a way that keeps them from working with anything else. They've hurt each other in a way that barely keeps them functioning together, and have been rendered useless with literally anything else.

This too is toxic yuri to me-

Suck it Up Buttercup by Zeke Tucker

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Like Or Like-Like You may be going through a breakup or relationship troubles in general. Sometimes you just need to listen to music and either cry, or get mad. Here’s the perfect soundtrack. Listen On Spotify

I Was Never What You Wanted A lot of people are in that bubbly, exciting place, where you’re trying to figure out if they like you back. Here’s to new romance and the pain and butterflies that come with it. Listen On Spotify

Soaked To The Skin With Emotion These song’s are bursting at the seams with emotional weight, and it can be therapeutic to indulge in someone else’s overwhelming thoughts. These songs are relatable, nostalgic, depressing, and honest, and they’re well worth a listen. Listen On Spotify

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I think my favorite part of the book, bar none, was Sima Yi freaking out: “Wait, you two haven’t fucked yet?!? No fucking wonder shit’s not working, I will deadass stop everything right now so you guys can go bang it out, I sincerely cannot overstate how important it is that you go get dicked down immediately”

Hi!

Do you have recommendations for books about life in the Arctic Circle?

I’ve read quite a lot about the far north, but all from the perspective of European explorers/miners/prospectors and I would like to expose myself to the perspective of people for whom it is home.

I came to this thought because I watched Avatar recently, and I always find myself thinking about background and the world in which favorite stories take place. It is terribly sparse in building up the lives of the water tribes. I grew up in a place with long cold winters and my contact with that extreme has given me a strong awareness that there is a lot to surviving and thriving in that, and a lot more that I don’t even know to wonder about.

I really appreciate your writing on this blog, and I thank you for the effort you have put into it. :)

Not many strictly within the arctic circle, but if you mean Circumpolar people in general:

I have two collections of stories with historical and cultural notes for context: The Dall Sheep Dinner Guest, compiled by Wanni W. Anderson; and Ugiuvangmiut Quliapyuit/King Island Tales, compiled by Lawrence D. Kaplan. The Dall Sheep Dinner Guest (which focuses on the Kobuk region Inupiat) can be ordered pretty easily but Ugiuvangmiut Quliapyuit (which is specifically based in the King Island village; i'm actually related to one of the storytellers in this one) is out of print and when I managed to track down a copy it put me back about $60 USD for a secondhand paperback published in the 1980s. I'd recommend checking your local library and seeing if they can get either on a loan.

For personal accounts, consider Fifty Miles from Tomorrow, a memoir by William L. Iggiagruk Hensley, who played a pretty big role in Inupiaq history in the 1960s-70s; as well as Once Upon an Eskimo Time by Edna Wilder, who wrote down her mother Nedercook's dictated acount of pre-contact life in a Yup'ik village. Native elders are often interviewed and invited to talk for oral history projects, and it's not too difficult to find recordings or transcripts of these interviews online. Do not underestimate the vallue of these interviews and talks because of their less formal structure, they provide a wealth of easily accessible information and are in fact the traditionally prefered method of sharing and preserving history.

Life at Swift Water Place, by the aforementioned Wanni W. Anderson, is an interdisciplinary study of an Inupiaq site but the Kobuk River written to give insight to what life was in early contact.

I haven't had access to all these materials, and as I am Inupiaq and mainly take interest in Inupiaq culture and history, all of these are based in Alaska. You might stumble on other circumpolar peoples in searching these materials but I can't guarantee it and i want to make very clear this is not an exhaustive list. Happy hunting, and best of luck

why do all the words sound heavier in my native language?

—  @metamorphesque, Yoojin Grace Wuertz (Mother Tongue), Still Dancing: An Interview With Ilya Kaminsky (by Garth Greenwell), Jhumpa Lahiri (Translating Myself and Others), @lifeinpoetry

˗ˏˋ☕ˎˊ˗        

Evangelion is the best anime ever and also absolute dogshit. Everybody should watch it. I don't recommend it to anyone.

Yeah you're right. It WOULD be pretty fucked up if you were a swan but you were raised by ducks and you grew up never seeing another swan or even knowing that such a thing as a swan even existed so you just thought you were a duck with something super wrong with it.

I’m sorry friends, but “just google it” is no longer viable advice. What are we even telling people to do anymore, go try to google useful info and the first three pages are just ads for products that might be the exact opposite of what the person is trying to find but The Algorithm thinks the words are related enough? And if it’s not ads it’s just sponsored websites filled with listicles, just pages and pages of “TOP FIFTEEN [thing you googled] IMAGINED AS DISNEY PRINCESSES” like… what are we even doing anymore, google? I can no longer use you as shorthand for people doing real and actual helpful research on their own.

Rewatched The Good Place for the first time since s4 dropped and. Oh my god. The Good Place said "people are a result of their environment but we always have a moral responsibility to be better" and The Good Place said "every day the world gets a little more complicated and it gets a little harder to be good" and The Good Place said "even in the face of total nihilism, when nothing you do will matter, you still have to at least try. Because trying is better than the alternative" and The Good Place said "if you have bills to pay and shit to deal with you don't have time or energy to become a better person" and then The Good Place really said "people get better when they get external love and support. How can we hold it against them when they don't " and THEN The Good Place really said "no one is irredeemable. Everyone can try to be better today than they were yesterday" AND THEN! The Good Place said "Heaven is just enough time with the people that you love" OH MY FUCKING GOD.

Everyone always wants to talk about Hook or Pan. Everyone always wants to debate which one is good and which is evil - who we’re supposed to follow and who we aren’t. The Peter Pan mythos has pretty much shrunk down to nothing but Hook and Pan (Hook, SyFy’s Neverland, Pan, OUAT, etc). Occasionally Tinkerbell factors in (Hook, Disney’s Tinkerbell, OUAT, etc). There’s one character, however, that always gets sidelined - which is puzzling since they are the main character of both the play and the book. That character is, of course, Wendy Darling.

Peter Pan is Wendy’s coming of age story. Wendy who decides to run away from home. Wendy who realizes that she must grow up - and that there’s no shame in that. Wendy who sees Peter as deficient and sees Hook as empty and decides that, no, she doesn’t want to be a part of that. Wendy gets the adventure she’s always wanted and she turns away because she realizes that it’s lacking. She’s the only one who truly sees the hollowness of being young forever. Barrie even says “You need not be sorry for her. She was one of the kind that likes to grow up. In the end she grew up of her own free will a day quicker than other girls.”

People always debate on who the hero is. When they learn that Peter could be horrid they assume it has to be Hook. Of course, the answer is that neither of them are the hero. Wendy is the hero of the story. You’re not supposed to be like Peter, who kept every good and bad aspects of being a child and can’t tell right from wrong. You’re not supposed to be Hook, either. He let go of everything childish and loving about him and became bitter and evil. They’re both the extreme ends of the scale. You’re supposed to fall in the middle, to hold onto the things about childhood that make it beautiful - the wonder, the imagination, the innocence - while still growing up and learning morality and responsibility. You’re not supposed to be Hook. You’re not supposed to be Peter Pan.

You’re supposed to be Wendy Darling.