That Is Amazing, Its Even Better Than It Normally Would Be Because I Read It Out Loud In An Irish Accent.

That is amazing, it’s even better than it normally would be because I read it out loud in an Irish accent.

My 90yr old Irish Catholic grandpa doesn’t miss with my gender. He’s never gotten my name wrong, or my pronouns, never even faltered over it.

It’s all so natural too: son, big man, young man…

We’ve never talked about it. He’s the only one who hasn’t pushed for details. He just accepted it and carried on because it’s not a huge deal.

It’s so comforting.

Alterra Update

I come baring unfortunate news. I have nearly run out of non-spoiler worldbuilding stuff to tell you guys about. I can tell you that I am currently at 57000 words into draft 1, and nearing the end of the story. There are still plenty of monsters, places, and historical events I could delve into that aren’t related to the plot, but I don’t have the mental capacity to fledge them out right now. Exams are coming up soon, so I’m probably going to be taking a break from writing for now.

Controlling Your Pacing

                Pacing is one of my favourite things to pay attention to when reading or writing something. The pacing of a scene is literally how ‘fast’ or ‘slow’ a scene appears to be moving. Action scenes that spring the story from one place to another tend to go faster than introspective scenes or scenes that explore character dynamics.

                All of this is created through putting space and words between elements of the scene. What I mean by that is that readers interpret a passage of time between ‘things’ (actions, dialogue, gestures, etc.) on the page, and pacing is controlling that interpretation.

                For example,

“Georgia sat on the couch, “wow it sure is hot in here,” she said. “It sure is,” Henry agreed, sitting next to her.”

                This sentence is just about the actions with some breaking dialogue, but it goes pretty quickly through what’s happening.

                Whereas, if we were to intentionally pace this scene, it may look like this:

“Georgia swiped at her brow, wandering over to sink into the couch. “It sure is hot in here,” she said, peering up at Henry through the wisps of her bangs. He nodded weakly, his entire body sagging from the heat. Crossing the room to collapse next to her, he added dryly, “it sure is.”

                It’s not perfect, but you can get a sense of the time between things happening. The added detail between the two characters talking conveys maybe a minute between sentences, which might be accurate for two people dogged down by a heat wave.

                To speed things up, we want less space between elements:

“Adam slammed open the door with his shoulder, letting it bounce off the concrete wall behind him. “Everyone out!” He shouted. A crack in the roof snapped above them.”

                The added (or subtracted) elements of a scene that control your pacing is the sights/sounds/feelings/smells/maybe tastes of a place. When we’re anxiously rushing to get out of the house we may not acknowledge that the kitchen smells like the bread our roommate baked that morning, or that there are smudges on the window from when the dog climbed up on the couch. However, when we have a second to contemplate, we’re going to notice these things, and it would be appropriate to write them in.

                Another important element to controlling pacing is your character’s thoughts or acknowledgement of feelings.

                For example:

“Adam slammed open the door with his shoulder, it bounced off the concrete wall behind him. He winced, his mother’s high voice ringing in his head, chiding him for damaging the walls even though he knew the building was coming down on top of them. How long would he live with her constantly in his mind? He tried to wave away the memory. “Everyone out!” He shouted.”

                That slows down the scene quite a bit, yeah? And maybe that’s what you wanted in that moment. Play around with the details and pacing in your scenes, you might be surprised how much can change.

                Good luck!

Hiiii… Active writeblrs?

hi there. just curious about what u guys are writing about. u can link ur work here if u wanna. tell me about the new character, the plot, the vibes. go ahead :) reblog if u like (I also wanna follow some active writeblrs, go ahead and like this/reblog if ur doing ur thing)

Worldbuilding a completely random, and unrelated part of my world that I can ramble on about for 2 hours at a later date.

Writers on Tumblr, what is the biggest source of inspiration when feeling stuck?

How do dragons in your world view the passage of time with such a long life expectancy? Is everything painfully slow for them or incredibly fast?

Most dragons aren’t immortal, with anything less than a purple dragon living only a few centuries. But the ones that live longer tend to focus much more on hobbies and relationships. Many of the night dragons are in kahoots with some of the most powerful kingdoms in the world to go over historical events and correct them.

Draconic literature is also quite popular in places such as Kio and Corkus, where dragons are idolized. However, in places like Runa, dragons are not considered welcome and are often hunted for sport.

I also forgot to clarify in the original post, but the dragons of Alterra are able cross-breed with certain humanoid species, which lead to people with a lot of draconic features. These include long lizard tails, subtle horns, wings (whether or not they are functional depends on the type of dragon), long black tongues, and small patches of scales in the color of the original dragon. Red dragons have the unique ability of granting human-red dragon crossbreeds a draconic form that is slightly larger than any of the lesser dragons. They can change form between hybrid and draconic form at will, but this takes a few days to a week to learn, and months to gain full control over.

To answer your original question, dragons tend to see time faster than we do, but still live life to the fullest.