#(by which I mean there's an exposition dump in the next two pages)

[m95theliveblogger]

Gunnerkrigg Liveblog #3: Fairies and Ghosts

"So I suppose that means I'll be posting my next one a bit sooner," I said, a whole month ago.

Yeah. My apologies for the delay.

Either way, let's get started with today's chapter: "Broken Glass and Other Things" (8.121), which I assume is about broken glass and other things.

I turn to the next page (8.122) and already see broken glass, along with some other things that are not broken glass. See? My prediction skills are utterly perfect. I'm a genius.

But in seriousness, this scene appears to be a flashback. Annie is talking to her late mother (8.123) before we suddenly flash forward to the present.

Having just fallen last chapter, Annie is being carried by two creepy green birds (8.124). They carry her to safety, and Annie takes the chance to walk around the shore.

Then we see something I didn't expect: apparently the birds are robots (8.127). That's new to me.

Then, on one page (8.128), we meet both the shadow individual from back in Chapter 1, and also two new kinda-creepy elf-looking faces; one a pale redhead, one a tanned... "bluehead?" Is that a word? Wait! The page right after (8.129) tells us that the shadow creature from down here is not the one from the previous chapter (but I still think he's the one from Chapter 1).

But either way, Annie is talking to a bird-headed individual right now (8.132)

That sounds kind of worrying, to put it lightly.

Mr. Bird here appears to be some kind of psychopomp, since he mentioned being the one who escorts the dead (8.134). He gave Annie a red gemstone. On the next page (8.135), we learn that it's called a "blinker stone" and that you can summon fire with it by mentally picturing one.

We're in flashback mode again, and out in a single page (8.136). Annie chats with the fairies/elves, who explain that they want to die so they can be reincarnated and go to Gunnerkrigg Court (8.138). Unexpected motive, but alright.

Then a creepy ghost lady walks up to Annie and tries stabbing her with a sword (8.141). But cavalry arrives just in time to save Annie, with the cavalry being none other than... Kat! She's in a hovering vehicle machine (8.142), and she's here to pick up Annie back home. Annie says her goodbyes to the fairies, and she takes Shadow 2 back home with her (8.145).

The final page is an exposition dump on fairies (8.148). Honestly, I expected this chapter to give us some explanation for the "Surma" line from the previous one. However it looks like we'll only get an explanation for that later. Either way, it's been a fun read, and I'll see you all whenever next time happens to be.

#gunncourtliveblog #gunnerkrigg court

[raindropsonwhiskers]

So... I might be making a comic.

#there will be context Eventually #(by which I mean there's an exposition dump in the next two pages) #but this is just the prologue so :) #doctor who #dw #pokemon #pixel art #my art #it needs a name but that's a problem for Future Me to worry about

[thetypedwriter]

Lore Book Review

Lore Book Review by Alexandra Bracken 

Lore by Alexandra Bracken was one of 2021’s most anticipated YA novels and it's easy to see why. The plot summary itself is enough to pull you in with the intriguing concoction of calling it the combination of The Hunger Games and the Percy Jackson series. 

What’s not to love when you fuse the illicit danger of Katniss Everdeen with the mythological enchantment of Rick Riordan’s masterpiece?

Turns out, quite a lot unfortunately. 

Before I get into why this book didn’t live up to the insurmountable hype it built up, I’ll attempt to give a basic summary. The key word being attempt as a good portion of this novel’s plot was a mind boggling and convoluted mess. 

The book takes place in modern day New York which Bracken likes to remind you every other paragraph with small snippets about how the city that never sleeps smells like sewage and is yet still the best place on earth apparently. 

Don’t get me wrong, I love New York as much as the next person, but the pandering to the Big Apple got annoying after awhile. 

Within the cantankerous city lives a girl named Lore which we are introduced to by means of her kicking ass in an underground Chinese restaurant’s fighting ring. 

Pretty strong start. 

Lore’s world (and the reader’s frankly) is tipped upside down when Lore’s long lost childhood friend, Castor, reappears to warn her that he is looking for her. Terrified, Lore is then at first unwillingly thrust back into the world in which she was born-a world dominated by violence, bloodlines, and the Greek gods who are very much alive and out for vengeful retribution. 

In a very exposition-dump heavy conversation, we learn that Lore is the last of Perseous’ line with the rest of her family having been horrifically murdered, that a week long event called the Agon occurs every seven years in which the original nine Greek gods or their reincarnated selves become mortal for seven days, and that a series of killing often happen because if you kill a Greek god you then become that Greek god as well as inhabit their powers, abilities, and immortality. 

Well, until the next Agon that is. 

The currently reincarnated God by the name of Wrath is attempting to end the Agon by killing all the other Gods, but in order to do it he needs to wield a special weapon called the Aegis. 

Unfortunately, only the Perseides can wield this shield (for some reason) and thus, Wrath is out to get his hold on Lore as the last of her line so that he can bring this eons old competition to an end with himself as the sole victor and only remaining God. 

Confused?

I’d be surprised if you weren’t. 

Now, I love Greek mythology. I’ve read the classics and would say I’m fairly up to date on the stories, the legends, the gods, and the stories they represent. I’m not an expert, but I would say I’m  knowledgeable on who the major figures are and what they stood for. 

I genuinely think this book would have been miserable for anyone that didn’t know anything about Greek mythology.

 Bracken does a terrible job of explaining what the hell is happening at any given point, and she often throws out allusions and references to Greek mythology without bothering to explain a single shred of information about it. 

In addition, after this laughably and poorly explained world and plot at the beginning, it is almost never explained again. It’s brought up, as are names and titles and weapons and relationships, but it’s never explained in a way that’s feasibly understandable. 

At the beginning of the novel Bracken lists who all the important characters are, their bloodlines, and their titles.

 I soon figured out why, as every other sentence a name like Wrath or Reveler or Tidebringer or whoever was brought up, and it was impossible to keep track of so I didn’t even bother. 

Even Lore brings up that the names are ridiculous, which I appreciate, but the meta moment of clarity doesn't make it any better. 

Also, what Lore and her friends get up to over 90% of the novel is a muddled mass of bewilderment. 

Why do Lore and Castor and the others need to find Artemis? I don’t know, but sure, whatever, sounds good. Why was Lore the last of her line again? Oh yeah, right, okay, I guess. Wait, Castor died? Oh, he didn’t? Why not? Oh, we’re not going to explain it. Sure, sure. 

Throughout this entire novel, what the characters are doing and what is happening is almost impossible to follow with the way it's presented and the way Bracken developed her world. I think this was a really cool idea that had very poor execution. 

Points for the originality and the inclusion of Greek mythology, but all of the positives were taken away when that originality was flushed down the drain with a lack of explanation and logic. 

Lore very much reminded me of a shoot-em up, bang-em up action movie. Almost every other chapter was some sort of super intense, super climactic fight scene, chase, theft, break-in, etc. 

Now. I do think action scenes are hard to write and I think Bracken actually did an incredible job of writing action in a way that was entertaining and thrilling. 

However, when the action takes place every ten pages it gets really old, really quick. Towards the end, I downright started skimming the fight scenes, because they lacked so little depth and stakes and we had read so much action at the end point that it had lost all vigor and vitality. 

Continuing with the action movie metaphor, most action movies focus solely on the bright explosions and the crazy fight scenes as their selling point of the whole movie, often to the detriment of the characters, plot, and development. 

Now, some people like this. I am not these people. 

I find action movies boring as most of my enjoyment from consuming media comes from the characters and the developments they undergo. 

My biggest criticism with Lore, other than the astonishing storytelling, is by far the characters. I just...didn’t care. About any of them. 

Bracken tried to make Lore come across as a strong, opinionated, fierce, angry female character and while sometimes she succeeded, more often than not I found Lore temperamental, aggravating, impulsive, selfish, and shallow. 

Bracken very much invoked the tell-not-show strategy that makes any book hard to get through. While there were some decent moments of showing instead of just stating, more often than not, Bracken would tell us that Lore was strong by having other people say it or others calling her weak. 

I appreciated Bracken’s feminist agenda and how strongly Lore felt about gender inequality, even if it was a bit heavy-handed at times. Still, I did appreciate this inclusion of civil rights on this front, even if some of the circumstances to incite it were ridiculous or over the top. 

In addition, I hated that there was all this backstory that we were just told but not shown. Like in my last review of Wilder Girls, Lore suffers from an intrinsic failure of getting me onboard with these characters and their relationships by telling me how I should feel about them instead of exposing them through action. 

I was told:

Lore and Castor haven't seen each other for seven years, but my gosh, Castor is just the best and is so beautiful. Ensue obligatory YA romance. 

Lore has a best friend! Yeah. Her name is Iro. Here she is! Um. Okay. Why was this necessary?

Miles is just the coolest best friend ever. Like, look how cool and chill he is. How funny is it that he has no idea what’s happening? Really not funny at all. He was a useless character used to build empty stakes. 

  The list goes on and on, but Bracken will throw out some sort of fact or relationship and just expect the reader to go “Okay!” Which. I didn’t. On any of those occurrences. 

Often Bracken would do this in the use of flashbacks at the most inopportune times (during a fight scene, after someone was injured, right before a huge revelation, etc). These flashbacks were the worst. I do not care for adolescent Lore and child Lore was somehow even worse. 

The romance in this book, much like an action movie, is off to the side and really only there to fulfill the trope of having a romance. 

Lore and Castor are boring. I don’t know what else to say. Castor is too perfect to be likable and Lore is the opposite. Nothing about their romance was unique or well-crafted. 

The kiss between Van and Miles I also saw coming a hundred miles away. I also thought it was pointless as Van and Miles had known each for six days and had had maybe two conversations. So. No. I didn’t care at all about the romances. 

It actually made me laugh and scoff simultaneously at the end when Lore is looking at Van, Castor, Iro and Miles and smiles because she realizes that these people are her family. 

Ummm. Sorry?

Castor disappeared for seven years and you’ve been reunited for seven days. You’ve hated Van your whole life until this week. You also haven’t seen Iro in seven years and she tried to kill you at least twice in this book. Miles is...fine, but again useless. I don’t even know why Bracken included him except to make Lore worry about him which she only did about half of the time. 

Phew. 

I know this review has come across largely negative, so this might be surprising, but I didn’t hate it. It lacks substance and depth, but it was entertaining. 

Just like an action movie.

 If you want some hyped fights and a plot that really doesn't matter and characters that won’t stick with you, but a fast-paced narrative that keeps you on your toes nonetheless, then you would probably enjoy this. 

It’s like the equivalent of watching a James Bond movie or one of the millions of the Fast and Furious. Bracken tries to develop the characters, but at the end of the day, most of the story is made up of cool fights, magic, and weapons. If that’s your speed then you would probably really love Lore. 

Recommendation: Action, action, action. If you want some high intensity, get-your-blood-pumping enterprise then this is your novel. The writing is fluid, the adrenaline-inducing scenes are non-stop, and everything else falls to the backdrop of external fights and villainous monologues. If action is not your preferred genre, then your best left to get your Greek mythology needs from Percy Jackson or the Song of Achilles instead.  

Score: 6/10

#lore #alexandra bracken #6/10 #ya fiction #YA Books #YA literature #book blog #book review #top books #teen books #Teen Romance #teen fiction #Book Recommendations #YA Book Review #ya book rec #popular fiction #popular books #greek mythology

[gay-jesus-probably]

Hey book rec for anyone that's into hard sci fi, I just read Seveneves by Neal Stephenson and it was incredibly good; I stayed up until 3-4 in the morning reading it two days in a row, it's really damn engaging.

It's also dark as fuck - the story begins with the moon exploding, for reasons that are never explained, because after the first week everybody realizes they have much bigger problems. Namely with the remnants of the moon, which initially start out as seven big fuckoff chunks hanging out where the moon used to be... but then they start bumping in to each other and breaking, and that collision sends a lot of pieces closer to Earth's orbit. That's a problem, because the more pieces the moon is split into, the more likely those pieces are to collide with each other, which makes more debris, which makes more collisions... it's a vicious cycle. And only a small amount of those bolides end up hitting the earth! ...But exponential growth means eventually they pass the point of no return where the debris cloud around earth is breaking apart fast enough to cover the planet (called the White Sky), and after a few days of white sky the Hard Rain begins, and the combined force of all those bolide meteors burning up at the same time literally sets Earth's atmosphere on fire, scorching the planet and rendering it uninhabitable for the next five thousand years.

They figure this out at the end of the first week. The Hard Rain begins 701 days after the moon explodes. They've got time. And pretty much all of that is spent with humanity throwing all of its resources into building the Cloud Ark, using the ISS as a base to try and construct a viable space colony (though plans to survive by going underground and underwater get throwaway mentions). It's an interesting take on it too; when the Hard Rain begins, the population of the Cloud Ark is 1552, but less than 200 of them actually live on the ISS full time; the majority live in Arklets, little pods that grow their own food and can hold a few people each, and can connect to each other to form groups or to stimulate gravity by spinning around each other like a bolo. At any given time, about 10% of them are docked with the ISS, restocking supplies and letting their crews socialize with the general population. Despite that, there's... rifts. Entirely caused by one fucking person playing politics and manipulating the Arkies into accepting her as a leader for no real reason except her being traumatized by escaping Earth at the last minute and trying to feel safe by taking control of the situation, justifying it to herself as she goes. Or maybe just her being a piece of shit, it's all just guesswork from the protagonists aboard the ISS, and by the time they get to the point of being able to sit down and properly talk with the troublemaker, things are so turbofucked that things like motives and past actions genuinely do not matter anymore.

Aand I'm not going to spoil any more of that. The book is split into three parts; part 1 begins with the moon exploding, and ends with the Hard Rain, part 2 begins right after that with the Cloud Ark trying to put together and enact a long term plan for survival, while dealing with frequent problems caused by both the hazards of space, and the Arkies becoming increasingly rebellious and hostile towards The Man (aka the general population on the ISS), and ends three years later with the remaining survivors succeeding in reaching a safe place to land the ISS for good, and coming to an agreement about their long term plans for humanity. Part 3 is... sorta weird and tbh I kinda skimmed it; it's set five thousand years later, where the Earth is returning to a habitable state, helped along by deliberate terraforming from the space colonists, and then discovering that those throwaway plans from part 1 for going underground and underwater both succeeded off screen, and five thousand years later their descendants are starting to move back up to the surface. The third part is more slice of life, showing how humanity has survived and changed, as well as the Spacers, Diggers and Pingers (descendants of survivors from space, underground, and underwater respectively) figuring out how to communicate with each other, and realizing the connections some of their ancestors shared with each other.

As you can guess by the whole apocalypse thing, it gets pretty fucking grim, both in part 1 with people trying to face the imminent apocalypse with relative dignity, and in part 2 with the already tiny population slowly shrinking as more and more people die off. But the novel is undercut with moments of hope (or even just joy) as people work together and find reasons to live in each other, along with the incredible sacrifices people make just to try and ensure humanity has a chance at a future. Plus the whole looming apocalypse/aftermath of apocalypse thing is broken up with occasional exposition dumps explaining stuff like the finer points of orbital mechanics, which is really damn interesting if you're a space nerd like I am.

Anyways 10/10 would recommend reading it if you're cool with the depressing setting; just googling Seveneves PDF turns up a page full of results to read it for free, so it's super easy to find.

[popculturebuffet]

Ducktales Final Four: Beaks in the Shell! or JESUS WEPT!

This.. this is a big occasion for me. It’s a return to regular Ducktales coverage.. but it’s also the first episode of the LAST four of the series. It was thanks to Ducktales my blog got a following, first through in character chat things, then through my reviews of this very season. It was starting this last year that took my blog from something I was passionate abbout but did ocassionaly to a vital part of my being and my source of income via one lucky boy who just wont’ let me stop! I kid of course, I thank kev for it, though i’d gladly welcome any other review comissions from you fine folks and fit them into the schedule. There’s a page on my blog for how and if your on mobile you can simply send me an ask or submit to ask about comissiong an episode or episodes of an animated shwo you like and i’ll give you my prices and what not. But it’s thanks to these Kev started comissioning in the first place and thanks to you all clicking on these reviews every week I do them that kept me doing them early on. So I wanted to thank you all. 

Covering the last four episodes is really bittersweet for me. It’s not the end for ducks here: I have most of seasons 1 and 2 to cover, and will be covering a lot of season 1 next month so I can properly cover shadow war for my Lena retrospective, not to mention continuing to cover life and times when I have the space, various birthdays, including Carl Barks Next Month!, and so on and so on. But this is not only the first show I covered on a weekly basis but it’s the first show i’ve covered like that to end. To put it in perspective, Loud House won’t be leaving until it WANTS to and even then nick will probably prepare a second spinoff to follow it up in some form, Amphibia has both the rest of season 2 to go, starting next month!, and a third season renewal meaning while that probably WILL be it i’ll have had two full seasons to cover by the time it’s over, and I went into Close Enough FULLY expecting it not to make it past season 1 as it’s long and harried production cycle lead me to belivie Time-Warner was just going to dump it on HBO Max and be done with it.. and to my utter and everlasting delight the opposite has happened: It didn’t just get renewed but it’s become one of HBO Max’s most popular shows, the flagship of it’s adult animation lineup, and been given THREE more seasons, two of which are coming very soon, and likely will get as many as it wants for the forseable future. 

The point is.. I went into covering Ducktales expecting at least one more season and genuinely not knowing if i’d make it thorugh covering this one, and once this started to really work out for me, to the point from doubting i’d EVER be able to set up a Patreon to having one that nets me ten dollars a month, feel free to contribute if you enjoy these reviews even a buck a month helps, honest. Plus thanks to that ten bucks a month i’ll be covering the five part 87 Ducktales pilot in April and if you get it up to ten i’ll cover super ducktales. But I wouldn’t even had one without these reviews giving me something to start with, and I figured they’d be around for a few more years, at least one more season. I didn’t think the show would just.. end with this season and while the season IS a proper final season of the show, wrapping up arcs, introducing long overdue cast additions, giving us the biggest and best overarching plot thus far.. a good final season dosen’t make it hurt any less. But as a wise Synthizoid once said...

It hurts it’s going.. I wasn’t prepared for it.. but it’s giving us one hell of a last act, and if this episode is any indication, just because the end is in sight dosen’t mean the last few eps before the finale are phoning it in. This is the end... so now i’ve got my emotional stuff and the weight behind it out of the way, for now i’m defintely going to be bawling come the finale and I’m not ashamed, we can dive into the begining of the end. Counting down.. because really when else am I going to get to use this...

We’re at four and under the cut it’s beaks in the shell. Let’s get dangerous. 

We open with a crime in progress as Gandra is stealing a thing for FOWL and Fenton has shown up on the scene to stop her as you’d expect.. along with Huey the boy wonder! He’s finally Fenton’s Sidekick!

Seriously it’s just so sweet to see this little payoff, to see Huey, after talking about it and clearly wanting to assit Fenton however he can, actually participate. Granted he dosen’t have an armor, yet, of his own, but still he’s been through enough stuff to be helpful> plus, Gyro’s reaction to Fenton trying to ge the resources for another gizmosuit was...

Gandra trips up his wheel, and im with 87 Scrooge in Ducktales Remastered, which I finally got to play recently! Horay!, what WAS gyro thinking with that design. Regardless she gets away, and our heroes return the loot off screen. Good day’s crime fighting. 

Except something’s off with Fenton as he’s been working extra late lately and lying to both Gyro and Ma’Ma about it with both suspcious, Gyro because he dosen’t like not knowing things and especially not knowing what his former intern’s up to because he’s a bit of a control freak.. and because he probably can’t go visit his new clone farm and work on speeding up the process of his replacement bodies after moonvasion used em all up without Fenton finding out as he’d tell Scrooge and Scrooge would be like “Stop playing God in ways that could get me a steep fine!”. It’d be a whole thing. The fact Fenton’s also using their now shared intern in Manny and neither is telling him why probably isn’t helping and i’ts only that workplace harassment seminar that keeps him from trying to strangle either of them again. That and Manny dosen’t have a neck.

Ma’Ma is more upset that not only is he lying to her again, more on that later, but .. that she’s figured out he has a new girlfriend and understandably thinks there’s some dark reason he’s not telling her, and unlike Gyro turns out she’s two for two. I mean she is a detective while Gyro is more worried about his clone army, his man horse and his robot son. I mean the last two are valid but still Mama just has to worry about her job and her socially awkward adult son. She has more time to focus on this.

But yes, not only is Fenton seeing someone.. but it’s Gandra again. A bit abrubt but honestly this isn’t the first Fenton episode to move his life fast.. and frankly i’m more lenient on final seasons, or seasons INTENDED to be the last ones in terms of offscreen stuff, as your trying to get everything you can wrapped up in the span of 13-24 episodes depending on how lucky you get, if not less. Sometimes you just gotta use a reveal and some exposition to hurry things along and if presented right it works.. and here it is a while the summary for this episode spoiled the reveal, i’ts still subtly dramatic that not only has hef ully forgiven her.. but their together.. despite the fact she still works for fowl. Wuh-oh.  After the credits we get an idea of what their working on, as Fenton used the gizmoduck suit to enter some kind of VR scape. This is the Gizmoscape! It’s a vast virtual reality landscape.. that looks like a fancy version of the VR Interface from community. Marble pillars, flowing water falls. Though ironically enough Jim Rash’s character is NOT a part of it and despite Fenton suggesting letting him in to help with their glitch problem she’s reluctant as it’s THEIR baby and she wants it to be perfect first before they allow other people in. Though i’m also sure part of it is that Gyro would start screaming JESUS WEPT! over and over. 

Meanwhile Mark Beaks is having a big flashy press confrence to announce the new Waddlephone. Only a 50% chance of exploding! And that’s not my dig at Samsung but the shows as that’s really Beaks sales pitch. Unsuprisingly only one VERY bored looking nerd is there at the confrence. As for why he’s finally fallen so low part of it is explalined in the episode: His attempted thefts of the Gizmoduck suit have gotten stale. As the bored nerd puts it he’s tried to steal it four times already, two that we’ve seen but i’m VERY unsuprised he’s tried again off screen. He’s made it PAINFULLY clear he has no ideas of his own, constantly steals them, and the public’s tired of it. As for why it took THIS LONG.. this is sadly realistic. As the throngs of “hardcore gamers” defending Cyberpunk 2077 before it was released can attest to, internet nerd culture can often be toxic, stupid and defend big personalities even when they’ve CLEARLY done something terrible as long as their doing something they like. Beaks was clearly pilfering enough good products and doing enough antics on social media to still be liked and for them to ignore his blanat and douchey crimes and had enough money on him during said crimes to walk away from it. 

Problem is.. while people can be awful and defend someone despite them not deserving their loyality, being a douche in public and doing VERY terrible things.. you have to have something to earn that loyalty. Waddle had that at first iwth project ta-dah, Waddleduck, various aps i’m sure... but it’s clear from context by this point Beaks has nothing left and no cult of personality to insulate him. Unlike say Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos he dosen’t HAVE some big product to mask his shadier wealth hoarding actions, he just has rampat supervilian attempts to steal someone else’s power armor and a hired hyjacking to get back at his cold unloving mother. Even when he does supervillian stuff like that.. he can’t be bothered to do it originally. The public will, and very sadly, defend you from terrible stuff, we’ve seen it with people supproting Gina Carano even though she’s actively spreading harmful disnfermation and then had the GALL to compare herself to jews hiding from the nazis, and one journalist trying to defend her had the gall to compare this to the hollywood blacklisting if the 50′s instead of you know, someone who woudln’t shut up about harmful dangerous shit finally getting fired for using teh platform said job provided to spread said harmful dangerous shit about masks and the vacine. But if you have nothing to offer.. thieri just going to forget you and move on. He has nothing to offer so they’ll gladly gravitate to some other jackass who can at leasat given them a neat phone instead of trying to steal a superhero suit for the 8th time. Mark realizes if he can’t steal something soon.. he’ll be forced to go with the Nuclear option: MAKE SOMETHING HIMSELF. 

Back at Fenton’s toilet lab, Huey finds Fenton having some cyber makeouts with Gandra... which translates to him kissing the air and Huey feeling evne more awarkd than usual. As for why Huey’s here despite it being late, he got a piece of Gandra’s nanotech during the robbery and figures they can track her. Fenton is.. less than enthused about that for obvious reasons but things soon get worse for our hero as our other hero notices the linkup. And while sidekicks are a good thing in my eyes; They allow young heroes to get proper training, help nuture their talents and prevent assholes from telling them to stop it instead of you know helping them. It’s.. a more common trope than you think let me tell you. 

But Fenton’s discovered the Downside is they can show up anytime, want to hunt your criminal girlfriend down not knowing the full story, and if their a genius like you, figure out what your up to with no effort and really want to try it. Seriously Huey’s almost as smart as you Fenton and will no doubt surpass you one day, this was a matter of when not if and you shouldv’e been more prepared. But Huey wants to try, and while Fenton tries deflecting since he only has the gizmoduck helmet and it only works for him now... Manny comes in with a bunch of vr rigs and Huey dives in.  Naturally, Huey soon running directly into Gandra dosne’t go great.. and given this is huey his natural instinct is to have a panic attack over his best friend, mentor and the only person besides maybe his family, boyfriend and girlfriend that really gets him possibly betraying him and his entire family. Gandra is of course mad Fenton invited someone in when she didn’t want that, and even more someone whose clearly not happy with her and will likely tell on them because that’s basic hue-man nature. 

Fenton explains he didn’t ask for this, so we get easily the best part of the episode: Gandra’s solution to the child having a mental breakdown.. is to summon a weighted blanket and throw it over him, which Huey mistakes for a trap and she explains helps with Anxiety.. and while he struggles.. it really does. Damn gotta get me one of those. Also while his Autisim remains vauge, likely on puprose, Huey having anxiety disorder, while obvious before, is now 100% confirmed. 

So now he’s calm, though his Anxiety meter shows he’s still not happy and Gandra doubts he’ll listen, Fenton can at least try and explain: The two have been seeing each other and working on this in secret.. but it has NOTHING to do with FOWL other than Gandra embezzling resoruces to make it happen. Gandra also explains why the project is so important to her and Fenton via her own backstory: Super Science is a dangerous, unrpedictable field and accidents happen a lot, and given people tend to hate what they don’t understand, hence why the X-Men founded their own island  after getting spat on one too many times, it often gets an unfair bad wrap.. and she shows she’s had to put up with this her whole life, making an intresting lazer thing as a kid that lost to a volcano and getting glared at for it accidently destroying said volcano. And as an adult due to her work’s dangerous and experimental nature, no one would take a chance on it and like many a super villian she had to experiment on herself. It’s also why she worked for Beaks last season and works with FOWL now, only supervillians with thier grandiose ambitions and lack of care for property damage would fund her. 

That’s part, at least, of why this is so very important to her: The Gizmoscap eprovides an invorment where scientests and others can experiment unabated, where the only limit is imagination and those glitches they keep having and any accident can be frozen , dragged and dropped away with no damage. There’s no risk but all the reward and they plan to give it out for free, to let the public use this and let the world grow from it. 

It also fills in a lot of Gandra’s character and gives weight to her last apperance: Her working with Beaks, while hypocritical, now has a tragic edge as he was simply the only one who’d fund her work. Her hatred of Fenton’s corprroate job and people like Scrooge.. is that in general billionares like him usually aren’t good people, and even SCrooge has his clear faults, and she assumed he was just making Fenton shut up and do things just to beniefit him and make him more money.. when Scrooge was instaead paying him to do a genuine public service as gizmoduck, and gives him and Gyro a LOT of leway and a pretty bottomless budget and only turns things down if their way too dangeorus for public release. The tragedy here is if she’d gone to Scrooge.. she never would’ve had to work for FOWL. He wouldd’ve genuinely supported her and likely given her a full ride and a spot in the lab of her own, maybe as an intern but probably on her own merit given how game changing her tech is and how he of all people understands a ballance of risk and reward. It turns her from a very hypcoriticla techie who works with the very people she scorns.. to someone who has no choice and desperatley wants out.  And this is her way out: something new and bold that’, while not hers alone as Fenton co created it, could change the world and make it safe for people like her to do what they do without ridcule, scorn or risk. It’s everything she could’ve dreamed of and more and once it’s done she promises to leave fowl and as the end of the episode bares out, and as her tone makes clear, she’s genuine about it. She also TRULY does love fenton and vice versa and both are desspearte for Huey to keep a lid on things from Gyro till it’s ready, as she rightfully worries if it gets out unfisnished they’ll just be mocked agian.  Naturally being a good soft boy Huey is now entirely on board, because he loves science, and he loves love and this is both. And frankly given what we saw way back in Astro BOYD... .he knows more than anyone what its like to be laughed at and mocked for being diffrent and simply being smart. And even though his family lvoes him.. only one member is as smart as him in the same way, his mom whose still a very diffrent person, and it wasn’t till this season he really got to connect with people his own age like him. And both Violet and BOYD could benifit form this.. everyone could. So he’ll keep it secret for now.  This proves problematic as both Gyro AND Mama are there and both have questions. And while Huey ducks gyro, Mama.. interrogates a small child who she’s defintely met and likely knows has anxiety over something as trivial as her son having a secret girlfrined. You.. you guys might’ve wanted to remove this bit given last year. I”m just saying. Does not play well. The most Huey can come up with is a girlfriend in Canada which fenton plays along with... but given neither her nor gyro are really buying into things, though Mama has a check done on seamstresses in canada just in case because this bit was clearly written years ago and not rerecorded for whatever reason, Huey uses little bulb to fake a gizmo emergency so Fenton can get out of there, go home and work on this himself while Huey stalls and lies. But since his best on the fly lie was “a girlfriend in canada”, which is somehow worse than “who’s Dewey”, and while our boy is many things: excellent at opera, a good friend, a wonderful wingman, excellent at setting a mood, a good son, great at panic attacks, a genius, an expert woodchuck, knowledgeble on quantum mechanics.. the list goes on lying is not one of those things and he seems to be in a pickle. 

Meanwhile Mark is struggling to create, can relate, because he’s entirely creatively sterile. And that’s probably why out of Scrooge’s foes.. he stopped being a threat. He has no vision. And while true the Beagle BOys also don’t besides steal stuff and maybe get our deed back, that’s by design as Ma knows they can’t take scrooge or gizmoduck so why cry. Stick to petty crimes and stuff he isn’t aware of or dosen’t care about. But Magica and Glomgold do. Magica is cunning, if not subtle, and manipulative and when on full blast horrifyingly powerful, and it took everything Clan McDuck had to stop her at full, and she still nearly won without any powers when she came back, and even if Lena can keep her in check now, she still GOT her powers back and got her new arch enemy to defeat her old one. Glomgold while only slightly more comipitent than beaks, and even then VERY slightly, he at least has vision. His schemes are entirely stupid.. but he dosen’t stop coming up with them. They may be his first draft but damn if they aren’t entertaining and damn if one or two haven’t WORKED. Simply stealing a few cents from scrooge and gaslighting him in a devil costume NEARLY drove him insane and cost him his fortune.  Beaks.. has no ideas. He has ambiation.. but it’s to steal the same tech that even if he got it, he woudln’t know what to do with. The ONLY time he’s been a full on threat has been using someone else’s scheme, that Gandra clearly came up with and STILL required piggybacking on the gizmo suit. He has nothing and while it was fine for a while.. eventually h’es left iwth nothing. Glomgold at least has money, magica at least has power... Beaks HAD both.. but had no idea what to properly do with it and now is on his last legs. Even his idea for a coffee cups with aps is taken because of course “even the dumbest ideas are taken”, this is america. Making dumb shit for rich morons is our primary export. But he sees the fleeing fenton, has a breakdown and declares FINE if that’s what fate wants i’ll steal the armor I’LL STEAL THE ARMOR ALL DAY. 

So Fenton heads home to recharge in both senses of the word, and to tell Gandra the timetable’s moved and Huey can hold them only so long. And he seems to be wrong as Huey confidently prepares to answer their questions.. but is seemingly thrown when we get the real reason Mama is so upset: She’s just worried and still a bit hurt from Fenton not feeling he could tell her he was gizmoduck and it breaks her heart that her son feels he has to hide from her again. However while this is genuinely sad and emotional.. the reason he’s thrown is it’s NOT huey, but Louie, whose a bit miffed as he DIDN’T know Fenton was Gizmoduck, and can’t properly bullshit without full info. it’s also really nice that bit FINALLY came up as the rest of the four main kids have known for a while now. But Huey convincnes him to do it.. for 6 months allowance. Frankly the real shocker here is that they actually GET an allowance. 

However Mama.. is again a cop. One who REALLY needs to rethink her ethics.. but a cop, and the best one on the force, and thus has easily guessed this is not Huey, and given she’s probably ran into his schemes before, figures out which one he’d bring in to buffer for him and easily gets rid of Louie by asking him to tur informant on himself, since the REAL Huey would under pressure and Louie instead flees in terror not wanting to get arrested and leaves both the lab and the episode. Though I’m pretty sure i know where he went

So yeah things are not great and only get worse, as Mark breaks into fentons house via the open window and upon finding out abotu the Gizmoscape naturally plans to hack into it and take it for himself. Before he does Fenton talks to Gandra and admits they may have to let other people in and we get another reason: She’s worried she’s not good enough. He reassures her.. and this tender moment is interupted by Beaks who imprisons them, hyjacks fenton’s security system aka a gizmo armor, and while still a creatively sterile douche, does have a decent if horrifically scummy way to profit all of this: use the open coloabreation concept to get the legal right to steal all this and say it’s his. 

Fenton bemaons the fact that Gandra was right, one bad apple spoiled the bunch and unveling it too qiuckly would’ve gone bad as she feared.. but Gandra’s grown and realizes Fenton was also right, and that they needed more people. While the wrong people can ruin a project, collaboration can help, finding perspectives you didn’t see and helping fine tune ideas. Huey, whose collapsed at Fenton’s due to the exustion of lying, wakes up to find Beaks crimes and being unable to just unplug him, as while Beaks is VERY dumb, even he’s not THAT stupid. But Fenton gets out an SOS over morse to tell everyone So Huey does.. and the calvary arrives, as Huey enters the Gizmoscape with Mama and Gyro. And while Mama is pleased to realize she’s right about the girlfirend thing they don’t really have time for that, so once Huey explains the basic concept, he uses it himself to give himself GIZMO ARMOR. AT LAST. 

He also has extra long legs, because of course, just.. of course. Naturally Beaks steals it, and everyone else takes a stab at their own gizmotech armor: Mama daawns a stunning police themed one, Gyro goes for a bulb mecha based on the giant version of little bulb from the great dime chase, an idea brought up by LB, and Gandra goes for a sleek tron esque nanotech number. Beaks take sa bit from each and our heroes wonder how to beat him.. but Fenton realizes that’s simple: Beaks can only copy and steal... they can create. And Gandra uses this against him by pointing that out so he drops his super armor.. to look like Andross from Starfox.. which shows that EVEN when trying to come up with a cool final boss form... Beaks has to steal from something. The rest of the Gizmo Corps, my name for them I own that, Gizmo Legion would also be good, after Iron Man’s iron Legion, suit back up and kick beaks ass as a team. I smell second spinoff.. or first if darkwing ends up hyjacked by Seth Rogen.. who I have nothing agianst he’s just not the one who put in the work for a reboot. 

So our heroes win in an awesome sequence, seirously spinoff and Beaks is knocked the fuck out and presumibly will FINALLY go to jail for good to this as he can get away from a lot but directly breaking into an officer’s house and stalking her son, they can omit the gizmopart and even if Fenton went public.. no one would care and he and Mama can take care of htemselves, as can Huey, Gyro, Gandra and Manny, so it’s not like anyones in danger. Beaks is well and truly defeated: he has no idea, an imminet jail sentence, and no one to back him up. Fenton’s finally got the little boil off his back

So now the big fight is over, Gyro can actually process the Gizmoscape.. and is genuinely impressed.. he tries to hidei t because of course he does.. but it’s clear for someone who himself has constnatly been called crazy and had his ideas blow up.. this is paradise to him. a place where he won’t be judged and has unlimtied funds to experiment with his ideas without having to get yelled at when they destroy a city block or nearly choked to death by his own robot son, daughter or nonbinary person. He also easily fixes the problem and proves Fenton right for wanting to include him, as he points out they hadn’t been DELETING anything, simply downsizing it and it naturally caused stress on the server.  Fenton talks about Gandra and defneeds her to Mama.. whose just happy he’s happya nd someone can take her son. Alls well that ends well right. 

Final Thoughts:  So this was a... wait.. why are we cutting back to fowl.. why is bradford there. 

Yeah turns out megalmanoical diabolical msterminds kinda monitor their employees so he knew she intended to quit and stole resources, and while she plans to leave, he simply calls in a bunch of eggheads who overwhelm her with sheer numbers and has her fined two weeks pay.. and taken to the lost library to indefintely lock her up. What’s that she asks “You have your secrets, I have mine”

So yeah a bit of a downer ending

Actual Final Thoughts: 

This was an excellent capper to Fenton’s character arc. While the Gandra relationsihp is a bit rushed the rest is a masterful capper to his character arc: This episode shows off how he’s changed from EVERY one of his previous three focus episodes, while a major part of astro boyd and how he got his docterate it dosne’t quite contribute to his character arc,  and grown from them: From beware the buddy system! he’s learned to colaberate properly and taken his desire to WORK with other people, like he always did with Gyro but was constnatly shut out, and found a proper and brilliant way to that allows people like him, gyro, gandra and huey to really express themselvs. He’s grown from a niave rookie trusting the wrong people in who is gizmoduck.. to someone whose STILL fully trusting despite constant betryals, but now knows who to trust, and an experinced hero who once freed easily counters his nemisis.  And finally from Dangerous Chemistry, he’s finally got a ballance in his life: inastead of running from gizmo or treating his alter ego as something else.. he’s found a way to use the gizmotech for science, and FINALLY found his world changing invention one so good and so practical even his mentor, despite trying to walk it back, is genuinely proud of him and genuinely in awe.

Every step lead to his happy ending.. well okay his girlfriend still needs to be freed from her insane ex-boss, but that’s just a few episodes away. Fenton has everything he wanted when he started: his boss finally respects him and treats him as an equal, his mom not only knows who he is but is proud and supportive of him, he has a loving partner creatively and romantically.. and a best friend who while a good two decades younger, is there for him and who he genuinely apologizes too for putting so much on him. LIke all the endings so far this season.. it feels like a throughly satisfying end to the journey we’ve been following. This fits in nicely with Penny realizing earth could be her home and that she dosen’t have to constnatly fight to have a purpose, Lena finally accepting magic instead of running from it and thus gaining peace of mind and power to stop her former abuser from hurting anyone else, Goldie finally accepting how much she cars about Scrooge and his family and that she CAN change... all of this, except penny obviously has been built up through three seasons and while I DEFINTLY could see frank and matt returning to all of them.. i’ts nice to get some closure.  It feelsd earned and impressive. The episode is also.. REALLY fucking funny, from the weighted blanket gag to Beaks in general, to Huey yelling at fenton about Mama “She somehow broke Louie!”. It’s a masterful and throughly satisfying end to Fenton’s story. And again we’ll likely see him in the finale but character arc wise.. its a good place to end his. 

Next Week: FINALLY, AFTER 10,000 YEARS, IT’S THE TAILSPIN EPISODE. OWEEOOO, OWEEHHHH. 

Tommorow: We return to the noiry furry world of John Blacksad as everyone’s favorite panther detective battles white supremacists to find a missing girl and we’re introduced to your faviorite sidekick and mine Weekly. 

Later on this week: The Lena retrospective continues with Jaw$, we celebrate Tex Avery’s birthday, and I tackle the awful original tom and jerry movie. 

So if any of that tickles your fancy see you at the next rainbow

#ducktales #beaks in the shell! #beaks in the shell #fenton crackshell cabrera #gandra dee #huey duck #mark beaks #gyro gearloose #mama cabrera #little bulb #manny the headless manhorse #gizmoduck #ducktales spoilers

[zwritesstuff]

Writing a First Draft

I’ve seen a lot of advice posts that encourage writing a “bad” first draft, or saying that the point of the first draft isn’t to be “good” just to be done, but I have yet to see any examples of what that actually means (which is unfortunate because for a lot of first-time writers that may just mean that their best effort on a first draft isn’t “good enough”), so that’s what I’m here for! The ultimate advocate of ugly writing, babey! Let’s write some “bad” first drafts!!

Forewarning that this is going to be difficult for you perfectionists out there (same hat tho!!!), but really, if you’re looking to finish a first draft within a reasonable time frame (and not continue to rewrite the beginning 50 times to get there, only to be disappointed when the next scenes aren’t as “good” as the beginning), then this really is the way to go. Perfectionism comes in super handy in later drafts, but it’s a real burden in the first draft, and I really really relate to that. What I find that helps keep my perfectionism in check while I’m drafting is to keep a separate Word doc open (or a notebook and pen at hand) to jot down new ideas or things that have changed throughout the draft. Putting a page number down next to the notation will save your life as well. Your future self will thank you!

Okay, so let’s get into it! You have an idea, and you need to get that first draft out before you lose motivation or move on to a shiny new WIP idea. What’s that first draft going to look like?

Write the scenes you’re excited about first. If you’re someone who, like myself, needs to write things in chronological order, then write these scenes in chronological order - but! if you have the conclusion figured out, then write it now, yes, even before that one bit in the middle you’re not sure about. Is it likely that some details in these scenes will change as you keep writing different parts of the book? Yes! Do it anyway! Anything you write will be helpful for later drafts, so write those scenes!!! Plus, if you start with what you’re excited about, you’ll want to keep writing even after they’re finished, because your brain will just keep generating other super cool ideas for those in-between scenes. And yeah, there will definitely be filler scenes to write, but you can probably worry about those in the next draft.

If you’re on a roll, don’t worry about punctuation, grammar, or spelling. I mean it! If those red squiggles in Word bother you, turn them off (they’re really only semi-helpful for editing, and we’re not doing that right now). If you write faster and think better using “internet grammar” (minimal/excessive punctuation, no capitalization, weird spelling, etc.), then do that! If it helps you get words on the page, it’s worth doing.

If you’re not on a roll, try putting some space between what you’ve written and what you need to write. For me, that frequently means hitting enter (even mid-sentence if I suddenly get stuck), typing “monkey,” and then hitting enter again, as many times as it takes for my brain to reboot and remember what the hell I was going for. If that means I have a chain of 20 monkeys in the middle of a paragraph, so be it. They get to hang out there until I come back in draft two and delete them. 

I’ve also written “uhhhhhh” and “oh fuck now what” several times in a first draft. It happens. It’s easier to write in a way that mirrors your thought process, so just do what works. Use memes in your prose to keep it moving - it’ll make future you laugh when you go back through on draft two!

Don’t be afraid to change major pieces of plot - but don’t you dare go back and rewrite earlier pieces to match! Let’s say you’re at the end of act one and you revealed some tragic detail about your MC’s backstory, but now you’re in the middle of act two and you’ve realized that it no longer fits your idea of MC and you no longer want it to be true. Simply make a brief note of it and keep writing like that scene in act one never happened. Deleting, rewriting, and repurposing are all for later drafts! The goal on the first draft is literally just to reach the end - and it’s inevitable that you’ll find and change the story along the way.

Forget about foreshadowing. No matter how detailed of an outliner you are, the fact is that in the first draft you really don’t actually know what’s going to happen yet in your book (see point 5). So forget about trying to foreshadow. Spell out what’s happening plain as day - because the first draft is just one long exposition dump to aide you in future drafts. If you get halfway through and a sudden twist or weird piece of backstory jumps out at you, write it in as if you had foreshadowed, even though you haven’t yet. Make a note of it, and maybe even note where you could foreshadow this in the next few drafts, but keep moving forward. 

Changing perspectives is fine even if it goes against how you know you want your final draft to be. If you have a scene in mind that you know you need to include, but you have no idea how MC would react during it, but you know how your side character would react, write the scene from the side character’s perspective. You can think about MC’s POV in that scene later - again, the point is just to get it written, so if switching POVs gets you through the scene, do it.

Ultimately, this is what people mean when they say your first draft is going to be “ugly.” It’s going to be a little (or a lot) messy. But that’s okay. The struggle of the beginning writer is realizing that your first draft is not going to look like anything you’ve read before - because those are final drafts. And to the gifted writers who breezed through school (like I did) by submitting their first draft essays for grading - that’s not going to work here. Every time you rewrite a piece, it gets better. If you try to make your first draft perfect, you will just end up frustrated and disappointed at the time you wasted, because you’ll end up reworking 80% of it or more in the subsequent drafts. Your writing style will change and improve, and your knowledge will grow, and every time you revisit a draft, that will be reflected.

So write that ugly draft. Insert so many author’s notes mid-paragraph that you look like an early 2000s fanfic writer. Contradict previous scenes like you’re constructing the most elaborate Winchester Mystery House -esque draft the world has ever seen, complete with paragraphs that lead to nowhere and mysterious monkey chains cutting sentences in half. 

And then, in the second draft, make it look as though the first draft never happened.

#writing advice #writeblr advice #first draft #first draft advice #nanowrimo #i feel like this is appropriate for nano #mine

[soyouareandrewdobson]

Alex ze Pirate Mini Review 4: The EED: Emotional Exposition Dump. Or why THIS is not friendship

So here we are. The last part of this 45 page three parter, meant to be about what Sam really means to the crew. And what have we seen so far in the previous parts? That Sam is not just their underappreciated, but downright exploited slave (yeah, did you know that in ancient Greece slaves supposedly had more rights than Sam in this one? At least they could buy out their freedom one day), that Dobson has no idea how to genuinely pace a story, turning what could have been a decent 100 page story if planned out and presented with more care into a 45 page short snore fest and that Hat Andy’s idea for jokes are either based on abusing token buttmonkeys, turning annoying memes into even more unfunny jokes or making dark comedy with dead orphans.

At least when South Park makes jokes about children dying, they are appropriate in that dark setting and the death is still in some way handled or refered to as a horrific event. In Dobson’s case however, it just leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.

Sorry, I just can’t get over the orphanage thing. If Dobson wanted the reason for Sam leaving be that he finds out someone he cared about from his old life is dead, that is one thing. But did this asshole have to destroy an entire building with countless victims to do it? Couldn’t he just have one person die and the rest be still at that place? Honestly, I think it would have been funnier and more meaningful emotionally, if Alex and Co actually interacted with people from Sam’s past and in doing so learn more about him as a person, by genuinely visiting a still standing orphanage. Give the comic some meat on the bones and in doing so actually create the impression this comic is truly about Sam and not just about characters doing random stuff in relation to finding him. Instead Dobson goes for a literal overkill, which he then does not even treat as a tragedy but as a joke.

Dobson, THIS is a better and more dignified joke about orphans than the shit you did.

You got outclassed by Chuck Lorree of all people on this planet, you disgrace of a storyteller. A storyteller who can’t even keep his own barely existing continuity in the Alex-verse straight, now that I think of it. After all, according to Legends, the orphanage was closed and all the orphans were sold out to others, with Sam being the last of the litter

Which again is just unintentionally more horrific than Dobson likely intented. But you know, dumb people don’t know when they do dumb shit.

But I digress Let us just get into the last part. In which we finally see the “emotional” pay off of everything that happened so far.

 Spoilers, this is my reaction to that pay off.

And here is what everything led up to now.

 Sam ran away, because he wants to say his final farewell to his sister figure, we never knew about at all and about whom we do not learn one single thing really.

 Where do I begin with how this revelation fails?

Let’s start with the fact that this in execution does not have the emotional impact that was intended. And why is that? Because Dobson doesn’t bother to actually introduce us to the sister as a character.

If I may digress a bit to talk about One Piece here: In the manga, oftentimes Oda will “interrupt” an ongoing story arc to feature flashback chapters, through which he tells about past events referenced in the “present” chapters prior. Through those flashbacks he further gives meaning to why in present time the characters facing certain foes or having to win in their current situation, is so important, even on an emotional level. In short, those flashbacks are no interruptions, they are integral in giving those story arcs emotional weight.

Because now we are not just “told” why we should care about things and people, we have been shown why we should care. The old rule of “show, don’t tell” being followed on.

A good example from a more “recent” storyline I can think of, is through the flashback chapters of the Dress Rosa story arc, where we are not only being shown how De Flamingo took over the kingdom of Dress Rosa and brought pain and misery over its people for years to come, but also the past of characters such as the gladiator Rebecca and Mr. Soldier, her father figure that raised her up from the time she was 10 and De Flamingo took over… only for the flashbacks to also reveal properly how Mr Soldier is not just a father figure for her that took her in, but her biological father Kyros, who had been turned into a toy by one of De Flamingo’s henchmen via a power, that also took Rebecca’s memories of her dad away so she never identified the toy as her dad.

This way Oda achieves multiple things at once; Among other things, he establishes how evil De Flamingo is, how tragic Mr Soldier and Rebecca’s lives really are, adding to us the readers wanting to see them and Luffy beat De Flamingo into a pulp and it makes the later “present day” moment when Mr. Soldier and many other victims turn back to normal and Rebecca regains her memories and is reunited with her dad so much more sweeter. Cause now we care.

Truth be told, I myself believe that Oda is one of few storytellers on this planet, who truly has “mastered” the technique of emotional flashback storytelling.

A technique Dobson could have used in this part of the story, but didn’t. Cause honestly, the way he tells how Sam’s sister was “important” to our poor cabin boy is not emotionally engaging from a storytelling perspective. We are told she is important, but we learn genuinely nothing about her, not even what her name was and what she looked like except from that one picture in the locket from over 15 pages ago. Nothing about how “close” she and Sam truly were is revealed through showing, only telling and as such we don’t even begin to care for her relationship with Sam and how her loss is genuinely important to him. So the main goal of this story, to make us the readers feel something for Sam aside of pity for how he is treated by his supposed friends, has not been achieved.

 … Dobson, you are a hack. You can’t even use flashbacks, a basic technique in the realm of storytelling, to show us why we should “care” more, heck, even at all, about Sam and his loss.

If you just had adjusted a few things, you could have had something good here.

By adjustments I mean the following: Take the first page of this chapter as well as the first panel of the second page, and combine them into the final page of the previous chapter. In doing so creating a proper cliffhanger for part two. Then start chapter 3 of with a few pages (lets say 6 or so) showing young Sam and his sister interacting in the orphanage in doing so turning her from a nameless plotdevice into a genuine person to care about. And then use content of page 2 and 3 of this chapter, to elaborate on their relationship, potentially with small cuts always between present day Sam at the grave explaining himself and saying his farewells, with pictures of the past showing what they meant to each other.

 But nope. This very basic idea a fanfic writer now has come up with, a fanfic writer who never studied literature or took writing classes by the way, something I doubt you did at college the more I read your work, has never crossed your “superior” mind.

Also, I find Sam’s text on page 3 really, really backwards in a way. Like, I get that we are meant to consider it a good thing Sam is this way. You know, being genuinely selfless and wanting to make others happy. And don’t get me wrong, generosity and selflessness are virtues I hold in high regard. But the way Sam talks about how he just wanted her to be happy while sacrificing any fulfillment of basic needs for himself feels more like a pathological disorder in that case than something to reach for. In fact, psychology speaks from different forms of generosity and the thing Sam describes here is likely “compulsive giving” or “unrelenting generosity”, a pathological variant that can be highly toxic for all people affected by it.

Funny how Dobson, a person who wants to claim he is all for mental healthcare, is essentially “promoting” the positivity of a psychological disorder via Sam.

 Then again, this also feels more like Dobson putting words into Sam’s mouth (in a literal sense) to retroactively make Sam’s treatment look less horrid. Cause now Sam doesn’t just do all the work because he is ordered around, he deep down is “happy” doing all of the work and gain not even some basic respect in return, because he cares so deeply for his friends.

… I feel myself get livid again here.

And the next few pages don’t really help me “calm down”.

 Cause now the “justifications” just go on. The thing that is meant to be a heartfelt farewell turning into Sam “justifying” that hey, it must be good that he ended up with Alex and her crew. Cause after all, by being abducted years ago and being treated as a slave who in the ginger’s eyes is worth less than lint, he likely avoided dying of shitting his pants and a crushing roof. Ignoring the fact that he was going to be sold out anyway back then and would have potentially ended up with a more generous master than the crew of non Captain Syrup.

Also, just all of the shit going on in page 6. Sam asking his “sister” to be at peace, when likely, if the girl could still talk, she may even just ask Sam the following: Who the heck are you. Cause really, if you think about it, if Sam did all the nice things for her in secret, did the girl even realize she had a “big brother” figure to watch over her? Also, him saying he is happy and he is doing quite alright for himself?

All the pictures of him sighing and looking in misery in this story alone, plus the cavalry of strips I posted about how Sam is abused in the first part of this post series tells me another story.

Finally, Sam’s message “At least now, we are both free”? Sam, she is dead, likely having died in pain when a house crushed on her, weakened by a deadly disease and traumatized by other children around her dying of said disease. And you are stuck with a bunch of people that haven’t shown to care for you up until this story and the only reason they may even care for you now is out of “sympathy” because you lost your sister figure, not because they genuinely love and care for you as a person. As far as I am concerned, you would be better off being the slaveboy of some nymphomanic pirate princess in the world of Berserk than you are on this plane of existence.

And now that the “emotional” farewell is out of the way, Dobson can go back to focus on the characters he really cares about in this shit anyway: Little Bitch Annie, lesbian chocolate rain Miroku and Deadpool’s pubes.

 Oh Alex, you are such a rascal. You really make me want to shoot you with a crossbow, stab you in the eye, hurl you out a window and shove explosives where the sun won’t shine.

Yeah yeah, you are a pirate, but that doesn’t mean you need to be that awful as a person or even protagonist.

Christ. For someone who complains how toxic Walter White is to the point he believes “sympathizing” with the character turns you into a nazi, Dobson certainly is blind to how awful Alex really is, particularly as protagonist in a comic series intented for little kids. Compared to her, I can think of freaking slasher movie villains with more of a moral compass. Like say what you want about Jigsaw, at least he never victimized genuine children or teenagers.

And Talus, thanks for ruining the “emotional” moment Sam “earned” by pointing out how weird it is he kissed a gravestone. Also, I am glad I know what happens in the next pages or else I would assume Alex’s great idea includes to dig up his sister and turn her into a life sized doll for Sam to cuddle.

No, their ideas to assure he is emotionally save and to redeem themselves for years of taking him for granted/hurting him, is to throw him a surprise party.

… you know, I think you may be the only individuals in fiction, that Pinkie Pie would think do not deserve to throw a party or get one thrown for.

 But I guess Sam is just so nice, he even throws you a party for no apparent reason.

Either that or now that his “sister” is dead he will overcompensate even more and this is the next destructive stage of his compulsive generosity.

… Sam, I am sorry for your loss. But you need to get help. Once by the authorities who will hopefully get rid of Alex and then by some psychologist who helps you redefine your own self worth.

By the way, I find it funny that the banner he made also actually only mentions Talus, Atea and Captain Daphne with a bad hair day. It just confirms that Peggy either never bothered to join the others or that Dobson developed an early onset of dementia and totally forgot about the fact that the midget is a genuine character in this trainwrack. And I am convinced the later is the case, which really just makes me wonder how someone is able to do that. To forget a major character of the thing they create and want to turn into a money making franchise. Imagine if Disney did e.g. a sequel to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, only to forget about the god damn dwarves themselves.

At least Talus finally realizes he is unworthy to get a party thrown or be Sam’s friends. Good. Now jump into a wood chipper and free ourselves from your existence you dog beaver thing.

Content of the next page in a just alternate universe… Alex: You are a better human being than I could ever be and this is all because my creator is a hack who does not know how to create genuinely likable personalities.

The reality:

 FUCK YOU, ALEX! FUCK YOU AND THE BIKE PUMP YOU FLEW IN ON! Atea and Talus have learnt more than you about what it means to be a friend and they don’t even bother to punch you in the face for still being the biggest red haired  raging cunt since Asuka from Neon Genesis Evangelion.

If this is how Dobson thinks “friends” should treat each other, it is no wonder he has a friendless background. Hey, Hat Andy, if you want to emulate manga, may I suggest you just become even more blatantly about it and simply copy paste One Piece? Cause Luffy at least knows how to be a friend. How much does he care for his friends, strangers and even at times former enemies of his?

He cares so much, that e.g. when a special military force that beat the crap out of him got hands on his crewmate Nico Robin, he did THIS:

He declared war on the world government. Fuck, even Jack Sparrow, who is an opportunistic jackass, in a movie where everyone stabs the others at least three times in the back, was less selffish than Alex, when he gave up his chance on immortality as Captain of the Flying Dutchman, just so Will would live in some form.

Metalbeard from the Lego Movie cared more about doing the right thing than anyone in Alex the pirate did. You created the worst friends and “heroes” I have ever seen in a webcomic since the entirety of sinfest. Congratulations for that accomplishment, Dobson. It really takes a special kind of anti-talent to show such level of not understanding the power of friendship as one of the most basic tropes in storytelling, to the point a show about pastel colored equines managed to profit of it for nine years.

 WOOOOO! We are the worst, we are the worst!

And look, Uncle Pennywise’s scrotum is back.

Anyway, here are the last two pages of this thing, to end on what is meant to be a whimsical note because Sam actually gets something from Alex that is not a beating or verbal abuse.

 Too bad anything that would feel heartwarming about this is drowned by a) me actually remembering all the shit Alex, the crew and the writer pull to get to this point (from abusive neglect of the characters to pathetic emotional manipulation on a narrative level) and b) the weird rapey face Uncle Peggy makes in the picture. Like Jesus, did Dobson try to emulate the Burger King here?

But hey, this story is over. And who knows, perhaps from this moment on, Sam will actually be treated better overall in the comic and Dobson will spend time actually developing an overall plot and the world of this com-

Tom Kenny: ONE COMIC STRIP LATER

And it is back to business as usual.

... How much would I need to pay for someone on the internet to write an alternate ending to the story where it turns out Sam actually poisoned the food at the party and while Alex is slowly dying, a now evil Sam who has finally broke under years of abuse, is going to become a genuine threatening pirat? that is after he villain monologues to Alex how much she sucks before scalping her?

Wow, I am entering a dark place right now. I think I need to take a break.

So I am going to give my final verdict on this story with the next post around the weekend most likely. Cause that is how much time I will now spend rereading One Piece and watching the Pirates of the Carribean movies in addition to playing the Pirates level of Kingdom Hearts 3, in order to forget this shit and remind myself why I think pirates are cool.

#andrew dobson #alex ze pirate #fuck you #hat andy #tom preston #so you are a cartoonist #syac #comic #webcomic #pirates #sam the cabin boy #atea #talus #one piece #magic of friendship this is not

[ginnyzero]

Does Your Story Suffer from Exposition-itus

Exposition. What is it? What does it do? Exposition according to dictionary.com is a noun and the definitions that concern us are numbers 2, and 3. The act of expounding, setting forth, or explaining. And Writing or speech primarily intended to convey information or explain, a detailed statement or explanation.

Or in author terms. Info-dumping.

It is the opposite of action. Action being the dialog and actions that move your story forward.

Now, not all exposition is bad. In fact, there are going to be places in your book where information is necessary. However, if your exposition outweighs your action, it will slow your story down and turn off readers. Especially, if your exposition is in the beginning of your book. Especially since most exposition is in passive voice. A lot of times, I find exposition to be the author starting the story in their own head and explaining everything up to the point where the inciting incident starts, and then not realizing it’s exposition and not editing it out later.

So, here are 9 symptoms of exposition-itus, a readers perspective and in author terms b/c I also happen to be an author.

1) It reads like a history book.

In fact, it might as well be a history book, as the author has decided to spend so many pages on the historical and cultural facts that have brought us to this point in the story. This can actually be disguised as dialogue, where one character is telling the other character everything they need to know whether or not the reader actually needs to know about it or not. This can include things like background, family history, asking what is going on in the other character’s life, and so on and so forth.

Boring. Yawn. Especially if this happens in the beginning of the book. There is no interaction or action, reaction going on for us to care. These are words for the sake of words and the author needs to edit, figure out when or if this information is actually important to the story and then casually slide it in there.

2) It reads like a character sheet.

This is when the author, instead of relying on their ability to show us character traits, decides to tell us the traits of these characters instead.

In the Lone Prospect, I could tell you “Gideon was a man in his mid-twenties exactly (25), fresh out of a medical discharge from the military and wearing his worn out, too thin, farm clothes from his teens that strained against his adult physique. He loved his mother and didn’t want to worry her, but he and his father weren’t getting along. Thus, leaving Gideon looking for a new place to settle down. He was mildly optimistic about it. Oh. And he was a werewolf, so it made things a tad more complicated.”

Or, I can do what I did, wait until chapter three, have Gideon write a letter to his mother while interacting with a duck and hope I conveyed the same information in a way that doesn’t bore you to tears.

In telling us the ‘traits’ of the character, the author makes it doubly difficult on themselves on top of frustrating the reader. If you tell the reader the character is competent, sarcastic, and reckless, then you have to show it too or risk not having consistency in the book. Instead, know your character traits, keep them close to your chest, and simply have your characters act. That way the reader can determine them for themselves, and character consistency is maintained.

3) It reads like a scene summary.

So, you’re reading along in the story and there in the middle of what could be a good scene of character interaction is a paragraph about how there was character interaction because these are all great friends, really! But instead of showing you, the author instead has decided to tell you.

Which completely ruins the point of the reader figuring out these people are good friends.

Again, in the Lone Prospect, I have a scene I could have summarized. Gideon has just been accepted into the pack after a potluck dinner. This turns into a party. And I could have summarized the party; people having motorcycle races over here, the hand to hand combat spars over there, people dancing to loud techno-metal music over here, what is the pack doing with a military grade drop ship in a hangar? Oh wait. Instead, I turned it into a several page scene where you see this all from Gideon’s point of view and actually interact with people.

4) It reads like a list.

Description. It’s difficult. It’s especially difficult when you aren’t sure how to do it. So, authors will often resort to lists in order to get it out of the way so they can get on with the exciting bits, the story. Without considering how much or if the character their using as a point of view character is going to notice such things, or if the reader is going to care.

Most readers will not care about detailed descriptions of clothes. They just don’t. As a person trained if fashion, this is painful, but I’ve come to terms with it.

A list description reads like this, “Gideon was six foot even with light olive skin, short brown hair growing out of a buzz cut and two days worth of stubble, and golden brown eyes that were best compared to aged whiskey. No one gave a damn if he shaved anymore, so why bother. He wore a too thin white t-shirt straining against his military physical trained muscles, and stone washed jeans that were spattered with bleach spots and worn around the knees. His black combat boots were all he had left of his uniforms, outside a few tailor made dress blues he only got to keep because they were tailored, and a mess of ribbons and awards he didn’t give a damn about. The boots were broken in and comfortable and one of his two pairs of shoes. Thus, why he was wearing them with his jeans.”

There are better ways to work in description. This is boring. In fact, it’s probably not even relevant. I don’t think I’ve mentioned he’s six foot yet. I may have mentioned Savannah is 5’2”. Or just that she comes up to his chin and it amuses him.

5) It reads like the author is telling themselves the story up to this point.

Instead of opening with some type of action or dialogue, the story instead opens with a ramble of words about the location, the history, or the characters, or combination thereof. What I mean is, the author doesn’t jump straight into the scene, they are instead setting the stage a lah ‘it was the best of times, and the worst of times, on a dark and stormy night.’

Maybe you could get away with that a hundred or more years ago. You can’t today.

Get to the point.

(This is especially frustrating when you’ve had a decent straight to the point prologue and a chapter, and then chapter two or three we’re on our third hook and it becomes an author ramble.)

6) Passive voice. Passive Voice. Passive voice.

You might notice in most of the points about, there is a lot of the use of the verb ‘to be.” Or it sounds like a newspaper story where the author is rattling off the facts of the incident.

Usage of the verb ‘to be’ slows the story down. Telling us things. Summarizing things, instead of ‘speeding’ the story up, makes the reader feel like the author thinks we’re stupid and can’t read between the lines. (Yes, it’s better to show AND tell emotions. Like, I said, exposition isn’t always bad.) Or, the author simply doesn’t know how to write. Because why would you skip the fun, and yummy character interaction scenes.

Go through your manuscript. Find the verb to be, kill it without prejudice as much as possible. Look for summarization and flesh it out! Then, figure out if you really need that scene or is it a ‘darling’ and needs to be excised with fire. (Or lovingly saved into a separate document for later. Yes. Yes. My precious.)

7) It’s irrelevant to the story at hand…

Many times, when your story suffers exposition-itus. It’s because the information you’re explaining or giving is simply not relevant to the story right that moment. The reader doesn’t need to know the information to get full enjoyment out of the book. And the information given is more or less to show off their world building or sometimes to simply up the word count.

As an author, I recommend taking all your exposition and creating a world building document called a “bible.” This will put all the world building into one place, get the urge to explain everything out of your system, AND give you the benefit of seeing places your world building might be weak. Then you can while you’re writing be able to put the relevant information into the book as the reader and character needs to know it.

Especially if the character doesn’t know the information yet or can’t know the information.

OR

8) It answers all the questions the reader is asking.

This is where the author feels the need to explain everything. The character is in a new situation. So, there is another character who knows what is going on, but can’t get involved for ‘reasons’ training the character. So, the author tells the character and the reader all the information including motivations and enemy capabilities.

And, well, there is the entire book and mystery ruined.

That is only one scenario mind you.

Your job as an author is to set up questions about the character, and the world, and the situation. The character and the reader go on a journey to answer these questions. These mysteries keep the reader turning pages and buying the next book. If you answer these questions in the prologue, or the first five chapters, then the reader has no reason to keep reading the book.

9) The story isn’t moving forward.

One thing about exposition is it stalls the plot.

Your story is like being in an elevator. The scenes that move the story along are like the elevator moving between floors with the chapters being the elevator stopping and opening the doors to let people on and off. Exposition is the elevator stalling between floors.

You’re hanging there, precariously over a long shaft by wire cables, and the elevator has stopped without any way for you to leave as the soothing and yet aggravating music drones on and on. Eventually, you hope, things start moving again.

And so, when the elevator stops at the next floor, the reader gets off and refuses to get back on. Or if they’re really aggravated, they will figure out how to crawl out the top of the elevator and pry open the doors to get out.

Exposition is the ‘dead spots’ of your story. They’re places where the reader starts skimming hoping to get to the next bit of action or character interaction that is relevant. Exposition kills your tension and makes readers set down your book.

If anything, put exposition near the end of your book, “Dumbledore Explains” style or “Elementary, my dear Watson,” mystery style. By this point, you have your readers so invested into the plot of the story, they’ll be more likely to forgive you a momentary ramble or history lesson.

I know I have exposition at the end of the Lone Prospect about different types of motorcycle clubs. One. This is actually relevant information that given the book is about a motorcycle club, you the reader need to know. And two, I’m not planning on addressing it directly by showing the differences until book five! Three, Gideon needed to know this information as it influences his decision on if he’s going to stay or not.

So, I’m hopeful, as an author, you can forgive me for my ramble about motorcycle clubs in the form of Hunter telling Gideon a story. Well, Hunter and Brand because Brand had to get in on it.

Anyways, here are 9 symptoms of exposition-itus. I hope it helps. Please remember, your action ratio should always outweigh your exposition ratio by a large margin. Be precise and be concise. Especially in the beginning of the book where you’re trying to keep readers reading your story.

#writing tumblr #writing advice #writrblr #exposition #info dumping #writing tips #show don't tell

[itsclydebitches]

Re the BTD recap: "the prose is still incredibly messy in places" "To be frank, it’s not that I think this is all particularly good… just not particularly bad either." If it's not too much trouble, can I get some concrete examples for why? I feel like I often don't notice this sort of thing, so I want to know what I'm missing. Might help me to be a better writer.

Challenging request, anon! :D I feel like I need a few disclaimers here: 

The book is serviceable. It’s just not going to be winning any awards. Talking about how the prose and dialogue can be better isn’t meant to translate to, “This is the worst thing ever written.” Because it’s not. 

This is very much a pot calling the kettle black situation. Anyone here has the capability of hopping onto AO3, finding a horribly written passage of my own, and shaking it in my virtual face. So this is likewise not intended to be me standing atop a pedestal going, “Anyone - myself included - could do better.” I often can’t do better because writing is hard. 

I’m not a creative writing instructor, thus it’s often difficult for me to articulate why I think a piece of literature doesn’t read well. If you’ve ever, say, come out of a movie with a strong sense of it not being “good” but can’t easily explain why it failed? It’s similar to that. By consuming lots of media we get a sense of “quality” over “badly written” that then informs our reactions to new texts, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to boil that response down to, “See here on page 3? They shouldn’t have done this. Fix that and it’s ‘good’ now.” 

Nevertheless, let’s try. I’ll take a passage from the prologue where Sun is facing off against these “goons” 

Two glowing clones of Sun flared into existence, one facing Pink and the second squaring off against Green. That left Brown—whom he figured was both the leader of the group and the most dangerous. Why? Because he was hiding the most.

Brown slashed a hand toward Sun. “Take him.”

“Which one?” Green asked.

“The real one,” Pink said. “These are just flashy illusions.”

Sun directed one of his clones to punch Pink in the face.

She blinked and looked more annoyed than hurt.

“That’s no illusion!” Green reached for clone Two.

Sun’s clones were physical manifestations of his Aura, every bit as capable of inflicting damage as he was. But it could be difficult to control them, especially while he was fighting. They were better suited to giving him the element of surprise, extra pairs of hands, or emergency backup when he needed it.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t sustain them long, and they couldn’t take much damage, as they drew Aura from Sun himself. If he kept them going too long, or tried to create too many clones, it usually weakened the Aura shield protecting him. But he’d improved a lot with training, and his Semblance was a lot stronger than it used to be.

Sun whipped out his gunchucks, Ruyi Bang and Jingu Bang, spinning them as he and Brown circled each other slowly. At the same time, Sun was fighting Pink and Green through his clones. Pink was some kind of boxer, dancing around and jabbing with her fists, which One was managing to block. Meanwhile, Green was trying to grab Two and wrestle him to the ground.

Brown had some kind of martial arts training similar to Sun’s—but he wasn’t nearly as good. Sun leaned back as Brown did a high roundhouse kick; he felt a breeze as his opponent’s booted foot swept past his nose with a lot of power behind it. Sun flicked his right gunchuck to loop it around Brown’s ankle and pulled him out of his stance, hitting him with the closed gunchuck in his left hand. The man took the full blow, but it didn’t even faze him.

Now let’s break down some of the reasons why this passage doesn’t work for me. I’ll work chronologically. 

As mentioned in the recap, it’s rather awkward for a PoV character to ask and answer their own questions. Especially when they’re not presented as literal thoughts. The “Why? Because...” takes me right out of the story. It suddenly sounds like I’m attending a lecture or reading an article. Sun believes X. Why does he believe this? Because of Y evidence. 

The dialogue is clunky. This problem is admittedly more obvious at other points, but there are a lot of moments where it doesn’t feel like this is a natural thing someone would think or say. Which again, is really hard to write. How people speak is quite different from how we think they speak and finding a balance between that (eliminating most pauses like “um” or “like” that would be too frustrating to read, giving characters more flowery language to serve the story’s goals even if it’s not realistic, etc.) is hard to nail. Here, Sun is often thinking things that don’t sound l like an actual thought in a panicked teen’s head.

Oh crap, Sun thought. I’m losing. How am I actually losing?

It just sounds like exposition. The reader needs to know that Sun is losing! So Sun will tell them that. 

The villains, so far, are a bit too cartoony for me. 

“You got lucky, monkeyboy,” Green said as he walked off, his companions following him through the cloud of foul vapor. “This time.”

Which is admittedly a matter of taste and does have some justification given RWBY’s early writing (think Roman). Still, it’s hard to take lines like this seriously, especially when we just had the group making fun of Velvet for cheesy quips. But the villain’s quips are supposed to read as daunting? 

Connected to Sun’s thought above, there is a lot of telling rather than showing throughout. For example: “She blinked and looked more annoyed than hurt.” There are ways of showing the reader that Pink is annoyed (indeed, just leaving it at “She blinked” would have gotten the point across) rather than resorting to, “She looked ___”. Another good example would be “ Sun leaned back as Brown did a high roundhouse kick; he felt a breeze as his opponent’s booted foot swept past his nose with a lot of power behind it.” You don’t need to reassure the reader that there was “a lot of power behind it.” The action itself - feeling a breeze, his boot passing close to his nose - conveys that on its own. 

To be clear, telling isn’t something you can’t ever do (break those writing rules!!) especially when sometimes you just want to be clear/convey something succinctly, but it is something to keep in mind. It’s another balancing act. Too much telling and the reader feels like they’re just being told a list of things to believe. Too much showing and it feels like the writer is trying too hard to make everything detailed, exciting, etc. Still, a good writer is going to be able to convey everything (Sun losing a fight, annoyance, a powerful kick) without feeling the need to remind the reader of things every few lines, “This is what’s happening. Don’t get confused!” 

After the fight starts we immediately get a two paragraph info-dump about Sun’s semblance. How it works, what his limitations are, and what that means for this fight. Again, show that! We’ve just started an action sequence. The fight is underway. The reader doesn’t want to get pulled out of the action for another lecture. Rather than hitting pause on the fun stuff to explain things, create scenarios where these details become relevant and can be shown to the reader. Right now we don’t care what Sun’s limitations are unless those limitations become important.  

We get another announcement in the form of “[Brown] wasn’t nearly as good [as Sun]” instead of (again) showing us that. Indeed, as I mention in the recap all the action that comes next contradicts this. So where did this assertion come from? If Sun knows that Brown uses a martial arts style similar to his then theoretically they’ve been fighting for at least a few seconds... but the reader doesn’t get to see that. Meyers was too busy telling us about Sun’s semblance. 

Finally, there are pockets of Meyer’s writing that are all roughly the same. Meaning, sentences have little variety to them. This isn’t a consistent problem (and it’s certainly not the worst example I’ve seen of this) but on the whole he could use a more engaging flow to his work, both in terms of sentence length and balance among actions, dialogue, descriptions, and thoughts. Otherwise you get prose that reads, “This happened. Then this happened. This happened next. See the length? It’s all the same. Very little changes. And the reader gets bored.” Again, not a consistent problem, but one he should keep working on. 

There are a number of other, smaller issues that are beginning to pop up. Such as the in parentheses pronunciation of the teams’ names, or the overuse of “he sent” whenever Fox communicates telepathically. In contrast, there are things about the writing that I’ve enjoyed. There are moments of dialogue - such as Fox’s joke in Chapter One, or how Sun’s instructions to “find Shade” literally refer to the school but also remind the reader that shade, in such a hot environment, is crucial - that I think are worth pointing to and going, “Yeah. That was a nice touch.” Overall though? It’s that, “I just came out of a bad movie” feeling. There’s too much clunkiness throughout. The writing often lacks variety or feels absurd. I’m taken out of the story more often than I fall into it. Is it the worst thing I’ve ever read? Far from it, but fans aren’t wrong when they say things like, “I’ve read better fic than this professional story.” 

#rwby #rwde #mymetas #Anonymous

[yeonchi]

Kisekae Insights #20: Sea Princesses Part 4 (Answering the Barracuda Kingdom saga and more post-mortem updates)

“Sea Princesses… Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.” – in response to a Brazilian Twitter meme

This is the first time I’ve revisited a completed segment to add more content to it. Back in #13, I teased a storyline for Soulbound Series 4 that answers the mysteries of the Barracuda Kingdom saga and Duante from Sea Princesses. At the time, I was taking a break from writing the story due to the coronavirus lockdown, but a couple of months ago, I was finally able to finish it and continue writing new stories. The embargo date I set for the story’s premiere has passed, so I want to take the first opportunity I can to share it with you all. Also, I want to address a few Sea Princesses-related things that have come up, but that will come later. Let’s get right into it.

Prerequisite requirements

Even though this is a Soulbound story, the characters from that series have very little involvement in the two-parter – in fact, only three minor characters show up and they mostly help the others in the fighting (I’m not good at working with large casts lel). That is why I’m able to tell this story to you without spoiling anything else.

The following Sea Princesses episodes are required viewing in order to understand this story:

The Lost Kingdom

The New Princess

The Guardians

The Healer

Reviewing the previous instalments of Kisekae Insights covering Sea Princesses (#11, #12 and #13 linked above) is recommended, but not required. The only main assumption made is that the Dryland girl (Windy) and her mother from The New Princess are descendants of the lost Barracuda Royal Family.

Lorah’s backstory

In #11, I wrote that Lorah wasn’t known to be a part of any royal family, but before continuing with the writing of the story, I found some introductory material I wrote in 2018 that stated that Lorah was the Barracuda Prince. I almost couldn’t remember writing it, but instead of making plans to change it later, I decided to utilise that plotline I forgot for three years (because I forgot to mention it in Decade, but I’ll fix it eventually).

Years ago, when the Barracuda Palace was destroyed in an earthquake, Lorah and a few of the royal family’s servants were thought to have died when they were forced to flee. Unbeknownst to them however, Lorah and the servants were saved by their fellow barracuda who had arrived to see what was going on. Lorah was taken to the Farlands, where he was raised by his family’s servants before he returned to Salacia some time after the end of the Time War. The kings and queens recognised him and allowed him to become a general in the Salacian Army, granting him a castle in the Turtle Kingdom to use as a base along with an army of Oni Riders. Nobody brought anything up about his family because they had no clue where they were.

Windy’s backstory

As I stated in #13, the name of the “new princess” is Windy Adams, a tribute to the namesake character of the third Sea Princesses main series book, The Windy Letters. Windy is 24 years old during her appearance in the two-parter, meaning that she would have been 7 years old during The New Princess. You could argue that she looks older, but then you could say the same for Polvina, Ester and Tubarina who are noted to be 7 years old in the official sources.

Fast forward to The Lost Kingdom, where the barracuda learnt that if they helped rebuild the destroyed Barracuda Palace, then there might be a chance that their royal family would return. They were happy for a bit, but then they became grumpy again because their royal family never returned… or so they thought.

Fast forward to The New Princess, where Polvina, Ester and Tubarina were left with more questions than answers after testing Windy, who had already left the island with her marine archaeologist mother by then, to see whether she really was the Barracuda Princess. Many questions are raised; how could a Drylander have read a book written in Salacian? Could someone else have gone onto the island and left “Goodbye friends” in the sand? No, Windy and her mother were the only ones on the island. They had the bracelet from the Barracuda Kingdom with them, so they might have been able to use that to read the book that Polvina had left on the island, but even then, how would they have been able to do it? Assuming that all this is true, then why were the barracuda being happy around Windy?

In 2018, Windy’s family was killed by Dai-Shocker when they attacked Santos. Though Yuki Yamaki and Marcela managed to confirm their links to the Barracuda Royal Family, Windy’s body was never found. The answer to all these questions can be explained with a simple explanation combining numerous elements. Speaking of which…

Duante’s backstory

In The Guardians, we learn that the goddess Salacia appointed the blowfish to be the guardians of Salacia, then covered it up by making each royal family’s history books say that their respective families were the guardians and tearing the respective pages out of the only public version in the Great Library of Salacia. As a result, the blowfish can speak to anyone they wish and be understood by them. Though the blowfish request Polvina, Ester and Tubarina to keep their discovery a secret, Hiroki and Duante are privy to this due to their contact with the goddess Salacia – this is referred to when Ester subtly reacts to them mentioning this secret.

In The Healer, Ester meets Duante, but he only allows her to ask one question and he disappears as fast as he appears. Ester’s only solution is to trick Duante into coming out and when he does, he becomes saddened because he didn’t want to meet Polvina and Tubarina through a trick. Though Duante told Ester that they could never be friends, he never said that it would be forever and as consolation, he gives her his name. So why did Duante seem like a wandering asshole back then?

Orphaned soon after his birth, Duante was found by the goddess Salacia, who raised him to be a guardian of Salacia and a healer of sick and injured sea creatures. Like the blowfish before him, Duante was given the ability to understand and communicate with every creature in the sea. He spent his life travelling around Salacia and the many other oceanic realms, doing what he can to help any sick or injured creature. In the 17 years after The Healer, Duante rarely ever showed up in Salacia.

The Aqua Conspiracy and the Poseidon Myth

The two statements are the titles of each episode in the two-parter.

In 2018, Salacia gave Duante the Aqua Driver and the mission of searching for the lost descendant of the Barracuda Royal Family on Dryland, namely Windy Adams. He managed to track her down to Santos, but he was caught up in a Dai-Shocker attack and was defeated.

Meanwhile, the Kougami Foundation were working on some new Core Medals (based on the new medals of the CSM OOO Driver) in the midst of a black hole paradox swallowing up the Riders and eventually, the world. Though they only made one of each medal to prevent Greeeds from forming, a Greeed still manages to form within the Same, Kujira and Ookami Core Medals before disappearing. The medals reappear in Windy’s house and possess her, transforming her into Kamen Rider Poseidon before she defeated the monsters. Windy’s body was never found that day because Poseidon saved her life.

By the time Duante got to Windy’s house, he was too late to save her family, but then, another supernatural force takes control of the Ebi, Kani and Sasori Core Medals and uses them to possess Duante. The supernatural force was Iemanja, the goddess of the ocean (more like the river according to Salacia) who was disgusted that a lowly Greeed had taken on the mighty name of Poseidon, the god of the oceans.

For the next three years, Poseidon went in search of worthy opponents to fight, but Aqua would constantly get in his way. Salacia’s concern for her two lost children led her to ask Hiroki for help searching for them, while the Kougami Foundation sent out OOO to help find the missing Core Medals.

After helping OOO and his friends fight Poseidon to no avail, Hiroki gets on the beers at the pub with Ester and Lorah. Some exposition dumps are shared and Hiroki gets frustrated at the dead ends and unsolvable mysteries until OOO’s group alerts him to a Greeed nearby.

Polvina and Tubarina encounter Jeopardy, Terumi and Minoru (the three characters from Soulbound) and challenge them to battle, but it is interrupted by Windy, wearing the bracelet and asking if they have seen Iemanja. When everyone arrives and points out that Windy is actually the Greeed, Poseidon takes control of her and begins fighting the Riders. Poseidon’s transformation sequence involves swinging the Deepest Harpoon in a cross, evoking elements of Kamen Rider Durendal’s transformation sequence. After everyone is defeated, Duante/Iemanja arrives and fights Poseidon, defeating him with the Oceanic Break and allowing Windy to regain control of herself.

Following another exposition dump back in the pub, Poseidon takes control of Windy’s body again and disappears to find more worthy opponents to fight in the sea and destroy Windy’s legacy. Tubarina realises that she is heading for the Barracuda Palace, but they can’t get everyone to Salacia by road in time. It is then that Hiroki and Polvina get an idea; the Riders (along with Jeopardy, Terumi and Minoru) use Mirror World to get to Salacia, where they alert the Shark King and all the other Riders. It is there that we get some amazing intercut transformation scenes based off the intercut transformation scene with Z and Geed in episode 15 of Ultraman Z.

Poseidon’s first opponent on the border between Salacia and the Farlands is Saula, the Salmon Princess (Alternative Zero, aka Bebe’s new owner from The Doll) and the Alternative Army. Poseidon defeats everyone one by one as she makes her way to the rebuilt Barracuda Palace in the Valley of Dusk. Aqua and OOO are Poseidon’s final opponents; Aqua has OOO use the Bikaso Combo to hold back Poseidon while he takes his medals, then gives them to OOO who uses the Saramiuo Combo to perform the Saramiuo Break Scanning Charge. After an Aqua Vortex from Aqua, Poseidon is purged from Windy’s body and destroyed as she lands on the throne.

Once everyone gathers at the Barracuda Palace, Windy reveals that her grandmother would always tell stories of how she came from the sea and was the princess of some kingdom until it was destroyed and they had to flee to Dryland. She also passed down her knowledge of the Salacian language in case they ever decided to find it one day. It is then that schools of barracuda begin gathering around the palace, cheering for the return of their prince and the arrival of their new princess. In case you didn’t get it by now, Windy is the lost descendant of the Barracuda Royal Family and therefore, the new Barracuda Princess.

Duante explains to Ester that he didn’t want to be friends with her back in The Healer because he had to keep his role as the guardian of Salacia a secret, but he eventually realised that his attitude back then made him seem impolite. He decides to stay and chat with Ester and her friends to make up for it. Lorah offers to take care of the Barracuda Kingdom in Windy’s absence while Miss Marla tells Windy that in Salacia’s absence, she can answer any questions she may have about the world of Salacia (the book series alluded to the fact that Miss Marla was more important than she actually seemed and in this project, that was because she was the messenger of the goddess Salacia).

With this, the Barracuda Kingdom saga has been resolved and a lot of loose ends in Sea Princesses have been tied up. To be honest, this storyline wouldn’t have existed if it weren’t for Kamen Rider Zi-O; given that Aqua is featured towards the end of the series, my decision to adapt the series in my project meant that I was obligated to introduce him along with any other Rider that was important to the story or original footage. Otherwise, I would have been happy with just saying that Windy and her family were dead and leaving it at that.

In regards to Iemanja’s inclusion in the two-parter – in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion (which combines traditional West African religions with Catholicism), Iemanja is the goddess of the sea and their counterpart of the Virgin Mary. Originally, in the Nigerian Yoruba religion, Yemoja (her original name) is the patron saint of rivers. This conflicts with Salacia, who is Roman goddess of the sea, which is why she makes a snarky remark at Iemanja in the story. Of course, this isn’t how I got inspired to include her in the story; it was from a Candomblé hymn named Mamãe Maria (Mother Mary) which had the words “princesas do mar” in the lyrics. I wonder if it would be sacrilege to turn that hymn into a fast-paced techno theme song for Kamen Rider Poseidon?

Post-mortem updates

Since I have covered everything in this series, I don’t want to dwell on it any more than I have because it’s beating a dead horse at this point (unless Fabio Yabu decides to make something new for it). So I want to take this opportunity to address some things before it becomes awkward when I make an update post out of nowhere with no new material to provide.

In the epilogue of the book reviews, I mentioned that Dan Wyllie (who voices Marcello and possibly Sirilo and Veto) had pleaded not guilty to assaulting his wife, Shannon Murphy (who voices Tata), in March 2020. The way I wrote that paragraph made it seem like Wyllie was the villain, but it turns out that everything wasn’t what it seemed. In February this year, Wyllie was found not guilty of assaulting his wife thanks to some selfies he took after Murphy poured yogurt on him. The magistrate stated that Murphy “was not an impressive witness” and that “she had tailored her evidence to suit a scenario in which she had been the original aggressor”. I’m going to leave it at that.

I’ve noticed that the episodes in the Portuguese and Latin American Spanish dubs on Amazon Prime are shorter than the English dubs by 2-3 minutes. While watching a couple of episodes and following along on my transcripts, I discovered that some scenes were cut from the episodes. I have no idea why this is the case, but this seems to confirm my suspicion that the English dub is the original dub.

For some time now, I have been wondering why Sea Princesses got very little exposure over the years. Some of my speculative reasons include the relative novelty of Brazilian animation at the time of production, not exporting the series to Japan, the US or the UK, not getting the books published internationally (or at least in English) until 2020, the just-about-average writing in the series and the lack of focus on other characters besides the main five.

Recently though, I remembered going on the official Sea Princesses website on UOL over a decade ago and having to wade through all the Portuguese in order to get the (low-medium quality) images of the characters. I asked Fabio Yabu if it didn’t cross his mind to make an English website for Sea Princesses or if contractual obligations with Southern Star prevented him from doing so; he told me that Southern Star were apparently supposed to translate the website, but they never ended up doing so. In my opinion, I don’t think he had an excuse not to make an English website, or at the very least, put translated descriptions of the characters on any of his social media or art sharing platforms like Facebook, Flickr, DeviantArt or Tumblr.

It’s been over a year now since my first correspondence with Yabu and while we did discuss publishing the translated versions of the main series books on Amazon Kindle, nothing much has come from that, the two remaining literacy series books to be translated or the mistake in the second main series book on Kindle that is still yet to be corrected. When I reached out to Yabu recently in regards to this, he told me that he is currently busy with projects and the coronavirus has made things much more complicated in Brazil, so things are on hold for now. To be honest, I’ve been iffy over sending him anything this past year because I’m afraid that I might be annoying him, but he’s been pretty cool about it, so I won’t worry so much about it if I decide to send him another email in a few months’ time or whatever.

Anyway, that’s it for Sea Princesses (again) for the time being. The next time I mention something new about it will probably be when Fabio Yabu finally decides to do something or when I talk about it in my adaptation of Kamen Rider Zi-O. I hope you enjoyed reading my theories.

#kisekae insights #sea princesses #princesas do mar #kamen rider #kamen rider ooo #princesas del mar #el reino de acuatica

[lukaafrancesca]

Writing Tips: A Master Post

These are writing tips, rules, and habits that I picked up over the years. This is just what works for me, not necessarily what will work for everyone. As with ALL writing advice, if anything I say here deters or discourages you from your writing, DO NOT LISTEN TO THE ADVICE AND WRITE HOW YOU WANT TO WRITE. Advice is supposed to help you get better where you feel you’re lacking, not prohibit you from doing something you like. Remember that even if your goal is to write for a wider audience, if you hate writing, you’ll never finish, therefore anything that makes you hate writing needs to be eliminated from your life, or at the very least, eliminated from your drafting phase of writing. Write for yourself and your happiness first and foremost, especially in the first draft. That’s you. That’s personal. That’s joy. If you’re already having fun, don’t listen to a word I say or read any further until you’re seriously considering refining your story into something you want to sell. Disclaimer: While I have won prize money for poetry, I am by no means an expert author, nor am I officially published yet with any sort of prestige. If authority matters to you, there are plenty of published authors that also have guides on how to get your work published. While good advice can come from anyone, it is important to disclose that I am not an expert and I do not have a fool-proof plan for how to write well or how to be published. This is just a collection of what I’ve learned over the years and things I think would be important to my younger self. So without further ado, writing advice. Outlining: While I don’t outline the way you might have learned in English/Literature class in school, I do have a similar process. For my writing, I create an appendix/guide/glossary type of thing. It’s a collection of key words, characters, places, items, and events written specifically for the story or the world my story is set in. I know they call it a "Bible" when it comes to TV shows, but I'm not sure the term applies to writing books. But you can call it your project bible. I call it my project appendix, but I know the term isn’t quite right, so for the remainder I will refer to it as “the project bible.” This is where you write down everything important that you want to be in your book, even details that you don’t want to reveal expressly to the readers. Someone has a mother that they don’t know is their mother? Write it in your project bible. Have a Magic McGuffin that does something super special that your reader is only supposed to find out about in the eleventh hour? Put it in the project bible. Have a really nifty idea for a scene? Put it in the bible. I do this so that I don't forget details and accidentally write down contradictory information. You can do this with or instead of a general outline or as part of your brainstorming phase when plotting ideas for your book. Remember to revisit the project bible often to add in characters you created spur of the moment or to add in any cool ideas you think up while writing. While you shouldn’t add to the project bible during your dedicated writing time so you don’t disrupt your flow, if it’s a detail that’s not relevant to your current chapter, you should definitely write it down if you’re habitually forgetful like I am. But what I prefer to do is to write a note at the end of the current chapter and add it to the project bible when the chapter is finished.  Beginning Writing (and the First Stumbling Block): Once my project bible is more or less complete, I start writing from the beginning. Then I get stuck and have writers block and cry. Then I play video games to cope with my performance anxiety. Then I wait 3 months for inspiration. This is the stage you want to avoid. Don't be like me. Instead, set a schedule. Have one or two hours a day set aside to write. I find I do best when I write first thing in the morning. This time is JUST for writing. Do not do research during this time, do not check social media, do not add to the project bible at this time unless absolutely necessary. You sit down and write and you do not stop for anything except the bathroom or an emergency. You do not backtrack. You do not rewrite. You do not read back what you wrote. You just write. If you get to a detail you're not sure of or a word you can't spell just get as close as you can to the general idea, write in a symbol or an uncommon letter pattern (TK is the standard) so that if you're on a computer you can Ctrl+F back to that spot during the editing phase. Write during that hour or two non-stop until you finish the chapter. You can keep going from there if you have lots of time dedicated to writing, but once I finish a chapter, I go into the Alpha Edit. If you have lots of time dedicated to writing and you’re in the flow, DO NOT STOP. Stopping is what gives you time to be self-critical, and that’s a major stumbling block for me. If you have the flow, DO NOT STOP. If your dedicated writing period is longer than 4 hours (and it may be because 2020 is a hell year and some of us don’t have jobs right now) remember to get up, stretch, drink water, and consume calories. But if you can avoid breaking your flow without detriment, DO IT. Flow is one of the most important things to writing, and a good flow can have you cranking out 50 pages in a single day if you’re lucky. Good flow can see you finish a short story in 3 days. My good flow days are the most valuable to me. When they come to you, do your best not to waste them.

Alpha Editing Phase: Once the chapter is done, reread it. Out loud is best so you can check the flow. If you stumble across a word, rewrite the sentence so it flows better. If you have any TK notes or words you want to change, this is the time to do research and change the notes. You do not have to do this during your scheduled writing time, but doing it during that time helps keep routine and trains your brain to want to write during that time. Just remember that if you do your editing during your writing time, you should try to work on writing your next chapter during at least half of your dedicated writing time. If you find something inconsistent with your outline or lore, change it. The editing phase is the ideal time to consult your project bible, add notes to it, and check for inconsistencies. If you have to "delete" something, DO NOT DELETE IT. Copy and paste it into a deleted scenes file with context (surrounding sentences) in case you want to use the idea or sentence somewhere else or want to change back to it during the final edit. If you're changing the sentence, that's fine. Most sentence changes only need to change the specific words but not what’s actually being said. But if you delete a sentence or paragraph or scene or passage, save it with context. You can keep it just for you, or you can refer to it during a later edit in case you change your mind again. Once you have all your spelling correct and all your TK notes filled with the proper information you have some choices. You either continue on to the next chapter if you're writing a book to publish all at once, or you move on to your beta reader if you're serializing your work. Beta readers come in after your book is done or after the chapter you want to publish is done. Beta Readers: After your alpha edit, get a few people to look over your work. All of them can be friends and family, but beware of "yes men." If your friends and family only ever say your work is good, find a more critical audience. While it’s nice to have praise, if none of your beta readers ever ask you to change anything, you run the risk of missing things that are detrimental to your work like errors with tone, clunky exposition dumps, writing about a sensitive subject without any sensitivity, and many other stumbling blocks. A beta reader can be your friend, but they shouldn’t ALWAYS put your feelings over the quality of your manuscript. A quality beta reader will sometimes butt heads with you, and it’s important you listen when they do. While a beta reader does not replace an editor, editors cost money, and a good beta reader will save you some time with your editor if you choose to hire one for your work when it’s completed. A beta reader’s primary usefulness is that their fresh eyes will catch spelling and grammar errors you and your software might miss and they'll be able to check for issues with tone, consistent lore, tedious exposition, run on sentences, and a myriad of other details that you might not be able to catch.  After the beta readers, you do a Beta Edit. You take all that advice you got from your betas, decide whether to follow it or not, and then change whatever you need to about the story. After that, sit on your “finished” chapter for a week. Do not look at it, do not reread it unless you need to check a plot detail for a future chapter (which should probably be in your outline/ project bible anyway but not everyone uses an outline.) Basically do not look at or think about your "finished" chapter for a week. This is so you yourself have fresh eyes when you revisit it. The "Final" Edit: I say final in quotes because serialized work may need to be retconned or edited in the future so the edit might not always be final unless it's for a completed book. During the final edit, you read it one last time, aloud. Ideally, your book will be done for this stage, but if you publish through a site like Inkitt or Tablo, the urge to serialize a work to get feedback is very strong in the digital age and I don’t blame you at all for wanting to publish a finished chapter to get feedback before your actual book is finished. (Please be wary of the terms and conditions of the site you choose to publish to if you publish a serialized work through a publishing site. If a site mentions having exclusive rights to your content, it’s not a good idea to publish through them if you plan to publish the final work through a different venue or seek traditional publishing and are using the site for archival and viewership purposes.) If you didn't have an outline before, write one as you read back your work. If you have one, make sure, as you read, that it's consistent with the outline. When you're done read the outline and make sure everything you wanted in the book/chapter is in the book/chapter, make sure the lore is consistent, make sure you like it. Make any final corrections. Check your deleted scenes and make sure there's nothing that you want to keep in there. You may choose to keep your deleted scenes file, as I do, but you may also wish to delete it once the book is finished. While either of these choices are entirely yours, remember that every deleted scene is still something you put work into, and there’s no shame in recycling some of the prose into a later story with different characters. Publishing: Decide whether to pursue traditional or digital self-publishing. On scams and more check here.  Digital Self-Publishing: Amazon is a tempting option, especially because many readers will search for books exclusively on Amazon because they are one of the cheapest options around and even if you publish traditionally, your publishing house will usually still sell through Amazon. While I personally don’t like Amazon on principle for it’s poor treatment of warehouse workers, it is worth considering that Amazon’s competitors are not well known and you have very little chance at success when Amazon is the leading name in online book and eBook retail. If you decide to go with another online publishing company, make sure they don’t have exclusive rights to your work so you can bail if a better offer comes along or if they start going under. Signing a contract or publishing exclusively limits you so if you do decide to go that route make absolutely sure you trust the company you’ll be making your business partner by publishing through them. If you decide to publish through Amazon as an E-Book, I recommend doing it yourself. Don't pay for a service that does it for you (I mentioned Inkitt and Tablo and while I do use their services for sharing my work with friends and the public, I would not elect to publish through them since the only benefit to me is that they can do the hard work for me and I’d much rather do it myself.) You can buy your own ISBN numbers and commission cover art from artists so really there's nothing you can't do yourself when it comes to self-publishing, you just need to know-how. Make sure you have the right to use the image you have on your cover, either by designing it yourself, commissioning it from an artist or photographer, or by using a royalty-free image. Remember that some fonts also require royalties if you use them commercially! Double check that you have the rights to use the typeface you have on your cover and in your book. Keep in mind that if you want to have a physical copy of your book that you need to check that the digital publishing service you choose has a print-to-order option. Amazon does, but not every site will. The Cons of Digital Self-Publishing: If you self-publish, don't expect to sell more than 1000 copies without doing some SERIOUS advertising on your own. Digital self-publishing has the perks of letting you keep more of your profits and rights, but it also has it’s downsides, namely that if you want to maximize profits AND sell more than 1000 copies, you need to do all the legwork yourself. A bookstore won’t just buy your book to put on shelves just because it exists, especially not stores like Barnes and Noble. Find the small, local bookshops in your area, get a couple books printed off and ask if they’d like to host an event for your book release. Tell everyone you meet that you wrote a book and show off your personal copy. Find online book groups and advertise there (Remember to advertise often, but not more than, say, 3 times a day for a week. There’s a point where getting the word out becomes blatant spam and spam will reduce and not increase interest.) If your local library takes donations, get a copy printed and donate it. Offer free or discounted copies to YouTubers that do book reviews in exchange for reviews and feedback. Have a Patreon or website where people can find you. If you’re willing to shell out cash and take risks, pay for ads/promoted posts on Facebook and other social media outlets. Go out to events in your hometown or nearby cities and promote the hell out of your book. Rub elbows. Keep a couple signed copies in your trunk and go ham. If you see someone reading a book, start up a conversation, ask them about their book. If it’s anything like yours, tell them that you’ve been reading a good book recently and name drop your own book if you think they won’t remember you or talk about a similar book that inspired you and let them know you wrote a book of your own. You’ll have to bust your tail for it, but if you do it right, you can get your book out there.  Traditional Publishing: If you publish traditionally, be aware that you will get many, many rejection letters. Before seeking traditional publishing, research the publishing house and the industry standards. Many times, they won’t even look at your manuscript if your book is “too long” or “too short.” That doesn’t necessarily mean you should change your book to fit industry standards, but it does mean publishing will be much harder if you don’t fit the standards because very few publishing houses will look at your work unless you know someone who can put in a good word for you. Even if you meet industry standards, expect rejection letters because you’re a first-timer and “a nobody” and most publishing houses get thousands of manuscripts every day and they’re going to pick manuscripts that seem like they’ll make money, or manuscripts from authors they already know, not necessarily manuscripts that are actually “good” writing. A rejection letter is not a reflection of your skills. It’s a badge of honor. You wrote a book and someone looked at it long enough to decide it wasn’t for them. Increase your odds of getting published by focusing a lot of energy into your first chapter, first paragraph, first sentence. If you have a good opening sentence, the person reviewing your manuscript will read more. If you have a good paragraph backing up that first sentence, they’ll go in even deeper. If your first chapter slaps and intrigues, then they’re on the hook wanting more. A publishing house is much more likely to accept your submission if the person who reviewed your work sinks some time into reviewing it. If you get them hooked with the first chapter even if chapters 2 and 3 suck, that reviewer is much more likely to look for the GOLD you put into chapter 4 or 5 when you really hit your stride. If your book doesn’t catch them with chapter 1, even if chapter 5 is absolutely on par with the classics of Shakespeare and the modern greats George R.R. Martin, they’re never going to read that far if chapter 1 sucks. If you get an acceptance letter, huzzah! Work with your publishing house on the final details. Usually a publishing house will do cover art and pay for the advertising necessary to market your book, but not all of them, which is why doing your research is important so you know what to expect. More Detailed Advice: If you have writer’s block try to write anyway. Remember that your first draft will be trash and you can delete anything you don’t like later, but you can’t edit or improve on work that you don’t have finished. Getting it written is way more important than getting it written well. Because, as I said, you can’t work to improve something you don’t have. Getting it on paper is the biggest hurdle. After that, editing is just a matter of reading and rereading, tweaking words and sentences, comparing what you wrote to your outline, and asking for advice from beta readers. Putting it all on paper might take you far less time than editing, but it is, to me far harder. You can pay people to edit your work. There are professional editors out there. But no one can get it on paper like you can, even if you can pay for a ghost writer, because your vision is entirely your own and only you know what you want out of your story idea. Things to Try When the Writing Doesn’t Come: Coffee, water, snack, nap, walk outdoors, bounce ideas off a friend, write a 100 word short story off a prompt and then try again. Any or or all of these shouldn’t take up more than half your scheduled writing time. Sometimes the reason you can’t write is because you’re trying to hard, and these small breaks can make a world of difference, not to mention coffee helps some concentrate, hunger and thirst are distractions even if you don’t feel hungry or thirsty, and time spent just walking and clearing your head in nature can refresh your mind and give you a level head since working through frustration rarely leads to good results. A 100 word short story gets your brain writing something with the focus away from your book, something your brain may see as a monolithic and intimidating task, and distracts it with something short and fun. Once you prove to your brain that yes, you can write right now and once you’ve already started something, it’s easier to make your brain keep working on the next thing. Bouncing ideas off friends can help you figure out why you’re stuck or help you remember that great idea you had for your chapter last night but forgot after you slept. A nap can clear your head and let you relax and you have time alone to think instead of write. If all else fails, try to write just one sentence, take a 15 minute break, and then come back to continue writing. Tried That, Can’t Write: If, for whatever reason, you CAN’T write no matter what you try, no matter how much you force it, take a break. Try again the next day. If the next day doesn’t work, give it a week. After a week if you STILL can’t write, reread what you have written backwards. If you stumble somewhere, edit that section. If ALL of it is either “good enough, but I still can’t continue somehow” or you just hate all of it, ask yourself a few questions. “Is the scene I’m writing important? What does the character accomplish in this scene and does it HAVE to be this scene? What does this scene reveal about the plot, the characters, their motivations, or the story at large. What will this scene mean for the characters in a future scene? What does the character learn here or what do the readers learn in this scene? Is this scene a payoff for something set up in a previous scene or does it bring closure to a subplot or character arc?  If you find positive answers, reformat your chapter around those answers. “Yes this scene is important because it’s where the MC learns to believe in themself.” Great, go back and make sure everything in the scene reflects that and keep moving forward from that perspective while keeping the next goal “The MC’s first success with Plot Thing A.” in mind. Keep this scene focused on the MC believing in themself while working toward their first success. If the scene isn’t important or nothing’s really happening, skip or delete the scene/chapter and move on to the next interesting scene where you find positive answers to those questions. Remember that even if you don’t plan on keeping the scene when you decide to delete it to add it to the deleted scenes file just in case, you may be forgetting a critical plot point or a good idea in the deleted section that you might need later and you’ll be grateful you saved the segment later on. This and more to try here. When You Just Hate Everything You Wrote No Matter What: Read something that inspired you before. Or watch a TV show or movie that made you want to write. Send your work to your beta reader early for feedback. Or, deal with the source of your anxiety. Are you hating it because you feel like it’s not impressive to others? It’s similar to impostor syndrome. You like the writing, but you hate reading it because you think other people will hate it. Send it to a beta reader and find out for sure. If they hate it, that’s fine. You can fix it. If they love it, GREAT. Now you know that at least one person out there likes it. More people will like it. Don’t let the critics in your head tell you otherwise. Do you hate it because you think you can do better? Then do better. Put the scene in the deleted scenes file. All of it. Every part that you hate and the context around it. Dump it. Start over fresh. If you hate that too, compare and see if you hate it less than the old version. Go with the version you hate least, or combine all the parts you hate least and move on until you figure out an even better way to write it. Are you hating it because you never wrote a scene like that before and it’s just really hard? Read stories or watch movies that do the thing you’re doing in a way that you like. Find out why you like it. Try to replicate that in your scene.  This and more about writing anxiety here. “Said is Dead” and Other “Bad” Writing Advice: “Never say said! Use other verbs to convey HOW the character is saying something! Yelled! Sobbed! Laughed! Growled! Whispered!” Most of us got this in grade school. And sometimes they’re right. There’s a difference in tone when you use “‘Hurry up,’ he said.” versus “‘Hurry up,’ she growled.” But if your characters are just having a dialogue, unless there’s a tone you need to set, you CAN use “said” and other plain words. I prefer not to, because I either use taglines like “‘That’s better.’ He smirked, walking across the room.” or I don’t use taglines at all “Really?” “Yeah really.” “Well dang, I didn’t know people could just do that!” “When it’s two people, you sure can!”  In the same vein: “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” While it’s true that it’s more powerful to say “His sentences blended together” or “the words came out nearly overlapped, narry a breath between them.” if you write that way all the time, it’s going to sound weird and won’t always convey the same mood as what you want. Sometimes it’s okay to say “he said quickly.” or “His sentence ended abruptly.” Yes, dashed or sprinted are usually better words than “ran quickly” and are faster to say than “He was down the hall faster than greased lightning.” But remember that adverbs are not the devil. Adjectives are okay. Starting a sentence with “but” is fine for impact. Dialogue has no rules other than “does it sound like something someone would say?” Ending a sentence with a preposition is fine, especially in dialogue. You can use ellipsis points (...) to indicate a pause in dialogue. If you don’t like the writing advice someone gave you, you don’t have to take it. The only real rules I try to stick by are “try to spell everything properly and use proper grammar unless it’s for dialogue” and “make sure it’s easy to read.” Like, I hate when people write “should of” when they mean “should’ve” or “should have” I hate that stuff with a passion. But unless I’m the one person you’re trying to impress, you literally DO NOT HAVE TO CARE. You can write “should of.” It’s your book. I am not the authority on all books. I am not the library god. What I like is not nearly as important as what YOU like. But do take that under advisement that grammatically correct books and properly-spelled manuscripts are way more likely to get published because the world of English literature is elitist as all heck because the rules were written back when hardly anyone was literate and people hang on to traditions like that whether they’re helpful or not. As long as people can understand what you wrote, that’s all that matters in regards to “rules.” So if a rule makes you unhappy? Forget the rule and write what you want. Writer Cartels: A writing cartel is especially important for new authors and self-published authors. A writing cartel is essentially a big group or club of fellow writers. This is your main resource for writing advice, research, a good source of beta readers, free advertisement, and inspiration. Your cartel is going to be there to support you while you write your book and after you get published. You can look for writers groups on social media platforms or by visiting libraries/looking for writing conventions in your town. The comments section of YouTube book reviews has a fair number of people. Make friends. Start your own writer cartel. Join a writer’s workshop program or a writers workshop discord since everything’s closed in 20/20 for the ‘Rona. If there’s a creative writing course at your local community college and you can afford it, take the course, make contacts, make friends with the people you meet there, stay in touch, and form a cartel with them.

“Kill your Darlings”, Crutch Tropes, Crutch Words, and Other Quirks: Kill your darlings is a piece of writing advice you tend to hear a lot. It basically means “Sometimes you have to cut out a cool scene or a neat detail or a beloved character because it doesn’t add anything to your book, weighs down the chapter, ruins the flow, or just generally doesn’t belong and takes up valuable word’s that could be used to advance the plot instead.” Tom Bombadil from Lord of the Rings is a famous example. “Darlings” and crutch tropes are similar but a crutch trope isn’t always a darling and a darling isn’t always a crutch trope. A “darling” is basically anything you like as the author that you want to keep that either all your betas HATE or that holds your writing back in some way. For instance, I like to show off when writing. I wrote a whole scene about different pieces of a ship’s rigging because I knew a lot of the terms and learned a bunch more to get familiar with ships for a scene that has ships in it. But it’s not important to my character to know what a clew garnet is. It’s not important to my readers to know what the clew garnet is. The clew garnet doesn’t serve any deeper purpose in my story other than showing off that I know what that piece of rigging is called. So I removed that scene from my book. I trimmed out all the rigging terms and explanations that weren’t relevant to what was actually happening in the scene, stuck to simple terms, and shortened that chapter by a good chunk by doing so. There’s nothing important missing from the story and it reads just as well without the rigging explanations. That is “killing your darling.” A crutch trope can be a darling, too, but only if you use it excessively. I know I have crutch tropes. I really love chewing the scenery in my stories and I really, REALLY love excessively describing food. Literally chew-able scenery. My book would be a lot shorter without those scenes since they serve no larger purpose other than giving the characters just a hair’s breadth more depth by saying “Yeah, Character A likes X food. And Character B likes Y food. Now you know.” This is a “darling” and a crutch trope. Whether I choose to kill this darling is up to me. But if it’s just a thing you do often, such as writing dream sequences in all your works, then it’s just a crutch trope and not a darling. But you may still want to kill it. Crutch Words: I often use the word “rather” when I actually mean “very.” “He was rather famished.” “She was rather tired.” While this does keep you a step removed from obvious adverb addiction, it becomes rather innocuous and you tend to not notice it or give it rather much thought until it’s become rather ubiquitous and taken up rather a lot of your rather limited word count. (And as you can see, that can get... annoying.) When the word swarms your prose to the point it’s almost more common than your articles “a/the” it’s a crutch word. I already gave you an example with rather, but it happens with more than adverbs and adjectives. Verbs can be crutch words too. If all your characters sob and none of them ever weep, sob is your sadness crutch word. If all of your characters smile and none of them grin, smiled is your happiness crutch word. When is a crutch word not a crutch? When you NEED it for the sentence to make sense. If it’s important to know “He smiled and she smiled back,” there’s no reason to change it to something excessive and potentially inaccurate with “He grinned at her and she simpered in return.” If someone says “I would rather do this than do that,” the “rather” is no longer a crutch. My general rules are: other than articles and common words like “a, the, it, that, what, etc.” you shouldn't have a word used more than once in the same paragraph and definitely not in the same sentence i.e. “Her eyes glazed over as she eyed the enchanted item.” Eye is used in both eyes and eyed and it sounds clunky. A better version of the sentence would be “Here eyes glazed over as she gazed at the enchanted item” or “Her eyes glazed over as she observed the enchanted item.” If you have a crutch trope, and it’s broad i.e. chewing the scenery, try not to do it more than once per chapter. And if it’s a highly specific trope like a dream sequence, use it no more than once per book. But again, these are just rules that I personally follow. I am not God. Write what you enjoy and only take my advice if you agree with it. More on Darlings and how to kill them here. Fringe Crutch Words and How to Cope: There are only so many ways to say “smiled” in the English language, and there are many different smiles that mean many different things. A friendly smile and a sheepish grin are different things, but we don’t always have words to describe different smiles. You can describe a wide smile as beaming and a coy smile as a simper, we have words for sneers and grimaces, but a pained smile has no single word of its own. A sympathetic smile does not have a unique word. Sometimes a sad smile is just a sad smile and if there’s no other way to say it, just use the “crutch” word. Even if you think your characters “smile too much.” Don’t antagonize trying to find a perfect word or you risk falling into “Thesaurus Syndrome” by trying to avoid a word that you simply can’t avoid. Thesaurus Syndrome: Know what your words actually mean, including their connotation. Connotation is the idea or feeling a word evokes, rather than it’s pure definition. For example: stench, scent, and aroma all mean “smell” but a stench or odor is almost always a bad smell; I can’t recall ever seeing a good smell labeled as, say, a “sweet stench.” Similarly, one would never call the scent of skunk spray a “perfume” or “aroma.” “Scent” is very context-sensitive and thus neutral in connotation. So when you use a thesaurus to vary your words, make sure the connotations are the same and that you know how much bigger “gargantuan” sounds compared to just “large.” Flowery words: “Cerulean orbs” is a meme for a reason. Fancy words are all well and good, but jargon runs the risk of alienating your audience. Going back to my clew garnet example, basically no layperson that’s not obsessed with sailing knows what a clew garnet is or what it’s for. If the word isn’t necessary to your story, don’t use it. And if it is, but it’s an uncommon word, make sure to give context or define it in some way. You don’t want to alienate your audience. When it comes to poetic language, i.e. cerulean orbs, it’s important to keep a few things in mind. When you use poetic language, it makes the thing you’re describing automatically more important than anything you describe in a mundane way. If you describe your main character as “a dude with a shaggy beard.” and then describe a trash can as “a silvery vessel for all the unwanted scraps, a prison for the castaways, the lonely, cold, metal receptacle for evidence of a human life, lived to it’s messy, pure, fullness,” that trash can sounds WAY more important than your main character and you also sound like a weirdo for describing a trash can like that. If you want to describe something exceptional, use poetic language, if you want to describe the mundane, use mundane language. A red scarf is nothing more than a scarf that is red. But a crimson scarf sounds significant. However, even when you describe something significant with poetic language, there is a point where too much is too much. Hence “cerulean orbs” instead of “blue eyes.” Cerulean orbs sits right in the middle of foreign/unnatural speech, overly poetic, and overly mundane. No one regularly calls blue eyes “cerulean orbs,” so it immediately sounds alien and unnatural. But it’s also not poetic enough to come from, say, a lover describing her partner’s beautiful blue eyes. “His eyes were deep and dark, the blue like the blue of a midnight sea, shimmering as the candlelight flickered across his irises,” is a much more fitting piece of prose if you want to give off a sense of beauty and the sublime. But if it’s just someone that has blue eyes? You want to go full mundane. “He had blue eyes” is all we need to know. Don’t over-complicate it. That’s not to say you should never write the sublime as mundane or the mundane as sublime, but that’s generally reserved for actual poetry and not part of prose, so unless your book’s main theme revolves around the beauty of common/ugly things or how utterly unremarkable even the most romanticized things are, you want to stick to the general rule that poetic language is reserved for things that are special to your narrative and that mundane language is usually fine everywhere else. Remember, you’re not trying to show off for your audience and you’re not trying to talk down to them. Some Things Specific to Fantasy Writing: The next few sections are dedicated to struggles I personally experienced when writing fantasy and how I overcame them. “How Can She Have a French Braid if There is No France?” and Other Linguistic Troubles: Generally speaking, if you’re writing a fantasy novel, it will not be set on our Modern Earth, and even if it is, there are sometimes troubles. Say your world is fairly unique, something like Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Your elves wear their hair in braids as a tradition. The braid style for upper-class elves is a French braid, unlike the Fishtail Braid which is relegated to the commoners. But wait. Nowhere in your world is called “France” so how can it be a “French Braid?” My rule on this is as follows: Things like French Doors and French braids are very specific and aren’t easily described smoothly in prose as “A set of floor to ceiling/ tall double doors that are made with glass.” or “a braid of three strands, in a gathered plait, from the crown of one’s head to the nape of one’s neck.” If you have to describe it like that EVERY time, it will get tiresome, and if you invent a new word for it, your readers will have to be constantly reminded what it means. With terms like these, it’s okay to use the eponymous word or the namesake word. If your character wears a Tam O’Shanter hat, it’s okay to call it that. If the item in question is, say, a branded thing, you can get a little more flexible. Say your character has a magical item that works just like a liquid Band-aid. But you can’t call it that because Band-aid is a brand and they don’t have adhesive bandages in the story for you to compare it to. In cases like this, it’s best to name the item yourself and define it for the audience. “’Hold still,’ Theresa demanded, pouring the syrupy potion over the wound. Within a few minutes, the liquid solidified, protecting the large scrape from the outside world and dulling the pain. ‘Wow,’ Sir Hugh said, running his hand over the area. ‘What was that?’ ‘Elvish suture,’ Theresa explained. ‘Made of pine sap, some medicinal herbs, and a little alchemy. Don’t strain too hard and it should hold until we can get you to a proper doctor.’” Here, you’ve established what the thing is, what it does, and gave off the general vibe of a liquid bandage without actually using the words. This technique is best used for things that are modified from things that exist in our world. Another option when you’re borrowing from our world is to use a generic term or modify a generic term to your advantage. Going back to the Band-Aid example, let’s say your world DOES have Band-Aids, but since it’s not Earth, you want to call it something else. You can give it a completely foreign name and appearance such as “Verdant’s Dressings” and describe it as “a green, leaf-shaped fabric bandage that uses an adhesive to bind gauze to an open wound,” or you can use a generic term and just call it an “adhesive bandage” depending on how different you want it to be from something in our world the more unique your name for it is, the more it seems to belong to your world and not ours, but this can have the disadvantage of confusing or alienating your audience. When something is entirely your own invention, huzzah! Name it yourself and have fun with it! A great way to make it familiar and memorable to your readers is to name it based on mythology or with Greek/Germanic/Latin base words. If there’s a sleeping potion in your world, you can name it Morph’s Tears to associate it with Greek God Morpheus or you can call it Somnetic Vapors to associate it with somnum, Latin for sleep. If you’re drawing from the mythology of other cultures, try using words from that culture’s language for your naming conventions. Beware of what you decide to borrow from and how you decide to use terms as some mythical creatures are sacred to some cultures, some gods and monsters are sacred to some closed religions, and some foreign words have had different historical meanings than their modern ones. See also: When is it Okay to Borrow This?

How Modern is too Modern for the Medieval? General Rules and How to Break Them: When you write a fantasy work, chances are it’s a high-fantasy novel. High Fantasy often sticks with a world that is medieval or at least pre-modern. While these rules can be applied to other time periods or genres like steampunk, I’m most familiar with high fantasy and medieval time periods so I will use that for most of this advice. Generally a lot of what we think of as “normal” has only been around for 200-500 years and everything earlier than that is considered ancient by our standards. However, some things might surprise you. This is why research is always important. Things like tea, bathrooms, fireworks, and aqueducts are much older than you may think at first and some things a full set of silverware or belts and buttons are more recent than you think. When researching, always be sure to search “the history of X” and not just “when was X invented?” Often times “invented” means patented and that will yield much more recent results. Bagged tea was invented in 1908, but tea as a beverage goes way father back in history (around year 200 BC.) Furthermore, loose leaf tea is a modern invention and wasn’t purchased or sold that way until around the late 1800s. Tea was usually sold in a brick and you could buy a tea cake or an entire sheet of them at the market to grate down to a loose leaf brew at home. Sugar, similarly wasn’t the white granulated stuff we have today. Sugar was sold as a damn, cone-shaped loaf. While the layperson may not be troubled by your medieval queens and kings sipping a loose leaf tea, a more “educated” reader might. The more familiar a reader is with the time period you’re basing your work around, the more your anachronisms will stick out. If magic is present in your work, you have more flexibility, but you should generally try to stick to a period of 100-200 years. The bigger your window of time, the more you run into the chance of some things seeming inaccurate. Anachronisms are definitely not something to break your brain over trying to avoid them, but if you want, say, steam-power in your book when everything else stays more true to the medieval period, you do want to try to justify the anachronism within the narrative. As previously stated, magic existing in your world makes this much easier to do. If your world has magic, then faster-than-light communication may be possible with, say, a telepathy spell or a scrying spell. This may eliminate the need for carrier pigeons and may even hasten the equivalent of something similar to a magical computer or a magical internet or telephone service. Keep in mind that this might also hinder technological development, making your world seem to be set further back in time than it actually is. If, say, your world has magic that allows a kind of hammerspace where you can store anything, and it’s widely accessible, then wagons might not exist in your world. Who needs them when you can shove everything you own in a cheap bag and take it with you on your horse? For that matter, if transporting everything is that simple, your world might not even have many towns or hubs because more groups can afford to be nomadic. Maybe agriculture doesn’t even exist, and your main character’s village is a group of nomads that live like cowboys and just follow their herds, eating their meat and supplementing it with whatever vegetables they find on the way, rather than building farms. Research technology you want to exist in your world, narrow down an analogous time frame in our world where that technology exists, keep most of your technology to things that exist to within a 100-200 year window of your desired time period. When you have anachronisms, justify their existence within the narrative by explaining why the invention of that technology was important. Think about how the anachronisms of your world shape it and how the magic in your world, if any, would shape what anachronisms exist. Why Everyone Probably Shouldn’t Speak the Same Language: While it is true that even in the medieval period, there were plenty of people and plenty of nations that spoke English, not every country did. Similarly, while most people in your fantasy world might be able to get away with speaking a common tongue, it’s important to think about a few things. The higher caste your characters are from, the better able they should be to communicate with almost anyone as, historically, they would have had schooling where they learned from tutors how to speak with others for diplomatic purposes. Keep in mind that this is especially true for allies but also true for enemies. You cannot negotiate peace treaties between humans and elves if the elves only speak elvish and the humans only speak their own language, after all and you cannot make war time demands if your enemy doesn’t know what you want. Vice versa, if your main character is a pauper, unless their relatives are from different walks of life, your character might only speak the language of the area they grew up in or some sort of pigeon language between their nation and its nearest neighbor. Dialects within regions also happen. Canadian French is not the same as the French they speak in France, after all. Remember that the language barrier increases if there’s a large body of water or a mountain range dividing two nations. The harder it is for them to trade with each other by geography, the harder it will be for them to communicate. While this can be mitigated somewhat by the use of magic (telepathy where communication isn’t verbal, or by the use of some magical translation spell) or by the existence of a long-lived tribe (language develops fast, but it’s harder to have a tower of Babel effect where language is highly diverse when there’s a 1000 year old dwarf in your village that speaks the old tongue and everyone else around them does too because good luck getting the old goat to learn the new slang) if your world doesn’t have magic or an ancient race where people regularly live to be very old, you can benefit from the use of Conlangs. Conlangs: Short for “Constructed Language,” a conlang is basically a made up language to add a diverse feel to your book. If your characters are interacting with aliens, it would be weird for the aliens to come down and speak perfect English without the use of some translation technology. Similarly, if your world doesn’t have magic, it’s very strange if people can all understand each other if they haven’t all been colonized by the same powerful empire or if they don’t all live near each other. And Island nation that’s hard to get to is probably not going to speak the same language that they do on the mainland thousands of miles away, and if they do, it’s going to be a weird dialect that no one on the mainland understands anymore if the isolated island doesn’t somehow keep in regular contact. This is when conlangs are useful. You don’t have to go full Tolkien and have a complete, speakable elvish language. But the closer you get to that, the more real the world seems. You don’t have to be an expert linguist to do this, but if you are one or know one, creating a conlang is easier. Start by figuring out what language you want to base it on. It’s much easier to construct a language based on one that already exists. Because English is one of the most commonly spoken languages in the world (both as a first and as a second language) English is a good base language, especially if you intend to market your book to an English-speaking audience. If your conlang doesn’t appear often, you can get away with coming up with only a few words as they’re needed. But if your character is best friends with someone who immigrated from another nation, you want your conlang to be borderline translatable if not fully translatable. Lingo Jam is a great resource for creating a conlang as you can add in words and their translations to create a translator to help your readers. Lingo Jam also provides a list of the most common words used in English to help you get started with a rough idea of what words you might need to translate. Keep in mind root words, regular and irregular verbs for conjugations, and word-order. Idioms unique to your conlang also add to authenticity, and the more important something is to a culture, the more likely their language would reflect that. If your character comes from a snowy climate, maybe they have more words for snow than they do for grass. Or maybe they have fewer. Or maybe they have specific words for different thicknesses because knowing the thickness of ice is important to their survival. If there’s a special magical item that comes only from that characters country, chances are that their word for it is unique, or that other cultures and nations borrow the word for that thing from that conlang. Consider also the interplay between gender, climate, religion, and other aspects of culture and how that reflects on your language. If your character’s culture originated in a desert where water is scarce and they’re highly religious, chances are that words for water and divinity will have some link or be seen together often. If your character lives in a matriarchal society, perhaps their word for doctor is “medicine woman” the same way English has gendered terms like “fireman.” Maybe your magical race of tree people doesn’t differentiate between male and their word for “person” isn’t gendered at all. Or maybe they have several gendered words that refer to tree species more than anything about our concept of gender and they apply these “tree genders” to human populations based on height and hair color. As a final note, remember that conlangs aren’t necessary, and if this kind of thing hurts your head, you can just use Esperanto or skip it all together. There are plenty of successful fantasy novels out there that don’t use conlangs. If you want a fun way to add depth to a vast fantasy world, do consider the conlang, but it’s by no means necessary to have one and it’s not world-breaking to not have one. “When is it Okay to Borrow This?” and Other Questions About Taking Inspiration from Different Cultures: I’m basing most of my information off this post, and it sadly seems to display in improper order, but it’s worth the read. Basically if something is specific to a culture or religion (this is why researching is important) it’s probably not okay to borrow from it unless you know what you’re doing. Having a sensitivity reader is good for this, but if you don’t have one or can’t find one, consider reaching out to someone you know who is familiar with the culture to ask if it’s okay. If something is a food, item of clothing, or a technology that has spread across the world, chances are it’s okay to use that. Rice is a common staple food, for example, so if your world or your character has a specific type of riceball or onigiri, it’s usually okay to call it a rice ball, call it onigiri, or describe it as such. I do have some caveats for that later. A kimono, likewise, is considered everyday clothes, if a bit old-fashioned, and kimono are often given as gifts if you stay with a family in Japan. If you base an item of clothing off a kimono in your story, that should be fine. A good rule of thumb is: If you can buy it in a gift shop in the country you’re borrowing it from, or if it’s widely sold across the world by the people who created it, it’s probably okay to use in your story. The Caveat: Keep in mind, when you borrow things, that stereotypes exist, and if you’re using it because of a stereotype, even a positive stereotype, you need to reconsider. Let’s say one of your fantasy races is coded as “Asian” (as non-specific and vague as that is) it’s obviously bad to describe them as having yellow skin, eating “gross” and “weird” foods, having “slit” eyes and a number of other things. But what’s less obvious are positive stereotypes. If this fantasy race of yours that’s coded after some Asian group are broadly characterized as “being smarter than everyone around” that’s ALSO a stereotype. While it’s generally the case that “Asian people are smarter” here in the USA, it’s important to note that a big reason behind that is that most people immigrating from Asian countries like China, Japan, and Korea are wealthy. They can afford to take a risk and move to the USA, so they do. And because they are wealthier, they can afford to pay for better education, tutors, and private lessons for their children. And when they do, the children tend to score better on tests which makes it seem like they’re smarter. Remember that a lot of things are highly correlated with wealth and challenge and scrutinize why you might want to pick a certain trait for a certain character. Pay Special Attention to Anything You Want to Characterize Negatively: If your character doesn’t like sushi, is it just because she doesn’t like fish? Or is it because she doesn’t like raw fish? If you can’t think of a reason why, or if the answer is “she doesn’t like it because it’s different from what she’d normally eat.” think about the reason YOU think that way. Not everyone has to like sushi, but if your character hates it just because she’s never had it before and it’s strange to her, unless your character is MEANT to be inexperienced, this makes her come off as a bit xenophobic. This kind of thing exists in a grey area, so again, this doesn’t mean your character is bad if they don’t like sushi, it’s just something to consider. A more clear-cut case is this. You describe a character as ugly, with a big, long, hooked nose. Why? Chances are you picked this up from an old cartoon, and that old cartoon picked it up from somewhere else. While not intrinsically anti-semitic the “ugly, long, hooked nose” has been a long-standing anti-semitic caricature. That’s not to say an ugly character can never have a long, hooked nose, but you have to be extremely careful with what other traits they have, because that anti-semitic caricature goes hand in hand with many other negative stereotypes and you may not even realize they’re stereotypes you hold. Again, this is why a sensitivity reader is so very important. Because nowadays, representation is important and it matters, and it’s great if you want to write about lots of different people and cultures and borrow from them, but it’s also very easy to be swayed by stereotypes and biases you didn’t even know you had and accidentally come off as racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic in the process. Don’t let the fear of falling victim to your own implicit biases stop you from trying to be diverse, but do let it give you pause. If you’re uncertain of the history of something, PLEASE research it and PLEASE consult as many people from that culture as possible. Remember: some things are sacred. Just because something is old doesn’t mean it’s safe, either. Some people still worship the Greek Gods. Some people still practice paganism.  So When is it Okay to Borrow This Thing?: Again, if it’s something you can buy from the people who’s culture it belongs to, it’s generally okay to assume that it’s a part of their culture they want to share. Clothing, food, and technology are usually safe bets, especially if you intend to talk about them in a positive light. (Beware of “Exoticising” things too much though.) If something is a part of a culture you belong to, then that’s also usually a safe bet of something you can riff off of without being insensitive. But beware. What’s good representation for you, might be bad representation to someone else. Your idea of Christmas, might be blasphemous to someone else, hence why it’s especially important to tread lightly with religions. “Exoticising”: Exoticising can be described as a subtle form of racism in which you worship, eroticize, romanticize, or fantasize a certain element of a culture, race, or religion to which you do not belong. This is often seen when describing a black woman as a “mocha-colored goddess” but can also be seen when describing he food, customs, or language of a particular group. “Weeaboos” are often guilty of exoticising Japanese culture, and food journalists are especially bad about this when they try to describe foreign foods by describing them in ill-fitting “terms that an American would understand.” It’s known as exoticising because it serves one of two purposes. It’s either used to make the foreign or “exotic” more palatable to an audience less receptive to it or by making something foreign even MORE foreign and mysterious, enhancing it’s “exotic” appeal. You may be exoticising a food if you describe it in a way that resembles the foods described in this post. If you describe a person using food terms or describe a religion as cultish or mysterious, you may be exoticising it. Sensitivity Readers: A sensitivity reader is a type of beta reader or editor that specifically looks for elements in your book that may be problematic. While no single sensitivity reader can possibly catch every single thing that might potentially be offensive, if you have concerns about your work, it might be a good idea to run your manuscript by one of these readers first. They will give you suggestions on what to improve or remove. Just like any beta reader, you do NOT have to take the advice they give or implement the changes they suggest, but they can be helpful if you’ve ever been told your work is “problematic.” Again, remember that what’s empowering for one person is denigrating to another, and your book will never satisfy EVERYBODY. Think about what group you’re trying to write for, and implement edits based on what you think would appeal most to that group. Magic systems: Ever important for people writing fantasy is the magic system. “Harry Potter” had the “wand as a focus” and “incantation as power” set-up, “The Elder Scrolls” series has potions, books, skills, and words of power, covering a whole slew of magical rules. When designing a magic system, you need to decide how it works, and that requires answering some questions. “What can magic do, what can it not do, what does it cost, who can learn it, how is it learned and how do you do it?” What Magic Can Do?: Can magic help you light a fire? Move a mountain? Raise the dead? Cool! Write down some of the things magic can do in your project bible or somewhere that you’ll remember to look so you can reference the rules of magic later. Think of what purpose magic has in your story. Is it a tool your protagonist needs to overcome obstacles? Is it an oppressive force that needs to be banned? Consider the role magic plays when deciding what magic can do and why that’s empowering or oppressive. And remember, it’s totally okay if you just want magic to exist in your world because it’s cool! Just remember that the other aspects of magic are that much more important now, so that the magic in your world doesn’t seem out of place. Next... What Can’t Magic Do?: Remember that limitations make the world more realistic and establish boundaries. If your magic can do anything, your characters are all gods, and relative power levels are meaningless. That can be boring and no one will know what to expect. Will a new obstacle cause the main character to struggle? Is their new opponent a threat? Limitations are necessary for your readers to actually see characters grow as they push boundaries and magic is no different. If magic can help you create fire, can it put the fire out? Does it need a source of fire to bend or can the fire be spontaneously generated? If you can move a mountain, does the size of the mountain matter? Does a larger mountain require more mages to move it? (Remember that limitations like this don’t have to be well known in your world. Consider “Avatar: The Last Airbender.” Metal bending was thought to be impossible even for experienced earth benders. And then Toph came along and blew that out of the water and bent metal because Toph is awesome like that. So consider the difference between hard limits [things no one can do] and soft limits [things that are hard to do, require a loophole, or are an obstacle for your special protagonist to obliterate.] One hard limit I see a lot is that magic cannot raise the dead/make you immortal because if you can raise the dead or make yourself immortal, the stakes are drastically lower for your characters unless your universe has a “fate worse than death” clause in it somewhere. If magic can raise the dead, they come back “wrong” or imperfect or it costs so much energy to do it’s not worth trying. If magic can make you immortal there’s usually a cost associated. Even if you elect not to use any hard limits at all, consider what magic costs. What Does Magic Cost?: Is it “free” but you have to know how to do it or else risk consequences and misfires like in “Harry Potter?” Does it require energy like spell slots in “Dungeons and Dragons” or mana like in most RPG video games and when you use up all that energy you have to rest or risk killing yourself with it? Going back to raising the dead and immortality, “Full Metal Alchemist” deals with the cost pretty well. You can’t raise people from the dead because God/the Truth won’t let you, but you can try. And you will fail. And it will cost you part of your body if not your life. And whatever you do create is not what you wanted, not who you wanted. You can make a Philosopher's Stone that makes you immortal and lets you bypass other costs for alchemy. Except it requires you to kill countless people and, if I remember correctly, using alchemy uses up the souls in the Philosopher's Stone instead of materials. So you can be immortal. You just have to be a moral monster. FMA also does cost with “normal” alchemy in an interesting way. It requires “equivalent exchange,” meaning if you want to alchemically make yourself a bunch of little bird-shaped wooden paperweights, you need to have the wood to do it and you have to know the alchemical formula to make an alchemy circle to do it. It’s also stated in at least one version of the anime that the energy to perform alchemy comes from souls in a parallel world so, like, honestly, alchemy is scary as hell and the cost usually involves human life. Cost is also a good way of creating “power levels.” The strongest mage might be the one that practices more, sure. But if magic is innate and everyone can do it, what separates one educated mage from another educated mage? Cost. Whoever is willing to sacrifice more will win. This also stops your character from relying on magic for everything. If magic has a relatively low cost, we should expect things like we see in “Harry Potter.” Things never really developed much beyond the medieval because magic solved most problems so there was no need for more technology. “Why have a TV? We have magic photographs and stuff! Airplanes? Nah, we have portkeys and floo powder and magic.” If magic has a high cost, you would probably see a lot of technical development alongside magic. Why do energy-sapping magic to light a fire to make your tea when you can just invent an electric kettle to boil water for you? Think about how the cost will limit your character and shape their world. Who Can Learn Magic and How?: Is it something everyone has the potential for? If so, is everyone a mage/witch/wizard? If not, what stops people with the innate ability from performing magic? (See again: cost.) If it’s not innate, or only innate to some people, what causes people to be attuned to magic? Is it something only elves can do? If it’s something you’re born into, how did it first appear and how is it heritable? Does it spring up at random in populations with a certain level of genetic heritability  i.e. Mudbloods and squibs a la “Harry Potter?” Is it passed down like an heirloom? Is it tied to access to a font/source of magic? How did the first mage learn to use magic? Experimenting? Watching another magical creature do it? Gifted the knowledge by a supreme being? How do new generations learn it? Apprenticing to a master sorcerer? From books? From parents? By practicing? From a school of magic? Are certain people limited to certain types of magic like the benders in “Avatar: The Last Air Bender?” How is Magic Done?: Do you need to know magic words? Arcane symbols? Do you need a focus or a medium like a wand or crystal? Is magic done primarily through potions, written hexes, or hand gestures? If the cost is a material, is it a special material like the tooth of a dragon or the remains of a dead fairy? If the magic is contained in a material like a scroll or a crystal, how do you cast the spell? Combining different things within and between categories helps you create a believable and controlled magic system that isn’t overpowered and creates a consistent feel for magic that your readers will pick up on. Do it right and you’ll create a world where your readers are more-or-less aware of who’s a stronger magic user than whom and why, while still leaving them room to be surprised if your protagonist is capable of breaking some of the rules of magic. Do it right and your readers will be confident in your characters’ abilities but will still be concerned when your characters go up against an opponent with either obviously more experience/power or an unknown/new power. Romance and Fluffy Stuff: Some general rules for romance writing. 

Feel the Burn: Decide how slow you want it to burn, first and foremost. If your characters are already an established couple, that romance is already lit. You are on fire and your job is to keep feeding it. However, most romance stories start with the characters as strangers or friends and it’s your job to build up the relationship so that the chemistry and synergy are apparent and the romance develops naturally. Now, when I write romance, I write a burn so slow that you get 10 chapters in and the leads haven’t even met each other yet. Unless the slowest of slow burns is absolutely your shtick, you probably don’t want to do that, but your characters also probably shouldn’t be kissing in the first 2 chapters unless they’re already an established couple. Something like Disney’s Animated “Beauty and the Beast '' is about average in terms of how slow the burn is. They’re catching feels ⅓ or ½ into the movie and they’re really bonding and genuinely romancing right before the climax. A slower burn might have you wait until ⅔ of the way for the first inklings of “will they/won’t they?” TV shows are notorious for this and almost never have the main couple pair up until the end of the series, but they usually still have chemistry showing up in season one. “Miraculous Ladybug” is notorious for doing this but that’s partly because the episodes aren’t necessarily chronological, and the big appeal is the romance potential between the leads which is why the writers don’t want to make them a couple until the very last moment or else they risk losing viewers who are only in it for the romantic tension. I personally think that’s cowardly, but it’s a tried and true method for a TV series. ABC’s “Castle” didn’t have the main couple together until Season 5 out of 8 seasons and they only got married in Season 7. Just remember if you seal the deal on the romance too soon, you need an exciting plot to follow it with the romantic partners working together in order for the story to remain interesting after the “will they/won’t they?” tension is resolved or else the book after that will just be boring. But if you wait too long to get to the juicy bits, the reader might get frustrated, the actual romantic parts will feel rushed by comparison, or if you flesh out the aftermath, your book will be 500,000 words long and let’s face it, most people don’t have the patience for that (that’s 5-10 times the industry standard length, by the way.) Decide how slow you want the burn to go and then pace the story accordingly. A faster paced book will want to see the characters getting along pretty early on if not right away, and a slower paced book leaves more room for tension, enemies-to-friends-to-lovers stuff, or lots of fluffy bits.  Believable Romance or “A Recipe for Good Smooches”: The next thing you have to worry about in romance is making it believable. Chemistry, synergy, and affection are your 3 big ingredients. If your characters don’t have all of this, the relationship is going to seem stale or fake. Are your characters attracted to one another? Do they get along? That’s chemistry. If your characters absolutely hate each other but suddenly start kissing, there are only 3 options, it’s either bad writing, or they’re hate-kissing/fake kissing. In a believable romance, you CAN have hate-kissing and/or fake kissing, but if you want the chemistry to feel real, they shouldn’t hate everything about each other and should like more than half (on average) of their partner’s personality quirks, facial features, hobbies etc. If your characters have nothing in common/no chemistry/no shared interests it will be REALLY hard to make your readers buy that their affection for each other is sincere. Next is Synergy. How well do the characters work together? If they fight side-by-side are they in sync? Can they predict their partners needs more often than not? If they played the Newlywed’s Game and had to answer trivia about each other, would they score a lot of points? The more your characters know about each other and the better they’re able to work with each other, the more believable their chemistry is. Finally we have affection. How warm are your characters toward each other. How easily do they resolve fights? How often do they give gifts, cuddle, or spend time together. The more affectionate they are, the more it gives credence to their synergy. You don’t have to show affection, chemistry, or synergy in equal parts or all at the same time, but remember that these aspects of the romance are part of a three-legged stool. If you remove any one of the legs completely, the stool will have a very hard time staying up, and the closer they are to the same length, the more stable the stool. A couple with very little chemistry and synergy but is VERY affectionate just seems weird, like inexperienced kids playing at romance rather than a real romance. An excess of chemistry with nothing else makes the pair seem like friends with benefits more than a romantic pairing. And synergy without the other two aspects leans way more deeply into the “best friends” category than the “we’re dating/married” category.  Like certain Disney Princesses, missing synergy makes the relationship look more like mutual pining at best or a one-sided romance at worst. Missing out on chemistry, again, makes the bond more familial like found-family or best friends. And missing affection can make it seem either like a broken marriage that’s only staying together for the kids or the comfort, or it makes the couple seem like they’re not really all that committed to each other. The closer you are to having the three ingredients in balance, the closer you are to a believable and idealistic romance. This and more in this post. The Fluffy Bits: Even if the romance isn’t a primary part of your story, the people who like romance and want to see it in your story are going to hate you if you just tell them everything straight. “Henry and Jess went out on a date and had a lot of fun. They had a nice dinner, watched a movie, and slept together at the end of the night,” is WAY boring. The romantic parts don’t have to be 10 page long pining scenes, or describe the dinner date in lucid, uninterrupted detail from start to finish. But you should let the readers see the juicy bits in real time, or at least without glossing over them. “Henry and Jess met up at eight and went to the book shop where they first met to pick up the new release of their favorite book series before heading off to dinner. They read each other chapters from the book while waiting to be seated, and talked about work while waiting for their meal. Henry offered sympathy when Jess expressed her upset that she wasn’t getting along with a new coworker in her department. After the meal, they went to see a screening of Jurassic Park at the old movie theater. Henry remarked how much he loved it the same as he had when he was a boy and Jess admitted that she never appreciated the film as much before she met Henry. They stopped for ice cream on the way home before Jess spent the night at Henry’s. She fell asleep beside him, drifting off somewhere around page 23 of their new book.” That’s not nearly enough detail for some people but it’s WAY better than the first example. The more heavily romance features in your story, the more time should be spent detailing these events and the closer to real time the descriptions should be. We don’t need a frame-by-frame of every second of their night together, but the more detail you give, the more it’s going to engross the readers. Opposites Attract: While some IRL couples can get away with having completely different political ideologies, no shared interests, and nothing in common, most people aren’t like that and it’s VERY hard to pull off in fiction. While the two romantic leads should NOT be carbon copies of each other, they also shouldn’t be complete opposites. Complementary opposites should be about as far into opposites territory as you go and “cut from the same cloth by a different tailor” is about as far as you should go in the other direction. Complementary Opposites: If your characters are more different than alike, their similarities need to be rock solid when it comes to synergy and their differences shouldn’t always be polar opposites but often complementary. While you can get away with “He’s an introvert and she’s an extrovert” and “She plays concert piano but he can’t even carry a tune” it’s a lot harder to get away with “She wants to party all day, every day, and never spend a quiet night at home, and he just wants to read in bed for 6 hours a day” or “She wants every waking moment to be filled with jazz music and he absolutely hates jazz and he would erase it from existence if he could.” If she’s messy and he’s tidy, she can never be TOO messy, or else he’d realistically end up resenting her for never putting anything away and occupying every flat surface in the house to the point where he can’t work on anything without having to shove all her things off to a corner. If she’s a vegan, it’s going to be very frustrating if he’s allergic to 90% of all green foods. If you have hard/distinct differences between the two, there should be more things they agree upon to make up for it. If she’s a big family gal and he’s a lone wolf, they may choose to compromise and have 2 kids instead of 8 like she wants and 1 like he wants, but the compromise is believable because they both love going running in the evening together and they both flip their lids over the same TV show. The better your chemistry, synergy, and affection, the bigger the differences you can get away with. Same Cloth, Different Tailor: While good friends usually agree on most things, just as good spouses would, people are not hive-minds and it’s VERY rare for people to agree on everything. Even if they do agree, their reasons for agreeing may be different. For example, maybe both your characters believe murder is bad no matter what. But one character comes from the perspective that murder is bad because all life is precious and no one should have the right to take the life from someone else so even even killing in self-defense is bad. The other character may believe that murder and killing are distinct categories and believes that it’s okay to kill in self-defense because letting someone kill you is worse than killing someone in self-defense because if you die, the killer might go on to kill more people. Maybe both characters like to eat vanilla ice cream, but one of them likes it because they’re just really picky and don’t like any other flavors but the other likes vanilla because you can add a lot of toppings without it tasting bad. When characters are cut from the same cloth, it’s important to remember that they not be too codependent. They should have other interests beyond shared interests and should be comfortable being alone. Insurmountable Differences: Sometimes things that do happen in real life aren’t believable in fiction. If your characters are too different in certain regards, it’s VERY hard to believe they have a genuine romance. If your characters are on the polar opposite side of the aisle on these big issues, it’s not going to be believable in most cases. These insurmountable differences that make suspending disbelief harder (but not impossible) are: Polar opposite political beliefs. If one of your characters believes trans women are women and the other believes trans people should all die, they’re PROBABLY not going to make a very believable couple. Religion. If one of your characters is a devout Christian who believes all non-Christians are going to hell and the other is an atheist who thinks all religion is superstition and baloney, it’s way harder to believe they’re going to get along without constantly fighting over that. Cleanliness: If one character lives in a literal pigsty hoarder nest and the other is so anal retentive about dust that they take 10 showers every day and their blood boils if something doesn’t smell “right,” they are absolutely going to fight and make each other miserable. Core personality traits. If your characters are polar opposites when it comes to level of openness, introversion/extroversion, or neuroticism, they probably won’t get along. Morals. If your characters have completely different moral compasses,  it’s very hard to make that work. Dependence. If one character is totally codependent and the other is completely independent, either one of them is going to be exploited or one of them is going to feel suffocated. Keep in mind this doesn’t mean the characters can never differ on these subjects, but if the differences are, as I said, polar opposite, there’s very little chance readers will believe the couple gets along, no matter how much chemistry, synergy, and affection you add in. The smaller you make differences in these categories, the more believable your couple will be. Friendships as a Bedrock for Romance: If your characters would not be best friends and you’re going for romance and not just steamy bedroom scenes, then your couple will be very hard to believe as a romantic pairing. Friendship is an ideal stepping stone between strangers and lovers, and often a necessary one. That’s not to say your characters have to start as friends. But if your characters couldn’t even imagine being friends with their intended partner, being in a romance also isn’t a likely path for their relationship.

Some Final, General Notes: A section dedicated to things I though up at the last minute or didn’t fit anywhere else. “Holy Shit! Two Cakes!” and Combating Impostor Syndrome: Sometimes you feel like, even when people like your story, that your work is nothing special, that other people are better than you, that you don’t deserve praise because your story was inspired by other things. In cases where you feel like an impostor, it’s important to remember what your work looks like from outside sources. In general, people tend to like “more of the same” and that’s why so many successful novels and movies are inspired by other sources. The Lion King didn’t set out to be Hamlet/Amleth, but it’s clearly working off the same bone structure. 90% of mystery shows take direct inspiration from Sherlock Holmes. Most high fantasy novels take inspiration from Tolkien. The Sistine Chapel is literally fanart of the Bible and Dante’s Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) are literally Bible fan-fiction where Dante self-inserts and hangs out with his faves like Virgil while writing in all the people he hated getting punished in hell. Most if not all of Disney’s properties are adapted from fairy tales that they didn’t write themselves. When you find yourself thinking: ”Nothing I write is unique,” remember that. There is nothing new under the sun, but even if your story has been told before, no one has ever told it like you will tell it. And when you find yourself thinking: “Nothing I write will ever be as good as what I was inspired by.” Remember: “Two Cakes.” If you work your butt off to make a cake to bring to a party and someone else brings a cake that looks way better, remember that most people at the party are not going to think “Ugh, TWO cakes? No one wants two cakes! Eat the pretty one and throw out the shitty one!” No. Most people are going to think “HOLY SHIT! TWO CAKES! THAT’S AWESOME! NOW WE HAVE ENOUGH CAKE FOR PEOPLE TO HAVE SECONDS!” Sure, people might eat the prettier cake first. But maybe yours has cherries and the other one doesn’t and cherries are someone’s absolute favorite! Or maybe your cake isn’t as pretty but it’s gluten-free and there’s someone in the crowd with Celiac who’s SO thankful you brought a cake that they can eat. And even if your cakes are the exact same? And everyone goes to the pretty cake first? The hungry people will come back for your cake after. And they’ll be happy for a second slice. “But Fan-Fiction is Bad!”: No. Fan-fiction is how we’ve been telling stories for hundreds of years. The story of King Arthur that we have today is literally a fanfic of a fanfic of a fanfic of a fanfic. The original King Arthur story didn’t even have other knights or a round table or Merlin. Disney literally makes its money by doing fanfiction of public domain stories. Niel Gaiman wrote HP Lovecraft and Sherlock Holmes fanfic and published it as an original work and won a Hugo award for it. The comic book industry is literally built off taking characters someone else made and making them do different things or making them do the same thing in a different way. Fanfiction is literally how stories are told. Any original idea you have is probably inspired by something that happened to you or something you adored as a kid and forgot about. Badly written fanfiction is bad because it’s badly written, not because it’s fanfic. “No one wants to read someone’s work if it’s not original!” Nah, man. There are people that have seen every Batman movie ever made, read every comic that even remotely mentioned Batman, and own anything with Batman’s symbol on it. King Arthur and his knights are referenced in media constantly. Neon Genesis Evangelion had and still has merchandise out the ass, reboots, spin-offs, and games made about it. Harry Potter inspired copycats around the world. There’s published work out there, right now, called “50 Shades of Grey” which is erotic “Twilight” fan-fiction re-branded to something original and it took the freaking world by storm, whether it deserved the fame it got or not. Fan-fiction is just a way some people tell stories and there’s no shame in that. “But Someone Said X Trope Was Bad!”: Tropes and archetypes are neither bad nor good. They are tools and building blocks. Learning how to use them, play with them, or subvert them in a way that works for your story is the difference between a “good” trope and a “bad” one. Do you like it when the grumpy person and the soft sweet person fall in love? That’s a trope. Do you like it when the hero has a snappy one-liner? Trope. Do you like heroes that are absolute dumbasses with hearts of gold? Trope. Do you like it when the villains are flashy and goofy? Trope. If you’ve seen it more than once, chances are it’s a trope. And there’s no shame in using a trope or an archetype.  Know the Answers to the Questions You Want Your Readers to be Asking: Does one of your characters die at the end? Do you want your readers to ask themselves “Oh my God? Did X just die?” Suspense is important to stories, and getting your readers to ask questions is part of building suspense. But even if you never intend to reveal the answers, you should still know the answers to the questions you want your readers to ask. “Was the hero the bad guy all along?” Even if you never confirm one way or the other, YOU personally should know the answer. This is useful not only for sequel baiting, but it also helps you tell a more consistent narrative with a one-shot story. Knowing the answers helps you be deliberate with what you choose to reveal, and whether what you reveal gets the reader closer to the answer, or muddies the waters more and more. That’s All Folks: Again, this is just stuff I picked up. Only take the advice that you want to take or that you think will help you. It’s your book and you have complete control over it. Hopefully, this has been helpful. Now get out there and write! I may add more information as I learn more because I’m always learning and growing.

#writing tips #refs #writing refs #long post #how to write

[septembercfawkes]

Story Structure Explained: Prologues, Hooks, Setups, Inciting Incidents

Over the last several months I've been reviewing story structure off and on as I try to brainstorm and "percolate" my next novel and finish revising my current one. I've already broken down and talked about the basic approach to story structure in the post "What to Outline When Starting a Story." But since there are different approaches and story structures and more elements than I covered in there, I'm revisiting the topic with more specificity.

The elements in here aren't my own, but they have my own spin and explanations. This post's take on story structure is influenced by Story Engineering by Larry Brooks, the Seven Point Story Structure, Million Dollar Outlines by David Farland, The Hero's Journey, and even the basics of Freytag's Pyramid. You'll find that a lot of story structure resources have the same points and elements, but may call them different things or approach them in different ways. What matters most is that you understand the concepts and ideas, not what you call them (and in the writing community, some terms are used very ambiguously).

None of these things are 100% black and white--there are grays and there are variations--but you'll find that most successful stories have this structure or some rendition of it. And whether you like to plot or discover your story, whether you write intentionally or subconsciously, you'll probably hit a lot of these elements by the time your story is finished, so this isn't meant to restrict you, but help enhance your storytelling.

I'll be referring to Spider-verse as an example, because I love it, it recently won an Academy Award, and I've watched it four times over the months I've been reviewing story structure. You'll see how it fits, and varies, from the structure. Also worth noting is that while it is not the most mind-blowing story, the creators completely nailed everything they approached.

Here are the elements I'm going to hit:

(Prologue) Hook Setup Plot Point 1 (or "Inciting Incident") Pinch Point Midpoint Pinch Point 2 Plot Point 2 Climax Resolution/Denouement (Epilogue)

This varies somewhat from the others (and is a combination of them), so I hope that doesn't offend anyone, but it's how I like to think of it. 😉

I'll also be taking the heroes through these stages (I've heard them attributed to the Hero's Journey plot structure, but I'm not sure that's where they originated):

Orphan Wanderer Warrior Martyr

And I'll be including character arcs and themes and talking about escalating stakes and costs. So let's get started with the beginning! (Cause apparently it's too much awesome to fit in one post! 😎)

Beginning (or "Exposition")

The following elements are in the beginning of the story, what Fretag's Pyramid refers to as "exposition"--I don't recommend using that term because it makes it sound like you can write a bunch of info-dumps. 😂 (Spoiler: you can't 🤷‍♀️)

Prologue (not always present)

I was going to say this was "optional," but that's not the right way to look at prologues. Listen, some stories need prologues, some DO NOT need prologues, and some can actually work either way.

People are hecka confused about what prologues are, how they actually function, and how to even write a good one. I strongly believe the primary, all-encompassing purpose of a prologue is to make promises to the audience. That is the main function of a prologue. There are different kinds of promises you can make and different kinds of ways to make them. If you haven't read my post and plan on using prologues in your writing, I strongly recommend you check out "How Prologues Actually Function & 6 Types to Consider"

In Spider-verse

In Spider-verse, the prologue is at the very beginning, where Peter Parker tells the audience who he is and what it's like being Spider-man.

Type: Informational

- an informational prologue functions by making promises to the audience via giving information

Note: This can't come across as a stale info-dump, which is why you'll see in here the prologue is also infused with the appropriate voice and tone to be entertaining.

Notice that this prologue also gets everyone on the same page by offering a quick recap of Spider-man and his origin story. It also bridges Peter Parker's past story to the story we are about to watch.

But most importantly, it makes promises to the audience--like every good prologue should. And the promises work as hooks, which brings me to the next element.

(Worth mentioning is that this prologue also relates to the dual draw, alternate POV, and even touches the theatrical types of prologues.)

Hooks

I decided to make the term plural, because today, you really need more than one hook. Hooks are lines, concepts, elements--whatever--that pull the audience in. Often this is done by making promises. (The terms can overlap, but technically aren't the exact same thing.)

Hooks primarily function by getting the audience to look forward in some way, so they are anticipating what comes next in the story (which relates to tension). There are a lot of ways you can infuse your story with hooks, so I won't lay them all out here, but I have some helps in "5 Tricks that Help with Hooks."

Hooks should be included throughout your novel, but they are vital to open with. You may even open directly with The Hook™ (the concept that the audience came for). But hooks should be in the very beginning, which is why I'm including it as part of story structure itself.

In Spider-verse

Most of the hooks in Spider-verse come from the prologue. You might be thinking, "Really? But it was just information we already know!" Stick with me. This is exactly why they work as hooks.

Almost always, by the time the audience has sat down in a movie theater or picked up a book, they know something about the story, even if it's minimal. For books we have the back cover copy. For movies, we have trailers. You can absolutely create hooks by playing with the relationship of the back cover copy with the opening pages (or, since back cover copies are often written later, by keeping that in mind).

Unless you are blind (haven't seen trailers, posters, or any promotional material, or talked to anyone), you know Spider-verse has more than one "Spider-man" in it, which is why the prologue has so many hooks--we know that everything Peter Parker is saying is about to change. "I love being Spider-man." "I'm the one and only Spider-man." In other words, it creates a lot of contrast and carries contradictions, which is one approach that almost always works for writing hooks in the beginning of a story: using contrasts or opposites. Contrasts and opposites immediately draw attention and beg the audience to stick around for the story--because they are wondering how those contradictions are going to fit together.

Other hooks include elements of humor (dancing, Christmas music, a popsicle) and the promise of simply getting a good Spider-man story. Even before the prologue, we get teasers of a glitching world and the comic book style of animation--all hooks.

Note: In the Seven Point Plot Structure, the term "hook" is used to encompass the whole story's setup. I don't like it used that way because I don't believe everything in the beginning functions as a hook, and it makes the term "hook" more ambiguous. Open with a hook and get the setup going.

Setup

This is often the most difficult part of the story to write, because you have to convey a lot without being boring or killing the pacing. (FYI, whether or not you have a prologue, you still need a hook in the opening, but then you should continue using hooks to help tighten pacing.)

In the setup, you are essentially grounding the audience: Who is this story about? Where is this story taking place? When is it taking place? What's normal?

And the last one is important, because I'd argue that one of the primary purposes of the setup is to convey a sense of normalcy to the audience (because everything is about to change).

The setup will introduce us to the main character's arc ("arc" refers to how a character grows or changes) by showing how the character is now, which means it also usually nods to the theme, because those two elements are almost always tied together.

If you are writing speculative fiction, you may be explaining magic systems and worldbuilding elements in this section as well.  

In Spider-verse

The setup conveys all these things:

Protagonist: Miles

Setting: Modern day, New York

State of normalcy: Miles is a teenager who lives with his parents, likes graffiti, and is attending a new school where he doesn't feel he fits in. His father is pushing him. Spider-man regularly saves people in New York (as shown on the news). Classes at the new school are intense.

Key characters introduced: Mom and Dad, Gwen, Uncle Aaron, Spider-man (already introduced in the prologue), and we even get a cameo of a villain, Olivia

Character arc introduced: Miles wants to quit his new school, is dealing with everyone's expectations of him, and doesn't know what he wants to do with his life.

Theme introduced: This is directly related to the arc. The primary theme of Spider-verse is to get back up (in other words, not quit). Notice how this is also introduced in a contrasting way in the prologue, where Peter Parker says directly that he always gets back up. Peter knows who he is, what he likes to do ("I love being Spider-man,") and how he is going to live his life.

Foreshadowing: In Miles's class, we see Olivia talking about other universes. When Uncle Aaron takes Miles somewhere to put up his graffiti, Miles asks, "How do you know about this place?" and Aaron answers, "I did an engineering job down here"--alluding to working for the villain. People are talking about earthquakes happening in New York.

Character traits, abilities, and wants: Miles does graffiti art and is apparently pretty good at it. He's also smart enough to go to this new school and get "100%" on his test. But what he wants is to flunk out and return to his old life and not deal with others' expectations. These are important elements. His skills make him likeable and a want/desire/goal gives a sense of direction to the story so it isn't stagnant--it still has a sense of progression.

It's important to know that while you are conveying a sense of normalcy, what's on the page (or screen) needs to be moving the story forward. This means that we don't need a play by play of your protagonist waking up, showering, eating breakfast, sitting through each and every class, etc. (though that is all one reason why those beginnings are so cliche). Notice that we don't get a play by play of every moment of Miles's day; we get a montage, which in novels, is the equivalent of summary.

Orphan State

At the beginning of the story, the protagonist is often in an "orphan" state. This may be literal (Harry Potter, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Peter Parker (both his parents are dead), Frodo (lives with his uncle), or a zillion other protags with no mom and/or dad), or it may be figurative--they may be removed from their parents, isolated from friends, or emotionally distant in some way.

In Spider-verse

While Miles has both parents, he is an "orphan" in the sense that he has become somewhat emotionally distant from his dad and literally distant by attending a new boarding school. He's been disconnected from his past friends, and he feels like he doesn't fit in.

Plot Point 1

This is often called the "inciting incident." But like other terms, there is some disagreement on what and when the "inciting incident" is, though putting it here with plot point one is most common. However, there are others who argue they are two different things, on a more micro-level. (Curse you ambiguous writing terms in the community!! 😡👎) But like I said in the beginning of this article, what matters is not so much what you call it, but that you understand it.

This is the moment where something enters the story and critically changes the protagonist's direction; it's when the story moves from setting up to reaction, from "exposition" to "rising action" if you like Freytag's pyramid, from beginning to middle, from intro to significant conflict. In a Hero's Journey story, this is the "call to action." However you want to think of it, it is the moment that disrupts the established normalcy and sends the protagonist in a new direction.

The inciting incident/plot point one may happen in an instant or it may take place over several scenes.

In Spider-verse

This is the moment where Miles gets bit by the spider. It changes everything. We leave the setup and enter the rising action. He can't go back to the "established normal." And he's going to have to react to all the changes.

In other words, we are leaving the beginning, and starting the middle. . . which I'll cover next time!

#writing tips #into the spider verse #spiderverse #writing tips and tricks #writeblr #miles molares #peter parker #writing lesson #writing help #writing community #writing advice #plot structure #plotting #writing a book #amwriting #author #editor #marvel #prologue #hook #setup #inciting incident

[taiblogcomics]

The Final Mission of the Suicide Squad

Hey there, excused princesses. Well... This is it. The culmination of eight years of reviewing. It's a new year, and it is also the very last issue of Suicide Squad.

From the resiliance of Yo-yo surviving inside King Shark, to the quotableness of the shark-man himself, to the terrible designs of Harley Quinn's outfits, to the road trip with Batman and Deadshot, to the oddly heroic spirituality of El Diablo, to the touchingly sweet relationship of Killer Croc and Enchantress, to Captain Boomerang who was also there... Boy, has it been a long and usually dumb ride. Not the road trip, though. The part where it was actually a ride was honestly pretty sweet. But yeah! This is our last issue. Will it go out with a bang, or more of a wet fart? Let's look and find out~

Here's the very last cover we'll ever see with these jerks on it:

The gang's all here! Honestly, a cool group shot is a great way to go out. I have no complaints, it's a cool cover. I just think there's a fun irony in "extra special anniversary issue" and it also being the last issue. Happy anniversary! For a gift, we got you cancellation!

So we open in the past with the Ghost Recon Squad, before they became zombie ghosts. Just in case you thought this was going to be a backstory to make them sympathetic, the whole thing is bathed in red lighting, and they're torturing Gulag of the Annihilation Brigade for information. Gulag spills the beans on the underwater base where the last issue took place. The Recon Boys head there to set up a trap of recording the Suicide Squad on camera and prove to the world they exist. Oh trust me, this is more of a trap for the viewers of said footage than the Squad itself, particularly Jared Leto's performance. Anyways, they open a secret vault and are transformed into the zombie ghosts.

Back in the present, the same power has infected Amanda Waller as well. She's less of a zombie ghost, though, and more of a Grey Hulk. And then her stomach opens up in a fiery maw, which is somehow both terrifying and ridiculous. She leans in and attempts to shove Rick Flag in her belly-mouth, which should give you some idea of how gigantic she is now. Fortunately for Rick, Harley suddenly appears and beats Waller in the face with her hammer, causing her to drop Rick. The pair regroup and swap an exposition dump about the Tunguska virus that's possessed Waller, then get the hell out of the room, just as Waller starts breathing fire.

The exposition doesn't stay confined to the one room, though. On the other hand, Cosmonut shows up to tank Waller's flame breath and make sure that stays confined. Seriously, it's a full page of plot details of more or less what we already know. At best, it at least gives me a specific issue number I can link to, which is at least nice for archive purposes. Otherwise, all this accomplishes is that Cosmonut gets killed while Harley yaks away. Alas, dear Cosmonut. He was exceedingly bizarre and out of place, and therefore was a fan favourite for me. Let us all raise a jar of Skippy in his honour~

Meanwhile, the Ghost Squad corners Captain Boomerang, who begs them to let him go and even offers to join them. Katana shows up and chops off the ghost's arms so Boomerang can get away. He's a ghost, though, so he just makes new arms out of fiery ectoplasm, and blasts Katana. Given that it's a magic cursed virus, this even hurts the souls in her magic sword. Ah, I love the sentences that comic books cause me to write sometimes. Deadshot also shows up and lays down some suppression fire so they can get away. The Ghost Squad opts not to give chase, figuring Waller will get them sooner or later. Finally, a lazy villain. That much I can relate to~

After a brief Stargate reference for no reason, they find a submarine. This also leads to a "Yellow Submarine" reference for no reason. I guess that's Boomerang's role now: Australian, coward, soiler of pants, thrower of boomerangs, spouter of pop culture references. Deadshot and Boomerang are all prepared to leave, but Katana insists that they have to stay to defeat the Tunguska virus-curse. Rick Flag and Harley join them, agreeing with Katana. This makes the vote 3-2, and they convince the others with simple logic: if Tunguska gets out, then everyone is doomed, including Deadshot's daughter. As for Boomerang, helping them is penance for killing Hack, and he sadly agrees to that. Deadshot also agrees, on the basis that his favourite film is The Wild Bunch. Well, whatever motivates you, I guess~

The underwater base breaks the surface, and the Ghost Squad prepares to go out and spread their virus among humanity. Whatever men they were are gone, though the one called Jones is still reluctant. Grier, however, is all gung-ho to be the apocalypse that dooms mankind. Once you're a zombie, might as well go all-in, I guess. It's at this point that Rick Flag finally actually learns that the zomblers here are made of his old squad, and he's horrified long enough to freeze and have them infect his arm. Deadshot pulls him back into cover, and tells him to snap out of it.

While those two are holding off the Ghost Patrol, the rest of the Squad is in the vault taking care of Tunguska's corpse. Katana's magic sword can parry the infection long enough for them to grab the body. And what is the purpose of the corpse? Well, remember the out-of-hand Stargate reference earlier? It's legitimately a Stargate, and they figure if they can get it open and chuck Tunguska inside, it'll cut the possession virus off at the source. Unfortunately, Monster Waller catches up with them and infects Harley with her flame breath, leaving the other two to drag the corpse.

Running out of both options and ammo, Rick Flag tries a new tactic. He gives up. He surrenders himself to the Ghost Squad and approaches them, where they gladly welcome him as a new infectee. After all, the Suicide Squad's supposed to be expendable, right? However, this turns out to be a ruse so he can get close enough to just deck them instead. And while that's going on, Katana and Boomerang manage to drag Tunguska's cadaver (the Tunguskadaver, if you will) to the dimensional door and force it open. Channeling her grief into her sword, Katana uses it as a beacon to lure the infection energy right to her.

Deadshot shows up, having abandoned Flag when Flag seemed like he was giving up. He helps Boomerang heft Tunguska into the Stargate. Of course, the powerful interdimensional vortex also catches Boomerang in its wake, and he's very nearly sucked into it himself. Deadshot, though, uses his particular talents of marksmanship to shoot the control console while still holding onto Boomerang, closing the gate and saving him. It's admittedly a cool, heroic moment, and it's nice that Deadshot gets one.

With Tunguska beyond the boundaries of this dimension, the infection dissipates. Waller and Harley return to normal, and even Killer Croc lumbers up, having avoided death in the previous issue. Harley gives a big thumbs up, since they've finally saved the world like Waller wanted. Waller, ever the grouch, chastises her, saying that being heroes once doesn't erase their past misdeeds. In fact, nothing will, and she tells them that no matter what they do, they're Suicide Squad for life--or death. No one leaves the Suicide Squad.

Except us! We, the readers, are leaving the Suicide Squad and moving on to better comics. And while a new Suicide Squad title is due to start up again next month, keep in mind how long this was on the back-burner for me. It’s actually been, like, a year since this issue originally came out. We’re only reviewing it now, but as an actual published work, Suicide Squad‘s been dead for a year or so. This very much is the final issue, as far as I’m concerned. Like, when the title briefly became New Suicide Squad, we knew that was happening, and it took over immediately enough to count as a continuous story. But for all intents and purposes, the Suicide Squad that I’ve been reviewing since 2011 is done, and I will not be checking out the new series. No thank you sir~

But as a final issue to all we’ve read before? This is honestly not that bad.It wraps up a story arc with a genuine world-saving hero moment, and dovetails a bunch of past arcs together. Surprisingly, for a book called Suicide Squad, they sure go out of the way to not have any of its members die in the last issue. Like, I’m very glad they didn’t kill off Killer Croc, I would have hated that. But it’s still very bizarre to have him suddenly turn up like “hey guys, I’m alive” when he hadn’t even been seen or mentioned in the preceding rest of the comic. It just seemed a little too “Saturday Morning” to me, if you know what I mean~

Don’t worry, though! This isn’t the end of Taiblog! I still have a good stack of ten or so Red Hood issues to get through before my backlog dries up completely. Even then, there’s still so much else I could do. I have other terrible New 52 comics we could review. Trust me, we’re not at a loss for terrible comics any time soon~

I’m just glad to have a finale that didn’t make me cry for once~

#comics #reviews #Suicide Squad #Taiblog

[sunnydwrites]

Tips for Writing Dialogue

Anonymous said:

hello! i was wondering if you have any tips for writing dialogue? mine always comes out a bit flat and boring (imo) no matter how hard i try.

Hi there, thanks for your ask! I definitely know the feeling here, and I’ve been meaning to write a good post on dialogue. Here we go!

The Importance of Dialogue

Have you ever had a conversation that changed your life? Maybe it was face-to-face, maybe it was over text, maybe it was over the phone. Maybe it was with your idol, maybe a friend, maybe a complete stranger. Think back to this conversation or to any memorable conversation you’ve had. What made it memorable?

Sometimes people talk to each other just to talk. (We refer to this as fluff in writing.) Other times they’re telling stories or speculating on the latest, strangest conspiracy theories. Whatever it was, you were gathering information whether you knew it or not. You learned more about your conversational partner(s), or you learned more about a certain topic, or both. This is what the purpose of dialogue should be in your writing.

Why is it so hard to write dialogue, then?

Dialogue is the most straight-forward form of characterization for non-PoV characters. Your conscious mind may not know it, but your subconscious is very aware that this concept brings a lot of pressure. If it’s hard to capture your own thoughts with words alone, it’s definitely hard to capture the thoughts of someone that you created from thin air.

So, let’s jump into it.

Characterization Through Dialogue

I’m sure you’ve heard of the term “mannerism” before, but in case you haven’t: a mannerism is habitual way of speaking or acting. It’s almost like a “trademarked” phrase or action, if you will. For example, I’ve been told many times that my mannerisms include:

Yelling in frustration at times (but with no actual words)

Calling people “dude”, “bro”, or “man”

Unnecessary finger guns

The phrase “yikes”

And a lot of others, but these are the most defining ones. Anyone who’s around me regularly could easily associate me with any of these three given things, so that’s going to be a good way to reveal bits of who your character really is. What are their mannerisms?

For me personally, mannerisms aren’t too hard to incorporate in my writing. For example, if I were to write a quick and generic string of my own dialogue, it would look like this:

“Hey, man,” she said, throwing double finger guns. “What’s up?”

Your character’s mannerisms will usually be more on the colloquial side here, as a person’s go-to phrase isn’t usually something super complicated. Additionally, mannerisms aren’t usually something that would take too long to include. They’re just thrown in as little quirks that appear in conversation.

What’s the danger with mannerisms?

It’s easy for someone to pepper their regular conversations with their most common mannerisms. The issues come when you’re including them in every single line in every single situation. Unless your characters are socially inept, they’ll probably know when it’s appropriate to use their mannerisms and when they need to be dropped for a manner of greater professionalism.

Mannerisms are fantastic to include as an a way to build on a foundation that you’ve (hopefully) already built. However, they’re not something you want to be writing in every time they speak.

Revelation Through Dialogue

The main goal of the dialogue you write should be to reveal some sort of information. With this goal comes the dreaded threat of the info-dump, does it not? Here’s where you strike your balance between exposition and characterization.

Maybe your character doesn’t know everything, or maybe they can’t talk about everything. Your PoV character is still getting information, but you’re also learning more about, well, everything. Take a look at these two bits of dialogue about finding treasure.

“You start at the red house on the corner of Clyde and Monroe, and walk exactly fifty-two paces north into the woods. Then you turn and walk to the crest of the hill over which the sun sets, and wait there until midnight. A shovel will be revealed in the branches of a tree exactly fifty degrees to your right; use it to dig down and uncover the treasure.”

“So there’s this red house on Clyde and Monroe, right, and from there you’re gonna walk fifty-ish steps north. Then there’s the one hill with the frickin’ huge trees that you always see the sunset on, right? Yeah, you’re gonna go there. Then you gotta wait until like midnight and a shovel’s gonna show up somewhere to your right, then you’re gonna use it and dig down to get the treasure.”

The first one was more precise, yes, but which one would you hear in a natural conversation. How would you give directions to a friend without having memorized the map beforehand? That’s what the first blurb sounds like to me, like someone memorized the map and the directions before the conversation started.

Including characterization in your dialogue is a good way to avoid the dreaded info-dump. The second string is less precise, yes, but it sounds like something that would comes from a person, not a GPS. You know the character speaking got the gist (which is all a dedicated treasure-finder really needs, right?) but didn’t quite catch all the details, and that’s a thing that naturally happens in real life. Use it to your advantage!

The Dangers of 100% Natural Conversation

Tangents. Topic changes. Unexpected bouts of laughter. Losing track of thought. Repetitions. Trying to same the same story and repeating it fifty times before someone listens.

Imagine having to read all of these in a single conversation because the writer wanted it to be as natural as possible. Infuriating, right?

When your dialogue is no longer actively contributing to your story, your plot, or your characterization in a useful way, your dialogue no longer has a purpose. Do people talk all the time in real life without a purpose? Of course they do. 

Do readers want to read through five pages of telling old anecdotes when the characters should be finding the magical sword to slay the dragon? Unless they’re climbing a mountain and passing the time in anything but silence, probably not. (But even then you don’t need to write out every line.)

You want your dialogue to be natural. You want it to flow in the way that a normal conversation would. But you don’t want it to mimic every nuance of the spoken English language. When you cross over from natural to nearing ridiculous, there’s an issue to be fixed.

So, that’s all I’ve got for today; hopefully this will help you bring your dialogue to life! If there’s anything else you want to see me write about, please don’t hesitate to leave a message in my ask. Until next time, much love! <333

#writeblr #writing tips #writing advice #dialogue #writing dialogue #conversations #writing conversations #tips for writing dialogue #tips for writing conversations #advice for writing dialogue #advice for conversations #write #writer #writing #author #authorblr #author advice

[authorincrisis]

planning a story

Planning a story goes differently for all writers but is useful regardless of style. The plan and plot are the two main components of the skeleton of your tale (the characters being the heart) and go a long way when coming to write your story. An issue that many writers face today is that they know where they want to go by the end but not how they will get there. This is a reason why planning is an essential step before and during the process of accomplishing your goals. Whether you are a do-er or a thinker, this guide can come in handy and give your big idea a backbone.

Most people know the fundamental conflicts, characters, and goals of the story but cannot precisely grasp the ins and outs of their plan, missing out on some extraordinary plot twists and details that would otherwise be present if they had thought it through. Though a huge part of writing is the thought-dumping within it, we must make that those thoughts are comprehensible for others to read as well. We have to give ourselves motivation and a plan for how we will make them into a unified piece. Below are some neat tips and common sense that should be kept in mind when completing the plan.

Keeping A Journal/Notebook

Maintaining a physical copy of your thoughts is crucial when coming to plan. Whether it is noted on a laptop or scribbled on a napkin, you should have an account of what you were brewing in your mind that will help you later. No matter how insignificant or silly it may seem, you should write everything that comes to mind. I cannot tell you how many times I wished that I'd written down or remembered a small detail from before only to have it gone in an instant. Unfortunate, yes, but I learned to document because of it.

These things can include small excerpts, quotes, twists, ideas for characters, ideas for events, and pretty much anything else. The sky's really the limit here.

Have a Basic Sense of Your Story Before Your Plan

Super simple. Exposition, Conflict, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, Denouement. You know all of this but in case you forgot, I'll put a little summary underneath.

Exposition: Setting, main characters, foreshadowing (although it can be present all around), and an introduction. Who is your story going to be about? Where are they? Give us a taste of their personality before we begin so we can connect and anticipate what will happen next.

Conflict: What's the problem of the story? How does the character find this out? Is it that they won the lottery and don't know what to do with the money or are they held at gunpoint in a Chinese Resturant? This is the central conflict of the story, but there can be more mini ones later on, which we will find in rising action. (Note: it is possible to start your story with conflict, however, make sure to include the exposition as you go on and about)

Rising Action: How are your characters trying to achieve their goals? How did they develop and what did they learn? What were the hurdles along the way and how did it shape them to be the people that they are? If you are writing in mystery, be sure to mull this through. The rising action is the bulk of the story and should not be taken lightly.

Climax: Is it a plot twist? A grand revelation? The ultimate fight scene? In any scenario, it's the most intense bit, and we discover the results.

Falling action: everything from the climax and rising action coming into place. This is where you decide if the character has resolved the conflict or not and how things are settling down.

Denouement: Aftermath. An epilogue maybe. It goes hand in hand with the falling action and shouldn't be too long. It's basically just ending your story.

Point of View

How will you tell the story and how will that cater to your readers? First person or third person? Past tense or present tense? Remember, this depends solely on your preference and comfort, no one being better than the other. Though past tense with third person may be traditional, it is not out of date, the same for present tense with first person not being careless. Most readers don't judge stories based on this so leave it up to yourself to choose. You are writing your story, the one that you've worked so hard on so be comfortable with it!

So, this may have been pretty elementary but do not forget it! You must at the very least know these details and write them down in a place where you can expand on them later. Also, this is BEFORE you start to write. Yes, you can add on more (something I will be touching on in a short bit), and you can also keep notes at the bottom of your document, but this is the bare minimum. Do it, and you'll thank yourself later.

[For those who don't need to plan as much, feel free to scroll to the bottom for organization ideas. You can also, as I stated earlier, plan while you are writing your story. This can be found below]

So, we've finished the basics but for those of you wanting a more elaborate storyline, expand. The following are some methods of doing so.

Do Your Research

Is your story based on a real-life event or setting? If so, research! Find out how life is/was like there, if the area was large or small, highly populated or not. What are/were the norms? Please don't lay out every detail but rather, be aware of them, applying them to your character and plot when necessary. I mean, how will your character live otherwise? Although it's fiction, we can't have a man in the 1720s scrolling through Tinder now, can we? (unless that's your purpose, of course)

I know it may be a pain, but it's loads of help too! Trust yourself and go ahead.

Build Your World

Writing fantasy? Think it out! What is your universe like? The laws? The norms? I, personally, don't have too much experience in this area but I am sure that you can find a post or article that will highlight it. In fact, here you go! 

Character Development

Where has your character come from? How did they get from A to B and what lessons did they learn to do so? What are your As and Bs? I'll put up a character development post soon enough, but for now, you can refer to this. 

Details

What additional information do you need? Is it the placement of a can of beans that will be crucial later on or a slip in an antagonist's dialogue? Write notes as to how this will be important later in your story and why. Stick to the key events and let your writing do the rest.

DO NOT plan out your WHOLE story. Yes, chapter by chapter is okay, but not everything down to the T. Give yourself a break and space for your imagination to flow. Have boundaries but don't choke yourself.

Additional Components/Expanding

Character development, description, and dialogue do not necessarily have to be planned out as stated earlier but keep the main details in mind. Go back to the journal entries, go back to the research and merely expand. How will your story be better with a little tweak? What about this character? Those types of things.

Remember, with every action, there is a reaction. This is very important to consider when drawing up your plot. If you are aiming for a more realistic type of story, make something go wrong. Increase the stakes. Make your character's stakes evident. What are they willing to do? If it can go wrong, it will go wrong, and with writing fiction, there are many possibilities.

So, with all of that being said, you now have your plan! You know what will happen, how it will happen, and some other details too. But now, how will you organize your thoughts? Though some of you may be okay with going back and forth between pages and pages, others may want a bit more structure. Luckily, there are many different, and unique templates and systems that you can use that will fit with your story perfectly. Ranging from the basic Exposition - Denoument to a massive spreadsheet, there are many options to chose from. Simply, select the one that is best for you.

If you are more of a visual thinker, try a flowchart or mind map. If you like detailed, maybe go chapter by chapter. If you fiddle a lot while writing or like to feel things, try making your own storyboard. Not only will you now have a customized planner, but also more motivation to write. (I mean, if you came this far then surely you'd want to finish it?) And that's what it's about. Really making the story matter to you. Yeah, you may have a dozen other projects waiting in line, urging for you to start them but this way, you finally can sort out your priorities. You can finally work.

So, that wraps up planning for now. I've attached some useful links below that can help you further, but if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask. I'm always here and ready to help at every step of the way. I hope that I didn't miss anything too important, but if so, I can certainly post them later. Keep an eye out for updates and feel free to interact. With luck, this helped, but for now, it's all. Thank you for reading this far and have a great day!

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#writing #writers on tumblr #writing advice #improve your writing #writing tips #plot development #plot #plan #planning #planning your story

[ramblingshit]

The Uninvited - 1944 - 5/10

long ass exposition voice over - beautiful ominous scenery, craggy cliffs, white water frothing against dark rocks,

tall large bricked house with vines climbing up the walls, doorways twice the height of people; smart funny concise script with light-hearted orchestral music to match, large columns, clear crystal chandeliers, large curve staircase; that one locked door; open fire by the bath; brother and sister couple who act authentically like siblings, loving and reassuring and taking care of each other ; large open white and naturally lit house on the edge of a dangerous cliff which has a dead tree at its edge.the creepy house always has an old name. house rumoured to be haunted  but the idea is shrugged off and laughed at. damn nice transitions and cuts. creepy and ugly room cold and damp and fills them with doubt and depressive thoughts and flowers wilt. there's always a dog barking at things. being black and white they have an awesome eye for contrast and tone. acting is eyyyyyy. okay they tried to edit together two parts of the same conversation and it was ew. ohh theres another one. omg this shit is so good - the little bits and pieces making the characters real and relateable and funny. suddenly flickering candles. the sound of a woman's heartbroken crying echoing around the house, coming from nowhere but sounding from everywhere and it stops at dawn. doors closing by themselves. ol mate jumped and hid under his sheets lolol. men interrupting girls and calling them delicate and needing to calm themselves. damn refusing ol mate to see his grandaughter - this doesn't mean we are of equal social standing like lol what an ass - 'Great Scott!!' secret meetings with the granddaughter ooohwerrooooh. ol mates all lovey with this 20 year old lass. 'golly!' using these terms completely unironically amazing. 'they're hardly our sort'. ol ol mate knows the house is haunted but won't admit it. 'go to your room!' 'don't be impertinent'.  vases taller than a person and flowers and bouquet just as tall. fuck that dress is gorgeous but i don't trust this granddaughter she was so mad at the start looked like she had decided on something and now all of the sudden she's buddy buddy? yeaaaaaah alriiiightt. this chicks twenty what twenty year old is actually this mature and wellspoken. he just stares smilingly at her enamoured with just listening and watching her talk. man at the piano, beautiful young girl listening to him, three candles in a candlestick on the piano. he literally seems old enough to be her dad, but he's goofy and excitable oooooh the candles went down and he started being sad and she noticed and wasn't affected? she's fleeing!! sprinting out to THE CLIFF IN HER WHITE DRESS HOLY SHIT he caught her at the last moment she didn't even realise she was doing it - right at the place where her mother fell by the dead tree, and now they make jokes and are singing to lighten the mood NEVERMIND a lady is SCREAAAAMING oh shit it was Lizzie - the studio is fucked up making people depressed and there was a creepy mist or some shit by the door now she says it was the ghost of a woman - gets one fright and lizzie is like lmao bye im not staying here - fkn smart lady - Stella is MIA. nope she's collapsed, is she dead 'stella, darling' she looks so dramatic in her long white dress - bish faints and they're spoonfeeding her soup and keeping her bedridden and not wanting to risk moving her. oooHoooo the great scary tale of the house comes out, everyones dying off in the house with their secrets, there's the strange smell of flowersss and lightss creepin about stellas gone out the window lol oh no she's creeping out behing the curtains. its very dark. she's convinced her mother is haunting the house, she sounds and looks mad lmao i still do not trust this bitch. he's declaring his love and she's tryna talk about her mother's ghost and how she wants to go to the house and he's like nah you're never getting back imma tear it down - 'i hate you for that!' 'oh stella' an they kiss??? ah no he kisses her and she's like fuck off and runs away and he's actually CONFUSED? moron lolol out here expecting her to want to marry him and him be her life and she's out here with her own problems wanting to go and do things and see her mum like mate stoppp they've known each other like a few weeks and he's out here tryna tell her what she can and can't do who he think he be?? she's not listening to me - she's on the edge of a mental collapse! ohhhh the faked seance is realllll damn sonnn oh wtf she's possessed the doctors all for it what a mate she's speaking in a language she doesn't knowwww ey mate spanish and the scent is back. is she maybe the spanish lady's baby and not the woman she thought? ooooooh spooky mist they're trapped in the dark cold room oh yikes its got a scary face grandad just showed up lmao she's spending half the movie in bed and the granddad is a fkn asshole stupid ass prick - he killed his daughter maybs? whos miss holloway all fancy n shit shit they drugged stella what this bitch what are these two up to. they're kidnapping her? dumping her off at holloways' house - she has secretsss; was friends with stella's mum. the mystery in this is really good and interesting. oh fuck miss holloway was a trained nurse and watched mary mereidith go over the cliff (stella's mum) they mentioned blonde hair, and holloway and stella have dark hair - important?? i'm getting very into this lolol. "Why are you whispering?" "Why are you?" the music is awesome to express thoughts and actions. an eccentric older lady with bows and scarves and a basket full of eggs "miss bird' i love her immediately wait its a basket of stones. i love her. holloway loves the stones and miss bird cute. she's a psychologist? a very successful psychologist with a big beautiful house and she's definitely a fucking lesbian mate she loves mary meredith. they hate spanish women in these movies. oh shit the spanish lady was gonna yeet the baby stella over the cliff that's hilarious. certainly don't trust this chicka either. she literally has an enormous picture of mary in her office between two bouquets of flowers taller than they are. she started a sentence and caught herself - secretssssss. god their dresses are next level gorgeous. so holloways house is actually an asylum and she's trapped. holloway hates stella and stella confronted her about it and she didn't deny it - she's glad stella's chucked in. wtf lady went to the doctor cause she thought her baby was delirious cause he was laughing lolol what the actual fuck it's a baby. miss holloway murdered carmel!!! they are so chill about it. shit's pretty dull. the book just turned pages - they smell the flowers again. what IS she up to - fkn holloway's eyes are in shadow while stella's face is completely brightened. wtf is she UP TO. damn that door is gorgeous - arched and a head an a half and with six squares of incredible carvings in the wood. she's too happy about all this. about sending stella to the house - to the 'cliff and the rocks below the cliff! that's where mary went, that's where she died' she's cray cray. 'i've done what she wanted at last - haven't i mary, it's all straight now.' mate how did she go from being suss to being mental. they didn't lock their front door??? 'i'll be alright now - i'll be with my friends! :)' okay she's not evil? she's actually excited and cute about being allowed to stay in the house. she's all alone - whtfuck there's a man snoring/groaning? someone calling her name - in the studio! its gdad. whats he doin here. her voice is so musical and soft and smooth and breathy - these women man. teh ghost is pretty cool - i  think the sight of it just killed him tho. oh shit ahaha she screm and flee. toward the cliff!!!! over she go!!!!!a a lot of people saying 'darling'. he's so enamoured with her and she doesn't give a shit ahahah. now she thinks shes cray- nevermind the smell is back and the doors just flung open. broke her arm twice in a year? CARMEL HAD A BABY TOO. SHE's for SURE carmel's baby!!! I told you!!! stellas chill with it. carmel's laughing instead of crying and then she's all good the ghost has been freed ---- nevermind. Rick's seen something and shut the door - mary meredith is cray?? she has icy rage - she wants Stella! creepy gaunt face with white scarf flappin in wind and no body or legs - she was gonna kill the kid if she couldn't have it herself. rick's being mean to the angry ghost. lol he threw lit candlestick at her? ew wtf the sister is getting with the old barely a character doctor? and now he's expecting yet again that stella is all for marrying him jfc. alright its over start was much better than end yikes.

#the uninvited #1944 #movie #movies #horror #review #commentary #ramble #shit #rambling shit #ray milland #gail russell #ruth hussey