~~~

it's kinda like a secondary blog, but it's actually a primary blog that i consider secondary to my main blog.

[fixyourwritinghabits]

Maybe you can answer this. I don't have access to the regular webpage so I'm on the Tumblr app. Do you have links to any good writing planning websites or planning ideas? I have this idea for a book that has been stuck in my head for a couple days so I know I'm gonna take off with it but I want to plan first. Just wanted to see if you had any recommendations

Our webpage is under construction for a little while, sorry about that! You could try our Plot A Month series. The Guardian also has a series of tips from published authors. First Draft in 30 Days author Karen S. Wiesner has a lot of examples of what she uses (although her website is not that great). I’ve also been fairly impressed by Matt Bird’s The Secrets of Story recently. Good luck!

[highreevecain-deactivated202502]

[12-g-deactivated20171009]

People in the notes are upset about “humanizing GWB” lmao

[girlbossjodiarias]

Important to note that he’s painting a series of portraits of veterans who were injured carrying out his orders in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of an art therapy program.

[cake-warrior]

And he is using profits from his royalties to help the families and Iraq war veterans that were hurt during his terms as president

[serendipitousus]

Can’t believe bush is getting a redemption arc

[cuteautumn]

TOMORROW IS HALLOWEEN!!!

[vxpo]

Tomorrow is March 28th

[yeahishipitbitch]

[wasabiskull-deactivated20191204]

—You said you could have kept going? Two or three more days. —But then? I am unsure.

[allthingseurope]

Lichfield, UK (By Dave Fieldhouse)

[lagonegirl]

[lifeofmythoughts-blog]

THIS. IS. ABSOLUTELY. INCREDIBLE. 🙌🏾 Unbelievable talent.

[guardyourheartstrings]

Who is the artist?

[blackfashion]

Arinze Stanley 

ig: @harinzeyart

[cinderstorm]

Writing Tips #7: Evoking Emotion through Description.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another installment of Writing Tips! As you may have guessed from the title of this post, today’s lesson focuses on crafting emotion and tone through word choice. Let’s get started.

Every piece of description should convey tone/mood. Description that fails to do so tends to be dull and forgettable: two adjectives which you never want to be ascribed to your writing. Every description is an opportunity to evoke a variety of feelings in your readers. But to understand how this works, we must first study an example of description without emotion:

Clematis covered the trellis, which stood above a row of rosebushes. Moonlight illuminated the thick foliage, and the leaves rustled in the wind. The scent of dirt and greenery filled the air.

You’re getting a clear enough picture of the garden, but because there’s little emotion attached, that description doesn’t really engage you in a meaningful way. In fact, you’ve probably already forgotten half the details because the paragraph was simply too dull to stick in your mind.

Every sentence in your story (or poem, or essay) should accomplish multiple purposes. A description should not only allow your readers to envision the scenery, but also inform how they perceive the scene. Now, let’s try that description again, this time with a romantic slant:

Clematis flowers clung to the trellis, basking in the pale light of the moon, and a faint breeze brushed against the leaves, carrying with it the scent of upturned earth and greenery. At the foot of the trellis, roses bloomed, stretching toward the sky, seeking the light.

This paragraph evokes a great deal more emotion than the previous example. Note the verb choice throughout this paragraph: basking, carrying, blooming, stretching, seeking. These verbs have positive associations, and when compounded like this, they give color to a once-bland description. Of course, the choice of nouns is also important. Earth instead of dirt. Breeze instead of wind. Leaves instead of foliage. In a previous lesson, we talked about the importance of specificity in your word choice. That same lesson applies here, but with the added consideration of how a given word makes you feel.

For further contrast, let’s examine another version of that same description, but instead of romance, we’ll aim for an eerie, haunting tone.

The clematis vines clung to the trellis like grasping fingers, their fragile flowers quivering in the wind. Beneath them huddled a dense row of rosebushes, their heads stretched forth to reveal rows of jagged thorns. The scent of those roses lay thick in the air, heavy and cloying, like decay. Above it all, the moon hung in the sky, its wan light casting trembling shadows through the leaves.

Same basic description, but tonally very different. Again, word choice is a major factor. Verbs like clung, quivering, and huddled make it seem like the plants themselves are hiding from something. Adjectives like jagged and cloying feel dangerous and invasive. Nouns like thorns and decay evoke dark imagery. Our romantic garden from the previous example is now an ominous, unwelcoming place.

Fortunately, attaching emotion to description is one of the easier skills to practice. As an exercise, you can pick pretty much any location, then describe it multiple times, each aiming for a particular mood/emotion. With a little practice, you will internalize this skill and be able to execute it without conscious thought. In the meantime, I hope you’ve found this post helpful, and I‘ll see you again in the next one.

[drawingden]

How to Draw WOODEN BUILDINGS CABINS SHACK tutorial by STUDIOBLINKTWICE

[septembercfawkes]

Coming up with a Good First Line for a Novel

Method 1

For some people, it’s easiest to just start writing and come back and look through what’s been written to see if any of it would work as a good first sentence. Then the writer rearranges the first few pages to accommodate that. He finds his first sentence by writing.

Method 2

This is similar to Method 1. The writer just starts writing, and it might be a bunch of rambling stuff that’s actually not that important to the story. The writer is just trying find the beginning of the story. When she discovers it, she chops off the starting, where all the rambling is.

Method 3

If you want to start with a good first sentence right off the bat, think of some sort of hook you could begin your opening scene with. The first sentence usually needs to grab the reader somehow. Keep reading for how to do that.

A Great First Sentence

The main elements of a story are character, setting, conflict, and theme. Pick one of those elements and come up with an interesting first sentence to introduce it.

The best first sentences usually promise conflict or intrigue us somehow. A lot of people think they need to start with something life-threatening, like a bomb going off. That can work, but as someone who has gone through submission piles, it can also get old, if it’s not told in an interesting way, like this:

The bomb blew apart the grocery store down the street; Grandma Smith listened to the sirens and went back to knitting with a smirk.

The opening sentence doesn’t have to contain life-altering information to be a great one. It just has to be interesting and make us want to learn more. One way to do this is to create interesting contrasts. Here are some examples I came up.

Mom handed me my Birthday present, and my stomach dropped.

We usually associate Birthdays with happy emotions, but the narrator feels sick about this present, so immediately, we want to why, so we keep reading. It’s an interesting contrast.

I took twice as long as usual to brush my teeth because Dad always preached the importance of looking your best at funeral.

The contrast here is that we start with something mundane and boring and relate it with something life-altering.

You can grab attention by opening with an intriguing description. One of my favorite sentences comes from Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon. He opens his story with a character description, and while this sentence wasn’t THE opening sentence, it would have worked brilliantly:

[Samuel Spade] looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.

Okay, there are several great things happening here at once. First, I would never say that looking like Satan was pleasant, so I’m curious to read more. Second, the main character is being compared to Satan–I’m interested to know more about him. And the qualifier of “blond,” just makes me more curious.

You don’t have to use the contrast technique, but I think it probably works most of the time. Sometimes just a poignant description works. Here is how Eragon by Christopher Paolini opens:

Wind howled through the night, carrying a scent that would change the world.

One more technique: capture your character or narrator’s voice very well. A great voice is one of the first things that grabs editors’ attention. Here is the opening of Harry Potter:

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

Can you hear that interesting voice in “proud to say they were perfectly normal, thank you very much”?

Openings to Avoid

I have gone through thousands unpublished story openings, and I can’t tell you how many times I get openings like this:

I woke up to my alarm clock blaring. I got out of bed like usual and got dressed and showered. I had toast and eggs for breakfast. I went to work just after eight. –this is boring, and I know it’s not important to the story. Get me to the important part!

Also, try to avoid starting your story with your character waking up, waking up on a regular day doing regular things, or waking up from cryosleep, waking up at all. I see this sometimes on a daily basis, so when a story starts like that, I don’t want to read it.

Avoid these:

Openings where characters are running away from something vague.

Stories that open with dreams or flashbacks. It’s extra bad when it’s interesting and then the writer goes “haha, just kidding, it’s a dream!” signaled by the sentence, “I woke up to my alarm clock blaring.”

Beginnings where the character doesn’t remember who she is or how she got there.

Startings where a character is looking in a mirror at herself.

Openings where a character is sitting and thinking or sitting and remembering and nothing is really happening in the present. If I read “I remember…” a red flag goes up for that story.

First paragraphs about the weather.

Beginnings that happen in bars or clubs or start with a cup of coffee.

The “historical” opening, where the writer gives me a complete history lesson of their world or their character or their magic system.

Openings that say somewhere, “It’s all started back when…”

I’m not saying these openings can never work (all writing rules can be broken), and many of these things are perfectly acceptable later in your story, but if you start your story this way, you better have a good reason for starting this way and an interesting way of telling it, because they are super cliche, and I groan every time I get one.

Hope that helps you with your first sentence! Good luck!

[cats-write-prompts]

Create More Confict

Give your protagonists two motives. They must sacrifice one to achieve the other.

Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

Your character’s flaw should be a barrier in achieving their movie.

Put drawbacks on all magical or scientific objects. Let these drawbacks affect your character negatively.

Let the decisions your characters make be the direct cause of conflict, even if they believed their decision would be beneficial.

Your characters should be wrong every now and then.

When faced with two choices, both should have positive and negative consequences.

[lackadaisycats]

Notes on Character Design

Character design and drawing are tome-sized topics and even if I had all the answers (I don’t - I have a lot to learn), I’m not sure I could communicate them effectively. I’ve gathered some thoughts and ideas here, though, in case they’re helpful.

First, some general things:  - Relax and let some of that anxiety go. This isn’t a hard science. There’s no wrong way, no rigid process you must adhere to, no shoulds or shouldn’ts except those you designate for yourself. This is one of the fun parts of being an artist, really - have a heady good time with it.

 - Be patient. A design is something gradually arrived at. It takes time and iteration and revision. You’ll throw a lot of stuff away, and you’ll inevitably get frustrated, but bear in mind the process is both inductive and deductive. Drawing the wrong things is part of the path toward drawing the right thing.

- Learn to draw.  It might seem perfunctory to say, but I’m not sure everyone’s on the same page about what this means. Learning to draw isn’t a sort of rote memorization process in which, one by one, you learn a recipe for humans, horses, pokemon, cars, etc. It’s much more about learning to think like an artist, to develop the sort of spacial intelligence that lets you observe and effectively translate to paper, whatever the subject matter. When you’re really learning to draw, you’re learning to draw anything and everything. Observing and sketching trains you to understand dimension, form, gesture, mood, how anatomy works, economy of line; all of the foundational stuff you will also rely on to draw characters from your imagination. Spend some time honing your drawing ability. Hone it with observational sketching. Hone it good.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone do this sort of thing better than Claire Wendling. In fact, character designs emerge almost seamlessly from her gestural sketches. It’d be worth looking her up.

- Gather Inspiration like a crazed magpie. What will ultimately be your trademark style and technique is a sort of snowball accumulation of the various things you expose yourself to, learn and draw influence from. To that effect, Google images, tumblr, pinterest and stock photo sites are your friends. When something tingles your artsy senses - a style, a shape, a texture, an appealing palette, a composition, a pose, a cool looking animal, a unique piece of apparel, whatever - grab it. Looking at a lot of material through a creative lens will make you a better artist the same way reading a lot of material makes a better writer. It’ll also devour your hard drive and you will try and fail many times to organize it, but more importantly, it’ll give you a lovely library of ideas and motivational shinies to peruse as you’re conjuring characters.

- Imitation is a powerful learning tool. Probably for many of us, drawing popular cartoon characters was the gateway habit that lured us into the depraved world of character design to begin with. I wouldn’t suggest limiting yourself to one style or neglecting your own inventions to do this, but it’s an effective way to limber up, to get comfortable drawing characters in general, and to glean something from the thought processes of other artists.

- Use references. Don’t leave it all up to guessing. Whether you’re trying to design something with realistic anatomy or something rather profoundly abstracted from reality, it’s helpful in a multitude of ways to look at pictures. When designing characters, you can infer a lot personality from photos, too.

And despite what you might have heard, having eyeballs and using them to look at things doesn’t constitute cheating. There’s no shame in reference material. There’s at least a little shame in unintentional abstractions, though.

Concepts and Approach:

- Break it down. Sometimes you have the look of a character fleshed out in your mind before putting it to paper, but usually not. That doesn’t mean you have to blow your cortical fuses trying conceive multiple diverse designs all at the same time, though. You don’t even have to design the body shape, poses, face, and expressions of a single character all at once. Tackle it a little at a time.

The cartoony, googly eyed style was pre-established for this simple mobile game character, but I still broke it into phases. Start with concepts, filter out what you like until you arrive at a look, experiment with colors, gestures and expressions.

- Start with the general and work toward the specific. Scribbling out scads of little thumbnails and silhouettes to capture an overall character shape is an effective way begin - it’s like jotting down visual notes. When you’re working at a small scale without agonizing over precision and details, there’s no risk of having to toss out a bunch of hard work, so go nuts with it. Give yourself a lot of options.

Here’s are some sample silhouettes from an old cancelled project in which I was tasked with designing some kind of cyber monkey death bot. I scratched out some solid black shapes then refined some of them a step or two further.

Here’s an instructional video by Feng Zhu about doing much the same thing (only way better).

- Shapes are language. They come preloaded with all sorts of biological, cultural and personal connotations. They evoke certain things from us too. If you’re ever stuck about where to go with your design, employ a sort of anthroposcopy along these lines - make a visual free association game out of it. It’ll not only tend to result in a distinguished design, but a design that communicates something about the nature of the character.

Think about what you infer from different shapes. What do they remind you of? What personalities or attitudes come to mind? How does the mood of a soft curve differ from that of a sharp angle? With those attributes attached, how could they be used or incorporated into a body or facial feature shape? What happens when you combine shapes in complementary or contrasting ways? How does changing the weight distribution among a set of shapes affect look and feel? Experiment until a concept starts to resonate with the character you have in mind or until you stumble on something you like.

If you don’t have intent, take the opposite approach - draw some shapes and see where they go. (It’s stupid fun.)

You might also find it helpful to watch Bobby Chiu’s process videos in which he feels out his character designs as he paints.

- Cohesion and Style. As you move from thumbnails to more refined drawings, you can start extrapolating details from the general form. Look for defining shapes, emergent themes or patterns and tease them out further, repeat them, mirror them, alternate them. Make the character entirely out of boxy shapes, incorporate multiple elements of an architectural style, use rhythmically varying line weights - there are a million ways to do this

Here’s some of the simple shape repetition I’ve used for Lackadaisy characters.

- Expressions - let them emerge from your design. If your various characters have distinguishing features, the expressions they make with those features will distinguish them further. Allow personality to influence expressions too, or vice versa. Often, a bit of both happens as you continue drawing - physiognomy and personality converge somewhere in the middle.

For instance, Viktor’s head is proportioned a little like a big cat. Befitting his personality, his design lets him make rather bestial expressions. Rocky, with his flair for drama, has a bit more cartoon about him. His expressions are more elastic, his cheeks squish and deform and his big eyebrows push the boundaries of his forehead. Mitzi is gentler all around with altogether fewer lines on her face. The combination of her large sleepy eyes and pencil line brow looked a little sad and a little condescending to me when I began working out her design - ultimately those aspects became incorporated into her personality.

I discuss expression drawing in more detail here (click the image for the link):

- Pose rendering is another one of those things for which observational/gesture drawing comes in handy. Even if you’re essentially scribbling stick figures, you can get a handle on natural looking, communicative poses this way. Stick figure poses make excellent guidelines for plotting out full fledged character drawings too.

Look for the line of action. It’ll be easiest to identify in poses with motions, gestures and moods that are immediately decipherable. When you’ve learned to spot it, you can start reverse engineering your own poses around it.

- Additional resources - here are some related things about drawing poses and constructing characters (click the images for the links).

Lastly…

- Tortured rumination about lack of ability/style/progress is a near universal state of creative affairs. Every artist I have known and worked with falls somewhere on a spectrum between frustration in perpetuity and a shade of fierce contrition Arthur Dimmesdale would be proud of. So, next time you find yourself constructing a scourge out of all those crusty acrylic brushes you failed to clean properly, you loathsome, deluded hack, you, at least remember you’re not alone in feeling that way. When it’s not crushing the will to live out of you, the device does have its uses - it keeps you self-critical and locked in working to improve mode. If we were all quite satisfied with our output, I suppose we’d be out of reasons to try harder next time.

When you need some reassurance, compare old work to new. Evolution is gradual and difficult to perceive if you’re narrowed in on the nearest data point, but if you’ve been steadily working on characters for a few months or a year, you’ll likely see a favorable difference between points A and B.

Most of all, don’t dwell on achieving some sort of endgame in which you’re finally there as a character artist. There’s no such place - wherever you are, there is somewhere else. It’s a moving goal post. Your energy will be better spent just enjoying the process…and that much will show in the results.

[dragon-doggo]

How does L sit like that?? I guess I’m not that flexible…

[fearlotsarchive]

Has anyone ever thought about the fact that in the dn universe people would probably write real person fanfics of what they think Kira and L are like?

[death-note-quotes]

It’s not a sense of justice. Figuring out difficult cases is my hobby. If you measured good and evil deeds by current laws, I would be responsible for many crimes. The same way you all like to solve mysteries and riddles, or clear video games more quickly. For me too, it’s simply prolonging something I enjoy doing. That’s why I only take on cases that pique my interest. It’s not justice at all. And if it means being able to clear a case, I don’t play fair, I’m a dishonest, cheating human being who hates losing.

L Lawliet, Death Note

[lyaress-deactivated20250627]

The scariest part about death note is that for a time you actually want him to beat L.

[animefunkopop-blog]

Funko’s official blog has officially revealed the glams for the upcoming Death Note Pops that are releasing June 2017!

Pictured above are Light, Ryuk, L, and the Hot Topic exclusive L (with cake).

Also worth mentioning – a Tony Tony Chopper keychain and Sasuke lanyard!

[yellowxperil-deactivated2026012]

recommendations for lesbian movies not starring white women/girls? i think i need to branch out and love myself

hell yeah!

saving face - two chinese american women (thiS MOVIE IS MY FAVORITE I LOVE IT SO MUCH)

pariah - black american woman

mosquita y mari - brown chicanas

i can’t think straight - palestinian-jordanian woman and indian-british woman - i just watched this and was squealing the whole time

ppl just reminded me of/recommend these ones too:

yes or no - thai women, very silly movie!

the world unseen - indian-south african women

[morphosyntax-deactivated2015021]

Also circumstance - iranian women. 

[relax-o-vision]

The Chinese Botanist’s Daughter is a French/ Canadian movie but stars two Chinese protagonists.

Fire is a really good Indian movie.

Butterfly also has Chinese protagonists. The ending is semi-happy as in the original couple doesn’t stay together. I thought it was really good, though.

[89584957294589425-deactivated20]

Spider Lilies has Taiwanese women and it’s directed by a Taiwanese lesbian. It’s an emotional movie but it has a happy ending!

Sancharram (The Journey) stars Indian women. Also really good.

[igotyouholtzy-blog]

Alles Wird Gut is a German movie about two Afro German women that fall in love. (One is lesbian and one is bi and there’s a happy ending)

[strangerserpents-deactivated201]

The Handmaiden (2016) it’s Korean and v good