a writer

yee what are words / yes I write! For now I'll just reblog things I need to remember... in a very messy way. You know... just writer things

[inusmasha]

Sometimes it’s hard to read fanfic when you’re studying herbalism.. when they have the character preparing a tincture to use that same DAY!!?

Baby those dried herbs need to sit in that jar with high proof alcohol for at LEAST a month!

That’s why before the use of calendars ppl use to prepare their tinctures either on the new moon or full moon. A a full moon cycle is usually 28 days or so. And they would give the moon names so it’s easier to remember when/what month said tincture was bottled.

This is also why herbal medicine is prepare in small batches. You have to take your time preparing your bottles. Making sure everything is clean so you don’t end up with mold. Diluting your grain alcohol. Heckkk knowing when to pick your herbs for max potency! Drying your herbs! That takes a lot of time too!

I didn’t mean to rant lol

[heywriters]

No, this explains literally everything to me, thank you.

[vv-itchy]

[ataraxetta]

DID YOU KNOW that sometimes characters lie. out loud to others and internally to themselves, and it'll happen right there on the page. other times they are just flat out wrong and don't know it. oftentimes they don't ever find that out. a sizable portion of any story is decidedly not cold hard fact.

[elderly-scrolls]

the inherent danger of loving a paladin. the inherent danger of loving someone who loves the thing they've devoted themselves to just as much as they'll ever love you. the inherent danger of loving someone who would do anything to uphold their ideals. the inherent danger of loving a sacrifice waiting to happen.

[sekaiichi-happy]

💜 CURE CORAL 💜

My gift for @cherry-suite 🎁 You mentioned Sango was one of your favorite Cures, and I love her too! She is so adorable & sweet (´∀｀)♡ She was a lot of fun to draw, especially with a summer-y/tropical theme like this! I really hope you like it 💜 @precuresecretexchange

[darkaviarymc]

Tragedy alignment chart. Feel free to use, but please reblog if you do.

[anotherdesperatewriter]

well I've finished my first draft. How hard can the second one be...?

[elumish]

I saw a post recent about the idea of, what happens after the revolution that some people are yearning for, and I have a lot of thoughts about that, but it actually also got me thinking about how a lot of people conceptualize government, and particularly how this shows up in books.

I've read a lot of books where someone is secretly or not-so-secretly the heir/rightful king or queen/the one true chosen leader/etc., and one thing that I see in a lot of those is this idea that government is its leader, and if you have an evil leader then the Government Is Bad and if you replace that evil leader with a good leader then the Goverment Will Become Good.

And there is definitely truth to the idea that an ineffective, immoral, greedy, cruel, etc. leader will generally lead to the government being worse and doing bad things, but a government is not simply the will of the person in charge taken form.

There are a few ways to think about a government, but I'd think of it like this:

A government is the services it provides, the rules it enforces, the external engagement it has, the people who decide all of that, the people who make it happen, and the fact that people agree that they are the government.

You'll see there that only one part of that is the leadership. Anyone can stand up in the middle of a town square or go on YouTube or whatever and say "I'm in charge and here are the four thousand rules that everyone needs to follow" and if they don't have legitimacy and enforcement power, it doesn't mean anything.

It also means that changing the head of state can't automatically change everything else. Most governments (especially national governments) have a large set of professional civil servants who do the business of government regardless of who is in charge, and that is a huge ship to resteer.

Often, the fastest way to resteer that ship is to literally fire everyone--and as we've seen in instances like the de-Ba'athification of Iraq, it can have massively negative impacts on the country and its ability to provide services.

There's a certain branch of fantasy that I've read where the government "is in charge" but doesn't seem to actually provide any of the services that exist in the world. There's a king or a ruling counsel or whatever--but there are no departments/ministries/public sector.

Who provides utilities? Who provides human services? Who collects taxes? Who manages the allocation of government funds? Who enforces regulations or laws? Who manages public spaces? Who delivers mail? Who prints money? Who facilitates relations with other countries? Who maintains public safety?

A lot of these stories act as though all of those things just happen, that they are self-perpetuating machines that have always existed and will always exist, and government is an unrelated piece of the world that is just there to look important and make decisions.

[elumish]

Actually, now that I'm thinking about the concept of revolutions:

Many, many (probably most) revolutions/toppling of governments fail, either because they don't have the ability (military strength, finances, support, etc.) to meet their goal, because their goal is unclear to begin with, or because they can't maintain their success once they've reached it.

January 6, 2021, for example, was a small-scale attempt at overthrowing the U.S. government--but they didn't have the ability to succeed at killing members of the U.S. Congress or stopping the vote to ratify Biden as the new president.

In Egypt, they did manage to depose Hosni Mubarak, and the Muslim Brotherhood then took power, but they was removed from power by the military about a year later, and the current leader, el-Sisi, has shifted the Egyptian government back towards authoritarianism, which is at least in part what the original protests were about.

Many revolutions in stories end with them taking power (just as many romance novels end with them getting together), which is fine, but if you want to write past that, think about what actually makes a post-revolution government succeed or fail. Is it disagreements about who should be in charge or the type of government? Is it other political infighting? Is it the lack of an effective, respected leader? Is it a lack of ability to provide civil services? Is it lack of support by average citizens? Is it a slight towards authoritarianism?

But also think about the impacts of the revolution itself, especially if it was violent. Has infrastructure been destroyed? Who has died? Are services still being provided, and if so, is the provision of those services equitable?

Let's say the revolution in your story ends with a grand battle in the capitol building--can they still use that building to legislate from? Where do people literally go to work the next day? Do necessarily files still exist?

Are civil servants willing to work for the new government? Can they be trusted?

Who from the old regime is still around, and what happens to them? Do they go to jail? Are they banned from working in the government? Are they needed in the government because they make up the vast majority of the institutional knowledge? Are they likely to form an insurgency to try to take back the government (see: the Taliban)?

Is the revolution tied to a specific ethnic or religious group, regional group, caste, etc.? If they were previously marginalized or shut out of power, do they implement oppressive or discriminatory policies against the previous ruling class (e.g., exclusion of many Sunnis from Iraqi politics/government following de-Ba'athification)?

Will the revolution spawn (or continue) an ongoing cycle of violence?

[neil-gaiman]

Hello Mr Gaiman, I’ve always seen you and Clive Barker as sort of mirrors of each other. Not only in the literary aspect but your adventures into all sorts of mediums. I was wondering if you like his work? And if you do witch one would yo recommend?

I love Clive's work. (And Clive.) I have a very soft spot for The Damnation Game and the short story "In the Flesh".

[entertainmentindustryupdates]

Update from the WGA on negotiations

[versegm]

Literally cannot emphasize enough that my #1 writing advice is to stop being afraid. Stop being afraid of sounding too cringe, or too stupid, or too horrifying, or too horny, or too weird, or too much, or too little, or too you. You need to put your entire pussy into your art. Sure, it won't be to everyone's tastes, but if you keep yourself to the blandest tamest safest roads possible you will be of no one's tastes, not even yours.

[ryderdire]

I fucking love repetitive lines that change meaning over a piece of writing yes slay

[spider-hands-mannos-deactivated]

There is a specific and terrifying difference between “never were” monsters and “are not anymore” monsters

“The thing that was not a deer” implies a creature which mimics a deer but imperfectly and the details which are wrong are what makes it terrifying

“The thing that was not a deer anymore” on the other hand implies a thing that USED to be a deer before it was somehow mutated, possessed, parasitically controlled or reanimated improperly and what makes THAT terrifying is the details that are still right and recognizable poking out of all the wrong and horrible malformations.

[spider-hands-mannos-deactivated]

hey I totally fucked up and forgot the 3rd type, which is “Is Not Anymore And Maybe Never Was” monsters “The thing which was no longer a deer and maybe never was” implies a creature that, at first glance, completely appears to be a deer, but over time degrades very slowly until you realize (probably too late) that it is not a deer anymore, and had you seen it in this state first, you wouldn’t have recognized it as a deer at all, and there’s a decent chance that it was never actually a deer to begin with but only a very good mimic, and what makes this one scary is the slow change from everything being right to everything being wrong, happening slowly enough that you don’t even notice it until its too late, as well as the fact that something now so clearly not a deer could have fooled you to begin with.

[endreal]

No idea if this commentary adds anything or not but since monsters are generally couched in terms of danger and threat, and therefore fear, in my mind these posts broke themselves down kinda like this:

The “was not a deer” monster speaks to fear born of deception, dangers that approach under the guise of familiarity, with varying levels of success to infiltrate the familiar before lashing out

The “not a deer anymore” monster speaks to fear born of coercion. Whatever it is was once familiar and perhaps even comforting but through the action of another agent the familiar has become grotesque and dangerous.

The “…and maybe never was a deer” monster speaks to fear born of self-doubt. Most people spend most of the time in a sense of vague assurance that they’re doing the right thing, or at least a right thing, in the situation they find themselves in. This fear lies in the danger of *thinking* you understood, only to be eviscerated by the cruelty of “no…you were never correct, and this is your consequence.”

[hamenthotep]

[tlbodine]

Yes this. Good analysis. 

[supreme-leader-stoat]

Actually, in light of this I’d like to propose yet one more type of monster to this list. The monster is a deer. But you realize you were very, very wrong about what deer are like.

The deer itself has not changed, you were just wrong about deer from the very start.

[normal-horoscopes]

I would like to add a fifth here.

The “Thing That Was Almost A Deer” something that, despite it’s best efforts, was never able to truly attain deerhood, and now spends it’s days being something wholly different.

Something that wanted to be a deer so very badly, but was turned away from the gates of deerhood, condemned to lurk in lonely the wilderness of liminality.

Monsters are monsters because they can’t be classified. The fear stems from our inability to understand what we are seeing. They are, by their very nature, unable to be understood. Which is why this is the most tragic kind of monster to me.

Something that, maybe now or in the past, didn’t want to be a monster.

[jelalee]

There’s also the “Thing That Could Have Been A Deer”, which may be a “there but by the grace of god” situation. Or something that made Choices; some of those Choices being things that may have tempted you in the past…….

[neil-gaiman]

Neil, I’ve got the summer and I want to start learning scriptwriting. Any advice, other than just writing? I’ve written short stories and a book, but never written for screen. Thank you, have a great day if you can whether or not you see this!

Read scripts.

I've read a few books on scriptwriting, but thinking back on the places I felt I learned the most from, I wind up at David Gerrold's book on making The Trouble With Tribbles and an essay by Harlan Ellison in a book called The Craft of Science Fiction, edited by Reginald Bretnor (if memory serves).

But mostly, read scripts.

[neil-gaiman]

Hello Mr. Gaiman :)

I'm currently double my word limit for a short story I'm supposed to write for my English class. I've tried all the tips, "take out every "the", paraphrase as much as you can, etc." but I'm still struggling with the word constraints. So, my question is this: Do you have any tips on condensing text? For creative writing, reports, and other texts too :)

Thank you!

Not really. I tend to try and shorten things, and spend several hours editing and trimming and so on, and then do a word count and find out they just got longer. For a short story you can always ask yourself questions like, can it begin later? Can it finish earlier? Can I lose some of the middle?

Having said that, the first story I ever sold, Featherquest, was an 8,000 word short story when I wrote it, and the publisher accepted it on condition that I cut it to 4,000 words. So I did.

(When it was republished, thirty-something years later, I restored all the missing text. I don't think it was any better at 8,000 words than it had been at 4,000 words. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing when I wrote it, although the published version was at least shorter.)

It was an episodic sort of a story, so I just trimmed out some episodes.

[lucyaudley]

I say this as an English teacher, turn it in when you’re happy with it no matter the word count. If your teacher want it shorter they’ll show you places they think you can edit, and if they don’t want you to cut then you’ll get feedback on the version you like as is.

[lord-boop]

Melog tsum commission!