My Writing-Side Blog

This is just silliness.

[absentminded-butch]

a thought i had

[rubythecrimsonwriter]

I think people need to tell more kids that they’re proud of them for graduating high school. I’m absolutely dead serious, especially now. I can see the graduating high schoolers surrounding me right now are burned out and traumatized and depressed, and they’ve undoubtedly had a much, much harder time in high school than I ever had, and I had some pretty shitty high school experiences.

I graduated high school with no more acknowledgement than the standard “congrats on surviving another year of school!” And immediately followed by “have you finished all your scholarship applications?” That was fine for me. I knew i wanted to go to college, I was set and ready for it, eager to get out of high school into more challenging courses.

But if I just finished high school after two years of fighting through online courses and no one acknowledged the battles I went through? If I was as burnt out and traumatized as these kids are right now? I’d have never have gone to college.

So for everyone graduating high school, even if you barely scraped by passing: I see you. I’m proud of you. You did such a good job. I wish you success in what you try to do, fortune enough to keep you safe and happy, and health always.

[dancinbutterfly]

This.

[jess-p-edits]

WIP Intro: The Hour of Magic

Summary: 

In the 100 years after the monumental Hour of Magic abruptly introduced magic, monsters, and a bit of modernity into the world, the Holy Kingdom of Crestwall has maintained its steadfast, tradition-bound identity. Kings still come from royal bloodlines, and magic is viewed as the coward’s escape from righteous toil.

Yet while the rest of The World’s kingdoms make advances in magic, monster slaying, and social change, the “fairytale kingdom” falls further and further behind, and King Agares Crestwall has finally decided to do something about it by inviting representatives from the Alliance Lands to partake in a cultural exchange.

The commander of King Crestwall’s personal guard and a monster slayer from the northern lands are two reluctant participants of this exchange. Should the two set aside their quarreling over their cultural differences, they may both learn some dire revelations about the way their respective kingdoms are coping with the aftermath of the cataclysmic, miraculous Hour, even a century later.

Keep reading

[votedami]

I want you all to know that an Arab Muslim from Tunis proposed the Theory of Evolution near 600 years before Charles Darwin even took his first breath. Don’t let them erase you.

[evilscum-deactivated20160223]

his name is Ibn Khaldun

[imaanhammaam-deactivated2016031]

Also, it was not the apple falling from a tree that made Issac Newton “discover” gravity. He was reading the books of Ibn Al Haytham, an Arab Muslim from Iraq, who pioneered the scientific method, discovered gravity and wrote about the laws governing the movement of bodies (now known as Newtons three laws of motion) some 600 years before Newton existed. Without him, modern science as we know it wouldn’t exist. Read on him. His achievements are far greater than what I’ve just mentioned here.

[afghanmenace]

#no offense but arabs literally invented chemistry and algebra and we came up with the concept of the camera #the cataract operation that’s still practiced today was invented by an Arab #we created alchemy and the wright brothers used abbas ibn firnas’ findings and writings to build on to create a plane #I could go on and on and on #pls don’t erase our scientific history

[guluna]

I reblog this post every time I see it

[kyraneko]

We fucking replaced a Muslim scientist with an apple?

[jess-p-edits]

There’s no wrong way to read a book.

“Audiobooks don’t actually count as reading-”

It’s so easy to get burnt out by text. Or sometimes we feel too guilty to simply “do nothing” and read, so listening to audiobooks while driving or doing the dishes or walking is a great solution to that. Not to mention audiobooks can be way more accessible for neurodivergent folks. 

“E-books are a travesty and physical books are the only acceptable way to read a ‘real’-”

Some people have a hard time getting comfortable while maneuvering a physical book, compared to sitting or laying down with a phone. Plus it’s way easier to switch from one book to another. 

If you feel pressured to consume books a certain way, don’t be. I honestly love the aesthetic of beautiful, hardcover books, but I find them a pain in the ass to read and I am typically reading three books at a time, so when I’m burnt out on one book, I can just switch to another on my reading app. I know I’m more likely to finish a book in an electronic format, so that’s what I read. Yeah, it looks like I’m just another millennial buried on my phone and people get even more judgey about that than reading a physical book (I had a relative criticize me for being on my phone while at some beautiful beach, but I was reading AND SO WAS SHE, JUST WITH A PHYSICAL “BEACH READ” BOOK), but fuck ‘em. 

Read in a way that will actually let you finish a story!

[jess-p-edits]

I am so tired of the writing trope where the author wants to show how smart and clever their protagonist is, but instead of giving them opportunities to show genuine cleverness, the author just gives them their own The Stupid Friend™ to look smarter than. Like the author understands “show, don’t tell” but not really.

I have never thought “Wow, this (usually a) guy is so intelligent because he had to explain what a semicolon was to Kevin-the-sidekick, who the author keeps repeating peaked in middle school!”

[jess-p-edits]

Oh your fantasy story has “deep” political intrigue? Sorry, but I didn’t see a scene where some commander of the king’s guard points dramatically at an oversized map on a big wooden table. No one even slammed a dagger into it representing the antagonist’s victory over a key outpost smh. 🥱😒🤔

[girlcaligula]

“Why do people like a character who’s committed war crimes but hate this other character just because they’re annoying” because it’s fiction Susan, and being annoying in fiction is a greater sin than being a supervillain, because it won’t make me want to read about them. It isn’t difficult to understand

[zombieporno]

“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.” (Oscar Wilde)

[charlesoberonn]

The war crimes are fictional but my annoyance is real.

[melissentee]

““Mei.” “G'way.” “Mei.” “Time ‘zit.” “Mei. Mei. Mei.” She sat up in her bed, the blankets falling around her waist. She wore an oversized shirt with the face of Friedrich Nietzsche printed on it. She jerked her head back and forth before settling on Wallce, standing in the corner of her room. “What? What is it? What’s wrong? Are we under attack?” “No,” Wallace said. “What are you doing?” She stared at him, “I’m trying to sleep.” “Oh, really? Hows that working out for you?” She started to frown. “Not well.” “Did you know I can’t sleep ever again?” “Yes,” she said slowly. He nodded. “Good.” He turned around and walked through the wall out of her room.”

— under the whispering door by TJ Klune

[acreaturecalledgreed]

the concept and idea of “you can always start trying to be a better person” is extremely important to me both in media and irl and i continue to be deeply deeply disturbed by the trend on this site pushing that these ideas in media are bad writing or even morally reprehensible

because theyd rather someone stay terrible or just straight up die than become a better person 

from a compassionate point of view it’s deeply distressing and from a pragmatic point of view it’s outright frustrating

it’s fucked up. 

[falliblefabrial]

What is the most important step a man can take?

The next.

[inklesspen]

[babblingfishes]

I think part of the pushback about this is the idea that, to “redeem” bad people, their victims must first forgive them for unforgivable acts.

This is false. No one is obligated to forgive you. You can learn from your mistakes and become the best, kindest person on earth, and the people you’ve hurt still won’t forgive you, and you’ll have to accept that. And that doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to grow. Because we aren’t just “pure” or “sinful”, we’re complex.

[tockthewatchdog]

[dancinbutterfly]

IM NOT CRYING YOU’RE CRYING SHUT THE FUCK UP

[loupgawou]

[transcription:

Have you ever wondered about like cave paintings?  Like, “What were they doing?  These don’t…  look very good,” -chuckles- In fact, almost every cave painting has Spaghetti Lines, which are webs of lines drawn over-top images, which you can see here.

-picture changes to a grayscale image of a deer standing in tall grass-

And here’s an example of natural Spaghetti Lines in nature, but we’ll get to that in a second.

-picture changes to a photo paleolithic drawing of a mammoth.  Alongside the photo is a tracing of the drawing, to clarify the lines-

The second weird thing is like sometimes animals are given extra body parts, like here the mammoth has two trunks.  And here, there’s a drawing of an antelope or a deer, it looks like, that seems to have two heads.

For a long time, people would assume like maybe the Spaghetti Lines were just some kind of paleolithic graffiti, and maybe the animals were these kind of religious creatures that they had mythologized.  But then, in 1993, a German scholar went into this cave in southern France, and it changed everything.

Unlike the other caves he had been to, this one was very poorly funded, so it had no artificial lights, and he had to be guided in by a local farmer, with nothing but a flickering lantern to guide his way.  Here is how he described the experience. 

He said, “M. Lapeyre finished his story and wanted to move on.  I encouraged him to remain and to slowly swing his lantern back and forth a few feet from the cave wall.  As he moved the light, I saw the colors of the tectiform begin to shift.  When the lamp arced to the left, the blacks faded, the browns became red and the red intensified.  When the light moved to the right, the pattern reversed, creating a shifting color scheme. Moreover, the engraved lines under and around the tectiform became animated.  Suddenly, the head of one creature stood out clearly.  It lived for a second, then faded as another appeared.  The spaghetti lines were no longer a confused two-dimensional pattern.  Rather, they became a forest or a bramble patch that concealed and then revealed the animals within. By firelight, a secret of the cave painters was exposed.  In the space of a few moments, I saw cuts and dissolves, change and movement.  Form appeared and disappeared.  Colors shifted and changed.  In short, I was watching a movie.”

Understood this way, the antelope with two heads, under the dance of the firelight, is an antelope going from grazing to checking for predators.  And the mammoth with two or three trunks becomes a mammoth in motion, swinging his trunk.

There’s something beautiful to me about knowing that hundreds of thousands of years ago, ancient humans descended into the depths to watch movies.

/end transcription]

[iamthecutestofborg]

I heard about this recently and about lost my fucking mind. I am begging someone to actually film the effect so we can see it for ourselves!

[shadowplot]

@lucithefer

[noneedtofearorhope]

here is a video showing some examples of this

[salamanderinspace]

“Here's an old insight that I've offered many times throughout my career, realized as far back as my first novel, which I started in 1961: One of the best ways to portray characters is as a combination of purposeful actions, habitual actions, and gratuitous actions. And somehow even the most insig nificant male character almost always gets portrayed as a combination of all three. However, their same writers will find it impossible to portray women characters as exhibiting all three kinds of action. If the woman is an evil woman, she will be all purpose with no habits and nothing gratuitous about her; if she is a good woman, she will be all gratuitous action with no habits and no purpose. It's a strange phenomenon. So when I was writing a set of three books called The Fall of the Towers, I sat down and made lists of all three kinds of action for the women characters; then as I got to the end of a chapter I would realize that I hadn't put them in. This habit has all the structure of a psychosis. It really does. When you discover that you are a victim of a psychosis, you realize just how deeply it works into the whole of society.”

- Samuel Delany, Of Solids and Surds.

[thecollectibles]

Swordtember 11-20 by Mukhlis Nur

[helenasurvives]

calling all authors!!

i have just stumbled upon the most beautiful public document i have ever laid eyes on. this also goes for anyone whose pastimes include any sort of character creation. may i present, the HOLY GRAIL:

https://www.fbiic.gov/public/2008/nov/Naming_practice_guide_UK_2006.pdf

this wonderful 88-page piece has step by step breakdowns of how names work in different cultures! i needed to know how to name a Muslim character it has already helped me SO MUCH and i’ve known about it for all of 15 minutes!! i am thoroughly amazed and i just needed to share with you guys 

[theredscreech]

Cultures include Yoruba, Sikh, Vietnamese, Polish, and dozens more!

[kay-frost]

so let’s chat about IRON WIDOW

We interrupt our regularly scheduled aesthetic posting with a special message about the upcoming science-fiction YA novel IRON WIDOW by non-binary cosplayer, history buff, and YouTube sensation Xiran Jay Zhao (links to their website in the next post)

I have a longer, more formal “review” of this book scheduled for the release date (September 21st, 2021) but I really, really want to hype this book up as much as possible as early as possible to encourage people to pre-order it. I haven’t been this excited about a YA book in quite a while. Let me tell you why!

- It was pitched as PACIFIC RIM meets THE HANDMAID’S TALE in a world inspired by Chinese folklore and history, where boy-girl teams pilot giant mecha to fight alien monsters – but the psychic strain usually kills the girls. But only the girls….hmmm…something fishy is going on here…

- The main character is a reimagining of Wu Zetian, the only female emperor of China, who decides she’s going to assassinate the boy who murdered her older sister by volunteering to be his next co-pilot. She assassinates him so well that she kills him through their psychic link and becomes a dreaded IRON WIDOW!

- This makes her very interesting to the government, which would really prefer to make her disappear, but can’t afford to waste that kind of psychic power – so they pair her up with a ~dangerous criminal~ to pilot a new mecha, confident that he will be psychically strong enough to overpower her

- This backfires spectacularly, and suddenly Wu Zetian and her co-pilot have to manipulate both pop culture and the government just to stay alive.

- Plot ensues.

Why should you read this book?

Go back and re-read that plot summary until you understand why  BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE!!

- We have a polyamorous F/M/M mutual relationship, I repeat, we PRE-EMPTIVELY SOLVE a LOVE TRIANGLE with POLYAMORY

- Wu Zetian is an amazing anti-hero and I mean that with all my heart. She is constantly doing stuff in this book that made me go, “Wait, can you do that?”  She WILL cut a bitch. Also, she uses a cane or wheelchair because she has bound feet, and you can tell that Xiran really went the extra mile to think about how to portray this and how it affects the character. A lot of YA protagonists can start to feel “same-y” after a while to me, but Wu Zetian REALLY stands out.

- The world is really, really cool? There is SO MUCH going on with the aliens and the mecha and the world they’re living in which I cannot spoil except to say that your primary emotion through the third act will be “?!!!?!!?!!?!!!” AND even outside of the meta plot, there is so much thought and detail put into the rest of the setting, it is so beautiful and it feels like you’re really there. Plus every character is a reimagining/reference to a historical or folklore figure and it was really neat to go on a little scavenger hunt of “Oh! I recognize that name!”

- IRON WIDOW will do for YA sci-fi what CHILDREN OF BLOOD AND BONE did for YA fantasy – if it gets support. Xiran has talked about how they couldn’t get an American publisher to even consider publishing this book because publishers didn’t think American audiences would be interested in Chinese folklore or idol culture or a story about giant mecha, which?? Have they MET the internet?? They were also told that schools and libraries will be reluctant to stock IRON WIDOW because of the polyamorous romance. BUT that is why I really hope people show up for this book because it is SO DESERVING OF SUCCESS and it could open so many doors for other writers and for the whole YA landscape

- Xiran Jay Zhao is a really cool non-binary author and their writing is as charismatic and entertaining as their other content. I just think they’re neat!

- And one more thing? The cover looks like this:

[bookrecarchive]

[bookrecarchive]

bookrecarchive on TikTok

I just think it's neat! 🐳 #booktok

Moby Dick in Pictures

A really unique take on the classic Moby Dick, but expressed in individual art pieces. I genuinely wish there were more books like this.