Today's Document
Game Changer & Make Some Noise
Kiana Khansmith
bliss lane
PR's Tumblrdome
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let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
taylor price
todays bird
tannertan36
pixel skylines
🩵 avery cochrane 🩵
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Xuebing Du
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2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Jar Jar Binks Fan Club
YOU ARE THE REASON
Game of Thrones Daily
seen from Malaysia
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seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from Chile
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seen from Singapore
seen from Spain
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seen from Maldives
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@booksellerlove
“suffering feels religious if you do it right” no shut up it doesn’t. my friends laughing in the kitchen while i make dinner feels religious. the sun on my face after a long winter feels religious.
somebody in the notes posted this screenshot from the one & only, ursula k let guin. and now i'm screaming wtf
Queen LeGuin, at it again
Recent book haul. And the Redwall and Doomsday Book are signed copies!
this painting came to me in a dream
NO ONE appreciated my joke and its two revisions when i posted it so i’m posting it here
My tower of failure—some of the books I purchased and didn’t read this year.
How to see whether a Chinese handmade teapot is well done or not - quality of the spout is an important standard.
cr: 承启 建水紫陶
that last teapot is like witnessing an eternal and important truth
I just watched this with the sound on and i really recommend it because the utter silence of the last teapot is both perfectly predictable and totally remarkable.
Just remember. There is no such thing as a fake geek girl. There are only fake geek boys. Science fiction was invented by a woman.
Specifically a teenage girl. You know, someone who would be a part of the demographic that some of these boys are violently rejecting.
Isaac Asimov.
yo mary shelley wrote frankenstein in 1818 and isaac asimov was born in 1920 so you kinda get my point
If you want to push it back even further Margaret Cavendish, the duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673) wrote The Blazing World in 1666, about a young woman who discovers a Utopian world that can only be accessed via the North Pole - oft credited as one of the first scifi novels
Women have always been at the forefront of literature, the first novel (what we would consider a novel in modern terms) was written by a woman (Lady Muraskai’s the Tale of Genji in the early 1000s) take your snide “Isaac Asimov” reblogs and stick it
even in terms of male scifi authors, asimov was predated by Jules Verne, HG Wells, George Orwell, you could have even cited Poe or Jonathan Swift has a case but Asimov?
PbbBFFTTBBBTBTTBBTBTTT so desperate to discredit the idea of Mary Shelly as the mother of modern science fiction you didn’t even do a frickin google search For Shame
And if you want to go back even further, the first named, identified author in history was Enheduanna of Akkad, a Sumerian high priestess.
Kinda funny, considering this Isaac Asimov quote on the subject:
Mary Shelley was the first to make use of a new finding of science which she advanced further to a logical extreme, and it is that which makes Frankenstein the first true science fiction story.
Even Isaac Asimov ain’t having none of your shit, not even posthumously.
You know what else was invented by women? Masked vigilantes, the precursor to the modern superhero. Baroness Emma Orczy wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1905. The character would later inspire better known masked vigilantes such as Zorro and Batman.
Got that?
Stick that in your international pipe and smoke it
I have literally been telling people this for over a year.
the first extended prose piece - ie a novel, was not, as many male scholars will shout, Don Quixote (1605) but The Tale of Genji (1008) written by a woman
The first autobiography ever written in English is also attributed to a woman, The Book of Margery Kempe (1430s).
The day may come when I find this post and do not reblog it, but it is not this day.
In the club
That’s cool
Here are some really quick Hermione character study sketches. I’m doing these because starting now I’m going to slightly pivot on my art style. I’ve been doing a lot of highly detailed, painterly, semi-realistic artwork, and honestly they take a bit too long to do. Also, I miss linework a lot. So, I’ll be developing a more stylistic approach to my depictions of all the harry potter characters moving forward.
October Glory, watercolour.
Marney Ward SFCA
Absolutely beautiful!
When a group of schoolboys were marooned on an island in 1965, it turned out very differently to William Golding’s bestseller, writes Rutger Bregman
Spoiler: they made a pact never to argue and took self-imposed time-outs when they lapsed. One broke his leg and they cared for him so well it healed perfectly. They planted a vegetable garden and kept their spirits up singing along to a guitar they fashioned from driftwood and a coconut shell. (Article is weirdly focused on the white guy who rescued them, though.)
The point of Lord of the Flies is not “Humans do terrible things without laws”
It’s “We’re raising our boys to be little terrors, why don’t we stop.”
Most works of fiction like Lord of the Flies, Heart of Darkness, Far Cry 3, etc. are misinterpreted to mean “human beings are intrinsically evil and will go wild without the laws of society to keep them in check” when the real message is more along the lines of “privileged white men are out of touch and often have unresolved anger issues, so when they are removed from their comfortable ‘civilized’ world, they turn into helpless, emotionally stunted animals ruled entirely by their id”
artist/writer: I made this creative work to criticize violent rich straight white men specifically.
violent rich straight white men: is this a pigeon portrayal of the universal human condition?
PSA: Halloween is pretty much here and it only takes on second to send a sick child in the hospital a Spook-o-gram. The best part about this is that $1 gets donated to CHLA’s Helping Hand fund each time you send one out. So let’s help some kids have a spectacular Halloween by sending them spook-o-grams and helping cause!!
This literally costs nothing but your time so please do it, you could make a kids Halloween.
The horse has entered the hospital
OMFG, losing it over here!
[image description: a tweet by user @indigenousAI saying
“fun fact: as a DV survivor i cannot register to vote because doing so makes my address public. anyone who is fleeing or hiding from an abuser is automatically disenfranchised from the political process and this is a feature, not a bug”]
I don’t know of the original poster might not be aware
but!
if you’ve been a victim of domestic violence, sexual assault, or stalking, you can enroll into the address confidentiality program (free of cost!) and be registered to vote as an absentee voter and your name and address will not be made available for the public
it is super easy to get enrolled - the application takes like 5 minutes, but it has to be with someone who is certified to do it (most likely an advocate! try going to a family justice center in your area or calling the Attorney Generals office in your area!!!!)
ALSO :
you don’t need to have any police reports or have a protection order to qualify!!! you just have to sign stating that you’ve been a victim of one of the aforementioned crimes.
Links to the info for every state in the Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_confidentiality_program
Address confidentiality program - Wikipedia
Good to know
Sample That Tasty Book: The Heroine’s Journey Table of Contents & Introduction
Dearest Gentle Reader,
Those of you who know me well, know that I like to give out a sample of forthcoming books to tempt readers’ appetites. Nonfiction is a pretty alien beast for me, but I still thought you might like a look-see.
So here, without further ado is the Table of Contents of The Heroine’s Journey. Sample follows.
(I am reliably informed that the TOC is Very Important when one is writing nonfiction.)
The Heroine’s Journey TOC
Introduction
CHAPTER 1: APPROACH
Why did I bother?
Why should you bother?
Pop culture is a weakness
CHAPTER 2: DEFINING TERMS
It’s all about sex & gender
Read this bit!
Writing terms & terminology
CHAPTER 3: HERO’S JOURNEY BEATS, THEMES, & MESSAGES
Things to notice
Hero’s Journey example 1: Wonder Woman
Hero’s Journey example 2: Star Wars
Additional examples of the hero
Hero’s Journey hidden messages
Hero’s Journey narrative structure
CHAPTER 4: BASIC STRUCTURE & FOUNDATIONAL MYTHS
The Myth of Demeter
The Myth of Isis
The Myth of Inanna
CHAPTER 5: HEROINE’S JOURNEY BEATS, THEMES, & MESSAGES
Notation of absence
Things to notice
Heroine’s Journey example 1: Harry Potter
Heroine’s Journey example 2: Twilight
Additional examples of the Heroine
Heroine’s Journey hidden messages
CHAPTER 6: HEROINE’S JOURNEY GETS DEVALUED
Heroine’s Journey out of focus
Hero’s Journey in focus
Repercussions of being devalued
Why did this happen?
Also, blame Gothics
CHAPTER 7: GENRE COMPLICATIONS
Gothic archetypes & the Heroine
Gothic tropes & the Heroine
Gothic side effects
CHAPTER 8: NARRATIVE VARIATIONS
Tragic journeys
Additional narrative elements
Whose journey is this?
Buddies & sidekicks
Foils & dualities
Multiple POV narratives
CHAPTER 9: READER EXPERIENCE
Reader expectations
Emotional hooks & writer’s block
Avoiding reader betrayal
CHAPTER 10: HOW TO WRITE LIKE A HEROINE
Give your heroine companions
Define & join a group
Write appropriate villains
Put side characters in power
Dialogue is your friend
Let help be a strength
Portion out achievement
Give your characters humor
Use Gothic tropes to indicate genre
Use Gothic archetypes to surprise readers
A counseling session
Be the heroine
Epilogue
Citations & References
The Heroine’s Journey Introduction
The Heroine’s Journey is a separate narrative structure from the Hero’s Journey. It exists. It has always existed. It is not derivative of, nor sourced in, the Hero’s Journey. I thought, for a really long time, that everyone knew this.
I was wrong.
Which is how I (a fiction writer) have ended up writing this nonfiction book.
They say that the oldest trick for nonfiction is threefold:
1. Tell them what you’re doing.
2. Do it.
3. Tell them what you did.
Truth? Exactly the same thing works for dirty talk, if you’re writing a sex scene… or just in life. (See what I did there? Now you know what kind of book this is.)
So I shall tell you, right up front, the basics of the Heroine’s Journey and how it compares to the Hero’s Journey. Then I’ll provide evidence for those basics using ancient myth and modern pop culture. Then I’ll break them all down so you can use them yourself. Finally, I’ll remind you of what I told you from the get-go. Knowledge: the best kind of dirty talk.
To get us started on the right path, so to speak:
Here is the Hero’s Journey in one pithy sentence:
Increasingly isolated protagonist stomps around prodding evil with pointy bits, eventually fatally prods baddie, gains glory and honor.
Here is the Heroine’s Journey in one pithy sentence:
Increasingly networked protagonist strides around with good friends, prodding them and others on to victory, together.
Don’t worry, more (considerably less flippant) definitions of both of these are yet to come.
However, I have been told not to be coy and to just lay it out there for you from the beginning.
Consider it laid.
~~~
Essentially the Heroine’s Journey is different from the Hero’s Journey in five significant storytelling ways (also known as the Five Key Ingredients):
1. Purpose
The goal or focus of the journey is different. A hero is usually concerned with defeating an enemy or retrieving a boon of great import – think classic video game quests.
A heroine is looking for reunification with someone who was taken from her. She is concerned with networking, connecting with others, and finding family.
2. Approach
A hero acts on the offensive most of the time. He is active in his pursuit of his goal and will kill or (in the case of Odysseus) trick his way to victory. His enemy is stasis.
A heroine goes about achieving her goals through communication and information gathering. She is not a conqueror. She is a builder and a general – she sees the skills and strengths in others and knows how best to apply them. She is a delegator, which is great for storytellers because it’s easy to build vibrant, supportive, extremely appealing side characters. Also, this humanizes the protagonist, who is self-aware enough to know what she is good at and when someone else can do it better.
Her enemy is loneliness or isolation.
3. Strength
A heroine’s definition of strength is materially different from that of the hero. A hero must eventually go it alone; the journey usually climaxes with a one-on-one defeat of his enemy. For him, asking for help is a sign of weakness. He must shed the restrictions of civilization and family in order to succeed on his own.
A heroine is the opposite. Requesting aid is a sign of strength. It does not diminish a heroine to seek and receive assistance on her journey. In fact, the more companions she has, the stronger she is.
(And if that concept makes you wince, perhaps you might consider your own personal definition of what strength means and how the narratives around you have influenced that.)
4. Power
As a result of all the above, when a heroine has her most powerful narrative and iconic moments, these will occur with others. They are usually characterized by intense communication and unity in the context of sex, romance, friendship, or familial relationships.
When the hero is at his most powerful, he is alone, because his quest is one of self-reliance and solitary achievement against overwhelming odds. His iconic moments will be ones of intellectual or physical superiority over someone else.
5. Ending
A hero, because of his need to self-isolate, has sacrificed too much for his goal, so the end of his journey is bittersweet. Iconography often depicts him alone, with the slow pan-out sequence and a sense of profound pathos. He has either grown too powerful to fit back into the world he has saved, or he has changed too much into a solo version of himself and can no longer exist in a group.
Poignancy typifies the end of a heroic narrative – lonely death, hard drinking, a hermit’s existence.
The heroine is more likely to get a happy ending, surrounded by friends and family, with an implication of continued safety.
~ ~ ~
Follow-ups to the Five Key Ingredients
The above are some broad brush strokes, but I’m giving you the essentials before we tunnel into specifics. In other words, these are the five explanations I trot out at cocktail parties. (Yes, I go to the type of gatherings where we chat about the Heroine’s Journey.)
One important note:
Biological sex characteristics are irrelevant to whether a main character is a hero or a heroine.
In other words, women, female-identified, and nonbinary characters can be heroes. Men, male-identified, and nonbinary characters can be heroines.
And one note of caution:
We humans have a tendency (once we know the two different journeys) to want to pigeonhole and fit every story we encounter into one model or the other. We like the binary; it’s simple and fun. Things are rarely that black and white – for readers or creators.
~ ~ ~
My idea is to teach storytellers a basic understanding of the two models, so you learn when to obey the narrative beats and when to break them, in order to better manage reader expectations.
Similarly, I hope to educate the consumers of such stories, so they can better understand their own desires.
Please, try not to use these two journeys to pigeonhole every piece of pop culture you encounter. Therein lies madness.
Yes, many stories do fit into one journey or the other, but not all of them (I’m looking at you, Black Panther, 2018). I’ll be talking about the havoc that swapped point of view narratives, buddy dramas, and ensemble casts can play with fitting comfortably into one or the other journey later on in this book.
To be clear, you’ve read the Heroine’s Journey in its many forms before. You’ve watched it. You just might not have realized that. More fascinating, perhaps? There’s a good chance that you love it, even yearn for more.
I intend to show you how to activate your own version of this narrative, whether as a writer of fiction, scripts, and games; as a parent thoughtfully choosing books for a child; or as a reader trying to better understand your own tastes and preferences.
This book will leave you with a solid working knowledge of how to read, identify, and understand what makes a Heroine’s Journey, and from there, how to write a good one.
Find this book on your vendor of choice! or Direct from me
Miss Gail
I offered this book 2 weeks early and $2 off to members of my Chirrup (newsletter). I do stuff like this all the time. Sign up here.
Not into newsletters? Get only new releases by following Gail on Amazon or BookBub!
Prayer Niche (Mihrab), early 1600s, Cleveland Museum of Art: Islamic Art
The prayer niche (mihrab in Arabic) is the focal point in the interior of a mosque. It is located in the qibla wall which is oriented toward Mecca, the holy city of Islam. Muslims face the qibla wall during prayer. This mihrab is an excellent example of different design elements-calligraphy, plants, and geometry-integrated into a beautiful harmonious whole. Graduated colors and sizes contribute to its success. The dominant white glaze presents the most important verses from the Qur’an written in elegant thuluth script which frames the niche. White glaze also outlines geometric patterns and arabesque vines. Less conspicuous turquoise glaze forms secondary designs such as curving vines behind the stunning calligraphy. Curved and straight lines are juxtaposed, enhanced with additional colors of mustard-yellow and aubergine on the deep blue ground. The design is formed with individual pieces of tile in the ceramic mosaic technique. Segments are cut according to the pattern from monochrome tiles with a chisel and their edges smoothed with a file. The pieces are then arranged face down according to a pattern and covered with plaster in manageable sections to install. Since colorful ceramic mosaic decorates many old buildings in Iran, modern craftsmen have become skilled in their workmanship and ongoing maintenance. The style and design in this mihrab, which developed during the 1500s, continues to the present day. Translation of Calligraphy on the Mihrab The Qur’anic inscription around the mihrab is from the Chapter of Light (24:35): God is the light of the Heavens and the Earth. His Light is like a niche in which is a lamp-the lamp enclosed in glass-the glass, as it were, a glistening star. From a blessed tree it is lighted, the olive neither of the East nor of the West, whose oil would well neigh shine out, even though fire touched it not! It is light upon light. God guideth whom He will to His light, and God setteth forth parables to men, for God knoweth. Size: Mihrab: 290.7 x 245.3 cm (114 7/16 x 96 9/16 in.); Frieze: 69.2 x 1563.5 cm (27 ¼ x 615 9/16 in.) Medium: ceramic mosaic
https://clevelandart.org/art/1962.23
To say, “This is my uncle,” in Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether he’s older or younger.
“All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn’t let me ignore it,” says Chen. “In fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.”
This got Chen wondering: Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions?
Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in this blog post — to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.
While “futured languages,” like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, “futureless languages,” like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chen’s explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant — and we’re less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.
But that’s only the beginning. There’s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:
Navigation and Pormpuraawans In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn’t refer to an object as on your “left” or “right,” but rather as “northeast” or “southwest,” writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.” On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.
Blame and English Speakers In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.
Color among Zuñi and Russian Speakers Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (forthcoming in the American Economic Review; PDF here). A 1954 study found that Zuñi speakers, who don’t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they’re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.
Gender in Finnish and Hebrew In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn’t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)
5 examples of how the languages we speak can affect the way we think.
Fascinating
