Hi, this is literally a reference blog, mostly reposting references for writing.
Also yes I had to remove the Emps posting that happened it was an accident—
trying on a metaphor
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Hi, this is literally a reference blog, mostly reposting references for writing.
Also yes I had to remove the Emps posting that happened it was an accident—
Writing Notes: Self-Care Wheel
Self-Care - activities required for personal care, such as eating, dressing, or grooming, that can be managed by an individual without the assistance of others.
The Self-Care Wheel
Provides a structure for identifying and nourishing areas where you are either failing, surviving, or thriving.
The most widely used assessment wheel, created by the Olga Phoenix Project, is based on the work of Karen Saakvitne and Laurie Pearlman (described in Transforming the Pain: A Workbook on Vicarious Traumatization; 1996).
The Olga Phoenix Self-Care Wheel consists of two sheets, each containing a set of 6 dimensions placed on the outside rim of the wheel, including:
Psychological
Emotional
Spiritual
Personal
Professional
Physical
Each dimension represents an area of your life that, ideally, deserves daily attention.
The first sheet contains a suggested list of topics, placed between the spokes of the wheel below the relevant dimension.
Each item is an inspiration or a prompt to take an action that promotes nurture in that area.
The second wheel is left blank for personalization.
A therapist or coach typically supplies both sheets to a client, but there may be times (to avoid bias) where only the blank sheet is given.
Self-Care Activities for your Physical Domain
a list of "beautiful" words for june
to try to include in your next poem/story
Ambsace - something worthless or unlucky
Boscage - a growth of trees or shrubs; thicket
Callipygian - having shapely buttocks
Deasil - clockwise
Effluvium - an invisible emanation, especially: an offensive exhalation or smell
Floruit - a period of flourishing
Gueridon - a small usually ornately carved and embellished stand or table
Ipseity - individual identity; selfhood
Jorum - a large drinking vessel or its contents
Legerity - alert facile quickness of mind or body
Messaline - a soft lightweight silk dress fabric with a satin weave
Nosegay - a small bunch of flowers
Oblectation - pleasure, satisfaction, delight
Perlustrate - to go through and examine thoroughly
Rupicolous - living among, inhabiting, or growing on rocks
Sacchariferous - producing or containing sugar
Tinctorial - imparting color
Veridical - truthful, veracious
Wakerife - wakeful, alert
Xerarch - developing in a dry place
More: Lists of Beautiful Words ⚜ Word Lists ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs
Writing Notes: Dialogue Tags
Dialogue tag (or speech tag) - a phrase that precedes, breaks up, or follows a bit of written dialogue and establishes who the speaker is and often how they are delivering the dialogue.
Properly Punctuating Dialogue
Here are the 3 most common ways to punctuate dialogue seen in literature:
Quotation marks. In English language literature, dialogue usually appears in quotation marks, as in the example above. If you put your dialogue in quotation marks, note that punctuation—like periods, exclamation points, and question marks—go inside the quotation marks. Also note that you should use a comma of a terminal punctuation mark when a piece of dialogue is part of a complete sentence including a dialogue tag. For example: “I’m going out to buy some milk,” she said or “Stop,” she said. “I already bought milk yesterday.”
Em-dashes. Some writers use an em-dash to notate a line of dialogue, like this: —What do you want for dinner? Jack asked his friend John.
No punctuation. Some writers don’t notate dialogue at all. For example, Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago treats his dialogue just like the rest of the narration, like this: Jack asked his friend John, What do you want for dinner, and John replied, I don’t know, you decide.
Writing dialogue requires a good deal of information be communicated to help your readers understand who is saying what.
At the bare minimum, good use of dialogue tags keeps your reader from getting too disoriented or confused.
Some writers believe that "said is dead" and prefer to use more descriptive words or to put an adverb before the word “said.”
But generally speaking, you can write an entire short story or novel using only “said,” without having to resort to more descriptive verbs like “shouted,” “seethed,” or “consoled.”
Stephen King, whose famous opinion that “the road to hell is paved with adverbs,” finds them especially annoying in dialogue attribution. (Tags like “he said cheekily” drive him crazy.)
In suspense writing specifically, Angels and Demons author Dan Brown advises you to keep your language from jarring the reader out of the story. This means sticking to “he said” and “she said,” and keeping adverbs or other words for “said” to a minimum.
Are Dialogue Tags Always Necessary?
Not every piece of dialogue requires a tag.
If your reader can be reasonably expected to assume who is speaking, you don’t have to use dialogue tags.
This is especially true during lengths of ongoing back and forth dialogue between two characters.
Oftentimes quotes will follow one after the other, with a line break to denote a change in speaker.
Source ⚜ More: Notes ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs ⚜ Dialogue References
"- You are their creation. Both haunted and holy..." Tellios having a hard time because serfs are way too tasty... Just a rough doodle.
So... I found this and now it keeps coming to mind. You hear about "life-changing writing advice" all the time and usually its really not—but honestly this is it man.
I'm going to try it.
I love the lawyer metaphor, because whenever I see “John knew that...” in prose writing I immediately think “how? How does he know it?” Interrogate your witnesses. Cross-examine them. Make them explain their reasoning. It pays dividends.
All of this, but also feels/felt. My editor has forbidden me from using those and it’s forced me to stretch my skills.
This is your "show not tell" advice explained!
Editor here.
First, let me preface this with something very important: you can treat all of this advice as SECOND-DRAFT ADVICE. It is so much easier to rewrite this kind of stuff once you have words on the page. Telling yourself the first draft is totally appropriate and acceptable.
What we’re talking about here are FILTER WORDS (and to some degree verbs of being). Yes, “thought” words are included. But so are “heard, saw, looked, tasted, smelled” etc.—most words having to do with the senses.
This isn’t black and white advice; sometimes you’ll use these words and that’s okay. They’re not WRONG. They’re just weaker. And they’re weaker because they create distance between the reader and the experience of the character.*
If you want your reader to feel like they’re experiencing the story right alongside the character, you want to cut down on filter words.
*This is particularly important with first person and close third POVs. The reader always knows whose eyes they’re seeing through and thoughts they’re privy to. So you don’t need to tell them “I saw X.” Or “I heard X.” Or “I thought Y.” You can just jump into the action/observation as it’s happening.
This is also where you want to pay attention to verbs of being.
“It was rainy.” Versus: “The rain pounded against the roof.” Or “The rain howled like an injured animal.” Or “The rain tapped against the window like an anxious lover.” All of these are inviting the reader deeper into the experience of the story by using stronger verbs and similes. And, at the same time, they stir feelings (instead of TELLING feelings). And feelings keep your reader engaged. Engaged readers keep turning pages; engaged readers become FANS.
This is also where
you want to pay attention
to verbs of being.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
The most valuable advice that Author Ex gave me through the years that we wrote together was this: the problem with all these filter words is that they create distance in the POV.
That means that when you read a line like
John saw that the curtains were open.
It immediately takes you OUT of the character's perspective and instead tells you what they experience as a secondhand observation.
You don't have to get fancy or purple with how you rephrase things like this. Not everything needs a ton of breathing room.
You wanna know what's perfectly impactful while keeping a tight POV?
The curtains were open.
Simple as that.
Idiot Writer Guide to Horse Riding
First thing: horses are not bikes or cars. They are large, emotional animals with opinions. If they don’t trust the rider, everything gets harder.
Mounting is awkward. Even experienced riders don’t look graceful every time. Missing the stirrup happens. Especially under stress.
Riding is physical work. Thighs burn, hands cramp, lower back aches. Beginners feel it in minutes, not hours.
Horses spook. Sudden noises, shadows, smells—anything can set them off. A startled horse doesn’t politely wait for instructions.
Speed has limits. You cannot gallop forever. Horses overheat, tire, and need breaks or they risk injury.
Stopping is not instant. Horses need distance to slow down. Pulling hard just makes things worse.
Terrain matters a lot. Mud, rocks, steep hills, ice, forests, crowds—each changes how fast and safely you can ride.
Falling hurts. Even a short fall can knock the wind out, break bones, or leave a rider stunned and slow to get up.
Horses get injured too. Strained legs, thrown shoes, sore backs—an injured horse may refuse to move at all.
Bond beats skill. A calm horse with a trusting rider is safer than a powerful horse with someone it doesn’t know.
Fear travels both ways. If the rider panics, the horse feels it and reacts.
Long rides leave evidence. Chafing, stiffness, sore muscles, raw hands—nobody rides all day and looks fine.
Talking while riding is hard. Breath bounces, voices break, and shouting is common at faster speeds.
If the rider is unconscious or dead, the horse doesn’t magically keep going toward the destination.
Common Horse Writing Mistakes
The Emperor of Mankind
I sketched such a cute Guilliman today, I am screaming
Obsessed with primarch x reader where readers a gift from the emperor in order to keep the primarch loyal. That they know this is likely the case but still falling for it anyway. Added bonus of reader being perfectly crafted/ chosen to suit the primarchs weak points and them hating but also loving them for it.
hi! i’m making a comic where gender expression, gender-non-conformity, transgender stuff, and beauty standards are big topics. i’m also trying to include a lot of disabled characters, in the main cast and in the background. i’m wondering if you’ve noticed disabilities (types, aids, tropes, specific disabilities) having weirdly gendered representation, and if there are things you’d like to see more in disability rep when it comes to gender. especially with more visible disabilities.
thank you !
Hello,
Facial differences, as a concept, are considered a masculine feature. Even if you do count the anime girls with scars through their eyes (that don't do anything), the representation is like 90% male.
Now, I've seen the "fandom take" on this to some degree where the solution is to make the most masculine women possible*, and to treat the disfigurement as another gender-non-conforming trait for a woman. This will come up later because it keeps happening.
“My perception is that my disfiguration makes it harder to be perceived as a woman.” [...] Coming out as a woman took Mikaela longer because of her disability.
Women with facial differences are degendered because of their facial differences at best, and dehumanized at worst.
The solution here is not that "masculine person [woman or man] with a facial difference=bad!", but to stop considering a facial difference to be a fundamentally masculine trait. It's literally just not. It's a human trait.
Intersectionality matters here too. Black, dark-skinned, intersex, and trans women are also seen as more masculine by default because of misogynoir, colorism, intersexism, and transmisogyny. It's not that women who happen to be any or all of these can't be masculine, but 1) it's not some default factory setting, and 2) as writers we make conscious decisions—things don't "just happen"—and we have unconscious biases we need to think about when making characters.
*for that author, that is. But even for those twitter artists people who can't imagine a genuinely masculine woman, you'll notice that their female characters with disfigurement will usually be more muscular, wear more unisex clothes, and be overall shown as less feminine compared to other women. Curious!
One exception here will be Down syndrome and similarly treated disabilities, which is also a segue into talking about developmental disabilities and how they're shown in terms of gender.
You will often notice that developmentally disabled people—and the more disabled they are, the more frequent it is—aren't really considered men or women. They're boys and girls. Mostly boys because visible disability is still considered a fundamentally masculine trait, but they're not shown as adult men either way. You'll be hard-pressed to find an adult, male character with Down syndrome that has facial hair or male pattern baldness. Same for an adult female character that's not literally dressed like a pre-teen.
You'll find that a lot of the time, this infantilization affects how the characters are presented in terms of gender. If we think of children as more-or-less genderless (at least compared to adults), and we do the same for disabled adults, you end up with this kind of situation.
And I'm not talking about making your developmentally disabled character into either a lumberjack or a tradwife, but allowing them the same amount of gendered expression as other characters their age get. Also allowing them to physically look like an adult of their gender, not some perpetual child. Visibly disabled people are allowed to have secondary sex characteristics.
Not sure how to nicely segue into any of my other points, so I'll just do them like this:
Interabled [straight] relationships. Good luck finding one where the woman's the disabled one. "Dying wife that's dying from the death disease and could've been a sick dog" is not a character.
Men with [the fandom version of] chronic illness. The one time a male disabled character is considered feminine/"babygirl"/not-masculine (but still adult) is when he's frail, physically weak, and needs help. Curious!
In a similar vein, mobility aids are often presented as overall emasculating. Especially wheelchairs, especially powerchairs, especially those really big powerchairs. Since this Iron Age idea of man=strong woman=weak is still going strong in 2026.
Female characters who use powerchairs are almost never actual characters. A man in her situation would probably be treated as "less" of a man, sure, but she's probably treated like a broken lamp that needs an expensive surgery or is/will be dead for the main character's development's sake. That is, if she exists.
Autistic female characters don't really exist. If they do, they are either written as extremely low support needs, or genuinely don't have any of the recognized symptoms of autism. Even in autistic advocacy spaces you still see people playing with this misogynistic idea that women can basically "turn off" their autism when it's inconvenient, since severely or even just unable-to-mask autistic women don't apparently exist.
Female characters with dwarfism also don't really exist. Dwarfism is The contender for most-male-dominated-representation award. "Chibi anime girl who's short but shows 0 other characteristics of dwarfism whatsoever, not even the proportions" doesn't count. "Fantasy short woman with a beard that lives underground" also doesn't count. I mean like, actual dwarfism. With symptoms other than "short", even.
Be careful with visibly disabled characters who use it/its pronouns. "Be careful", not "don't do it". Unless you're writing for a hyperspecific audience, almost no reader's assumption will be that those pronouns are used in a positive/neutral manner. For every character that uses them willingly, there's a million times when it's used as a dehumanizing insult. Introduce them in a way that's not ambiguous as to which is the case for your character.
Significantly disabled characters who, for any reason, express their gender in a specific way. Trans dysphoria, cis dysphoria, because they're questioning, because why not, because it's fun, it can be anything. It could be a trans woman who changes the voice of her AAC to a female voice as part of her transition, a cis man who needs his caregiver's help to trim his facial hair because it makes him feel handsome, a gender-questioning person who gets pink spoke guards for their wheelchair because they want to see if they like it or not. Basically: a disabled character who has autonomy, including over their gender and things associated with it.
Any visibly disabled character who's nonbinary on purpose. As in, the author actually knows that they're nonbinary and made them nonbinary on purpose. Not degendered or creature-like, but an actual nonbinary human being who is nonbinary, rather than just denied a gender by Big Society.
There's a whole field of gender-and-disability discussions in the personality disorder representation department. I'm not qualified to talk about any of the ones that are relevant (namely: BPD and HPD) but most of the female characters with either of these might as well have been made with female hysteria in mind, and you wouldn't be able to tell a difference. Overall not great.
To elaborate a bit more: while there are disabilities that either men or women experience more frequently (ex. ~80% of people with SCI are men, while ~80% of people with MS are women), there's no such thing as a gender-exclusive disability. You'll sometimes read otherwise because many medical sources are inter- and cis-sexist. So while it might take some research to figure out what exactly they mean by "it only happens in boys" (they almost always mean "X-linked recessive"), it's important to remember that there will be women with said disability as well. They just might be intersex and/or trans.
This is especially something to consider when writing a trans character. Having a disability that is so heavily associated with one sex is 1) very unlucky but happens, and 2) dysphoric. But on the other hand—you could have a trans character that is also intersex and has a disability that they wouldn't otherwise have if they weren't intersex. Think a trans man with Duchenne's and CAIS, or a trans woman with endometriosis and PMDS.
It basically boils down to the disability and gender intersecting, and what that means depends on the specific character. For example, if your character is a blind woman, she might feel safer having a big dog with her rather than a cane. If your character is an older, Deaf trans person from Ireland, they might have to change how they sign. And so on. You can consider how a totally blind trans character might experience dysphoria or navigate passing. Or how a character whose disability makes them infertile might experience that. Etc. There's definitely a lot of ways to think about how disability and gender can intersect rather than just doing the fandom classic of putting two borderline-random labels on a character and not elaborating further on either.
A lot of this is out of what I usually write about, so sorry if it's uneducated/less helpful.
Thanks for the ask,
mod Sasza
Hey, don’t cry. Free online database of Japanese folk lore
Might I add, free database of mostly European folklore and myths
:0
Thank you!
okay mentioning remus one more time. yes he did have duct tape over his mouth which implies someone tried to silence him BUT!!!! he has no problem taking it off and then janus tries to use his powers on him and it doesn't work (maybe janus was the one who put duct tape on him in the first place?)
it feels like one of those small things that will come up and be important for later. at least i hope so....
the orange side seems to encompass rage/disappointment/being overlooked. remus' ability to never be silenced unless he chooses to silence himself....... listen. i'm just saying that would make for a good teamup
Favourite joke in the new sasi episode
"Teacher teach by the stairs, why these dude's being uptight squares" just TICKLED me i want roman to rhyme all the time. i want remus to put a spell on him so he only speak in rhyme for a whole episode. like a gay dr suess
Can someone get their gay asses away /j
“The topic of love does not interest me” aro 😏
⚠️SANDERS SIDES SPOILERS!!!!!! Kinda but I’ll but it here anyway⚠️
I think the orange side is going to represent rage and irrationality. Sort of Logan’s “dark” foil, like Roman and Remus.
I hypothesize he’s probably going to be brought up in a moment of severely heightened emotions where Logan is no longer being listened to. As much as Logan denies it, he feels things deeply, especially rejection and loneliness. I feel like it will all come to a head when he finally feels so disconnected from the group that he just cannot take it anymore.
Anyway so glad to have a new video after all these years. Thomas and the team have delivered another incredible video and I look forward to their future plans!