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Tattletale: I’ll be there as quick as I can, so, apply pressure to the wounds and try not to move too much.
Skitter: It’s okay.
Skitter: The weight of the rubble crushing my body is pressing down on my wounds AND preventing me from moving at all.
Tattletale: Taylor.
Tattletale: Buddy.
Tattletale: We’ve really gotta work on your concept of what’s “okay”.
WHY DO I KEEP SENDING POSTS TO PEOPLE THOSE ARE SUPPOSED YO BE REPOSTS STOP MESSING WITH ME PHONE
I’m sick of numbers defining me. My GPA. My PSAT scores. My weight. My violent assault convictions. My grades. These things are not who I am.
Skitter (via incorrect-wormquotes)
Skitter: Regent, that's not the point. Why did you think any of this would be a good idea?
Regent: Probably because I'm a dangerous psychopath with a history of violence.
Undersiders:...
Regent: I don't understand how you keep forgetting that.
God I love Skitter.
That’s it. That’s all of Worm in 7 words.
Writing Prompt #277
I wasn’t certain the bard was worth much more than a morale boost in this party until I saw him literally sing his way out of an arrest.
Tweetstory
“Arr,” said the pirate, “ye’ll walk the plank!” “Um, I can’t.”“ "Apologies, figure of speech. The plank has wheel chair access, o’ course.”
— Micro SF/F stories (@MicroSFF) July 31, 2017
via MicroSFF on Twitter https://twitter.com/MicroSFF July 31, 2017 at 06:22PM
Aegis Class by Jude-Baldonado
Mirror, Mirror
The Wicked Queen sat in the palace movie theater, watching Titanic and eating a bag of microwave popcorn. She was sitting with her feet tucked up on the seat, and occasionally she would lean down to grab the wine bottle that was sitting on the floor, giving it a sort of disappointed look every time she realized it was still empty.
“Hey, Mirror?” said the Queen.
“Hmm?” said the Magic Mirror, which was leaning back slightly in the space next to the Queen, where several of the movie theater seats had been torn out to make room. The Mirror had been having a very nice psychic chat with an enchanted coffee table a few floors down, and it hastily hauled its attention back to the present moment.
“Yes, my queen?” it said. “What do you require?”
The Queen sat silently for a moment in her pajamas, her face half hidden in shadow.
“Mirror,” she said, “Do you think I’m pretty?”
Oh no, thought the Mirror.
“Of course, your majesty,” it said out loud. “Word of your beauty has spread through all the courts of all the kingdoms from the Sylvan Expanse to the Crystal Sea. There are none who can deny it.”
“Mumble mumble,” said the Wicked Queen.
The Mirror waited for a few seconds. “I’m sorry, majesty,” it said, “I didn’t quite catch–”
“I said,” said the Queen, very quietly, “Do you think I’m as pretty as Snow White?”
People were falling off the deck of the Titanic as its stern lifted ever higher out of the water. The Mirror was starting to be a little concerned. This was usually the Queen’s favorite part. The Mirror considered its words carefully.
“Attraction and beauty aren’t really linear scales, your majesty,” it said. “And they’re not inherent qualities either. They’re something that happens when you look at someone you care about. So being the fairest in all the land really has more to do with the people you surround yourself with, rather than what you actually look like.”
“Yeah,” said the Queen, more quietly than ever, “But do you think I’m as pretty as Snow White, though?”
The Mirror sighed. It gazed up at the movie screen, which was reflected in its own face.
“Mirror,” said the Queen.
The mirror turned its magical gaze towards the Queen. She was sitting with her head cocked to one side, a strange expression on her face.
Oh NO, thought the Mirror.
“Listen, your majesty,” it said, “I’m sure that after a good night’s sleep you won’t even be worried about–”
“Mirror,” said the Queen, who was leaning farther and farther over the edge of her chair.
“You know, I’ve always thought this movie was actually kind of underrated,” said the Mirror desperately. “Which sounds ridiculous, I know, because it won awards and made all kinds of money; but I think these days people are too quick to just dismiss it out of hand; they remember some of the stilted dialogue, but they forget how good the–”
The Queen leaned down and pressed her lips against the center of the glass.
On the screen, a hapless passenger hit the Titanic’s exposed propeller and went pin-wheeling down into the ocean.
The Queen pulled back. The Mirror found itself looking up at her through a smear of purple lipstick. Her eyes were huge and trembling.
Good grief, thought the Mirror.
“Your majesty,” it said.
There was a long pause.
“Your majesty,” said the Mirror, trying to muster some semblance of tact, “Would you like to talk about this, or would you rather pretend that it never happened?”
“I think,” said the Queen, not looking the Mirror, but not really looking at the movie in front of her face either, “That I would like to pretend it never happened, please.”
“Ah,” said the Mirror. “Good. As you wish, your majesty.”
You need to talk to her, the Mirror’s conscience whispered. Help her to make friends. Tell her to go outside, for a change. This obsessing over the fairest in the land thing isn’t healthy.
Light from the projector flickered gently over rows of empty seats.
“Would you like me to tell the kitchen to send up more popcorn, your majesty?” said the Mirror.
“Yeah,” said the Wicked Queen. “That would be nice.”
Tweetstory
The dragon looked out of the tower. “Nobody’s coming.” “Told you,” said the prince. “I’m very disappointed by your country.” “Yeah, me too.”
— Micro SF/F stories (@MicroSFF) July 23, 2017
via MicroSFF on Twitter https://twitter.com/MicroSFF July 23, 2017 at 11:59PM
Hi ! Im sorry, my question is going to be very vague and I'll understand if you do not want to answer it. Here it is : I always have beginnings, or very basic concepts, but I never know how the story will go between the beginning and the end (when I have one...). Like, I've been writing for nearly ten years and I came up with hundred of idea but I only found what happens in the middle only two times. Can something help me ? Sorry again for this vague question but I'm like... Desesperate.
I think that this is probably a pretty common problem, and one that I deal with myself a lot of the time. It’s easy to start off with a great idea, it’s harder to persevere through the middle of it and get it done, right?
To me, it seems like there are a few different factors that can make it really difficult to get through the middle part of a story (aside from the difficulty in itself of just sitting down and writing the whole thing, of course), so I’ll go through a few of the main sticking points in writing that I’ve come up against.
I have a beginning, but then what?
Figuring out how to continue a story once you’ve gotten past the ‘brainwave’ section of the idea can be really hard. If the first part of the story came to you so naturally and easily, shouldn’t the rest of it just fall into place?
Well, not really. At this point you’ve probably got to look at what you have so far, look at where you want to get to in the end (if you know that) and figure out the most satisfying path to take to get there. The middle part of a story is often the hardest part, you have to expand on all the great little concepts that you’ve thrown together and you’ve got to figure out how to make them all make sense.
Sometimes brainstorming ideas will help get through this, just to figure out what could possibly happen:
What is the protagonist trying to achieve?
What is the antagonist trying to achieve?
What would be the simplest solution for these things?
What is the biggest mistake the protagonist could make?
What happens if the antagonist succeeds?
What outside forces does the protagonist have to contend with in addition to the events of the main plot?
What could tempt or force the protagonist away from achieving their goals?
Figure out the simplest path from start to end, and then throw a big old roadblock in your protagonist’s path. Make them question their own motives, their own goals, make them question whether they’re the hero that’s really needed here.
Essentially, lay out all the possible things that could happen, and then pick the ones that make the best story/ the highest drama.
Too many great possibilities?
While having too many ideas is often more of a ‘good’ problem to have, it can also wind up getting you stuck just as badly as not having ideas, because when you get right in there in the middle of the story and you realise that of the two or three or five GREAT concepts that you’ve got on your hands, only one or two of them can possibly fit in and have the story make sense, it can be heartbreaking to have to pick and choose.
If you’ve got too many ideas on hand, don’t stress. Pick the one or two that are the MOST exciting/ dramatic/ fun/ heartbreaking and go with them. Don’t throw away the other ideas – put them in a ‘for later’ folder and use them in the sequel, or in another story altogether.
It doesn’t feel ‘natural’, or I want the rest of the story to flow like the start did:
Sadly, most of the time there are going to be sections of every story that are difficult to just sit down and write. It’s going to feel like pulling teeth, but the only way is to figure out what you need to happen, and how you’re going to do it, and then sit there and type until it’s on the page. Maybe it won’t be pretty, it won’t be as fun as the start of the story was, but once it’s done it can be edited until it shines.
You can’t edit a blank page, and you can’t finish a story with only a beautiful opening.
Can’t think of what might happen next?
It happens, doesn’t it, you write out a fantastic starter and you’re just as excited as anyone to see where it goes and then it just … doesn’t. You’ve stalled out in your own story and it’s horrible.
Go back and look at your characters, at your world building, look at the direction that it was all going in before you stalled and work on fleshing things out – a lot of the time in this situation you’ve gotten ahead of yourself and the reason that you don’t know what happens next is that you’ve dived in headfirst without really getting familiar with what you’re creating. That’s okay, it just means you have to go back and do the work that you skipped in the beginning.
Other tips:
If you’re attempting to jump right into longform stories, like novels or full length scripts or comic scripts etc, and finding that you just can’t get through the whole thing, why not scale it back?
Try writing short stories, ten minute films, single page comics, to hone your craft and exercise yourself in being able to go through the beginning/ middle/ end stages of your form.
As well as that, the feeling of finishing something, even if it isn’t a ‘full’ length work, is very rewarding, and as well as the practice, it can give you the motivation to get back into the slog of working on a longer piece.
I hope that this helps, and please feel free to ask if you have a more specific question.
Some other posts that might help you are:
Post about plotting [HERE]
Post about speed plotting [HERE]
Post about three act structure [HERE]
It had been eight years since college had ended. Eight long years since Bob last saw Elly. She never liked staying somewhere too long. She'd move out in the middle of the night, leave the lecture five minutes after it's started, and sometimes he'd receive a call saying she's somewhere in Europe. Nothing was permanent with her. Art, perhaps, but even her interest in it grew and shrank. Bob wasn't surprised when she didn't show up to get her diploma. Nor was he surprised when she called him up one day. "Hey!" a familiar voice said. Bob had a thousand things on his mind. Without even asking for a name he knew who it was. He'd never forget her voice, the way she spoke like she had too much air, how she'd put an emphasis on each word. "Elly," he said, pacing around his house. What could he possibly say? It's been a long time since she called, or done anything to show she's still around. He couldn't just go "nice to know you ain't dead," that would just be rude. He opened his mouth, then the voice continued. "I miss you." "Same," he said after a short pause. Does she really miss anything, Bob wondered. Images of her constantly throwing out pictures, letters, anything that was older than three weeks flashed in his mind. Elly wasn't sentimental, that much was clear to him. "How've you been?" "Doing great actually," she chuckled. "I've found this wonderful village in the Amazon, they had this strange huts and buggy cuisine. Thinking of going back someday." He smiled to himself. Elly liking "buggy cuisine" is a completely foreign and comedic idea to him, but that's what eight years can do. Bob poured himself a glass of water and took a sip, before asking "Where are you now?" There was a long pause on the other end. A pause filled with crashing sounds and people's shouts. Bob's eyebrows furrowed. What's going on over there? Soon the sounds disappeared, replaced by Elly taking quick breaths. "Sorry about that," she said between each breath. "Listen, I can't talk much but I'll drop by soon." With that the call was ended. Bob stopped pacing and sat on his couch. There was something odd with Elly. Something he can't quite put his finger on. Then again, she's been gone for eight years. He threw his phone to the coffee table and exchanged it for a remote control. Elly can wait till later. Right now, what's important is for the King Elstone to find Lady Rosewood. As soon as the opening credits started, someone pounded on his door repeatedly. "Bob! Open up!" shouted a girl. A girl who was just on the phone five minutes ago. Bob groaned. As much as he missed his friend, he really hated having people over.
Therapy
Rhekatta the Spider Goddess lies back on the couch and steeples all forty of her long white fingers. “I dunno,” she says, “It’s not that I don’t like conquering worlds. I enjoy it in the moment, I guess. But it’s just not very fulfilling, you know?”
The Elder One, which is perched on a chair on the other side of the room, taking notes on a clipboard clutched in one of its many tentacles, nods and flexes its mandibles encouragingly. A close observer would note that it is actually floating an inch or two above the chair, all the extremities of its body drifting slightly as though underwater. The walls are lined with framed medical certificates written in forgotten languages, a few of them with adorned with tasteful bloodstains and burn marks around the edges. The Elder One burbles low in its throats and gestures for Rhekatta to continue.
“It’s just all the same, after a while,” says Rhekatta. She is wearing a clingy black dress that appears to be held together mostly by spiderwebs and imagination. The neckline does not plunge so much as it simply suffers a total existential failure. When she sits up and stretches her arms, as she does now, you can see eight shoulder blades moving under the skin of her back. The Elder One, a being from beyond space and time and all preoccupations of the physical universe, coughs and pretends to be carefully studying its clipboard.
“You’re supposed to feel something when you conquer a universe, right?,” says Rhekatta, gesturing with several of her hands. “All the other chaos deities I know talk about how satisfying it is when you’ve finally snuffed out the last sheds of light in a dark and empty cosmos, and I just…I just wish I knew how that felt. For me, whenever I’ve finished exterminating the last of the human resistance, again, it’s like, okay, I guess I’m done with this now. And then it’s just on to the next dimension, and the next one after that, and I don’t feel anything. Sometimes I go back to the worlds I’ve conquered, just to have a look at them, and, yup, everything’s still burned down. Sometimes the orcs have figured out how to make toothpicks out of their own ossicles or something, but that’s it. How do you take a sense of accomplishment from that?”
The Elder One’s pencil scribbles on the paper. Rain taps gently against the windows. There is no rain in the void, but the Elder One thought the sound made for some nice ambiance.
“Anyway,” says Rhekatta, sighing, “I’ve been thinking about maybe getting into a new line of work. It’s hard, because my only real skills are controlling spiders and destroying civilizations, but I was thinking…Maybe I could do something with gardening? Like, pitch myself as an organic alternative to pesticide, and show up and just send out all my spiders to eat up the bugs?”
The Elder One makes a noncommittal noise. Outside the window, purple lighting streaks silently across the vast flickering dark.
“But I suppose I’d have to give up the clothes,” says Rhekatta, picking at a loose thread on her dress. “I do like the clothes. They don’t let you dress like this when you’re running a pesticide company, I bet. And I’d miss the orcs. They’re stupid, but sometimes they’ll come up to you all pleased because they’ve figured out how to do finger painting with human viscera or something, and you can’t help but be proud of them.” She broods for a moment. Nobody broods like a spider goddess. The Elder One admires her technique.
“Maybe,” says Rehkatta, slowly, “Maybe I’ve been thinking about it all wrong. Destroying a world doesn’t have to be an ending, right? Maybe it’s just the beginning! Building dark cathedrals is definitely sanctioned by the chaos handbook, and you could probably expand that to include dark museums and dark art galleries if you wanted. I’m sure you could!” Rhekatta has jumped up from the couch and is pacing around the room. “I think you could get away with building whole cities as long the living conditions were kept grim and oppressive enough–you’ve got to keep up to code, but that’s not too difficult. And that way the orcs could actually use their creatives sides, and I’d have an excuse to learn about architecture, which I’ve always wanted to do, and I could build things! In between burning other things down, of course.”
Rhekatta claps all her hands at once. She gives the Elder One a dazzling smile that would cause high priests on a dozen different worlds to wonder if maybe certain aspects of their vows hadn’t actually been meant metaphorically this whole time. “Thanks for this. I think it really helped.”
The Elder One waves a tentacle as if to say it’s no trouble at all. Rhekatta snaps her fingers, and the spiders that have been hanging from the ceiling descend all at once, an almost solid sheet of them that lands on the floor and trails after Rhekatta like an extension of the train on her dress.
The Elder One sits there as she sweeps out the door, which closes itself behind her. The walls, the medical certificates, the furniture, and everything else in the room begins to disappear, crumpling as though burned by invisible flames. The Elder One hangs in the void, surrounded by nothingness. It remains there for a very long time. There is no rush, it thinks. Someone will come along sooner or later. Someone always does.
–
(more Rhekatta)
Hello! I was wondering if you could do some prompts for a fantasy au
1) Growing up in the court of mirrors, where lying was impossible and deceit was the first game taught to children, a silver tongue was prized by all else. She didn’t have a silver-tongue. She didn’t even a glittery tongue of distracting and pleasing shine. So, she didn’t know who thought it was a good idea to betroth her to the Queen of Faces, the most powerful and silver-tongued being in court.
2) When all of the dragons have been slayed, what is left for a dragon-slayer to do? Retire? They couldn’t bear the thought! Found themselves hunting hydra, and hags and witches instead as the next convenient monster. Found themselves cursed. Turned into a dragon, in shame and scale and blistering appetite. A lot of new dragon-slayers came looking to kill them after that.
3) “You’re the one the prophecy talked about!”“No.”“It says your name.”“It’s a common name.” “I saw what you just did – you’re the chosen one!”“And if you don’t miraculously unsee what I just did, I’m going to remove your eyes,” the prophesied saviour said sweetly. “And maybe your tongue for good measure.”The other deflated, crestfallen. “You’re not what I expected.”“People rarely are.”
4) “The thing that took your sister is a monster.”“No shit. No other type of person takes children.”“No, I mean an actual monster.” The stranger grasped their hand, eyes big and imploring. “The type that lives under beds and in dark places, waiting for a child scared enough to make it real.”A shiver skittered up their spine, but it was complete bullshit. And they didn’t have time for that when a very real and horrible monster had taken her.
5) He was born with the magical ability to find other people’s missing things. A family heirloom, a body, the broken pieces of their heart. He helped out the local police, ran a consultancy, his house a magpie trove of other people’s odds and ends that he was one day fated to give back to them. Then one day he met someone born with the ability to make anything in the world vanish.
Writing Prompts #2
Character has the ability to hear a person’s thoughts as long as they touch them
Another similar idea: a character has the ability to feel a person’s emotions as long as they touch them. Maybe the two characters meet
Road trip with a complete stranger
Character can see shadowed figures that no one else can, but only out of the corner of their eye. One day they are approached by a fully-visible figure. As the years go by, the figures become less shadowed and more colourful and defined
“It had been six months since they left the war bunker.”
“It was at the back of the bookstore …”
Love at last sight
“The fountain of …” (instead of ‘youth’)
“I thought you said you weren’t dead!” “I wasn’t lying … exactly …”
And finally: capture lightning in a jar
OTP Prompts- Fantasy Edition
“You just "rescued” me from a dragon, and you look so proud, but that dragon is actually my best friend. Oops.“ Au
"I was cursed, and only True Love’s Kiss can save me, but I’m a hundred miles from civilization, and the only other person around is my nemesis: You.” Au
“I’m a mermaid/merman, and you’ve fallen in love with my voice. How do I break it to you that you don’t actually love me, you’re just enchanted?” Au
“I’m an alchemist, and you’re my ever-so-patient assistant who finds me the random ingredients I ask for, I really need to find a way to thank you.” Au
“I’m half-dragon, and I’ve always hidden that from everyone, but now you know, and somehow, you don’t think it’s awful? And you’re touching my scales? And asking me to roast you marshmallows? I can’t decide if I’m relieved or annoyed.” Au
“You’ve been my best friend for years, and I can tell you anything, right? Good, because I sort of stole a dragon egg.” Au
“You and I were sent on a quest together by the king, but now we’re horribly lost, and I’m fairly certain this quest was just meant to kill us.” Au
