Pictures for Pleasure

And maybe inspiration. I write stuff. Or used to, anyway.

[captainkirkmccoy]

Happy #NationalSpousesDay to these loveable idiots.

[lianabrooks]

Quick And Dirty Tips For Creating Subplots

– Not everyone should love the hero.

– The more antagonists you have the more conflicts you create.

– Real life should happen to the characters, even if they are saving the world they have jobs and responsibilities.

– Give the character interests and friends outside of work.

– Multiple point of views aren’t a bad thing if you know how to juggle them.

– It all needs to come together at the end.

– Not every antagonist needs to be vanquished at the end.

– – Give us more than one character to love– (from Diantha)

— Make each and every character count — (from Diantha)

Stories need subplots. Make sure yours has one.

[goawfma]

wrong enemy

[number6bitch]

What Would A Mediocre White Man Do? (new mantra to live by!)

[thatfriendyoualreadyhave]

I DO THIS FOR EVERYTHING AND I SWEAR TO GOT IT WORKS AND GETS ME THROUGH THE WORST DAYS

[rad-and-i-dont-stop]

I use this same logic for dealing with assholes and abusers. Works pretty well.

[letswritesomenovels]

Writing the Perfect Query Letter

The point of a query letter is to sell your story. 

Writing your query letter, your goal is to make the reader want to pick up the book. That is the entire purpose. We’ve all recommended books to friends before. It’s exactly that, except now that book is yours and the stakes are high. A query letter is, above all, persuasive. While writing your query letter, make sure you draw your reader into your story with every word. 

A query letter is not a creative letter; it’s a business proposition. 

Writing a query letter, don’t think of yourself as a writer, especially not of this particular story. You’ll need that degree of separation from your work for a good query. An agent/author relationship is foremost a business relationship. You’re pitching a product to someone whose job it is to sell your product (the agent) to someone whose job it is to sell your product (the editor) to someone you want to buy your product (the reader). This means that by querying your manuscript, you’re requesting a place in an industry. As such, you should follow some industry standards:

Use business letter formatting. 12 point font. Single spaced. Left alignment. No indentations. A space between paragraphs.

Don’t be familiar. This is a business letter. A formal letter. Unless you already have some sort of a relationship with the person you’re querying–if you’ve met at an event or corresponded in some other regard–write like you’re writing to a potential business associate. 

Write the letter as yourself. Don’t write as your character. Don’t write as your narrator. Don’t write as the historian who discovered your story 1,000 years into the future. It’s a risk that rarely pays off. On that point…

Don’t be creative with the form of your query. Save the creativity for your manuscript. Don’t quote a section in your opening lines. Don’t include a box of chocolates with it when you mail it off. Don’t be gimmicky. If you resort to a gimmick, the agent is going to wonder if it’s because you don’t know how this works or your story isn’t strong enough to stand on it’s own. Play by the rules. Trust your story. 

Keep it short. 250-400 words. Remember your goal: to get the agent to pick up the first chapter. Agents can receive hundreds of queries in a week. They don’t have time for wasted words. They won’t wait for you to get to your point. Say what you have to say as quickly as possible. 

Writing Your Query:

You don’t have long to tell your story. Just a page. This means you can’t include much more than the information that is absolutely vital to your story and the querying process. I’ve outlined the information, and separated it into paragraphs. You don’t have to divide it the way I’ve set out here, but these are the general lumps of Query Stuff. 

Each point I’ve bulleted should only be a sentence or two long. If your reader wants to know more, they’ll read the first chapters and request the manuscript. 

The Opening Lines: The Formalities

Address the agent. As this is a business letter, start with something akin to “Dear Mr./Ms. [First Name, Last Name] or [Last Name]:” Ex. Dear Mr. Tolkien: 

State your intent. In my research I’ve found this unnecessary, but if you choose to do so you can say something along the lines of: “I’m submitting for your consideration my completed novel, [TITLE].” 

The First Paragraph: The Introduction

Introduce your story as cleanly as possible. It should be minimal, yet evocative. Specific to your story, but skimming the surface of it. The more set-up you give, the more complicated you’ll make things for yourself. 

The set up. What was life like for the character when the story began? Where does the story take place? 

The inciting incident. The “but when…” What set the ball rolling? This can be in the same sentence as the setup. 

The combination of the set up and inciting incident should work as a sort of tagline. 

Protagonist motivation. What does your protagonist want? What is it about the inciting incident that motivates the protagonist to action? 

The Second Paragraph: The Conflict 

I’ve made this a separate paragraph because shorter paragraphs make a page more inviting for a reader, but it’s your call. In this paragraph, you don’t want to summarise the entire book; you want to show your ability to weave a compelling story. It should have energy. It should tell the reader just enough to get them excited. 

The rising action. What are a few key events that raise the stakes in your manuscript? Take a few sentences to lay out the most important events leading to the climax of your story. 

The central conflict. What is the main obstacle your protagonist will face to achieve their goal? Lay out exactly what your protagonist’s biggest problem is. 

The hook. The line or question that will make your reader want to read more. If you’d like, you can make it it’s own paragraph. 

The Third Paragraph: The Details

Some people make this their first paragraph, but I’ve decided to put this after the introduction to the story. These are the formal details of your story, where it gets very Industry.

The title. You might have said it earlier, but it won’t hurt to say it again here. 

The word count, genre, & age range. All necessary industry information. Round your word count to the nearest 1,000. 

Comp titles. What books might this person have read that are similar to your own, either in tone/setting/story? This can give your reader a sense of the potential audience for your story. You only want to include two. 

If you really want, you can choose to personalise the submission here and say why you’ve queried this particular agent. If you only want to show that you’ve done your research, you should have already gotten this point across clearly with the summary, age range, and genre. But, if you really love this agent, if you follow their blog or twitter or love some of their authors, it won’t hurt to say so. 

The Fourth Paragraph: The Author

The last paragraph is usually set aside for a few short lines about yourself. This should only include information relevant to writing this manuscript. Examples of biographical details you might want to include: 

Awards

Degrees

Writing conferences/workshops attended

Expertise related to the content of the book

Where you lived/have lived (if it matters)

You should be able to summarise this paragraph with: here is why you should trust me to tell this story.

You can also include a line about what you: are currently writing, enjoy writing, or have written. Let the agent get to know you as a writer and reader outside of this one story. (Especially if you don’t have many manuscript-related accolades/experience.) 

The Closing Line: The Niceties 

Thank the agent for taking the time to read your query. A small but important consideration. 

Tips

Highlight your writing ability with narrative voice. If your story is funny, make sure your query reflects that. If the writing is lyrical, your query should be too. You don’t want to drown the agent in your writing style, but you should splash them a bit. 

DON’T INCLUDE THEMES. Don’t say this is a story about “friendship and the power or love,” or “children will relate to this story of bullying.” A query letter isn’t a literature class. Don’t analyse your manuscript for your reader. Let the story speak for itself. 

Use active language. Don’t use phrases like “this story is about” or “the main character is.” Again, let the plot and the character’s actions speak for themselves. 

Only name a few characters and locations outright. If you’re querying Harry Potter, you’ll want to use Harry’s name in the query, but Aunt Petunia and Uncle Dursley can be “his cruel relatives.” Hermione and Ron can be “his friends.” Even Hogwarts can be a “school for people with magical abilities.” Refer to things by their function in the manuscript and keep your query simple and easy to follow. The more names, locations, and special terms in your query, the more confusing it will be. 

Don’t sing your own praises. Don’t say that your mom loves your book, or that your little cousins devoured it. Don’t compare it to Harry Potter or any other best-seller. Don’t say you think the book will sell well. The agent won’t believe you. 

It’s okay if it takes you days and days to write your query. It should take days to write. Whether or not the agent even looks at your first chapter will depend entirely on this single page. You can write the novel of the century, but no one will look at it unless your query sells it. 

Have someone else look over your query before you send it out. Share it with the smartest person you know. Share it with your old English teacher. Share it on a writing website, like r/writers. Have them judge it on clarity and quality. Ask them where it can be trimmed. Ask them what they think the strongest sentence is. Ask what the weakest sentence is. Have them check for typos. 

Triple-check you’ve spelt the agent’s name correctly. Agents are trying to get through their inbox. If they find one good reason to move past your query, they will. Don’t give it to them in the first line. 

Triple-check the agent’s submission requirements. Getting these wrong is another way to get your query moved directly to the reject pile. 

Let them know if there’s a potential for sequels. If you’re writing a trilogy, don’t try to sell all three books at once. Use this query letter to sell the first book of the series only. Then, let the agent know that “[Your Title] has the potential for two sequels continuing [Your Protagonist]’s story.” An agent wants you to have more than one book in your arsenal, but this is a short letter. There’s only room for the one book in it. 

And one last tip? Your query doesn’t have to be perfect. Following this advice will help you draw the essential story out of a manuscript and make it look like you know what you’re doing, but many queries break these “rules” and still get full manuscript requests. As long as there’s something in the pitch that is enough to make the agent want to take a look at the manuscript itself, the query is doing its job. 

Remember: you’re recommending a book. That’s all. It just happens to be your book. 

Sources. 

Writing a Six Sentence Synopsis

23 Successful Query Letters

How to Write a Query Letter

How to Write the Perfect Query- Agent Advice

The Anatomy of a Query Letter (Podcast episode: 1hr)

The Narrative Breakdown (Podcast episode: 35min)

[letswritesomenovels]

Update: I originally wrote this post in May of 2016 while researching an assignment for a publishing module in my MA course. Almost exactly a year later, I sent out my own (imperfect) query and received my first offer of representation within a week. I learned quite a bit in that year, and I’ve edited this post to reflect that.

[ceres-libera]

#writing #query letter

[rageofthenerd]

I tried to make jack-o-lanterns for Command, Science, and Engineering, but one of them was a little….accident prone.

[obsessionisaperfume]

OH MY GOD

[soyeahso]

There are a couple of things about current shipping culture that confuse me.  

1. The focus on whether or not a pairing will become canon as a reason people should ship something or not.  Do you not understand what the “transformative” part of “transformative works” means?”

2. This idea that saying “I ship that” means “I think that, as presented in canon,this is a perfect, healthy relationship that everyone should model their relationship after.” 

Sometimes shipping something does mean that.  Sometimes shipping something means “Person A is a trash bag who doesn’t deserve person B but I would love to explore how Person A might grow to deserve Person B.” Sometimes it means “I want these characters to live together forever in a conflict free domestic AU.”  Sometimes it means “I want Person A to forever pine after Person B.  Nothing is beautiful and everything hurts.”  And sometimes it just means you like their faces and want to see Person A and Person B bone in various configurations and universes. 

[mominmudville]

Listen to your parents, kids.

[handypolymath]

This really should be one of a handful of Public Service Announcements randomly and chronically inserted into one’s dash.

[violent-darts]

Hell man sometimes it means “these two are TERRIBLE and I want to watch them burn like a catastrophic forest fire as a proxy for all the shit I don’t actually want in real life (like to light my own apartment on fire and scream) and then laugh at the destruction at the end.” 

[sixpenceee]

Incredibly couloured ivy on National Museum in Wroclaw, Poland taken by Anna Kowalów.

[readysteadytrek]

Iconic

[amalugoingboldly]

Me: *watches Jack Ryan purely because Chris Pine is in it*

Jack Ryan: *Has a PhD and spends a good portion of the film being a fucking nerd*

Jack Ryan: *Spends the entire trip from Russia to America putting everything together and figuring out exactly what’s going on, when, where and how*

Me: *has existential crisis about James Tiberius Kirk being a giant fucking nerd and putting everything together and figuring out exactly what’s going on, when, where and how, on the bridge when a mission fucks up, and astonishing the shit out of the all the people that bought into his hornball and nepotism-got-me-here reputation* (ie; none of the command crew, but certainly the visiting dignitaries and even some of the Enterprises own crew)

Me: …I need to write this

Bonus

Bones: *standing back with a sly smirk at the astonished expressions around him* What, y'all honestly thought the kid with the genius level aptitude scores actually needed nepotism to get him where he is? Bless your hearts.

[ceres-libera]

Kirk: *about to receive a hypo from a doctor who isn't McCoy* So, standard procedure, then?

Doctor: Yes, sir. Just give me a moment to--

Kirk: *rips own sleeve off* I'm ready.

Doctor: Wha... why... why would you... that's not necessary--

Kirk: *rips off other sleeve* Let's go.

[yourfluffiestnightmare]

My friend told me a story he hadn’t told anyone for years. When he used to tell it years ago people would laugh and say, ‘Who’d believe that? How can that be true? That’s daft.’ So he didn’t tell it again for ages. But for some reason, last night, he knew it would be just the kind of story I would love.   When he was a kid, he said, they didn’t use the word autism, they just said ‘shy’, or ‘isn’t very good at being around strangers or lots of people.’ But that’s what he was, and is, and he doesn’t mind telling anyone. It’s just a matter of fact with him, and sometimes it makes him sound a little and act different, but that’s okay.   Anyway, when he was a kid it was the middle of the 1980s and they were still saying ‘shy’ or ‘withdrawn’ rather than ‘autistic’. He went to London with his mother to see a special screening of a new film he really loved. He must have won a competition or something, I think. Some of the details he can’t quite remember, but he thinks it must have been London they went to, and the film…! Well, the film is one of my all-time favourites, too. It’s a dark, mysterious fantasy movie. Every single frame is crammed with puppets and goblins. There are silly songs and a goblin king who wears clingy silver tights and who kidnaps a baby and this is what kickstarts the whole adventure.   It was ‘Labyrinth’, of course, and the star was David Bowie, and he was there to meet the children who had come to see this special screening.   ‘I met David Bowie once,’ was the thing that my friend said, that caught my attention.   ‘You did? When was this?’ I was amazed, and surprised, too, at the casual way he brought this revelation out. Almost anyone else I know would have told the tale a million times already.   He seemed surprised I would want to know, and he told me the whole thing, all out of order, and I eked the details out of him.   He told the story as if it was he’d been on an adventure back then, and he wasn’t quite allowed to tell the story. Like there was a pact, or a magic spell surrounding it. As if something profound and peculiar would occur if he broke the confidence.   It was thirty years ago and all us kids who’d loved Labyrinth then, and who still love it now, are all middle-aged. Saddest of all, the Goblin King is dead. Does the magic still exist?   I asked him what happened on his adventure.   ‘I was withdrawn, more withdrawn than the other kids. We all got a signed poster. Because I was so shy, they put me in a separate room, to one side, and so I got to meet him alone. He’d heard I was shy and it was his idea. He spent thirty minutes with me.   ‘He gave me this mask. This one. Look.   ‘He said: ‘This is an invisible mask, you see?   ‘He took it off his own face and looked around like he was scared and uncomfortable all of a sudden. He passed me his invisible mask. ‘Put it on,’ he told me. ‘It’s magic.’   ‘And so I did.   ‘Then he told me, ‘I always feel afraid, just the same as you. But I wear this mask every single day. And it doesn’t take the fear away, but it makes it feel a bit better. I feel brave enough then to face the whole world and all the people. And now you will, too.   ‘I sat there in his magic mask, looking through the eyes at David Bowie and it was true, I did feel better.   ‘Then I watched as he made another magic mask. He spun it out of thin air, out of nothing at all. He finished it and smiled and then he put it on. And he looked so relieved and pleased. He smiled at me.   ‘'Now we’ve both got invisible masks. We can both see through them perfectly well and no one would know we’re even wearing them,’ he said.   ‘So, I felt incredibly comfortable. It was the first time I felt safe in my whole life.   ‘It was magic. He was a wizard. He was a goblin king, grinning at me.   ‘I still keep the mask, of course. This is it, now. Look.’   I kept asking my friend questions, amazed by his story. I loved it and wanted all the details. How many other kids? Did they have puppets from the film there, as well? What was David Bowie wearing? I imagined him in his lilac suit from Live Aid. Or maybe he was dressed as the Goblin King in lacy ruffles and cobwebs and glitter.   What was the last thing he said to you, when you had to say goodbye?   ‘David Bowie said, ‘I’m always afraid as well. But this is how you can feel brave in the world.’ And then it was over. I’ve never forgotten it. And years later I cried when I heard he had passed.’   My friend was surprised I was delighted by this tale.   ‘The normal reaction is: that’s just a stupid story. Fancy believing in an invisible mask.’   But I do. I really believe in it.   And it’s the best story I’ve heard all year.

Paul Magrs (via yourfluffiestnightmare)

[berlin-1976-has-moved]

I would shoot the roll of film and develop it and make a contact sheet, I would then give them to Mr Bowie, he would Gold Star them and send them back to me with his marked favourites. - Tony McGee

[jellie-bells]

My therapist told me something meaningful yesterday, she said “It’s important to remember that when you’re depressed you have to nurse yourself and be extra gentile towards yourself. Just like an athlete wouldn’t break an ankle then force themselves to run that ankle. They rest as it heals and do not think “I am a failed athelete” they think, “right now something isn’t working so i’ll take care of myself until it does.“ 

Just like a broken bone, depression can change the way your daily life plays out, and pushing yourself too hard and getting frustrated when you don’t feel better is just like trying to run on that broken ankle and getting frustrated when it doesn’t heal.

[moonlight69]

Read this. Then read it again. And then save it and read it over and over when you are depressed.

[wildandwild]

What kind of combat training do you have?                             Fencing.

[goddessofidiocy-deactivated2019]

captain america: a summary

[karadin]

Marvel Movies are not Marvel Comics

Note to everyone fired up as hell about Hydra Cap, Hydra Magneto and Nazis Should Have Won World War 2.

For a long time Ike Pearlmutter (Trump supporter) and a creative group at Marvel comics were harming the films made under the Marvel Cinematic Universe banner, through things like being notoriously cheap and deciding Black Widow merch was a bad idea.

Kevin Feige led a push to separate the movie and the comics divisions last year, and probably the offensive idea of making Cap a Nazi on the part of the creative group to celebrate Cap’s 75th anniversary had something to do with it.

So please, go see Thor Ragnarok and Spiderman Homecoming and our beloved Chris Evans as Cap in Infinity War if you were planning on it. 

By boycotting the comics around the Secret Empire event, you’ll insure it never makes it to a screen in the future, but keep on getting those Squirrel Girl and Ms Marvel and America Chavez books, to prove diversity is not the problem with Marvel Comics.

And there’s nothing the comics division hates more than being eclipsed in the public mind by the success of the movies division.

[sinbadism]

PLEASE ESPECIALLY SUPPORT THOR: RAGNAROK, DIRECTED BY A POLYNESIAN MAN AND STARRING A BLACK WOMAN AS A LEGENDARY VIKING WARRIOR. THANKS.

[bigsphinxofquartz]

further info: the television series Agents of SHIELD has been actively, directly opposing the sort of shitty things that have been happening in the comics. basically, in the MCU currently, Hydra no longer exists, but the current story arc in Agents of SHIELD takes place in an alternate universe within a computer simulation where they are in control of basically everything and arrest and execute anyone who opposes them.

the series has gone to great lengths in the last few episodes to explicitly state that no amount of retconning their backstory changes the fact that Hydra is explicitly a Nazi organization, and it’s gone on to explicitly draw a connection between Hydra and Trump and everything he stands for. a scene in a recent episode had one of the characters who is part of Hydra say that their goal is to “make our society great again”, and in the most recent episode, that same character comments that an attempt to extract information from one of the protagonists by torturing her failed, and that “nevertheless, she persisted”.

this has been the status quo that the series has established from the very beginning, too–this is a scene from the first season where one of the protagonists explicitly, directly describes Hydra as a Nazi organization.