Teo @cordeliav7 - Tumblr Blog

THE METAMORPHOSIS book review

Fun facts: 1. I had been dying to read one of Kafka's books for a long ass time. 2. My boyfriend is deeply afraid and repulsed by cockroaches. Now GUESS who gave me as a gift this book 😂 Oh, his face when he realises what the book was about 😂 Oh, how he reacted when I read to him some parts of the book😂

I HIGHLY recommend this book. It's easily 5/5 star. It's small so it's easy to read but I would recommend not to read it too fast so you enjoy what the book is really about. I do have to give out a trigger warning tho to all the people who have entomophobia. It might be obvious with the hug bug on the cover but it was not obvious enough for my boyfriend so... I'm just saying... Anyways let us begin

⚠️SPOILERS AHEAD⚠️

This book made me so sad and angry at the same time. Because this book is not about a man turning into a roach. This book is about a man who lets his mask fall down and allows his family to see and realise just how depressed and bad he is feeling.

Gregor is working his ass off trying to pay off his parents' debt and at the same time he saves some money up, not for himself but for his sister. So she can have a better and more fulfilling future. He wakes up as a roach and his first thought is not 'oh no ew what shall I do to turn back' but it is 'oh no work! My parents!' Even his parents admit to his boss that he lives just to work, that he cares for nothing else in life, not about himself, but only for his job.

His sister tried to be gentle with him. Even his mother tried at some point. To help him out, to clean after him, to feed him, to help him be a part of their family even tho he was locked away. But even that was not enough. Because at some point they stopped treating him and thinking of him as a part of this family. They were barely tolerating him. And all he wanted was to be seen, heard and to feel included. And at the same time he tried his best not to be seen and heard by his family so they dont get disturbed by him.

I swear the way he was treated when he died. Oh my gods I felt so sad and angry. I was FURIOUS but not fast (sorry that was a bad pun. Just like me *laughs in pansexual* SORRY I'LL STOP I SWEAR)

#book tumblr #booktok #book reading #book reccs #book recommendations #book review #books #book spoilers #good books #writerscommunity #books and reading #franz kafka #kafka #metamorphosis #metamorphic #kafka my beloved

allthingswhumpyandangsty

writingdose

writers, instead of asking ai for help, you can always use your childhood trauma and repressed issues to help you with that fic

luna-azzurra

The most interesting question you can ask about any character is not what do they want. it's what do they believe they deserve. because those two things are almost never the same and the gap between them is where your entire story lives. a person can want love completely and believe they don't deserve it and that belief will destroy every good thing that comes toward them in ways they won't even notice they're doing. write the gap. the gap is the character.

luna-azzurra

Tips for Writing Injuries! (AGAIN)

Your action hero just got shot in the shoulder, stitched it up in a motel bathroom, and is now running through a forest. I need you to know that a shoulder wound severs muscle, nerves, and sometimes bone, and the human body's response to that is not "mild wincing followed by full range of motion." here is what injuries actually do to peoplee...

⊹ Adrenaline is REAL and it does allow people to do extraordinary things immediately after injury, BUT it is a loan, not a gift. you borrow the function and you pay it back later with interest. Your character might genuinely be able to run for twenty minutes after being stabbed. and then the adrenaline drops and everything the body was delaying arrives all at once. the collapse is NOT weakness. it's biology collecting its debt. write the debt collection. it's more interesting than the heroic sprint anyway.

⊹ Blood loss changes cognition before it drops you. you don't go from "fine" to "unconscious." you go through a whole middle stage of confusion, poor decision-making, emotional dysregulation, a strange calm, tunnel vision, difficulty forming sentences. Your injured character making a bad call, saying something they normally wouldn't, becoming suddenly and inexplicably gentle--that's blood loss. use the middle stage. it's dramatically rich and almost nobody writes it.

⊹ Recovery has a timeline and the timeline is long and boring and inconvenient to plot. a broken rib takes six weeks and during those six weeks sneezing is a genuine emergency. a concussion means no screens, no reading, no bright lights, and symptoms can persist for months. a stab wound to the abdomen means weeks of infection risk, limited mobility, and a specific kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with sleep. Your character being sidelined and frustrated and useless for a long time is not a narrative problem. it's the story.

⊹ Pain also affects personality in ways writers skip. chronic pain makes people short-tempered and then guilty about being short-tempered. it makes concentration difficult. it makes intimacy complicated, both emotional and physical. a character who was patient and warm before their injury and is now snappy and withdrawn is not a character regression. they're in pain. pain is exhausting in ways that don't show on the outside. the people around them noticing and not knowing how to help is a whole story in itself.

ladyignatius4

It doesn't matter if you wrote 5,000 or 50 words today.

It doesn't matter if all you did was day-dream about your characters while staring at the ceiling.

You are still a writer and your progress is valid.

moninils

And all of this at once.

obsidianpegasus-deactivated2025

Reading my own fanfiction is basically just a rollercoaster of emotional whiplash.

20% of the time: “Hold on. I wrote this? This is fire. This is emotionally devastating in the best way. This scene is dripping with tension. I’m a literary perfectionist. Someone give me a book deal.”

80% of the time: “Straight to jail. Immediate prison. Why is everyone’s breath hitching?. I used the word ‘gaze’ three times in one paragraph like I was possessed. Did I think 'his eyes darkened' was profound? Why is everyone clenching their jaws? Why is someone whispering 'their name like a prayer' again?? No one talks like this. What is this dialogue. Why are there so many weird metaphors and em-dashes…”

hollowgods-deactivated20250921

Non-writers don't understand how much of writing is just googling things like "when was the croissant invented" for worldbuilding reasons and staring off into the distance.