DaemonMeg

Welcome to my writing blog. Main is @snkrfnd I'll post my goals, links to my fics, and writing references here. I write as DaemonMeg on AO3.

[inkatesbush]

they're saying spending 2 hours in the word doc changing words slightly to be more specific and evocative and moving endless commas around is one of the most noble and respected things that you can do

[akaanmo]

i think i just witnessed a miracle

[fractiousrvt]

There is always hope

[cyberneticnightmares]

saw an elderly woman walking around with a tote bag whose design were the four AO3 fic category squares and she very excitedly asked if i was a reader or a writer bcs nobody else at the con had recognized it, and after telling her that i've been writing fic since fanfic.net, she solemnly nodded and explained that she'd been reading fic since "the days of personal websites" but that she only started writing fanfic when she was 47 and oh my god when i tell you that i genuinely teared up on the spot!!!!! like!!! HELL YEAH???? LITERALLY NEVER TOO OLD TO START WRITING. NEVER TOO OLD TO WRITE AND SHARE YOUR FIC.

her enthusiastic "i'm a very nice and bubbly person, i swear! but i love writing angst and major character death :)" nearly took me the fuck out.

icon. legend. diva. i wish her nothing but a kajillion million comments and kudos. i hope her fic updates crash AO3. i hope she knows i'm promoting her to my personal patron saint of AO3.

[rosemoonweaver]

GUYS. DID YOU KNOW YOU CAN WRITE CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE FICS ON AO3

[rosemoonweaver]

Other things you can do:

Linked footnotes

Customized page dividers

Sticky notes

Lined paper

Paper that looks stacked on top of each other

Old looking paper

Newspaper articles

Tumblr posts

iOS text messages

Emails

Fake ao3 authors notes and kudos button

Freaking discord chats

Its fucking amazing. Ao3 is fucking amazing. Can I legally marry a website?

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[transformativeworks]

[geneticdriftwood]

honestly? abandoned/on indefinite hiatus/very slow to update fics, even and especially AUs and longfics, are often some of my absolute favorites. and people who refuse to read them are missing out!

for one, stories don’t have to be finished to be enjoyable and worth reading. but also? an unfinished fic is a whole little universe that just keeps on existing in my head! their world stays alive for me in a way that doesn’t always happen with fics I binge read and finish, and i love it. i don’t know how their story ends, so it just keeps going! and even when those stories DO update and finish years later, they’ve been in my head for so long that they stick around like old friends.

so to any author with unfinished works: thank you SO much for sharing what you had without waiting to finish it first. you’re just giving me the gift of getting to spend more time with your story and your idea. if you do update again someday, i’ll be delighted to jump back in! but if you don’t, just know a little piece of your world still lives on in a beloved tiny terrarium in my brain. i promise i’m taking good care of it :)

i don’t normally ask this, but if this resonates with you please reblog it, so it can reach the authors who need to hear it <3

[elleldoe]

anything can be a slow burn if it takes you forever to upload new chapters

[plushworldz]

trust i got yall fr 💯💯💯

[uhhhhmanda]

I almost forgot about the final step in fic writing: the post-posting edit. When you see your fic on AO3 and realize it's riddled with errors.

[hacvek]

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

[olyia-stories]

@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this

[dragonpyre]

I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset

[serinos-kitt]

What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know

[dragonpyre]

Mordor.

Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.

And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!

[serinos-kitt]

So what is a rain shadow?

[lethalbutterfly]

Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Oh yeah nothing is more annoying than fantasy maps that can't get mountains, rivers and rain shadows right.

[mindfulwrath]

May I recommend my new favorite tool: Mapgen4. You start with a random seed and then add mountains, valleys, shallow water, or oceans as you like. You can adjust the wind direction to make wind shadows off the mountains fall where you want. You can adjust overall raininess to make the rivers larger or smaller, or have more or fewer tributaries. It works best for small, isolated landmasses (think islands more than continents) but as there’s no scale bar and it’s all slightly abstracted anyway you can do whatever you want with it. I’ve only just started playing with it but it’s SO FUN.

[jeanjauthor]

I do think this could be useful for writers! ...Caveat, if you're going to use this for making a map for anything published (digital or paper, even if it's only in a fanfic archive or whatever), please, please credit the creator and their program as how you made that map! The more ways information like this gets out there, the more useful it'll be to other writers, roleplaying game DMs/GMs, creators, etc.

[oh-opossum]

One of my favourites for mapping plates, biomes, etc is Tectonics.js. If you're familiar with how tectonics shape a planet, you can guess where the features go by toggling plates, crust thickness, etc. Between Mapgen4 and Tectonics.js, we've got some pretty sweet tools at our disposal.

[brehaaorgana]

More stuff!:

European Geosciences Union Blog — Beyond Tectonics: Building fictional worlds to better understand our own

Reshaping Reality's Worldbuilding Tips

Worldbuilding pasta's series, An Apple Pie from Scratch also check their resources page!

R/worldbuilding's Reading List. Also check out their collected resources link. This basic geology guide from 11 years ago is still nice.

Creating an Earth-Like Planet, and The Climate Cookbook (aka Geoff's Climate Cookbook) technically the climate cookbook is a part of Creating an Earth like Planet I think.

Related: Worldbuilding Workshop's "Working Out Climates Using Geoff’s Climate Cookbook." Which goes through using the resource in order to map make. Also just the Worldbuilding Workshop in General.

Madeline James Writes's Worldbuilding Guide

Worldbuilding 101 (this links to the Biomes section but there's like...everything.)

Also I would recommend looking into Landscape Archaeology as well! That's because Landscape archeology is basically adding the social/cultural layer on top of all that geology and geography. Environments change when communities live in them, and communities likewise adapt to various environments.

This is a short free introduction to the concept: "Notes on Landscape Archaeology." To summarize, Landscape archaeology sort of like...studies the relation of people to places/spaces (that is, landscapes) in time.

Also this paper [An Archeology of Landscapes] breaks down/introduces the key concepts that I learned which is first that you can form the "construct paradigm" of a landscape from settlement ecology, ritual landscapes, and ethnic landscapes.

And then the highlights of their summary of what constitutes defining a landscape:

Landscapes are not synonymous with natural environments. Landscapes are synthetic (Jackson, 1984, p. 156), with cultural systems structuring and organizing peoples’ interactions with their natural environments ...

Landscapes are worlds of cultural product ... Through their daily activities, beliefs, and values, communities transform physical spaces into meaningful places. ...

Landscapes are the arena for all of a community’s activities. Thus landscapes not only are constructs of human populations but they also are the milieu in which those populations survive and sustain themselves. A landscape’s domain involves patterning in both within-place and between-place contexts ...

Landscapes are dynamic constructions, with each community and each generation imposing its own cognitive map on an anthropogenic world of interconnected morphology, arrangement, and coherent meaning ...

Basically a "landscape" is made by a community living in an environment. Once you have a geological environment that makes sense, landscape archaeology is like... Basically how I feel confident knowing where trade routes would be on a map, where there are areas of continual high conflict, what kinds of agriculture exists where, etc. once the geological stuff is hammered out, it's like...I know how that would influence the local cultures and vice versa. At that point, it's easy to start marking the natural borders, settlements, trade/port cities, and even strategic fortresses. If you have properly put rivers on a map, then marking your port cities is effortless, basically.

Also:

This course syllabus for a Landscape Archaeology class is freely accessible. It includes an online resources page.

Place, Landscape, and Environment: Anthropological Archaeology in 2009

(Landscape Biographies is open access, as is Landscape Archaeology between Art and Science: From a Multi- to an Interdisciplinary Approach. But I wouldn't try to read every essay.)

[dedicatedfollower467]

If you are like me and find it helpful to have video reference for a process/activity in addition to a written guide, Artifexian is a YouTube channel that does a LOT of world building stuff and specifically he's in the process of creating a world following a lot of Worldbuilding Pasta's methodology!

[daemonmeg]

I wrote 1201 words today

[chokopoppo]

writing historical fic set in real places is so scary. what if someone who knows more about Philadelphia's timeline to move from gas to electric streetlamps reads my fanfiction and laughs at me

[milfsisyphus]

stop earning advanced degrees i need you to finish your fanfiction

[sarnakhwritesthings]

what if I need the advanced degrees to write more accurate fanfiction

[fanficmemes]

Anybody else got that Evergiven sized writers block

[fanficmemes]

“Where’s the next chapter?!” Well buddy you’re never gonna guess

[fanficmemes]

[callmebliss]

What’s the comic sans trick?

[cargopantsman]

[chaifootsteps]

#i feel like someone just asked me to eat dirt for my health

[buc-eebarnes]

wingdings' true purpose as a font

[naamahdarling]

Wingdings holy shit some of y'all are on a whole different level of galaxy wizard brain batshittery and I am in awe.

[brawltogethernow]

Exciting. When I don't want to see what I'm writing I just make the font color almost indistinguishable from the background color. (Do not do this.)

(I don't think the secret to the comic sans hack is comic sans itself; I think it's any deflation of being intimidated by your canvas.)

[brawltogethernow]

Hold on I need to go look something up immediately.

[darker-than-darkstorm]

... you can't say that and not give the link.

The Internet's best write-reward system! Write one hundred words, get an image of a kitten!

Looks like you can even make it something other than kittens, by appending ?search=dinosaur (that's the example the page gives) to the end of the URL.

[nightingaletrash]

@andauril

[todaysbat]

sharing this here because you can can do bats

[chucktaylorupset]

*emerges from the other room covered in blood* you should see the word document

[wantonlywindswept]

does it look like this

[what-even-is-thiss]

When inventing a fantasy religion a lot of people a) make the mistake of assuming that everyone in fantasy world would worship the same gods and b) assume that polytheistic religions see all of their gods as morally good

[what-even-is-thiss]

Some types of religions for your world building (any of these ideas can stand alone or be combined with each other):

One god, don’t play with any others.

Everything is God

One big god or small group of gods made everything but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other smaller ones that work for the big one(s)

There’s one god but all of these hundreds of gods are aspects of that one god and the aspects of the one god can absolutely marry each other and have marital squabbles

Individuality is an illusion and the universe is a series of vibes experiencing itself

The world used to be an egg but then that egg became a god and then that god made some other gods and then those gods became bored and made the universe and then they got to screwing each other to make even more gods and now there’s hundreds of them and exactly what gods are worshiped changes on who you ask in a particular region

Everything has a soul. Act like it.

Someone or something spoke the world into existence and we’ve been stealing other people’s stories ever since we’ll take whatever gods you have

A bunch of regional gods got smushed together and now there’s a state mandated religion that’s trying to make this smaller pantheon more popular than local folk religion

The difference between a god, a nature spirit, and a legendary person is extremely unclear even to worshipers but there’s shrines to all of them

A god chose these people to be their special guys and their special guys are gonna have a tough time. That god may be the only god or it may be one of many those people believe exist

Humans were kinda stupid until this one spirit or person showed up and taught them how to do stuff so now we do stuff to thank the person or thing that taught us how to do stuff

The world will keep on ending and being rebuilt it just does that sometimes nobody knows when it started or if it ever did

You can learn a lot from talking animals.

People were made to do work the god(s) don’t wanna do

People were made because the god(s) were lonely/bored/drunk

This river in particular is the most important thing in the whole universe

You need to get better philosophy. This guy was good at philosophy. Read his book.

[bucketofdeltav]

I just want to plug this (college history professor) guy's entire series on how real ancient polytheistic religions worked -

https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polytheism-part-i-knowledge/

https://acoup.blog/2019/11/01/collections-practical-polytheism-part-ii-practice/

https://acoup.blog/2019/11/08/collections-practical-polytheism-part-iii-polling-the-gods/

https://acoup.blog/2019/11/15/collections-practical-polytheism-part-iv-little-gods-and-big-people/

'How Not To Fantasy Religion' https://acoup.blog/2019/06/04/new-acquisitions-how-it-wasnt-game-of-thrones-and-the-middle-ages-part-ii/

Actually his whole page of resources for nerdy worldbuilders is kind of awesome

https://acoup.blog/resources-for-world-builders/

[bidet-of-evil]

i had a request to share the ao3 skin i created for my wangxian college au (shameless plug), but ao3 no longer allows public skins, so if you're a fic writer who includes text conversations and wants them to look like this:

here's how you can make it happen!

go to your ao3 dashboard > skins > work skins > create

add all of this css to the doc, then save it:

#workskin .phone-wrap img { max-width: 200px; }

#workskin .phone-wrap { max-width: 400px; padding: 1em 1.5em; margin: 60px auto; border: 1px solid black; border-left-color: transparent; border-right-color: transparent; border-radius: 15px; background-color: #FFFFFF; display: flex; flex-direction: column; align-items: flex-end; }

#workskin .phone-wrap p { margin: 0em 0em 1em; max-width: 75%; line-height: 1.25; position: relative; padding: 0.5em .875em; border-radius: 1.15em; }

#workskin .phone-wrap p.sender { opacity: 0.7; font-size: 0.8em; font-weight: bold; align-self: flex-start; margin-bottom: 0; }

#workskin .phone-wrap p.outgoing { background-color: #2a96f5; border-color: #2a96f5; color: white; text-align: left; }

#workskin .phone-wrap p.incoming { background-color: #e2e1e6; border-color: #e2e1e6; align-self: flex-start; }

#workskin .phone-wrap p.outgoing:after { content: ""; position: absolute; right: -0.5em; bottom: 0; width: 0.5em; height: 1em; border-left: 0.5em solid; border-color: inherit; border-bottom-left-radius: 1em 0.5em; }

#workskin .phone-wrap p.incoming:after { content: ""; position: absolute; left: -0.5em; bottom: 0; width: 0.5em; height: 1em; border-right: 0.5em solid; border-color: inherit; border-bottom-right-radius: 1em 0.5em; }

#workskin .phone-wrap p.title { font-size: 0.8em; color: #616161; text-align: center; max-width: 100%; line-height: 1em; }

#workskin .phone-wrap .chaticon p { width: auto; text-align: center; margin: 0; }

#workskin .chaticon { background-color: #e2e1e6; border-color: #e2e1e6; font-size: 1.5em; border-radius: 50%; margin: auto; margin-bottom: 1em; height: 60px; width: 60px; display: flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; }

----------------

3. then, when writing your fic, wrap all text convos in a <div> tag with class="phone-wrap". that will create the phone screen-sized wrapper with borders. (wrapping it means that it opens with <div class="phone-wrap"> and everything else happens here, and then when you want the convo to end, you add </div>)

for every incoming message, add class="incoming" to the <p> and for every outgoing message, add class="outgoing" to the <p>. if you want your chat to still be distinguishable via alignment by someone who chooses not to use your skin, you should also add align="right" to every outgoing <p>.

for the chat icon on top of a chat, wrap the initials of the receiver in a <p> tag and wrap that in a <div> with class="chaticon".

for group chats, to add the name of a sender, wrap that in a <p> with class="sender". optionally, inside of that tag, wrap it in a <strong> tag. this will make sure it's bolded even without your skin.

to add a gif/image, wrap it inside the <p> tag with the outgoing or incoming class with <img class=“chat-gif” src=“[url goes here]” alt=“[description of image]”/>

example for a regular text:

<div class="phone-wrap"> <div class="chaticon"> <p>LWJ</p> </div> <p class="outgoing" align="right">hi</p> <p class="incoming">Who is this?</p> </div>

example for a group chat:

<div class="phone-wrap"> <p class="outgoing" align="right">hi chat</p> <p class="sender"><strong>Wen Ning:</strong></p> <p class="incoming">yoooo</p> <p class="outgoing" align="right"> <img class="chat-gif" src="https://64.media.tumblr.com/b33161ba62441664ecf3ad647e8c980c/caff55261bba6810-25/s100x200/d8aa0dc5c68a7c22d3fd519687901536f51f38fb.gifv" alt="Oprah GIF" /> </p> </div>

[chimaerakitten]

One under-appreciated breed of fic writer are the ones who hyperfocus on logistics to the exclusion of all canon shortcuts, and thus usually strike upon an awesome way to flesh out the worldbuilding or characters.

Like, I’m not necessarily talking realism here since often it’s still pretty far from realistic, but more like, “someone has to be running spies in this fantasy kingdom, and we’ve seen the whole royal court, so which background character is it? How does that change these three major interactions?” Or “real life historical nobility did in fact have some things to do that were like jobs, how does this human disaster cope with running an estate?” Or “there’s no reason for a sci-fi robot detective to know how to whitewater kayak, where’d she learn?” Or “if this guy is serving the emperor directly he has to be way high up in the space empire servant hierarchy, why is he doing this menial task for someone else? What’s his motive? Does he perhaps have the secret space telepathy?”

Anyway I’m always DELIGHTED to find a fic or writer who asks these questions because the fics themselves are universally bangers.

[ocean-again]

person who knows how logistical things works has picked up the cannon, hefted it thoughtfully, and put a single chalk mark precisely on the problem.

[dduane]

One of the great background principles of fiction writing: “Ask the next question.” Never stop looking for the Next Question.

And when you seem to run out of questions, ask the one that’s always applicable, a gateway to both action and (more info on) motivation:

“Who does it hurt?”

[minim-calibre]

"Ask the Next Question/Who does it hurt" does have a serious risk of eventually becoming "everything I write now is at least a novella". That said, it's awesome (not just for writing, but for alpha and beta reading--great way to spot the gaps that might need to be addressed somehow).