✧ Broken ribs suck. You don’t just “walk it off.” Breathing hurts. Laughing hurts. Existing hurts. Characters with rib injuries won’t be doing heroic sprints.
✧ Concussions aren’t instant naps. Dazed vision, nausea, dizziness, maybe even personality changes, but they’re not going to collapse neatly like in the movies.
✧ Blood loss is sneaky. It’s not just about dramatic pools of blood. It’s dizziness, confusion, and the body getting cold as circulation tanks.
✧ Adrenaline lies. Someone can take a serious injury and not feel it until the fight’s over. That “I didn’t realize I was bleeding until later” trope? Very real.
✧ Twisted ankles are brutal. One bad step and suddenly running is off the table. Even walking hurts like hell. Perfect way to ground a chase scene.
✧ Burns linger. Even small burns hurt more than most people expect. Blisters, infection risk, constant pain, it’s not just a cool scar later.
✧ Dislocated shoulders = useless arm. Characters can’t keep swinging a sword or firing a gun. They’re basically fighting one-armed until it’s fixed.
✧ Shock is a thing. Pale skin, trembling, rapid heartbeat, and eventually disorientation. A character might not even realize how bad their wound is.
✧ Stitches aren’t magic. Getting sewn up is painful and recovery takes time. They’re not instantly battle-ready after a needle and thread.
✧ Scars tell stories. Some fade, some don’t. Some stay sensitive forever. Don’t forget the aftermath when the wound becomes part of the character.
Listen, we all know they're cool as a CONCEPT, but the truth is sawed off wands are SO hard to aim, and even if you're a good shot, the range and area effect of your spells is gonna be WAY off.
Your fireballs WILL fizzle out like a wet sparkler, or spread out and take your face off, or a whole range of uncomfortable in betweens.
I know, I know, you saw it in some big action mage flick and it was SO COOL, but reality is different than fiction kiddos.
Stick to full length.
*slide projector click*
Next up we have some illegal wand additions!
*slide projector click*
HERE is why you don't glue or embed things on your wands unless you're a trained professional!
As you can see, that lovely healing amethyst is doing a less than optimal job healing anything embedded in this wizards eye!
*slide projector click*
And while nails might have been a totally badass looking addition to this wand, they look LESS badass riddling the wizards arm, torso, and FACE!
*raises hand from back of room* yeah my cousin had a nail wand. It didn’t shoot the nails but uhhh instead of casting a spell like normal it casted mini-versions of the spell from each of the nail points which was really cool but one of the points was facing him and well………….
... I'd be interested in seeing your cousins design notes. Just purely from an academic stand point. Later though.
*slide projector click*
Now, butterfly wands! Also called fan wands and folding wands, these aren't strictly illegal, they're just a poor idea. The addition of hinges and the split of power into three sections tends to cause a good quarter of your spell power to dissipate, and even when that kind of defect is avoided or compensated for, they can overload if one section of the wand is damaged. If you go into wand crafting, you'll learn more about the math behind that, but for now lets just take this picture of Johnny the wizard with half a hand as a lesson, okay? OKAY!
*slide projector click*
Look, if you're close enough to use a bayonet you're TOO close. Wands are RANGED weapons for a reason! Just carry a damn knife in your pocket if you're worried about close range, and don't risk BREAKING your WOODEN implement like that!
For the writers struggling to rid themselves of the classic ‘said’. Some are repeated in different categories since they fit multiple ones (but those are counted once so it adds up to 100 new words).
SU having a whole-ass episode with the moral of 'you know sometimes you and your friends will have different feelings about the same piece of fiction and that's fine, don't get too worked up over it' hits different after learning how the internet treated this show while it was running.
It's a cryin' shame that we didn't get better Indiana Jones stories after Last Crusade, especially when you can *literally put anything after the titular "Indiana Jones and-" to get a great sounding adventure.
On the topic of humans being everyone’s favorite Intergalactic versions of Gonzo the Great:
Come on you guys, I’ve seen all the hilarious additions to my “humans are the friendly ones” post. We’re basically Steve Irwin meets Gonzo from the Muppets at this point. I love it.
But what if certain species of aliens have Rules for dealing with humans?
Don’t eat their food. If human food passes your lips/beak/membrane/other way of ingesting nutrients, you will never be satisfied with your ration bars again.
Don’t tell them your name. Humans can find you again once they know your name and this can be either life-saving or the absolute worst thing that could happen to you, depending on whether or not they favor you. Better to be on the safe side.
Winning a human’s favor will ensure that a great deal of luck is on your side, but if you anger them, they are wholly capable of wiping out everything you ever cared about. Do not anger them.
If you must anger them, carry a cage of X’arvizian bloodflies with you, for they resemble Earth mo-skee-toes and the human will avoid them.
This does not always work. Have a last will and testament ready.
Do not let them take you anywhere on your planet that you cannot fly a ship from. Beings who are spirited away to the human kingdom of Aria Fiv-Ti Won rarely return, and those that do are never quite the same.
Basically, humans are like the Fair Folk to some aliens and half of them are scared to death and the others are like alien teenagers who are like “I dare you to ask a human to take you to Earth”.
We knew about the planet called Earth for centuries before we made contact with its indigenous species, of course. We spent decades studying them from afar.
The first researchers had to fight for years to even get a grant, of course. They kept getting laughed out of the halls. A T-Class Death World that had not only produced sapient life, but a Stage Two civilization? It was a joke, obviously. It had to be a joke.
And then it wasn’t. And we all stopped laughing. Instead, we got very, very nervous.
We watched as the human civilizations not only survived, but grew, and thrived, and invented things that we had never even conceived of. Terrible things, weapons of war, implements of destruction as brutal and powerful as one would imagine a death world’s children to be. In the space of less than two thousand years, they had already produced implements of mass death that would have horrified the most callous dictators in the long, dark history of the galaxy.
Already, the children of Earth were the most terrifying creatures in the galaxy. They became the stuff of horror stories, nightly warnings told to children; huge, hulking, brutish things, that hacked and slashed and stabbed and shot and burned and survived, that built monstrous metal things that rumbled across the landscape and blasted buildings to ruin.
All that preserved us was their lack of space flight. In their obsession with murdering one another, the humans had locked themselves into a rigid framework of physics that thankfully omitted the equations necessary to achieve interstellar travel.
They became our bogeymen. Locked away in their prison planet, surrounded by a cordon of non-interference, prevented from ravaging the galaxy only by their own insatiable need to kill one another. Gruesome and terrible, yes - but at least we were safe.
Or so we thought.
The cities were called Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the moment of their destruction, the humans unlocked a destructive force greater than any of us could ever have believed possible. It was at that moment that those of us who studied their technology knew their escape to be inevitable, and that no force in the universe could have hoped to stand against them.
The first human spacecraft were… exactly what we should have expected them to be. There were no elegant solar wings, no sleek, silvered hulls plying the ocean of stars. They did not soar on the stellar currents. They did not even register their existence. Humanity flew in the only way it could: on all-consuming pillars of fire, pounding space itself into submission with explosion after explosion. Their ships were crude, ugly, bulky things, huge slabs of metal welded together, built to withstand the inconceivable forces necessary to propel themselves into space through violence alone.
It was almost comical. The huge, dumb brutes simply strapped an explosive to their backs and let it throw them off of the planet.
We would have laughed, if it hadn’t terrified us.
Humanity, at long last, was awake.
It was a slow process. It took them nearly a hundred years to reach their nearest planetary neighbor; a hundred more to conquer the rest of their solar system. The process of refining their explosive propulsion systems - now powered by the same force that had melted their cities into glass less than a thousand years before - was slow and haphazard. But it worked. Year by year, they inched outward, conquering and subduing world after world that we had deemed unfit for habitation. They burrowed into moons, built orbital colonies around gas giants, even crafted habitats that drifted in the hearts of blazing nebulas. They never stopped. Never slowed.
The no-contact cordon was generous, and was extended by the day. As human colonies pushed farther and farther outward, we retreated, gave them the space that they wanted in a desperate attempt at… stalling for time, perhaps. Or some sort of appeasement. Or sheer, abject terror. Debates were held daily, arguing about whether or not first contact should be initiated, and how, and by whom, and with what failsafes. No agreement was ever reached.
We were comically unprepared for the humans to initiate contact themselves.
It was almost an accident. The humans had achieved another breakthrough in propulsion physics, and took an unexpected leap of several hundred light years, coming into orbit around an inhabited world.
What ensued was the diplomatic equivalent of everyone staring awkwardly at one another for a few moments, and then turning around and walking slowly out of the room.
The human ship leapt away after some thirty minutes without initiating any sort of formal communications, but we knew that we had been discovered, and the message of our existence was being carried back to Terra.
The situation in the senate could only be described as “absolute, incoherent panic”. They had discovered us before our preparations were complete. What would they want? What demands would they make? What hope did we have against them if they chose to wage war against us and claim the galaxy for themselves? The most meager of human ships was beyond our capacity to engage militarily; even unarmed transport vessels were so thickly armored as to be functionally indestructible to our weapons.
We waited, every day, certain that we were on the brink of war. We hunkered in our homes, and stared.
Across the darkness of space, humanity stared back.
There were other instances of contact. Human ships - armed, now - entering colonized space for a few scant moments, and then leaving upon finding our meager defensive batteries pointed in their direction. They never initiated communications. We were too frightened to.
A few weeks later, the humans discovered Alphari-296.
It was a border world. A new colony, on an ocean planet that was proving to be less hospitable than initially thought. Its military garrison was pitifully small to begin with. We had been trying desperately to shore it up, afraid that the humans might sense weakness and attack, but things were made complicated by the disease - the medical staff of the colonies were unable to devise a cure, or even a treatment, and what pitifully small population remained on the planet were slowly vomiting themselves to death.
When the human fleet arrived in orbit, the rest of the galaxy wrote Alphari-296 off as lost.
I was there, on the surface, when the great gray ships came screaming down from the sky. Crude, inelegant things, all jagged metal and sharp edges, barely holding together. I sat there, on the balcony of the clinic full of patients that I did not have the resources or the expertise to help, and looked up with the blank, empty, numb stare of one who is certain that they are about to die.
I remember the symbols emblazoned on the sides of each ship, glaring in the sun as the ships landed inelegantly on the spaceport landing pads that had never been designed for anything so large. It was the same symbol that was painted on the helmets of every human that strode out of the ships, carrying huge black cases, their faces obscured by dark visors. It was the first flag that humans ever carried into our worlds.
It was a crude image of a human figure, rendered in simple, straight lines, with a dot for the head. It was painted in white, over a red cross.
The first human to approach me was a female, though I did not learn this until much later - it was impossible to ascertain gender through the bulky suit and the mask. But she strode up the stairs onto the balcony, carrying that black case that was nearly the size of my entire body, and paused as I stared blankly up at her. I was vaguely aware that I was witnessing history, and quite certain that I would not live to tell of it.
Then, to my amazement, she said, in halting, uncertain words, “You are the head doctor?”
I nodded.
The visor cleared. The human bared its teeth at me. I learned later that this was a “grin”, an expression of friendship and happiness among their species.
“We are The Doctors Without Borders,” she said, speaking slowly and carefully. “We are here to help.”
You have a subtle superpower. You can understand any language known to man, written or spoken, even ancient ones, braille, and sign language. Your normal life as a successful archeologist suddenly takes a turn, when a girl on a phone call walks past you, but you cannot understand her at all.
god okay in an attempt to be less of an asshole, here’s how child speech DOES work (or tend to work, at least)
kids tend to hypercorrect — this means that they tend to say things like “sleeped” instead of “slept,” “writed” instead of “wrote,” “goed” instead of “went,” etc
kids tend not to make errors such as omitting verbs (“i hungry”)
kids also tend not to make errors in the i/me, she/her department (“me am hungry”)
simplification of difficult sounds — consonant clusters especially, so things like st, sp, ps, etc., as well as f, v, th-sounds, ch-sounds, etc.
“babbling”-type utterances (“apwen” for “airplane,” using one babbly word for multiple objects, things like that) generally occur in children under the age of three and a half
say it with me: an eight-year-old child is not going to be saying “me hungwy”
do not confuse child speech with stereotypical learner english mistakes, that’s not only incorrect but also gross on the stereotypical learner english front (“me love you long time,” anybody?)
if you’re going to write kidfic please do some * research
Totally. It can be helpful to remind yourself that young children tend to speak as though the English language actually made sense. Our brains are pattern-recognising machines: children are really, really good at puzzling out the implicit rules of the English language, but they don’t necessarily know all the silly exceptions and bizarre edge cases that break those rules yet - those can only be learned through experience and rote memorisation.
Basically, when children who speak English as a first language make mistakes, it typically reflects a tendency to treat English as more grammatically, syntactically, and/or orthographically consistent than it really is. In some cases, this can be compounded by the fact that some kids will get offended at how little sense “proper” English makes, and insist upon using the more consistent forms even though they know very well that they’re technically “wrong”.
for a long young portion of my life I insisted on pronouncing Sean “SEEN” because that’s how it’s spelled.
As someone who spends a good majority of her time working with kids, it irks me to no end when I see children written as if they’re babies.
Past the age of about five or six years old, children can have deep, intellectual conversations about the most bizarre of things. I HAD A CONVERSATION LAST WEEK WITH FOUR THIRD GRADERS ABOUT THE GAS PRICES AND TAXES IN HAWAII.
Were they entirely correct in the facts they were giving? No, because it was all from what they had heard from parents or on the news. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that I was having a genuine conversation with four eight and nine year olds about taxes.
Just about the only speech problems most kids have, unless they have a speech impediment, is not being able to pronounce certain consonants (replacing ‘th’ with ‘fw,’ for example, and some letters are harder to form with your mouth than others) and doing exactly what the person above said: using the English language the way they know how, which isn’t always the way English works.
Kids aren’t stupid. Stop writing them like they are.
I was tutoring a little kid (second grade, I think). He was complaining about a worksheet. “This is hard.” I started to correct him as I knew he was more than capable of it and this bright kid, who had obviously heard the lecture before from others, interrupted me and said: “I know. I know. It’s not really difficult. It’s just time consuming.” Some kids are spooky-smart and even quite articulate.
If you need (plotwise) to emphasize that the child is specifically childish … have them tell the same joke to everyone they meet, cracking themselves up before they get to the punchline … have them ask “Why?” incessantly … have them fidgeting and possibly breaking things (”Oops.” “What?” “Nothing!” “WHAT?!”) … and if you have more than one kid, even of the same age, you don’t have to write them at the same intelligence level or emotional maturity. Some kids are messy and some are obsessively neat. Some are quiet, some loud. Some giggly, some surly. They basically come in the same range of personalities as adults.
If you don’t want to invest a lot of time writing dialog for kids, just establish that you have a quiet kid. But a kid who gives single-word answers is usually doing so because they don’t like you (or trust you) or they are focused on their own thing and you’re interrupting them. It doesn’t mean they lack the vocabulary or that they don’t understand the adult conversation going on “over their head” (the more inappropriate the conversation, the more likely the kids are paying attention).
The only children I have ever met who did say things like “me hungwy” were the ones who had figured out that if they sounded “adorable” they could wrap adults around their precious little fingers. Kids get it.
Kids also slur and mumble a lot. Especially when they’re tired. They don’t say “me hungwy”, they say “M’hungry”, or “m’hung’y” cause it just takes too much effort or time to do a proper distinct ‘r’.
Really, with kids, it’s more about how they say the words than what they say. A sleepy kid can be adorable, but they’re either cranky as hell or nearly dead on their feet. A hungry kid is going to be cranky (again) or whiney. A bored kid’s going to be fidgety and/or whiney. etc.
Generally speaking, in my experience, kids are as smart as any adult. What they lack is:
* Life experience and knowledge about the world. So sometimes, things that seem silly and cliche to us are new, exciting, and profound to them.
* A long term perspective. They don’t have a sense of “this too shall pass.” If something upsets them right now, it’s the end of the world. If something makes them happy, they think they’ll never be unhappy again. This hurts their judgment and can make them emotionally reactive.
* Self-control. Try to get kids to sit quietly when they’re tired or hungry or angry, and you’ll see what I mean.
* The ability to know what they know and verbalize it to others. Any therapist will tell you kids pick up family dynamics and detect conflict parents are trying to hide like no one’s business. They can’t usually talk directly about it, though, although they might enact the patterns they see with dolls and pretend play.
* Defenses and seeing themselves through others’ eyes. I love teaching and doing research with children because their personalities are so quickly and easily visible. Their parents are another matter. Until at least 5th or 6th grade, they’re not constantly thinking about how others perceive them and constructing complicated facades.
* Meta-thinking. When I ask a child who just solved a logic puzzle or answered a question correctly how they knew, they’ll often say something like “I just knew,” “because I’m smart,” “my sister taught me,” or “I don’t know.” This is related to kids rarely knowing and being able to verbalize what they know.
* Basic executive functions like working memory, processing speed, and inhibition. All of these rely on the frontal lobe and develop slowly. A concrete example: on a brief IQ test like the Woodcock Johnson, I’ve seen kids get lost in the problem and forget part or all of what they were being asked, but they could solve it accurately if you kept reminding them (but did not otherwise provide help). Their standard scores with reminders were often over 120 (roughly “gifted range”), while without, they did about average.
* They ask questions, but they don’t critically question what you’ve been told. In my experience with gifted kids for example, they ask so many questions it wears parents and teachers out. But until adolescence, they trust what they learn from books, parents, and teachers. They don’t ask constantly, “how do you know? How do I know?” I vividly remember beginning to ask these how-do-we-know questions at 14. I suddenly became aware of a lack of certainty of everything I knew and believed.
Kids are smart and observant, but they are not little adults. Their perspective is so different given their size, relationship to time, and dependence on the adults around them. If you want to write about kids, keep that in mind, listen to them, and observe them closely.
i’m a speech/language therapist who specializes in language development for preschool aged children (under 5). as a rule of thumb, children approximate adult language at 5 years of age. i didn’t really include speech sound development because that’s a whole lot of explanation. but, here’s what their language looks like from birth - 5 years:
Birth–3 Months
Startles to loud sounds
Quiets or smiles when spoken to
Seems to recognize caregiver’s voice and quiets if crying
Makes pleasure sounds (cooing, gooing)
Cries differently for different needs
Smiles they see caregiver
4–6 Months
Turns eyes to the direction of sounds
Responds to changes in tone of voice
Interested in music / toys that make sounds
Babbling is reduplicated repetitions of different easy to pronounce sounds, (i.e. ”papapa,” “bababa,” “mamama”)
Chuckles and laughs
Vocalizes excitement and displeasure
7 Months–1 Year
Enjoys games like peek-a-boo and pat-a-cake
Turns and looks in direction of sounds
Listens when spoken to
Recognizes words for common items like “cup”, “shoe”, “book”, or “juice”
Begins to respond to commands and requests (e.g. “Come here” or “Want more?”)
Babbling has many different sounds (”pabamima”)
Uses gestures to communicate (waving, holding arms to be picked up)
Imitates different speech sounds
Has one or two words (hi, dog, dada, mama) around first birthday, although words may not be intelligible
1-2 Years
Points to a few body parts when asked.
Follows simple commands and understands simple questions (“Roll the ball,” “Kiss the baby,” “Where’s your shoe?”).
Points to pictures in a book when named.
Vocabulary size increases every month
Child over generalizes words (i.e. every four legged animal is “doggy”)
Uses some one- or two- word questions (“Where kitty?” “Go bye-bye?” “What’s that?”).
Once vocabulary size reaches ~250 words child begins to put two words together (“more cookie,” “no juice,” “mommy book”).
Follows two-step requests (“Get the book and put it on the table”).
Should be able to listen to story books for longer periods of time
Vocab size increased to the point where they have a word for almost everything, new words every day.
Uses two- or three- words sentences.
Speech is understood by familiar listeners most of the time.
Often asks for or directs attention to objects by labeling them.
Asks “why?” but may not be able to answer (**asking questions comes far before being able to answer them!!)
May stutter on words or sounds (this is normal unless it distresses the child)
3-4 years
Will respond when called from another room.
Can talk about familiar activities that happened at school or at friends’ homes while the listener was not present. Uses about 4 sentences at a time. (Not yet a full adult-like narrative, but making progress.)
People outside of the family understand child’s speech.
Answers simple “who?”, “what?”, and “where?” questions.
Asks “when?” and “how?” questions.
Understands simple meta-linguistic structures such as rhymes (i.e. “hat-cat”)
Uses pronouns, such as I, you, me, we, or they
Uses some plural words, like toys, birds, and buses (may overgeneralize plural or past tense “
Sentences have 4 or more words.
Usually has outgrown stuttering behaviors.
4-5 years
Understands sequencing words like first, next, and last.
Understands words for time, like yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Follows 3-4 step directions, like “Put your pajamas on, brush your teeth, and then pick out a book.”
Says all speech sounds in words. May still make mistakes on sounds that are harder to say, like l, s, r, v, z, ch, sh, th. **Mistakes on /r/ are common until 7 years of age
Uses sentences that have more than one verb.
With adult support can construct a short narrative about something the listener is not familiar with (i.e. “What happened in the movie?”)
Understands that they must change their language depending on the listener and place. May use short sentences with younger children or talk louder outside than inside.
Do an outline, whatever way works best. Get yourself out of the word soup and know where the story is headed.
Conflicts and obstacles. Hurt the protagonist, put things in their way, this keeps the story interesting. An easy journey makes the story boring and boring is hard to write.
Change the POV. Sometimes all it takes to untangle a knotted story is to look at it through different eyes, be it through the sidekick, the antagonist, a minor character, whatever.
Know the characters. You can’t write a story if the characters are strangers to you. Know their likes, dislikes, fears, and most importantly, their motivation. This makes the path clearer.
Fill in holes. Writing doesn’t have to be linear; you can always go back and fill in plotholes, and add content and context.
Have flashbacks, hallucinations, dream sequences or foreshadowing events. These stir the story up, deviations from the expected course add a feeling of urgency and uncertainty to the narrative.
Introduce a new mystery. If there’s something that just doesn’t add up, a big question mark, the story becomes more compelling. Beware: this can also cause you to sink further into the mire.
Take something from your protagonist. A weapon, asset, ally or loved one. Force him to operate without it, it can reinvigorate a stale story.
Twists and betrayal. Maybe someone isn’t who they say they are or the protagonist is betrayed by someone he thought he could trust. This can shake the story up and get it rolling again.
Secrets. If someone has a deep, dark secret that they’re forced to lie about, it’s a good way to stir up some fresh conflict. New lies to cover up the old ones, the secret being revealed, and all the resulting chaos.
Kill someone. Make a character death that is productive to the plot, but not “just because”. If done well, it affects all the characters, stirs up the story and gets it moving.
Ill-advised character actions. Tension is created when a character we love does something we hate. Identify the thing the readers don’t want to happen, then engineer it so it happens worse than they imagined.
Create cliff-hangers. Keep the readers’ attention by putting the characters into new problems and make them wait for you to write your way out of it. This challenge can really bring out your creativity.
Raise the stakes. Make the consequences of failure worse, make the journey harder. Suddenly the protagonist’s goal is more than he expected, or he has to make an important choice.
Make the hero active. You can’t always wait for external influences on the characters, sometimes you have to make the hero take actions himself. Not necessarily to be successful, but active and complicit in the narrative.
Different threat levels. Make the conflicts on a physical level (“I’m about to be killed by a demon”), an emotional level (“But that demon was my true love”) and a philosophical level (“If I’m forced to kill my true love before they kill me, how can love ever succeed in the face of evil?”).
Figure out an ending. If you know where the story is going to end, it helps get the ball rolling towards that end, even if it’s not the same ending that you actually end up writing.
What if? What if the hero kills the antagonist now, gets captured, or goes insane? When you write down different questions like these, the answer to how to continue the story will present itself.
Start fresh or skip ahead. Delete the last five thousand words and try again. It’s terrifying at first, but frees you up for a fresh start to find a proper path. Or you can skip the part that’s putting you on edge – forget about that fidgety crap, you can do it later – and write the next scene. Whatever was in-between will come with time.
Richard Siken… Richard Fucking Siken. You asked RICHARD SIKEN if his poems were inspired by BUDDIE. Gay men do not exist in people’s heads except as props huh?
Gonna be completely honest if I got this kind of feedback from one of the world’s most famous gay poets, I’d just scrub my entire online presence and start from scratch.
she was dead silent on the drive home, but that was okay. sometimes, after band practice, she was just out of words. it was a short drive to her house. the only part where it actually felt weird was after i pulled up her parent’s driveway.
after that, the silence stretched so far it smeared and left a weird residue. she kept looking at the car door like she wanted to leave, so i looked at the door too, then she looked at me, and i looked at her, and my first thought was that she was going to tell me that the door was stuck. i was used to that car always doing some damn thing. it was the car me and all my siblings had learned to drive in, and it was really beat to hell. there were dents all over the body, which we’d unsuccessfully tried fixing up with spackle. it had looked nice for maybe a week, but then the sun wrecked it - the spackle cracked up like the mud on the bottom of a dry riverbed and turned a sort of off yellow-white that made the car looked like it had been molded out of chicken shit. it also had a bullet hole it through the cabin that whistled like a toothless old man whenever the car went above 40, so loud it could drown out the radio, and a cabin that smelled so strongly of bugspray that even the arizona summer we drove everywhere we could with the windows down.
(if you have kids one day, you will maybe, possibly, begin to understand how much i loved that car.)
anyway, i was thinking about what else could possibly be wrong with the chickenshitmobile, and she just kept looking at me, and then i wondered if there was something on my face, and she just kept looking at me, and then the penny dropped and i realized she was trying to work up the nerve to break up with me.
now, i’d seen her work up the nerve to do things like this before – it could take quite a while. and knowing it was about to happen made the waiting immediately unbearable.
so i said hey.
and she looked at me, very startled, and said hey back real small. like she’d been caught. and in a way, i suppose she had.
and i said it’s okay. you can just say it. i’ll be okay.
i’m always okay.
and she said: i’m really sorry.
i loved her, you know? it was highschool, but teenagers are capable of love. the way people love changes over time just as much as the way they stand, or the way they talk, but things don’t stop existing just because they're different. opposite really – a thing only stops changing when it's fully gone.
and i said, nothing to be sorry for, and i meant it. she looked a little relived, and i was happy to give her that peace. then she left. i watched her make it through the front door, because that was just habit at that point, and then i sat there a while afterwards, checking how i felt. and the answer was not good, but good enough to make it home. good enough to limp on.
so i put my car in reverse, took my last look goodbye, and immediately backed into her neighbor’s car.
crunch.
air bags didn't go off, which was good. i left a decent dent in the bumper of the other car. genuinely couldn’t tell if i did anything to my car – anything wrong with it just kind of blended together into the general ecosystem of hand mottled, sun cracked, chickenshit spackle.
i checked my glove box, and my car insurance info was, of course, out of date. my phone was dead too. as a teenager, my phone was less my lifeline to my friends, and more my tether to my parents, so i wasn’t particularly conscious of keeping it charged. both my fault.
i sat there a few minutes, trying to think of the best way to handle things, and there was only one answer i could think of, and i hated that answer, so i spent a few more minutes trying and failing to think of a better one, and then a few more coming to peace with what had to be done.
then i went back to knock on my now ex’s front door.
her dad opened, which i was very relieved over, even if he seemed less than thrilled. he looked me over, and in a firm, but slightly apologetic way said: she does not want to see you right now.
(i think he assumed i was going to try and talk her out of the break up?)
and i said not here for her. i just backed into your neighbor’s car, and i need to call my dad, but my phone’s dead. could i borrow yours?
and he looked at me, then back at his neighbors car, which sure enough was dented, then he looked at the chickenshitmobile, and if there was something wrong with it, it just kind of blended into the general Wrongness of the car, then back to me, and i could see him imagining the last ten minutes from my pov: getting broken up with, backing into a car, having to walk up to your exes door and borrow a phone, calling my dad to tell him that i just reversed into someone.
and his expression shifted from stern and apologetic to truly sad, which felt more kind that i deserved. things only got here because i kept fucking up - forgot to look behind me, forgot to replace the insurance forms, forgot to charge my phone. it was my mess, but his sympathy meant the world to me. i probably would’ve cried if he said sorry, or patted me on the back or called me sport, but instead he said
stay out here – i’ll bring you a phone.
and then he left.
i found a nice spot on the lawn in the shade under a sycamore, then settled into his grass.i was trying not to freak out, and was doing an okay job. he came out a minute or so later, not just with a phone, but a juicebox and a jar of green olives, which really threw a wrench in the whole try not to cry thing. soon as i saw those, a few tears squoze out. i was still hoping i could pass them off as Manly Tears but then he told me that he’d gotten the olives a few weeks before and had been meaning to hand them off to me, and that this was his last chance for that. then i made a sound like a horse drowning in a bog, and he patted my back pretty rough, four solid thumps, like he wasn't sure if i was crying or choking on an olive, and was trying to cover both bases at once.
then he went back inside, and i made a few more bog horse noises while finishing off the rest of the entire jar of green olives, and then i called my dad.
he was about ten minutes away that day, and luckily was home. he drove over, and we went to the neighbor’s house, and from there things actually went quite nice. the neighbor was a retired man who actually said he could fix the dent himself, no need for insurance. he said he appreciated that i didn't just drive off, and i said i was really sorry about his car, and he said he was really sorry about my car, and then he gestured to the chickenshitmobile and i laughed because it really was a disaster on wheels.
then we left.
i thought we were going to head straight home, but instead we went to a gas station, and we both got several slim jims that we folded into thick enough coils that we could put them on a hotdog bun because the growing up mormon equivalent of having a sad brewski with your dad is just choosing to make bad decisions sober. then he took me to the canals and we watched the sun turn all orange and pink, and he looked over at me and said:
brains are good at remembering bad days. so you gotta make sure that a bad day has a good part in in, so you can remember that too. remember that when you have a kid. try to do a good job on days like that - they're going to be a big part of how they remember you.
and then he gave me a big hug and said he was never going to eat another slim jim again.
---
the year after that i went to college, which kicked my butt in new and exciting ways. and on a lot of those bad days, after a test that went sour, or a faux paus that was particularly embarrassing, or some other hardship of my new adult life, i’d stop by the gas station and pick up leathery, half jerkied hotdog before heading to the canals to watch the sun set. i’d take a bite and imagine my dad next to me, grimacing through the slim-jim wad, asking what good thing i was going use that time to remember.
first incidence of good writing advice i've seen in 10+ years on this platform and it's in the notes of a mustelid wreaking absolute havoc in a german grocery store
working full time is terrible why do we just accept that having 8 days off a month is normal and okay........ being alive could be cool but we waste it at our JOBS.... sorry i’m just heated about capitalism again i’ll be fine
not to be dramatic but the amount of people commenting on this post that I should stop whining and be grateful for having two days off a week when they only get one or none is...... literally proving my point that we’re all brainwashed ghfjhddjfk... thats like if someone cut off your arms and then only cut off one of mine, you focus on how much worse you have it instead of the fact that we’re still both fucking bleeding out
i didn’t see around a lot of indications about this, so i decide of making some short, direct and usefull indication based even on my experience. (feel free to add tips)
Why create a religion for my world?:
Religion is a big part of every culture that can influence the daylife of larg group of people so it’s important to define it if present in your world. The other thing is that is a good way for worldbuild, you can define the life of people, the way cities are built and the way of think of the population.
Where to start:
- Polytheist or monotheist: choose the type of religion that fit better your world, it’s important because polytheist and monotheist religions have some differencesthat have relevance when you write. (not only the number of gods but for example how gods are workship or how are build temples)
-Read about real religions: this is a good base and you are going to see a lot of aspect that you have to take count of. Reinterpret is a way of creating a new one, so you can take prinples for example.
-Decide the characteristics of the God/s: After have a clear idea of what you want to do (example: religion similar to Romans’ one or a mix between Egyptians and Greeks gods) you have to put cleare some poits:
Is you god/s good or bad? : so how is see by humans, what is famous for, which is their temper, is revengeful or their forgive, if it is feared or loved or both. If you create more gods then you can decide to make them represent somenthing.
Did your god/s in contact with humans?: The relationship with humans; so if they are between humans and if humans know about it. In this case when and how they do so. If they don’t meet humans you have to decide if they communicate with them and how.
Physical appearance: if they had a physical appearance describe it or describe characteristics that the god have when in physical form.
- Worship: While the poits before where about the poit of wiew of the God/s, you have always to define how humans venerate God/s. Some points:
Is all the population religious?: This is important because there you can determine the relationship between who belive and who not or between different religions. Or say if is imposed.
What role have religion in the State: So if religion have a political power, how much power have and if is used for good or for bad.
What are the religion institutions: There is a leader of the cult, what are the offices and how they are built, how much the istitutions influence the population.
Where: where is workshiop God/s (temples or churches or at home)
HOW: this is probably the most important aspect but the more compless too. Here you need to define how people practice their own religion so if they only pray or do make sacrifices, if there are rules that influence the daily life, if there are festivity or particular ritual, if there are simbols that are workship.
The Name: The name can be 1 word or more but it’s better if not more than 4 because it have to be somenthing that affect. It can be a word or a period that describe a foundamental principe of your new religion, or somenting like “The believe of X” .
A thing that is always good to keep in mind is that religions tend to give a sense of belonging to the believers. This can be use in a lot of way and is a important specially if your new religion have political power or a big influence on population.
I hope it help someone. (feel free to add tips)
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