JB Hofstee

My name is JB Hofstee, and I am a writer working on my first novels. This is my dump to find resources and post some ideas on characters and world building. Do not steal any of my characters or world building, but you're more than welcome to engage and ask questions.

[jbhofstee]

Hello! This is a writeblr for an aspiring author! I go by JB Hofstee and I prefer to write in supernatural and fantasy genres at this present time. I have two projects currently simmering on a back burner while I attend college. Their summaries and primary characters are going to be under readmore for anyone curious!

PSI Files - Multi Book Supernatural series

Clarity Fergus always knew she was different. And she wanted to use that to help people—both living and dead. After an incident in her hometown, she finds herself involved in the Bureau, an international organization which keeps the balance between the natural and the supernatural. Clarity joins the organization and works to solve cases around the globe of supernatural and natural beings disrupting the balance.

Main Characters

Clarity Fergus - A young American human woman with spiritual powers, sense auras, and the ability to speak with the dead. Having suffered high social anxiety, Clarity learns how to cope and grow into herself once she finds herself working for the Bureau.

Gershom Black - the enigmatic detective who is one of Clarity’s trainers. Often the serious and more balanced view, his severe outlook covers up a deeply caring personality and deeply buried guilt. His words oftentimes contradict his actions, almost as if he naturally tends to walk a line.

Dáithí Murty - a water type of Fae from Scotland called a tangie, Daithi is the magical and tech of the trio, a forced detective for the Bureau and Clarity’s other trainer. He acts more lighthearted and is a bit flirtatious, but beneath that lies a deep sea hiding away his true personality and intentions.

Supporting Characters

Todd Anderson - a dhampir detective for the Bureau and the former apprentice for Gershom and Dáithí, Todd is a quiet and reserved type, preferring to think before he speaks or acts. Very observant, he sometimes states his observations out loud, though, which can cause some discomfort. He has good intentions, but he tries to keep people at arm’s length due to fear of his nature.

Gwen Collins - a half-fae, half-human young woman who works as an archivist for the Bureau. Very friendly and bubbly, she often is seen sporting a new shade of pastel hair each week. Gwen is on the backend, getting information from the archives for detectives, frequently for Gershom’s team.

Robert Faeway - The stoic Deputy Director of the Bureau, Faeway was once human, until necromancy and science were used on him to bring him back, turning him effectively immortal and super-human. a turn of the 1900s century man, Faeway was far more scientific and less spiritual and this still translates into much of his mannerisms to this day.

Lady Emilie - a being who creates and protects portals, she’s often found at the entrances to the Bureau, typically in what’s designed as an antique shop. A very knowledgeable woman in her own right, she has no issue moving pieces how she pleases without telling anyone. Her goal is to help maintain the balance so the threads don’t converge and collapse, though, so there is little malevolence to expect.

Piotr Stolarz - a trickster poltergiest from Poland who can’t seem to cross over. Even as he took revenge against those who wiped out him and his family, he can’t seem to find the reason why, starting to extend his punishment to members of their families until he’s tracked down by the Bureau. He eventually becomes an ally and is considered an anomaly due to his inability to move on.

The Stonekeeper - A Fantasy Trilogy

A banished darkness threatens to return from the Wastes. Yet the kingdom is in shambles after the murder of the king, his wife, and their unborn child. The barrier keeping the dark prince in the Wastes is weakening and the only way to strengthen it is to find the royal family’s ancient elven stone. Which is in the possession of a young woman far from the capital, in a village of no consequence...

Main Characters

Lucasta Henda - Working on her mothers’ farm and training to be on the village guard, Lucasta owns a golden stone necklace she always wears. Level headed and strong willed, Lucasta is not the kind to take nonsense and does not tolerate injustice. Despite her desire to remain in her village to protect it, she knows she must leave it to keep it safe.

Val Guiscard Thankarat Amadeus - a disgraced mage, labelled a warlock, Val values his freedom above all else. The wealth of his family couldn’t tempt him to remain in a gilded cage, so he left. He reunited with his elder brother, though, to help him with a mission to guarantee the kingdom’s freedom. After the murder of his brother, Val must continue it on his own.

Mira Loch - Lucasta’s childhood friend, highly knowledgeable from her connections with her monk uncle who would send her books as presents, she also serves on the village’s guard as an archer and healer. Mira is not the type to shy away from sharing her knowledge and is not fond of being patronized. She refused to be left behind when Lucasta left the village.

Lian Wu - Her family having fled civil war in her homeland, Lian Wu was found to be slightly gifted with magic, not enough to be a mage, but enough to be trained to be a guard for a mage so they would not fall to the dark arts. Lian was paired with Val’s elder brother to be his guard and he escaped her watchful eye for his mission. Frustrated, Lian managed to track down Val, Lucasta, and Mira, learning the truth and joining them on their quest.

Pyrrus Aneirin Maddoc - a nobleman, Pyrrus is known to be a highly honorable man and his family to be fiercely loyal to the royal line. Pyrrus offers his allegiance to Lucasta and her group, offering to travel with them to assure their legitimacy in the capital. Trained as a warrior and a politician, his skills and reputation prove to be invaluable.

Sciéno - An ancient elf who was awakened by the dark prince’s invasion of the temple he and the other sentinels were sleeping in, only to be awakened to guard. He was the only one to awaken and had to destroy the room his comrades were in to keep their secrets safe. After running into Lucasta and her group in an ancient ruin, he reluctantly agrees to assist them, if only to keep the dark prince from gaining all the ancient stones to have the powers they possessed.

Prince Dubhan - Dubbed the dark prince, Dubhan is the son of the Emperor from centuries ago who ruled over the kingdom with an iron fist, bleeding the people dry for his dark arts. The Emperor was defeated by the ancestor of the royal line and he and his son banished to the Wastes. While in the Wastes, Dubhan learned how to consume the energy of other beings, especially mages, to strengthen his own power and killed his father in this manner to begin his return and take back what he believes is rightfully his.

[clusterbuck]

someone on twitter is trying to claim that use of an em-dash is an indication of AI-generated writing because it’s “relatively rare” for actual humans to use it. skill issue

[exhuastedpigeon]

I can admit this is a little out of hand, but I promise AI didn't write my 150k fic 😂

[fuctacles]

Reblog if you're a human that uses em-dashes

[mortalityplays]

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

[teaandcrowns]

Preserving previous' tags because firelxdykatara also makes excellent additions in them

[jbhofstee]

I enjoyed Superman (2025) except for one thing: the translation of the rest of Jor-el and Lara's message.

How did they find a linguist with the skills to accurately translate an alien language that was wiped out 30 years ago and there's only a handful of native speakers left?? Is there a xenolinguist or something??? Even then, it would be a newer field and would be rife with inaccuracies

The trope of demonization of one set of parents to elevate another set of parents for an adopted character. It's a pointless stupid trope and can damage public opinion about adoption a lot. Superman has normally had 4 loving, kind, supportive parents so why change that?

Tied in with above; demonizing others. Which plays into anti immigrant views. Also, in this instance due to the original writers of Superman, could possibly be interpreted as antisemitic. Superman, like his original writers, always balanced being both Kryptonian and Earthling (some writers less so but it's meant to be a thing). This relates to a lot of Americans, who say they're Irish American, Mexican American, Chinese American, and so on and so forth. To create a reason to demonize the "other" to have Clark fully embrace just being an Earthling is damaging to his legacy, history, and what he means to a lot of immigrant families.

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

pro censorship people are always like “actually I’m living proof that books can be really harmful to kids! when I was a child I read a book that upset me and of course I couldn’t talk to my parents about it because they would throw rocks at me whenever I confessed to reading anything but the Bible, so as you can see, that book was the source of my trauma and warped ideas about right and wrong”

[jbhofstee]

I might have a slight hyperfixation with world building

[jbhofstee]

okay maybe more than "slight"

[jbhofstee]

I might have a slight hyperfixation with world building

[jbhofstee]

Currently working on a map for my fantasy story to make it feel more solid to me to work on.

Used Inkarnate to get the basic geography then started editing in the countries myself. it's still rough but it's getting there. Due to the history of the continent, I wanted it to a mesh of languages of countries that evolved from people escaping a calamity and then carving out their own lands over millennia.

Currently working on city names and populations now.

[genlossranbooautism]

You use "arospec people can still date and feel romantic attraction " as an excuse to ship cannon aro characters , I use it as justification to headcannon characters who canonically feel romantic attraction as arospec , we are not the same

[anexperimentallife]

[pyrrhicraven]

This looks about right 🤣😅

[jbhofstee]

the realization your writing is a mix of British and American English due to the books you read so you die inside every time you go through spellcheck.

[amuseoffyre]

Quick thing for people writing Scottish characters - dinnae, didnae and disnae are not interchangeable.

Dinnae - do not/don’t

Didnae - did not/didn’t

Disnae - does not/doesn’t

“I dinnae want to do that” means “I don’t want to do that.”

“They didnae find the loot” means “they didn’t find the loot”

“He disnae ken what he’s talking about” means “he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

What I’ve noticed is that there is a tendency for non-Scots writers to always use “dinnae” regardless of context. I’m assuming that’s because it’s a quick shorthand to show the character is Scottish for the audience which is pretty much… you know. How media works.

Unfortunately, every time I hit a sentence like “he dinnae want it”, my brain goes ERROR ERROR ABORT OUT OF CHEESE.

I doesn’t like it.

[jewfrogs]

this is so mean but sometimes i see published writing and suddenly no longer feel insecure about my own writing ability. like well okay that got published so im guessing i dont have much to worry about

[naamahdarling]

I have a friend who is an editor, and gets submissions of mostly poetry and short stories.

I have had a glimpse into her slush pile, and let me tell you, the contents were unbelievable and immediately disabused me of the notion that reading through submissions is in any way glamorous. People have the nerve to submit unhinged paranoid ramblings, fetish porn, and a seemingly endless supply of poems about masturbation.

I no longer feel like my fiction is somehow an imposition on the people who read it. It may be forgettable, but at least it isn’t typeset to look like sperm.

Do not be afraid to submit your work. Your competition is not only worse than you think, it’s worse than you ever imagined.

[silverhand]

Do these three things to get to the top of the slush pile:

The place has a style sheet. Use it. They say they want your MS in 16.5 point Papyrus italic with 0.8 inch margins all around, guess what you’re doing before you send it off? Save As, reformat, send it. In the absence of a specific guide: Courier 12 pt (Times New Roman if you must), double spaced, align left, tab 0.5 at each new paragraph.

Check the word count. Don’t submit novellas to 2500 word short story venues. BTW, you format the MS in that old style above because the question isn’t literal words. Courier 12pt double spaced gives you 250 words per page for typesetting purposes. 2500 words is 10 ms pages, 5000 is 20 pages, etc.

Don’t send your romance to Analog or your war story to Harlequin. If it’s a cross-genre story, be sure there’s enough of what the publication is focused on to interest them, but breaking through is hard if that’s not something they usually do.

That’s basically what every single editors’ panel at every con I’ve ever been to has boiled down to. And invariably, someone tries to get up and argue with them, not realizing it’s not a discussion.

Bonus tip: Don’t be in any way cute in your cover letter. Just the facts/Luke Skywalker’s message to Jabba the Hut in ROTJ.

Enclosed/attached is my story <Title> for your publication <Magazine>. It is x (rounded to the nearest 500) words. I can be reached at <email> (that you check regularly and isn’t likely to dump things into spam) and <phone>.

(If submitting a hard copy: The manuscript is disposable. A SASE is enclosed for your response./A SASE is included for return of the manuscript and your response.)

Thank you for your consideration.

If submitting a novella length piece or greater, a brief and complete summary is appropriate.

In the midst of an interstellar revolt against an evil galactic Empire, vital weapon plans fall into the hands of a farm boy on the edges of the galaxy. With the help of an aging warrior from the Old Republic, and a smuggler with a dark past and his imposing alien copilot, the four set out to deliver them to the rebel forces but are instead flung into a rescue mission to save the beautiful princess who stole the plans as worlds are destroyed by the might of the Empire’s weapon, the Death Star.

Captured by the Death Star on route to deliver the plans, they manage to escape the base with the princess, the old warrior sacrificing himself to make this possible. As the Death Star approaches the rebel base, they use the captured plans to stage a desperate final stand. In a fierce space battle of single-pilot ships over the surface of the moon-sized weapon, the farm boy manages to make the critical shot with an unexpected assist from the smuggler, destroying it.

Never under any circumstance put a cliffhanger into a query letter summary. There is no faster way to get the entire MS binned than doing that.

Happy writing.

PS “Top of the slush pile” means into the top 25% of manuscripts received. Three quarters of the submissions don’t take the trouble to do even those three basic steps.

Now, that still means 25/100 submissions or 250/1000 submissions, but it still improves your odds and forms the basis for starting a relationship with the publisher for the next piece you send them.

PPS This is obviously about prose. Poetry certainly has its own submission rules, and I know none of them. If you’re writing poetry, find out what they are.

[carriereedwrites]

People… please listen. This is when your art crosses the line of business. You want to be talen seriously? You want to get that sweet, sweet pub contract? Then, DON’T SKIP THESE STEPS.

[jbhofstee]

Dear Dracula Daily people,

You should read The Vampyr by John William Polidori. It was written by Lord Byron's physician at the same gathering that Frankenstein was written. Also read Carmilla. Varney the vampire from penny dreadfuls is questionable, in my opinion, though.

Signed,

A 19th century vampire lit nerd

[jbhofstee]

I saw a list of "problematic content" to watch out for in Dracula daily and I have two thoughts

1) it's a horror novel from late 1800s victorian England borrowing legends from Eastern Europe, what else are you expecting

2) I see they completely ignored the metaphorical sexual assault of Mina in their list

[apocryphics]

the sea, the sea

[adarmistead]

Brand new to writeblr and looking for blogs to follow and engage with as I draft my first series!

Especially excited to interact with:

Fellow lgbtq+ creators

Fantasy, historical fiction, and romance authors and readers

I follow from midnightprelude. ❤️