l ann dulin

writer. harsh armchair tv critic. filled with opinions about gender and narrative theory. occasional discussion about television story.

[lanndulin]

New Fiction up at Eckleburg

The mechanism by which you reveal yourself, by which you are revealed -- it's blood and bone, it's black feathers and red ribbon.

Blackbird Baby, up now at Eckleburg.

[thewordriven]

11 Plot Pitfalls – And How to Rescue Your Story From Them

Source: [X] By: Laura Whitcomb

We’ve all been there: basking in the glow of a finished manuscript, only to read it over and realize something is wrong with the plot. Finding ourselves unable to identify the problem only makes matters worse. But take heart! Here are some common plot gaffes and sensible ways to revise without starting over.

1. THE PLOT ISN’T ORIGINAL ENOUGH. Go through your pages and highlight anything that you’ve read in another book or seen in a movie. In the margin, write where you’ve seen it. Then list these sections and make a note for each one about how it could differ from its lookalike. A mental patient escapes by throwing something heavy through a window. Too much like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? Instead, the patient walks out with a visiting grandma after convincing her he’s an old friend. Quick notes like these can help you detach from unintentional imitation.

2. READERS ALWAYS KNOW EXACTLY WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN. This may be because you’ve chosen a plot point that’s overused, or because you keep giving away the answer in advance. Readers know the villain is going to whip out a picture of the hero’s son and blackmail her by pretending to have kidnapped the little boy because you showed the villain taking pictures of the child and driving away from the schoolyard. You could be less obvious by only showing the antagonist sitting in the car watching the boy on the playground, and no more. 3. THE PLOT IS BORING. Take each page and imagine what different writers might do with the same plot. Choose extreme examples. Would a comedy writer have the cab driver and the villain coincidentally be childhood friends with unfinished business? Would the mystery writer have the taxi pass a clue on a street corner that makes a new connection for the hero? Would the horror writer have the cab driver channel a ghost? Or, imagine the most surprising thing that could happen in a given scene. It doesn’t matter if these ideas don’t fit your story. You’re not going to use them. But often, after thinking of wild ideas to make the story more interesting, you begin to come up with workable ones that are just as stimulating, but better suited to your book. 4. THE PLOT IS ALL ACTION AND THE FRENZIED PACE NUMBS READERS. Let them breathe. Give the readers a little downtime now and then in your action story. Look back at your favorite action novels. Notice the conversations, summarized passages, meals, introspection and releases of emotions that are set in between the car chases, shootouts and confrontations. List them. Then give the readers a chance to breathe in your own manuscript. Find the dramatic respites that come from your characters’ needs, flaws and strengths.

5. THE PLOT IS TOO COMPLEX. Often, a complex plot can be trimmed into a sleek one by cutting out some steps. Does your protagonist have to visit her father in the hospital twice—once to bring him flowers and talk about Mom, and then again to find he has taken a turn for the worse? Couldn’t he take a turn for the worse while she’s still there the first time? Does your villain need to have three motives for revenge? Would one or two be interesting enough? To find the messiness in your overly complex story, summarize it out loud to yourself. When a section takes too long to explain, make a note. When you find yourself saying, “Oh, wait, I forgot to mention that …” you’re probably in need of a plot trim. When deciding whether or not to simplify the plot, ask yourself over and over again,

“Why does she do that? Why didn’t she just do this?” Making a plot less complicated doesn’t have to make it less clever. 6. THE PLOT IS TOO SHALLOW. Sometimes as writers we get caught up in the action. The symbolism. The metaphors. The witty dialogue. The great character names. The slick descriptions. Sometimes we ride these skills over the surface of the story and forget what’s really important. If you or your first readers (friends, family, agent) complain that the novel feels insubstantial, step back and ask yourself these questions: Why am I bothering to write this story? Why does the outcome matter to the characters? How do the characters change? How did my favorite book affect me the first time I read it?

7. SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF IS DESTROYED. Readers need to buy into the reality put forward by what they’re reading. You may go too far with a plot point or not far enough with preparing your audience for that plot point. If something that sounded right when you outlined it is coming off as farfetched even to you, look back at the stepping-stones that led to the event. If your murderer turns over a new leaf at the end of act two, make sure you’ve given her reason to.

8. TOO MANY SUBPLOTS MAKE THE PLOT OVERLY COMPLEX. If you start to feel weighed down by your numerous storylines, start cutting them. List the subplots (shopkeeper with a crush, neighbor’s dog that tears up the garden, accountant who threatens to quit every day), and then list under each title all the ways it’s necessary.

Only subplots that are so vital that you could not remove them without destroying your novel get to stick around. Be bold. 9. THE SEQUENCE IS ILLOGICAL. Sometimes the sequence set down in an outline starts to show its true colors when you’re writing the chapters. If you feel the order of scenes or events in your story is off, list each scene on a separate index card and, in red ink, write a question mark on every card that doesn’t feel right where it is in the story. Shuffle the cards. I’m not kidding. Mix them up completely. Lay them out again in the order you think they might work best, giving special attention to those with red question marks.

Something about these scenes tricked you the first time. This time, really look closely at the proper place for those tricky bits.

10. THE PREMISE ISN’T COMPELLING. If you fear that a mediocre premise is your holdup, take out a sheet of paper. Make a list on the left-hand side of everything that’s dodgy in your present premise. Then write a list down the right-hand side about all the things that work great in the premise of a similar favorite book, play or movie.

See where you might make the stakes higher, the characters more emotional, the setting more a part of the overall plot. Remember: The premise should make your readers curious.

11. THE CONCLUSION IS UNSATISFYING. Once again, write a list of what bothers you about your conclusion, and next to it, a list of what worked great about the end of your favorite novel. Do you have to create more suspense before you give the readers what they’ve been craving? Do you need to make the answer to the mystery clearer? Does the villain need to be angrier, or perhaps show remorse? Unsatisfying conclusions are usually lacking something. Whatever that is, make your story’s ending have more of it.

[lanndulin]

October 20th, 2016 @ Sky Stage

Hey guys, check it out. On October 20th, I’ll be reading from my novel in progress, Road Music, at Sky Stage in Frederick, MD. Thanks to the Frederick Arts Council and the Dr TJ Eckleburg Review for having me and the rest of the wonderful readers. If you’re in the area, check out the readings happening at this cool venue every Thursday for a while, from 7-9.

There’s a memory.

You are seven and four, and you have a blanket tied up into a ball with all of your worldly belongings: three GI Joes, a brown round teddy bear with slick shiny fur, seven horse figurines, a large gray cylinder magnet, a sparkling lump of fool’s gold, a satchel of sea shells.

You are walking on the road together, following the double yellow lines. On either side, grasses as tall as you are, flowerheads bobbing, bees drooping from cup to cup.  You picnic just off the road, you gather the little white and yellow flowers into your hands and you set them between you and Jay.  You both sit cross-legged and you feast.  Sour tang, juice from the seed pods, a flower cup for each of you filled with water.  You have been walking for a year on the road, you have a year left to walk.   It doesn’t seem to bother you. --Road Music

[lv0009]

it is so upsetting listening to so many males talk about all of the times they have gone on road trips alone and slept in their cars alone or on the side of the road, or travelled overseas alone and slept on the floor of strangers homes or in parks or at hostels, and they appear to have such freedom in that they are able to be alone in ways that females, unfortunately, cannot. and there is an ignorance surrounding this in that these boys never seem to comprehend just how fortunate they are that strange people and unfamiliar places and the dark of night are not their enemies but rather exciting, promising things.

[1or3]

“Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night…”

― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

[lindsaybottos]

honestly so important, i even have part this journal entry tattooed on me its so important

[maggie-stiefvater-deactivated20]

Ok, fine, fine, fine.

dreaminginblue asked “Is Ronan’s dream thievery a reflection of your own artistic thievery?” and I merely replied, “yes.” 

Which, yes. The short answer is yes.

The long answer is yes, because—

Yes, because he discovers he can perfectly copy things he’s seen in real life —thievery.

Yes, because it takes tedious practice, and someone showing him how.

Yes, because it takes a lot of work to create a perfect copy, but it turns out there is a level beyond that that takes even more work: creating something that wasn’t there before. Not a copy, something unique.

Yes, because this ability can also be horrific: when you write, or paint, or make music, it’s a reflection of what’s in your head, and that is not always roses.

Yes, because making art is all wrapped up in who we are, and how well we know ourselves, and whether or not we love ourselves.

Yes, because the things we create have the power to support us or to destroy us. Our art reflects our questions about our lives and sometimes that means our created world is more beautiful than the world that we currently live in, and sometimes that means our created world is a dying earth.

Yes, because writing and painting and music are about sexuality and philosophy and theology and humor and desire and fear and the things that make us tick. You can create art without acknowledging these parts of yourself, but it’s never, ever going to be as impressive as the work you do when you stop lying to yourself and hiding yourself from others.

Yes, because when you discover that you can make anything, you begin to ask yourself the questions — am I supposed to make things that change the world? Or am I supposed to make things that change me? What if what I make would hurt someone else? Do I have to make anything at all? 

Yes, because every creative person in the world has had that moment that they see the world differently from the others around them, and asked themselves, “am I the only one?”

Yes, because yes.

urs,

Stiefvater

[archatlas]

Between the Trees Ellie Davies

What is a forest?  Is it the trees or the space that exists between them?

‘A forest is what exists between its trees, between its dense undergrowth and its clearings, between all its life cycles and their different time-scales…A forest is a meeting place between those who enter it and something unnameable and attendant…  Something intangible and within touching distance.  Neither silent nor audible.*

These images explore the nature and meaning of ‘Forest’ by considering the experience of standing alone in the woods; the eerie and captivating sensation that time has slowed down and that the forest and everything within it exists in a different state.  Somehow set apart from our usual perception of linear time the wind drops, the air cools, all is quiet and still and the forest draws in.  To enter this other place is to accept a slowing of time and a shift in perception.

Read More

[lanndulin]

i would call you brother; i would call you sweet

[shannonhale]

No Boys Allowed: School visits as a woman writer

I’ve been doing school visits as part of my tour for PRINCESS ACADEMY: The Forgotten Sisters. All have been terrific—great kids, great librarians. But something happened at one I want to talk about. I’m not going to name the school or location because I don’t think it’s a problem with just one school; it’s just one example of a much wider problem.

This was a small-ish school, and I spoke to the 3-8 grades. It wasn’t until I was partway into my presentation that I realized that the back rows of the older grades were all girls.

Later a teacher told me, “The administration only gave permission to the middle school girls to leave class for your assembly. I have a boy student who is a huge fan of SPIRIT ANIMALS. I got special permission for him to come, but he was too embarrassed.”

"Because the administration had already shown that they believed my presentation would only be for girls?"

"Yes," she said.

I tried not to explode in front of the children.

Let’s be clear: I do not talk about “girl” stuff. I do not talk about body parts. I do not do a “Your Menstrual Cycle and You!” presentation. I talk about books and writing, reading, rejections and moving through them, how to come up with story ideas. But because I’m a woman, because some of my books have pictures of girls on the cover, because some of my books have “princess” in the title, I’m stamped as “for girls only.” However, the male writers who have boys on their covers speak to the entire school.

This has happened a few times before. I don’t believe it’s ever happened in an elementary school—just middle school or high school.

I remember one middle school 2-3 years ago that I was going to visit while on tour. I heard in advance that they planned to pull the girls out of class for my assembly but not the boys. I’d dealt with that in the past and didn’t want to be a part of perpetuating the myth that women only have things of interest to say to girls while men’s voices are universally important.  I told the publicist that this was something I wasn’t comfortable with and to please ask them to invite the boys as well as girls. I thought it was taken care of. When I got there, the administration told me with shrugs that they’d heard I didn’t want a segregated audience but that’s just how it was going to be. Should I have refused? Embarrassed the bookstore, let down the girls who had been looking forward to my visit? I did the presentation. But I felt sick to my stomach. Later I asked what other authors had visited. They’d had a male writer. For his assembly, both boys and girls had been invited.

I think most people reading this will agree that leaving the boys behind is wrong. And yet—when giving books to boys, how often do we offer ones that have girls as protagonists? (Princesses even!) And if we do, do we qualify it: “Even though it’s about a girl, I think you’ll like it.” Even though. We’re telling them subtly, if not explicitly, that books about girls aren’t for them. Even if a boy would never, ever like any book about any girl (highly unlikely) if we don’t at least offer some, we’re reinforcing the ideology.

I heard it a hundred times with Hunger Games: “Boys, even though this is about a girl, you’ll like it!” Even though. I never heard a single time, “Girls, even though Harry Potter is about a boy, you’ll like it!”

The belief that boys won’t like books with female protagonists, that they will refuse to read them, the shaming that happens (from peers, parents, teachers, often right in front of me) when they do, the idea that girls should read about and understand boys but that boys don’t have to read about girls, that boys aren’t expected to understand and empathize with the female population of the world….this belief directly leads to rape culture. To a culture that tells boys and men, it doesn’t matter how the girl feels, what she wants. You don’t have to wonder. She is here to please you. She is here to do what you want. No one expects you to have to empathize with girls and women. As far as you need be concerned, they have no interior life.

At this recent school visit, near the end I left time for questions. Not one student had a question. In 12 years and 200-300 presentations, I’ve never had that happen. So I filled in the last 5 minutes reading them the first few chapters of The Princess in Black, showing them slides of the illustrations. BTW I’ve never met a boy who didn’t like this book.

After the presentation, I signed books for the students who had pre-ordered my books (all girls), but one 3rd grade boy hung around.

"Did you want to ask her a question?" a teacher asked.

"Yes," he said nervously, "but not now. I’ll wait till everyone is gone."

Once the other students were gone, three adults still remained. He was still clearly uncomfortable that we weren’t alone but his question was also clearly important to him. So he leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “Do you have a copy of the black princess book?”

It broke my heart that he felt he had to whisper the question.

He wanted to read the rest of the book so badly and yet was so afraid what others would think of him. If he read a “girl” book. A book about a princess. Even a monster-fighting superhero ninja princess. He wasn’t born ashamed. We made him ashamed. Ashamed to be interested in a book about a girl. About a princess—the most “girlie” of girls.

I wish I’d had a copy of The Princess in Black to give him right then. The bookstore told him they were going to donate a copy to his library. I hope he’s brave enough to check it out. I hope he keeps reading. I hope he changes his own story. I hope all of us can change this story. I’m really rooting for a happy ending.

[chaosophia218]

Ancient Alphabets. Thedan Script - used extensively by Gardnerian Witches Runic Alphabets - they served for divinatory and ritual purposes, as well as the more practical use; there are three main types of Runes; Germanic, Scandinavian/Norse, and Anglo-Saxon and they each have any number of variations, depending on the region from which they originate  Celtic and Pictish - early Celts and their priests, the Druids, had their own form of alphabet known as “Ogam Bethluisnion”, which was an extremely simple alphabet used more for carving into wood and stone, than for general writing, while Pictish artwork was later adopted by the Celts, especially throughout Ireland Ceremonial Magick Alphabets - ”Passing the River”, ”Malachim” and ”Celestial” alphabets were used almost exclusively by ceremonial magicians

[darkbookworm13-deactivated20240]

Reblogging for future reference, I love learning how to write in these alphabets.

[lanndulin]

so now that it's paid for and everything, it feels official -- i'm going to the yale writer's conference in the summer and i'm so super psyched.  

so. super. psyched. 

[writingcareer]

'Dreams from the Witch House' Anthology Posts New Deadline - Pays 5 cents/word

Seasoned fiction writer Lynne Jamneck announced that she is editing an upcoming anthology called, Dreams from the Witch House, which Dark Regions Press will publish in 2015.

She is curating dark fiction stories written by women writers. The anthology will include diverse stories and viewpoints that embrace the axioms and motifs of Lovecraftian fiction, including the strange, the weird, and the eccentric.

Read More

[maggie-stiefvater-deactivated20]

I hope you don't mind me writing to you but you're a writer and you use tumblr, so we have at least 2 things in common. I'm scared people will read my work and won't like it, so my dream will be over. How do I get over this? I want my work to be read

You’re going to have to do two things.

1) realize that writing — nay, all creative endeavors — are not like a moon landing. It’s not like you have one shot, and if you don’t pull it off, you have destroyed your spacecraft on the surface of the moon and it’ll take more decades than you have left in your lifetime for taxpayers to buy you another spacecraft. If you fail in writing, you’ve failed once. Get up. Do it again. Wipe your nose if you have to, but for God’s sake. Get up. You’re getting grass stains on everything.

2) trust yourself. You don’t have to trust that you’re great now. You have to trust that you have the ability to learn how to be great. And a huge part of that learning process is figuring out that you get up and start moving again. And another part of that learning process is realizing that writing is a craft at its heart. Good news! Craft is learned, not granted.

Think of it this way: imagine that you, young and sprightly and full of verve, have decided to build a staircase. You invite your friends to use your staircase. You have done a terrible job, it turns out, and the staircase breaks and they all fall into a heap, getting grass stains everywhere. You have indeed failed at making the staircase do its job of not bucking people off. Does this mean that you, as a person, have no ability to build staircases? You have just not been granted the staircase-building genes? NO CHILD GO OUT THERE AND STUDY SOME MORE STAIRCASES. 

[maggie-stiefvater-deactivated20]

A Perfunctory Guide to Writers Looking for Publishers

I’m asked at least once a week how to get published. Once upon a time, this was a very straightforward answer:

1. Write a novel.

2. Write a query letter.

3. Send the query letter to agents or to editors.

4. Rinse and repeat until said agents and editors ask to see the rest.

5. Rinse and repeat until they see the rest and ask to buy it.

5. In the case of multiple offers, speak to all parties on the phone and see which one makes you feel like the prettiest pony. 

Here were things you did not do:

1. Pay to be published.

2. Pay your agent anything besides 15% of the sale price of your book and your royalties.

3. Pay for any of the costs associated with being published such as cover design, editing, printing, hiring of performing bears, etc.

4. Do anything other than write and be paid for writing.

But now there are many ways to be published. Self-publishing and small publishers no longer have the same stigma attached to them. It is no longer the most obvious thing to say: to get published, write a query letter and submit it to an agency or a publishing house, DONE.

Instead, you must ask yourself: what is my goal in publishing?

If your goal is to write a book that you hope will appear on the shelves of Barnes & Noble, CostCo, and supermarkets everywhere, you still need to follow the first set of steps. A traditional publisher is still your only way to get into all of those places. And if you really do have your eye on stands in supermarkets and Sam’s Club and airports, you not only need a traditional publisher, but you need a large traditional publisher of the sort that generally exists in New York and is called something like Little, Brown, or Scholastic, or Random House. You will also need an agent.

You will need, as I said before, to do all of the steps I first listed.

If your goal is to write a book that you’d like to see on shelves but are fine with those shelves being the ones in specialty stores or libraries or schools, a smaller traditional publisher might be a good option for you. This is especially true if you’ve written a less commercial book. (here is a good way to judge if something is commercial: can you imagine your mother, your hair dresser, your veterinarian, and your brother in law all reading it? if so, it is super commercial. Commercial =/= good. It merely means many people will pick it up). 

These smaller houses will carry the burden of editing and printing and marketing for you, but they won’t always have the clout to get your book into major stores. They are, however, often less competitive than the larger New York houses, and they will often give you more personal attention and promote your book for longer. You don’t always need an agent to submit to them either, though I recommend an agent if you’re pursuing a full-time career in writing.

But if your goal is only to be read, or to if you have a keen marketing mind and want to represent yourself, self-publishing is an emerging option. You’ll have all of the control, and there will be no rejection letters in your future. But you’ll also carry the entire burden of cover design, editing, printing, formatting for digital distribution and, most importantly, marketing and publicity. I was a self-representing artist, and success is possible, but it will look different than success at a traditional larger house, and it will ask different things from you. You will not, at this point, ever walk into a Sam’s Club and see a self-published title sitting on the table out front. It is very possible to be a writer without Sam’s Club. But it’s important to keep that in mind if a big commercial career is what you long for — the book on that table bears the logo of a large traditional publishing house.

A note: There are several companies that offer to help you with self/ digital-only publishing at the moment, but I’m not convinced of their usefulness at this point. I think it’s a little too soon to see how they’re anything but a middle man at this stage. My feelings are if you’re going to dive into the digital world, you should be doing it because you want the freedom and control in your own hands.

What it comes down to is that you need to be honest with what you need out of your publishing experience. Unhappiness comes from wrong-headed expectations and targeting the wrong house. If you long to see your book at O’Hare airport, you’re going to have a miserable experience self-publishing. If you want to publish a serial story in ten parts over two years, you’re going to have a hard time pitching it to a traditional house. Don’t expect a small house to suddenly change its stripes and drop a quarter million marketing budget on your novel.

DO YOUR RESEARCH.

Make a list of books and careers that you admire and would like to model, and then work backward to find out how those authors ended up where they were. And if something sounds too good to be true, it is. Consider suspect any option that seems like it doesn’t require rejection and work and practice and polish and scrabbling of your hands and teeth. This is the best job in the world, which means there are a lot of people who are fighting for it. If you really want it, you’ll fight alongside with them.

It’s very worth it.

Further reading:

A Rather Longer Post on My Self-Publishing Thoughts

Publishing Does Not Want To Eat Your Heart

A Proper Education: What To Study to Be A Writer

Ten Rules for Query Letters

(all of my writing posts here)

AgentQuery

[maggie-stiefvater-deactivated20]

reblogging myself because I have a giant pile of asks in my inbox that are all answered by this, or one of the links herein.

[bruxcat]

How to Structure A Story: The Eight-Point Arc

Stasis

Trigger

The quest

Surprise

Critical choice

Climax

Reversal

Resolution

Follow the link to get all the goodies.

[politicsprose]

Yoga for Writers (via Electric Lit)

[maggie-stiefvater-deactivated20]

I recently read Vladimir Nabokov's essay "Good Readers and Good Writers" in which he says a good reader remains detached from the story and refuses to identify with the characters or conflict, instead reading with "impersonal imagination". Do you have any thoughts on this? What do you think makes a good reader?

I’ll bet he was a barrel of monkeys at parties!

It’s worth noting that one of Nabokov’s detractors said, in glorious metaphor, that he could “hear the clatter of surgical tools in his prose." Also it’s worth noting that I can imagine many people sneering over the idea of a cage match of Nabokov vs. Stiefvater, as I write commercial supernatural fiction, and he wrote celebrated literary novels that have stood the test of time. Further, further worth noting I haven’t read the essay, so I don’t know the details of his thesis.

That said, I think what makes a good reader is defined entirely by what your goal is as a reader. It’s subjective. If you want to analyze a book’s prose only, I suppose that is a fair way to do it. But it seems like a sterile, incomplete jury.

As a writer, I spend a good deal of time crafting chapters in such a way that it’ll make the reader feel. Tears or laughter or anxiety or even simply temperature. A lot of times, I’m doing it by appealing to experiences readers have already had, throwing out a metaphor to help them climb the ladder to whatever situation I’m trying to get them to experience viscerally. I’m relying on the reader empathizing and identifying. I’ve read that readers store emotional memories from novels in the same places as actual memories, and that’s what I want: to create a story that lives in the same place as your real emotions.

So why would a “good reader” hold themselves impartial? Because an emotional reaction clouds the knowledge of whether or not the prose was accomplished? The emotions are part of the craft!

Of course, emotions are subjective — what pushes one person to catharsis can make another roll their eyes. But I still think it can be analyzed as easily as whether or not the prose or structure is any good; I think there’s as much universality in emotional resonance as there is in style preference.

Even if my goal is to read as a writer, I don’t see the purpose of holding aside my personal baggage. Instead, I come into a novel with all my biased guns firing, and then I watch the novel disarm me or not. Then I ask: how did it do it? How did I suddenly sympathize with this character; why did I start to doubt the pacing here? I don’t think I could effectively use novels as craft textbooks without coming at it as a biased, emotional reader.

Here’s what I think makes a good reader at any level:

- read all the words. If an author fails to convince you on any point and you haven’t read all the words, the first person to blame is yourself, not the author.

- look for layers. The best books say lots of things at the same time, and you can miss out on half a book’s greatness by taking every single sentence at face value only.

- be patient. Especially if you’re reading outside your comfort zone, a book can seem dull or confusing until you learn its language.

- remember that the characters are not the author.

- remember that a flawed character is not necessarily a bad character. Please, internet, please remember this in particular when reading female characters, because it’s getting a little crazy out there.

- shoot your snobbery in the head. You’re doing yourself no favors, and you’re only going to look like a shitnozzle when you look back on yourself ten years later.

[sin-ecdoche-deactivated20141101]

To All Writers of Everything Ever

I need to rant about this:

Also known as the best writing program ever! It’s a full-screen writing program!

So you open it up, and it looks like this:

You’re thinking, “Ok, so what? It’s a screen with a picture. Whoopdie do.” But it get’s better! It’s customizable!

See that “appearance”? Click it.

You can also use custom fonts that you have installed!

See that “music”? Click it.

If you drag your own music into the folder, like so:

You get this!:

But wait! It gets better!

See “typing sounds”? You can change those too!

Perhaps the best is - YOU CAN USE ANY PICTURE FOR THE BACKGROUND. It will automatically fade it for you!

Seriously, guys, this tool is wonderful. You can use it for:

Research papers

Novel writing

Play writing

Short stories

Homework assignments

Ranting about your friends when they piss you off

Writing your shopping list

It auto-saves. It exports to .rtf. Hotkeys from Word for italicize, underlining, and bold work. You can print RIGHT FROM THERE.

And the seriously best thing ever?

It fits on a flash drive. The entire thing with added music is maybe 131MBs.

The bestest thing ever.

It’s free.