Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
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hello vonnie

shark vs the universe
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Origami Around
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Three Goblin Art

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JVL

Kiana Khansmith
Today's Document
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Stranger Things
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
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@mediaeval-thotte
Variant Comic Cover Sketches
Fereldan Statuary
Retreat
How do you develop the ability to tell a good story? Is it something innate, or does it only come through years of hard work and practice? Should you remain conscious of every word you write, or is it better to just let go and allow the story to tell itself? How valuable is others’ advice? What’s the best way to handle unsolicited harsh criticism? Most importantly, what do you do if you’re a Type A perfectionist who crumbles into a state of quivering anxiety at the mere thought of producing something that isn’t Good™?
Let me go point by point:
How do you develop the ability to tell a good story? Is it something innate, or does it only come through years of hard work and practice?
I’m sure some people have an “innate” knack for telling a good story, but I am not one of those people so I had to practice. You be the judge if I’m any good now! But I’ve definitely improved a bit since I first started writing. Storytelling is a learnable skill, definitely.
Should you remain conscious of every word you write, or is it better to just let go and allow the story to tell itself?
After years of working to improve as a writer, I’ve concluded it’s best to have several different “modes”:
You’ve got your playful drafting mode, when you don’t give a fuck and you’re just slinging playdough at the wall and telling your story with finger puppets. You don’t remain conscious of every word; in fact, you try to give as few fucks as possible about the words! Unless the pleasure of specific words drives your creativity, in which case go with that. The point is, you tell the story as innocently and playfully and with as much joy and freedom as possible, doing whatever you need to do to disinhibit yourself. (I’m so self-critical I often have to trick myself into this headspace, for instance by deliberately writing badly or with bizarre brainstorming/freewriting exercises.)
Then you’ve got your analytic mode where you’re, say, reading yours or somebody else’s work and breaking it into functional parts. I do this a lot with stories I love and want to learn from. If there’s a passage I find really sexy, for instance, I try to figure out why it’s sexy, what makes it sexy for me. Is it the word choice? The sentence rhythm? The sensory details? The deep POV? Some combination of those things? I’ll extract maybe one little lesson, one “trick” I’d like to try in my own work, and apply it to the next thing I write.
And finally you’ve got what I think of as your mechanic mode, where you’re taking stuff you’ve learned in analytic mode and using it to revise your own writing. Say you’ve decided, oh, I want more of my POV character’s emotional responses to the events in my story. So in this mode, you’re going through your messy draft and seeing which bits you can tweak to make that happen.
(I also have an editor mode, in which I only focus on smoothing out the prose. I do things like make sure I don’t repeat any words or phrases too closely together, crap like that. I can’t do substantive revisions and think about that little shit at the same time, though, so I separate the tasks. Writing is like carpentry: you don’t want to sand and polish something that you’re going to make bigger changes to later.)
The point of these different modes is, you want to be in one at a time, because they require very different attitudes. If you’re drafting, you’re giving zero fucks. If you’re revising, you’re giving one kind of fuck but maybe not another. Etc.
How valuable is others’ advice?
Most advice of the “don’t use adverbs” variety is not that useful, especially if you’re at the beginning of your process. New writers should stay away from “rules” because they just tie you up in self-critical knots. Instead, find writing you like and figure out why you like it. Or, just write a lot and splash around in the pool and see what happens. Don’t read Elmore Leonard’s rules for writing unless you want to write like Elmore Leonard.
As for feedback on your work: personally, I find that readers’ responses are valuable to me, but rarely their advice. Like, I want to know how they reacted to various moments in my story, but I don’t usually ask them what specific things I should change. I just want to know if my jokes landed, or if the part that’s supposed to be hot was, in fact, hot. I then use their reactions to decide for myself what to change. Most people, even experienced writers, don’t give very good revision tips, first and foremost because it isn’t their story and they don’t know exactly what you’re trying to do. They also aren’t good at separating “what didn’t work for me” from “what wouldn’t work for anyone.” So treat your readers less like critics who must be appeased and more like a focus group that shows you how your material might play with certain audiences.
(Every now and then, you’ll find someone who’s a great story mechanic who reads your stories with a charitable eye and gives great, practical, specific advice on how to make them better. If you find one of these people, hang on to them.)
What’s the best way to handle unsolicited harsh criticism?
“Thanks for your feedback. I’m sorry this wasn’t to your taste!”
(Most nasty crit I see on fanfic boils down to “I was hoping to read this one kind of story and yours turned out to be another kind, and I’m mad about that.” Just ignore that shit.)
Most importantly, what do you do if you’re a Type A perfectionist who crumbles into a state of quivering anxiety at the mere thought of producing something that isn’t Good™?
I have this problem myself. There are a few things you can do:
Make your first drafts deliberately messy. Don’t use correct punctuation, write in the most colloquial you-talking-to-yourself voice you can, give your draft as many markers of “this is not a finished aesthetic object available to critical evaluation” as possible so you won’t be tempted for a second to mistake it for something that ought to be judged by standards appropriate to a finished story.
Do you post headcanons? Write a headcanon and let it sorta morph into a fic as you go. Take a mode of writing you’re comfortable with - exchanging ideas over chat, for instance - and just elaborate on it and expand it, rather than sitting down all seriously and shit and being all “I must now write A PROPER STORY.”
Writing fast helps you give zero fucks. Fill your draft with placeholders like [devastatingly sexy description of Ben Solo in slave-girl bikini goes here] so you don’t get bogged down in details. Set word-count goals or do timed writing sprints to keep yourself moving. If the results are desperately in need of revision, well, they should be. You wrote them super fast; nothing written under those conditions is supposed to be good.
Start with the part of the story you’re most excited about. Don’t start with the set-up, the backstory or the boring part we need to slog through before we get to the good part. Start with the scene that made you want to write the story. That “but first I’ve got to establish the blah blah blah” impulse is a way of procrastinating because you’re afraid, and it can really kill your interest in the story.
When you start revising your rough draft into something more story-shaped, give yourself a limited amount of time. You’ll want to polish it until doomsday, so set a deadline. Once the deadline comes, send the draft to someone you trust and find out how it worked for them. Get them to liveblog their reactions over chat if they can. Reread it yourself and focus on what you like about it. Don’t think of subsequent drafts as fixing what’s wrong with the story, but as refining and maximizing what’s good about it.
If revising starts to depress you, switch back to drafting. Work on something else if you have to; just generate more words. Play and splash around. Don’t let yourself get too far down the rabbit-hole of revising and re-revising. If you’re learning how to make clay pots, you don’t spend weeks perfecting a single pot; you make a bunch of practice pots. Write short stuff so it’s easier to let go of. Don’t ruminate and agonize over a story you “can’t get right”; either throw it out or post it and move on. Anon kink memes are good for this. You’re writing short stuff, you’re anonymous, and you’re writing for someone who will be so goddamn happy their prompt got filled at all that the fic doesn’t need to be a masterpiece to make their day.
I wrote a big post about shitty first drafts that goes into more detail on this subject. I can only speak to my own experience, but maybe it’ll help.
@a-hobbit-of-the-shire I COULD HAVE USED THIS YEARS AGO!!!
Howdy, Felassan! Do you happen to know the chronological order of E v e r y canonical piece of Dragon Age media (books + games + wasn't there a movie?), or where I could find that info?
Hello! Like chronological in the in-universe timeline? (If you mean irl release dates or wanted in-universe dates for each too lmk and I’ll update the post.)
Pls note there is some overlap (things happening concurrently). Some placements I used here are approximate or what’s more intuitive for the people consuming the media. In the lore, some dates aren’t exact, some pieces of media take place over a long period or at multiple points in the timeline, or are able to take place at various points in the timeline depending on player choice. Also in the lore, in some places there are discrepancies, conflicting information, things that don’t make complete sense or things which aren’t clear So, tis not a perfect list:
Dragon Age: Last Flight [novel]
Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne [novel]
Dragon Age: The Calling [novel]
Dragon Age: Dawn of the Seeker [film]
Dragon Age [IDW comic; unclear, but probably takes place before DAO]
Leliana’s Song [DAO DLC; takes place before DAO]
A Tale of Orzammar [DAO DLC; takes place before DAO]
Dragon Age: Origins [Penny Arcade comic]
Dragon Age: Origins [game]
The Stone Prisoner, Return to Ostagar and Warden’s Keep [DAO DLCs; take place during DAO]
Dragon Age: The Revelation [comic created by a fan and David Gaider; takes place near the end of DAO]
The Darkspawn Chronicles [DAO DLC; alternate universe timeline of DAO]
Dragon Age: Journeys [game; unclear, but is a tie-in to DAO]
Dragon Age: Warden’s Fall [online miniseries]
Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening [Penny Arcade comic]
Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening [game]
The Golems of Amgarrak [DAO DLC; takes place after DAO-A]
Witch Hunt [DAO DLC; takes place after DAO-A]
Varric, Fenris, Merrill, Isabela, Anders, Aveline and Sebastian [short stories; take place before DAII]
Dragon Age II [game]
The Exiled Prince [DAII DLC; takes place throughout DAII]
Dragon Age: Redemption [web series; takes place at the same time as DAII but always before DAII DLC Mark of the Assassin]
Mark of the Assassin [DAII DLC; can take place at various points during DAII but always after Dragon Age: Redemption]
Legacy [DAII DLC; can take place at various points during DAII. The official date for it is 9:37, which is DAII Act 3]
Dragon Age: Legends [game; unclear, but is a tie-in to DAII]
Dragon Age: The Silent Grove [comic]
Dragon Age: Those Who Speak [comic]
Dragon Age: Until We Sleep [comic]
Dragon Age: Asunder [novel]
Dragon Age: The Masked Empire [novel]
Dragon Age: Hard in Hightown [novel; in-universe it’s a novel written by Varric that essentially fictionalizes the rough time period of DAII. He references it in DAI]
Paying the Ferryman, Paper & Steel and The Riddle of Truth [short stories; take place before DAI]
Dragon Age: The Last Court [game]
Dragon Age: Magekiller [comic; takes place before and during DAI]
Dragon Age: Inquisition [game]
Jaws of Hakkon and The Descent [DAI DLCs; can take place before or after end of main DAI storyline but always before Trespasser]
The Final Conversation [short story]
Trespasser [DAI DLC]
Dragon Age: Knight Errant [comic]
Dragon Age: Deception [comic]
Dragon Age: Blue Wraith [comic]
Dragon Age: Dark Fortress [comic]
Tevinter Nights [short story anthology; hard to place, as the different stories take place at different points. For example, Hunger takes place after The Next One, Murder by Death Mages takes place during DAI, Herold Had The Plan takes place between Knight Errant and Deception, and The Dread Wolf Take You probably takes place after Dark Fortress. Some of stories clearly take place at some point after DAI or Trespasser and some are unclear]
Minrathous Shadows [short story; unclear, sometime after Trespasser? Is a sorta tie-in to Tevinter Nights]
The Next One [short story; unclear, but before Hunger in Tevinter Nights. Is a sorta tie-in to Tevinter Nights]
The Wake [short story; unclear, after The Wigmaker Job in Tevinter Nights but before Eight Little Talons in Tevinter Nights? Is a sorta tie-in to Tevinter Nights]
Ruins of Reality [short story; unclear, after Three Trees to Midnight in Tevinter Nights?]
‘Dragon Age 4′ [upcoming game; my assumption only]
Hope this helps?
A tarot style commission of my Warden Flora, by @thereisnomadnessanymore
It’s based on the Sun tarot card, which represents (amongst other things) renewal, energy and optimism - I wanted a piece that represented Flora as a mender, with her golden healing magic and a serene expression (as opposed to her usual stony stare!(
It’s such a beautiful piece of artwork, I feel so privileged to commission such a talented and visionary artist. I am so grateful to them for all their hard work and the wonderful outcome of this piece!
Man still shoot his shot even though he tried to kill you. To his credit, it worked.
I like to imagine that if Alistair becomes king, Zevran drops by the castle every now and then to visit his former companion, but naturally he won't use the main entrance and instead sneak his way in. Mostly because honestly, which self-respecting assassin uses front doors? But also because he can then brag point out blind spots in the castle's security. It would be most regrettable after all if less friendly visitors than himself found their way into the king's bedroom, no?
Hello!! My last duncan piece didnt feel very accurate, and I wanted to try again until I got it right!
It’s all part of the Dragon Age experience ™
I saw this post by @bitchfeeet once and it has lived in my head rent free ever since
Dragon Age Origins: Why have I been in the deep roads for twelve years
Dragon Age 2: Why have I killed twelve different bandit leaders in this same warehouse
Dragon Age Inquisition: Where am I
“Brown eyes are so plain and ugly you can’t even compare them to gems like emerald and saph-”
Stop.
Carnelian
Cairngorm
Cassiterite
Smoky Quartz
Zircon (brown)
Citrine
Diaspore
Dravite
Enstatite
Hessonite
That’s not even all of GORGEOUS BROWN GEMS THAT EXIST IN THIS WORLD. Just like there are a lot of beautiful brown gems they’re a lot of BEAUTIFUL BROWN EYES. BROWN IS A GORGEOUS COLOR. Start treating it like one.
I am so glad someone did this.
if you don’t want someone to have brown eyes because you can’t compare them to a gem then you’re a bad writer
Chocolate Opal
Brown Boulder Opal
Tiger’s Eye
Brown Scapolite
Brown Tourmaline
Brown Andalusite
Brown Axinite
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I may not get to everyone every single day, but by reblogging this you tell me that you're okay with getting questions on a regular basis.
Please do not like! Have a wonderful day!
all da:origins romance options are god tier i love em