Last week I was in Florence for a school trip, it was awesome ! I’ve started to write notes and do some more research.
Mel -
9 years ago already. I want to be back 🥹🥹 Especially now that I'm writing a story set in Florence in the 16th century.
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@melliannen
Last week I was in Florence for a school trip, it was awesome ! I’ve started to write notes and do some more research.
Mel -
9 years ago already. I want to be back 🥹🥹 Especially now that I'm writing a story set in Florence in the 16th century.
Et vous comptez faire quoi après le bac?
Arsène Lupin : Il y a deux filières qui m'intéressent. La première serait plutôt devenir ingénieur chimiste. Après je ne sais pas encore dans quelle branche de la chimie😉. Je sais que j'aimerais bien travailler avec la Nature. Sinon la sécurité informatique me plaît bien aussi.
Mel : J’aimerais faire de l’histoire de l’art (ausun rapport avec la S ^^’) mais je ne sais pas encore ce que je vais faire directement après, peut-être une prépa AL.
9 ans plus tard ...
Lui : ingénieur mais pas en chimie 😎
Moi : historienne de l'architecture et j'ai effectivement fait hypokhâgne khâgne ✨
ctrl+f is one of the greatest things to happen to academia and indeed this world
I am far from the first to say that if you want to make better fantasy worlds you need to read a lot of non-fiction, not just other fantasy stories.
One area where I think this becomes very visible is in the lack of diversity in fantasy political systems. Very often they are just simplified and less interesting versions of medieval European kingdoms or empires. Maybe a basic theocracy if you're feeling spicy.
I think things would be much more interesting if we got more well-researched takes on things like city-states, democracies (and not just for the good guys), and various systems from antiquity.
Even your standard medieval European system would be made much more interesting if it was actually developed and explored things like the relationships and power dynamics between vassals and lieges in a historically-informed way.
Same with sci-fi, though of course who really cares about the distinction at some level. I have a huge shelf of history shit that I found interesting enough to read or that I researched for one setting or another, some of it very boring and unhelpful, some of it giving me galaxy brain moments.
Histories of small towns and of indigenous tribes! Histories of revolutions and constitutions! The incredible volume of Icelandic epics! History of insane asylums! History history history! Gather facts like a little squirrel burying nuts and you’ll run across them later in your stories when you least expect it.
I highly recommend getting obsessed specifically with administrative law. That will definitely help and surely won't lead to you zoning out in a coffee shop pondering the question "what impeachment process for a minister of state is cumbersome enough to make assassination a more efficient alternative?" for several hours.
History! of! Science and technology!!!
You want to know how new techniques and ideas move through a society? History of science and technology! You want to see alternate ideas of verifying truth? History of science and technology! You want to see how a major societal dustup can come from some new ability? History of science and technology! Want to track power, privilege and information hierarchies? History of science and technology!
You can absolutely apply these lessons to magic and scifi!
It's not just "we used to think this wrong thing and now we know better". It's who has the the information, how when and to whome is it transmitted? Who controls that? Who enforced it? Who wants to stop it? Who will make or loose money off it? Who will it be used against? What other areas of study will use this new development to advance their own?
These are key questions of RIGHT NOW that you can absolutely apply to your scifi or magic world-building IF you take time to learn and get a bit of nuance in there. this is good, meaty stuff not giving it it's due when you should fucks up your whole worldbuilding.
my best tip for anyone trying to get back into reading is to remember that you can read books to avoid other responsibilities in ur life and it can become a vice if you play your cards right
On Writing People Who Self-Sabotage
✧ burning down bridges, then complaining about isolation.
✧ procrastination, but make it existential.
✧ turning every opportunity into a test you’re doomed to fail.
✧ knowing exactly what would fix things and refusing to do it.
✧ saying “I don’t deserve this” until it becomes prophecy.
✧ mistaking chaos for control.
✧ pushing people away, then grieving the silence.
✧ calling it “honesty” when it’s just fear in disguise.
✧ needing to be right about your own brokenness.
✧ craving love but ducking every time it gets close.
✧ sabotaging good things before they can leave you first.
✧ perfectionism as slow self-destruction.
✧ the guilt hangover after every impulsive decision.
✧ healing, finally, and realizing how exhausting it was to fight yourself.
Creating characters is fun until they start making decisions without your permission. You sit down to write a quiet breakfast scene and suddenly they’re confessing childhood trauma, or worse, falling in love with the wrong person. You’re supposed to be the god of this story, but really you’re just the exhausted babysitter of a bunch of fictional anarchists.
hey we've never really interacted but i was going through my blogs and your phd topic stood out to me - depending on the specifics of what you're researching you might enjoy the first couple sections of Christopher Chitty's book Sexual Hegemony, which are focused specifically on Florence in the 15th century (looking at sexuality and sexual culture from a Marxian perspective, as the title implies). It's been one of my favorite reads of the last few years - feel free to shoot me a dm if you're interested but can't find it!
Ooh thank you! That sounds super interesting. I've been meaning to read Michael Rocke's Forbidden Friendships and Dale Kent's Friendship, Love, and Trust forever but haven't gotten around to it—they seem to all be in the same area, but it's super interesting that this one goes much farther beyond the Renaissance/early modern period alone!
honestly we used to have hard rock but now all we have is metal. what happened
Bronze age
In today's episode of Giulio's great great ambition :
His eyes told a soft excuse, as if all of this were his fault. It was not. I would have chosen him over all of them, even with the shiny promise of the most brilliant career.
Then Giulio would be : Wait what ?? Did I really just think that ? (And that's a shame I can't write it like that in my draft)
Real Glasto'bitches go to the festival to hear the shawms
A lot of times writing is regretting the choices past-you has done for you to sort out.
At the moment, I regret having two books with intertwined stories and parallel timelines. Making it coherent is currently not fun. I've already made so much change in my wip that I'll have to modify in the first book... 🤧
Writing Prompt #2961
"I'm not letting you give up."
"I wasn't asking for your permission."
Andrea and Ernesto coded... (I may or may not have used this prompt at some point 👀).
Describe your OC's worst memory or experience in three words or less.
For Giulio in my WIP Antéros
Identified the corpse.
Novel planning in Obsidian
Last October, I was planning my current novel project, Antéros, just in time to start writing the first draft in November.
It looked something like this.
My Post-It board with scenes was very useful to visualise the progression of the story, but I was losing them and I had nowhere to put my board.
Since I also use Obsidian for my writing projects, I figured two days ago that I could recreate a somewhat similar scene board for my novel. Since my novel is not yet planned 'til the end (I don't have a strict and heavy plan), I think it will be useful to know in which direction I need to go. I tend to forget the succession of plot points as I go and I really need this full view to not get lost in the details.
The titles I came up with for the scenes are a bit ridiculous sometimes, but one thing I tried to do is to have the same name multiple times like "This scene 1", "This scene 2" in order to spot motifs and parallels.
I also have a color code for the characters pov. The columns are supposed to represent the story arcs but it's still a work in progress.
Each scene is a note and I plan to link the characters, places and other useful info in each note. This way I can have the local graph (bottom right) show me every scene a character is in when I am in a character's note. And maybe I'll get other useful insights that I've not yet imagined.
Do you also use Obsidian for your writing projects?
01.03.25
Cathédrale d'Amiens.
WIP checkpoint!
reblog this with the last 3 sentences you wrote from your current WIP
Last 3 sentences of my WIP Antéros, in French.
Une dernière touche donna vie à l'œil de la déesse. L'envie irrépressible de détruire à nouveau ce beau visage s'empara de moi. Je voulais lui faire payer de se moquer ainsi.