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breathtakingqueens

JODIE FOSTER by Zoey Grossman for ELLE US, Dec 2023/Jan 2024

slitherbop

mjhartwork

Made some outfits for Dalv Zilchester!

unusual-suspects

x

aureentuluva70

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: one of the only few bad things about Tolkien's legendarium is that it makes 90% of all other fantasy worlds look either completely or somewhat mediocre in comparison.

Like, what do you mean you don't have a fictional language for your fantasy world? WEAKLINGS

aureentuluva70

This man right here gets it.

farewell-to-lorien

Yep, Tolkien's linguistic puns and translation jokes are legendary. Although it's not accurate to say the in-universe origin of the books is that an elf told the stories to Tolkien. Rather, Tolkien is translating them from a volume he found, written in Westron, called the Red Book of Westmarch. This contains Bilbo's book (The Hobbit), Frodo and Sam's additions to it, (LoTR), as well as Bilbo's translations of Elvish histories he encountered during his time in Rivendell (The Silmarillion). These were all in one volume and Tolkien himself made the editorial decision to publish them all separately. Even more fascinating, the Red Book is not even the original writings, which of course would have been lost by now to time and disintegration. It's actually a copy of the original, or probably a copy of a copy, multiple times removed. And it wasn't copied from the original, either, but from a copy that made it to Gondor where it was annotated and corrected. There's probably even more to its history that I'm forgetting, but yeah, even this kind of metatextual provenance was something Tolkien thought a lot about that very few writers even consider anymore. Which, of course, they're not obligated to; but the fact that Tolkien was even interested in that kind of thing just shows how above and beyond he went

tuulikki

Professors will do literally anything other than grade your exams (valid)

snowbairdd

Marilyn Monroe as Pola Debevoise in HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE (1953) dir. Jean Negulesco

unpretty

How did you get so good at writing??? Did you take classes? I feel like you should get paid all the money for this! (I subscribe to your website!)

after i dropped out of high school i found a torrent of like 5GB of OCRd romance novels and i read like 3 romance novels a day for a while

read enough romance novels and you will realize that they live or die entirely on technical skill. if you are new to romance novels then even bad ones can dazzle you with novelty but by the time you are on your 30th historical fake engagement between a bluestocking and a rakish duke you can grade them and you know when they've failed. when two books have what should be the same main characters hitting the same plot beats, but one of those books is delightful and the other fucking sucks, you learn some things. some books are bad and still delightful. other books are good but they just don't hit. you start to see the seams in the bad ones. 'oh, this is a weird out of character moment because she wanted to have the kabedon moment and didn't know how to get there'. 'she didn't want the ust to end but couldn't think of a better reason than this deus ex cockblock.' that kind of thing.

you could probably do this with other genres but i like romance because the plot is two people fall in love. that's it. everything else is set dressing. if you can figure out how to make that work you can carry it over into whatever other genre you feel like. mysteries would give you a different skillset around plotting that i don't have.

anyway after that i wrote a lot.

unpretty

i said it in my original tags but i want to talk out of my ass and say that one place that a lot of current romantasy falls short for me is that it ends up being written by people who mostly read other romantasy without going back to the original genres of romance and fantasy. it's like a 'learn the rules before you can break them' kind of thing. you have all these magical macguffins to hit the tropes but can you make me believe that these characters have chemistry without that? is there chemistry, or did you tell me they're fated mates and now i'm supposed to assume this fight is sexy? does the fantasy aspect exist for anything aside from the magical macguffins? i'm not going to throw stones from inside my house made of worldbuilding designed to make all my fetishes happen, but the really fun part is when the lore spins out of control and you end up really going in depth on linguistic anthropology things that aren't relevant to the makeouts.

and the other thing is that you can't really sub in fanfic for this. plenty of fanfic takes characters from other genres and plops them into romance, but it's not the same. a good romance novel says, "here are two characters. you may know their archetypes, but you don't know them. you are going to get to know them, and you are going to love them, and you are going to want them to love each other, and when they love each other you are going to be happy for them". i love a rakish duke. when a man who's never had to do his own laundry is slutty as fuck that's my shit. but you still have to make me like him. you can take that archetype and make a guy who fucking sucks. most fanfic will not impart to you any knowledge about how to make a reader like a guy from scratch. you already know that guy. that's the whole point. fanfic with as much character building as an original work is the exception, not the rule.

the whole reason i get catty about fics that just make a different guy is that... you've made a different guy. i don't know who this guy is and i don't like him, and you haven't bothered trying to make me like him, because you slapped another guy's nametag on him like a cheat code. it's cool if you did make me like this new guy, but why is he wearing that other guy's nametag if no other aspect of him is present?

read the genres you want to write, obviously, but there's a reason the shitty comphet romantic subplot is a cliche. it's because romance is its own skillset, and if you try to fit romance in your thriller when you only read thrillers it's probably going to be the weakest part. if you want an ensemble cast then chemistry between characters is important regardless of whether they're going to fuck about it.

thegunlady

#this is also what i call the Star Wars Problem (although: wide category lol)#but i mean specifically the thing where george lucas watched a BUNCH of westerns and samurai films and ww2 flying ace films#and then made a space movie ABOUT high points in those other story forms#because he knew those pulp genres inside out and knew what bits he needed to hit in RAF Dambusters pulp when he added laser swords#or in western saloon showdowns when he added spaceships#but then you fast-forward a few decades and people are making star wars movies ABOUT other star wars movies#and like not many of those scenes are going to hit that way - they just wont have the chance#they’ll be a copy of a copy and the emotion is going to degrade like the worlds crustiest reformatted ocr PDF#or a xerox of a xerox of a xerox#they’ve ceased to be about the feeling generated by the Form and have become simply the Form in isolation (via harrietvane)

stag

ball-jointed doll by 山丘里的羊 on xiaohongshu.

art-tnt

clownplushie

character design practice

thesilliestpotato

I was looking for references and stumbled across a series of paintings from 1930s by Soviet painter Alexander Samokhvalov called "The young women of metro construction"