writing blog under construction

[mister-writes]

....Hey.

New year, new me, I guess? A month late?

For those of you who don't remember me, hi, I'm mister-writes. For those of you who DO remember me, hello also.

It's been a while since my last posts. I got a new job, got a busier schedule, and just kind of let this blog fall on the back burner for a while. But tbh, I've missed my writingposting, so here I am again, finally!

It's been long enough that I think I'm going to do a re-intro:

Hello. I'm mister-writes. I go back and forth about having a nickname but right at the moment I'm changing my Official Tumblr Nickname to Gull. Why? I don't know. I just like gulls. Pronouns she/her.

Writing Things: My current project is Drift, an ocean-based YA fantasy. I'm tangentially working on editing another piece called Wildblood, so you might hear about both of them haha.

I mostly write fantasy and the occasional sci-fi, mostly YA but sometimes adult as well!

Tag games: I do love to be tagged in these!!!!! I am going to be completely upfront with you though, I was noooot at all good at doing these myself back when I was on here. So if you tag me, know that I would LOVE to see and rb your work, but that it might take a long time for me to actually do the game myself, if I do it at all 😅

Other Things About Me: Besides writing, I'm into crochet, birding, and other old lady activities. I have an assortment of succulents and a couple tanks of isopods at my apartment that I might post about as well because I think they're cute.

Nice to meet you/reintroduce myself, writeblr! I'll try to keep it up this time!

[artmagine]

The beautiful art of Thomas Blackshear II

[lanimalu-deactivated20170422]

Actually I wanted to draw a picture of Bilbo, but hmm … I made the background first and now I think the red coat would destroy the harmony. So it’s Gandalf and the shadows of some dwarves. XD Let’s pretend Bilbo is out there too. *_*”

[rosieandthemoon]

in Tintagel, Cornwall

[osabishi-yama]

石上純也氏 Junya Ishigami – Water Garden, 2018, Nasu Mountains, Japan

[crinoid]

there's photographs of it in other seasons, pretty cool.

the source has more info and stuff like plans and cross sections.

[folkfashion]

Barabaig bride's dress, Tanzania, by African Ceremonies

[hacvek]

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

[olyia-stories]

@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this

[dragonpyre]

I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset

[serinos-kitt]

What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know

[dragonpyre]

Mordor.

Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.

And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!

[serinos-kitt]

So what is a rain shadow?

[lethalbutterfly]

Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.

[roach-works]

this is because, as clouds are forced upwards by rising land, they cool and dump their rain. so the side of the mountain facing the ocean (or an inland sea, or a great lake) gets all the rain as the clouds are squeezed out, and the opposite side gets nothing.

my favorite thing is the american great lake snowbelts! so, the 'flow' of weather across north america, in very general terms, blows from the northwest on down south and east to the gulf of mexico.

so the wind is blowing from west to east, and in the winter it's a dryer wind than in the summer because it's colder. but after blowing across a great lake for a hundred miles, the wind is wet again. and that wet turns into snow. so for all of these lakes, the big cities are on the west side, not the east sides, because the east sides absolutely suck to live on.

the sole exception is buffalo, NY, which literally has to be there because, unfortunately, that's where all the important canal stuff between lake ontario and lake erie is happening.

also this always strikes me as cool, check out where cleveland is:

it's right at the edge of that snowbelt. and you see way more cities west of it than east, too.

[beatrice-otter]

#but again. mordor looks like that becaue sauron made it#and he's an ass

On a Watsonian level, sure.

On a Doylistic level, Mordor looks like that because plate tectonics was a fringe, ludicrous, laughable theory that nobody outside serious geology nerds had ever heard of until scientists proved seafloor spreading in the early 1960s. The first edition of the LotR trilogy was published in 54-55. We literally did not know that plate tectonics was real until almost a decade after the book was published, so obviously, it was not something Tolkien could have been considering as he made his maps.

I don't know enough meteorological history to know when white people figured out about rain shadows and added it to geology classes, or what would have been taught about volcanoes and such. But any education Tolkien got on the subject would have been in childhood/adolescence; his college education focused on the liberal arts, not the sciences, and his professional study was linguistics and the middle ages. So anything Medieval and earlier European authors wrote about he had a pretty good chance of knowing about. But not much exposure to modern science. So his science knowledge was probably limited to "what English schools taught at the turn of the 20th Century."

[whetstonefires]

I mean, it's true he didn't know about plate tectonics, but he did know what mountains look like, and that it's not normally That. And it wasn't his style to break that kind of norm without cause.

LotR has recurring themes of the reckless imposition of one's will on the natural world creating ugliness, an order you thought was inherently an improvement that in fact is inferior to what you have displaced. (Typified by reckless tree-felling; a reflection of the despoiling of the English countryside and the world by Progress.)

Mordor is a rectangle because Sauron is an asshole.

[beatrice-otter]

#the rain shadow thing otoh was undoubtedly total ignorance#but those mountains were made as the fortress of a demigod#too steeped in evil to understand beauty#it's *supposed* to look like something that Shouldn't Exist#like quite often this is something that happens in worldbuilding yes#things are arranged Wrong because a person doesn't grasp the underlying logic#but mordor is a bad example for the same reason it's an obvious one#it's So Very Wrong because it was designed to be wrong#to give you a bad feeling with how much it shouldn't look like that#if he just wanted it unapproachable on all sides it could've been in a caldera formation it didn't *need* corners#the corners were a choice#tolkien's job involved lots of looking at maps and things okay#meanwhile people whose lives revolved around the weather generally knew where the rain happened#long before it was formalized into 'rain shadow effect'#people not having The Science doesn't mean they don't have eyes and brains

[cannibalcharon]

Western Washington vs Eastern Washington is a good example of a rain shadows effects for fellow writers.

Western Washington:

Eastern Washington:

For fantasy writers, Washington is a really cool state to study because we have nearly every biome from alpine forests, desert, alpine desert, rainforest, riparian forests, wetlands, coastal, and so on. We have two main mountain ranges, the Olympics and the Cascades. We sit on three tectonic plates which give us said mountains (and earthquakes). Our ecology is really neat here.

[heywriters]

Character motivation advice? I need my character to be in a city for reasons relevant to the plot, but I feel his motivations for being there are weak (especially considering he has family in another country). I’m trying to write more character-driven than plot driven, but I don’t know how to strengthen his motivations

Going on the assumption your character resides in this city and isn't just a visitor, I've compiled a list of ideas.

Reasons A Character May Live in a City

1. work—either it's the best place to succeed in his chosen career, he has strong financial ties to a physical place of business there and cannot commute, his primary customer base lives there, or wages are high there

2. education—his preferred school, university, intern/apprenticeship, etc. exists in the city

3. relationships—he made friends there, or friends have moved there, or there is/was a romantic interest there that drew him to the city

4. circumstance—whether he used to go to school, work, or live with friends/lovers in the city but that's now all in the past, he's settled down and doesn't feel leaving would be worth it

5. family—either he likes independence from his family, needs to be away from them due to conflict/trauma, or earns money in the city that he sends back to them

6. medical—he or a nearby loved one has to stay near a hospital or other medical center in this particular city for their own health

7. culture/lifestyle—he just likes it there. his "people" live there and not in his home country. maybe his personal tastes and interests are better catered to in this city than anywhere else.

—

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[the-literary-lesbian]

writing mood™️

[kiramartinauthor]

WHY YOU SHOULD WRITE HORRIBLY:

1. You’ll never write anything if you don’t

[gjdraws]

[ltwilliammowett]

1. Ketsch- a vessel with two masts, the front main mast and the aft mizzen mast, which is getting smaller and smaller. The ketch has its mizzen mast within the (construction) waterline.

2. Schooner- a schooner is a sailing ship which has two or more masts, has scraper sails as main sails on all masts and whose foremost mast is lower than (one) the aft mast(s).

3. Topsail schooner - This term describes the rigging of the ship, not the type of ship. It is a two- or three-masted sailing vessel rigged primarily with fore-and-aft sails (gaff mainsail and staysails) but featuring one or more square topsails on the foremast.

4. Brigantine - a brigantine is a two-masted sailing vessel with a fully square-rigged foremast and at least two sails on the main mast: a square topsail and a gaff sail mainsail (behind the mast). The main mast is the second and taller of the two masts.

5. Brig- A brig is a type of sailing vessel defined by its rig: two masts which are both square-rigged. Brigs originated in the second half of the 18th century and were a common type of smaller merchant vessel or warship from then until the latter part of the 19th century.

6. Barkentine - while a full-rigged ship is square-rigged on all three masts, and the barque is square-rigged except for the mizzen-mast, the barquentine extends the principle by making only the foremast square-rigged.

7. Bark - a barque, barc, or bark is a type of sailing vessel with three or more masts of which the fore mast, mainmast, and any additional masts are rigged square, and only the aftmost mast (mizzen in three-masted barques) is rigged fore and aft. Sometimes, the mizzen is only partly fore-and-aft rigged, bearing a square-rigged sail above.

8. Full rigged ship - a full-rigged ship or fully rigged ship is a sailing vessel with a sail plan of three or more masts, all of them square-rigged. Such a vessel is said to have a ship rig or be ship-rigged, with each mast stepped in three segments: lower, top, and topgallant.

9. Ewer - classic fishing and transport vessel of the Lower Elbe with flat bottom and side swords. It is rigged as single mast as well as one and a half mast.

10. Galeass- mostly a two-masted coastal sailer, ketch rigged, especially common in the Baltic Sea. Length rarely over 20 meters.

11. Tjalk - old East Frisian-Dutch coastal vessels with flat bottom, side swords and round ship ends. Rigging as one or one and a half master. Still common in the Netherlands.

12. Cutter - is a single-masted rig with two or more foresails – typically a jib and a staysail

[gothredy]

[sparrowlucero]

the befouler of our crops

[samimarkart]

Finally, some new art! Really had fun with the colors on this one, feels the complete opposite of the rainy spring I’m experiencing right now 🌧️

[soulofthedeep]

Sea’s rough today

[sesiondemadrugada]

Erin Vest.

[theforsakenprince]

Bet it feels good as fuckkk to rest your hand on the pommel of your sword when the newcomer steps a little too close to your lord who you’ve sworn to protect with your life