Ammonitte

Multifandom, though currently deep in Dragon Age, Disco Elysium and wrestling hell. She/her is fine. (crow bg by vetiverfox)

[slimetony]

Just tried to play an ancient flute and it started filling the room with this awful miasma that wont go away

[slimetony]

Why does staff still allow people funnier than you to leave tags on your posts. They should have fixed that by now

[42starsintheuniverse]

When Grace dies he asks for his body to be turned to ashes, and then into a statue. The statue has him sitting, legs crossed, arms curled slightly, with his palms on his knees. He says in his final message there is a reason for this very specific positioning, but that he can't say what it is.

Time continues forward. Rocky and Adrian grow and change. They move house a couple of times. Rocky changes career from engineer, to inventor, to scientist, to diplomat, to teacher. Adrian picks up a new hobby every few decades. They explore other parts of Erid they've never seen. They meet humans on more than one occasion, but there's something about it... Something not quite right. The Eridian mind can never forget, and no matter how much time passes, Rocky feels it. Missing Grace. His human.

And then time really does move on. Rocky walks stiffly, Adrian sleeps for weeks at a time, they both eat less often due to how draining it is.

And one day, the temperature is perfect. Adrian wakes earlier than they have in years. The warmth loosens Rocky's arthritis, the wind is quiet that day, and sound can carry for miles because of it. The soil is quiet, ready, resonant. And they both know.

They go for a walk, take a dip in the sea, attend a choir in a crystal cave. And then, without fanfare, when no one else is around, they visit Grace. And Rocky climbs into his stone lap. And Adrian curls their body around Grace too. Just like Grace did hundreds of years ago, they let go, no scream, no pain, just peace and togetherness. Too beautifully intertwined to ever untangle.

And there they sit, three stones, for the rest of time.

[tyler-the-geek]

*UGLY CRYINGGGG*

@conartist170

[beanswithbones]

this is what Ava/Simon is to me [positive]

[dragonpurplecristal]

If i had a nickel every time i watched a movie where a pathetic man gets send in a religion themed suicide mission in space by an angry woman because the stars are dying and meets an alien that is the reason he doesn’t get back home, i would have two nickels

Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice in the same year

[chewupmyheart]

[sludgebones]

[two tumblr soldiers bleeding out on the internet frontlines]

“heh… remember strawbebby…. And ranibow spramkle… always made me laugh”

“Don’t talk like that man. We’re gonna get out of here i prommy.” [mortar fire sails overhead and land nearby] “christ its like a childrens hospital out there”

[through shallow breaths] “I always loved…… the color of the sky…………”

End scene

[annasinthewalls]

It's that time again

[adhdwerewolfgf]

mr sandman

man me a sand

[thesylverlining]

Make it the cutest man car door hook hand

[adhdwerewolfgf]

i cannot begin to explain the emotions i feel every day knowing that this post i made in the middle of playing tf2 when i was 16 is going to be the one thing of mine that has made the largest impact on the world by a fucking mile

[wafflewarrior111]

So... I found this and now it keeps coming to mind. You hear about "life-changing writing advice" all the time and usually its really not—but honestly this is it man.

I'm going to try it.

[missroserose]

I love the lawyer metaphor, because whenever I see “John knew that...” in prose writing I immediately think “how?  How does he know it?”  Interrogate your witnesses.  Cross-examine them.  Make them explain their reasoning.  It pays dividends.

[heck-in-a-handbasket]

All of this, but also feels/felt. My editor has forbidden me from using those and it’s forced me to stretch my skills.

[ineedthesons]

This is your "show not tell" advice explained!

[tarysande]

Editor here.

First, let me preface this with something very important: you can treat all of this advice as SECOND-DRAFT ADVICE. It is so much easier to rewrite this kind of stuff once you have words on the page. Telling yourself the first draft is totally appropriate and acceptable.

What we’re talking about here are FILTER WORDS (and to some degree verbs of being). Yes, “thought” words are included. But so are “heard, saw, looked, tasted, smelled” etc.—most words having to do with the senses.

This isn’t black and white advice; sometimes you’ll use these words and that’s okay. They’re not WRONG. They’re just weaker. And they’re weaker because they create distance between the reader and the experience of the character.*

If you want your reader to feel like they’re experiencing the story right alongside the character, you want to cut down on filter words.

*This is particularly important with first person and close third POVs. The reader always knows whose eyes they’re seeing through and thoughts they’re privy to. So you don’t need to tell them “I saw X.” Or “I heard X.” Or “I thought Y.” You can just jump into the action/observation as it’s happening.

This is also where you want to pay attention to verbs of being.

“It was rainy.” Versus: “The rain pounded against the roof.” Or “The rain howled like an injured animal.” Or “The rain tapped against the window like an anxious lover.” All of these are inviting the reader deeper into the experience of the story by using stronger verbs and similes. And, at the same time, they stir feelings (instead of TELLING feelings). And feelings keep your reader engaged. Engaged readers keep turning pages; engaged readers become FANS.

[the-haiku-bot]

This is also where

you want to pay attention

to verbs of being.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[defilerwyrm]

The most valuable advice that Author Ex gave me through the years that we wrote together was this: the problem with all these filter words is that they create distance in the POV.

That means that when you read a line like

John saw that the curtains were open.

It immediately takes you OUT of the character's perspective and instead tells you what they experience as a secondhand observation.

You don't have to get fancy or purple with how you rephrase things like this. Not everything needs a ton of breathing room.

You wanna know what's perfectly impactful while keeping a tight POV?

The curtains were open.

Simple as that.

[porcupine-girl]

What I always love about this every time it crosses my dash is that while it's good advice, it's not actually framed as advice. It's framed as a time-limited challenge. That's very different!

It's not saying "never use these words again." It's saying "give this a try, a really hardcore try, just for a little while (it says six months but obviously you can adjust that), and see what happens." Which is so much more useful, because it's framing it as a learning experience.

If you do this, for six months or two months or one full story or whatever, at the end of that time you'll have a better understanding of when these words are and aren't necessary and when and how to use them to get the specific effect you want - because like defilerwyrm says, they create distance, and maybe sometimes you want that!

So much writing advice falls flat because you can always think of an exception that allows you to ignore the rule. But a writing challenge gives you a chance to explore new territory and see how it works.

[dateamonster]

by the fourth or fifth time you "come back wrong" no ones even impressed anymore

[dateamonster]

and good luck explaining things to your insurance provider!

[silima]

in loving memory of my favorite shirt

[silima]

turmeric kun update

[elodieunderglass]

Hmm hmm hmm. oxiclean loves her for who she is but turmeric cannot help but change her

[what-even-is-thiss]

You ever think about how they made the minions immortal so that they wouldn’t have to explain how they reproduce

[forever-lynx]

?? they made the minions immortal???

[what-even-is-thiss]

Yeah it’s like the same 200 minions forever

[what-even-is-thiss]

They also trapped them in the Arctic for a long time so they wouldn’t have to show them working for hitler because canonically they’re evil and serve the most evil master around and they’re clearly ok with serving dictators because they were depicted helping Napoleon so the solution to keep hitler out of the story was just to trap the yellow blobs on an iceberg.

[what-even-is-thiss]

So these things have been alive since the dinosaurs and are basically minor spirits or gods that exist to serve the side of evil and during that whole time they remained grossly incompetent.

Does the universe in despicable me want evil to fail or win? Or are these stupid yellow sexless idiots meant to keep a balance of some kind? Because they do not seem to have a niche in any ecosystem that I know of so their origin must be divine somehow.

[dame-a-dozen-deactivated2023061]

since the minions are technically the last of their kind (since they seem to not be able to reproduce) does this mean that they are a protected species?

[what-even-is-thiss]

See, I don’t think that they’re a species. I think that they’re something else. Because everything else in that universe seems to follow ordinary rules of evolution but the same however many hundred minions keep changing their appearance and not dying. I think that the minions were intelligently designed.

[sammy-genderspikeidiot]

Roman, my guy, are you really saying that minions are evidence of a god in despicable me lore?

[what-even-is-thiss]

Not god per se but… something.

[jackest-jack]

Evil vs good. Evil made minions, good made them stupid yellow blobs

[what-even-is-thiss]

So are you positing that maybe they came to be because of some primordial yin/yang type battle between energies in the ocean or something?

[crap-copper]

But they have to reproduce somehow, there are way more minions in the Despicable Me movies than the Minions movie

[soupsy-daisy-deactivated2023072]

[ndiecity-deactivated20241101]

there's a blueprint hanging on a wall in the first movie that shows Gru developed a way to create minions out of corn kernels

[official-lucifers-child]

please i don’t want to learn these things

[cool-jpgs-of-wizards-with-swords]

They're incompetent servants to evil though, right? god forbid i actually watch the movies to find out but I feel like they might have been a poison gift

[memewhore]

[charlesoberonn]

Archeologist 20,000 years after horses go extinct: *cries* I don’t

[why-cant-i-have-a-good-username]

That comment is one of the most accurate things in studying history.

[silly-jellyghoty]

I can feel the pain already

[deactivated-blog]

Sometimes when I’m high I like to imagine arguments in the far future about what kind of milk or eggs were in our recipes. I hope the main opposing factions would be divided over whether the milk was from dogs or cats because “what other mammals were in the vast majority of households back then?”

[catflowerqueen]

Like that one Foxtrot cartoon.

[magic-and-moonlit-wings]

[tweet by Quite Interesting] 

The first Polish language dictionary (published 1746) included definitions such as: 

“Horse: Everyone knows what a horse is.” 

[/end tweet]

[runawaymarbles]

My new rating system for 19th century novels is the misery:shenanigan scale. For example, while Wuthering Heights is extremely high in misery, for every big of suffering there are at least two shenanigans behind it. Meanwhile Pride and Prejudice, while facing the potential threat of misery, is almost entirely shenanigan in attempt to avoid it. I'm now working on Jane Eyre, which errs towards the other end of the spectrum; a miserable time, with only one or two shenanigans on the horizon to keep me going.

[kivizzaofficial]

Got a chance to draw my bbygirl for the ValZine!

they are two!

Ideas(there were some reeeal sad ones but I decided that he suffered enough alr✌️)

[marekdavid]

[halorvic]

[cecilias-cool-stuff]

Never stop hating