Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Writer in Progress

[morganhazelwood]

I'm kicking off my convention season with a #conventionTips round up. Anything I missed?

Morgan's Con Tips Round-up

[morganhazelwood]

It's been literally a couple years since I did a retrospective, but here's how Morgan's been doing on her goals! How did you do?

Morgan's 2024 & 2025 Retrospective

[morganhazelwood]

Morgan's 2026 Resolutions

While New Years resolutions aren’t for everyone, most years I like to step back at the start of my year and think about what my priorities for my writing life should be for the coming year. After a year hiatus — I’m back! 2024 was a year of binge reading, cons, and a November project while 2025 was a year of revisions, more reading, and conventions. This year? My focus is going to be on writing…

Morgan's 2026 Resolutions

[morganhazelwood]

November is coming, I'm getting ready to get my words down, and I'm Terrified. Are you working on any projects? Any writing challenges? Remember, you are worthy, no matter what you do or do not produce.

The Simple Reason I'm Terrified to Break My Writing Streak

[rneliflua]

this female character has toxic masculinity because she's rude and angry. it's misogynistic to hate my male fave because he's popular with women but it's ok to hate on this female character because she's bad female rep and women who like her don't count. it's actually misogynistic to like badly written women because it is rewarding low effort of male writers and I'm the sole arbiter of what is a badly written woman. it's misogynistic to write women with personality flaws because complexity is for silly boys. it's feminist to remove women from stories and focus on the men because I don't have to deal with that bad rep in my fanfiction. it's misogynistic how the narrative has reduced her to a love interest for a man so I reduced her to the mom friend, yaoi cheerleader, and therapist for the same man instead. she deserves better so I decided to remove her from the narrative altogether so she won't have to suffer all the interesting conflict my guys will have to suffer instead. no, I'm not a misogynist, my disregard for women is 100% feminist.

[morganhazelwood]

5 Points To Better Understand Genres and Subgenres

When you go to a bookstore or traditional library, the novels are sorted by category, and then author’s last name. But, these days, a new subgenre emergences from BookTok almost weekly. We’ve got ‘litRPG’ — or literary role-playing games, where those D&D players turn their adventures into stories. We’ve got romantasy — fantasy romances. And, if you’ve been here a minute, you know I’m ready to…

5 Points To Better Understand Genres and Subgenres

[morganhazelwood]

Introducing: My Agent Database (for writers)

Patrick Hopkins and I launched a thing, so this post is just a shameless plug. And a query process complaint. You have been warned. About fifteen months ago, Patrick got fed up with the querying process. For those who aren’t familiar, if an author wants to be published by a big name press — a ‘traditional publisher’, they usually need a literary agent. For fiction writers, you need to start…

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[morganhazelwood]

How To Keep Newsletters From Overwhelming Your Inbox

If you know me, you know I HATE email. I only have a newsletter because my dad couldn’t remember my website address (morgan Hazelwood dot com) and that I blogged on Thursdays. Anyhow. Since I’m now a romance addict, and I NEED those bonus stories/epilogues, I’m currently signed up for about 40 newsletters a week. A WEEK! My inbox was getting crazy. I had to do SOMETHING. So, here’s how I fixed…

How To Keep Newsletters From Overwhelming Your Inbox

[morganhazelwood]

Okay. got the rough draft outline for the urban fantasy sorted, with notes for each chapter on things I want to change. Then, I mapped it to the 'Romancing the Beat' beat sheet.

While I always worry about my pacing, especially since this one seemed to just keep going? I'm hitting things RIGHT where I like them.

[morganhazelwood]

The Return of the Morgan! Reading, Writing, and Conventions (oh my)

Hey! It’s been a minute, but I’ve been doing stuff off of the socials. Let’s do this in backwards order. Conventions I’ll be at RavenCon in Richmond, Virginia this weekend. It’s a small, but friendly SFF convention. I’ll be talking about Things I Hate as a Reader, To Pseud or not to Pseud (all about pseudonyms), Old School Monsters, Embracing Fear (when your writing isn’t going well), What’s…

The Return of the Morgan! Reading, Writing, and Conventions (oh my)

[morganhazelwood]

I just learned more about the Icelandic version of Dracula. I was telling a friend, that the Icelandic translation was actually a massive fanfiction that nobody found out for like a century. And then I looked it up, and apparently it's based on the serialized swedish version, that used a lot of Bram stoker's notes and stuff to make double the original length.

And I was all, but I thought I learned this on Wikipedia. And this is who told me it was fanfiction? So I looked, and apparently they didn't find out it was based on the swedish version until 2017. So, I've been carrying this tidbit in my head for a while.

Based on notes and earlier works is less hilarious, but I'm willing to share the true story.

[bitchycode]

January was a tough year but we made it

[the-fandom-crossroads]

i don't think people understand the irony of the date on this post. yes it's jan 31st and it's a mood so every jan 31st we reblog it. but guys. . . this was made in Jan 2020. By the first week of February covid numbers were finally starting to come out of china, by mid Feb Italy was shutting down and by the end of Feb half the world was entering their covid lockdowns. OP Jan may have be tough but you had a big storm coming

[shadytail]

We also figured out—the hard way—that the ancients probably cut each layer of linen to the proper shape before gluing them together. For our first linothorax, we glued together 15 layers of linen to form a one centimeter-thick slab, and then tried to cut out the required shape. Large shears were defeated; bolt cutters failed. The only way we were ultimately able to cut the laminated linen slab was with an electric saw equipped with a blade for cutting metal. At least this confirmed our suspicion that linen armor would have been extremely tough. We also found out that linen stiffened with rabbit glue strikes dogs as in irresistibly tasty rabbit-flavored chew toy, and that our Labrador retriever should not be left alone with our research project.

[krakenartificer]

I love this in every way possible. What is it from? Where can I read more?

[blackcatphysics]

The pitfalls of experimental archaeology and puppies.

[shrewreadings]

link to source:

“Unraveling the Linothorax Mystery, or how Linen Armor Came to Dominate our Lives.”

https://jhupress.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/unraveling-the-linothorax-mystery-or-how-linen-armor-came-to-dominate-our-lives/

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

holy shit read the article. it’s short but wild

[mounmantaka]

We found that even more of a threat than rain was one’s own sweat on a hot day. So, yes, it does need waterproofing, both inside and out. We did a number of experiments along those lines, and found that rubbing a block of beeswax over all sides of the armor provided nice waterproofing. It also makes the armor smell nice! When you wear it for a couple hours, your own body heat softens the glue a bit and makes it conform to your body shape, so it is much more comfortable to wear than rigid types of armor. Our reconstructions weighed about 10 pounds–about one third the weight of bronze armor that would provide the same degree of protection.

Honey i gotta go to war… not to smell my bee armor or hang with the boys or anything no.. uhh we need to uh do war things?

[thefibrarchaeologist]

#i've definitely read this before and i've probably reblogged it before but like.#no one in this thread is mentioning that they actually shot someone with an actual arrow in this armor.#they were like 'we've got to test this in practice' and instead of getting a mannequin or something they had an actual person wear it.

They what?

[classicslesbianopinions]

from the article:

While all of this mayhem (both scientifically controlled and free-form) convinced us that our linothorax was ancient-battlefield-ready, we still felt compelled to try a real-life scenario, so Scott donned the armor and Greg shot him. And while we had confidence in our armor, our relief was still considerable when the arrowhead stuck and lodged in the armor’s outer layers, a safe distance away from flesh.

a good life-size mannequin is expensive but i guarantee it would've cost way less than they were spending on all that linen.

[kaijuno]

🌊

[shieldfoss]

#oh thats what he meant by wine-dark sea

[lost-wandering-historian]

[morganhazelwood]

New Game: "I Read About That In A Romance"

Let's Play A Game! I'm calling it "I read that in a romance". You give me a trope/setting/story prompt/whatever, and I'll tell you if I've seen it in a romance.

Reminder: I spent 90% of 2024 reading paranormal gay romances. If I can find the link in under 5 minutes, I'll give it to you.

[morganhazelwood]

Whatcha Doing?

Hey writers! Tell me about your current project!

Me? My current WIP is a why-choose urban fantasy? paranormal romance? with an alpha werewolf who's ready to start her own pack, a cinnamon-roll vampire who's been doing van-life while hiding from his past, and a broody barista/untrained mage who'd really like to catch a break.

[morganhazelwood]

2025 Resolution: Read FEWER Books

I'm probably the only one with this resolution included on my list, but my biggest NY Resolution is to read FEWER books this year*.

That said: what books/authors did you enjoy last year? And what releases are you looking forward to?

* 706, not counting rereads. It was... excessive. And unhealthy. And unless it was KU m/m paranormal romance, the odds that I read your book are 0.1%