yet another work in progress

the writing blog of @muggle-the-hat Muggle (they/them) WIP Masterpost Muggle95 on AO3 Accepting FILWW Trick or Treaters

[queenangst]

fanfic end of the year asks

since it’s december, i thought i’d make a little end of the year ask meme for fanfic writers and readers! reblog and ask away

favorite fic you wrote this year

least favorite fic you wrote this year

favorite line/scene you wrote this year

total number of words you wrote this year

most popular fic this year

least popular fic this year

longest completed fic you wrote this year

shortest completed fic you wrote this year

longest wip of the year

shortest wip of the year

fandom you enjoyed writing for the most this year

favorite character to write about this year

favorite writing song/artist/album of this year

a fic you didn’t expect to write

something you learned this year

fic(s) you completed this year

fics you’ll continue next year

current number of wips

any new fics to start next year

number of comments you haven’t read

most memorable comment/review

events you participated in this year

fics you wanted to write but didn’t

favorite fic you read this year

a fic you read this year you would recommend everyone read

number of favorites/bookmarks you made this year

favorite fanfic author of the year

longest fic you read this year

shortest fic you read this year

favorite fandom to read fic from this year

*feel free to specify fandoms or a fic depending on the question.

[rederiswrites]

There used to be a lot of activities that took place around a populated area like a village or town, which you would encounter before you reached the town itself. Most of those crafts have either been eliminated in the developed world or now take place out of view on private land, and so modern authors don't think of them when creating fantasy worlds or writing historical fiction. I think that sprinkling those in could both enrich the worlds you're writing in and, potentially, add useful plot devices.

For example, your travelers might know that they're near civilization when they start finding trees in the woods that have been tapped, for pitch or for sap. They might find a forester's trap line and trace it back to his hut to get medical care. Maybe they retrace the passage of a peasant and his pig out hunting for truffles. If they're coming along a coast, maybe your travelers come across the pools where sea water is dried down to salt, or the furnaces where bog iron ore is smelted.

Maybe they see a column of smoke and follow it to the house-sized kilns of a potter's yard where men work making bricks or roof tiles. From miles away they could smell the unmistakeable odor of pine sap being rendered down into pitch, and follow that to a village. Or they hear the flute playing of a shepherd boy whiling away the hours in the high pasture.

They could find the clearing where the charcoal burners recently broke down an earth kiln, and follow the hoof prints and drag marks of their horse and sledge as they hauled the charcoal back to civilization. Or follow the sound of metal on stone to a quarry or gravel pit. Maybe they know they're nearly to town when they come across a clay bank with signs of recent clay gathering.

Of course around every town and city there will be farms, more densely packed the closer you are. But don't just think of fields of grains or vegetables. Think of managed woodlands, like maybe trees coppiced-- cut and then regrown--to customize the shape or size of the branches. Cows being grazed in a communal green. Waiting as a huge flock of ducks is driven across the road. Orchards in bloom.

If they're approaching by road, there will be things best done out of town. The threshing floor where grain is beaten with flails or run through crushing wheels to separate the grain from its casing, and then winnowed, using the wind to carry away the chaff. Laundresses working in the river, their linens bleaching on the grass at the drying yard. The stench of the tanners, barred from town for stinking so badly. The rushing wheel-race and great creaking wheel of the flour mill.

If it's a larger town, there might be a livestock market outside the gates, with goats milling in woven willow pens or chickens in wooden cages. Or a line of horses for the wealthier buyer or your desperate travelers. There might be a red light district, escaping the regulations of the city proper, or plain old slums. More industrial yards, like the yards where fabric is dyed (these might also smell quite bad, like rotting plant material, or urine).

There are so many things that preindustrial people did and would find familiar that we just don't know about now. So much of life was lived out in the open for anyone to see. Make your world busy and loud and colorful!

[ahedderick]

This is a big reason that I have always loved the Brother Cadfael novels, set in the mid 1100s. Written by Ellis Peters, each book has such a vivid sense of the place and the time period. Many different settings around Shrewsbury are described, along with the people and their various jobs.

[toooldfortumbling]

I love that kind of world building and would add that many resources were tightly regulated that we don't consider nowadays. Examples are the right to herd your pigs in an oak forest belonging to a specific monastery (saw an example where an altar piece had a carved pig to make sure the claim was known and advertised) or down to which farmers had the right to tree leaves in the fall (shortage of other animal bedding in certain Swiss valleys). The idea of a wilderness in a medieval setting is not what we think.

[headspace-hotel]

i hate how you get desensitized to the cool stuff in your WIP if you've been writing it for a long time so when you read back over it you're like "this isn't as cool as i thought :(" but it still is! you just read it too many times

[headspace-hotel]

Gotta recirculate this post periodically just cuz

[thegreatyin]

"how can m/f ships be good-" first of all through the power of bisexuality anything is possible so write that down. second of all if we start othering ships based on gender and nothing else we're no better than the opposition. third of all you need to watch more addams family

[geek-ramblings]

not even joking. Write them like wlw mlm ships. There seems to be so much more care and thought and intention put into wlw and mlm ships (generally). Like the author is trying to justify and explain and build up why they are together. That is highly lacking in straight ships.

[yeeclaw]

Too good to leave in the notes:

It’s boring when it’s assumed two characters are going to get together because one’s a man and one’s a woman and they’re in proximity to one another. Many writers rely on heteronormativity to substitute for a well-written relationship. We’re meant to assume the chemistry is there because there’s a man and a woman in a room together, instead of the writer making the effort to create the chemistry between them. The more effort a reader has put into rooting out their own comp-het indoctrination, the more apparent that weakness in the writing is. It’s normal and fine for a fanfic to expect readers to have some preexisting knowledge of the characters and ships that fill in the blanks in the writing to an extent, but when you’re also expecting heteronormativity to create the chemistry, the ship is going to fall flat. Show us the romance, don’t rely heteronormativity to tell us.

[hemipenal-system]

human sexual bimodality and dragon sexual bimodality are completely different. the fun effect of this is humans usually can’t differentiate dragons by sex, and vice versa

[hemipenal-system]

human: ok they don’t have breasts or hair. their hips are kinda nice but that’s all tail musculature so idk if i can go off that. dragon voices don’t work like human ones so that doesn’t help at all. the cloaca hides everything

dragon: ok i’m getting NOTHING from their scent. no ear frills so i can’t use frill size. wing claws would be their thumbs i think? humans all have those, and none of them have horns so i can’t go off their horn curvature. their external genitalia is very cute but they’re human so that doesn’t tell me very much

human and dragon simultaneously: this is so complicated how does everyone else figure this out

[dragonofthedepths]

Reblogs were turned off but I wanted to be able to find this again

[blackswallowtailbutterfly]

I don't hate it, I think it's fun. But also import, discount, refund, contrast, update, and survey as verbs aren't always pronounced differently from the noun.

Also also! Live as a verb is pronounced differently from live as an adjective. :)

[writeblrfantasy]

I am far from the first person to make this point, but…

Isn't it strange how authors, both self and traditionally published, have been forced to become jacks of all trades in recent years? Graphic designers, content creators, social media managers, web designers, marketing managers tasked with knowing what’s trendy and exactly where to go viral, all while juggling day jobs and leaving room to actually write?

since we are both passionate about this strange shift in recent years, author @ettawritesnstudies and I collaborated on this topic, and you can read our blog post about it here.

Why have modern authors become one man bands? with author Etta Grace

I am far from the first person to make this point, but...

if you're an author for which this issue grinds your gears like it does mine, give it a read! not only is there some good old fashioned (thank you, etta, for your endless optimism and insistence on finding a solution to the problems of the publishing market.)

enjoy! if you're an author with any personal experiences to share or thoughts to add, we would love to hear them. we worked hard on it and i would love to hear what everyone thinks

[ghosthorse-tracks]

Lesser-known steps of the writing process:

Finding all the paragraphs where you used some hyper-specific word more than once

Rearranging paragraphs that you swear you wrote in the right order but turned out to be totally backwards

Going for a walk, coming up with the perfect line, and forgetting it as soon as you get home and open your laptop

Creating a separate document where you can dump all of those nice sentences that no longer fit in anywhere

Waking up in a cold sweat because so-and-so was supposed to be barefoot but never actually took his shoes off

[writing-prompt-s]

What are some chronic illnesses that can only occur in a fantasy setting?

[beleester]

Partial transformation - mummy rot is slowly turning you to sand, a near miss from a medusa left you with partially stoned body parts, etc.

Hypnotic suggestions from being mind controlled persist after the controller’s death, causing the victim to occasionally take actions to support the cause of a mind flayer cult that no longer exists.

Repeated demonic possession has left the patient with permanent gaps in their soul’s defenses, causing them to immediately get re-possessed if they go outside a consecrated area.

Post-resurrection trauma as the revived soul remembers an unpleasant afterlife.

Magical healing can get very weird if something is stuck in the wound. It’ll get you back on your feet, but you can get outcomes like “there’s a chunk of wood fused into your chest because the magic couldn’t figure out how to get the arrow out of your chest and just healed it in place,” and this can cause mobility issues or infection vectors down the line.

[duckprintspress]

How to Delete your NaNoWriMo Account

NaNo has done dubious things over the years that prompted me to stop using it, but this most recent dubious thing has tilted me from "not using it" to "deleting it." If you're like me, here's what to do:

Log in to your NaNo account

Go to settings

Select "delete account"

Go to the e-mail account associated with your NaNo account, find the e-mail they've sent, and click the "delete account" button in that e-mail

You're done

It's incredibly easy, and I'm hoping that if a lot of us delete - especially people like me, with long-time accounts who have won NaNo repeatedly, who have also supported them monetarily in the past - then perhaps they'll get some kind of message about what a shit idea this LLM stuff is.

They probably won't. But. I'm an optimist.

[kiramartinauthor]

When you're writing and you suddenly realize you don't know what happens next

[taraljc]

When you’re writing and you suddenly realise you DO know what happens next

[justahappycloud]

When you’re writing and you realise you have to write what happens next

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

“why would you write fics for small, unpopular fandoms? you’re not gonna reach that many hits in fandoms not many people know about” ?? because I’m not writing fics for hits or kudos, I’m writing them for me because these characters are my blorbos and I have so many ideas, so much thoughts about them that my brain might explode if I don’t write them out.

[tanjir0se]

What is your BIGGEST Toxic Writer Trait?

Any sentence can be a full paragraph long if u try hard and believe in yourself

Got so caught up in dialogue now idk what anyone is doing w their hands

Got so caught up in an action scene now no one has spoken for 10 pages

Abuse of one metaphor you thought was really good and now can’t stop using

WIPs Georg, who has over 1 million unfinished WIPs, is an outlier adn should n

It really WAS supposed to be a one shot this time (now a 200k word epic)

Abuse of a specific word/descriptor you just happen to like

No beta readers we post our barely edited drafts at 2am like MEN

OP how could you forget ___? (Tags)

All of these exactly 100% equally/show results/I’m bald

Voting ended onMay 30, 2024

Disclaimer these are just a small sampling of some possible writer traits I’ve noticed either in myself or in fics I read. Also consider a rb for sample size !

[illarian-rambling]

Yay, unsolicited advice time! Or, not really advice, more like miscellaneous tips and tricks, because if there's one thing eight years of martial arts has equipped me to write, it's fight scenes.

.

Fun things to add to a fight scene (hand to hand edition)

It's not uncommon for two people to kick at the same time and smack their shins together, or for one person to block a kick with their shin. This is called a shin lock and it HURTS like a BITCH. You can be limping for the rest of the fight if you do it hard enough.

If your character is mean and short, they can block kicks with the tip of their elbow, which hurts the other guy a lot more and them a lot less

Headbutts are a quick way to give yourself a concussion

If a character has had many concussions, they will be easier to knock out. This is called glass jaw.

Bad places to get hit that aren't the groin: solar plexus, liver, back of the head, side of the thigh (a lot of leg kicks aim for this because if it connects, your opponent will be limping)

Give your character a fighting style. It helps establish their personality and physicality. Are they a grappler? Do they prefer kicks or fighting up close? How well trained are they?

Your scalp bleeds a lot and this can get in your eyes, blinding you

If you get hit in the nose, your eyes water

Adrenaline's a hell of a drug. Most of the time, you're not going to know how badly you've been hurt until after the fact

Even with good technique, it's really easy to break toes and fingers

Blocking hurts, dodging doesn't

.

Just thought these might be useful! If you want a more comprehensive guide or a weapons edition, feel free to ask. If you want, write how your characters fight in the comments!

Have a bitchin day <3

[twotailedtornado]

Guys guys guys fighting tips fighting tips

[mushroom-soup-is-my-religion]

A few other things from my personal experience:

-An elbow to the face can absolutely leave a cut, the blade of your elbow is sharp enough

-If a shorter or lighter person wants more power in a kick, turning out your foot gives you momentum

-In a similar vein, a kick that misses is likely to take you around in a circle which you can either use for an opening for a hit or a quick recovery (by going on the way around and landing in the same position) to show skill or training

-if you kick someone in the liver they pass out

-people with training will often use a dodged kick as setup for momentum for an elbow or punch

-a jab in some styles of martial arts is not mean for power, you jab to the face to make them put their hands up to protect and then cross, hook, or kick to the body

-if your stance is too square you fall on your ass

-untrained or self-taught fighters dont turn their wrists as they punch, but trained ones usually do. Back of your hand should be on top while you punch, but facing out when you just have your hands up to guard

-stuff that breaks limbs usually requires a lever of some kind (basically, hold down both ends and push up in the middle)

-twisting your wrist to break someones grip can be uno reversed into grabbing their wrist

[themightyhumanbroom]

My average writing experience:

"Alright I think I'm almost done actually-"

*Google doc grows second health bar and a choir starts singing in latin*

[jauntylittlefrillyboy]

The time frame between fic conception and finishing is either 24 hours or never.

[noctude]

people with social anxiety hyping each other up like omg yes queen you’re looking very passive and unremarkable. i wouldnt spare you a second glance on the street