[insert title]

[luna-azzurra]

Desire should make your characters a little stupid. Otherwise what are we even doing here.

[frodo-of-the-nine-fingers]

it is always narratively correct to make your characters sleep together before they sort through the hundreds of lies and misdirections between them. make things worse make things worse make things worse #i love betrayal #i love lying #i love people feeling bad about themselves

[if-loki-was-a-fox]

The most obsession inducing trait a character can have for me is knowing somewhere in their heart That They Are A Bad Kid

[if-loki-was-a-fox]

This isn't necessarily literal. It can apply to characters who aren't children too. But there's something about characters who are either certain of the fact, or terrified of the possibility, that they are just fundamentally wrong and bad at their core

[if-loki-was-a-fox]

It is also important to me that it is not true. No one is fundamentally broken and evil.

[scorchroots]

I've never loved anyone as much as I love Ursula Le Guin

[whatagrump]

Apparently a lot of people get dialogue punctuation wrong despite having an otherwise solid grasp of grammar, possibly because they’re used to writing essays rather than prose. I don’t wanna be the asshole who complains about writing errors and then doesn’t offer to help, so here are the basics summarized as simply as I could manage on my phone (“dialogue tag” just refers to phrases like “he said,” “she whispered,” “they asked”):

“For most dialogue, use a comma after the sentence and don’t capitalize the next word after the quotation mark,” she said.

“But what if you’re using a question mark rather than a period?” they asked.

“When using a dialogue tag, you never capitalize the word after the quotation mark unless it’s a proper noun!” she snapped.

“When breaking up a single sentence with a dialogue tag,” she said, “use commas.”

“This is a single sentence,” she said. “Now, this is a second stand-alone sentence, so there’s no comma after ‘she said.’”

“There’s no dialogue tag after this sentence, so end it with a period rather than a comma.” She frowned, suddenly concerned that the entire post was as unasked for as it was sanctimonious.

[thewritinggrindstone]

And!

“If you’re breaking dialogue up with an action tag”—she waves her hands back and forth—”the dashes go outside the quotation marks.”

[probablyasocialecologist]

“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”

What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us

[wire-smith]

I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. "The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable" sort of deal. But lately I've been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.

I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.

And this is really true of any futuristic apocalypse scenario. If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth? Even if you smash an ice comet into Earth and destroy basically everything, Earth will still be more habitable than Mars! It'll still have roughly the right atmospheric pressure, and magnetic field, and heat balance, and it'll still have whatever life the comet didn't kill... Same with a starshade to cool Venus. Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations. Same with abandoning Sol System entirely and heading to another star. If an ark-ship arrived in a new star system and found Earth-but-choked-by-climate-change, the crew would be ecstatic. They would never have thought to get that lucky. So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.

[top-cheese]

ok so its a pretty good story but you know what would make it better? a liar. a character who lies. maybe two.

[wolfertinger666]

I get rly sad that so many nonblack artists get scared of making black ocs because they "don't wanna be racist" but trust me with a bit of research and viewing black individuals with personalized style and autonomy, it makes the process easier.

I think ultimately if you are unwilling to force yourself to unlearn racial biases especially antiblackness then I just find your reasoning extremely lame. even my black ocs are from different diasporas besides American only. I just find any excuse upsetting atp because it feels like the fear of being racist or making a caricature overrides wanting to genuinely depict people like myself. it feels like you just avoid blackness all together. please engage in black art more, make more black friends, and please include us, especially in your art.

[wolfertinger666]

for example, I'm not japanese or Asian but one of my ocs is Asian(Japanese/Okinawan) + white coded and I get told by both Asian individuals (both east and southeast) + (mixed Asian individuals) that they see themselves or at least enjoy her presence and thank me for just, depicting an Asian character that feels grounded while also giving me tidbits and criticism and I appreciate it so much. it's not hard to make characters outside your culture if you genuinely love different people and the world. please don't box yourself into a self made prison.

[saturncoyote]

The most frustrating part about giving my own characters sexualities and labels is that i always feel like it gives the impression that these characters are aware of this information and would actively use these labels for themselves when that is rarely ever the case

They do not know what aro or ace means, that dude would never describe himself as trans, that other guy is nonbinary but they got a job so they don't care about that right now, she's bisexual but if you ask her she'll just tell you everyone has a beautiful soul and move on, they use multiple pronouns but not out of choice people just keep on guessing and she doesn't mind and honestly kinda enjoys it but he's not telling you that

Ooc They're gay or bi or aroace or bigender or whatever the fuck but in-universe they're looking you in the eyes and telling you that every man on earth secretly wants to kiss other men and that's just a desire you gotta live with and that it's completely normal and they will not for a second question what this implies about themselves

[shalpilot]

[annabelle--cane]

gothic horror is when there's a location. cosmic horror is when there's an unauthorized fucking Thing. folk horror is when you're outside.

[virtualtoybox]

[queerofthedagger]

everything is about The Character except The Character who is about grief

[skyrim-forever]

big plans tonight

[herssian]

give your character a traumatic experience and you'll calm down

[ladydeath-vanserra]

I love u angry female characters. I love u deeply misunderstood and problematic female characters. I love u cold hearted and sharp female characters. I love you prideful and reckless female characters. I love u unbeautifly destructive female characters. I love u prickly and snarky female characters. not everyone understands u but I do and I'm listening

[yourl0calqueer]