nettle's writeblr

nettle, 25, molecular ecologist making an ill-advised attempt at nanowrimo this year

[nettleandthorne]

hello! welcome. make yourself at home. i'm nettle, writer of hands in the deep, dark earth (alternative title: the gravedigger and the beast). i'll be attempting nanowrimo this year (with a very gentle goal) and i'd be grateful if you walked it with me. journeys are so much better with company, don't you think?

about me: i'm an asexual and non-binary molecular biologist with a love of mushrooms, properly-brewed tea, gothic horror, steampunk, kpop (for my sins) and queer podcasts. i've been writing since i was six and as far as i'm aware, i'd probably just die if i tried to stop now.

about hands in the deep dark earth: a queer gothic romance about a lonely gravedigger and the thing who visits their graveyard at night. focusing on themes of shared otherness and self-acceptance played out through a story of mystery, monsters, and dark magic, i'm hoping it'll turn into the kind of story i needed when i was young and trying to understand myself as someone queer.

thank you for reading! i work full-time so finding time to write and post on here isn't the easiest thing in the world, but i'm hoping nanowrimo will encourage me a little. i will almost certainly lose focus and post mushroom pictures.

[nooskadraws]

a study of comfort 🌿✨💀

an illustration for a blanket available for preorder! (only open for two weeks!)

[animentality]

[the-fabled-disabled]

i just need someone to go through joint by joint and realign my skeleton. i think it would fix me/j

[squarebracket-trickster]

GOD PLEASE

[nettleandthorne]

the word count on my writing doc is really enhanced by the long list of Questions To Be Solved When Editing at the bottom of the final page

[kkachi35]

I made something

[i-am-shitpost]

“I would buy a mansion” “I would buy designer” “I’m getting a pool” Don’t give me that lame ass if I won the lottery shit. You’re all pathetic. If I came into a significant amount of money, you know what I’d do? I’d go to the Ren Faire, B-line straight to the cloaks. I’m talking floor length, heavy, wool, felted details, huge hooded cloaks that are like 450 a piece and all handmade and I’d get me one. Maybe even get one of the smaller ones that hangs off the shoulders and lands just above the elbow that are 90 by themselves. And I’d be the baddest bitch around because I’d wear that shit everywhere. It’s 115 degrees? I’m sorry do I look like I give a fuck? I have a cloak bitch I don’t need your fahrenheit bullshit. And you’re a FOOL if you wouldn’t do the same.

[politicalmamaduck]

Writing about a child rapist did not make Vladimir Nabokov a child rapist.

Writing about an authoritarian theocracy did not make Margaret Atwood an authoritarian theocrat.

Writing about adultery did not make Leo Tolstoy an adulterer.

Writing about a ghost did not make Toni Morrison a ghost.

Writing about a murderer did not make Fyodor Dostoevsky a murderer.

Writing about a teenage addict did not make Isabel Allende a teenage addict.

Writing about dragons and ice zombies did not make George R.R. Martin either of those things.

Writing about rich heiresses, socially awkward bachelors, and cougar widows did not make Jane Austen any of those things.

Writing about people who can control earthquakes did not make N.K. Jemisin able to control earthquakes.

Writing about your favorite characters and/or ships in situations that you choose does not make you a bad person.

It’s a shame that in this day and age these things need to be said.

[nyarnamaitar]

Or, in short: the narrator =/ the author.

[oblakom-deactivated20200302]

You know what else is a shame? This nowadays tendency of putting on the author the responsibility of teaching their readers morality.

Authors are allowed to write morally ambiguous characters.

Authors are allowed to write downright despicable characters - and guess what they are even allowed to make despicable characters charismatic and likeble and the protagonists of their stories if they wish - because absolute monsters exist only under the bed.

It is not up to the author to spoonfeed the readers about morality and Yes I know this character did a bad thing and I am going going to show it in the story and make other characters call them out of it and– Bullshit.

The authors should be able to write what they want without having thousands of people jumping and their throats claiming to know them, their ideas and their morality based on what they write.

It’s not up to the author to teach you about what is right and what is wrong.

[theanishimori]

It’s not up to the author to teach you about what is right and what is wrong.

[wordsmith-storyweaver]

It’s neither the responsibility, nor the duty, not the right of the author to teach you morality. That’s specific to allegory, but even allegory does not deny the reader the freedom to critique the moral. It’s up to the reader to interpret the text and decipher the meaning, to critically engage with the text, the characters, and their moral stances.

[ashlovesfiction-deactivated2024]

I saw a very blunt Instagram comment today that told a writer, "AI is going to steal your job soon. You may want to choose something else." It was so nonchalant and casual, like what was just said wasn't heartbreaking to hear.

Can we writers just make a pact just to... not quit? Can we not give in so easily? Can we actually fight to keep our professions and continue to share our own original work? I will never expect writing to be my main source of income, but that does not mean I'm so willing to give it up for the sake of some robot.

[charliejaneanders]

I seriously would not worry... First of all, in order for AI to steal anything from anyone, we'd have to develop AI first, and we're nowhere near doing that. (What we have now is basically what Ted Chiang calls "applied statistics," or what others call "enhanced autocomplete.") And writing, as a practice, contains hundreds of tasks that require human creativity. Seriously, don't believe the hype.

[despazito]

Dendrogaster (a crustacean that parasitizes starfish)

[loving-n0t-heyting]

this is how they look

[headspace-hotel]

WHAT DO YOU MEAN, CRUSTACEAN.

[headspace-hotel]

my tags need to go in the main part of the post actually

[ceausescue]

this is what im talking about that's fucking horrible. worth noting though that the crustaceans are a broad class of marine animal which include barnacles and such as well as the usual suspects. so the nightmarish vision of a crab evolving into that terrible thing is thankfully not true

[ceausescue]

IMPORTANT UPDATE FROM @velociraptrix BARNACLES ARE DESCENDED FROM MOBILE LEG HAVING NORMAL ANIMALS. hell world hell world hell world

[catadromously]

Oh, it gets better. Barnacles aren't just descended from mobile leg having normal animals, they ARE mobile leg having normal animals! A barnacle larva looks like this:

Waldo Nell, flickr ... and do they ever swim around. Quickly. Effectively. Tirelessly. It's only at barnacle puberty that they stick themselves upside down to a convenient rock and scramble their body plan through metamorphosis. The feeding tendrils (cirri) on adult barnacles are actually the remaining legs! See?

Matt Lau, Point Reyes National Park Yeah... There is in fact a group of barnacles, called the Rhizocephala, that do the ungodly horrorparasite thing. Instead of finding a rock or section of timber, that normal looking larva finds the skin of a host. Instead of turning upside down and growing a shell, it expels a tiny, featureless glob of cells that burrows into the host and begins to grow. And grow. And grow. The resulting animal has no symmetry, no segments, no organs except ovaries. It is a filigreed tangle of thirsty roots, weaving into the host's body, stealing its shape and drinking its life.

And the hosts are?

Conventional crustaceans, like this hermit crab here!! Worst family dinner ever! Yeah if you sequenced the genomes of these entwined bodies you would register kin. There are barnacle relatives that we've only ever seen as larvae because they're parasites and we can't find the host. Hundreds of years of careful documentation and we do not know what they turn into. What a lovely, terrifying mystery!

[nyxshadowhawk]

I made this and I am very proud of it.

[nereb-and-dungalef]

Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene

I'm begging of you, please don't take my man

Your sword is long, your lance is keen, your shining helm afar is seen

[nereb-and-dungalef]

But into darkness fell your star, Jolene

Long ago you went away, and where thou dwellest none can say,

In Mordor where the shadows are, Jolene.

[nereb-and-dungalef]

The last whose realm was fair and free between the mountains and the sea

Gil-galad was an Elven king, Jolene

[lotr-calligraphy]

[thepromiscuousfinger]

Is it just me or are the new tumblr users convinced there's a penalty of some kind for using this site like it's meant to be used?

[beardedmrbean]

reblogs have always been in short supply for artists, sadly, but it's hitting the shitposts and even the cat pictures lately. Gotta keep getting the word out that reblogs are good and keep people posting new material that will be passed around for the next 12 years

[mornington-the-crescent]

They’re used to other social media sites, where the only equivalent of reblogging is straight-up content theft; so the idea that you can put someone else’s stuff on your page and have it not be a bad thing is a strange experience for them.

They’re likely also used to an algorithm recommending content based on what they hit “like” on, so they probably think that that’s how this works, too.

[anotherdayofdrudgery]

[a-dauntless-daffodil]

to be fair tumblr DOES try showing me stuff sometimes but it mainly just leaves me confused and unsettled.... and not in the fun way of my ~beloved dashboard~

[shamebats]

🥺🥺🥺

[vaspider]

My kid and my brother are faster than I am to correct people misgendering me. It's fucking great.

[roach-works]

dandelion jelly time!

once again i am begging you guys: make dandelion jelly this year. it's incredibly delicious.

Ingredients

2 cups dandelion petals, lightly packed

4 cups water

4 cups sugar (2-3 if using low-sugar sure-set pectin)

2 Tbs. lemon juice

1 box powdered pectin

Instructions

Cut the green part of the flower off and place the petals into a quart canning jar. (i have the best success cutting them in half with my thumbnail then slicing just above the seed line)

Pour 4 cups of boiling water over the flower petals. Allow them to cool and then place into the fridge for 24 hours.

Strain the flowers well and squeeze out as much dandelion tea as possible. Using a clean dishcloth is better than a metal strainer.

Place into a large pot 3 1/2 to 4 cups of dandelion tea, lemon juice, and pectin. Bring it to a boil.

Add sugar and return to a boil while stirring. Boil the jelly for 1 to 2 minutes.

Remove from the heat and pour into canning jars. Let the jars cool to room temp then pop them in the fridge to set overnight.

Dandelion jelly lasts 3+ months in the fridge and 6+ months in the freezer though I've unfrozen perfectly fine jelly 9 months later. This isn't a good recipe for shelf-stable, room-temperature preserves, though. Keep the jars cool as much as you can.

[aritany]

i truly think the best thing you can do for your writing is remove the sense of urgency.

this especially applies if you're hoping to break into tradpub (or publishing in general). there's this pervasive feeling that you've got get it done. get it polished get it ready go go gogogogogogo, because the querying process takes forever, and then being on sub takes forever, and getting published after getting a deal takes forever on top of that, and all of those timelines are one hundred percent out of your control.

the logical step is to speed up the part of the process you can control, right? it's tempting to try to rush to the finish line.

don't fall into that trap. let your writing simmer. it takes time to tell a good story. allow yourself that time. it's a gift.

[damndorothea]

what's your relationship with tomatoes*?

obsessed

i like it only when raw

i don't eat raw ones but can eat when cooked

i don't like/eat tomatoes in general

other/ put in the tags

Voting ended onApr 6, 2024

*we're talking about ripe, juicy tomatoes: