祝日 / Permanent Vacation
occasionally subtle
Sade Olutola
JVL
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
★
Misplaced Lens Cap
ojovivo
Andulka
izzy's playlists!
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
#extradirty
Cosimo Galluzzi
wallacepolsom
trying on a metaphor
will byers stan first human second
Today's Document
⁂
taylor price
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seen from Egypt
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@no-book-left-behind
About Me
Call me Swan, pen name is J.D. Swan
Aspiring author and librarian
Love writing fantasy adventures stories, POC, queer characters, and complicated relationships (platonic, romantic, familial, etc.)
Note: this is not my main blog
My Writing
I have a lot of writing projects but below the cut I'm only going to list the few I'm currently working on right now
i must say, i am a huge fan of when a book is in the middle of a very exciting plot containing many interesting problems when out of nowhere for a few pages it's like, "hey by the way, real quick, here's a detailed explanation of the city's water filtration system! i'm telling you this for a reason and you should worry about it. anyway! haha okay back to the plot" and you just get to be Scared for a while
i am kissing you on the mouth right now
you are the only person who understands me. you and the person who tagged a series of unfortunate events
some of the best tropes: divorce, cheating, cucking, weird love triangle, breaking up making up, breaking up never making up, pining for your ex, pining for the person you're nominally in a competition with for the third end of the triangle, infidelity, emotional infidelity, fucking someone and imagining they're someone else, toxic soulmates, toxic codependency, proxy sex, exes with benefits, cheating, divorce
If you're writing 18th century dialogue, this website lets you search words and phrases to double-check whether they were in use & meant what you intend. It doesn't include every period-accurate use of a word/phrase, but it certainly helped me separate genuine 18th century grammar from the vague tangle of 💬old-fashioned fancy-speak💬 I've internalized from TV and video games.
Other websites that let you do this:
Johnson's Dictionary Online (thanks @yellowbelliedtoad!) – 1755 and 1773
Green's Dictionary of Slang – 1300s to today
A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue – 1788
Feraud's Dictionaire critique de la langue française – 1778
A dictionary of the English and Italian languages by Giuseppe Baretti is a bilingual dictionary from 1790!
Fundamentally I believe that writing about the rich and varied human existence is so important, and authors who do this end up seeming prescient in ways that naive analysis often rejects.
Two examples. First; a lot of people ship Frodo/Sam or Legolas/Gimli (or more obscure gay ships like Maedhros/Fingon), and some people say stuff like “well, Tolkien was catholic, he clearly didn’t intend for these characters to be gay.” But Tolkien himself says that he doesn’t write Christian allegory, in fact he despises all allegory. What he does is write about the rich and varied human existence, and when he did so he drew on the experiences of the likely closeted gay and bisexual men he had met over his life! And he synthesized this as just a way people behave, not as ‘representation’ but reality. And we can recognize that while in the early twentieth century, the 15% of people that identify as bisexual in the current generation (gen Z) would likely have married people of the opposite gender, that doesn’t mean they didn’t have same-gender relationships that had romantic elements even if they were never consummated.
A second example; in Tamora Pierce’s the Song of the Lioness Quartet, Alanna, the main character, dresses as a boy and trains to be a knight. As she grows up, she has to re-learn to connect with her femininity in secret with the few people who know who she is (thus making her a paradoxically-apt role model for both trans men and trans women, depending on which parts of the narrative one projects oneself onto). But Alanna never feels truly comfortable as a woman, either, and constantly has to assert both her masculinity and femininity to different people once she becomes a knight and reveals the secret. Tamora Pierce has since stated that if Alanna were born in the modern day, she would likely identify as genderfluid. But these books were written in the 1980s, and while there were people in that time period who were exploring the language of nonbinary and genderfluid identities, it wasn’t really a widespread notion, and while I can’t be sure Tamora Pierce didn’t encounter that language I sort of doubt Alanna was intended from the beginning to fit that identity. Instead, Pierce wrote a character based on the people she knew in life, who perhaps uncomfortably chafed at their assigned gender, and wrote a character who really believably would be genderfluid today, despite (plausibly) not knowing what ‘genderfluid’ was!
And I think that’s beautiful. There’s not really a point to this but just to highlight a perspective in literary analysis that you can lose if you focus too much on the biographical details of the author.
Fictional country: average fantasy
Fictional small town in the middle of nowhere in real country: par for the course in any genre
Fictional major city in real country: standard fair, but it's usually clearly based on a real city
Fictional suburb of real major city in real country: strange but I can see the application
Real major city in fictional country: Chicago can be anywhere you dream of
Just finished chapter 19/38 for Realm Jumpers, two more chapters and the girls finally all meet
WHAT ARE YALL READING RN you must tell me
"just write a little every day" ok but what if i write nothing for 3 weeks and then suddenly type like i’m being hunted by god
my daily affirmation as an author
I wish magic was real
I love characters who would die for each other but will not, under any circumstances, communicate a single honest feeling.
"Stained glass" faille jacket by Freda Blackwood, 1970's or early 80's, via Kerry Taylor Auctions.
Fluff Starters
✮⋆˙ "I looked up your favorite meal and practiced it three times before I made it for you."
✮⋆˙"You mentioned it once, months ago. I remembered."
✮⋆˙"I turned the shower on early so it'd be warm when you got in."
✮⋆˙"I kept the porch light on. I always do when you're out late."
✮⋆˙"You seemed tired so I cancelled our plans. I hope that's okay."
✮⋆˙"I charged your phone while you were sleeping."
✮⋆˙"You don't have to explain yourself. I already understand."
✮⋆˙ "I know that smile. That's not your real one. What's wrong?"
✮⋆˙ "I know you hate asking for help. You don't have to ask. I'm already here."
✮⋆˙"I saved the window seat for you. I know you like to look outside."
✮⋆˙"I saw it and thought of you. I couldn't not get it."
✮⋆˙ "I knew you'd forget to eat. So I brought food."
✮⋆˙ "You were going to apologize just now, weren't you. Don't."
✮⋆ ˙"I don't know when it happened. I just looked up one day and it was you."
✮⋆˙ "I think I've been yours for a while now. I just didn't say it."
✮⋆˙ "You're the first person I want to tell things to."
✮⋆˙ "I used to hate mornings. Then you started being in them."
✮⋆ ˙"I'm not scared of a lot of things. Losing you is the exception."
✮⋆ ˙"I think about you in the most ordinary moments and it still surprises me."
✮⋆˙ "You have no idea how many times a day something makes me think of you."
✮⋆˙ "Can you just--hold me for a second. I don't need anything else."
✮⋆˙"Your heartbeat is really calming. Can I stay like this."
✮⋆˙ "You give the kind of hugs that make everything feel less heavy."
✮⋆˙ "I fit perfectly right here. I'm not moving."
✮⋆˙ "Stop, your hands are cold--here, give them to me."
✮⋆˙ "I didn't realize how much I needed that hug until you gave it to me."
✮⋆˙ "Will you play with my hair? You don't have to stop."
✮⋆˙ "I don't have to be anyone else around you and that's the rarest thing."
✮⋆˙ "Being with you feels like exhaling."
✮⋆˙ "I love how you don't rush me."
✮⋆˙ "You make the world feel smaller in the best way. Like it's just us."
✮⋆˙"I hope you know you're someone's favorite part of the day."
✮⋆˙ "I watch you when you don't notice. You're just--really something."
✮⋆˙ "I never want to stop knowing you."
✮⋆˙ "You called me at 2am just to say goodnight. I'm still smiling about it."
✮⋆ ˙"I don't care that it's late. Your voice is worth it."
✮⋆ ˙"Tell me something. Anything. I just want to hear you talk."
✮⋆ ˙"I'll stay on the phone until you fall asleep. I don't mind."
✮⋆ ˙"I always sleep better when I know you're okay."
✮⋆ ˙"The whole day felt too long without you in it."
"i think", i say, about my own ocs, who i made,
“my headcanon is…” i say about the canon that i made about my own characters
