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@nyotasaimiri
making up characters is so fun because you can be like “this is johnson he came from my mind” and all your friends will go “yippe!!! horray!!! we love johnson!!!”
very unfortunate but hilarious side effect of calling the example oc johnson in this post is now people are saying this in the tags
Well, for anyone who still follows... Hi, it's been a long time. Thought I should just check in and let y'all know:
My novel leaves print after this season. Same story as a lot of first time authors: low sales, poor seasons, can't afford to keep it on the roster. Still, we had a decent few years. That meant something.
I am a little sad... It means this chapter of my life is fully closed. Kind of expected it, it's not like I had time to promote it myself... I've been rather fully occupied as a full-time teacher and librarian for a few years now.
But it's been a good one. I gained so many friends, grew so much as a person, writer, and artist. The long push to get it published in the first place did leave me bitter toward Starbound for a while, I'll admit. It was a hard road. But I've been dabbling again lately, for old time's sake. I'm learning to love it again, even if I'm only active in small ways.
(And I had the genuine pride of seeing a print copy on my local library shelf. Now that, that is a memory worth keeping.)
This blog will stay up as long as Tumblr endures, provided staff don't stick it in the microwave or something. So Nyota and I will be here, watching quietly, holding onto those memories. Because nothing is ever truly lost, as long as you remember it.
Me going to tell my fandom (my Tumblr followers) lore about my oc that will shatter their hearts (I will get 2 notes)
Hello! I've been re-reading as Long as We Remember, and a detail stuck out to me where "There was a single Luminous feather resting on it, plucked from one of [Isobus] vestigial wings." If I may ask, was this a piece of Novakid lore that was abandoned/never expanded upon? I've never heard of this concept regarding Novakid biology. Thank you!
Hi, thanks for the ask!
This is a bit unique(ish) to Isobu. I have a vague headcanon (can't recall if it's mine or I picked it up somewhere tbh) that Novakid tend to "take after" beings they grow up around as they grow from protokid into adult. Isobu was raised by two Novakid who lived near an Avian town. The old priest that first befriended them always wore his ceremonial wings (the kind that move with the wearer) to visit the "blessed star-children" family, and baby Isobu kinda internalized that, so he ended up with feathered wings, though he couldn't properly fly with them. He could glide, though, and the "feathers" could be plucked off like natural ones. They'd dissolve after a few glowy hours. During his time at the Protectorate, he'd sometimes hand them off to his friends for a little night-time exploring fun. Eco-friendly glowsticks~
Just a dream👁️
#Starbound #this kicks so much butt actually what the hell #The playing with perspective and how everything is warping around Roberik with the eyeballs underneath #With this contrast of cold medical equipment and eyebals against the warm clothing fur and monitors #Not a lot of art explores this anxiety of the apex of what has been done to make them this way #Im glad to see more love given to what I think is the most under-appreciated Race in Starbound
Keeping these tags in a little box by my bed forever🐇
someone on twitter is trying to claim that use of an em-dash is an indication of AI-generated writing because it’s “relatively rare” for actual humans to use it. skill issue
I can admit this is a little out of hand, but I promise AI didn't write my 150k fic 😂
Reblog if you're a human that uses em-dashes
THIS ALSO GOES FOR WRITING
REBLOG REBLOG REBLOG! EVEN IF YOU DON’T ADD TAGS.
REBLOG!!!
I haven't been active here in a while but I'm just popping in to say yes I'm a Kae, but no I'm not at all related to anything happening with OpenStarbound. I haven't done anything Starbound in a few years and (many apologies to all of you) that isn't likely to change. Just wanted to put that out there.
Space Station Planner
I recently moved my Mall into space, and realised that even though I've had this site bookmarked for ages, I don't think I ever shared it.
It's so incredibly useful if you want to make your own space station, with all the modules available and also tells you the total parts costs before you commit.
made a little village in starbound and got extremely attached to the silly villagers that flocked to it
People liking your personal OCs is still such a crazy feeling, I've been doing this for years and ppl asking about them still fills my entire heart with warmth and idk how to handle it
You enjoy this fictional guy I made up for fun?? Whose only content is random artwork or writing made by me and a handful of other artists at most? They have no show/book/game with a large fandom, it's just one person with an art blog?? I love u
do you think insight can be gained about an author from the stories they write?
no. authors are like squids and can only be understood through spirited but ultimately futile combat
would you like a nice glass of
I want to write a book called “your character dies in the woods” that details all the pitfalls and dangers of being out on the road & in the wild for people without outdoors/wilderness experience bc I cannot keep reading narratives brush over life threatening conditions like nothing is happening.
I just read a book by one of my favorite authors whose plots are essentially airtight, but the MC was walking on a country road on a cold winter night and she was knocked down and fell into a drainage ditch covered in ice, broke through and got covered in icy mud and water.
Then she had a “miserable” 3 more miles to walk to the inn.
Babes she would not MAKE it to that inn.
Are there any other particularly egregious examples?
This book already exists, sort of! Or at least, it’s a biology textbook but I bought it for writing purposes:
It starts with a chapter about freezing to death, and it is without a doubt the scariest thing I’ve read in years (and I read a lot of horror fiction).
This book can be downloaded for free on Researchgate, posted there by the author himself:
The Biology of Human Survival: Life and Death in Extreme Environments
"youve already written that trope" yesss. i like it a lots. i will be writing it again. 1000 stories of the same trope over and over again for ten million years
Hot take: Actual literary analysis requires at least as much skill as writing itself, with less obvious measures of whether or not you’re shit at it, and nobody is allowed to do any more god damn litcrit until they learn what the terms “show, don’t tell” and “pacing” mean.
Pacing
The “pacing” of a piece of media comes down to one thing, and one thing only, and it has nothing to do with your personal level of interest. It comes down to this question alone: Is the piece of media making effective use of the time it has?
That’s it.
So, for example, things which are NOT a example of bad pacing include a piece of media that is:
A slow burn
Episodic
Fast-paced
Prioritizing character interaction over intricate plot
Opening in medias res without immediate context
Incorporating a large number of subplots
Incorporating very few subplots
Bad pacing IS when a piece of media has
“Wasted” time, ie, screentime or page space dedicated to plotlines or characters that are ultimately irrelevant to the plot or thematic resolution at the cost of properly developing that resolution. Pour one out for the SW:TCW fans.
The presence of a sidestory or giving secondary characters a separate resolution of their personal arc is not “bad writing,” and only becomes a pacing issue if it falls into one of the other two categories.
Not enough time, ie, a story attempts to involve more plotlines than it has time or space to give satisfying resolutions to, resulting in all of them being “rushed” even though the writer(s) made scrupulous use of every second of page/screentime and made sure every single section advanced those storylines.
Padding for time, ie, Open-World Game Syndrome. Essentially, you have ten hours of genuinely satisfying story….but “short games don’t sell,” so you insert vast swathes of empty landscape to traverse, a bunch of nonsense fetch quests to complete, or take one really satisfying questline and repeat it ten times with different names/macguffins, to create 40 hours of “gameplay” that have stopped being fun because the same thing happens over and over. If you think this doesn’t happen in novels, you have never read Oliver Twist.
Another note on pacing: There are, except arguably in standalone movies, at least two levels of pacing going on at any given time. There’s the pacing within the installment, and the pacing within the series. Generally, there’s three levels of pacing–within the installment (a chapter, an episode, a level), within the volume (a season, a novel, a game), and within the series as a whole. Sometimes, in fact FREQUENTLY, a piece of media will work on one of these levels but not on all of them. (Usually the ideal is that it works on all three, but that’s not always important! Not every individual chapter of a novel needs to be actively relevant to the entire overarching series.)
Honestly, the best possible masterclass in how to recognize good, bad, and “they tried their best but needed more space” pacing? If you want to learn this skill, and get better at recognizing it?
Doctor Who.
ESPECIALLY Classic Who, which has clearly-delineated “serials” within their seasons. You can pretty much pick any serial at random, and once you’ve seen a few of them, you get a REALLY good feel for things like, for example…
Wow, that serial did not need to be twelve episodes long; they got captured and escaped at least three different times and made like four different plans that they ended up not being able to execute, and maybe once or twice they would have ramped up the tension, but it really didn’t contribute anything–this could have been a normal four-episode serial and been much stronger.
Holy shit there were WAY too many balls being juggled in this, this would have been better with the concepts split into two separate serials, as it stands they only had four episodes and they just couldn’t develop anything fully
Oh my god that was AMAZING I want to watch it again and take notes on how they divided up the individual episodes and what plot beats they chose to break on each week
Eh, structurally that was good, but even as a 90-minute special that nuwho episode feels like it would have worked a lot better as a Classic serial with a little more room to breathe.
How in the actual name of god did they stretch like twenty minutes of actual story into a four-episode serial (derogatory)
How in the actual name of god did they stretch like twenty minutes of actual story into a four-episode serial (awestruck)
If you’re not actively trying to learn pacing, either for literary analysis or your own writing…honestly? Just learn to differentiate between whether the pacing is bad or if it just doesn’t appeal to you. There’s a WORLD of difference between “The pacing is too slow” and “the pacing is too slow for me.”
“I really prefer a slower build into a universe; the fact that it opens in medias res and you piece together where you are and how the magic system works over the next several chapters from context is way too fast-paced for me and makes me feel lost, so I bounced off it” is, usually, a much more constructive commentary than “the pacing is bad”.
And when the pacing really is bad, you’ll be doing everyone a favor by being able to actually articulate why.
Show, Don’t Tell
This is a very specific rule that has been taken dramatically out of context and is almost always used incorrectly.
“Show, don’t tell” applies to character traits and worldbuilding, not information in the plot.
It may be easier to “get” this rule if you forget the specific phrasing for a minute. This is a mnemonic device to avoid Informed Attributes, nothing more and nothing less.
Character traits like a character being funny, smart, kind, annoying, badass, etc, should be established by their behavior in-universe and the reactions of others to them–if you just SAY they’re X thing but never show it, then you’re just telling the audience these things. Similarly you can’t just tell the audience that a setting has brutal winters and expect to be believed, when the clothing, architecture, preparations, etc shown as common in that setting do not match those that brutal winters would necessitate.
To recap:
Violations of Show Don’t Tell:
A viewpoint character describing themselves as having a trait (being a loner, easily distractable, clumsy, etc) but not actually shown to possess it (lacking friends, getting distracted from anything important, or dropping/tripping over things at inopportune moments.)
The narration declaring an emotional state (”Character A was furious”) rather than demonstrating the emotion through dialogue or depicting it onscreen.
A fourth-wall-breaking narrator; ie, Kuzco in The Emperor’s New Groove directly addressing the audience to explain that he’s a llama and also the protagonist, is NOT the same! This actually serves as a flawless example of showing rather than telling–we are SHOWN that Kuzco is immature and egotistical, even though that’s not what he’s saying.
A fictional society or setting being declared by the narrative to be free of a negative trait–bigotry, for example–but that negative trait being clearly present, where this discrepancy is not narratively engaged with.
(For example: There is officially no sexism in Thedas and yet female characters are subject to gendered slurs and expectations; the world of Honor Harrington is supposedly societally opposed to eugenics, yet “cures” for disability and constant mentions of a nebulous genetic “advantage” from certain characters’ ancestry are regular plot points that are viewed positively by the characters and are not narratively questioned.)
A character declaring that their society has no bigotry, when that character is clearly wrong, is not the same thing.
The narrative voice declaring objective correctness; everyone who agrees with the protagonist is portrayed as correct and anyone who questions them is portrayed as evil, or else there is no questioning whatsoever. For example: in Star Trek: Enterprise, Jonathan Archer tortures an unarmed prisoner. What follows is a multi-episode arc in which every person he respects along with Starfleet Command goes out of their way to dismiss the idea that he should bear any guilt, or that his actions were anything but completely necessary and objectively morally correct. No narrative space is allowed for disagreement, or for the audience to come to its own conclusion.
NOT Violations of Show Don’t Tell:
A character explaining a concept to another character who would logically, within that universe/situation, be the recipient of such an explanation.
An in-universe explanation BECOMES a SdT violation if the explanation fails to play out in reality, such as a spaceship being described as slow or flawed in some way but never actually having those weaknesses. Imagine if the Millennium Falcon was constantly described as a broken-down piece of junk…and never had any mechanical failures, AND Han and Chewie weren’t constantly shown repairing it!
Information being revealed through dialogue, period. Having your hacker in a heist movie describe the enemy security system isn’t “telling” and thus bad writing. Having information revealed organically through dialogue is what “show” means.
The “as you know” trope is technically a Show Don’t Tell violation, despite being dialogue, because it’s unnatural within the universe and serves solely to let the writer deliver information directly, ie, telling.
Characters discussing their own actions and expressing their motivations and/or decision-making process at the time.
The existence of an omnipotent narrator, or the narration itself confirming something. Narration saying “there was no way anyone could make it in time” is delivering contextual information, not breaking Show Don’t Tell.
Keep in mind that “Show, don’t tell” is meant to be advice for beginning authors. Because “telling” is easier and requires less skill than “showing,” inexperienced authors need to focus on getting as much “show” in as possible.
However, “telling” is also extremely important. Sometimes, especially in written formats, the most appropriate way to deliver information to the audience is to just say it and move on.
Keep in mind that a viewpoint character in anything but…a portal fantasy, essentially…is going to be familiar with the world they’re in. Not every protagonist needs to be a raw newcomer with zero knowledge of their new world! In most cases, a viewpoint character is going to know things that the audience doesn’t. Generally, the ONLY natural way to introduce worldbuilding in this situation is to just have the narration point them out. (It makes sense for Obi-Wan to have to explain the Force; it would make no sense for Han to explain the concept of space travel to Luke, who grew up in this universe and knows what the hell a starship is. So, if you’re writing the novelization of A New Hope, you need to just say “and so they jumped into hyperspace, the strange blue-white plane that allowed faster-than-light travel” and move the hell on.)
For that matter, in some media (ie, children’s cartoons) where teaching a moral lesson is the clear intent, a certain level of “telling” is not only appropriate but necessary!
The actual goal of “showing” and “telling” is to maintain a balance, and make sure everything feels natural. Show things that need to be shown, and…don’t waste everyone’s time showing things that would feel much more natural if they were just told.
But that’s not nearly as pithy a slogan.
(Reblog this version y’all I fixed some really serious typos)
Quick addition: When you Show, you Slow.
Taking the time to Show something rather than simply Telling it slows the moment down–and that can be a good thing! When you want a moment to have real emotional impact, when you want the audience to linger and really connect with the scene, use Show to slow them down and really make them live in it. Use descriptive language, engage the senses, and make your audience spend some time with it.
This is Not always desirable. If you’re heavily Showing in moments that aren’t truly important, your audience will disengage and get impatient and then bored. I always err on the side of over showing in a first draft, over trimming to lots of telling in a second draft, then marrying them together in a third once I’ve gotten a better understanding of the pacing with the second Telling draft.
@nyotasaimiri
Please, for the love of god, please don’t be this person. No matter how long it’s been since an update, no matter how many unfinished stories are sitting on their account, no matter what - do not be this person.
Not only is it insanely rude, but you also do more damage than you think be being such a self-entitled ass about something someone created for free and for fun. “This author” can see what you say.
RIP decency indeed.
I was literally about to post a chapter once and got a snide comment similar to this - not addressing other readers, just me - and decided to keep the rest of the story to myself. It's still there. I could post it anytime. But I'm not going to.
I also got a glowing compliment on a fic and went into a flurry of writing, suddenly inspired, then by happenstance got a nasty, impatient comment on that same fic a few days and moved onto writing a different fic that didn't have that associated annoyance.
Like. I am writing for fun. For me. I reread and enjoy my fics all the time because they're exactly the story I want to read. I get the same enjoyment out of a fic wither or not anyone else ever sees it or knows it exists.
I'm sharing it for fun too.
I'm not going to share if sharing isn't fun.
I’m not going to share if sharing isn’t fun.
I once got a comment on a fic that just read RIP with my username. It's really fucking demotivating. Maybe the work will end up abandoned, maybe it won't, but don't fucking leave this sort of shit on a fic. It's more likely to prevent any future updates than encourage them. Authors are not vending machines. You can not shake us and force the story out (believe us, many of us have tried doing this to ourselves because we want to finish the story but sometimes life and other shit gets in the way).
