DAUGHTERS OF DEATH;
Love this!
Xuebing Du
Peter Solarz
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open

@theartofmadeline
KIROKAZE
🪼

blake kathryn
almost home
styofa doing anything

pixel skylines

Kiana Khansmith
Claire Keane

Love Begins
hello vonnie
Misplaced Lens Cap
we're not kids anymore.

shark vs the universe

No title available
Monterey Bay Aquarium
trying on a metaphor
seen from Malaysia
seen from Morocco
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Malaysia
seen from Belgium
seen from Gibraltar
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Ireland
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Türkiye

seen from Malaysia
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United Kingdom

seen from Brazil

seen from Canada

seen from United States
@robinlafevers
DAUGHTERS OF DEATH;
Love this!
{Just One Word March Book Photo Challenge}
8. Death.
“…while I am Death’s daughter and walk in His dark shadow, surely the darkness can give way to light sometimes.” The His Fair Assassin trilogy by Robin LaFevers, which I have yet to finish.
“The inspiration is an ossuary, the crypts of the cardinals, of the monks in the 15th century, and the precious decorations. This idea is that everything that is linked to the afterlife is accompanied by something of maximum beauty,” Alessandro Michele. A collared gown featuring ornate decoration inspired by detail from an ossuary from the Gucci Cruise 2019 collection by Alessandro Michele at the Promenade Des Alyscamps in Arles.
Creepy and also excellent.
Ooh @robinlafevers!!
Extremely unusual Victorian perfume bottle in the shape of a sword, fitted with a ring to hang from a chatelaine.
@robinlafevers
Cleric/rogue multiclass
For when you realize it’s not demon under your jurisdiction
@robinlafevers
What all the coolest this assassin nuns are carrying.
Infestation by Billelis
@robinlafevers
The cell in Berkeley Castle, where King Edward II was murdered in 1327.
And finally, Diana, Princess of Themysicra, the only Amazon who has never been tested in battle. She longs to prove herself to her legendary warrior sisters, but when she risks exile to rescue a mortal girl from a sinking ship, she will change both of their lives and the course of human history forever.
The Wonder Woman: Warbringer crew— Alia Jason Nim Theo Diana
Aaaaand if you’d like to get @jenbartel‘s gorgeous art and an exclusive Wonder Woman: Warbringer poster, details coming momentarily!
THE POSTER! I love @jenbartel. It’s like a Wonder Woman: Warbringer Breakfast Club.
To get this exclusive poster, just pre-order the book and follow the instructions here to submit your receipt.
And do come see me on tour for Warbringer and The Language of Thorns this summer!
Click here to learn more about Alia Jason Nim Theo Diana
Wonder Woman: WARBRINGER releases August 29th.
Finally back into the swing of things!
On Writing: Managing a Cast of Thousands
Someday, I will write a book that does NOT have a cast of thousands. Some day. But for now, that seems to dog me with every book I write. Here then, is a trick I devised to not only help me keep track of the characters, but to help the ones that need to be memorable BE memorable.
When one’s novel is populated by hundreds of people, not every one of them can stand out, nor should they. It would be exhausting and overwhelming. Even worse, it would risk diluting those characters who truly were important. It is perfectly acceptable to have some characters in one’s novel simply be part of the backdrop, the bodies that populate the room for realism’s sake while the true drama unfolds among a select handful of your characters. For those walk-ons and stand-ins, its okay, necessary even, to use quick broad strokes, perhaps even, dare I say it—stereotypes—since their actions have no bearing on the plot.
Because their actions have no bearing on the plot.
Those words are key.
On Writing: The Basics--Now Make It Worse
Let’s say you’ve spent some time and come up with this perfect conflict for your character. There is even something at stake if she fails. Go you! Now think of a way to make it worse. Seriously. I had an opportunity to attend one of Donald Maass’s all day workshops, and he asked this question. Many times. So often, we got to giggling, however, it was highly effective in driving home his point. Push the limits. Dare to take your character to the wall, then blow the wall away and take him even farther than that. So, have you found a way to make it worse? Good. Now make it matter even more. No, I’m not kidding. And there is a subtle different between making something worse, and making it matter more. Making something worse is about upping the stakes, making it matter more is about upping the emotional intensity of those stakes. For example, when I was writing Theo, my initial external conflict was that she was going to discover this cursed artifact and removing the curse was going to fall on her shoulders. To make it worse, I decided that curse had the power to bring feast, famine, drought, and destruction to the entire country. To make it matter even more, to twist the conflict so that it uniquely and intensely skewered Theo, I had it be her mother who had unknowingly unleashed this horror on the world. For a child who felt responsible for her parents and whose familial role was to take care of them, this really upped the intensity of the conflict. Not only was it the worst that could happen (death and destruction on a national scale) but it would be her family’s fault, which gave her an added impetus to stop it. So now take a look at your conflict. How can you make it worse? How can you make it matter even more? Can you make it even worse than that? Oh go on, try. I bet you can. Some things to consider: Make your characters suffer. Whoever your hero cannot live without, cannot possibly succeed without, remove them. (Maass suggests killing him, but I write for kids so I take a gentler approach.) What is your character’s greatest asset? Take it away. What is sacred to your hero? Undermine it. How much time does he have? Shorten it. What matters most to your character? Threaten it. You get the idea. The thing is, Maass said that of all the manuscripts that cross his agency’s desks, few fail because they go too far or push too hard. No, the majority of them fail because they don’t go far enough, they don’t take things to their extremes. Which relates to my post of a couple of weeks ago about failing gloriously. Don’t let your failure be a whimpering one. If you aim for the bleachers, you have a better chance of getting past first base. (Or something like that. I’m not so good with sports metaphors.)
Yatagan Sword
Dated: early 19th century
Culture: Ottoman
Medium: steel, silver, gold, coral, leather, wood
Measurements: overall lenght 75.5cm
The sword has a curved single-edged blade with remains of blueing, decorated with floral and geometrical motifs on the entire length. The cylindrical, silver grip has a ring-nut entirely decorated with filigree frames and circles, and several round and drop-shaped coral cabochons.
The pommel features the typical large ears, decorated with cabochon corals. The scabbard has dark leather covering, silver mounts, cap with pierced, floral rings and a long, bas-relieved section, plus a filigree decoration at the chappe.
Source: Copyright © 2016 Czerny’s International Auction House S.R.L.
On Writing: The Basics--Speaking of Conflict
Conflict drives the story. It’s pretty much that simple. If you don’t have conflict on some level, you don’t have a story. The good news is, conflict comes in many shapes and sizes, flavors and colors. The bad news is, most people tend to avoid conflict, so it can be difficult to grab it with both hands and force your characters into the thick of it. Besides, we writers usually like our characters. We don’t want to put them through the wringer. But alas, if we want to effect a transformation in their lives, we must. Remember, we are the meddling, interfering Olympian gods in our book’s universe. It is our JOB to mess up our characters’ lives and force them to change or teach them a life lesson. One of the first things I do after I’ve managed to come up with an internal and external GMC for my characters is I step back and try to decide if the nature of the conflict is actually big enough to sustain a book. The truth is, all of the manuscripts that languish under my bed are there because the initial idea simply wasn’t big enough or didn’t contain enough conflict to sustain an entire book. It is also one of the most frequent mistakes I see when editing or critiquing beginners' work. Keep in mind that an average MG book is about 100-150 mss pages, and an adult book is around 300. There’s a fair amount of conflict needed to keep things clipping along toward the end. Without conflict, you have no dramatic push or narrative drive. Things just float along, attention wanders, and suddenly readers are putting your book down so they can go surf the net or watch a reality TV show. So one of the first questions I ask myself is, If the protagonist doesn’t attain her goal, what is at stake? What does she stand to lose? And I usually need two answers to this, one that can be addressed by the physical actions of the story (if Theo doesn’t return the artifact to Egypt, her mother will have infected Britain with a curse so vile, it brings down the entire country) and a second one that addresses the emotional wounds or scars of my characters (If she saves the world, surely they’ll love her then. They'll have to.) The second question is, Why this character and this problem? This is where irony comes in, or Fate, or Kismet. Why has the universe graced this particular character with this particular problem? Why her?? Why is this the worse thing that could happen to her? In fact, if you have a character in mind for a story and you’re not being able to get any sort of conflict to gel, ask yourself, what is the worst possible thing that could happen to her? That is conflict. The thing is, random crappy stuff happens to people in real life all the time. Life is hard and then you die, as the saying goes. But the one thing we can do to prove that saying wrong is to choose to embrace our circumstance and learn from it. As writers, we simply have to plan that out ahead of time. Fiction can't be random, it needs to mean something in order to resonate with readers. Theo, a child who is emotionally abandoned and somewhat willfully ignored by her parents, gets by by being invisible and uber responsible. So if she suddenly starts blabbing about magic and curses, her parents are going to see her as being very fanciful, irresponsible, and constantly in the way and underfoot. They will stop taking her seriously, and she will lose what tenuous connection she has with them and will be completely dismissed by them. Considering the day and age she lived in, she might even be committed to a sanitorium. If her parents were more attuned to her, or more doting, she might have stood a chance in telling them the truth. But in light of their current dynamic, the truth didn't stand a chance. On the external plot level, the Why her? question is embedded in Theo herself, a young girl with few resources except an ability to detect ancient magic and evil curses. If she didn’t have that ability, she’d never have gotten wrapped up in all this business to begin with. For all intents and purposes her parents museum would have suffered a normal burglary and that would be the end of it. But since she does have that ability, she gets drawn into far more than the average bear. So take a look at your conflict. First of all, do you have any? And if so, is it big enough? Is something truly at stake for your character if they fail? Lastly, why this character and this problem?
On Writing: The Basics--Plotting: Baby Steps
Okay, so let’s say you’ve figured out—kind of—what your characters' motivations and desires are. You even have a pretty good idea as to what is standing in their way—a bad guy, a raging storm, a stalking fae, a lovesick werewolf, whatever. Now, how do you take what you know and shape it into a plot? What I do at this point is I sit down and look at both the internal and external GMCs. Then I try to brainstorm four to six baby steps the character will need to take to achieve both the internal goal and the external goal. In real life, change may happen over night, but in fiction, we readers want to see the process of change, make that journey to a new, improved self along with the character, so it helps to be sure and break down the change into manageable bites. Now is probably a good time for me to explain that I don’t do all of this at the very beginning. I usually spend some time writing what I do know, either snippets of scenes or dialogue, details about the world, setting, or characters. Sometimes, I’m pleasantly surprised by how very much I instinctively know about the story. Then I use these exercises to fill in the blanks. Other times I’ll have a pretty clear idea of the external plot, but then need to be sure the action precipitates growth in the character. In that instance, I’ll look at the baby steps for my internal GMC, and make sure that the scenes I have for the external plot change the character’s internal landscape, using those baby steps as my guidelines. Other times, I’ll have a solid idea of an internal journey, but no clue as to what has to happen physically in the story. In that case I’m pretty wide open for brainstorming the most effective (and dramatic) external events that will bring about those changes. It’s also not a bad idea to write an entire discovery draft, learning about your characters and their internal landscape, friends and relationships, before applying any plotting or structure to the manuscript. The point I’m trying to make here is that whatever you way you approach the story is the right way. It’s just a matter of finding a process that allows you to plug up the holes you don’t know yet.
On Writing: The Basics--How To Grow Plot From Character
In order to understand what actions will effect a transformation in your character, there are a few things one needs to know. Debra Dixon addresses this brilliantly with her concept of Goal, Motivation, and Conflict, and if you haven’t read the book, I highly, highly recommend it. She talks at length about needing to have both an external GMC (plot) and internal GMC (internal growth arc). Goal – What your character wants. Motivation – Why do they want it? Why are they pursuing this goal? Conflict – What is standing in their way. Ideally you should be able to answer those questions on an external and internal level for your character. One of the things I constantly stumble over is giving my protagonists an actual, bona fide goal. It takes me a while to figure out what they want, and sometimes I realize they don’t actually want anything. Or at least anything that they could articulate to themselves or anyone else. However, it finally occurred to me that sometimes simply allowing oneself to want something can be a dramatic act all its own. In fact, I wonder if that’s one of the reasons I write kids books, because they are immersed in learning they have the right and the power and eventually the responsibility to act, not just observe or get carried along. Maybe that thematic issue kind of clusters around kids books. Or maybe that’s just one of my personal themes. Not quite sure about that… Anywho, sometimes I have more luck by asking myself what my characters needs or longs for. Those words seem less self aware than goal, and especially with young protagonist, having an unarticulated need seems a more realistic way to drive their actions. At least initially. Often I will start with just the germ of an idea; What if a girl could see curses and black magic on artifacts in a museum that no one else could see? Then I have to step back and decide what kind of girl would have this skill, and how it would affect her. Then I massage and poke and scratch my head until I have at least some semblance of GMC. For Theo, it was pretty easy. Goal: To neutralize black magic and curses before it harmed anyone Motivation: Because it was nasty, vile stuff that could cause great harm to those she loved; plus she was the only one who could see it, so the responsibility landed in her lap. Conflict: She was only a child, with few resources; no one would believe her if she tried to explain; and certain bad guys wanted to let use that magic for their own gains. Knowing that allowed me to begin to design the framework of the structure of the novel; what the inciting incident would be, what the turning points might look like, how the conflict and tension would rise. But that was only the externals. To give the novel depth, I had to find a way to put what I knew about Theodosia emotionally onto the page. These physical events had to force her to some new understanding or awareness on her journey to becoming an adult. I knew that one of the things that Theodosia hungered for was her parent’s attention as she was often overlooked. (Luckily, there was a fairly hands-off child rearing philosophy in 1907, so her parents didn’t appear to be horrid people.) She also wanted their professional respect, perhaps simply an extension of the above, since her parents were consumed by their professions, she felt that would be the best way to gain their attention, with her professional expertise. For me to be able to develop the internal GMC, I often have to look to my character’s wounds or scars; what is lacking in their life, what hole are they trying to plug up, for those are often what drive our actions. So the internal GMC might look something like this (and notice how I word them differently so they make sense to me): Goal (Emotional need/longing/desire): To be reassured that her parents really do care about her. Motivation (Why she has that longing/Emotional Wound): Emotionally abandoned by her parents Conflict (What prevents her forward growth): Parent's preoccupation with selves, child-centric perspective A couple of additional things: Goals can be to NOT want something, to NOT move, or NOT go to a new school. They can also change over the course of a book as they character grows or acquires new knowledge.
On Writing: The Basics: Plots--Getting Started
So this week I’ll be talking about the writing basics–plot, character, conflict, and stakes. Again, this is all stuff I look at and try to work out in the pre-writing stage, so it’s fair game if you’re prepping for NaNo!
So, if, as Julia Cameron says, transformation happens through action, then plot is simply the actions our characters go through in order to grow and change.
Of course, in real life, we all stumble upon events and revelations, epiphanies and sudden tragedies, all of which can move us to change. But fiction is different than real life. Fiction has to make sense. Therefore, it is up to the author to take their characters through a sequence of actions that force those characters to grow or transform.
Now some writers do this instinctively. Others have such beautiful prose or skillful characterization that we never even notice a lack of plot in their writing. But not all writers—or not me at least—possess that innate skill. I have to work at it.
The thing is, we have all been studying plot since our parents first began reading Good Night Moon or Harold and the Purple Crayon to us. Ever since our first cartoon, we became consumers of story, and most classic story comes with a plot.
In its most simple form, plot is merely a beginning, a middle, and an end. And really, as a reader that’s all we need to know. Well, that and whether or not the combination of beginning, middle, and end works for us.
But as writers, or more specifically, writers for whom this is not instinctive, we need to break it down a little more.
First Act – Beginning Second Act – Middle Third Act – End
And as long as one act pulls the reader along into the next act, you’re golden. But as writers, how do we make that happen. I think the first step is to understand the structure behind the structure.
First Act (Awareness of problem/situation) Second Act (1st Attempt to solve or fix the problem/situation) Third Act (Second Attempt to solve or fix the problem/situation) Fourth Act (Third and successful attempt to solve or fix the problem/situation)
Wait a minute, you say! I thought we were talking about three acts! For me and my process, it is hugely helpful to break that middle act into two parts, thus Act Two becomes in my mind Act Two and Three. The reason for this is that I think the middle of the book is a very important moment, one that deserves to be included in the structuring of the novel.
So that gives us a vague idea as to what different acts should entail, but still maybe not enough to actually start writing the dang book.
But first, some definitions so you won’t all think I’m speaking Greek.
Story – a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Plot – the physical actions of your story that drive the narrative; the choice of events the author uses to propel their character’s growth. Acts – the sections of a story; beginning, middle, and end. Usually mini stories within the bigger story framework that build toward the ending. Arcs – the forward trajectory taken by the plot or character. Turning Points – scenes that come at the end of an act and propel the reader into the next act, either by a dramatic revelation, ramping up the stakes, increasing the tension, or spinning the story off in a new direction.
Now let’s take a look at all the structural components of a plot, from a writer’s perspective.
First Act Set up – Section of the story that gives a sense of who the character is, what is missing from their lives, and what they will need to change and grow.
Inciting Incident – what forces the character to engage in the elements of the plot, where the trouble starts, the day that is different
1st Turning Point (TP) – the scene that propels the reader into the next act
Second Act Increasing Conflict/Dramatic Action – action that has some meaning or purpose within the greater context of the story as opposed to simple physical action.
Rising action – scenes increase in dramatic tension as the plot progresses. Also causality. This happens, because something else happened, which in turn forces even more conflict to happen.
2nd TP – MID POINT – this scene propels the story into the next act, but it also is the point of no return, the hero cannot go back to who they were, must go forward, which is why I think it needs to be marked on its own.
Third Act Continued Rising Action (Protagonist and Antagonist engaged in escalating struggle)
Final TP – the moment when everything coalesces to propel the hero toward the final showdown
Fourth Act Climax – the final confrontation (either internal or external but preferably both) that the story has been building to.
Resolution – how the newly changed character, using skills and knowledge acquired through the course of the story, fixes the problem or comes to terms with the situation. ~ ~ ~
So that are the basic components of a plot. Tomorrow I’ll talk about how to go about creating them from your what you know about your characters or story idea.