A Blog About Writing

We're Rook (they/them, he/him), and we sure do like to do that writey thingy, huh? This blog is for writing resources we squirrel away into my own organizational spot or reviews of books from the perspective of someone trying to write them!

[rook-writes]

We’re in an Anthology!!!

[Image ID: An announcement with art on the side, reading "Rook Laz, the Parliament System Will Be In: Nothing Without Us Too, Releasing September 15, 2022. An anthology of Spoonie writing by and for Spoonies, featuring an introspective short story on therapy, being trans, and having DID by our system!" A scan of the cover is present interspersing the text.

The artwork on the side is of the Parliament System. In the bottom corner is an illustration of a headphone wearing pale person with green eyes and brown hair tucked under their headphones, looking towards the announcement. Behind them are some of the headmates of the system all looking at the same announcement, including: a white goat demon, a goggles-wearing person, a mirror-masked changeling, a gold-cloaked redhead, two similar-looking red-heads in white and red turtlenecks, and a horned humanoid with long ears. All of them have varied expressions of excitement. /ID end]

Hi hello yes I know we rarely use this blog but I just realized we never announced this here! What!

Nothing Without Us Too is coming out in FIVE DAYS, and we have a piece in the anthology about the experiences of being an undiagnosed queer dissociative mess in college!

Should we have made an official actual intro post before this? PROBABLY. Are we going to? NO CLUE. Regardless, we saw a new tag for plural writings and were reminded that yes, we do have a writeblr blog!

Wanna Know More?

Nothing Without Us Too, published by Renaissance Press, is an anthology collecting Spoonie writing!

Our piece is “The Pronoun Game” in which Arcady, a dissociative queer college student, navigates the difficulties of fluctuating pronouns and liking it/its pronouns and struggles with the fear of having its queerness discarded as a symptom of its undefined and mis/undiagnosed neurodiversity.

(Maybe not the happiest piece for us to promo but we write less bleak shit with systems too, I promise lmao. Like, we have a few novels in the works, let’s just say.)

All stories in the anthology are marked with content warnings (thank you very much to the lovely editors!), and the menagerie of stories on display have us very, very excited (not just because we have a piece in this anth either)!

If you would like to order NWUT, you can check here (remove spaces): https:// nothingwithoutusanthology .wordpress .com/nothing-without-us-too-anthology/

If you would like to learn more about us and our writing, you can check our authorsite out here (remove spaces): https ://rooklazwrites .wordpress .com/

[rook-writes]

Get to know me game! Tagged by @kamenridersuper1

Last song I listened to:

Digimon Story Time Stranger - The In Between Theater (1 hour ambient loop). That's what I sleep to most nights, and I haven't put on any music otherwise since waking up.

Currently watching:

Digimon: Beatbreak (despite how frustrated I've been by it, I'm sticking it out).

Current obsession:

In between obsessions right now. Would argue that we're obsessed with our original fiction right now but we're honestly just in a fixation lull at the moment (it's been a busy few months).

Currently working on:

Commissions, applying to scholarships for grad school, and getting a better job. That's kind of what we've been doing for the last few months though, to be fair.

Currently reading:

The Spear Cuts Through the Water by Simon Jiminez and The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi are the audiobooks I've been listening to at work. Meanwhile, I also have Rosewater by Tade Thompson and Platform Decay by Martha Wells checked out to read when I have some time, though I have yet to start either.

Last search-engine search:

"digimon story time stranger misono houshold." I was working on a fanfic this morning.

I will tag: no one because I don't feel like pestering anyone specific. Do this if you want to.

[rook-writes]

//knocks politely on the writeblr tags//

yo can anyone hit me up with some blog/community recommendations?

or tags?

this blog was mainly meant to be a place for me to put writing resources i liked but i realize that 6 years out of college has made me feel like an absolute withered husk without anyone to yap to about writing. where do i find my fellow writers?

(<- mainly an original fic author with a small sprinkling of fanfiction when the muse hits my head with a home run bat)

[rook-writes]

til earthspark has a "season 4"

or: rook puts their wife and another housemate through the s4 specials with zero prior context to earthspark because i couldn't get the eps to play on my computer (so i watched them on the tv)

thoughts including spoilers under the cut

this is one of those cases where i'm curious what the hell happened in production behind-the-scenes, the same way looking at a crime scene feels. we don't talk often about transformers on any of our blogs but we do occasionally get grisped by the brainworms, and es was a really phenomenal show for us minus a lot of the same gripes most people have with it (ex: what happened with starscream, the decepticons).

the main takeaway from watching "season 4" (the two specials) feels kind of like a robbery on what must be the higher-ups part. there are a lot of bones i recognize would go into some good stock for a story--- twitch and thrash both struggling with feelings of leadership and worthiness, especially with the conclusion they arrive at in 4x2, makes sense!

however, rushing it into about 2 hours of animation time that's paced the way it is, you really only see that skeleton of a good arc.

this might be preaching to the choir saying that, this might also be me being a hard to please audience. i am also a legacy viewer, and not the show's intended age range target demographic of kids. but i also think that the kids that enjoy earthspark deserve a much better paced and plotted show like what we saw in s1 of es.

not to say that i think a single season of transformers has gone without this very sort of problem or anything (prime, animated, i love you both but dear god you got mangled on the landing). i think this is just the most horrifically maimed a transformers cartoon has gotten in its twilight.

both eps felt like they would have been good for about half a season's worth of build, which would've given the different elements time to breathe. instead, especially 4x1 feels like we couldn't have any moment to get a break. plot contrivances come out the ass hard in 4x1. all questions, no time to answer them, let's just go go go.

it also feels frustrating how little any of the other maltobots got to feel like themselves. i might be able to articulate this more when i'm not about to pass out (i have work in the morning), but it really feels like they all got, at most, a few lines just for the sake of talking.

also i know everyone probably has their feelings on that ending but god damn that ending.

as soon as i saw the fucking time knife i was like "ah okay yes, the time knife that turns you into yourself from the past, this is totally not going to be used for a death fakeout." i just was a little surprised the death fakeout was for megatron, and we also didn't get to stop to talk about bumblebee getting whacked with it.

i feel like if we had more time to breathe that could be interesting but instead the time knife shows up two minutes from the ending and we watch a funeral that Totally Won't Be A Death Fakeout while we know about the time knife. and ohhhh noooo!! megatron pre redemption!!!

been a while since we watched the rest of es so i don't remember if they talked about why megs wears the decepticon insignia but this is one of those instances where i feel like, if it'd been thought about, he could've switched or added an autobot insignia to his chassis. then, we could set up for a re-redemption arc and maybe even something that reinforces optimus's whole "it wasn't the matrix that made him change" thing.

also shout out to everyone treating liege maximo as a pre established character when my amnesiac ass was like "lol i know you're a legacy character but babe i don't know your lore <3 fucking explain please" and they just didn't. i could swear liege maximo wasn't even mentioned in this whole cartoon. like hi what???

in short: //grumpily lays face first on my office rug and screams//

[rook-writes]

tempted to use this blog for unhinged rambling about things we're reading since i never remember to use our storygraph account (i say, writing a whole ass post about our current read)

current book making me struggle is martha wells' witch king and i have some thoughts that make me feel insane

(i'm 4 hours in and have also listened to 6/7 of the murderbot books so i don't think it's an issue necessarily with wells' writing, just. how she decided to write witch king.

the way i described the witch king to our wife is "fantasy where you can really tell an anthropologist wrote it" sdfbgkjsdfbgjkdsf

it also might be that my particular pet peeves wrt fantasy (as someone who mainly writes fantasy) color my impression of the work, but also, i'm a third into the book and wondering why the fuck i should care, why we chose to go with a dual-timeline structure, and why she couldn't structure the plot so that we are naturally introduced to the characters rather than making the audiobook narrator read names for four minutes

if you like witch king, no hate to you, i'm just grumpy as someone who wanted to like wells' other works.

i think murderbot's really good all things considered. as i was telling our wife, the genre lends a lot of scaffolding to what wells has to exposit to us about. humans exist, and while i don't think any of the novels mention earth (at least, not the first 6), it borrows a lot of aspects from earth culture while iterating on it in a way that feels natural. i don't feel like i'm having to keep track of too many things, and even when there are things i don't understand (it took me a while to understand how the feed worked, for example), the plot is so quick that i don't find the questions distracting enough to worry.

[catchymemes]

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

Okay. Say you ask a small child to draw you a house, and they come up with something like this:

For the purposes of this analogy the child is shit at colouring in, because I only wanted to give the general idea.

So, we can all agree that the child who draws a house probably isn't trying to communicate anything in particular other than “look at this cool house I drew”, right?

Cool.

So… Why is it seemingly in the middle of nowhere, when most children live in houses with neighbours?

Why is the main body a square and the roof a solid triangle when that doesn't look like any house that has ever been built anywhere?

Why does it have a wood-burning stove with smoke actively coming out of the chimney, even though the sun indicates warm weather?

Why is the sun smiling? Why is it yellow?

Answer: because the child has seen picture books, and films, and the drawings of other children, and has on some level absorbed that this is what a house is meant to look like.

Face to face, the child almost certainly wouldn't know where to begin communicating “yellow is a colour culturally associated with happiness and warmth, and two dots accompanied by a curved line symbolically represent a smiling human face, so I have combined these attributes with the sun to convey that it is a very warm and pleasant day”.

Or “historically most houses in my country used fire for heat and cooking, and even though this is no longer the case for the majority of households, most media portrayals of houses are inspired by other, older, media portrayals and therefore include the chimney. I have chosen to follow this trend.”

Or even, “I have poor motor control because of my age, and large, 2 dimensional shapes are easier to draw than anything involving detail and perspective”.

Yet this is all information that you can pick up from detailed study of the house drawing.

Ultimately, it's not about what the writer intended. That's what the whole death of the author thing means.

If you think of literature like as a conversation, then think of all the analysis stuff that your English teacher keeps trying to get you to look at as like body language. It's the stuff that the other person doesn't even necessarily mean to communicate, but that can tell you a hell of a lot about what they mean.

[lierdumoa]

Also, a poem written by a poet who got high is still a poem written by a poet.

People love to say dismissive bullshit like, "oh, that's just the drugs talking" but actually, drugs can't fucking talk! It is always the human being doing the talking regardless of how intoxicated they are. The drugs are not creating the poetry. The poet's mind is creating the poetry. A person doesn't stop being a person just because they took something.

[whetstonefires]

also if it got published they probably still liked it sober

[telltaletypist]

i think people who complain about paragraphs being too long should just read/write screenplays instead. some of us actually enjoy reading

[telltaletypist]

"start a new paragraph when you'd imagine the camera angle changing" if you're writing prose you should not be imagining a camera at all i'm begging y'all to read actual books

[telltaletypist]

do not take writing advice from people who view writing as an obstacle to be overcome in order to imagine the movie they didn't get to make

[rook-writes]

extremely rare writing blog reblog here but on paragraphing i always think about the old tiptop post that circulated around tumblr a while back. for those that have never seen it, tiptop stands for time, place topic, person. these are practical ways to split paragraphs, but also, that last one is especially important for how dialogue reads. standard formatting is useful in that regard.

also, paragraphing (in my experience) has a similar purpose to syntax diversity in that they're about how a piece Flows(tm). all different elements of what you do when writing can affect flow, as well as tone and mood. but on a basic level, syntax and paragraphing are peas in a pod. what you put where, and how you break it up, will always affect how an audience absorbs information.

that said, i want to highlight that you can still learn important skills from employing techniques inspired by other mediums. obviously they shouldn't be the only thing you use, but there's a reason a lot of creative writing programs will make you study more than just your focus (the MFA i'm looking at makes you do that, and my undergrad degree did as well). learning from other mediums of writing helps us innovate with the way we use language.

do i think books should be written like movies? nah, not really. but while i was looking for the tiptop post to make sure i quoted it right, i saw another post i reblogged about paragraphing that talked about people wanting to capture the feelings that movies invoked in them.

(hell, it's literally the last post we reblogged here)

studying elements of the stories we like can help us learn how to elevate our craft. for my money, i've learned a lot about paragraphing by working on personal comics (and more comic-oriented people than i have noticed that paneling and paragraphing are far from entirely divorced concepts). thinking about what i want a reader to see versus what i want them to know has been a lot of fun as i've gotten back into writing recently. but that's less related to paragraphing and more just me trying to develop "show and tell" techniques (in this case, showing one thing while a character is telling another).

that was kind of a tangent. anyways.

at the end of the day, paragraphing is, like many other elements of writing, a stylistic thing. it's going to vary from writer to writer, and for people building a style of their own, you'll really need to pull from more than just visual media if you're writing something not intended to be visual.

if you want to write film scripts, do it! but understand that you'll be severely limiting yourself if you only sup your style on the way film crafts stories.

[sarahtaylorgibson]

Writing a novel when you imagine all you stories in film format is hard because there’s really no written equivalent of “lens flare” or “slow motion montage backed by Gregorian choir”

[audacityinblack]

You can get the same effect of a lens flare with close-detail descriptions, combined with breaks to new paragraphs.

Your slow-motion montage backed by a Gregorian choir can be done with a few technques that all involve repetition.

First is epizeuxis, the repeating of a word for emphasis.

Example:

Falling. Falling. Falling. There was nothing to keep Marie from plunging into the rolling river below. She could only hope for a miracle now, that she would come out alive somehow despite a twenty-foot drop into five-foot-deep water.

Then there’s anaphora, where you write a number of phrases with the same words at the beginning.

There were still mages out there living in terror of shining steel armor emblazoned with the Sword of Mercy.

There were still mages out there being forced by desperation into the clutches of demons.

There were mages out there being threatened with Tranquility as punishment for their disobedience, and the threats were being made good upon.

Mages who had attempted to flee, but knew nothing of the outside world and were forced to return to their prison out of need for sustenance and shelter.

Mages who only desired to find the families they were torn from.

Mages who only wanted to see the sun.

This kind of repetition effectively slows the pace of your writing and puts the focus on that small scene. That’s where you get your slow pan. The same repetition also has a subtle musicality to it depending on the words you use. That’s where you get the same vibe as you might get from a Gregorian choir.

[sarahtaylorgibson]

Damn I made relatable reblog- bait post and writer Tumblr went hard with it. This is legitimately very good advice. 

[ariaste]

For more neat tricks (aka figures of rhetoric) like epizeuxis and anaphora, read THE ELEMENTS OF ELOQUENCE by Mark Forsyth. It’s both educational and delightful, not to mention overflowing with wry wit. Great book. 

[rook-writes]

messed around with a mixture of canva and photopea for a working cover for quartzproj. i get it now, i understand the appeal.

but as someone who wants to also just pull out my tablet and mess with vectors ooooogh lemme mess around more

-res

[rook-writes]

trying to outline the plot for a longer project for the first time in a very long time. doing a dump doc style outline, though, and it's very wild compared to the "bullet point chap by chap" thing. we're instead doing a paragraphed outline thing.

and uh. wow. it's like 20 pages so far. i think the outline is aaaaalmost done? but wow. this is weird. is this what it feels like to write an actually detailed outline for a thing? instead of just having it in your brain and kind of loosely messing around with it like it's a connect the dots? (we are a plantser; the brain outline generally gets us from point A to Z)

anyways we're branching out with a novel idea that's not part of our series which is kind of exciting but also a little anxiety inducing. it's closer to the sci-fi end of things as opposed to our usual fantasy niche.

-res

[rook-writes]

update: ended up being a 28 page dump doc, 5 pages of which are character bios and the rest are paragraphs of outline stuff!

it's gonna be an interesting time!!

-res

[rook-writes]

trying to outline the plot for a longer project for the first time in a very long time. doing a dump doc style outline, though, and it's very wild compared to the "bullet point chap by chap" thing. we're instead doing a paragraphed outline thing.

and uh. wow. it's like 20 pages so far. i think the outline is aaaaalmost done? but wow. this is weird. is this what it feels like to write an actually detailed outline for a thing? instead of just having it in your brain and kind of loosely messing around with it like it's a connect the dots? (we are a plantser; the brain outline generally gets us from point A to Z)

anyways we're branching out with a novel idea that's not part of our series which is kind of exciting but also a little anxiety inducing. it's closer to the sci-fi end of things as opposed to our usual fantasy niche.

-res

[cassieoh]

A skeleton crew doesn't mean a site is going away (though it likely won't get updates and bugs/outages will take longer to fix), but just in case anyone is concerned, here's a link to instructions to download your entire blog

[mtfoss]

Just checked the link and a quick heads up the code recommended in the article has moved from the link provided to here:

GitHub - TumblThreeApp/TumblThree: A Tumblr and Twitter Blog Backup Application

A Tumblr and Twitter Blog Backup Application. Contribute to TumblThreeApp/TumblThree development by creating an account on GitHub.

[vaspider]

Okay. Yeah. I've seen the post.

I'm not panicking and you shouldn't either.

What I am going to suggest is that us indie artist & writer folx - @thebibliosphere , @seananmcguire , @dduane , @simakai , @somecunttookmyurl , @renthony , @mayakern , @fatsexybitch , @natalieironside, @lauraannegilman , @optimysticals , @theshitpostcalligrapher - tag others, I know I'm forgetting so many people - should probably chat about where we want to start building community.

Like, we gotta. That's an unfortunate part of being a creative in the world as it is. So rather than wandering in various directions and hoping people will follow us, we might wanna like... try to do things in an organized fashion. Or at least a semi-organized fashion.

[thebibliosphere]

Yeah, I'm not panicking (just sad), but yeah, we need to organize and do... something idk. I'm sending you a DM, Spider.

[vaspider]

Yeah. I'm not panicking, to be extremely clear. I've been through this before. Anybody over 30 has been through it several times.

[thebibliosphere]

Gonna be real, though. I hate losing my community spots over and over again. Like @seananmcguire said in another thread of this post, I still miss LiveJournal.

[natalieironside]

This sucks so bad. I like it here. All my friends are here. :(

[theshitpostcalligrapher]

i got the chat invite, will be joining about this when I'm able to

[spacedustpan]

Since there's some confusion in the tags:

Tumblr is starting to actually sunset it seems.

The site will still be basically functional but we don't really have a way of knowing for how long.

It could be months or years, but overall functionality is going to start going down. The staff is being cut down to a skeleton crew.

Here are the threads for The Post:

Link 1

Not Much

Hey friends 🫂

Link 2

Not Much

Hey friends 🫂

Link 3

Not Much

Hey friends 🫂

It's time to start coordinating on where to go next.

Tumblr had just recently started up when Live Journal was sold to a Russian company so this is where most of LiveJournal ended up and that was on purpose. People chose as groups to come here.

(LiveJournal was where most of FF.net and a fair number of deviantart artists had ended up previously when those sites had been losing popularity and having issues)

Honestly though it's been a nice decade plus here and I guess nothing lasts forever.

It's time to start archiving your blog, archiving your favorite blogs run by other people, and setting up new accounts to put everything elsewhere.

With Black Friday around the corner now is a good time to buy some flash drives or other storage for your backups.

Maybe make a youtube video of what your blog/favorite blogs look/looked like while the site is still functional to remember them by.

People will begin to discuss the merits of various platforms/websites and compare and contrast them and give them a trial run while keeping their account open on tumblr for a while.

Different communities will have different needs. Tumblr really was amazing because it catered to so many different styles of expression and because of that so many different kinds of communities could make a home here; but most sites aren't really built like that so that's where people may find some sticking points.

It may mean that we won't have a one-stop website for everything that we have a niche interest for anymore and instead have multiple sites for different things.

And of course there will be things (probably distinct reblog chains and tags scrolling / note scrolling) that only Tumblr did unless the new sites incorporate that into their design.

What's great about the fact that we were given the info now is that we can coordinate where to go to a certain extent.

Tumblr being built the way it is has fostered a lot of unique interaction but at the end of the day it's still the community and comraderie that makes this place home.

If we coordinate where to go then we'll have an easier time getting started there.

I do feel extra bad for all the recent Reddit and Twitter influx because while I'm sure you all knew you were running from a burning building into a sinking ship, no one knew quite how fast we were taking on water it seems.

[dduane]

Reblogging this thread so I can find it again later. (cc: @petermorwood)

...This particular spectre has been hanging over the feast for a long time now. And many of us—particularly those of us who left LiveJournal after the servers were moved to Russia, or those who're still dealing with the day-to-day chaos as Twitter-that-was crumbles slowly into right-wing ruin—know how the "cyberdiaspora" drill goes. Contact your favorite contacts: find out where they're going: start making plans for maintaining/re-establishing community elsewhere.

...Always with the understanding that no newer community will ever be quite what this one has been, and is. It's a PIA. But start preparing for the concept that eventually, one by one or en masse, we're going to have to move toward the lifeboats.

Not today, though. Doesn't look like this is going to be a sudden change. There should be plenty of time to prepare.

Meanwhile: a deep sigh for the fact that entropy's still running, and that change is inevitable (dammit). Then, for the moment, back to reblogging: because I for one am not going anywhere sudden. :)

[cedar-west-deactivated20230408]

If your plot feels flat, STUDY it! Your story might be lacking...

Stakes - What would happen if the protagonist failed? Would it really be such a bad thing if it happened?

Thematic relevance - Do the events of the story speak to a greater emotional or moral message? Is the conflict resolved in a way that befits the theme?

Urgency - How much time does the protagonist have to complete their goal? Are there multiple factors complicating the situation?

Drive - What motivates the protagonist? Are they an active player in the story, or are they repeatedly getting pushed around by external forces? Could you swap them out for a different character with no impact on the plot? On the flip side, do the other characters have sensible motivations of their own?

Yield - Is there foreshadowing? Do the protagonist's choices have unforeseen consequences down the road? Do they use knowledge or clues from the beginning, to help them in the end? Do they learn things about the other characters that weren't immediately obvious?

[mishkatelwarriorgoddess]

Thank you so much for this!

[artisimpossible]

I keep seeing posts talking about the WGA/Sag-Aftra strike, which yes, good, but in all this "support writers" sentiment I'm seeing no one talk about book writers, which I think is something people should know more about right now.

We are at an all-time high for book bans, namely targeting queer & PoC-authored books. This means that a lot of schools and libraries are no longer stocking diverse YA books, and if you're not in publishing, you may not realize this but school & libraries are by far one of the biggest markets for diverse YA books.

This means that in 2023, YA book sales are down. This is also in part because Barnes & Noble (the largest physical book retailer in the U.S.) is no longer really stocking YA hardcovers. This means that marginalized authors and debut authors are struggling to sell books.

But it's a LOT worse than that. In the past couple of years, marginalized authors are *really* struggling to get new book deals. Most books are acquired by a publisher about 2 years before they release to the public, so this isn't all that noticeable yet, but a LOT of marginalized authors I've spoken to (myself included) have been unable to sell a new YA book since 2020. So while I had a book out last year, even if I sell one right now, you won't see it until 2025-2026. That's three to four years without a new release or the income I get from publishing those books.

On top of that, Big 5 publishers have started closing imprints (namely their diverse imprints) and have started telling their marginalized YA authors to just go. I've had multiple authors tell me their publisher basically said, "eh, we don't care to put in the work for you anymore. You can just go somewhere else". Of the authors who *are* getting offered new contracts, we're being offered pay far below the cost of living and we're being handed contracts that split our payments 4 or 5 ways and require we sign over our work to be used to train AI so they can replace us a few years down the road.

Authors are freelancers who own our IPs, which means we can't unionize the way Hollywood writers can, and despite authors showing up in droves to support HarperCollins employees when they went on strike for fair wages, we're being hung out to dry when it comes to our own rights.

If you enjoy diverse books, especially diverse YA, please understand that many of the authors you loved over the past 3-5 years are being forced out of the industry. We're being exploited, and we have no way to defend ourselves. Our books sales are drying up thanks to anti-queer legislation, our rights are being eaten up by AI, and our publishers are degrading us while profiting of us and refusing to share those profits with us.

Within the publishing industry, we've all been watching this decline happen over the last decade, but outside of it, I know most people have no idea what's going on so please spread the word. And if you care about diverse books especially in YA, please support marginalized authors in any way you can. The industry needs to be reminded that it needs us before we're all eliminated from it.

[dduane]

This. :/

[caitgauthor-deactivated20240429]

While Season One: Iris and the Crew Tear Through Space has representation of folks who are disabled, Blind, Deaf, neurodivergent, non-vocally speaking or selectively speaking, and/or who manage mental illness…

…it also has representation of folks who are ace/aro, bi, gay, lesbian, trans, and nonbinary.

Support stories where all kinds of people are celebrated and living their best lives.

https://renaissance-107765.square.site/s/search?q=Iris%20and%20the%20Crew

[soy-sauce-and-mothra-deactivate]

Hey! Are there blacksmiths in your story? I'm a hobbyist blacksmith and I'm here to help!

Blacksmithing is one of those things that a lot of people get wrong because they don't realize it stuck around past the advent of the assembly line. Here's a list of some common misconceptions I see and what to do instead!

Not all blacksmiths are gigantic terrifying muscly guys with beards and deep voices. I am 5'8, skinny as a twig, have the muscle mass of wet bread, and exist on Tumblr. Anybody who is strong enough to pick up a hammer and understands fire safety can be a blacksmith.

You can make more than just swords with blacksmithing. Though swords are undeniably practical, they're not the only things that can be made. I've made candle holders, wall hooks, kebab skewers, fire pokers, and more. Look up things other people have made, it's really amazing what can be done.

"Red-hot" is actually not that hot by blacksmith terms. when heated up, the metal goes from black, to red, to orange, to yellow, to white. (for temperature reference, I got a second degree burn from picking up a piece of metal on black heat) The ideal color to work with the metal is yellow. White is not ideal at all, because the metal starts sparking and gets all weird and lumpy when it cools. (At no point in this process does the metal get even close to melting. It gets soft enough to work with, but I have never once seen metal become a liquid.)

Blacksmithing takes fucking forever. Not even taking into account starting the forge, selecting and preparing metal, etc. etc. it takes me around an hour to make one (1) fancy skewer. The metals blacksmiths work with heat up and cool down incredibly fast. When the forge is going good, it only takes like 20 seconds to get your metal hot enough to work with, but it takes about the same time for it to cool down, sometimes even less.

As long as you are careful, it is actually stupidly easy to not get hurt while blacksmithing. When I picked up this hobby I was like "okay, cool! I'm gonna make stuff, and I'm gonna end up in the hospital at some point!" Thus far, the latter has yet to occur. I've been doing this for nearly a year. I have earned myself a new scar from the aforementioned second degree burn, and one singe mark on my jeans. I don't even wear gloves half the time. Literally just eye protection, common sense, and fast reflexes and you'll probably be fine. (Accidents still happen of course, but I have found adequate safety weirdly easy to achieve with this hobby)

A forge is not a fire. The forge is the thing blacksmiths put their metal in to heat it up. It starts as a small fire, usually with newspaper or something else that's relatively small and burns easily, which we then put in the forge itself, which is sort of a fireplace-esque thing (there's a lot of different types of forge, look into it and try to figure out what sort of forge would make the most sense for the context you're writing about) and we cover it with coal, which then catches fire and heats up. The forge gets really hot, and sometimes really bright. Sometimes when I stare at the forge for too long it's like staring into the sun. The forge is also not a waterfall of lava, Steven Universe. It doesn't work like that, Steven Universe.

Welding and blacksmithing are not the same thing. They often go hand-in-hand, but you cannot connected two pieces of metal with traditional blacksmithing alone. There is something called forge welding, where you heat your metal, sprinkle borax (or the in-universe equivalent) on it to prevent the metal from oxidizing/being non-weldable, and hammer the pieces together very quickly. Forge welding also sends sparks flying everywhere, and if you're working in a small space with other blacksmiths, you usually want to announce that you're welding before you do, so that everyone in a five-foot radius can get out of that five-foot radius. You also cannot just stuck some random pebbles into the forge and get a decent piece of metal that you can actually make something with, Steven Universe. It doesn't work like that, Steven Universe.

Anvils are really fucking heavy. Nothing else to add here.

Making jewelry is not a blacksmithing thing unless you want jewelry made of steel. And it will be very ugly if you try. Blacksmithing wasn't invented to make small things.

If there's anything here I didn't mention, just ask and I'll do my best to answer.