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brooke - 22 - writer

[purpurle-iris]

Can't believe some people don't have a project™

[periodicallypurple]

Thought this might help others who struggle when writing. I know I get in my head too much.

[oldwinesoul]

[quiltofstars]

Polaris (α Ursae Minoris) surrounded by Integrated Flux nebulae // Davide Coverta

Polaris (α Ursae Minoris) is a yellow supergiant star located about 450 light years away. It is most famous for being the current northern pole star, a position it will have until about 4200 AD. The name comes from the Neo-Latin phrase stella polaris meaning "polar star."

[autopsybaby]

Unreliable worldbuilding exposition infodump.... Infodumping but it's borderline propaganda or conspiracy theory or pseudoscience..... infodumping that only shows one side of events, infodumping that might be more scientific/religious/political/personal depending on who u ask.......Infodumping that informs you of how a character views the world, and in turn how their world view has been influenced by politics, culture, etc. ....... infodumping that forces the audience to piece together their own idea of the world, after hearing out various unreliable views from various unreliable characters

[writers-bane]

You're afraid to write because you care too much about your craft. Not because you suck.

You want it to be perfect. Worthy. You're scared it won't be good enough. But the thing is, everything you write is worthy if you write it with heart.

That fear doesn't make you a fraud, or lazy. It makes you a perfectionist who doesn't write as much as they should because their fear is choking them. Your writing will never be perfect—nothing ever is.

So stop waiting for the perfect moment and go pour your heart out. Unleash your wild—and slightly disturbing—imagination onto those pages. Go create magic that only you can make.

GO WRITE THE THING YOU KEEP THINKING ABOUT DAY AND NIGHT. And make sure you write it for yourself before anyone else!

[becherdireinen]

trust that everything will fall into place without you forcing it there.

[fantasticdreamnemesis]

Note to self..

[bitesizedpoetry]

Sylvia Plath, "Lady Lazarus"

[weltenwellen]

May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

[marthajefferson]

The International Space Station (ISS) crosses in front of the Sun’s roiling chromosphere, captured in extraordinary detail by photographer Andrew McCarthy. source

[edwhiteandblue]

February 9, 1971 — The crew of Apollo 14 splashes down in the south Pacific Ocean

Apollo 14's Kitty Hawk command module reentered and splashed down after nine days in space and was recovered by the USS New Orleans. The crew spent three weeks in quarantine following their return from the moon to prevent backwards contamination. Kitty Hawk is now on display at the Apollo/Saturn V Center at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida.

[nemfrog]

A swarm of comets.

Die Welt in hundert Jahren. 1910.

Internet Archive

[greenjudy]

weird cultural shift detected

Fam, be careful with your time online. I highly recommend sinking some time and energy into offline pursuits.

Try: knitting or crochet; gentle movement, stretching, walking if you can; playing a musical instrument, whether it's piano or penny whistle; and especially reading.

I do not mean performative BookTok reading that we do for likes because our neurotransmitters have been nerfed by modern life.

I mean actual reading that we do for ourselves alone.

If reading is hard, if attention or energy or memory are operating at a deficit, I get it. Nevertheless, please try. If you notice you're skipping across big chunks of text like a river stone, if you can't finish a paragraph, slow down, pronounce the words out loud. Stop sometimes and ask yourself what you just read. Explain the story or article or poem to your blorbo or your cat or a stuffed animal.

If your head feels scrambled up, no judgment. We may have incredibly intractable neurochemical reasons that this is hard. Just tell the blorbo, "That's hilarious, I don't remember any of what I just read. Let's read it again, together."

(Please don't ask A.I. to do this for you. Please. It's your right to read and think about it your own way. A.I. doesn't actually understand anything. Please don't assume it will guide you safely through this next weird phase of our human culture.)

If reading longform, offline, makes you feel bored or anxious, be gentle and patient with yourself. Start with stories you remember well, reliable sources of well-being. But please know you will need to put some backbone into it in the long run.

I think we are going to need to rebuild our ability to think, to process experience. This will be an unsupported activity. In fact, most of the really powerful cultural forces are making it very hard for us to notice, feel, perceive, or think clearly.

Not sure what, but something's happened quite recently that is making this situation much worse, some kind of tipping point.

Please read something every day.

Your friend, greenjudy

[captain-kit-adventuress]

i've been thinking about this a lot lately and how to make it easier for people to accomplish. ability to read and think is not some innate gift, it's a skill you build. i don't think a lot of people realise that school did a lot of the work for us because we constantly had to read and think all the time. now that a lot of us are out of school, we have to continue that work ourselves, but i'm not sure all of us have the tools to make it a thing.

so where do you start? before you even pick up a book, it's probably a good idea to put some thought into how having to do this at all makes you feel, and why that might present another barrier. it's hard, and it's ok to admit it's hard, and that you maybe don't have the skills you want to have anymore. it's good to acknowledge your feelings surrounding this.

then try something small. offline, an actual piece of reading material like a physical book if you can. if it has to be digital, that's ok, too. it's more than ok to start with a book intended for children, even. after all, that's where you learnt these skills in the first place, and so many kids' books are intended to help build reading and comprehension ability. don't be ashamed of it; lots of well-funded groups like corporations and others have worked very hard to make sure this skill has eroded as much as possible.

do what greenjudy says and be gentle. take care of yourself. take breaks if it's hard, try not to get frustrated.

one of the best things you can do for yourself is to not be afraid if it's hard. it's not a sign you're doing it wrong. it's because you're building new roads in your brain, or maybe fixing the bad roads that already exist. if it helps, you can imagine little tiny construction guys in your mind repaving or smoothing out the land for something new, whatever floats your boat. it's not easy for the construction guys, either, but hey, these roads need to get built or fixed, right? they're doing something really worthwhile and so are you.

it's ok to read and think about easy things until you feel ready to take on more of a project. it's like scales at the piano; they're not meant to be hard, they're meant to support muscle memory and technique so that you can tackle bigger challenges. reading and thinking are no different.

reading is itself an act of revolution. being able to think on top of it is even more so. helping people can also mean helping ourselves, because we're people, too.

i can't think of anything more worthwhile than fighting to reclaim our minds.

[fremedon]

Oddly, I've been having better luck reading for pleasure in French, a second language and one I haven't been studying that long, than in English lately. I'm forced to go slow, to notice the words and think about word choices--and that means I notice the words and the rhythms, I pick up on little details, I get to savor the sounds.

This might be a good time to pick up a book (comics and picture books count) in a language you're learning or have always wanted to learn.

[fixyourwritinghabits]

One of my favorite books (Shelley Jackson's Riddance or The Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children) has a number of reviews that complain about the language used and how often they had to look a word up, and I get it, I promise I do, but it would not be the book it is without the language used. It is worth the effort.

But it doesn't have to be a slog, and you don't have to torment yourself. Working yourself up to reading headier things. One thing you can try is picking up a couple of books in the same genre you like at varying levels. Take time time to compare what makes them different. Keeping a reading journal is a fun way to get more engaged in your reading and track where you go.

(This is also great for writing, because you can compare different approaches to description and storytelling.)

[zespaceblog]

It Started with a Kiss

They say you can find romance amongst the stars, and while Pluto and it's orbital partner Charon have stuck around together ever since, the kiss that brought them together, may have certainly moved the "Earth" had you been on either body at the time.

For many years Astronomers have puzzled over how Pluto got to have a moon the size of Charon, it's far too large to be either a capture or a smash up similar to what birthed our moon.

However, it turns out that objects of lower mass to Earth, don't behave as a liquid, and can and often do find themselves in at close contact, "The Kiss" .

Slowly rotating objects like Arrokoth (originally named Ultima Thule) can find themselves embraced in an ever lasting smooch, increasing the mass and the chances of new mass accumulating, however the suggestion is that Pluto and Charon kissed briefly, bounced off each other causing the body of Pluto to accelerate, and when Charon came in for the 2nd, was ultimately span off, but now slowed and captured by the gravity of Pluto.

[gemini-enthusiast]

Astronauts Gordo Cooper and Pete Conrad egress from spacecraft after splashdown, Gemini V

[enchantedbook]

Grimm's Fairytales illustrated by Albert Weisgerber, 1900

[catsofyore]

Young soldier posing with kitten. 1916. Source.