Scribbling Away @scribblermerlin - Tumblr Blog

Too bad the prophet Cassandra never met Odysseus

They say if she made a prophecy Nobody would believe her

edgar-allan-possum

I’ve gotta say, that is exactly the kind of stupid thing that probably would circumvent a curse.

elidyce

Cassandra: YOU ARE ALL GOING TO REGRET THIS SO MUCH YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW.

Odysseus: Regret it why?

Cassandra: You won’t believe me if I tell you. If I prophecy, nobody believes me. That is my curse.

Odysseus: … I’m Nobody. Fill me in.

*A couple of months later*

Odysseus: HELLO PENELOPE, I AM HERE PRECISELY ON TIME AND NOT YEARS LATE incidentally I rescued and adopted a Trojan seer while I was away, she’s great, got me home really fast, Cassandra this is your new mother who’s not going to treat you like shit.

Penelope: … I’m going to need more details, but okay, sure.

Cassandra: *in tears* I love you, new family.

cipheramnesia

Cassandra: Penelope, I’ve had another vision.

Penelope, sighs: Go tell your father.

val-the-bun

sankta-wraith

the original? on my dash?

absolutely-esme

Apollo: you’re the one who unleashed your little freak of a trouble maker on my Greek tragedy! You don’t get to blame me for this.

unheardoracle

Your dialogue is stiff because everyone is being too honest

Great dialogue can come from radical emotional honesty. But in most real conversations, people

dodge questions

answer indirectly

lie (badly)

change the subject

crack jokes to avoid serious answers

lie (convincingly)

say half of what they mean

tell the truth but get so anxious/angry/defensive others now think they're lying

If your dialogue feels unnatural, it might be because everyone is saying exactly what they think, or articulating their thoughts too well. Try letting characters hide things instead.

Subtext is where tension lives.

dopedyk

more so,

people don’t always speak in full sentences,

slang can change depending on age range, demographic, etc. &

don’t be scared of vocal pauses (uhm, uh, err)

walmart-the-official

Hey, don’t cry. Free online database of Japanese folk lore

bleu-guacamole

Might I add, free database of mostly European folklore and myths

bogleech

A Book of Creatures by @a-book-of-creatures doesn't update these days but is another thing along these lines, really huge, fully illustrated all by the author and cites all sources

st-dionysus

Free database of Native American folklore, sorted by tribe.

beemovieerotica

please say sike

cheese-sample-official

flannelunderpants

xenocelsus

I mean.... you don't have to write descriptions. But there's a word for that: a script. Congrats you're not a novelist, you're a very inefficient playwrite who writes plays that go on for several hours. Go pitch it to netflix.

mariacallous

#not to be pedantic but even scripts have description

vigilantsycamore

"prioritize character development and plot" by. skipping everything but dialogue? Æthelred, you skipped the part where 90% of the character development and plot is

but what if I rewrote Arthur in space. what if Arthur and Lancelot retained memories of a hauntingly different life. what if Lancelot is basically like, if you die again, imma destroy the universe about it. what then.

what if Lancelot didn't fall in love with Gwenivere because he's already been warned off by, oh, memories of Arthur lying dead in his arms. what if the forces of good cannot always defeat the forces of evil, but evil never wins anyway.

as a matter of fact.

what about this.

Lancelot Du’Lac was born small and bloody and screaming, and she would not stop being small and bloody and screaming for the majority of her unfortunate life.

how about this, if this makes it to 10k notes I will not only attempt to write this but attempt to send it to a publisher since I will know it has at least some potential audience

trixic-frankenman-deactivated20

I might even be persuaded to name it the once and future space vigilante

two-thirtyy

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

Look buddy, i’m just trying to make it to Friday.

taykoutmccleod

reblog if its friday and you made it

cenneidi

do it grieving

cenneidi

do it while the ground falls out from under you; do it while everything you loved goes up in smoke; do it while the dream of your future is still burning embers around you; build anew on the hot ashes of everything you worked for; keep going, keep loving, keep living, even as all you want is to turn back (there is no turning back; it is gone already); do it through grief, which feels like fear in the body

do it grieving

cenneidi

The tag I have seen most often on this post is "I needed to hear this," and I am so, so grateful to have said something that was needed. These words came out of the depths of my own grief, and I am so grateful to have made this small connection with others in the midst of it. Grief is isolating and indescribable, but none of us are alone.

That said, these tags were what I needed to hear:

we're all gonna make it

it's okay if you can't see how yet. you don't have to believe in better. for now it is enough to just keep going, and eventually the path will emerge. you are not alone. you are not lost in the woods forever. keep going. I love you.

The problem with giving advice to angry and suffering people is that rather frequently the thing they need to know to improve their position is the last thing they want to hear and not something they have the capacity to internalize or accept

Unfortunate truths you can tell people that would help if they could hear what it means and not just what it sounds like

You were the victim, and it wasn’t fair, but it’s over now. Nobody came to save you, and I’m sorry, but it’s too late for anyone to go back and do it different.

You’re suffering over something that cannot be resolved. You’re allowed to feel angry, or outraged, or betrayed, but there will eventually come a time that you don’t feel that so violently anymore, and you’re going to want to have something good left to go back to.

You can’t make anyone love you the way you need to be loved. That’s how a lot of good things end. Not with a clear sign, something blocking the road that says “do not proceed”, just a splitting of the path that’s still moving somewhat in the same direction.

You can’t fix them. Nothing you can do will fix them. And if they fix themselves, they can’t do it for you- they have to do it for themselves as well, because otherwise a day may come when they’re alone, and as long as they live, they are their only true constant. So you can support, and you can encourage, but the hardest part is up to them. And sometimes they can’t do it even with your help.

Sometimes letting go of someone feels like mourning at their funeral before they’ve died, and every time you see them after it’s like talking to a ghost that doesn’t know it’s dead. Sometimes that happens. You’ll both still wake up tomorrow anyways.

I understand that you’re afraid, and that you’re afraid for good reasons. And I understand that being brave isn’t as easy as just turning that fear off, and you would if you could in a heartbeat. But the thing is, as long as that fear is able to dictate your choices, it will have power over you. If you don’t believe you can try to fight it, if you accept that it will always be in charge, you let the frightening thing stay present in your life. It will exist as long as you stay paralyzed. And that sounds cruel, but it isn’t something anyone can fix for you.

The person you may let yourself become after experiencing the terrible thing may very well grow into a much bigger, much more terrible thing, and someday it will swallow the first terrible thing whole. And all that will be left is something far worse for someone else. And you will not be able to shrink it down by explaining where it came from, because terrible things that are dead and gone are never as terrible as terrible things that are alive right now in front of you.

No matter how much or how little I love you, I still do not have the ability to help you the way you need to be helped. I might be the helper you want, but I am not a helper you can get. If you are to be helped at all, you will need to accept that it will come from someone else.

If anyone goes out of their way to find this user and harass them, please know that’s shitty behaviour and I will be deeply disappointed, but I think they really helped to underline number 8 in a way I wished I’d known to consider of others years ago

So I’ve read the notes and the messages.

If you read this whole thing and found yourself angry, if you thought to yourself ‘I know that, and it doesn’t help. I know that, and I’m still suffering. I know that, I’ve heard that, I’ve been told that before, over and over and over again, by people who aren’t listening who don’t understand, who don’t get it, and I’m still hurting, still tired, still in pain, still suffering, and this isn’t something a handful of pithy words from some asshole who isn’t here and present and walking in my shoes suffering what I’m suffering from can fix. I know all of this and it changes nothing”, I want you to know:

Yeah. That was me, too. I sat at the bottom of a miserable pit that I didn’t even dig while a bunch of detached, emotionally unavailable jackasses who weren’t helping even a little yelled all this down at me, like just saying it hard enough or making me hear it as though I wasn’t already a hundred percent aware and still hurting anyways would magically solve all my problems and it didn’t. Like I was some whiny little rat with a victim complex looking for the easy way out and not the survivor of something awful doing their goddamn best to keep going, scraping by on the skin of their fucking teeth.

Every single note on this list is something someone told me at the exact wrong time, that made me want to scream and cry and smash a goddamn brick over their head because ‘I already know that, you fucking asshole, and it doesn’t change anything, so fucking help me or piss the hell off.”

That’s why I wrote the list.

It’s everything I needed to know that I already knew, that only made me feel worse, and didn’t help me improve anything at all even a little bit until I experienced the exact right circumstances that made them click the exact right way and allowed me to say it to myself and feel only a sense of, “okay yeah, I get it now.”

It’s not something I would ever directly say to someone in a time of crisis, but it’s all stuff I learned and needed to learn while I was that person.

You get what I mean?

The difference between knowing and internalizing, the difference between hearing the pain is temporary when you’ve broken a bone and KNOWING the pain is temporary after its healed, is that you KNOW, but you’re still not done experiencing the part that makes it true and real and meaningful.

hst3000

Lemme add my #9

"I know you're afraid, and I know it isn't likely to work, and I know you don't want to. But nevertheless it has to be done and it has to be done by you."

The amount of slavery in Ancient Rome was legitimately terrifying tbh

Y’all know that I’m into ancient Roman history and I do a lot of research on it but even though I should be used to it by now sometimes I read an anecdote about how an individual slave was treated and I’m hit with the realization that like a third of the population was living like that and I just need to put my head in my hands for a second

Emperor Hadrian randomly stabbed a slave in the eye in a fit of rage and he was supposedly unusually sympathetic to slaves.

There’s other instances of people randomly punching slaves that they didn’t even know because they got in their way or something. This was just normal behavior.

And slaves didn’t rebel en masse because if even one slave committed an act of violent rebellion it was common practice to kill every slave and former slave in the household.

People only took notice for posterity when these mass executions got into the hundreds of people. One of the few recorded for the history books is of over 400 people being killed because one guy stabbed his enslaver.

Like how many people throughout history were beaten to death because some rich asshole was angry and there was no legal or social consequences for doing so? We don’t know.