A writing blog @shouldbewritingbutguesswhat - Tumblr Blog

Okay, here’s a plan :

Stuff I post, as finished, wips or just random ideas :

- Geography related (Map)

- History (the official version, the myth...)

- Political & Economical things (Associations, guilds, governments, societies...)

- Biology and Ethnicity of the different Species (probably gonna be a mess lol)

- Theological related (the Golems, the different Gods and religious system, the churches)

- The Science behind the Magic (the Elements, the Systems, the Illness and inflictions...)

- The Characters

The Stories : (all untitled for now)

Hazel’s Story (fantasy, coming-of-age ?) : tells the life of Hazel as she fights against her world to find a place for her and her kind.

Lotty’s Story (post-apo in a way ? romance) : tells the life of a woman, Lotty, as she’s trying to repair the end of the world she might have caused while being haunted by a demon.

The World outside Hazel : because I’m building a huge damn world for Hazel’s, I’m using it for others, smaller projects. -> A group of adventurers, meeting and working together for a simple quest as they look for their own personnal goal. (actually a big project, oups) -> Two sisters have traveled across the continent to meet their remaining family after a tragic passing and are searching for their place in this new place. -> A scientist takes interest in a slave and decides to take her in and help her.

#world building #hazel story #lotty story #wip

bluebxlle-writer

Writing Indonesian Characters

masterlist. main navigation.

@bluebxlle_writer on Instagram

Growing up, I thought that books needed to be about white people in order for it to be a best-seller. So when I wrote my first novel, I made everyone white, made the setting in the classical NeW YoRk, and yeeted in like, a Chinese token character (I’M SORRY HAJSHKAHS Y’ALL CAN GO PUNCH 11-YEAR-OLD ME) - Since it’s Indonesia’s independence day, I decided to repost this in case anyone needs it!

1. Physical appearances

Indonesia has LOTS of islands - more than 17k of them - so you better expect that we don’t look the same. Our skin colors vary from pale, fair, light brown, to dark brown. We also have different hair types - wavy, straight, curly, and coily, but all dark- colored, either brown or black. Our eyes are also commonly dark brown. There are three unique tribes that consist of people with blue eyes, though - the Lingon, Lamno, and Simpou tribe.

2. Names

Okay not gonna lie, about 90% of my friends have modernized names (Look I have a friend named Karen), but in this post I’ll only be covering our native names. Our name structures are incredibly diverse, some have patronymic names, some have their surnames placed before their name. But I’ll focus on the structure I’m most familiar with - the standard ones with the name-surname format.

Masculine first names : Agung, Adika, Adit, Banyu, Dharma, Genta, Hadrian, Reza, Raditya, Raka

Feminine first names : Aster, Citra, Indah, Jelita, Juwita, Kemala, Mawar, Nirmala, Ratih, Ratu, Ratna

Surnames : Ang, Hioe, Heryanto, Susanto, Hartanto, Widjaja, Wijaya, Winata, Sianturi

If you need more reference, @lintang.docx has this wholeass series about Indonesian names in their page, so go check it out!

3. Tribes

What tribe your character belongs to isn’t THAT relevant tbh, but I’ll talk about them anyway. Indonesia has lots of tribes (even I can’t memorize them all rip), but the most common ones are Jawa, Sunda, Betawi, Dayak, Batak, Bugis, Ambon, and Chinese Indonesians (me!!). Chinese Indonesians are divided into MORE tribes, like Kanton, Hokkian, Tiochiu, etc. (Lmao yes this is complicated af, so if you have any follow- up questions, feel free to dm me!)

4. Common cultures

• Smiling at strangers as a form of politeness - we tend to smile at strangers we make eye contact with.

• Using the left hand to eat or to receive/give something from/to others when you’re not left-handed is considered incredibly impolite, because the left hand is usually used to clean oneself in the bathroom.

• Referring to someone older without honorifics is disrespectful. Common honorifics include “pak” (sir), “ibu” (ma'am) “tante” (aunt), “om” (uncle), “mbak” (miss), and “mas” (Mr).

• Silence during meals is common.

• Praying before eating is encouraged.

• Shaking people’s hands as a form of greeting. Don’t squeeze to hard though, it’ll be seen as a form of agression.

• Indonesians tend to be religious. The most common religion is Islam, followed by Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Confucianism.

5. Other facts

• We only has two seasons, the dry season and the monsoon season.

• Lots of Indonesians love spicy food for some reason lol.

• There are over 400 volcanoes here, and around 130 are active. Yikes.

• We produce the most expensive coffee - the Luwak coffee.

• Our schools start a new academic year in July (Yes, July. 0.0)

#writing help #writing reference #indonesia

wafflewarrior111

So... I found this and now it keeps coming to mind. You hear about "life-changing writing advice" all the time and usually its really not—but honestly this is it man.

I'm going to try it.

missroserose

I love the lawyer metaphor, because whenever I see “John knew that...” in prose writing I immediately think “how? How does he know it?” Interrogate your witnesses. Cross-examine them. Make them explain their reasoning. It pays dividends.

heck-in-a-handbasket

All of this, but also feels/felt. My editor has forbidden me from using those and it’s forced me to stretch my skills.

ineedthesons

This is your "show not tell" advice explained!

tarysande

Editor here.

First, let me preface this with something very important: you can treat all of this advice as SECOND-DRAFT ADVICE. It is so much easier to rewrite this kind of stuff once you have words on the page. Telling yourself the first draft is totally appropriate and acceptable.

What we’re talking about here are FILTER WORDS (and to some degree verbs of being). Yes, “thought” words are included. But so are “heard, saw, looked, tasted, smelled” etc.—most words having to do with the senses.

This isn’t black and white advice; sometimes you’ll use these words and that’s okay. They’re not WRONG. They’re just weaker. And they’re weaker because they create distance between the reader and the experience of the character.*

If you want your reader to feel like they’re experiencing the story right alongside the character, you want to cut down on filter words.

*This is particularly important with first person and close third POVs. The reader always knows whose eyes they’re seeing through and thoughts they’re privy to. So you don’t need to tell them “I saw X.” Or “I heard X.” Or “I thought Y.” You can just jump into the action/observation as it’s happening.

This is also where you want to pay attention to verbs of being.

“It was rainy.” Versus: “The rain pounded against the roof.” Or “The rain howled like an injured animal.” Or “The rain tapped against the window like an anxious lover.” All of these are inviting the reader deeper into the experience of the story by using stronger verbs and similes. And, at the same time, they stir feelings (instead of TELLING feelings). And feelings keep your reader engaged. Engaged readers keep turning pages; engaged readers become FANS.

the-haiku-bot

This is also where

you want to pay attention

to verbs of being.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

defilerwyrm

The most valuable advice that Author Ex gave me through the years that we wrote together was this: the problem with all these filter words is that they create distance in the POV.

That means that when you read a line like

John saw that the curtains were open.

It immediately takes you OUT of the character's perspective and instead tells you what they experience as a secondhand observation.

You don't have to get fancy or purple with how you rephrase things like this. Not everything needs a ton of breathing room.

You wanna know what's perfectly impactful while keeping a tight POV?

The curtains were open.

Simple as that.

songlin

This was one of my all time most powerful writing lessons! This mindset shift makes you a stronger writer immediately in a way that just keeps getting easier and better for you.

elumish

The take I always have on advice like this is that "John saw that the curtains were open." and "The curtains were open." are sentences that are telling you two different pieces of information.

Some of this, yes, is about POV distance--but some of it is also about the information being conveyed by the sentence. If you are using a sentence like "John saw that the windows were open" it should be because the information you are seeking to convey is that John saw it.

Maybe this matters because the next time John looks back they are closed, and so he's doubting what he saw. Maybe it matters because he later has to recount information about the room he was in, and it's notable that he specifically saw that the windows were open. The fact and method of his observation is part of the point of the sentence, rather than simply the observation itself.

When we are using sense verbs, it should be because part of the point is the sense. Same with "thought", "felt", etc.: "Mary thought that Susan looked a little thin" is telling us a different piece of information than "Susan looked a little thin."

Contrarily, at least in my opinion, simple telling phrasing like "It was rainy" can sometimes bring us more into a character's head than something showing like "The rain howled like an injured animal." I have read books when a relatively plain-spoken/plain-thinking character suddenly starts having elaborate descriptions of things like scenery or weather, and it is abundantly clear that the author wanted to spruce up their writing and avoid "telling." The problem is that it drags me as the reader out of the character's head and shows me where all of the strings are. I'm suddenly thinking about how the author is worried about being yelled at for "telling" instead of just reading the story.

Your writing, down to the sentence structure and word choice level, should be about what you are trying to accomplish. Is the point to tell us that the window was open, or is it to tell us that John saw that the window was open?

wafflewarrior111

So... I found this and now it keeps coming to mind. You hear about "life-changing writing advice" all the time and usually its really not—but honestly this is it man.

I'm going to try it.

missroserose

I love the lawyer metaphor, because whenever I see “John knew that...” in prose writing I immediately think “how? How does he know it?” Interrogate your witnesses. Cross-examine them. Make them explain their reasoning. It pays dividends.

heck-in-a-handbasket

All of this, but also feels/felt. My editor has forbidden me from using those and it’s forced me to stretch my skills.

ineedthesons

This is your "show not tell" advice explained!

tarysande

Editor here.

First, let me preface this with something very important: you can treat all of this advice as SECOND-DRAFT ADVICE. It is so much easier to rewrite this kind of stuff once you have words on the page. Telling yourself the first draft is totally appropriate and acceptable.

What we’re talking about here are FILTER WORDS (and to some degree verbs of being). Yes, “thought” words are included. But so are “heard, saw, looked, tasted, smelled” etc.—most words having to do with the senses.

This isn’t black and white advice; sometimes you’ll use these words and that’s okay. They’re not WRONG. They’re just weaker. And they’re weaker because they create distance between the reader and the experience of the character.*

If you want your reader to feel like they’re experiencing the story right alongside the character, you want to cut down on filter words.

*This is particularly important with first person and close third POVs. The reader always knows whose eyes they’re seeing through and thoughts they’re privy to. So you don’t need to tell them “I saw X.” Or “I heard X.” Or “I thought Y.” You can just jump into the action/observation as it’s happening.

This is also where you want to pay attention to verbs of being.

“It was rainy.” Versus: “The rain pounded against the roof.” Or “The rain howled like an injured animal.” Or “The rain tapped against the window like an anxious lover.” All of these are inviting the reader deeper into the experience of the story by using stronger verbs and similes. And, at the same time, they stir feelings (instead of TELLING feelings). And feelings keep your reader engaged. Engaged readers keep turning pages; engaged readers become FANS.

the-haiku-bot

This is also where

you want to pay attention

to verbs of being.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

defilerwyrm

The most valuable advice that Author Ex gave me through the years that we wrote together was this: the problem with all these filter words is that they create distance in the POV.

That means that when you read a line like

John saw that the curtains were open.

It immediately takes you OUT of the character's perspective and instead tells you what they experience as a secondhand observation.

You don't have to get fancy or purple with how you rephrase things like this. Not everything needs a ton of breathing room.

You wanna know what's perfectly impactful while keeping a tight POV?

The curtains were open.

Simple as that.

songlin

This was one of my all time most powerful writing lessons! This mindset shift makes you a stronger writer immediately in a way that just keeps getting easier and better for you.

elumish

The take I always have on advice like this is that "John saw that the curtains were open." and "The curtains were open." are sentences that are telling you two different pieces of information.

Some of this, yes, is about POV distance--but some of it is also about the information being conveyed by the sentence. If you are using a sentence like "John saw that the windows were open" it should be because the information you are seeking to convey is that John saw it.

Maybe this matters because the next time John looks back they are closed, and so he's doubting what he saw. Maybe it matters because he later has to recount information about the room he was in, and it's notable that he specifically saw that the windows were open. The fact and method of his observation is part of the point of the sentence, rather than simply the observation itself.

When we are using sense verbs, it should be because part of the point is the sense. Same with "thought", "felt", etc.: "Mary thought that Susan looked a little thin" is telling us a different piece of information than "Susan looked a little thin."

Contrarily, at least in my opinion, simple telling phrasing like "It was rainy" can sometimes bring us more into a character's head than something showing like "The rain howled like an injured animal." I have read books when a relatively plain-spoken/plain-thinking character suddenly starts having elaborate descriptions of things like scenery or weather, and it is abundantly clear that the author wanted to spruce up their writing and avoid "telling." The problem is that it drags me as the reader out of the character's head and shows me where all of the strings are. I'm suddenly thinking about how the author is worried about being yelled at for "telling" instead of just reading the story.

Your writing, down to the sentence structure and word choice level, should be about what you are trying to accomplish. Is the point to tell us that the window was open, or is it to tell us that John saw that the window was open?

miyuliart

Trying to figure out how to draw armour. These are some of my notes I uploaded on patreon. A lot more to come since I really want to figure this one out.

gupdoo3

@anim-ttrpgs

anim-ttrpgs

This is a great reference for mid-15th-century plate armor. I'm going to add a few things that aren't meant as corrections but rather, like, additional info.

That type of bevor seen in the first picture wouldn't usually go with an armet-style helmet, but rather with a helmet without its own built-in neck protection, such as (what is neologically called) a sallet or kettle helm.

If you wanted to get more neck protection out of an armet, you'd use what is usually called a "wrapper plate" which is kind of similar to a bevor but shaped to fit armets.

Arming jackets/doublets (usually also called gambesons - the thing about the Middle Ages is that they didn't actually have a lot of standardized words for things at all and many words we use today to refer to specific pieces of equipment are either completely new, or they refer to something specific today but a medieval person would have used the same word to refer to many different things) have strings all over them not just to keep them tied together but because that's how you attach the plate armor to the body. Their padding also not only acts as padding, but also offers some basic resistance to blades in the event that a blade gets between the plates and through the maille (chainmail) armor that usually fills the gaps between the plates. There is almost no chance at all of a blade penetrating the plates themselves.

Bigger thicker gambesons were worn as a form of armor themselves for poorer soldiers who couldn't afford anything better. They are surprisingly cut-resistant and cushion the body against blunt force as well. Stabbing weapons will go straight through them, but even then it's better to have it than not, because if you're wearing 2 inches of padding and get stabbed by a 5-inch blade in the heat of battle when everyone is constantly moving around and your opponent has no time (or desire) to drive it all the way in, that's only 3 inches deep into your actual flesh instead of 5.

Oh one tip I will give that technically is a correction is that that belt in the bottom-left picture is anachronistic. It's hard to describe how 15th century belts buckle but it usually looks something like this.

ltwilliammowett

1. Ketsch- a vessel with two masts, the front main mast and the aft mizzen mast, which is getting smaller and smaller. The ketch has its mizzen mast within the (construction) waterline.

2. Schooner- a schooner is a sailing ship which has two or more masts, has scraper sails as main sails on all masts and whose foremost mast is lower than (one) the aft mast(s).

3. Topsail schooner - This term describes the rigging of the ship, not the type of ship. It is a two- or three-masted sailing vessel rigged primarily with fore-and-aft sails (gaff mainsail and staysails) but featuring one or more square topsails on the foremast.

4. Brigantine - a brigantine is a two-masted sailing vessel with a fully square-rigged foremast and at least two sails on the main mast: a square topsail and a gaff sail mainsail (behind the mast). The main mast is the second and taller of the two masts.

5. Brig- A brig is a type of sailing vessel defined by its rig: two masts which are both square-rigged. Brigs originated in the second half of the 18th century and were a common type of smaller merchant vessel or warship from then until the latter part of the 19th century.

6. Barkentine - while a full-rigged ship is square-rigged on all three masts, and the barque is square-rigged except for the mizzen-mast, the barquentine extends the principle by making only the foremast square-rigged.

7. Bark - a barque, barc, or bark is a type of sailing vessel with three or more masts of which the fore mast, mainmast, and any additional masts are rigged square, and only the aftmost mast (mizzen in three-masted barques) is rigged fore and aft. Sometimes, the mizzen is only partly fore-and-aft rigged, bearing a square-rigged sail above.

8. Full rigged ship - a full-rigged ship or fully rigged ship is a sailing vessel with a sail plan of three or more masts, all of them square-rigged. Such a vessel is said to have a ship rig or be ship-rigged, with each mast stepped in three segments: lower, top, and topgallant.

9. Ewer - classic fishing and transport vessel of the Lower Elbe with flat bottom and side swords. It is rigged as single mast as well as one and a half mast.

10. Galeass- mostly a two-masted coastal sailer, ketch rigged, especially common in the Baltic Sea. Length rarely over 20 meters.

11. Tjalk - old East Frisian-Dutch coastal vessels with flat bottom, side swords and round ship ends. Rigging as one or one and a half master. Still common in the Netherlands.

12. Cutter - is a single-masted rig with two or more foresails – typically a jib and a staysail

#naval history #naval artifacts #ship types #sail plan #worldbuilding #world building #writing resources #writing help

arevieh

Meet Doliane, designed from a vibe in 2022, to a bit more work with his lore.

I actually still don’t know sh-t about him lol

shouldbewritingbutguesswhat

Okay so, Doliane.

I didn't work much on him ; neither his design nor his personal story.

He's supposed to be an Ondine, despite the fact that I don't know what Ondine looks like nor what they do. He's attached to his home - the sea, and works mainly for the Black Guild, whether he's a spy, an assassin, or just collect info here and there.

He's now working on this mission with the group of adventurers to get some more info and maybe answers to unsolved problems.

#doliane #adventurer's group #original character #worldbuilding #world building #wip #character design #design evolution #open to criticism

Milo ? - wip

Name : Milo (not sure, probably won't keep) (no design yet)

He's a young man, 25-30ish something, joining the adventurer's group as a way to get information and contacts in the Adventurer's Guild. He's a fighter using melee-weapons and has the Wind blessing.

Unknown to the other member of the group, he's a ranked guard for the Dragon Empire in a special mission to collect a certain someone, and the more informations, the better. Just so happens this quest might have info about Them...

He works for the Empire to repay his personal debt ; found half-dead and amnesic a few years ago, he got saved by the Empire's army and decided to join them to share their message. He's not that interested in his past, yet... past visions and voices seem to try to make him remember.

#world building #worldbuilding #wip #original character #oc milo #adventurer's group #dragon empire

concerningwolves

favourite things about first drafts:

square brackets with notes to self mid-line like [does this make sense with worldbuilding?]

ah yes, Main Character and their closest friends, Unnamed Character A and Unnamed Character B.

bullshitting your way through something that you probably definitely need to research later

also square brackets to link up scenes. [scene transition idk] my beloved

the total freedom of word vomits

"I'll fix that later"

the moment when the world and characters start to gain a life of their own

pieces falling into place as you write that you were uncertain about before you started

the accomplishment of Made A Thing

concerningwolves

Not only is this allowed but it's something i encourage all writers of any kind to play with! :D

The idea that all writers know what to say all the time and just splash fully-formed drafts out one word after the other is false. There are some who can do it, but i think most of us... can't. Which is why we need tricks like square bracket notes! They're not cheats or lazy writing or some other flavour of Not Allowed, but instead really really important tools that we should use as much as we need to.

Some of the most helpful tricks I've collected over the years are:

make some notes in square brackets – e.g., I had to write a scene on a sailboat, but I know nothing about sailing so i literally just had notes like [boat part] and [how to do X thing?]. If you use square brackets as punctuation anyway, use something else like [[double square brackets]] or a unique letter combination like XY at the start of the note; the point is to pick something you can search for easily later on.

(You can also style inline comments in a different font/colour. Scrivener has an inline annotation feature; if you use Word, you can make a specific Style to make notes stand out at a glance, etc.)

bullet-point your way through any tricky parts – this can be pure stream-of-consciousness vague ideas. it only needs to make sense to me later. much more helpful than just leaving big blank gaps that Future Me has to work out how to fill, but also better than dwelling on a piece of writing forever.

use comment tools – mostly do this if I have ideas for alternate events and/or phrasing, or if I want to check something for continuity purposes.

write out of order – Best advice i ever got for academic writing is to know or even write your conclusion first and your introduction last, which your main argument in between. Similar principles apply in fiction, or any kind of creative writing. If there's a part of the essay that I can visualise clearly or a part of the story that is particularly exciting or important, I might write that first, then figure out how it fits/how everything fits around it.

keep a loose scenes and/or "outtakes" folder – anything that i write out of order goes here, along with any notes for how I think I want to incorporate it into the full text. In the same vein, if I delete something but don't know for sure it will never be relevent ever again, it gets cut and pasted into an outtakes folder.

Basic rule though is that you do not have to get your writing perfect on the first try. This is where drafts come in. The way I see it is to treat each draft as a fresh start – I create/open a new document (well, new Scrivener file) and start over as if from scratch. Each draft gets a narrower focus than the last. This is my process, as an example:

first draft is the word vomit. You do whatever you need to do to get it onto the page, and it can be terrible. In fact, it probably should be terrible. You can fix everything later. it's fine.

The second draft is a half-hearted cleanup attempt. I'll re-type everything because everything is subject to change, from the characters' personalities to the pacing to the order of events. It's all primordial goop, basically. i'm just poking and prodding and making a few adjustments, but mostly trying to create a more stable version of the first draft. All shortcut tricks continue to be my best friend.

By draft three I'll let myself copy-paste between documents if I'm particularly happy with a passage, but try not to get hung up on anything specific. I'll still make liberal use of square brackets etc. as I need to, but try to address as many from the previous draft as I can. This is where I get more brutal with making decisions and trying to fix parts of the story in place.

Draft four is usually my final draft, but there's literally no rules about how many drafts you're allowed to write. It's at this point that I try to keep square brackets etc. to a minimum (unless i've diverged significantly from the plot of a previous draft and having to rewrite large chunks), and make sure to address all the notes and problems encountered in previous drafts.

This is when I move on to revisions. Revisions are the "final do-overs", for me. I start them when I'm satisfied with all the large-scale aspects: plot and chronology; characters' personalities, motivations and arcs; large-scale pacing (so the over-arcing pace, rather than the pacing in individual scenes); backstories; and worldbuilding. I'll copy the last draft's document instead of starting with a blank one. First I run through those large scale things one more time and tweak until I'm happy, not just satisfied. Then I shrink my focus to in-scene pacing, dialogue, and the quality of the writing itself.

I'll also rewrite my plot outline between each draft, too. The act of actually re-writing stuff is very helpful for making your brain think about it.

Drafting like this isn't for everyone, but realising that you can just bullshit your way through chunks of text was a massive game-changer for me. Some people will do a draft, then work on something else, then come back and do another draft, work on something else, etc. Some people's drafting process will look more like what I consider to be revisions. Do whatever works for you. Just remember that from the moment you first decide you Want to Write a Thing to the moment you hit "post" or "publish" or give your manuscript over to a publisher, you can keep making as many changes as you like in any way you like. (And if you go the querying to traditional publishing route, you'll probably get suggestions for, and have space/time to make, changes to the manuscript quite far into the process).

laurenkmoody

Yes!!

I don't believe I've ever met two writers who have exactly the same process. Every writer I've spoken to about the craft of writing has their own process, usually developed over years and years of practice and trying things out.

For example, I don't rewrite at all, that sounds horrendous, I just save-as to create a new draft. I also get the big structure stuff done in outlining, but I'm a weirdo who writes 20k word outlines. As mentioned above, I am one of those people who needs space between drafts--or at least, between rough draft and first revision. And I do my first revision on paper, always. The human brain processes screens and hardcopy differently! I write all over my printed rough draft, and then go back to the doc and apply those edits and anything else that occurs to me at the time, so my draft 2 is more sort of draft 2.5??

There's a lot more, obviously, and it's different between novels and short stories (I don't print short stories unless I'm really struggling). But I'm always experimenting with different ways to write, and sometimes they work and sometimes I get stranded and have to go back to the drawing board. Some people have a lot more hand writing in the prep stages, in notebooks or on index cards--I visited someone once whose dining room walls were covered in butcher paper and index cards with pushpins!

So if you're a newbie writer, experiment! Read about a bunch of different ways to get those words down! Try new things! Put notes and placeholders and such in your drafts, write by the seat of your pants, try out the whole in-depth outline thing, revise every paragraph before moving on to the next one, whatever works!!

Also please feel free to come talk to me about it! I love hearing about how people write.

shouldbewritingbutguesswhat

Update on the map.

I went through 4 more versions, and I am now settling on the fourth. I think I just have to build my world now, instead of changing its shape.

The big soft red in the middle is my main Empire. Where most of the story takes place.

Green for forest, ‘x’ for cities, square for capitals, triangles for a few temples I managed to place. They don’t pray all the same gods, obviously.

Later, I’ll draw ‘national’ maps.

And I’ll name all those places. I just need ideas, and to make a few researches

shouldbewritingbutguesswhat

I have bad news for the v4 of this map.

It has a problem I can’t figure. I made a fifth, and I can tell it has the same issue. It feels…. Empty ? Too fake.

I mean, fair point, I don’t usually draw map, so I don’t know how to but…. It bothers me very much ….

#map #world building #worldbuilding #help #how do you make map #i don’t want to generate it #I want to make it #I’ll keep working on cities and important countries anyway but still

vinguist

Not posting this on my art account since this technically isn't finished yet. I'm thinking of changing a few things around, like maybe changing some of the shapes of the land masses. Also adding arctic/ice masses up at the poles potentially. I do also plan on making more detailed maps later with the rivers & mountains + names of places.

Main question I have for cartography/world building side of tumblr; is there a way/how do you go about translating a map between different projections? Or even potentially mapping this onto a globe? I specifically chose to do a robinson projection because I thought it looked nice but curious about other potential interpretations of the map-

I could probably also just redraw it with gridline translation too tho lol

robinsonprojection

ROBINSON PROJECTION MENTIONED !!!!!1!!!!!!! I have always loved the way it looked, good choice 😊👍👍👍😎👍😊👍👍😎

I do actually have a good solution for you, in the form if GIS programs, more specifically the freeware version of it QGIS (Here is the site for download) - It should be able to run on basically any computer, especially if you aren't doing complex stuff in it

I'll include a demo for GIS stuff below the cut, if you need more explanations, feel free to ask! A couple of the sketch maps I've done with QGIS have been included as examples before that.

ellipsus-writes

Right y’all 😮‍💨—we worked our way though over 5,000 responses for our survey on writing in the age of AI. We crunched the numbers, made some lovely infographics, gathered a ton of phenomenal quotes, data’d the data—and shared the results over on our blog.

Who’s ready for some pie charts?!🧵🧵

aquilacalvitium

Write it badly or it'll never be written

aquilacalvitium

Please keep interacting with this post because when I come to tumblr to procrastinate, this shows up again in my notifications and guilts me into writing again

lrlamauthor

hello! i started reading dragonfall the other day, and i was delighted to find that you were on tumblr. i've only just gotten to everen and arcady meeting, but i'm thoroughly enjoying it so far! it's written so differently to anything i've read before, and once i'd wrapped my head around everything, i was gripped. i'm loving every second of it!

off subject of dragonfall, i just wanted to ask, if it's okay, if you had any advice/tips for naming characters? do you have a way you go about it- by the vibes, the meanings, or just picking names that you like and think fit?

Hiya, thank you for the ask! I'm glad you're enjoying. Yes, it starts a bit intense as you get to know the world, but then it does level off, and I added a glossary in the paperback version. I always go to behindthename.com to get initial inspiration and like to choose names based on meaning. Arcady was partly because the first protagonist of the book I tried writing age 16 was Arc so it's a little callback, and Arcady means someone from Arcadia but also bear. Evren is inspired by Everen, a Turkish name that means cosmos or the universe. Sorin means sun. Kelwyn means river or blessed. Some of the smaller secondary character names I might make up on the spot, but I try to 1. make sure they sound believably fantasy (Chad would not work, for example, but Lowe does) and google to make sure it doesn't accidentally mean anything awful. I once almost named a character after a dictator and I was like....well, not that one, then! Hope that helps. :-)

#writing advice #naming

scriptwriters-network

In writing a series of stories about the same characters, plan the whole series in advance in some detail, to avoid contradictions and inconsistencies.

- L. Sprague de Camp

huntingrays

me, feeling confident about my writing:

grammarly, ready to tell me about the 700+ mistakes i made:

mycroftrh

Unsolicited commentary from a professional copyeditor:

A: every single person makes grammar mistakes.

I have my writing read over by others because you know what you meant, so your brain automatically fills in the right thing. Also, copyediting is its own trained skill which is separate from writing. (Hence the profession!) While writers should definitely have some of those skills, given the horrors that I see from professional writers I do not expect amateur writers to be low on mistakes.

So that’s my first point - everyone makes mistakes in their own writing. Copyeditors make them, professional writers make them, amateur writers make them.

B: take Grammarly with an entire shaker of salt.

Your writing does have mistakes, I guarantee it, but I’d say for most people about half to two thirds of what Grammarly comments on is valid. Grammarly is like if a 3rd grade teacher with a grudge against children who just goes down the page slashing everything with red, had a baby with an old-school robot of the type that breaks down with a “does not compute” if you ask it to calculate the last digit of pi.

B1: In most situations, your writing should not be 100% grammatically “correct”. Stylistic writing requires stretching some grammar norms and breaking others, and almost all writing is stylistic. Some is really obviously stylistic - dril writes Like That on purpose - and some is more subtly so, but if you aren’t doing technical writing or in a 3rd grade English class, you’re stylizing. You should be stylizing. Otherwise Grammarly could write your thing for you.

B2: Grammarly is sometimes just flat-out wrong. Languages are complex, sentences are complex, and computers being able to parse human language at all is a VERY recent concept. Grammarly can’t always figure out what that pronoun was meant to refer to, or where that clause actually ended.

TL;DR: Your writing definitely has mistakes and that’s not because you’re a bad writer. Do look at everything Grammarly says!!! But also half of what Grammarly says you may disagree with after looking, and you may not be wrong to do so.

letswritestories101

You’re saving lifes here, pal.

so-its-a-writblr-deactivated202

Unsolicited commentary from a professional writer:

Learn to edit your own work.

Buy these:

The Elements of Editing is for writers, too.

Ask yourself: If I didn’t have a computer, could I write confidently? Would I know whether my grammar is correct?

You need to know the rules. You need to know how to recognize if something’s wrong and how to fix it on your own.

When I hear writers say Grammarly makes their writing better I have to say: For the entire history of humankind until we had PCs, every single writer learned how to edit her or his own work. Every. Single. One.

Homer, Sun Tzu, Virgil, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Harper Lee, Agatha Christie.

ALL of them self-edited their work. And then editors, who also learned to edit without computers, helped them polish their work.

It’s not difficult. Of course it takes time to learn. Becoming very good at something always does.

Like all computer programs Grammarly is flawed. If you don’t know the rules of grammar by heart then you won’t know when Grammarly is wrong. And you could submit or post work that makes people shake their heads and say, “Damn, this writer’s sloppy.”

I know editors who say they can tell when a writer has used a computer program like Grammarly and when the writer self-edits. And the self-edited work is always better.

Of course you’ll make mistakes. But you’ll make fewer, and when you see them you can fix them. Correctly.

For god’s sake, become a real writer. Learn how to write, not to obey a fucking algorithm.

heywriters

Tiny addition from me, I learned to edit from other bloggers online. I learned to edit from infographics on Pinterest, some of which were totally wrong or biased, but I learned that eventually too. Some people have a better eye for errors than others, but who’s to say they didn’t train that eye first?

You can pick up books on editing at the library for free, or you can start reading what’s already here at your fingertips.

redstonedust

pet peeve is when you look up fashion references from a specific era and you keep getting modern day '[era]-inspired' fashion like NO i want authenticity damn it. i can see your 2020 photo quality and your 2020 hair and your 2020 makeup. youre not fooling me.

bincliff

hello i'm a historical fashion researcher and i have a lot of experience looking up things! this is a very widely experienced irritation and you're definitely not alone in this, but i am here to share everything i know!

so, ways to get around this:

turn off AI results. they're literally nonsense to us

don't use pinterest because the sources/provenance is often hard to trace

a standard internet search can be okay, but museum collections are the top tier (list of collections below this list)

instead of broad terms like victorian, regency, tudor, renaissance etc. try using the decade you're looking for. if you're not sure of what decade it is but have a vague image in your head, look on the fashion history timeline and just jump around until you find it. but even changing to e.g. 19th century will give better results than victorian

including terms like womenswear/menswear, daywear, formal wear, evening wear, court dress should increase the value of your search too

including "fashion plates" in your search can give you a nice impression of the intended silhouettes of the era. some of these might be a little stylised but will show you what was considered in vogue

for pre-fashion plate eras or things like makeup and styling, you'll have to look at portraiture or manuscripts. these are harder to actually find what you're looking for, but searching museum collections and limiting results to specific date ranges will be your friend

when looking at art, do bear in mind sometimes artists would paint fabric extra flow-y to show off their skills. it might not have been exactly like that in terms of fabric weight or drape. so, a pinch of salt required!

if you find something on image search where the provenance is dubious, reverse image search and you might find a source! i've been able to trace random pinterest images to real sources, but this does take a lot of time and effort and is often not worth the headache

some online resources and museum collections:

fashion history timeline is an invaluable resource if you're trying to get a feel for everything and should be your first port of call. it'll also link to good examples

the met has a vast number of extant examples of clothing, as well as fashion plates

costume institute fashion plates is a subcollection of the met for fashion plates (1800s-1922)

v&a also has many extant garments, fashion plates, and incredible articles on clothing and aesthetics. read the details of the objects because they'll often reveal a lot about the piece

lacma is good for C19th-20th pieces

nypl digital collection for photographs

national portrait gallery or similar for portraiture, or literally any museum in your country that has historical art

national museums scotland can be useful situationally but might be oddly specific

stout style history is a great collection for finding image references for fat people wearing historical clothes. survival bias of a lot of museum pieces tends towards smaller clothing that couldn't be repurposed, but this aims to counter that. it's not sortable, but is still a really nice resource

wikimedia commons is surprisingly handy! and the images, if you should need to link/repost them, are public domain

auction websites sound like a funny one to recommend. some won't have mannequins and some will. just look up historical garment auctions and you'll find some!

anyway, i hope this has been a good place to start for anyone interested! there are probably some i've missed because there are so many museums across the world and i don't know about all of them or can't remember them. but these are the ones i've used the most! (my specialisation/jobs i've had to research for have only really been in western fashion, so my resources reflect that)

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