just another writing blog

Newbie author of silly stories with silly characters in love. Queer lit 🌈

[somewriterchronicles]

Hi everybody, my name is “mf” and no, it is not short for motherfucker.

I am a twenty-something newbie writer, I published two books in the past two years and in 2023 another one is gonna be out very soon.

I won’t advertise my works here, so I am not sharing the pen name I use as an author. This is not the goal of the blog nor it would make sense, since the language I write and publish my books in is not English so most of you would not be able to purchase and read them anyway.

I am here to share some tips, chat about the writing process, answer questions about the publishing world, and obsessing about writing in general.

As said in my bio, the books I write and publish are mostly queer books about queer characters. However, whatever kind of book you have in the making, you just plotted, you already finished writing, you just have a vague idea of, I am here for you!

This is a sideblog, so I’m not gonna send you asks/follow you from this blog. My main is a fandom blog and it’s called @littleturtle95. If you find it following you after you follow me... it’s me!

Askbox always open ❤️

[prophetic-writer]

“What if I write it and it’s bad-”

WHAT IF YOU WRITE IT AND ITS GOOD? WHAT IF YOU WRITE IT AND ITS EXACTLY WHAT YOU WANTED? WHAT THEN????

[elleldoe]

a comment a day keeps the insanity at bay

[elleldoe]

absolutely love abusing the power that comes with 3rd person limited pov and just ignoring things and being vague sometimes. does the character know all the details? no? then I don't have to either.

[tobiasdrake]

Something I'm fond of saying is "The villain drives the plot but the hero sets the tone." Something that's very important about this is that the resolution to the conflicts presented need to match the hero's tone. If your story doesn't believe problems can be solved the way the hero wants to solve them... why is this the hero?

If you want your problems to be solved with brutal catharsis, then your hero should be someone who believes in brutal catharsis.

If you want your problems to be solved with forgiveness and reconciliation, then your hero should be someone who believes in forgiveness and reconciliation.

They don't have to begin there. This can be something they come around to over the course of the story, as they grow and change per their character arc. But by the time of their ultimate encounter with the villain, their values should be the values that drive the story forward.

There's this thing in D&D that some DMs do. Where, when you roll enough damage to deplete the monster's hit points, they'll turn to you and say, "That's a kill. Describe for the group how you take the monster down." And you're allowed to come up with some cool maneuver or something that your character did in order to deliver the finishing blow.

The hero's ultimate triumph over the villain is a lot like this. More than any other part of the story, this moment is their apotheosis. It should be a celebration of everything they are and everything they stand for.

You have defeated the villain; Now describe for the group what form that victory takes.

[ursulaklegay]

its so scary to put yourself out there but a SINGLE message saying "hi i loved what you made it touched me in some way" makes it all worth it 10000%

[ursulaklegay]

daily reminder that if you like something someone made tell! them! tell them tell them tell them TELL THEM

[natalieironside]

If u want to write a story about a character that’s just you but hotter with a dark twisted backstory and magical powers and a pet falcon or something, I think u should just go ahead and do that. Who’s gonna stop you? The government?? Fuck the police.

[charlon-lumi]

What if someone barges in, points at said character and scream, “Mary Sue!”

[natalieironside]

Tell them to come back with a warrant

[charlon-lumi]

This post came across my dash again and now I am having an absolute blast with self insert hotter me that gets the girls and guys everywhere.

[natalieironside]

This is the Way

[natalieironside]

#everyday i remember i can write whateveer i want#and then get too embarrassed to do it😕#one day.. 

[jld-az]

[v8roadworrier]

need a permission slip? have a permission slip

[princessofthevalley5]

i get so happy when people that are new to fanfic writing, or just writing in general, post their work on ao3. despite their doubts, despite their fear of something so personal and vulnerable being perceived, they still press that button, and i turn into the equivalent to a proud mom cheering on the sidelines. like yes! you did that! your work is worth seeing! you deserve to share your passion for and be part of a community! i’m so proud of you!

[somewriterchronicles]

It is so good that hobbyists and amateurs can express themselves on online platforms.

We get so obsessed over being perfect, and researching everything, and getting beta-ed, and proof reading our work... which is great! All of this is great.

I love people who want to be good at writing and actively try to achieve it.

But I also love people that don’t want to be good at it. Writing just as a hobby is also great.

Writing and posting just because it’s fun to do so is okay.

Your writing, your grammar, your style not being good is okay. Not being interested in improving yourself is okay.

If you don’t want to put in an effort... that’s also okay. It is super okay, actually.

Do things badly just because it’s entertaining to do so.

Sing out of tune. Draw ugly art. Write crappy stories.

It’s your hobby. You’re doing it for fun. You don’t owe commitment, dedication, energy to your hobby.

You are entitled to engage with your hobby just to spend some time doing a pleasant activity in a shallow effortless lazy way.

If you want to get good at it, and practice to be better and better every time that’s fantastic. But it’s not the only way to engage with something you do for fun.

[pontsalin]

"the tallest" "the brit" "the ravenette" "the oldest" "the pinkette" "the colorblind" "the smallest"

Please I beg you just use names and pronouns

[pontsalin]

I've found a winner

[luna-azzurra]

Real talk, dialogue is where your characters come alive. But here’s the thing, people don’t speak in perfectly crafted sentences. They stutter, they pause, they cut each other off. If your dialogue reads like a speech, you’re doing it wrong. Write conversations that feel like actual people talking, not robots exchanging ideas. Give them quirks, slang, and awkwardness. Sometimes the silence between the words says more than the words themselves. Don’t just use dialogue to tell the reader something, use it to show who your characters really are.

[weaponwifer]

All the cultural relativism going away in a person's worldbuilding once they get to sexuality & gender

[weaponwifer]

This is actually a problem with not just "hey everyone is straight", "somehow heteronormativity is the standard", "everyone is traditionally masculine/feminine" but also to concepts such as "somehow, being trans/nonbinary is a concept in this world, and directly transplanted to 21st century queer discourse", or "while there's no heteronormativity, somehow the label of being gay/lesbian/bi persists the way that it is in the real world"

[alkatyn]

really annoys me when the progressiveness of a setting seems to arise out of a vacuum, your agrarian society with strict class distinctions and heredity is LGBT friendly and not at all sexist? How? Like, literally how.

There's a reason similar forms of prejudice evolved separately in different places over history. For all that a lot of online discourse is vaguely marxist influenced people seem to believe that culture has no relation to material/economic reality, and instead all prejudice was imposed out of thin air by evil imperialists in 1800

Also just misses out a great opportunity for world-building. Your society can be tolerant, but the precise way it manfests can be a really interesting way to explore things

Quick plug for Pale Lights by erraticerrata which does a good job of it, examples:

society with nobility, that allows for same sex dynastic marriages, but because producing an heir is the point a male relative is expected to "stand in" for wife from their side to conceive the child. And discussion of the awkwardness of that. And how number of children and by who becomes part of the negotiations in marriage alliances

other society where you can gender transition by having a conclave of priests declare you to be a mans soul in a woman's body, but only men can inherit noble titles. So this has been abused historically, and so this puts suspicion on trans nobility

Neither of these are big plot points, but it demonstrates things about the societies in interesting ways and makes the world feel more lived in than "generic fantasy medieval setting plus modern values"

[alexanderwales]

This is one of the things that I was trying to do with This Used to be About Dungeons. There are six gods and one of them is the Garos, the God of Symmetry, which gets a cultural designation as being the god of homosexuality, and this is generally a positive thing because there's a cleric who's trained in talking about those things with children and families, and there are specific marriage rituals and things, and one of the ways you signal to other people is a pin of Garos, or sometimes just a very symmetrically tailored outfit.

But then you have all these second-order effects from this, and it's a rigid way of thinking with some problems of its own, and the way that people align with the gods isn't really along the lines of sexuality for anything else.

I think that people treat gender and sexuality stuff like they do because it can get really jarring for modern readers if you do anything else, which is a shame. I don't really care about people being ahistorical, but I do care about them being boring, and I think we get a lot of boring worldbuilding because people don't want to step on too many toes or scribble outside the lines.

[roach-works]

in the Michigan Fleet, a post-post apocalyptic worker's cooperative made of boats in the middle of Lake Michigan, we deliberately went with an 'appetite' mode of sexual identity, where people identify as wanting women, men, both, or neither. some amount of bisexuality is considered the norm, especially due to the frequency of gender-segregated work spaces, while asexuality is seen as a lack of appetite and slightly concerning. there's a default and normative gender binary with a good deal of gender essentialism (women are tough and rowdy and sexually aggressive, men are high strung and sensitive and need discipline and careful handling) with bigender folks politely tolerated as a special case. binary trans folks tend to be folded into their declared gender quickly, to preserve gender segregated spaces and reinforce gender norms, and are 'brought up to speed' after their 'reassignment'-- it's treated more like a sorting error to be smoothed over and ignored. there are a good deal of edge cases and unsorted spaces for the nonconforming to be sorted into, but those spaces aren't highly regarded by normal citizens. orderliness is a prized quality in this society.

but anyway, in terms of sexuality, a straight man and a lesbian are considered to have the same appetite: a gynophile, or a birdwatcher. those who like men are fishers. more specialized terminology to specify someone's gender and orientation together starts borrowing from the bird/fish metaphor: ospreys are girls who spend all their time chasing boys, for example, but the term wouldn't be applied to a woman happily married to a man because she's not pursuing men anymore, she caught one. her appetite is satisfied.

the understanding of sexual identity as a mode of consumption rather than an inherent resting quality drives the language and assumptions, and is a lot of fun to write.

our modern understanding of sexual identity and orientation is deep and nuanced; however, it arises from a very specific time and place. these circumstances where this understanding makes sense is not universal and we don't actually have a final, objective, comprehensive, permanent handle on the way people are. i strongly encourage all writers to rethink that shit and try some different takes on the matter.

[pontsalin]

"the tallest" "the brit" "the ravenette" "the oldest" "the pinkette" "the colorblind" "the smallest"

Please I beg you just use names and pronouns

[pontsalin]

I've found a winner

[somewriterchronicles]

Especially if the point of view is close with the people they’re talking about. And even more especially if the point of view is talking about themselves.

No one would think about themselves or their brother or their significant other like “the short one” or “the redhead”

If the point of view has just met two people and they don’t know their names or anything about them, and there’s, Idk, a blondie and a redhead, them they can think “the redhead is looking at me with a weird look” because it’s how they would call that person in their head.

If “the readhead” is their cousin they would think “Martha is looking at me with a weird look”, or maybe “the asshole is looking at me with a weird look” or even, if it’s clear from what said earlier “she’s looking at me with a weird look”.

Not “the redhead”.

Repeat. The. Names.

Use. The. Pronouns.

Make the characters speak like their true selves so it’s not always necessary to say who spoke because it’s blatant by what they said and how they said it.

But, please, do not use their random characteristics to talk about them instead of their names.

[burins]

"he would not fucking say that" but it's "they would not be having carefully negotiated bdsm manual sex"

[lierdumoa]

All erotica writers should ask themselves this question: "Am I including kink negotiation in this scene because I think it makes the sex hotter/more interesting/more believable/more entertaining, or am I letting the imaginary morality cop that lives inside my head police what kind of sex I'm allowed to write?

[lyonnerileyauthor]

it just be like that I guess

[ad-wills]

[ad-wills]

[writing-prompt-s]

Accurate

[aristobun]