So Wrote the Godless

Leth (they/she), 33 //// writeblr sideblog //// asks open

[sowrotethegodless]

Writing Masterlist

Thought I should get a head start putting this together before things get super buried from posting more :)

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Fiction Stories (tag)

The Tale of Ainrim (chapter index)

Chapter 1: Born Fallen

Chapter 2: Threat

Be Not Afraid In the Aftermath The End of Time In a Name Something Lively In Candlelight Flesh The Dead Are the Dead Are the Dead Are the Dead Dealer's Choice Sight When It's Dark

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Poetry (tag)

from Hades with love A Moonwort Blossom's Tips to Thriving in an Ice Cold World summertime jack-o-lanterns Housecat thousand in a box ace week acrostic poll worker poetry

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Fanfic (tag)

Fracturing (Twisted Wonderland) Occam (Life is Strange)

You can also find Obey Me fanfic writings on @inhuman-obey-me under the Mod Chaos tag!

[madeofklay]

What I learned not to do in art school

[uncannymagazine]

Reading for the Hugo Awards?

Try the finalist for Best Short Story "Six People to Revise You" by J. R. Dawson!

It also placed 1st on the Uncanny Poll and was a Nebula finalist!

You can read it here or in the Hugo packet!

Six People to Revise You - Uncanny Magazine

A parent or guardian Someone who has known you since childhood A mentor or teacher An employer or coworker A spouse, partner, or close intim

[captainkirkk]

What they don't tell you about writing is that as you write, you discover scenes and entire plots that you hadn't accounted for that need to be written. So you can spend two hours writing and editing only to realise you're further away from the finish line than you thought you were when you started

[sowrotethegodless]

Moon Joy June Week 1: Launch

(text version below the cut)

from the earth

forget the cannonball, jules forget the calculations and the math and just for a moment, remember

the aspiration — unbound, the heavens so beyond our reach, beyond our size but for eight rising, weightless minutes

in that moment, humanity's boldness shedding all that holds us down when orion dared to shoot at the moon

artemis in his grasp, carrying the dreams of a fractured world coming together we remember to look up, reach up, for

3… 2… 1…

liftoff

[nasa]

Join Moon Joy June!

Are you in need of some serious Moon joy? Get ready for Moon Joy June. NASA is hosting a month-long art challenge and we would love for you to participate! For every week of June, NASA will introduce a new prompt to inspire artists and creators of all kinds:

June 1-7: Launch 

June 8-14: Moon 

June 15-21: Crew 

June 22-30: Earth 

To share your Moon joy-inspired art on Tumblr, use the hashtag #ArtemisArtShow.

The sky is (not) the limit! We encourage all forms of art, including but not limited to: paintings, drawings, sculptures, dances, music, animations, nail art, latte foam art, poetry, fashion. Choose your favorite medium and share it with us!

Learn more about the challenge in our FAQ. Happy Moon Joy June to all who celebrate!

[mortalpractice]

& how when we left there was a white-haired lady, funny in the parking lot, feeding pigeons with the bread from her fanny pack, in front of a big truck she paid no attention to though it was waiting for her to move & my eyes caught a flood & I turned looking for someone who would understand I’d just seen my angel throwing bread down to the pigeons just kindly, slowly. & you, without my saying a thing, as if you heard the chest its joy & cardinal, you said yeah, just that. How marvelous. Ordinary. To get to see & turn around, & know somebody else was seeing, too. One day it will be otherwise. I always meant to thank you for that. Thank you. What is close to my heart is that woman, that city, you, that noon on the dry land dressed in pigeons & daylight, the dry land dressed in our brief lives, our lives brief & miraculous, as the bees.

— Aracelis Girmay, from “Central City Senior Center, New Orleans,” Kingdom Animalia

[ad-wills]

[apoemaday]

When Eurydice Saw Him

by Gregory Orr

When Eurydice saw him huddled in a thick cloak, she should have known he was alive, the way he shivered beneath its useless folds.

But what she saw was the usual: a stranger confused in a new world. And when she touched him on the shoulder, it was nothing personal, a kindness he misunderstood. To guide someone through the halls of hell is not the same as love.

[sowrotethegodless]

Fandom: Life is Strange Word count: 405 Written for this week’s @flashfictionfridayofficial theme, “It's So Obvious”!

Occam

MISSING: Rachel Amber Age: 19 years old Height: 5'5", Weight: 110 lbs Hair: blond, Eyes: hazel

Rachel Amber has been missing for almost six months.

Chloe is printing out more flyers. The whole town of Arcadia Bay has been practically covered in the posters on every wall of every building already, but it doesn't matter. She's going to keep doing it until she finds out what happened.

Occam's Razor: the theory that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

No one is particularly concerned, not really. No one but Chloe, it seems. Rachel always said she wanted to leave this place. Is anyone honestly surprised that she's gone?

They were going to run away to LA together. She'd become a big star out there, and Chloe would be right there beside here. Where else would Chloe be? Rachel was — is — her north star, her guiding light. They promised to go together. She promised.

But Rachel, they say, is a complicated person.

Look, it's obvious, isn't it? She must've left without you.

But Chloe knows better. Rachel never would have left without her. They think they knew her, but they don't know her like she does. Chloe needs Rachel. But Rachel needed Chloe too.

A team. Yeah, their time together wasn't particularly long, but it was special. Chloe saw sides of Rachel that no one else at school really saw, no matter what they thought they knew about her.

Just accept it already. She could make everyone around her feel like they were special, but in the end, Rachel only cared about Rachel. You were just another person to her, and now she's gone.

No one else thinks anything happened to Rachel — because things didn't happen to Rachel Amber, Rachel Amber happened to the world around her.

Chloe used to think Rachel was invincible too. But she knows better now. And she knows Rachel wouldn't have just left her, not suddenly like this, not without a word.

The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

It wasn't just that Rachel had made her feel special. They had shared something special, between them.

So something is wrong. Something had to have happened to her — something bad.

Chloe plasters the flyers all over the school, the diner, anywhere she can find the space. She'll never stop, until she finds out what happened.

Occam, sir — she begs to differ.

This world is more sinister than it appears.

[kjscottwrites]

[X] <- psst click this

[deadbranch]

Reblog if you're okay with receiving asks for backstory info on any/all of your fics.

If not all, specify which ones in the tags.

[qapleulia]

characters who are undead. characters who die in the end and so they've been dead from the start. characters who are chased by death. characters that chase death. characters who died and came back to life. characters that die again and again and again. characters who consider their past self dead. characters who were born in someone else's corpse. characters that claw their way out of the grave. characters whose deaths leave such a gaping wound that even their absence is still a presence. characters who are emissaries of death. characters who are alive but consider themselves dead. characters whose deaths are ambiguous. characters whose existences are defined by death.

[hacvek]

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

[olyia-stories]

@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this

[dragonpyre]

I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset

[serinos-kitt]

What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know

[dragonpyre]

Mordor.

Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.

And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!

[serinos-kitt]

So what is a rain shadow?

[lethalbutterfly]

Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Oh yeah nothing is more annoying than fantasy maps that can't get mountains, rivers and rain shadows right.

[mindfulwrath]

May I recommend my new favorite tool: Mapgen4. You start with a random seed and then add mountains, valleys, shallow water, or oceans as you like. You can adjust the wind direction to make wind shadows off the mountains fall where you want. You can adjust overall raininess to make the rivers larger or smaller, or have more or fewer tributaries. It works best for small, isolated landmasses (think islands more than continents) but as there’s no scale bar and it’s all slightly abstracted anyway you can do whatever you want with it. I’ve only just started playing with it but it’s SO FUN.

[jeanjauthor]

I do think this could be useful for writers! ...Caveat, if you're going to use this for making a map for anything published (digital or paper, even if it's only in a fanfic archive or whatever), please, please credit the creator and their program as how you made that map! The more ways information like this gets out there, the more useful it'll be to other writers, roleplaying game DMs/GMs, creators, etc.

[oh-opossum]

One of my favourites for mapping plates, biomes, etc is Tectonics.js. If you're familiar with how tectonics shape a planet, you can guess where the features go by toggling plates, crust thickness, etc. Between Mapgen4 and Tectonics.js, we've got some pretty sweet tools at our disposal.

[brehaaorgana]

More stuff!:

European Geosciences Union Blog — Beyond Tectonics: Building fictional worlds to better understand our own

Reshaping Reality's Worldbuilding Tips

Worldbuilding pasta's series, An Apple Pie from Scratch also check their resources page!

R/worldbuilding's Reading List. Also check out their collected resources link. This basic geology guide from 11 years ago is still nice.

Creating an Earth-Like Planet, and The Climate Cookbook (aka Geoff's Climate Cookbook) technically the climate cookbook is a part of Creating an Earth like Planet I think.

Related: Worldbuilding Workshop's "Working Out Climates Using Geoff’s Climate Cookbook." Which goes through using the resource in order to map make. Also just the Worldbuilding Workshop in General.

Madeline James Writes's Worldbuilding Guide

Worldbuilding 101 (this links to the Biomes section but there's like...everything.)

Also I would recommend looking into Landscape Archaeology as well! That's because Landscape archeology is basically adding the social/cultural layer on top of all that geology and geography. Environments change when communities live in them, and communities likewise adapt to various environments.

This is a short free introduction to the concept: "Notes on Landscape Archaeology." To summarize, Landscape archaeology sort of like...studies the relation of people to places/spaces (that is, landscapes) in time.

Also this paper [An Archeology of Landscapes] breaks down/introduces the key concepts that I learned which is first that you can form the "construct paradigm" of a landscape from settlement ecology, ritual landscapes, and ethnic landscapes.

And then the highlights of their summary of what constitutes defining a landscape:

Landscapes are not synonymous with natural environments. Landscapes are synthetic (Jackson, 1984, p. 156), with cultural systems structuring and organizing peoples’ interactions with their natural environments ...

Landscapes are worlds of cultural product ... Through their daily activities, beliefs, and values, communities transform physical spaces into meaningful places. ...

Landscapes are the arena for all of a community’s activities. Thus landscapes not only are constructs of human populations but they also are the milieu in which those populations survive and sustain themselves. A landscape’s domain involves patterning in both within-place and between-place contexts ...

Landscapes are dynamic constructions, with each community and each generation imposing its own cognitive map on an anthropogenic world of interconnected morphology, arrangement, and coherent meaning ...

Basically a "landscape" is made by a community living in an environment. Once you have a geological environment that makes sense, landscape archaeology is like... Basically how I feel confident knowing where trade routes would be on a map, where there are areas of continual high conflict, what kinds of agriculture exists where, etc. once the geological stuff is hammered out, it's like...I know how that would influence the local cultures and vice versa. At that point, it's easy to start marking the natural borders, settlements, trade/port cities, and even strategic fortresses. If you have properly put rivers on a map, then marking your port cities is effortless, basically.

Also:

This course syllabus for a Landscape Archaeology class is freely accessible. It includes an online resources page.

Place, Landscape, and Environment: Anthropological Archaeology in 2009

(Landscape Biographies is open access, as is Landscape Archaeology between Art and Science: From a Multi- to an Interdisciplinary Approach. But I wouldn't try to read every essay.)

[dedicatedfollower467]

If you are like me and find it helpful to have video reference for a process/activity in addition to a written guide, Artifexian is a YouTube channel that does a LOT of world building stuff and specifically he's in the process of creating a world following a lot of Worldbuilding Pasta's methodology!

[violetnshenanigans]

yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes

this is good

[daily-prompts]

Create a scenario where your character acts like someone they despise. What triggers it?

[concerningwolves]

you can take a quick pause from writing to fact-check something on the internet. but watch out

[conindiundrum-writing]

They who see this shall get out of their writing rut.