Kaledo Art
RMH
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Three Goblin Art
dirt enthusiast
Origami Around
Acquired Stardust
★
tumblr dot com
shark vs the universe
NASA
ellievsbear
No title available
#extradirty
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Monterey Bay Aquarium
@theartofmadeline
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
Sweet Seals For You, Always
roma★
seen from United States
seen from Lithuania
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@studiointerrobang
Tips from an author with memory problems. Feel free to leave comments if you have questions, or you have ideas about how to draft, outline or plan for big wr...
Lee got peer pressured on the internet and made 5 videos about how to write a novel or series when your memory is hot garbage. Spread them around in case someone could use them?
I wanted this and couldn’t find it, so I decided to be the change I want to see in the world.
This is not meant to deride pigeons. I admire their ability to thrive at the margins. Will probabaly slap it on some merch at some point.
Writing Interview
Q: What is your coffee order?
Q: What is the coolest thing you’ve ever done?
Q: Who has been your biggest mentor?
Q: What has been your most memorable writing project?
Q: What does your writing path look like, from the earliest days until now?
Q: What is your favorite part about writing?
Q: What does a typical day look like for you?
Q: What does your writing process look like?
Q: What’s the best advice you’ve gotten?
Q: What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned?
Q: What advice would you give someone who wants to start writing?
Questions for authors! I love learning from fellow authors, it drives me and inspires me. I took these questions from an interview I was reading for character research and changed them to fit what we do. I encourage you to do this and then to tag ten authors you want to learn about. Let’s all be friends and try to inspire one another!
@murder-daddy-buckyy @stanclub @thebestpersonherelovesbucky @notlucy @angryschnauzer @buckysbrat @rowdy-redhead @ginabaker1666 @buckmesideways22 @supersmuttyqueernerd @freshwoods @take-me-tom-hiddleston @musette22 @ravensonata @wintersoldier1989
captainrogerrsbeard@justanotherstonyfan i totally should have tagged you and i dont know why i didnt! But id love your answers ♥️☺️ So sorry!
No worries! Thinks for thanking of me!
These answers get long, however, so let me tag people at the start and then cut. Guys, just reblog from @captainrogerrsbeard and copy the questions fown into and reblog:
@missbeckywrites, @shinelikethunder, @constant-instigator, @simplyjo, @dsudis, and anybody else who follows me who writes.
Keep reading
Q: What is your coffee order?
Caffeine and I are...not friends. I have never had a cup of coffee and odds are I never will.
Q: What is the coolest thing you’ve ever done?
I accidentally had a lasting impact on my city’s local opera scene by sending off an email at 2 am because I was lonely when my wife was out of town. They’ve had a “social media night at the opera” inviting artists, tweeters, bloogers ect to the final full dress rehearsal of every one of their shows. I’ve seen about 20 this way, now. Including the night before the world premier of the opera version of The Shining. Yes, that The Shining. It was a fantastic opera.
If the meeting with the composer, whose shown some interest in turning my wife’s thesis into an opera, goes well next week because of my tweeting a wish into the ether, that may end up being the coolest thing. I very much want to instigate an opera off my wife’s amazing novella.
Q: Who has been your biggest mentor?
I have two very central writing mentors- my wife, who has an MFA and is my editor, and my best friend/neighbor who was in that MFA program WITH my wife. They have very different specialties so together I have a LOT of writing knowledge at my fingertips.
Q: What has been your most memorable writing project?
I mean I wrote a whole-ass novel but the thing I’m probably best known for is a 40 page, annotated ramble about how major changes to a characters body would be likely to affect their mental health, relationships and capacity for self care.
Q: What does your writing path look like, from the earliest days until now?
1) get angry at a made-for-tv avengers cartoon, think maybe I could write the concept better as fanfic. Write 100+ pages of fanfic. Get so angry at the utter lack of what I want in MCU that I start writing original fiction. Write a novel. Realize it’s a series. Publish book 1. Start the sequel. And that brings us to now.
Q: What is your favorite part about writing?
People caring about my favorite made up people.
Q: What does a typical day look like for you?
I’m unemployed right now so it’s a bunch of trying to drum up business, doing paperwork to start a business, chasing a toddler, cleaning, and writing.
Q: What does your writing process look like?
Outline the whole projects, write 3 chapters. Revise the outline. Revise chapters 1-3 then write about 3 chapters. Repeat till at the end of the novel. Do a majpor tectonic edit. Do 1 pass to refine character arc for each POV character. Revise for language. Revise to tighten the bolts. Get betas and sensetivity readers whenever available.
Q: What’s the best advice you’ve gotten?
The best writing advice I ever got was from my old painting instructor. “Get something down TO correct.” It’s made me a very fast, very open-to-inspiration drafter.
Q: What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned?
I actually can write a whole-ass book and people will enjoy it.
Q: What advice would you give someone who wants to start writing?
“Get something down TO correct.” & Learn how YOUR brain wants to write, and do that as hard as you can. All other advice is irrelevant.
I know a ton of you write but I suck at remembering tumblr handles. TAGGING ALL MY WRITER BROS- INCLUDING FICCERS!
Fresh tea, cool accessories and plethora of useful information. Adagio Teas is the most popular tea store online, with stellar customer service marks.
So, APPARENTLY you can make custom blends on Adagio and I realized the character cards I made before would fit on the tins and anyways I designed some custom teas based on my Secondhand Origin Stories series and they honestly all sound so delicious? And I’m going to order tins right now and drink all of this.
You can also buy these tins and drink these delicious teas based on Issac, Jamie, Martin, Opal and Yael.
It’s been nearly 1 year since Secondhand Origin Stories came out! So, since a lot of YA books are releasing with character cards, I thought it’d be fun to try my hand at making some of my own kiddos, framed by the legacies they’re trying to live up to.
Stay tuned tomorrow for an exciting surprise on our proper 1 year anniversary!
https://www.amazon.com/dp/197839781X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1517692244&sr=8-1&keywords=secondhand+origin+stories
“In Miles, we have a kid who’s not ready — he’s not ready for school; he’s not ready for this mission.”
Miles Morales, for fans of comic books and Spider-Man, is very well known. But for people outside of that world, he’s not very well known. With Into the Spider-Verse, we’re introducing a character who our audience already knows is going to become a new Spider-Man. But the audience loves Peter Parker, the Spider-Man they’ve got. It’s a challenging introduction of a character: Our movie doesn’t work if you don’t fall in love with Miles Morales.
We open the movie with a montage that introduces the real Spider-Man. The scale of that scene is enormous. It’s like seeing an entire superhero movie in 45 seconds, guided by this very confident narrator. Then we cut to Miles, and things slow down a lot. In an elegant script, everything is deliberate, and everything is a microcosm for something larger: When you meet Miles, we see him singing a song with headphones on. We made a very deliberate choice to spend the first couple of minutes we’re with Miles really just watching him. We wanted Miles to be kind of lovable. We see him drawing and making stickers; we’re establishing that he’s a creative person, he’s an artist, who is able to create without feeling self-conscious or encumbered.
The most important thing for this scene to communicate is that Spider-Man, as a character, is always punching up. In Miles, we have a kid who’s not ready — he’s not ready for school; he’s not ready for this mission. He doesn’t have all the tools, but he has spirit, and we fall for him because of that. We start the movie looking at Miles, and then we end it with him looking right at us.
We needed Miles to score a foolproof laugh at the beginning of the movie, right when you meet him. There aren’t exactly jokes in this stretch, or any clever lines. It’s just what a reasonably clever kid would say. We had this idea that if he sang a song that was out of his register, it would make the audience laugh. It got a big laugh in the preview screening a year ago, but there was one problem: The song we initially used was the Donald Glover song “Redbone,” and we liked the double-layered joke of opening with a Donald Glover song because of his history with Spider-Man. “Redbone” killed … until Get Out premiered.
It was critical that the song gag landed. We had a feeling it was because people knew the song, and they knew how he was messing it up. We were in big trouble when we couldn’t use it anymore — we needed to replace one of the greatest songs of the year, and we had to do it in time to spend the three months we would need to animate that shot. It turns out “Sunflower” is a massive hit song. We heard it as part of a batch of songs that Republic Records presented to us.
We also liked the metaphor this presents: Miles is singing a song that theoretically he’s a little too young for and he doesn’t know the words yet. That’s the metaphor we’re going to be working with for most of the rest of the movie. He’s going to be asked to step into shoes that he feels he’s not ready for, he’s not going to know the words, and he’s going to feel very self-conscious and nervous about that.
With Jefferson, we need to convey the authority he has in Miles’s life. His lines are delivered from either off camera, or passing. In a very subtle way, there’s a bit of a disconnect between these characters: Miles and his dad talk to each other, but they don’t necessarily look at each other, or face each other. Jefferson is a character who’s searching for a way to communicate with his son. This line — “you’re a grown man now” — was improvised by Brian.
Jeff and Rio are both helicopter parents in some ways. We were always riding a line, we didn’t want Jeff to feel punitive or naggy. We always wanted him to seem like he was a good dad.
We had to have Spanish in this scene. We worked really hard with Shameik [Moore] and Luna [Velez] to have enough Spanish in there that felt credible and that didn’t alienate English speakers when they heard it. It was important that it wasn’t subtitled, that it felt completely normal, and was never presented as foreign or other.
Sometimes we overdid it. And at one point we underdid it. We spent a lot of time fine-tuning that stuff. Even in recording sessions where sometimes Rodney would be on the phone with his mom, and Luna would be on the phone with hers, and we’d be saying, “What would you say if I didn’t do my homework, and you were going to call me out?”
We tried a lot of different versions of this scene, but sometimes the most down-the-middle structure works the best. A lot of these sequences were grounded in conversations we were having about how a lot of the characters in the movie were fighting against inevitable change, and were seeking to go back to a comfortable place in the past that didn’t really exist anymore. That was the intention behind Miles and his old school, and wanting to go back to it. We decided that Miles’s school was around the corner from his house, because it let us say a lot of stuff very quickly.
The initial versions of this scene, in some ways, hit a lot of the same things but in a different order. You saw Miles hanging out a lot with a specific group of friends that we no longer meet specifically. There was a dinner-table scene with the parents, and a lot of the dynamic of that was eventually moved to the scene where he drives to school with his dad. You had stuff about how Jefferson feels about Spider-Man. In those drafts, the movie started with him telling his parents that he decided to quit school.
You don’t get the sense that Miles is Mr. Popular, but you definitely get the sense that he’s a well-liked kid who has history and rapport with the people around him. In some ways we started to draft a lot on Shameik, and his charm. This is just a piece of flavor that popped up, between the writing and the recording sessions. Miles is not in control of his powers; it’s almost like setting up what’s to come. He is a charming kid. He is starting to make connections with other people that may or may not be romantic; it’s unclear. He’s capable of getting the connection, but he just isn’t quite in control of what he’s doing yet.
The stickers that Miles works on came from Bob Persichetti and his rebellious, street-art-skateboarder past. In the initial treatment, we wanted him to have something that was a little lie that he would keep from his parents, because it felt like a good microcosm of the big lie that he has to keep from them, going forward into the next stage of his life. What’s cool with the stickers, too, is that they literally say “My name is.” It very uniquely set up that Miles was someone who was still searching for himself and identity and wasn’t quite sure who he was, and was almost trying out different versions of who he was, graphically, on these stickers.
There were many versions of this scene, even in its current structure. We tried over and over again to write more jokes for Miles. Beyond meeting Miles, this first scene with him is about mapping out the visual contours of what you’re doing, and the tonal contours of what you’re doing. You’re conveying the overture for your whole movie, and the audience is paying attention. Sometimes if you don’t establish that stuff early enough, it feels jarring later on if you take a sharp turn and do something that you haven’t set up as one of the colors you’re playing with. A lot of jokes just didn’t work. They either felt fake, or written. So we just said, “Forget it.” All we want to do is fall in love with this kid, fall in love with his family, and convey a couple of very simple things. The kid feels a little overwhelmed; he’s not prepared. He’s a regular kid who fibs to his parents, parents who have very high expectations of him because they love him and are trying to do as much as they can to help him. And, of course, we had to do all that in 45 seconds.
Miles is such a likeable, lovable character! I loved following his growth in this movie. :)
i’ve been thinking about all those posts about “we need female heroes who do girly things”/”why is the female hero always such a tomboy” and then the response posts that are like “uhhh actually we don’t really have any really masculine female heroes either” so i was trying to figure it out—what do we have, exactly?
and really what we get is women who eschew “girly” things while still managing to look like society’s ideal woman. they would never touch eyeliner (they’re too busy with Important Things), but their eyeliner is immaculate. they have a huge, varied wardrobe, but wouldn’t be caught dead actually shopping for clothes. and it reminds me of the expectation that women must be effortlessly beautiful. don’t wear makeup or you’ll seem self-absorbed—but god forbid you look like you’re not wearing makeup. it’s interesting to me, that the impossibilities imposed on female characters are the same ones imposed on real women.
YES THANK YOU THIS
Read PoC//Fantasy and Science Fiction
I only listed one book per author, usually their most popular or highest rated book/series, so make sure to check out their Goodreads page for more of their hardwork!!
Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed
Tales of Moonlight and Rain by Ueda Akinari
Prince of Ayodhya by Ashok K Banker
Servant of the Underworld by Aliette de Bodard
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
Three Souls by Janie Chang
The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate by Ted Chiang
Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho
The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin
The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
My Soul to Keep by Tananarive Due
Acacia: The War with the Mein by David Anthony Durham
The Antelope Wife by Louise Erdrich
Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
Sunbolt by Intisar Khanani
Salt Fish Girl by Larissa Lai
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin
The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu
War Child by Karin Lowachee
The Lost Girl by Sangu Mandanna
The Stars Change by Mary Anne Mohanraj
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
Nexus by Ramez Naam
Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor
Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyami
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Cast in Shadow by Michelle Sagara
A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar
Of Bees and Mist by Erick Seitawan
The Immortals of Meluha by Amish Tripathi
Ink by Sabrina Vourvoulias
More Recommendations
19 Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels by Women of Color You Must Read (Buzzfeed)
10 Sci-fi Stories Created by Women of Color (The Mary Sue)
7 Black Women Science Fiction Writers Everyone Should Know (For Harriet)
Speculative Fiction by Authors of Color (Goodreads)
Speculative Fiction Reads by Asian and Asian-American Authors(@cielrouge)
The Ultimate 21st Century People of Color Sci-Fi List (ColorLines)
Read PoC Posts Young Adult//Historical Fiction//General Fiction//Autobiographies and Memoirs
Olivia Jaimes’ Nancy continues to amaze and delight.
But there’s an extra frame in the comic version and it’s bothering the living hell out of me
For comics that still run in newspapers, the long Sunday strips often include an extra panel near the middle that can be added or removed without unduly disrupting the joke; this gives individual newspapers more freedom to rearrange the panels to fit their publication’s page layouts.
(As an aside, refusing to follow this practice is a big part of why Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes fame was considered such a pain in the ass to work with. His Sunday strips used complex, tightly scripted panel layouts that couldn’t be rearranged even a little bit; if you wanted to run the Sunday Calvin and Hobbes in your paper, you designed your page layout around the comic, not the other way ‘round!)
Cheryl Lynn Eaton and Geoffrey Thorne have joined the judging panel.
It’s Pride month, at least here in the states, and as it happens I’ve just finished this comic that I made as a gift for my wife, telling my rendition of the history of our romance.
This is a true story.
HI TUMBLR!
Would you like some to read about some queer teens on the fringes of the superhero world, trying to cope with family drama, AI’s, brain-altering nanites, and the corruption of the US government? If you’d like some SJW teens fighting real-world style corruption, I have a couple options for ya.
Buy the book or ebook on Amazon
Buy the book or ebook on Barns & Noble
Audiobook on Audible
Check out the Synopsis:
Opal has been planning to go to Chicago and join the Midwest's superhero team, the Sentinels, since she was a little kid. That dream took on a more urgent tone when her superpowered dad was unjustly arrested. Now, she wants to be a superhero not only to protect people, but to get a platform to tell the world about the injustices of the Altered Persons Bureau, the government agency for everything relating to superpowers. But just after Opal's high school graduation, a supervillain with a jet and unclear motives attacked the downtown home of the Sentinels'. When Opal arrives, she finds a family on the brink of breaking apart. She meets a boy who's been developing secret (and illegal) brain-altering nanites right under the Sentinel's noses, another teenage superhero-hopeful who looks suspiciously like a long-dead supervillain, and the completely un-superpowered daughter of the Sentinels' leader. Can four teens on the fringes of the superhero world handle the corruption, danger, and family secrets they've unearthed?
Not convinced? Here’s a bunch of reviews and interviews.
And in case you have concerns, You can also check out trigger warnings here. (I’ve tried to be comprehensive but if there’s something in particular you’re concerned about, feel free to pop into my DMs for spoilery trigger-warning questions, and I will answer them.)
And..not to be That Guy, but...I had bronchitis this month, and not gonna lie, a few more book sales wouldn’t exactly hurt.
- Lee
It’s Pride month, at least here in the states, and as it happens I’ve just finished this comic that I made as a gift for my wife, telling my rendition of the history of our romance.
This is a true story.
Bonus material!
So, I like the original cover for my book (see it here) but felt like doing some practice on my design work, so I whipped up an alternate cover this week, before I have to return to work. If you’re thinking the style seems vaguely familiar, that’s because I was doing a style study on the incomparable Mike Mignola, of Hellboy fame.
I actually really like this cover! But my wife has threatened me with marital doom if I don’t stop futzing with a book that’s already been released and focus on the sequel.
PS reminder that my book just came out, and features late teen superheros, social justice, 4 queer protags of various flavors, and super-science. Consider checking it out, maybe?
-Lee
Bonus material!
So, I like the original cover for my book (see it here) but felt like doing some practice on my design work, so I whipped up an alternate cover this week, before I have to return to work. If you’re thinking the style seems vaguely familiar, that’s because I was doing a style study on the incomparable Mike Mignola, of Hellboy fame.
I actually really like this cover! But my wife has threatened me with marital doom if I don’t stop futzing with a book that’s already been released and focus on the sequel.
PS reminder that my book just came out, and features late teen superheros, social justice, 4 queer protags of various flavors, and super-science. Consider checking it out, maybe?
-Lee
Home
Lee has a website! It contains several illustrations I never posted on Tumblr, multiple COMPLETE comics, and info on Lee’s brand spankin new prose book Secondhand Origin Stories. Because what’s the point of being an artist and author if you can’t make your own bonus art, diagrams, etc.
Hey, so, some of you might enjoy a book about superheros with complex family dynamics, disability rep, and loads of queerness. So, here’s one of those. Out RIGHT NOW.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/197839781X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1517692244&sr=8-1&keywords=secondhand+origin+stories
Synopsis:
Opal has been planning to go to Chicago and join the Midwest's superhero team, the Sentinels, since she was a little kid. That dream took on a more urgent tone when her superpowered dad was unjustly arrested for protecting a neighbor from an abusive situation. Now, she wants to be a superhero not only to protect people, but to get a platform to tell the world about the injustices of the Altered Persons Bureau, the government agency for everything relating to superpowers. But just after Opal's high school graduation, a supervillain with a jet and unclear motives attacks the downtown home of the Sentinels, and when Opal arrives, she finds a family on the brink of breaking apart. She meets a boy who's been developing secret (and illegal) brain-altering nanites right under the Sentinel's noses, another teenage superhero-hopeful who looks suspiciously like a long-dead supervillain, and the completely un-superpowered daughter of the Sentinels' leader. Can four teens on the fringes of the superhero world handle the corruption, danger, and family secrets they've unearthed?
