#nikkilbook

[rainbowchibbit]

I’ve made the 3-ingredient cookies before! They’re pretty good.

OOOOO GOOD TO KNOW TY :D

[the-writers-bookshelf]

My current WIP is a middle grade story called “Seven for a Secret.” I’m taking a lot of inspiration from Irish folklore and their mythological cycles. It’s not an exact one-to-one, because I’m tweaking some things to make it work with some of the other things I added because I liked their flavor, but the whole goal is to make it *feel* like it could be part of an old Irish story, and to give it that sense of mythic weight.

I think right now, my favorite thing about it is that I’m letting myself be absolutely chaotic. If I’m trying to write story-words, I have to turn on a specific part of my brain, and turns out that part of my brain isn’t super compatible with the part of my brain that makes story decisions. It’s just really difficult for me to figure out “well, how exactly do I want to achieve the goal of this scene?” when I’m trying to actually write a draft, so I decided that I would focus on just telling myself the story first. I’m just rambling to myself about what’s going on, brainstorming how to solve certain problems, going on backstory tangents, just absolute chaos. Or rather, CHAOS, because that’s the name of this “draft.” Then, I type everything up into Scrivener, and break everything up into individual ideas and then move them to their appropriate place. I have character folders, relationship folders, lore folders, worldbuilding folders, and of course scene folders. Then I link everything together so I can see all the relevant thoughts I was having while I was trying to solve the scene. I make sure the notes that stay in the scene folder are in story-order, and that there aren’t any gaps, and then I link that folder to the folder where the actual drafting will take place. I can follow all the tangents my brain wants to go on, but when I’m actually writing, I’ll be able to see exactly what I want to say and THEN I can just figure out how exactly I want to say it.

Right now, I’m trying out using second person and talking out the story with my main character. It’s like the rubber duck exercise for coding, if you’ve ever heard of that. She’s my rubber duck, and it’s kind of fun to imagine that we’re on the same team, figuring out the story together. Here she is:

This is Siobhra. She’s an absolute sweetheart who loves and know the old epics by heart. She lives in a village on the moors, near a goblin market and a magical circle. She visits both regularly, and has made many friends, but for some reason, all the rules of engagement that everyone swears exist don’t seem to apply to her. She’s even given away her name, and nothing has happened. Recently, strange things have started happening in the moor village and the goblin market, and children from above and below—her friends—have started disappearing. A strange, yet somehow familiar man has appeared in the circle, and she has to decide whether to make a deal—one with actual, frightening consequences—before the sun sets on May 1st, and the doors opened wide by the advent of summer snap shut, scattering her friends into fragments of memory across this and every other world.

(picture by me, circa December 2019)

I am IN LOVE with your story! And Siobhra!!

I worked for 2.5 years as a library assistant in youth services and let me tell you!!! Children's literature is the purest form of storytelling on the planet!

That illustration is WONDERFUL too!! You're so skilled!! :D Fantastic job!! Thank you so much for sharing!! ♥♥

[beerecordings]

Jackie. Jackie just sit on him. Bundle his arms in so he cannot swipe and just SQOOSH him. Punish him with squooshy. Flatten him into a pancake.

“alright bastard you want to act like a cat, you can get HUGGED like a cat”

cue twenty minutes of Jackie chasing a screeching Marvin around the house, five minutes of them wrestling on the floor of Chase’s recording room (”guys I am LIVE”), and two hours of Jackie squishing, hugging, squeezing, poking, tickling, and scratching a whining, grumbling, crying Marvin as revenge for all the times he’s been a little bastard shape-shifter instead of a sweet little brother

and ten minutes of Henrik cleaning and bandaging all of Jackie’s cuts and scrapes. but it was WORTH IT

[my-brothers-corrupted]

Y’all look so tired. How’s things going? No need for a big recap if you haven’t got the energy. I’m happy to accept grammatically incomplete and/or one-word answers.

“No, I’m awake,” says Chase hurriedly, sitting up. “I got this, I’m good. I told Blue and Red I’d look after everybody til we meet up again and I will. I can handle it. Um, so. Yeah, well. When was the last time we saw you?”

Chase closes his eyes and thinks.

“Ro burned Anti’s body. JJ got so sick that night. His nose bled til he passed out in the old bed. We got scared Dark was coming to get him or avenge Anti or something, so we ran away. We got everything out of the house and pawned as much shit as we could. Red and Blue got us food for a couple days and I didn’t ask where from.”

He glances down at his hands. “We’ve been scraping enough together to survive but we need doctors and things like that. Cause Dok’s... still not talking. And Dap needs a shrink and some other things. And Blue hides it, but I think he’s going to snap in half. He scares me lately when he’s upset. He hits things now like Red. Not us, but he just... rages. And burns. Blue does, he burns. I know it doesn’t hurt him but it looks like it does. The way he grits his teeth and tears at himself like that.”

Chase is gnawing on his bottom lip, already torn from his stress-chewing. He licks up a little blood, distracted.

“Red, though, you should see Red. Cause honestly I thought he’d get overwhelmed. But he’s so calm. He’s just had his mind on getting us out of America and making sure everyone’s okay and it’s like nothing else will distract him. He hasn’t broken down once. And even when he said we should take two separate trips to get here, he didn’t cry when we split up. Sometimes he gets scared when he can’t be around us but he said he knew I could do it.”

Chase looks over at Dapper like he’s waiting for something, but Dapper is scrawling in his sketchbook now, filling up pages already coated with chalk in more chalk, squishing pictures into the margins and spaces between.

“I have nightmares that Anti comes back to life,” says Chase. “And then the next night I cry because he’s gone. It’s shitty. Are you mad at us? We didn’t know if we should turn you on again. Dapper says Anti can still see us in the eye of the camera.”

Dapper’s tongue flicks out for a moment, licking his mouth. He doesn’t look up from his papers. His face twitches.

“Are you sad?” asks Chase. “Is this... do you still want to be here? He’s gone. It’s just us. And I thought maybe it would be more fun if things were less scary. But it’s not fun. I’m sorry. We’re pretty hungry and Blue thinks we might have mites in our feet. That’s all that’s going on. We’re going to get a place to stay, though. I promise. Things are going to be okay. Ro said I can do this.”

Chase closes his eyes tightly. “It’s just been kind of hard... it’s just been kind of hard.”

[nikkilbook]

Let it begin! I’m opening up commissions for the foreseeable future. Take a look, and let me know if you’re interested or if you have any questions. You can contact me in the comments, through a DM, over Tumblr, etc. It’ll be first come, first serve, but I’ll keep you posted about where you are in the queue.

[spinach-productions]

This is an ask hailing from like 3.5 years ago, but I thought you might like to know that my sister recently messaged me that she realized she had managed to write herself halfway into a Hot Drinks™️ scene (hold the cup, breathe, freak out less), and that “I must go reread science dad, so I remember how hot drink scenes go. I have no choice.” So if you got a few more hits on Baby Spinach last week, that was why. Because you wrote a scene 3.5 years ago that we still come back to. 💚

Aaaaaaaaa oh my god this is amazing

[script-a-world]

Do you have any suggestions for how to treat the setting like a character? I’ve heard that advice a few times, and I have a hunch that that might be what my current project needs in order to maintain a cohesive sense of place, but I’m a little unsure how to do it.

Constablewrites: It’s possible to have a [setting that is an actual character], but I don’t think that’s what the advice is generally about. Rather, it’s about giving your setting some of the qualities that characters have, rather than treating it as static set dressing.

Characters interact. One of my favorite quick-and-dirty tricks for building mood in a story is the weather. Not in the “it was raining” sense--someone enjoying a pleasant spring rain or hunched against freezing wind and sleet. Even a seemingly neutral partly cloudy day can affect a person, especially when there are fluctuations like the sun going behind a cloud or the wind picking up. Beyond weather, other elements of your world can be actively complicating a character’s life, like its traffic patterns or its legal system (even if embodied in a character, this is still tied to setting).

Characters do stuff when they’re not on screen. Settings start to feel small and inorganic when every element of them is tied to something the characters are doing. Even in a tiny town, there are going to be all sorts of things that keep it running that your characters never see or think about. This is why a lot of world building exercises include questions like “Who gets rid of the trash?” and “Where is the food grown?” It’s not that you need to have this stuff on the page, but understanding it as the writer will inform other choices you make (like the level of technology you’d need to fully automate those things, or the social implications of having people do that work).

Characters are shaped by their pasts. If a character is terrified of ostriches or snappish with everyone except small children, there’s probably some sort of story there. Like with your trash pickup, it might not be something that ever needs to get laid out on the page, but understanding that background as an author helps you paint a more rounded, nuanced portrait of that character.

Ultimately, this last one is a lot of the work we do here at script-a-world: it’s not just about “can you have this cool thing in your setting” but “what is it about your setting that allows this cool thing to be possible?” It’s about thinking through the way various systems interconnect, the way that people think and act and want, the unforeseen ripple effects of small changes.

@scriptstructure might be able to weigh in more on specific methods for getting this onto the page, but one thing you can do is pay attention to the things that make you aware of the world around you: sounds, sensations, events, etc. Then look for ways for your characters to do the same thing.

Brainstormed: This is a good question, and not the easiest one to answer. I’d say look at the masters, like Tolkien (of course) and Terry Pratchett, both of whom created very distinct, personality filled worlds with very different tones. Let’s look at them for a minute.

First, their writing styles. Tolkien, in writing Middle-earth, used high flowery fantasy language that’s become a staple of every vaguely medieval story written since. It recalls the eddas and epics of older civilizations like Beowulf or the story of Ragnarok, which Tolkien actually used as inspiration. The way people speak and the way things are described gets the reader into a very firm mindset about how this world is. Pratchett, on the other hand, denotes Discworld with about as much respect as he had for a normal use of the English language, that is, very little! His way with words is almost nonsensical at points, but vivid, and charming, and just a bit left of weird and straight into magical. The comic tone of the series is encapsulated perfectly by the very words used to build the world, and the serious undertones are brought out in starker contrast when they appear. So think about your world’s personality and your own writing style. If your world could speak, would it do so in the way that you do? Would it use your vocabulary? Would it follow proper grammar or throw around run-on sentences and contractions like no tomorrow? Treat your descriptions of the world in the same way you should be treating a character’s manner of speech: ensure it has a deliberate flair that communicates a personality simply in the writing style used.

Second, their breadth, or scope. This one is a little more difficult to pin down, and you need to figure out where your limit is, unless you don’t mind driving yourself into the ground with a bunch of details that won’t ever show up in your story. Middle-earth is probably the biggest example of this, with its multiple complete languages with their own histories and migrations, with dozens of kingdoms living and dying long before The Lord of the Rings takes place, with its genealogies and appendices and timelines and cosmology! Tolkien went whole ham. But the Discworld series, meandering about with no set first or last book, skipping across characters and settings for the fun of it, accomplishes similar scope with none of the structure. The looseness of the worldbuilding is in fact one of the things that contributes to the worldbuilding. You ought to have a general idea of your world’s entirety, I think, but that should only serve to provide context and richness to the more specific setting your story takes place in. If personality is flavor, then a five star chef laboring over a professional meal will give one taste, a homecooked comfort food with simple ingredients will give another, and they are equally tasty, but very different meals.

Third, the tiny details, perhaps what you’d find if you took the second point and held it up to a magnifying glass. Tolkien barely even bothered to tell us what many of his main characters looked like! He does give us some details, like how the hobbits have an informal speaking style, even when talking to royalty, which led many people to believe they were royalty themselves. That ties in to his language worldbuilding, but it also gives us a sense of how this world works, which lends it a personality. Pratchett finagles such descriptions of small habits and quirks, in both characters and world, that I feel as if I’ve been there already. The ridiculousness found throughout his world is presented so normally that the idiosyncrasies in Discworld give it delightful character instead of confusing the reader. If there’s small details about your world that give it a certain personality, find a way to finagle those in! Make a Pinterest board or an aesthetic folder of some sort, to save the bits and bobs that you know you want your readers to visualize, and try to work backwards from there. The little things will sell it.

[star-of-fortitude-art]

@nikkilbook asked: I’ve been watching Jack’s Slime Rancher videos, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s actually Chase playing them in an attempt to cope with the divorce.

@reverseblackholeofwords answers: Oh my goodness, I want art of Chase playing with a bunch of little slimes now and doing trick shots with them!

@shedras-art thinks: Okay!