#solicited advice

[gallusrostromegalus]

Hi, hopefully I'm not bugging you with this.

I'm writing for a pathfinder campaign and trying to describe the skin of a plant person. A ghoran or a leshy.

What do you call plant skin if it ISN'T bark. If it's green like a flower stem or some such. Searching is only giving me vague "if the stem is woody or herbaceous" and not "we call the analogue skin or epidermis of a plant bark or (blank) if it isn't bark" I remember you doing scientific illustration so you were the first person I thought to pester with this.

So the outermost layer of tissue on a plant really is also called an Epidermis or Skin. No really. There's also the term "Periderm" that covers things like bark, the pseudoskin on potatoes, and other tougher skin coverings some plants develop. For fruits specifically, the skin is called an "Exocarp" (with the fleshy part being Mesocarp and the innermost layer around the seeds being the Endocarp). But that's specific to fruit.

In order to get the "Plant-ness" of the character through, describe the specific botanical features this plant-person's skin has, like how she'd have Trichromes instead of hairs on her skin, or possible needle-like spicules or glochidia, maybe even actual spines! Does she grow Bracts, perhaps as an analogue for eyelashes or lips?

Hope this helps!

[andmaybegayer]

hmm. I'm almost done with my current Big Game. Gonna play some Small Games for a bit but considering making my next one specifically some kind of fantasy JRPG. I have never played a JRPG and I think they sound extremely finicky but I would like to try one. Recommend a good fantasy JRPG.

Willing to put up with a fair amount of Weeb and however much Ass but almost no Shit. Ideally on PC but I can emulate some systems. I think the 2D ones look neat but I'm not tied to it. Do newer JRPGs suffer from complexity creep?

[emptycounsel]

Q: How do you fight writer’s block?

The advice I got from my most successful teacher was that Writer’s Block is a gift. Writer’s Block tells you that something is wrong. Unfortunately, you then have to figure out what’s wrong. So it’s taking off your writing hat and putting on your diagnostic hat.

Start with you. Do YOU have what you need to write? Food? Sleep? Energy? Emotional Engagement? Commitment to writing? Enough of a goal to be getting on with?

If you have everything you need, move on to the piece itself.

First check where you are.

Do you understand what is going on, or are you completely winging it and a bit lost yourself? If you’re lost, the audience will be lost. Pause and figure out what is going on before you resume writing.

Do you wholeheartedly believe the current events could happen or do you have reservations? If you don’t buy it, then it’s time to change it to something you will believe so you can convince everyone else. You have to believe it first.

Do you care about what is going on or do you just think it has to be gotten through? If you don’t care, why should anyone else? Change what’s going on so that you care or delete it.

If where you are pans out, are the same things all true for what lead up to this moment? Is there a scene that predates the one you’re blocked on, that it relies on, that isn’t working well enough. Go back and fix that scene before continuing on.

If everything is good enough, it’s at last time to look to the story’s future.

Do you actually have a good enough idea of what happens next to write it or do you need to do some more planning?

Do you know what should happen, more or less, but the events to come are unclear, unbelievable, or unmeaningful? Change the plan to fix those.

If it’s still an impenetrable problem. Start going through other basic elements of the story.

Are you happy with your MC, or are they not carrying the story well enough? It may be time to go back to the drawing board and change them.

Are you happy with the setting? Is it doing the best job that can be done or is it time to change it?

What’s your theme? What’s your “moral?” What’s your “what if?” Do you know them well enough to work with or is it time to take a deeper look? If you think you know them, are they actually still working? Is it what you’re actually saying? Are you wandering off topic?

Is the structure working? Are you writing a hero’s journey but finding that kind of structure isn’t leading where the story needs to go? Are you in the right Genre? Is the story being told in the best order?

Does your authorial voice and language choice fit? Are you being super serious with lots of big words when it’s just a fun romp? Vice versa? Is your voice so strong it’s getting in the way? So weak it can’t hold it up?

Finally, if you just can’t figure it out right now with any of these. Pull out another project and start working on it a while. Let this one sit and germinate in your subconscious for a while.

The problem and solution may just come to you while you’re looking somewhere else. Or you may just need some distance to see it, so after a month or two you can try again. Or you may have simply grown out of this story and need to be working on another instead and this one will slowly molder and become the fodder for other, future projects.

[unpublished-me]

in my story I am killing off a character who is at war. He leaves behind a grieving sister, but how can I make my readers mourn him and sympathize with her when we never actually meet him?

That’s pretty tricky! Personally, Ithink that if you never show this character, the character will notbe mourned. This is because readers generally attach and identifywith characters that they see in action. You will have to walk a fineline of revealing the dead character through your living ones, but ifyou veer too much on talking about how great they used to be, you mayend up alienating your reader. It’s setting up your dead character tofail, in a sense, because now there’s all these expectations. Atleast for me, when I heard how great someone is, I see it as achallenge for them to prove themselves. Not the healthiest, but I seethis reaction in others as well.

I’ll go into an example of how to do it below!

EXAMPLE BELOW - (RED QUEEN SPOILERS)

I going to use Red Queen as anexample, since it’s the first one that came to mind. In the firstbook, readers are told early on that Mare’s brother, Shade, wasdrafted by the ruling government and died in the war. At this pointin the series, Shade never made any kind of appearance, however, hispresence, or more particularly his absence, was clearly felt by thefamily that he left behind.

The death of a loved one can be aprism through which the character examines the different aspects ofherself. For example, the specter of his death also spelled adevastating future for Mare, as her own enlistment is looming. Shewants to avoid it all costs, not only to survive, but because shesees everyday how it affected her family. Mare also wore earrings torepresent each time one of her brothers went off to fight in the war.She had several brothers, but Shade was the only one who didn’treturn. The introduction of these physical tokens to represent herbrothers, held near and dear to her, allowed the author to touch backon their meaning. Also, Mare knew that one day she would have to givean earring of her own to her younger sister.

You’re performing a sleight of handwhen you do this in your own writing. It seems like you’re talkingabout one character, but you are actually going to be examining theone with the point of view at the moment.

If you found this post helpful and would like to see more advice like this, please send me an ask! HERE

[antennapedia]

Is it acceptable for writers to demand (only favorable) feedback from readers? I've seen writers defend that they write for free and what kind of a person would critique a freely given work? And is it right to blame the readers' lack of feedback for the loss of a writer's motivation? That because the readers don't make the writers feel appreciated enough, it's their fault? Is it even their responsibility to begin with? Thanks in advance!

I have two answers to this question, and they're both correct *in context.* The first answer is aimed at writers, and the second answer is aimed at readers.Publishing a story is *publication*. It is the dissemination of your work to a wide audience. It's the act of broadcasting something. The act of publishing you lose control of your work in a few important ways, in exchange for the pleasure of having a lot of people read it. This is true whether you're publishing in print with the expectation of making some money from those readers, or publishing by putting your story on a web page with no expectation of anything other than maybe some comments or thumbs-up button presses.

When I say you (the author) lose control of it, I mean that. People can save the story to their phones to read later. People can show the story to each other. People can talk about the story in places you cannot hear them talking. People who don't know you can read the story. People who don't know what you're thinking about as you write will read the story and react to it. 

When critics say "the author is dead", this is partly what they mean. You, the author, can't be standing next to every reader and explaining to them what the words you typed mean. Your words have to stand on their own, without you around. And you don't have any idea who's reading them, or what they bring to experience. And you have no ability or even *right* to control their reactions. That's the tradeoff you made when publishing. You said "here! have a story! I hope you like it!" and sometimes people won't. And they get to say they don't. And they get to notice that your grammar is shoddy (or excellent) or that you have a problem with spelling (or not) or that you misuse semicolons terribly. And they get to say that to each other, write review commentary on their own blogs, and so on.

It is incumbent on you, as an author, to grin and bear it gracefully. Don't respond to your bad reviews. Don't justify yourself. Find a close friend and vent if you need to, but in public, thank everybody and move on to your next story. You took the good stuff that came from publishing your story; cope with the bad stuff. Maybe fix your spelling by finding a line editor? Some critique is helpful! But if the commentator didn't like your ships and complained about the things your story set out to do, ignore them and keep on shipping.

Where we run into trouble -- and by "we" I mean "fandom" -- is in the context of where this conversation and critique happens. We, as fans, publish our stories not in vast public spaces that we do not own (say, the pages of the New Yorker, if we're super-famous) but in more *personal* spaces. We publish stories on our Tumblrs. In our LiveJournals. On AO3 pages that have commenting affordances that are *personal* and aimed right at us. So the easiest place to have a conversation about a story ends up being right there under the author's nose.

Readers, these conversations are your right to have. But for best results, don't have them right in the author's living room. Have them on your own Tumblrs, in your own LJs, in the format of a long Medium post about how adverbs are ruining fan writing or whatever. Don't shove your critique into the writer's face. If you do that, you're a jerk. That conversation is for *you* to enjoy, not for you to score points.

Constructive criticism is a touchy subject. We as authors need it and crave it, but it has to happen in an atmosphere of trust. I, as a writer, only show my unfinished stories to early readers whom I know will help the stories *be the best version of that story they can be*. That means I need to know my early readers can set aside their own wishes and egos to figure out what *my* story wants to be, and then I have to believe that they have the writing skills they need to help me make the technical changes required to make the story better. And friends, I love you, but I don't know 99% of you well enough to trust you in this way. That means if you come up to me and say "you use too many adverbs buddy cut a few" I am not going to be open to it. Please don't. I'm not going to be a jerk to you about it, but you'll get a bland "thanks for your input" and then a private "wtf was that about". (Please do always tell me if I spelled something wrong, btw. I fix my typos. I will gracefully accept that concrit.)

It doesn't help that so many fans are willing to grind shipping axes in the form of unsolicited concrit. That well is kinda poisoned already before you even got here. Like, poisoned 20 years ago or more. Shipwars are eternal.

tl;dr criticize away *in your own spaces*; be kind to each other. Live and let ship.

[gallusrostromegalus]

Question: on the how-to landscape art piece, you showed the names of some of the layers and one of them was labeled Eyestrain Guard

As somebody who only occasionally dabbles in digital art, can you explain or provide some links to resources that explain what that is?

Thank you, and the landscape thing is very interesting and making me think more on how to effectively draw and color stuff

The Eyestrain Guard Layer for me is a layer that is solid black at 50% opacity so that I'm not staring at a GLARING BRIGHT WHITE LIGHT. I'll toggle that opacity darker or lighter as I need it (mostly to make sure mid-tone scraps aren't hiding on the gray during cleanup)

Its it's own layer instead of the Paper Layer because sometimes I want the white paper if I'm doing a seperate background or as part of the final composition.

One exception to this is if I am working in black-and- white, then I make the eyestrain guard a 50% value/Saturation (the exact middle of the color selection square) of a red or pink so I can see my grays clearly and the red is also good for less eyestrain, like red lenses for driving or the full-screen red filters some people use.

I don't have any specific links or studies to back this up, I just know I get less eyestrain when everything is in dark mode and also my value range is better when working on a mid-toned background so I combined the two and now I just work on middle gray "Paper" all the time.

[andmaybegayer]

I need a Linux for my laptop, it's been between operating systems for like three months now, taking suggestions, probably not Debian or Arch or their derivatives. Previously had Tumbleweed and then briefly Aeon but Aeon is GNOME which sucks and if I'm considering reinstalling to Kalpa for Plasma I could also switch to anything.

[andmaybegayer]

what kind of glue should one use to reattach plastic moulded pieces to hiking boots