#writeblor

[thebookishkiwi]

Writemas Day 1 ✨

I'm so excited to be taking part in Writemas this year! Today, we have a little Melinoë and Vasileios moment, that probably takes place... a little after TAM.

My chosen prompts are:

A silver forest

Enjoy!

The forest was eerie. But not eerie in the way many people think of: it was silver. Personally, I found it quite charming. Not the first time I went there, but in the numerous times after that, certainly.

“Melinoë… where are we?” I shrugged. 

“Somewhere. I found it on one of my accidental teleportations a few years ago. Pretty, right?”

Vasileios walked in a large circle, wonder glazing his eyes. “Very.” 

  I laughed, tugging him along. “Come on, then. I’ll show you my second favourite place here.” We ran through the silver trees, tripping over each other and laughing, joyful even in Vasi’s concern. It was only a few minutes until we stopped at the edge of a lake. 

  The silver trees reflected onto the dark water, creating an alluring mirror on the lake. Silver streaks through dark water, rippling and curling around themselves. I pulled Vasileios towards the small wooden dock that hung out over the water. 

  We sat in comfortable silence for about a minute before Vasileios asked the question I had been waiting for. 

  “You really don’t know where we are?” Vasileios watched me. I sighed. 

“No. I think somewhere in Harulen, most likely. But I’ve looked through all of the books, explored around whenever I visited, and never found any mention or sign of this place.” 

He nodded, and we relapsed into silence. But not for long, because in two seconds I stood. I ignored Vasileios’ questions and dived into the water. Underwater, I pulled Vasi in after me. I immediately started laughing as he came back up, choking and spluttering. 

  “Mel!” He coughed. “What was that for?” 

“Love you too, Vasi. Look up.” Confused, he did as I directed. In the lake, there was a gap in the trees. Through that gap was a gorgeous sunset that I knew perfectly well occurred at this time of day. And when Vasileios twirled around to pull me close, I smiled. 

  Perfect.

-----

Tags: @the-ellia-west @seastarblue @cb-writes-stuff @corinneglass @vesanal @sunflowerrosy @thatoneacerobot @nossumusstellae

And, of course, the creator of Writemas: @agirlandherquill

[rpmemesbyarat]

I don’t think your protagonist has to be relatable. I don’t think they have to be an unproblematic person (or that this even exists). I don’t think they need to be morally correct. I think they just need to be interesting. They need to be someone the reader wants to read about. They need to be doing things that keep our attention for some reason, and this can include being horrified by their actions, or enjoying what a piece of shit they are and laughing when they get their comeuppance. I can only speak for myself, but my favorite characters in a work are typically awful assholes and gleefully so; I have a real “type” in that regard. And again, while I can only speak for myself, I don’t think I’m the only one. There’s surely other people out there who like reading about happily terrible people being happily terrible and doing terrible things without remorse, and not having some noble sympathetic reason behind it at all. Just as I’m sure there are people who like characters that are so unrelatable that they’re totally alien to them, or characters that are “problematic” and still manage to do good in the world or just have an interesting story, or characters that just make shit decisions and have to deal with it. In fact, I know there are people like this, otherwise series like Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles wouldn’t be so incredibly popular, and for so long at that. And while I have never read ASIOF, I understand most of the characters there aren’t angels either. I personally have really enjoyed what I’ve read by Nabokov and Rushdie, but I can’t say I “related” to characters in their works, I just found the stories super interesting and their writing styles really enjoyable. This isn’t to say being relatable is bad in a character. It’s great, actually. It’s just not the only thing that can make a character compelling. And while being sure that you avoid things like, say, racist stereotypes and the like, the idea that your protagonist (or any character at all, in some cases) must never have a bad opinion or action, regardless of their circumstances or upbringing, and especially can never do anything bad if they’re any kind of minority or else it is Bad Representation is not only not what terms like “problematic” or “bad representation” were ever originally meant to have meant, it’s also limiting and, in its own way, actually dehumanizes your characters—-our shitty parts, after all, are a big part of our humanity! And in many cases, they’re what make us interesting!

[thebibliosphere]

In a world of dwindling hope, love has never mattered more...

Captain Nathan J. Northland had no idea what to expect when he returned home to Lorehaven injured from war, but it certainly wasn’t to find himself posted on an island full of vampires. An island whose local vampire dandy lord causes Nathan to feel strange things he’d never felt before. Particularly about fangs. When Vlad Blutstein agreed to hire Nathan as Captain of the Eyrie Guard, he hadn’t been sure what to expect either, but it certainly hadn’t been to fall in love with a disabled werewolf. However Vlad has fallen and fallen hard, and that’s the problem. Torn by their allegiances—to family, to duty, and the age-old enmity between vampires and werewolves—the pair find themselves in a difficult situation: to love where the heart wants or to follow where expectation demands. The situation is complicated further when a mysterious and beguiling figure known only as Lady Ursula crashes into their lives, bringing with her dark omens of death, doom, and destruction in her wake. One thing is for certain, nothing will ever be the same.

Hunger Pangs: True Love Bites by Joy Demorra, book one available now in two different versions.

Flirting with Fangs Edition Full romance, lots of kissing, and all the spicy scenes for those who want them. Available now in eBook, Paperback and Audiobook.

Fluff and Fangs edition. Full romance, lots of kissing, and fade to black scenes for those who prefer not to read graphic depictions of sex. Available now in eBook, Paperback and Audiobook. Why are there two versions and what’s the difference? Glad you asked! Don’t forget to check out the listed content warnings and corresponding heat ratings on my website at www.joydemorra.com

[rpmemesbyarat]

You only need as much information about your character as is necessary to tell a story.

I see a lot of people stressing that they don’t feel they’ve developed their protagonist enough to begin their story. And in some cases, that’s possibly true. But in a lot of cases, these folks often have a pretty fleshed out profile of their character’s appearances, likes, dislikes, and so on, yet still feel it isn’t enough.

Hey, remember Calvin & Hobbes? It’s a comic strip series beloved by many, including me. We never know Calvin’s last names, or the names of his parents, or the exact nature of his dad’s job, or how they met, or their lives before being his parents. We don’t know anything about Susie’s family, or the bully Moe or babysitter Rosalyn; they’re only seen in the context of their interactions with Calvin. We don’t know about the lives of his teacher or principal outside of school. We don’t even know the street that he lives on, or the name of the city. It could literally be any suburbia, and I think that’s the point. This is Calvin’s world as he understands it, where Mom and Dad’s names are just Mom and Dad, and Dad’s job is just some ambiguous office, etc. While Calvin’s imagination is huge, it’s contrasted by his reality being very small and localized, confined almost exclusively to his home, school, and neighborhood, with occasional trips to the doctor, store, beach, museum, or zoo. In fact, the creator Bill Watterson regretted the story in which he added Calvin’s Uncle Max specifically BECAUSE of how it expanded the potential of Calvin’s world, especially since it required some awkward writing to avoid having him call the mom and dad by their names, and Watterson very much wanted them to remain unnamed.

This is a world that is deliberately small and information deliberately scant, and it works MARVELOUSLY. Calvin & Hobbes is the world through the eyes of a creative, hyperactive child and it’s perfect like it is without us needing to know everyone’s family tree, zodiac sign, favorite food, and political affiliations. Now, does that mean NO story needs that information? Absolutely not! There are stories where that might be relevant or even ESSENTIAL information to include about a character.

The question is, is your story one of them? Perhaps, instead of trying to work out your cast down to the last detail, work out what your story will require from your cast, and build their bios based on that. It’s not BAD to have superfluous details, and they’re often very fun for fans, but one should also avoid stressing out about lacking them when it’s unlikely they’ll come up in-story.

[As a note, this is one of the VERY many differences between story characters and RP characters; RP characters often need to come with very thorough bios and headcanons for others to consider them well-developed or worth interacting with, and because you alone don’t control the story, virtually ANYTHING can come up. Hence why a lot of people feel they need their character’s astrological chart worked out, their blood type, a list of allergies, and where they attended elementary school, since all those things may get asked in RP—-but you don’t NEED them for a story unless YOU make it that way!]

[rpmemesbyarat]

A VERY basic rule of writing is to challenge your protagonist. A story is only as good as its antagonist at the end of the day. The antagonist doesn’t need to be a person—it can be a situation, the environment, or the protagonist to themselves—but whatever it is, it has to challenge the protagonist. If a hero just overcomes everything with little or no effort, there’s really no tension or stakes, which makes for a poor story. When I read a book or watch a movie, I know LOGICALLY that the hero is going to survive and win (unless it’s a tragedy) but I need to wonder HOW. Even children’s stories understand this. Let's say I'm writing a story about Little Timmy entering a boat race. He builds the best boat and he wins. That's technically a story, but it's not very gripping, because it has no stakes. There's never a moment I'm really wondering if Little Timmy will win, or how he will pull it off. When I go into watch most movies, I know the good guys are going to survive/triumph unless it's a tragedy. But a good movie makes me wonder, holy shit, how? How can they get through this? That's what keeps me there. I know how it will end, but I'm there to see the journey. So, Little Timmy enters the boat race. But the store is out of materials to build his boat! So he has to hunt through junk heaps to find materials. The time he spends doing this gives him less time to build his boat than the other kids, so he's at a disadavantage. Then on the day of the race, his dog gets sick and he's in a time crunch to get his pup to the vet AND get to the race in time to start. He manages that, and once the race begins, another kid's boat rams into his!  That kid is trying to sink him! See how it gets more exciting when things go wrong for Little Timmy? And in order for these stakes to exist, the antagonist has to be competent. If a master martial artist is attacked by a common street punk, the fight isn’t really interesting or impressive, because the master doesn’t have to do much to win in a second. If the master martial artist has to face another master, then we get to see them struggle, and they’re forced to display their best moves, which is far more impressive. You can certainly have a comical antagonist, but unless you’re actually writing a comedy where the joke is the antagonist constantly failing, they still need to present a threat. Like, Don Karnage in TaleSpin is funny as hell and really ridiculous and I love him, but he also genuinely has the heroes on the ropes a few times. I have to wonder how they’re going to get out of this, and in order for me to have that concern, Don Karnage has to be competent enough to warrant that concern. If he’s weak and stupid and ineffectual altogether, and presents little or no real challenge to the heroes, there’s no concern, no tension, no stakes, and thus no satisfaction when the heroes best him, because it’s not impressive that they did so. If Little Timmy’s boat is never under a threat that seems genuine, I’m not really invested in his win, and it’s not much of a story if he does win. This not only means making your villains competent, it also means letting them get one up on the heroes. Think of the climax scene in any movie or book or show, the big showdown between the hero and villain. The moment of truth. In order to get to that point, the villain has to have gotten a few wins in. How could Will and Hannibal have ever gotten to the cliff scene if Will had bested Hannibal every step of the way from the start? How could A Series of Unfortunate Events have lasted past a single book if everyone believed the Baudelaire children and Count Olaf was successfully captured? This is where a lot of writers mess up; they do a good job building the villain up as being a real threat in theory, but they’re so against letting their darling protagonists so much as struggle or, gasp, LOSE for even just a moment, that in practice The Big Bad is barely an annoyance, no matter how menacing they originally seem. In the Anita Blake series, Marmee Noir, The Mother of All Darkness, is a great example of this. She’s presented as being the originator of both vampires and wereanimals, an ancient pre-human who has been in hibernation for thousands of years, and a being of immense power and terrible intentions. When the characters realize she’s begun to stir, it’s a huge Oh Shit moment, and there’s a lot of buildup over the books about how bad this is. But when Anita is actually up against this supposedly all-power supernatural force, she just. . .absorbs all Marmee’s power and kills her, lickety-split. A great many fans understandably found this terribly disappointing and anti-climactic. Let your bad guys be threatening, and let them make good on at least some of that threat potential before being defeated. Let the villains get some wins in. Which, yes, means letting your protagonist lose sometimes---and have to WORK for their ultimate win, become their best selves to triumph, pull out all the stops and everything they’ve got so that the audience sees what they’re really made of. It makes both your hero AND your villain look cooler to the readers, AND makes for a better story!

[rpmemesbyarat]

Internal Consistency

Have you ever been watching a show or movie, or consuming any other piece of fictional media, and complained something was unrealistic to you, only to be hit with responses like “this series has dragons and you think the hero betraying his friends is unrealistic?” or “they’re aliens, why is it unrealistic to you their technology has inconsistent rules?” And you knew something was wrong with that logic, but not what? Here’s what it was: No matter how unrealistic the world you’re writing, both the rules of the world itself and the characterization of people in them should be consistent, or it seems wrong. Which breaks our immersion in the world. We can believe in a society of unnaturally-colored talking horses with human sentience and mannerisms, but not that a character who has been solidly established as fashion-conscious diva would show up to a gala looking like a slob for no reason. We can believe that a seemingly normal schoolgirl is actually the reincarnated princess of another world, and that she battles monsters each week using magical items created from thin air by her talking animal companion, but not that she could defeat the incredibly powerful built-up Big Bad Final Boss using the same move that she used to take out those grunt-level monsters. We can believe in a world where people wield elemental magic as a part of daily life, but if fire magic is established early on as very rare and difficult and always met with amazement by others when someone uses it, but later even unskilled people are using it all over the place with no remark from anyone, that feels odd and unrealistic, even if magic itself isn’t real to begin with. Your world needs to follow the rules you lay down, and if rules are broken, that should be remarked upon appropriately in proportion to how big the rule is, and most of the time explained somehow. For instance, if it’s firmly established that two different color dragons can’t have young, a red dragon and a blue dragon making a baby probably needs an explanation beyond “well somehow they did” . There are cases where leaving it a mystery or at least ambiguous can work to the betterment of a story, but in most cases, an explanation is better and often necessary for the reader.

[twofagschillininahottub]

whhere is an in depth description of how it feels to die from nitrogen hypoxia when you need one :((

[brianmostcertainlymay]

Okay! A few weeks ago I took all (all) my story notes and deleted bits and ideas, and went through the story chapter by chapter, inserting bits where they would be just perfect ::chef's kiss::, and creating draft chapters for/around other bits. It's fleshed out the story considerably, but yikes!!! but yay!!! but yikes!!!