Tamara Haddock @tamarahaddock-author - Tumblr Blog

Dramatic tension is held if the story develops through decisions made by the main characters. It is not held if the story develops through coincidence and arbitrary accidents.

William Smethurst (in 'Writing for Television')

Rebranding

Hey everyone, my blog has been tjswritingstuff for about 15 years. I decided since that name doesn't really capture what I'm doing I'm going to change it to my actual name, and title.

I write science fiction, horror, poetry, and flash fiction. This blog has mostly been a collection of writing resources and my thoughts on writing, it will continue to be a place where information is shared. In February I started writing full time. I'm currently submitting to 9 submission calls per month and creating daily. I am not great at personal updates, but I wanted you to know if you see this blog and don't recognize the name that's why. TLDR; tjswritingstuff blog has become tamarahaddock-author.

#writeblr #writing #writblr #self promo

April is over and it was a productive month!

#writeblr #writing #writblr #self promo #youtube #writing advice #Youtube

Personalized Rejection!

I sent out a poem a couple weeks ago about "rest as resistance" for a submission cal. I wrote about workers who were paid to put stones on each others backs. The rejection I got back was "“The Stone Workers ” came close, I'm sure another venue will buy it." So I guess we know what's on my list of submissions to send out for this upcoming week.

#self promo #writeblr #writing #writblr

This site came up in the well crafted sentence textbook for my Style for Professional Writers class. This is a complete list of rhetoric terminology. I fully intend on thoroughly exploring this page.

#Youtube

I got my first piece accepted since I started writing full time!

#writblr #writing #writeblr #self promo #Youtube

theyuniversity

🧠🎓 If your grammar goal for 2026 is to finally figure out how to use a comma properly,

THIS POST IS FOR YOU. 👈

Website | Twitter | Instagram | Medium | Pinterest

allthingswhumpyandangsty

tamarahaddock-author

Writing will make you tired.

Even if it's not physically taxing writing is a mentally taxing activity. It burns energy and calories.

I have been writing full time the past two months and this is what I've found out, I feel safe when I sit at my computer and start writing, when your nervous system relaxes the first thing that happens is you get tired. Here's how I work around it.

Self Care first:

Take care of everything that needs done before writing. Make the bed. A made bed is a deterrent for me. I don't want to mess it back up so I'll stay out of it as much as possible. Eat Breakfast. Don't start by sitting at the computer, start with eating. If I skip breakfast it's harder to focus. Take medicine. These help me focus, putting it off means my brain is foggy for longer.

For the writing session:

Set Goals. Have a clear plan for the writing session. Knowing today's goals will help keep you focused.

Take Regular Breaks. When you feel tired don't push through it, you're just going to get more tired.

Be productive during breaks. I set a ten minute timer and start a physical task, cleaning, laundry, dishes, something that needs done that I've been procrastinating that doesn't take a lot of mental effort. While doing that task I focus on what I want to work on for the day. When that timer is done I go back to writing.

Get moving. If I don't have something that needs done I will take a walk around the yard. Fresh air and sunshine will wake you up.

Repeat as needed.

dollscentrose

riapm

I want to start journaling. I used to when I was really going through it and let me just say… I was absolutely nuts. I only wrote about negative things and talked shit about myself and other people 😭 it sure is entertaining to read now but I want to journal about positive things now. Any tips would be appreciated

tamarahaddock-author

So I love my journals. Start off by reading what you wrote before and note what you liked, and what you wanted more of. You said positive thing. So to start maybe write down one thing each day that made you smile, or that you learned, or that you found interest. I put quotes, recipes, movie & book reviews, photos, stories, etc in mine.

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!

sassinake

WOW. but I think I'll just stick to Star Wars worlds that don't make any sense anyway.

write-on-world

ekjohnston

This is, and I cannot stress this enough, extremely normal for literally any even vaguely creative person. I would argue even further that it's a sign of skill: you can prioritize ideas and sift through your thoughts for the best/most excitung ones. Many, many people never get to that second jar at all.

quotefeeling

“Unless you open up and share your feelings, no one can understand what you’re going through.”

— Kim Taehyung

chromalogue

For the past I don't know how many years, it's been my practice to read 100 books a year. I usually have to hustle a bit in the last couple of weeks, but I make it to 100.

This year, not only did I have to finish my monograph, but I also fell down a bit of a rabbit hole in April, and developed a side project that has been consuming most of my bandwidth, to the point where the little time I have spent reading, I've felt like I should be spending working on this other thing. (For which I have gone to numerous extremes. I have 400 tabs open in Firefox. I spent a weekend researching manhole covers in Wimbledon, and another researching reflex tests, and yet another on Brexit. I have given myself [very mild!] cyanide poisoning twice, and I can't recommend the feeling, but the dish that gave it to me is definitely a keeper, and worth it.)

For the longest time I was resigned to just not making my goal this year. Didn't read 100 books, but I've written two, and that has to count for something, doesn't it? But then I remembered that now that I'm back in Canada, I can go to the local library, and they have hundreds of picture books. So if I can get in enough library time tomorrow and Tuesday, I just might, by cheating egregiously, get my hundred books read anyway.

tamarahaddock-author

It's not cheating if you read the kids books, books are books. The 100 books that I read in first grade were kids books, they still counted to get me that prize.

librarysilverfish

Ok but before you go throwing random stuff into your story to spice it up or get it un-stuck, consider doing the following:

Grab a few events (minor or major doesn’t matter) from earlier or later in the story and trace out the causal chains. What caused it and what did it cause? Can the domino effect lead to a new event?

Trace out the “story” of the main cast’s motivation. How does the motivation interact with the story and how does the motivation change over time?

Go hunt for story elements you put in earlier that could be escalated into subplots.

Take a few characters who have different levels of information (or are more or less close to antagonists) and go through the story from their perspective. Perhaps you don’t know what should come next for your main character, but it might be obvious what comes next for a different character.

When you throw in new characters, first try to repurpose old characters. This makes them feel less cheap and gives them a better chance at developing depth. And when you do want to use a totally new one, consider someone who’s related to an existing character or a causal chain. The reader might already be wondering where X character’s parents are, after all.

Point is, the deeper the connections between your story elements, the more satisfying the read. You don’t have to view those connections as a constraint. They can tell you what needs to happen next.

prompt-heaven

a list of 100+ buildings to put in your fantasy town

academy

adventurer's guild

alchemist

apiary

apothecary

aquarium

armory

art gallery

bakery

bank

barber

barracks

bathhouse

blacksmith

boathouse

book store

bookbinder

botanical garden

brothel

butcher

carpenter

cartographer

casino

castle

cobbler

coffee shop

council chamber

court house

crypt for the noble family

blubomb280

DAMN YOU, TUMBLR! LET ME BOOKMARK STUFF LIKE THIS!

Anyways, time to share this in my personal discord so that I don’t lose it

lullabytez

Try to do journalling. Occasionally. Because it's good for mental health. And building thknking skills. Apparently. But I'm. Complete ass at it. The fuck do I write.

tamarahaddock-author

I usually start a new journal with a brief summary of myself and what I hope to get out of it, if you don't know what you want from it, you can just write that down.

I put in quotes that I find that I like.

Daily affirmations. (I get them from an app on my phone and copy down the ones that I like.)

In the morning I put in my to do lists for the day, any dreams I remember from the night before, and my hopes and fears for the day ahead.

In the afternoon I'll write what I did that day.

I love putting doodles and drawings in.

Notes from books I'm reading.

Movie, book, and tv reviews.

Story ideas.

Stickers.

lots of photos and mementos.

Appointments until i can copy them to my calendar

brainstorming sessions

habit trackers

It's kind of a personal journey of trail and error, some things you'll try and be like - "this wasn't for me."

So just do something different tomorrow. You can try journaling at different times. Like it might be too much to write when you first get up.

do random things. there's no right way, keep doing what you enjoy, stop doing what you dislike.

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Tamara Haddock