Hi! My name is Charlie and this is my writing blog
I've written and rewritten this introduction a thousand times and I hate it. About me: I am a long-time fantasy writer, an obsessive worldbuilder, and an avid enjoyer of all things storytelling. I love picking apart characters and structures and analyzing media in any form.
I currently have two literary magazine publications, The Incident in God's Eye and Vampire Jazz Band, and one more on the way. Alongside that, I also have a handful of long form projects I intend to post about when I get the courage to.
Projects:
Dead Dragon - This ambitious epic is my main priority and it essentially boils down to Pirates vs. Settlers vs. Dragons vs. Gods.
Deviltown - A modern comedic fantasy that turned into a sit-com the more I wrote it.
Corpse Town - A double-sided Us vs. Them that involves dark caves and body horror. Out of all of my projects (even the ones not listed), this is the one that is the least fantastical.
if you ever get bored, find a worldbuilding community (doesn't matter which kind, can be a forum or reddit or whatever as long as it's got topics) and search "nile" to find the meanest arguments
if someone starts with what seems like a polite question and you can clearly see they've attached an image of the nile delta, that means they're so angry they want to kill someone
in broad strokes, to quickly give a(n admittedly simplified) serious answer,
there's a geographical rule that's usually shortened to "rivers don't fork because rivers erode. when a river temporarily forks, one flow becomes weaker and deposits sediment, which means less water flows through it, which strengthens the other, and this snowballs until it all becomes one flow again" which is basically true, but leaves out enough nuance that people like to bring up bifurcation, confluence, and deltas as exceptions to it
the nile has a lot of things that kinda look like they run counter to that rule, and if someone didn't take the time to explain why deltas seem to fork like that, or why the nile delta is exceptional and interesting among deltas, it'd look like a magic bullet you could drop on the table in bad faith to prove everyone in the room except for you is an idiot (which is why people usually post it)
people draw forked rivers enough that people shorten their critique down to "rivers don't fork" (which is a fair rule of thumb) and people post the nile delta as an attempted gotcha to this often enough that it reliably happens in every single worldbuilding-adjacent community at least once a month
Ok, it's taken me SIX YEARS to make this. But I did it! It's done! Please watch it!
(No AI used fuck AI)
It's my first animation project, which is why it took so long. I had to learn to animate to make it. It's only a bit over 2 minutes, but I made it the best I possibly could. Please please please watch it. I am so proud of it.
It's a trailer for my first novel- a late YA scifi/superhero book.
Is it absurd to make a fully animated book "trailer" for a book that's been out for 6 years, with voice acting and commissioned music (by the fantastic @plottwiststudios) ? I mean yes. Of course. I'm not even doing this for real marketing purposes because this is a ridiculous thing to do. I don't even really think it'll sell books but the process of making it made me really really happy.
I love my fictional disaster queers, and I love my book, and when I was a kid I thought I'd grow up to be an animator. I've always loved animation, and I really, really enjoyed making something animated myself. I'm really proud of how it turned out.
Please watch it. Please share it.
If it does make you actually want to read the story, you can get it as an ebook, paperback, or audiobook. (the ebook is currently free)
I start my next animation project- a fake anime opening credits for book 3 in this series, starting next month.
Hello Jennifer! A query’s job is to sell the manuscript and entice an agent to read the pages, but what should the sample pages be doing and not be doing to maintain interest? Anything that should be obvious or less obvious? Any insights are much appreciated!
Let's say you are in a bookstore. You only have $20, you can get ONE book. So you're wandering around looking at stuff. Maybe first you look at the books on the New Releases table, then go to the sections that have stuff you usually like.
You pick out a few potential books. They all have cool covers, they all have interesting-sounding descriptions on the jacket, so you decide to turn to the first page and just start reading.
WHAT MAKES YOU DECIDE YOU WANT TO KEEP GOING? What makes you decide THIS one is the one you are going to spend your $20 on? And, what might make you set the book down?
The answer might be a little different for different people on different days. Some of it might be just vibes-based, you just really aren't in the mood for XYZ or for whatever reason XYZ gives you the ick, and this book seems to be brimming with it. OR, on the other side of the coin, you ARE really in the mood for XYZ, or you are always a sucker for this trope or this type of premise, and this particular book seems to be really ringing that bell in a fun way.
So... it's the same when I'm looking at the query inbox. There are a lot of things that are easy to say no to. But, there are probably several things that look potentially promising based on the query and the first page or so, and they have become Maybes. If I'm looking at the "maybe" pile and trying to decide what to request, I'll go in deeper on the sample pages, just like hypothetical you reading a bit of the book in the bookstore.
For ME, the books (or manuscripts) that make me say YES are generally the ones where the voice rings true and the writing is clear as glass. I feel instantly like I am in good hands with this author, and I'm excited to keep going because I'm already hooked and want to know more about what will happen next.
Ideally, I FORGET that I'm reading a query, it just feels like a REAL BOOK.
I don't really know how else to describe it, or how you ACHIEVE that. It's just a FEELING. (Sorry!)
If at ANY point I want to nope out, for any reason at all, I will do so. If I get to the end of the first page and want to keep going, that's good. If I get to the end of the sample and want to keep going, I'll request a full.
(Sorry I don't have more specific Things You Must Do... just, you know, make it so people want to keep going????)
how do you distinguish grey from other colours beyond black and wite?
Distinguishing features of moral beige:
The protagonist is constantly agonising over Hard Choices; however, circumstances always conspire to prevent them from actually having to make those choices, so in practice they're just angsting over stuff they might have done.
The text exhibits a recurring pattern whereby the protagonist seems to to have made a Hard Choice, but new information is reliably revealed shortly thereafter which retroactively establishes that whatever they did was the morally upright course after all.
The protagonist's moral impulses are straightforwardly heroic, except in one specific context which lacks any clear real-world analogue; for example, being prejudiced against telepaths.
The protagonist's actions are consistently reasonable based on the information available to them – they're merely operating on bad information basically all the time due to a bizarre conspiracy and/or a series of increasingly implausible misunderstandings.
The protagonist always ends up doing the right thing (for some fuzzy value of "right"), but, like, they're really grumpy about it.
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
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!!!!!!!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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!
the best advice i can give is honestly just to put your absolute heart and soul into your work. and consider it a craft. really hone it. but the honesty is the key thing. you've got to bare your soul or it won't matter to anyone. oh wait writing? sorry, i was talking about selling counterfeit armani bags on ebay. i've got no fucking idea about writing
one of my worst writing sins is abusing my power to create compound words. i cannot write the sentence "The sun shone as bright as honey that afternoon." no. that's boring. "The sun was honey-bright that afternoon" however? yes. that sentence is dope as fuck. i do not care if "honey-bright" is a word in the english dictionary. i do not care if the sentence is grammatically correct. i will not change. i will not correct my erred ways. the laws of the english language are mine.
This is what's called a poetic epithet, and it happens all the time in writing. Consider, for example, Homer and his wine-dark sea, or Shakespeare and his death-mark'd love.
If you were then to start using them instead of the word they're describing, you'd be making a kenning. For example, if instead of describing the sun as honey-bright, you said "the honey-drop in the sky". Kennings are best known from Norse writings, like "the path of serpents" for gold, or "Grímnir's lip-streams" for poetry itself.
So you're not sinning, you're participating in an ancient literary tradition!
Words: cruel, narrow, lost and bend. These are from Gracemeadow Manor, except the first which is from Totentanz:
Cruel:
Karandren actually had the audacity to throw himself down in the snow beside her. He folded his arms behind his head and stared up at the stars as he spoke. "Yes, I hated you. I wanted to hurt you as much as you hurt me. Because you did hurt me, you know. I understand why now -- you're just a cruel bastard to everyone, including yourself--"
Narrow:
That was a narrow escape, Debra thought. Her camera was safely in her pocket and she didn't think Violet had seen it.
Lost:
No two sources agree on what set him off. Some say that both Arthur and Aaron had fallen in love with the same woman, that she returned Arthur's affections, and that Aaron chose the most permanent method of getting rid of his rival. Others say it was an argument over a card game, as Aaron was known to react violently and accuse his opponents of cheating when he lost. The police report and the inquest took the view it was nothing more than an alcohol-fuelled rampage aimed at whoever was unlucky enough to get in Aaron's way.
Bend Corner:
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the chandelier dripping blood. His head snapped round. No, his eyes must have been playing tricks on him. There was no blood there. The living room door was wide open and bright sunlight shone on a marble floor.
hate it when you're noodling on a story and all of a sudden you're like. "oh no. I have thought of a way that I can make this stronger and more thematically coherent and impactful. but I don't like it"
tagged by @totally-not-deacon thank you :') I'm not sure who I'm following that does these so I did a lil research and I nominate @evilwriter37, @your-talos-is-problematic, and @friend-of-giants (sorry if this is not your thing, I'm new to this!)
Currently working on an ongoing novel that focuses on autism, war, and folk music, with a little supernatural fantasy and a steampunk element thrown into the mix. CW for descriptions of a meltdown, emotional and physical trauma, and You Are My Sunshine (lol). I like just wrote this.
I looked at the kid in my arms. His face was red and splotchy, snot running over his lips and chin. He was looking around between the four of us. “You’re looking for your parents, aren’t you?” I asked him.
He didn’t respond, of course, but that made it all the more easier to talk to him. “You’re not the only one, kiddo. I haven’t seen my Da in years. You’ll get used to it.”
The baby looked up at me. He’d stopped crying and instead was focusing on my voice. I paused, because I didn’t know what else to say, and his face crumpled at the silence. I felt my face crumple, too.
As he began to whimper again, I thought of Edet, bleeding, curled in the arms of a stranger. Then I thought of our father.
I opened my mouth and began to sing.
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine
You make me happy when skies are gray
You’ll never know dear how much I love you
Please don’t take that sunshine away
Truthfully, I hate that song. It’s a tragic heartache that’s been watered down to a lullaby for babies. In the earliest renditions, the song tells about a man begging his partner not to leave him for someone else, and most versions do not have a happy ending. Most songs don’t.
Most lives don’t, either, it seems. In the darkest of times, one seeks comfort in mutual pain. I sang the heartache version to the baby, softly, hoping the others couldn’t hear me.
The other night, dear, as I lay sleeping
I dreamed I held you in my arms
But when I woke, dear, I was mistaken
And I hung my head and I cried
Some part of me found comfort in imagining that I was singing to my younger self in the wake of tragedy. And it hurt to realize that as abandoned as I’d felt in Sommerstad, I missed my father fiercely. In the aftermath, I longed for a voice to sing to me. His voice.
I’ll always love you, and make you happy
If you will only say the same
But if you leave me and love another
You’ll regret it all someday
The baby rested his head on my shoulder, hiccuping but no longer in tears. The terrain began to even out. When I looked up, I saw a house standing on chicken legs. I blinked and looked again. Indeed there was a structure that was more of a shack, but it was suspended off of the ground and built around the trunks of two firs. The roots of the trees were reminiscent of talons digging into the dirt. The frozen creek trailed underneath the house.
The shack was not alone. A ways up the incline there was a collection of houses, and a crowd of people bustling. A canopy had been set up and another was already being erected, underneath which very few spare cots were occupied by the injured. A man, a soldier with a bloody bandage wrapped over one of his eyes, jumped up from his cot and beckoned for the soldier carrying my sister. In an instant she was swept up in a flurry of rags and medics. Her skin was as pale as the frost, and she was dangerously still.
I couldn’t control my breaths. My lungs burned, my throat still acrid from the bile. The infant squealed unhappily in my arms, and I realized I had been squeezing him too tightly. I put him on the ground before I could drop him. I flexed my fingers to gain some semblance of control, but soon that became ineffective and instead I was pulling my hair. Edet, I swore. Oh, Edet. Now it was my turn to hiccup.I wept. I screamed. Someone had to tear me away from Edet’s cot, and the contact evoked something rabid in me. Something I hadn’t seen since I was a little kid, before I’d steeled myself from constant meltdowns. I cursed the person restraining me. I cursed God. I cursed myself for daring to consider a world without Edet, and now here I was staring in the face of it. No mother, no father, no Edet.
