The Little Librarian

just a goth studying to be a librarian, 25, studyblr, dark academia

[nateconnolly]

These days, lots of public libraries have a "library of things" collection where you can check out kitchen appliances or yard tools or toys, and, as a children's library assistant, the most popular library of things item that I handle regularly is a plastic scepter thingy called like "unicorn princess magic wand". And whenever I check it out I make a big show of looking at the little kid and being like "do you solemnly swear to use your unicorn princess magic powers only for good and never for evil?"

And pretty much without fail, the little kid will get the world's most mischievous grin and go "I'm gonna use it for EVIL!!!"

[official-library-posts]

official library post

[lamignonette]

[bitegore]

i made a character sheet. free to use as you wish, feel free to change whatever you want XD open source ass thing. spent all of ~maybe an hour on it.

Credit: the text in the insert-image box comes from this video, and the text for the top three lines (intense, complex, fruity) comes from this post. The actual image was made with the free NBOS character sheet creator, which is a sort of dated but free and solid text-layout sheet maker intended for ttrpg style character sheet creation.

[mirrorbird]

this is GENUINELY one of the best character development sheets I've ever seen. Cuts right to the core of what you and your readers will glom onto, doesn't waste time on details that don't directly affect the narrative. Stupendous. Effervescent. Finally, some good fucking food

[thepoisonroom]

literally so important to have friends where you can be like "can i be insane for a second" and then you get to be insane. and they still like you afterwards

[jester-nonconforming]

btw i love when dubcon is used in fiction as a way to explore characters. i love when characters don’t understand how to “properly” ask for consent because they have never had their consent respected in their lives. i love when traumatized adult characters make potentially unwise choices about what to do with their bodies because they have the autonomy to do so. i love when characters make choices that i personally wouldn’t make, but i can totally understand how they got there. i love when characters have complex, fucked up, unhealthy dynamics, but still care about each other and want to do better. i love when writers trust audience members to read between the lines instead of spoon feeding them moral lessons. i love when characters are allowed to actually fuck up and have mistakes to learn from!

[what-even-is-thiss]

I think a lot of writers might benefit from giving themselves permission to get weird with format.

Use second person, drop classic rising action and climax format, write backwards, just sit in a moment, tell all you want and refuse to show, make an entire book that’s just one run on sentence, reject tropes, use all tropes, cliche yourself to death, produce something that’s completely gibberish. Break all the rules of marketability. Become ungovernable.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Write a story that just takes place inside one pathetic little person’s head. Do it. It’s enrichment in your enclosure.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Do the writer’s equivalent of playing with finger paints. Do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it

[what-even-is-thiss]

It’s the middle of the night and I should be sleeping but listen. Listen. Just get weird with it. Open your soul up a little bit. Like actually don’t worry about it being palatable. I’m serious. Get weirder. Get weirder right now. I’m demanding that you get weirder right now. It’s not your responsibility to make your reader feel good. It’s your job to make art, goddamnit. Make art. Make weird art. Open up your third eye and eat an entire cheesecake.

[louisegluckpdf]

[freezing-daisy]

the full article

[spider-starry]

THIS ARTICLE IS THE MOST BITCHEST ARTICLE I’VE EVER READ!!! And I loved every goddamn moment of it!!!

[bethfuller]

i love dropping my pen putting my glasses on my desk and rubbing my face like an exhausted divorced academic in the 1980s who is greying and sexily tousled and has been up for hours digging through the yellowed pages of old obscure treatises about etruscan pots

[3liza]

god help me i just remembered the post i saw on here a few weeks ago (WITH MANY NOTES IN AGREEMENT) about how, if you squint your eyes juuuuuust right, vampire fiction can be read through the lens of chronic illness and disability, and someone should really explore these themes more! and then like a hundred replies going "wow OP youre really on to something here i never thought of it that way before"

[3liza]

for the most part i dont really understand what the people in fandoms think they are being fans *of*. just sheer animal reactions i guess, completely unexamined beyond that?

[gothiccharmschool]

Just including @3liza’s tags here while nodding sagely.

[pussyhoundspock]

joining the war on kids reading any book they want on the side of kids reading any book they want. simply you will be fine. it's even good to be confronted with things you don't understand and even find upsetting, uncomfortable and difficult. it's a surprise tool that will help you later.

[starless-planet]

Me, age 10, doing an essay on the pharaoh’s curse for school: huh. So this archeologist that died and everyone thought it was because he disturbed the pharaoh’s tomb actually died because he used a rusty razor to shave and it infected a mosquito bite. I can see how people could come to that conclusion, but it is a bit silly

Me, today, shaving my mosquito bite-ridden legs: I must tread carefully lest I incur the pharaoh’s wrath

[bobzillashiftwoods]

[orcbara]

too many stories about turning yourself into a monster as a metaphor for pretending to be something you aren't and losing yourself in the process. not enough stories about turning yourself into a monster as a metaphor for choosing to openly embrace yourself even if it's strange to other people

[orcbara]

any time the conclusion of the story is "and then he turned back to normal because what really matters is being true to yourself and being loved for being who you really are: a boring human" i hear a spongebob boo-womp in my head. can you tell i'm autistic by the way

[heedra]

not to oversimplify an extremely complex discipline but if i had to pick one tip to give people on how to have more productive interactions with children, especially in an instructive sense, its that teaching a kid well is a lot more like improv than it is like error correction and you should always work on minimizing the amount of ‘no, wrong’ and maximizing the amount of ‘yes, and?’ for example: we have a species of fish at the aquarium that looks a lot like a tiny pufferfish. children are constantly either asking us if that’s what they are, or confidently telling us that’s what they are. if you rush to correct them, you risk completely severing their interest in the situation, because 1. kids don’t like to engage with adults who make them feel bad and 2. they were excited because pufferfish are interesting, and you have not given them any reason to be invested in non-pufferfish. Instead, if you say something like “It looks a LOT like a tiny pufferfish, you’re right. But these guys are even funnier. Wanna know what they’re called?” you have primed them perfectly for the delightful truth of the Pacific Spiny Lumpsucker

[akiragatr]

I was in martial arts for years, and in particular I kinda specialized in working with the younger kids.

The two Big Rules when instructing younger students was- 1. Compliment before Critique 2. Don’t say ‘but’, say ‘now’

Praise kids on what they get right first, especially if they are struggling. Like OP said, kids don’t like to engage with people who make them feel bad. They need encouragement when learning new things.

Number two boils down to this. If you tell a kid a compliment, then say “but you need to fix this”, that ‘but’ completely negates your compliment. It’s gone. It was canceled out like adding a negative to a positive. Using “hey, that punch is looking great, now let’s focus on your stance” doesn’t verbally cancel out the progress they’ve made. It’s like they’ve checked off something on their list of stuff to work on.

Wording can absolutely make or break a child’s motivation and interest.

[problemedic]

Rebloggling as it’s relevant in a Medical Education context

[lizziedoesvetpath]

Honestly I use all of these to teach vet students too. I think people in general respond better to positivity in teaching. Not coddling, but acknowledging when a student got part way to the right answer, or had a good thought process, is something I’ve found keeps students engaged and builds confidence, which encourages them to keep going instead of shutting down and just “getting through” a lab or a rotation

[hedgiwithapen]

Advise we use at my work (teaching mostly younger kids with a hard time reading) is Specific Positive Support. If they read the word “brisk” as “bricks” you go “ yeah, you got that first blend, nice job, those can be tricky!” before getting into what they struggled with. Just saying ’ good work’ or ‘nice job’ starts to feel like a platitude and precursor to ‘here is everything wrong’ if it’s not paired with proof that the kiddo /actually did do a good job on a thing/. Kids aren’t stupid, they can tell when you’re Just Saying Something Nice to head off a shutdown. But praising the specific things they did well, or got right, even if it’s just “ dude, you said that so fast!” or “Thanks for matching my question, good job listening.” is a game changer.

[nudityandnerdery]

Honestly, y'all, I'm begging you. Take the time to think and learn for yourself. Even if it's just something casual like knitting or cooking. Exercise your brain. It's important.

[darlingofdots]

at a conference I attended recently, a researcher pointed to the difficulty of finding material in archives because so much depends on the metadata and the terminology used to describe things changes over time. "it would be so helpful," the researcher said, "if I typed 'lesbian' into the library of congress database, it would also show me results that were categorised in the 50s, when the materials were interpreted as 'intimate female friendships'"

which is what tag wrangles at Archive Of Our Own do incredibly effectively: searching for "omegaverse" also leads to "alpha/beta/omega dynamics" and "alternate universe: a/b/o" and so on. but ao3 achieves this frankly incredible categorisation and indexing system by the power of countless volunteers putting in hours and hours of unpaid and unthanked free time, and it's completely understandable that most archives do not have that kind of infrastructure, but also how incredible that a fan-run website has better searchability, classification, and accessibility than the library of congress

[pangur-and-grim]

-_- apparently the cut-off for this thing I want to submit to (which closes tomorrow) is 70k words, and I’ve got 67k

I need to think of three thousand words of bullshit to pad this thing. like a chapter where everyone goes for coffee, or something. 

[pangur-and-grim]

okay there are 42 chapters in the book, and dividing 3000 by 42 = ~72

so I’d have to write the chapter titles like this:

Chapter 2: In Which an Elf Is Concussed, but it’s Not Really My Fault Because What Would You Have Done? Would You Not Have Concussed the Elf? No, Of Course You Would Have. We All Would Have Concussed the Elf. Besides Which, I Am Very Sorry for Concussing Her and Will Try to Make Amends Later If She Stops Trying to Kill Me. Also, Her Intent to Kill Me Was a Highly Relevant Factor In My Decision to Concuss Her

[pangur-and-grim]

and who will stop me? God?

[pangur-and-grim]

TWO YEARS LATER! Titan Books is publishing this, and every chapter title takes up a third of the page. god didn’t stop me after all

(you can pre-order here: Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Indigo, Waterstones, Forbidden Planet, Bookshop.org)

[pangur-and-grim]

it’s so funny to see this all fancy and formalized