The Title Always Gets Me

[doctorslippery]

I’m all over this.

[archerinventive]

Hi all! After one of the busiest months yet, I finally have some time to share a few images of my most recent creations with you. :)

I’m really excited to continue making new designs with the dragon scale pattern, and can’t wait to share some new themed designs with all of you here soon.

Wishing you and your families all the best during these uncertain times.

I look forward to days when we’ll all be able to go out questing together safely again. ❤️

Until then all my love to you, and may you be in good health.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/ArcherInventive

~Star Bracers (Current Available)

~Dragon Scale Bracers (Currently Available)

~Dragon Scale Pouch (Recent Giveaway on Patreon)

[eregyrn-falls]

I thought there might be a lot of other people who would benefit from reading this, too.

(Original tweet.)

[teashoesandhair]

In the wake of JK once more being a total jk, here’s a (non-exhaustive) thread of works by Black trans writers.

Don’t Call Us Dead - Danez Smith, poetry about Black masculinity, police brutality, gender and queerness. Probably the best book of poetry I’ve ever read. Smith has several collections available and you should read them all.

The Deep - Rivers Solomon, a speculative fiction novella about the descendants of murdered slave women. Themes of trauma and memory. Really beautiful writing. Their sci-fi novel An Unkindness of Ghosts is equally unmissable.

Redefining Realness - Janet Mock, the memoir of Mock’s childhood and adolescence as a trans woman before she transitioned. Mock’s second memoir, Surpassing Certainty, focuses on her life in her twenties.

Felix Ever After - Kacen Callender, a YA novel about a teenage trans boy (at the start of the book), Felix, as he further questions his identity, tries to find love, and works on his artistic future. Everything that makes YA novels great.

Reacquainted with Life - KOKUMO, a debut about Black trans womanhood and the power of her voice and body. This work is so hard to describe. Ferocious? Lively? Witty? Completely different to literally any poetry I’ve ever read? All of the above and more.

Mannish Tongues - jay dodd, a poetry collection about Black youth, queerness, religion, family, and gender. I hate how pretentious the word ‘visceral’ is, but it’s pretty accurate here. dodd’s collection The Black Condition ft. Narcissus is also phenomenal.

Pet - Akwaeke Emezi, a YA novel about a Black trans teenage girl and having to confront the existence of monsters. Emezi also has an acclaimed adult novel out, Freshwater, and I believe their new adult novel, The Death of Vivek Oji, is out in August 2020.

trigger - Venus Selenite, poetry about being Black, trans, queer, and unapologetic. This one is hard to get hold of, but worth it if you can. Selenite also co-edited and is featured in Nameless Woman, an anthology of writing by trans women of colour.

Surge - Jay Bernard, a poetry collection written in response to the 1981 fire at New Cross Road, as well as Grenfell Tower and the Windrush Scandal. Bernard is one of those poets who can use 10 words to say more than most of us can in 1,000.

Nameless Woman: An Anthology of Fiction by Trans Women of Color - ed. Venus Selenite, Ellyn Peña and Jamie Berrout, this one includes several stories by Black trans women and is, as a body of work, completely invaluable. The stories here range from semi-autobiographical and romance to sci-fi and speculative fiction.

Resilience - ed. Amy Heart, Larissa Glasser and Sugi Pyrrophyta, an anthology of writing by ©AMAB trans people. Again, this anthology is not specifically dedicated to Black trans people, but it includes work by KOKUMO and CHRYSALISAMIDST, amongst others. This book is super varied, with short stories, poetry and personal essays.

Consider ordering these, where possible, from independent Black owned bookstores.

You can also financially support Black trans people through donating to organisations such as this and these.

Important addendum: I tried incredibly hard to find published works by Black trans women, because trans women are the focus of JK Rowling’s tweets and indeed an overwhelming amount of violence and bigotry in general, but I’m sure it’s no surprise to anyone that Black trans women are enormously discriminated against by the publishing industry, and are routinely denied a platform for their work and their voices. Literally, when you Google ‘black trans woman author’, you just get Janet Mock’s author page. I think all of the books by Black trans women in the list above, with the exception of Janet Mock, are self/indie pub.

I have trawled through online indie and radical publishing magazines, message boards, and nearly 100 lists of ‘trans authors you must read now!’ and I would charitably say that about 1% of people featured in such lists are Black trans women. Obviously, Black trans women are writing, but the lack of available platform for their work is a huge barrier to their voices being heard. If anyone else has recommendations for work by Black trans women, whether it’s a physical book, an online chapbook, an Insta account of poetry, or anything else, please add it, because there must be so much more than I’ve managed to find.

[bysaestyl]

I was reading this article about how much work and heart hiromu arakawa put into writing fullmetal alchemist and Silver spoon and I’m honestly so impressed???

-she talked with war veterans and people with disabilities to accurately depict characters with those backgrounds

-she also researched military corruption extensively

-she fought to bring in more female characters with her editors who opposed it

-she has told her readers that there is no shame in leaving an emotionally toxic situation and you should never feel guilty for it

-she based the situation with the ishvalan people off of a real displaced indigenous group called the ainu people in hokkaido to raise awareness of their situation

-she criticizes the notion of self sacrifice being a noble thing especially since it’s such a prevalent theme in most shonen manga

-she worked on a farm with a lot of hardworking women and wanted her work to reflect just how complex real women can be rather than overdone anime stereotypes

-she has stated that she thinks there is value in not repressing anger in the face of injustice, and she thinks it’s good to use that anger in constructive ways

-she has emphasized in her story that you don’t always have to forgive the people who hurt you

-she worked on and alongside several other manga one shots, illustrations, character designs, anime adaptions, movie adaptions, and light novels all while having three kids over the course of her career

I don’t even think this is everything I read but hiromu arakawa is a goddamn badass

[earlgraytay]

…so I just realized something about all the ~TOM NOOK IS EXPLOITING YOU!!~ discourse that uhhhh… puts things into a different perspective.

animal crossing is a japanese game. 

in the first game, the prices for houses are unchanged from animal forest, which was intended for a japanese audience. the price for buying a house is 19,800 bells.

going to google: 

at the current exchange rate, one dollar is about 100 yen. (and while this has its ups and downs it doesn’t seem like it’s varied THAT much over time.) on top of that there’s been a little inflation since 2002- something that costs $180 now would have cost about $125 today.

tldr: tom nook sold you a house for a hundred bucks and told you to pay him back whenever you can. 

[frankdelflno]

Surnames are just as important as given names. So, I compiled a list of the websites I use to find my surnames.

English Surnames

Dutch Surnames

Spanish Surnames

Scottish Surnames

German Surnames

Italian Surnames

Irish Surnames

French Surnames

Scandinavian Surnames

Welsh Surnames

Jewish Surnames

Surnames By Ethnicity

Most Common Surnames in the USA

Most Common Surnames in Great Britan

Most Common Surnames in Asia

[bee-earthly]

[old-manrupee]

For whoever needs these.

[dragons-arrow]

I NEED THE ITALIAN LAST NAMES SO BAD

[ebvoice-deactivated20150727]

We are like fireworks…: Surnames Master Post.

[chronophobica]

Chinese surnames

Indian surnames

Indonesian surnames

Pakistani surnames

Bengali surnames

Japanese surnames

Filipino surnames

Korean surnames

Syrian surnames

Mongolian naming and clan names

Thai surnames

Asia is not a single country.

[tmifangirl3096]

Surnames

[heywriters]

Anyone got a list of Central/South American surnames?

[whitepeopletwitter]

[crispy-ghee]

Guys, if you want to be a good artist and storyteller you need to absorb other media and influences beyond popular comics and movies and video games. Hell, even beyond visual art. Read novels, science articles, history books. Listen to podcasts, watch documentaries. Dip into different disciplines. Explore stuff outside your everyday. What you create and the pool of ideas you can pull out of is expanded by the knowledge you gain. Don’t do yourself a disservice by limiting your library. You never know when some weird shit you read about mushrooms could end up inspiring you or helping you solve a design/story problem.

[landprince]

what if writers did streams like artists did

[sodacune]

[adventures-in-a-world-of-fiction]

I think it was a Monty Python sketch that showed an author writing with a commentary like a sports commentator.

“And he’s started writing… no, he’s just written his name at the top of the page. He’s written ‘the’, a very strong opening, used in several of his books. Oh, no, he’s crossed it out again.”

[gingersnapwolves]

“Ah, look, she’s opening the thesaurus again … perhaps she’s realized she used the same word six times in two paragraphs”

“Now that sentence is lovely, an excellent example of her style in - oh, no, she’s deleting it, never mind”

“This scene is clearly over, yet the brave author forges onward regardless…”

“She’s really picking up steam now, the words just flowing out from her - she’s stopped midsentence for some reason and is opening Buzzfeed”

“Choosing to google ‘which countries are nonextradition countries’ is a risk but it’s one some authors must take…”

[88thparallel]

Why you gotta call me out like that?

[lizbetweenthelines-deactivated2]

“She is now putting her thirtieth comma in the one sentence she’s been working on for two hours…”

“Ah it’s now feeding time, a period in which she will grab the nearest piece of trash and eat two bites of it before remembering she wanted to break her charecters arm and delving back into the document.”

“She is now starring into blank space which she will continue to do for three years”

“I love this bit. Watch her trip over her desk from lack of sleep and proceed to scream into the void as she lays on the floor. This really captures the essence of her style. Truly a master of her trade.”

[illiteracy-is-for-woozles]

You don’t have to call me out like that

[teenscoolest]

[thetitlealwaysgetsme]

Called out

[dollopheadedmerlin]

I have … a tip.

If you’re writing something that involves an aspect of life that you have not experienced, you obviously have to do research on it. You have to find other examples of it in order to accurately incorporate it into your story realistically.

But don’t just look at professional write ups. Don’t stop at wikepedia or webMD. Look up first person accounts.

I wrote a fic once where a character has frequent seizures. Naturally, I was all over the wikipedia page for seizures, the related pages, other medical websites, etc.

But I also looked at Yahoo asks where people where asking more obscure questions, sometimes asked by people who were experiencing seizures, sometimes answered by people who have had seizures.

I looked to YouTube. Found a few individual videos of people detailing how their seizures usually played out. So found a few channels that were mostly dedicated to displaying the daily habits of someone who was epileptic.

I looked at blogs and articles written by people who have had seizures regularly for as long as they can remember. But I also read the frantic posts from people who were newly diagnosed or had only had one and were worried about another.

When I wrote that fic, I got a comment from someone saying that I had touched upon aspects of movement disorders that they had never seen portrayed in media and that they had found representation in my art that they just never had before. And I think it’s because of the details. The little things.

The wiki page for seizures tells you the technicalities of it all, the terminology. It tells you what can cause them and what the symptoms are. It tells you how to deal with them, how to prevent them.

But it doesn’t tell you how some people with seizures are wary of holding sharp objects or hot liquids. It doesn’t tell you how epileptics feel when they’ve just found out that they’re prone to fits. It doesn’t tell you how their friends and family react to the news.

This applies to any and all writing. And any and all subjects. Disabilities. Sexualities. Ethnicities. Cultures. Professions. Hobbies. Traumas. If you haven’t experienced something first hand, talk to people that have. Listen to people that have. Don’t stop at the scholarly sources. They don’t always have all that you need.

[keatsgay-deactivated20200126]

foreshadowing done well makes me go feral like there’s NOTHING better than getting to the end a book or an important storyline moment and realising that the author laced information so intricately into their writing that weren’t noticeable upon first read but when you read back sections they’re light giant red flags like wow writing is amazing

[phasered]

my favorite thing about au fanfiction the sheer range of it. how like sometimes the tag is like “alternate universe- they’re werewolf space pirates in charge of stopping their planet from being blown up by ancient immortal aliens from another realm” and sometimes it’s “alternate universe- chefs”

[gr8writingtips]

writing tip #2737:

your target audience shouldn’t have to “read” to know what’s going on

[but-the-library-of-alexandria]

the thing about writing fantasy stories is that language is so based on history that it can be hard to decide how far suspension of disbelief can carry you word-choice wise - what do you call a french braid in a world with no france? can a queen ann neckline be described if there was no queen ann? where do you draw the line? can you use the word platonic if plato never existed? can you name a character chris in a land without christianity? can you even say ‘bungalow’ in a world where there was no indian language for the word to originate from? is there a single word in any language that doesn’t have a story behind it? to be accurate a fantasy story would be written in a fantasy language but who has the time for that

[a-kite-dancing-in-a-hurricane]

Tolkien had the time apparently

[misbehavingmaiar]

LIsten. Linguistics Georg, who invented over 10,000 conlangs each day, is an outlier and should not have been counted. 

[thetitlealwaysgetsme]

You can always thwort them by saying, "That's just how I chose to translate their language." Because in the end your readers are going to be reading it in a real world language. Like watching a dubbed anime. Tolkien was just extra by providing the original languages as well.

[just-shower-thoughts]

There are two kinds of people. Those who think, “I don’t want anyone to suffer like I did.” And those who think, “I suffered; why shouldn’t they?”

[lazyyogi]

This is an important distinction.