I've got your back

Author, tumblrite, hot mess

[drachenmagier]

scanned. :)

[sentientsky]

so so confused by this culture of amanormativity. i was describing the love i have for my best friend the other day, and someone said "so you love them romantically. that's how it works" and no. no, that's not how it works. at all. intense and profound and overwhelming feelings of friendship and affection and adoration don't automatically tick over into romantic once they reach a certain level. my love for my best friend is deep and strong, and it hits me like a tidal wave sometimes. but it's not romantic

[queer-reader-07]

i think the worst part of the "everyone thinks i'm dating my best friend" bit is the amount of people that ask "well if she was gay too you'd want to date her right?" and like no. i'm not attracted to her like that. i'm not settling for best friendship because she likes men. this isn't a second choice. the shape of my love for her is profound and bone deep and wholly platonic. she's not my best friend because girlfriend wasn't an option, she's my best friend because that's how i love her. how i want to and how i choose to love her. day in and day out it's an active and wanted choice, never a concession. with a bond so deep it aches to see her hurt, and it fills my heart endlessly to see her happy, and not once have i ever had a romantic thought for her.

[artisimpossible]

I genuinely wonder if people realize how many projects get abandoned because the readership "wasn't there", when in reality, the readership just stayed silent. It's a big thing in trad pub that book series get discontinued because readers pirate the books or wait until the series is finished to buy a copy, leading the publisher to think that nobody actually wants the book enough to continue the series, but it happens with indie creators too.

I've discontinued a lot of free, online series because it's not worth putting 3-5 hours a week into posting a project for no readers. Sometimes I finish the series for me but just never post it again, other times I don't finish it at all because it feels more worthwhile to put my time into other things. Sometimes I hear from readers who are sad or upset that I didn't finish something they were liking, but the *reason* it never got finished is because I didn't know anyone liked it. If you like something, tell the creator, tell your friends, make some noise about it. If you would be sad if a story never finished, make that interest known because one of my biggest considerations before discontinuing a series is "will people miss this? Will I be letting people down" and 9/10 times, I come to the conclusion of "no, it doesn't even seem like anyone's reading this" only to learn after I've moved on that apparently someone was.

[healerqueen]

I've said this before in a different way, and this post said it so well. With real examples. If you like something, tell people.

If you want more content from an artist or author, if you like their stuff, tell them. It will give them creative fuel to keep going. And often it gives them other resources as well. Recommend a work to other people. Leave a comment or a review. It doesn't have to be long, just genuine, a sentence or two. Not many people know that a book's success is judged by book reviews as well as sales. Review the book on Amazon or another site to help it pass the metric of success and be recognized by publishers and retailers.

[rad-roche]

writing is a fantastic hobby but the kicker is it's a lot harder to show your friends as it's progressing. with a sketch i can show someone and they'll be like oh that's an apple. you can't do that with words until you get a lot of them down. so i'll just be like damn fuckin. uhh. check this out

that's right. and that's just one of the several words i know

[corpseprize]

the reality of being a writer

[busty-shackleford]

LOLLLLLLLLLL

Reddit - Please wait for verification

The rest of us who already knew this shit seeing data back it up are SO VALIDATED rn

[stealingpotatoes]

i don't know what older adults were on about when they said being a teenager was good <3

[bl00dfroma-fairy]

[bethanydelleman]

Important research for a story I'm writing! Not real life, never real life.

You are transported back in time and into the body of a young noblewoman in the 1400s. Your parents have married you off to an awful, abusive, rapist husband whom literally no one else would marry despite him being very high nobility because he's that terrible. You successfully produce a baby boy and then plan to murder this man for the good of everyone and yourself. Here is the question: do you think you could murder him in a way that is undetectable to the historical people around you? Note: they aren't stupid, you are the prime suspect as the battered wife AND you can't just say poison. Where are you going to buy poison? Do you know anything about poison actually? NO GOOGLING! You were sent back without a plan!

Do you think you could murder someone in the 1400s and get away with it with your modern know-how?

Yes, I totally have a plan (tell me for research purposes)

No, I realize that I'm very uninformed about murder

I have some ideas but I'm not sure they would work

Voting ended onJun 18

Edit: my notes are full of murder. I love you all

Edit: to clarify about the poison, you can use poison if you actually know how to identify it, I'm saying you can't just go "Poison!" with no knowledge about poison. Buying it probably means they know that poison and you're caught. Your personal knowledge when you read this post is all you have.

Another point of clarity: You went through all that trouble to have a baby without modern medicine so you could get the sweet house after your husband died. That's why you can't be caught. No disappearing.

Edit again: Air embolisms are going on a high shelf because the syringe won't be invented for 350 years. Prove to me that you could make one from scratch, lol

I promise to stop making edits (lol): I left the country vague because I just wanted to see ideas for modern vs. past. Whatever place you are most knowledgeable about

[shinesurge]

Guys if you want queer shit written by queers on our own terms you're going to have to start seeking out weird independent media. I'm sorry that's the only place you can regularly find it idk what to tell you, we can't keep acting like there's nothing if we're not getting blockbusters and triple A titles or whatever it is we're waiting around for. The thing you keep saying you want is already being offered for free by one person making a passion project on the internet and you would both benefit enormously if you interacted with it instead of lamenting that the only options we have for representation are pandering afterthoughts from corporate shit

[fandomsandfeminism]

I say this with so, so much care: Real queer shit written by real queers can and will sometimes make you uncomfortable. That's one of the defining features of weird, independent queer media. And weird independent media more broadly. Art that comes from true individual passion and authenticity has edges and bite to it that mass market corporate products intentionally do not. Has a rawness that can offend.

You are allowed to feel uncomfortable about it. But don't ask for queers to self censor for your comfort.

[kosmogrl]

get in loser we’re gonna try again despite it all

[eisenkrahe]

"For decades, wolf researchers believed ravens followed wolf packs to find food. Every biologist who flew aerial surveys over Yellowstone saw the same thing.

Wolves moving across the snow with ravens overhead, black shapes trailing the pack like a shadow with wings. The assumption was simple. The ravens were following the wolves. The wolves would kill. The ravens would eat. A study published in March 2026 using GPS transmitters on wolves, cougars, and ravens in Yellowstone proved the assumption wrong.

The ravens were not following the wolves. They were remembering where kills had happened before and flying over those locations looking for new carcasses. The relationship between the two species is real. The mechanism is not what anyone thought it was.

Bernd Heinrich, a University of Vermont biologist who spent years studying ravens in Maine and Yellowstone, first documented the scale of the association. His data showed ravens present near wolf packs 99.7 percent of the time during winter in Yellowstone. Not occasionally. Not frequently. Essentially always. On Isle Royale, researcher John Vucetich observed the same pattern from the air.

Every wolf pack had ravens with it. The birds were just always there.

The numbers at kill sites are staggering. The average number of ravens documented at a Yellowstone wolf kill is thirty. The maximum recorded at a single carcass is 135.

A wolf pack brings down an elk in the Lamar Valley, and within hours over a hundred ravens have materialized from across the drainage to feed. They do not wait politely. They land on the carcass while the wolves are still eating. They grab chunks of meat and cache them in the snow and in tree crotches for later retrieval. Research estimates that ravens can consume up to forty percent of a carcass, which means a wolf pack that kills a seven-hundred-pound elk may lose nearly three hundred pounds of it to birds.

That loss is so significant that one study proposed a theory that reshapes how we think about wolf pack size entirely. If a pair of wolves can take down an elk, why do wolves hunt in packs of four, six, eight, or more? The per-capita meat return decreases with every additional mouth. A pair gets the most meat per wolf. The answer may be ravens. Two wolves cannot eat fast enough to outpace a hundred ravens stripping the carcass simultaneously. A larger pack can post guards, feed in shifts, and physically dominate the carcass long enough to retain a greater share of the kill. Wolves may hunt in packs not because they need more teeth to bring down prey, but because they need more bodies to defend the kill from birds.

The ravens pay for their meals. Heinrich documented in his book Mind of the Raven that ravens serve as an early warning system at kill sites. Ravens are more vigilant than wolves. They perch in trees overlooking the carcass and scan the horizon in every direction. When a grizzly bear approaches, or a rival wolf pack, or a mountain lion, the ravens see it first. Their alarm calls alert the feeding wolves to the incoming threat before the wolves' own senses detect it. The wolves get airborne sentries. The ravens get an animal with the jaw strength to open a frozen elk carcass that no raven beak can penetrate.

That is the core of the mutualism. The raven cannot open the hide. The wolf can. The wolf cannot see a threat approaching from a mile away while its head is buried in a rib cage. The raven can. Each species fills a gap in the other's capability, and the result is a partnership so consistent that L. David Mech, the most published wolf researcher in the world, wrote that each creature is rewarded in some way by the presence of the other and that each is fully aware of the other's capabilities.

The play behavior is the part that makes biologists uncomfortable because it implies something beyond transactional mutualism. Wolves and ravens play together. Not at kill sites. Not during feeding. During downtime. Yellowstone observers have documented ravens diving at resting wolves, pulling their tails, and flying away. Wolf pups chase ravens across meadows. Ravens steal sticks from pups and hold them just out of reach. The interactions look like the cross-species equivalent of two bored kids messing with each other because there is nothing else to do.

Doug Smith, the retired lead biologist of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, had watched this relationship from the air for decades. Wolf researchers have believed forever that ravens follow wolves, he wrote after the 2026 study was published. Every wolf researcher has seen it. I have seen it routinely from the plane while wolves are chasing an elk in Yellowstone Park, numerous times. Ravens are just always there. This is an age-old observation. But it has never been rigorously tested until now.

The 2026 study, which used 2.5 years of GPS data from transmitters on wolves, cougars, and ravens simultaneously, revealed that ravens were not tracking wolf movements in real time. They were patrolling known kill sites. A raven that fed at a wolf kill in a specific drainage in November would return to that drainage repeatedly over the following weeks and months, flying over the exact location where the carcass had been, checking whether a new kill had appeared. The ravens were not following the wolves. They were following the memory of where wolves had killed before.

That distinction matters because it changes the raven from a passive follower into an active strategist. A bird that follows a wolf pack is reacting. A bird that memorizes kill locations across an entire landscape and patrols them systematically is planning. The raven is not tagging along. It is running a surveillance network across hundreds of square miles of Yellowstone, checking sites where food has appeared before, and showing up fast enough when it appears again that every observer since the 1995 reintroduction assumed it had been following the wolves the whole time.

The wolf and the raven share almost identical geographic range across the Northern Hemisphere. Everywhere wolves live, ravens live. The association is not a Yellowstone novelty. It is a continental relationship between two of the most intelligent species in North American wildlife, running continuously across boreal forest, tundra, mountain, and prairie, built on meat, memory, and a mutual awareness that neither species has ever needed to be taught."

Sources: Heinrich, B. "Mind of the Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf-Birds." / Stahler, D. et al. (2002). Animal Behaviour. / Mech, L.D. "The Wolf: The Ecology and Behaviour of an Endangered Species." / Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Living Bird, 2020. / Bozeman Daily Chronicle, March 2026.

[luna-azzurra]

Ways I Show a Character is Emotionally Burned Out (Before They Even Realize It Themselves)

I love writing characters who think they’re fine but are actually walking emotional house fires with bad coping mechanisms.

They stop doing the things they used to love and don’t even notice. Their guitar gathers dust. Their favorite podcast becomes background noise. Their hobbies feel like homework now.

They pick the path of least resistance every time, even when it hurts them. No, they don’t want to go to that thing. No, they don’t want to talk to that person. But whatever’s easier. That’s the motto now.

They’re tired but can’t sleep. Or they sleep but wake up more tired. Classic burnout move: lying in bed with their brain racing like a toddler on espresso.

They give other people emotional advice they refuse to take themselves. “You have to set boundaries!” they say—while ignoring 8 texts from someone they should’ve cut off three emotional breakdowns ago.

They cry at something stupidly small. Like spilling soup. Or a dog in a commercial. Or losing their pen. The soup is never just soup.

They say “I’m just tired” like it’s a personality trait now. And not like… emotionally drained to the bone but afraid to admit it out loud.

They ghost people they love, not out of malice, but because even replying feels like too much. Social battery? Absolutely obliterated. Texting back feels like filing taxes.

They stop reacting to big things. Catastrophes get a blank stare. Disasters feel like “just another Tuesday.” The well of feeling is running dry.

They avoid being alone with their own thoughts. Constant noise. TV always on. Music blasting. Because silence = reckoning, and reckoning is terrifying.

They start hoping something will force them to stop. An accident. A missed deadline. Someone else finally telling them, “You need a break.” Because asking for help? Unthinkable.

[userfish]

where are you

Voice of a generation

Somewhere in the middle

Never opening a word document again

I don’t write/bald

Voting ended onJun 3

[queerpyracy]

"wahh i only like enemies to lovers if it's gay bc i don't want men to be mean to women" what about a woman doing heinous shit to a man and that man (who also sucks) being pathetically psychosexually obsessed with her. you people have no fucking vision. if you were willing to read & write women doing actual wrongs this wouldn't be a problem. let that female character commit atrocities with the sole goal of ruining one guy's life while they have weird sexual tension about it

[haridraws]

Keep thinking about this Austin Walker post that now lives in my brain. It's a reply to people saying genAI can help creators 'develop concepts' and waste less time on research (x)

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁ Fuck off and give me the ball . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁

[penultimate-step]

It's always disappointing when a series makes a big deal about societal and structural problems in it's setting, making readers think it has interesting things to say about the subject, only to then resolve the problems by fighting The CEO of Racism, John Racist, so that all of society's problems would then get better because they promoted a new CEO.

[apricops]

Trying to do this myself and learning firsthand that the reason so many people do this is because if you stick to a theme of structural problems than it’s very very very hard to have any kind of narratively satisfying ending. The most obvious resolutions are, from most to least satisfying:

1. you go full-throated modernist and say “and then nothing the protagonists did actually mattered because we are all crushed into paste beneath the vast unfeeling gears of capitalism” (YES that is modernism and NOT postmodernism because we are LAMENTING the powerlessness, that the center cannot hold, that the individual facing the institution is like the romantic cavalry charge facing the rip of a maxim gun behind barbed wire).

2. the protagonists aren’t able to fix the world but they are able to chip away at some part of a larger, more intractable problem (if you portray this as a good thing then online communists everywhere will call you a neoliberal bootlicker and publicly fantasize about your violent death. If you don’t portray this as a good thing then everyone on bluesky will send you their Aaron Sorkin monologues. both outcomes are equally obnoxious and miserable)

3. your protagonists are so good at understanding the assignment that everyone just needs to give them total power to reshape the world and then they fix everything (you just did the CEO-of-racism thing with extra steps)

One might even make the case that the conventions of storytelling itself push back against most attempts to address and discuss structural problems. And if one really wanted to, one could make the case that this means the act of storytelling is in and of itself regressive and reactionary: ‘protagonist’ is merely the modern signifier of the proverbial Good King whose ill treatment by the Bad Boyars (antagonists) both excuses his abuse of authority while justifying his desire for even more authority.

To be clear, I’m not saying this and I think it’s stupid but there’s a one million percent chance you could become the next Žižek by sticking really hard to this line. The AI discourse still shows no signs of slowing down and if you fired off a shot like “all creative writers are fascist” into that you’d be doing big numbers overnight.

[apricops]

btw if you do this and get famous then you owe me residuals. I am a firm believer in IP and copyright laws wjen it benefits me personally

[discoursedrome]

Look, not to put too fine a point on it, but why would you hold your characters to a standard that no real person could meet? What's happening here is that there's a conflict between whether the narrative satisfaction is mostly about the characters, or mostly about the system.

If it's about the characters, narrative satisfaction comes from their story, not society's; a happy ending for them looks like what you'd call a happy ending for a real person challenged by systemic problems: it's like "you cleared your name and made some friends," or "you got the best of this one specific asshole who had it in for you", or "that could have gone a lot worse!" The reader is engaging with this problem through its effect on the characters, and a resolution on that level is fine. You can hint at the idea that the characters are part of a historical process, but you can't take it too far or it will snap the tether to their personhood.

If it's about the system, conversely, you can't dwell excessively on any one character, because the characters are just there to give you a perspective on this huge thing, completely out of scale with human experience. A narrative that's about societies and structures will necessarily be high-level and widely dispersed; it will appeal to the kind of people who like to read histories or ethnographies or organizational case studies, much more than to those who read novels. (I think serial webnovels can sometimes straddle this divide, because they're ten million words long and written by and for systematizing nerds? But that kind of wordcount is cheating.)

The problem comes from wanting to have it both ways, to tell a story about characters that shows them reforming a corrupt society; it's the intersection between activism and Great Man Theory. "Defeating John Racism" is unusually bad, but the more normal approach is for the protagonist to somehow awaken the public conscience with a decisive act, and that's hardly better as a conclusion. No matter what, it's going to be an infantile "blow up the Death Star with one missile" story that seems more concerned with denying the idea of a systemic problem than in the problems themselves. I'm always on board with schlocky escapism, but I have misgivings about this approach because I think it plays into that mythology of activism which exaggerates the role of individual agency, and the imminence with which positive change can be achieved.

Some possibilities that I think do actually work, staying at the human level:

John Racism can just be, like, one guy who has enough influence to increase racism levels in his immediate vicinity. Narrative is about where you put the camera, and when you turn it on and off! A local and temporary victory feels symbolically connected to the wider conflict, and it's the level that naturally aligns with storytelling.

You don't really need to beat a bad guy at all, do you? If the conflict structure is like "society keeps trying to fuck me up for no good reason" then you can get a Hollywood ending purely on an affirmation of your unfuckupability. And as above, it can be specific, you don't need to solve everything for everyone for all time!

If you want to depict the character presiding over social change as an authority, or being swept up in it as a citizen, start that in the second act. This will still be a childish story if it boils down to an affirmation of unrealistic easy answers, but it will be a much more interesting childish story, and if you are prepared to accept some ugliness and moral compromise, it's a more fun way to do it than by just having the protagonist sell out to the incumbent.