I wrote a thing

My main writeblr. Mostly I reblog things here, though occasionally I'll make a post, normally #worldbuilding for beginners. My own writing lives over at @copper-coin-writing. Nice to meet you!

[whynotwriting]

Finally introducing some WIPs

I’m not entirely sure how these are meant to go, but I’ve been part of writeblr for some time and still haven’t introduced my main WIPs.  So here we are.  This post will just outline my main WIPs, while there should be some future posts explaining each of them in more detail.  Here we go!

The Primal Trilogy — consisting of To Know A Name, Awake Once More and An Opening And A Close.  When a boy awakes in a clearing in the middle of a forest, he does not know where he is, or who.  His journey of discovery will pit him against enemies old and new, as he struggles to understand the strange world he finds himself in, as well as his place in it.  The world hangs in the balance.  As a centuries-old war reignites, it’s time to pick a side.  But what if neither side is the good one? (You can find posts on this project under the tags #wip: tkan , #wip: aom and #wip: aoaac) Genre: Fantasy

Silas Conway — at present this consists of The Empty Frame, a short story and Safe Or Sorry, a novella (a third is on the way, when I get round to it).  Set in a dystopian present where the past is forbidden, Silas’ job is illegal — he’s a historian.  As he struggles to hide himself from the powers that be, he finds himself embroiled in the criminal underworld, the rebellion, and far too many mysteries for his liking… (Find under #wip: Silas Conway, wip: Safe or Sorry) Genre: Mystery/Crime

Apocalypse FM — The world has ended.  How is not important to the remaining humans, but ‘what now?’ very much is.  A band of teenagers are brought together by this question, and find a way to bring hope to the wasteland through music.  The radio station they set up, Apocalypse FM, brings hope to those who wander the desolate streets, as well as more danger to the teens than they could ever have imagined… (Find under #ApocFM) Genre: Post Apocalyptic

Willow’s Tale — currently a temporary title.  Willow is old, as old as the trees, far older than the people who survived the fall of the Old World.  With the fall of the world of numbers, magic returned.  The Gods rose, Old Ones were born.  When a young boy discovers Willow’s source, she quickly finds herself in a situation she never anticipated, nor wanted — babysitting a child.  Close at hand, a human hunts her kind.  And in the distance, an old enemy searches, hunting for something he lost… (Find under #wip: Willow) Genre: Fantasy

[whynotwriting]

If you like any of the ideas here, please check out my personal writing blog, @copper-coin-writing!

[whynotwriting]

I've also created an account to boost the books of other writeblrs who've published! Check out @supporting-books-to-buy to see what the community has created!

[zoredaichaso]

Stop Killing Games

This is really important to me; if you are part of the EU I implore you look at this petition and sign. If you have any questions, Accursed Farms has made a few videos explaining any questions you may have as there's a lot of disinformation out there If you aren't in the EU you can still share. And remember, this is also a fight for consumer rights, so even if you don't play videogames, it can benefit you in the long run.

[thread-starters]

What's all this?

Threadstarters is a resource for freeform and text rpers, writers of any stripe, indie ttrpg designers and enthusiasts, and anyone who is curious about roleplaying.

Neat! How do I use it?

Check out our posts, reblog 'em if they inspire you, tag your favorite mutual you think might get a kick out of it, and even start roleplaying or writing based on the post's prompt! Think of these posts as a little sampler of the game they're based on; if you like it and want to find out more, click on the title of the post to check out its source. :)

[cataclysmic-writer]

May your prose be gut-wrenching to readers and unintelligible to AI

[eatyoursparkout]

approaching the wip carefully from the side like a skittish animal. speaking in a low, gentle voice so it doesn’t run away

[ramblings-of-lola]

I click the doc open and it runs away

[leveragehunters]

CoPilot in MS Word

I opened Word yesterday to discover that it now contains CoPilot. It follows you as you type and if you have a personal Microsoft 365 account, you can't turn it off. You will be given 60 AI credits per month and you can't opt out of it.

The only way to banish it is to revert to an earlier version of Office. There is lot of conflicting information and overly complex guides out there, so I thought I'd share the simplest way I found.

How to revert back to an old version of Office that does not have CoPilot

This is fairly simple, thankfully, presuming everything is in the default locations. If not you'll need to adjust the below for where you have things saved.

Click the Windows Button and S to bring up the search box, then type cmd. It will bring up the command prompt as an option. Run it as an administrator.

Paste this into the box at the cursor: cd "\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\ClickToRun"

Hit Enter

Then paste this into the box at the cursor: officec2rclient.exe /update user updatetoversion=16.0.17726.20160

Hit enter and wait while it downloads and installs.

VERY IMPORTANT. Once it's done, open Word, go to File, Account (bottom left), and you'll see a box on the right that says Microsoft 365 updates. Click the box and change the drop down to Disable Updates.

This will roll you back to build 17726.20160, from July 2024, which does not have CoPilot, and prevent it from being installed.

If you want a different build, you can see them all listed here. You will need to change the 17726.20160 at step 4 to whatever build number you want.

This is not a perfect fix, because while it removes CoPilot, it also stops you receiving security updates and bug fixes.

Switching from Office to LibreOffice

At this point, I'm giving up on Microsoft Office/Word. After trying a few different options, I've switched to LibreOffice.

You can download it here for free: https://www.libreoffice.org/

If you like the look of Word, these tutorials show you how to get that look:

www.howtogeek.com/788591/how-to-make-libreoffice-look-like-microsoft-office/

www.debugpoint.com/libreoffice-like-microsoft-office/

If you've been using Word for awhile, chances are you have a significant custom dictionary. You can add it to LibreOffice following these steps.

First, get your dictionary from Microsoft

Go to Manage your Microsoft 365 account: account.microsoft.com.

One you're logged in, scroll down to Privacy, click it and go to the Privacy dashboard.

Scroll down to Spelling and Text. Click into it and scroll past all the words to download your custom dictionary. It will save it as a CSV file.

Open the file you just downloaded and copy the words.

Open Notepad and paste in the words. Save it as a text file and give it a meaningful name (I went with FromWord).

Next, add it to LibreOffice

Open LibreOffice.

Go to Tools in the menu bar, then Options. It will open a new window.

Find Languages and Locales in the left menu, click it, then click on Writing aids.

You'll see User-defined dictionaries. Click New to the right of the box and give it a meaningful name (mine is FromWord).

Hit Apply, then Okay, then exit LibreOffice.

Open Windows Explorer and go to C:\Users[YourUserName]\AppData\Roaming\LibreOffice\4\user\wordbook and you will see the new dictionary you created. (If you can't see the AppData folder, you will need to show hidden files by ticking the box in the View menu.)

Open it in Notepad by right clicking and choosing 'open with', then pick Notepad from the options.

Open the text file you created at step 5 in 'get your dictionary from Microsoft', copy the words and paste them into your new custom dictionary UNDER the dotted line.

Save and close.

Reopen LibreOffice. Go to Tools, Options, Languages and Locales, Writing aids and make sure the box next to the new dictionary is ticked.

If you use LIbreOffice on multiple machines, you'll need to do this for each machine.

Please note: this worked for me. If it doesn't work for you, check you've followed each step correctly, and try restarting your computer. If it still doesn't work, I can't provide tech support (sorry).

[thatsbelievable]

[probablygoodrpgideas]

Having used a setting for over 7 years is great except when you look up something and are suddenly forced to read your own 7 year old writing

[helpful-writing-tips]

if you're trying to get into the head of your story's antagonist, try writing an "Am I the Asshole" reddit post from their perspective, explaining their problems and their plans for solving them. Let the voice and logic come through.

[writingwithfolklore]

We had a lot of fun with this one on the discord so reblogging it here as well!

[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!

[rimonoroni]

pssssst hey. hey. free and expansive database of folk and fairy tales. you can thank me later

[damienthepious]

watching @nanowrimo within a single hour:

make an awful, ill-conceived, sponsored post about "responsible"/"ethical" uses of ai in writing

immediately get ratio'd in a way i've never seen on tumblr with a small swarm of chastising-to-negative replies and no reblogs

start deleting replies

reply to their own post being like 'agree to disagree!!!' while saying that ai can TOTALLY be ethical because spellcheck exists!! (???) while in NO WAY responding to the criticisms of ai for its environmental impact OR the building of databases on material without author consent, ie, stolen material, OR the money laundering rampant in the industry

when called out on deleting replies, literally messaged me people who called them out to say "We don't have a problem with folks disagreeing with AI. It's the tone of the discourse." So. overtly stated tone policing.

get even MORE replies saying this is a Bad Look, and some reblogs now that people's replies are being deleted

DISABLE REBLOGS when people aren't saying what nano would prefer they say

im juust in literal awe of this fucking mess.

[airplanned]

☕️

[tgraywrites]

Woooow

[magess]

NaNo When It Started: Join our challenge to bootstrap your own creativity. Write! Let it be bad! Trying is the point and will feel good when you are done!

NaNo Now: Skip the effort. Cheating is for everyone. Get that badge. Pay us.

[jv]

I'm fascinated by the part about NaNoWriMo trying to enforce its code of conduct within tumblr messages to other people.

Are we sure that messages haven't been written by a chatbot?

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Gonna start private messaging people and if they don't respond how I want I'll say their their response to my message in their inbox is against my code of conduct

[stargloom]

by making art you are improving no matter what im so serious never stop making art ever . Never stop drawing that game you like or those ocs only you know or things you see or objects that appeal to you or stars or hearts or shapes. draw wonky hands and weird proportions . This is important btw

[grand-theft-carbohydrates]

i want to coin a phrase that's the opposite of writer's block. call it the muse's fire hydrant. thirty thousand story ideas are being beamed directly into your brain and if you don't write them all at once you will die.

[its-not-a-pen]

yknow what i mean?

[describe-things]

[ID: A greyscale digital sketch drawing showing a brick building labeled, "Writer's Block", with a firehydrant in front of it labeled, "The Muse's Fire Hydrant", blasting out a steam of water, with a dog standing in front of the steam with its mouth open and exaggerated eyes. End ID.]

[rathayibacter]

sometimes i struggle to work on creative projects and get really down on myself, but then i remember that ive released like 25+ games on itch so far. admittedly most of those are small experimental projects but like, if i wanted to go for an average of one release a year, id have two decades to make my next game.

[rathayibacter]

and like, if youre feeling the same way, if youre struggling w your passion or feeling like an impostor, its not necessary to have already done a ton of work to argue against those feelings, but i would encourage you to genuinely consider what you have done, because odds are when you stop discrediting yourself its a lot more than youd think

[natalieironside]

At the end of the day, some people are correct and believe the purpose of literature is to observe, reflect, and analyze life and the human experience, and some people are incorrect and believe the purpose of all literature is unilaterally to impart good moral lessons to small children, and we're never going to agree with each other

[thatsbelievable]

A Humble Request…

As many of you already know, my original middle-grade novel, The Monstrous Adventures of Mummy Man and Waffles, came out last week. It’s very much a labor of love by me and the artist, Robb Mommaerts.

If any of you have read the book, it would mean the world to me if you’d take a minute to leave a review — on Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, your favorite indie book site, etc. Every review helps draw attention to the book, and get it into the hands of kids who I think will really enjoy the spooky fun of this goofy, bandaged hero.

Thanks very much for your consideration. And while we’re at it, thanks for sticking around this blog and reading our nonsense for the last eight years. Y’all are the best.

Click HERE to get a copy! Or you can request it from your library!