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tastefullyoffensive

A truly magnificent creature. (via artisticapis)

alksdjaslkfdalsk

Lok’tar Ogar!! – The Orcs of World of Warcraft

lorthemar-therons

webangel-deactivated20220514

im starting a new aesthetic its called mmocore and all you post is pictures of extremely cluttered MMO uis

just9gag

When you’re in the 1400’s Florence and your buddy starts coughing

imhereforthefandomsandrwby

I will never not find this funny

slayeroftears

Brilliant.

riftclaw

could you have picked a less terrifying way to tell us this, maybe

deadlykillerqueen

i-have-the-worlds-best-url

Tumblr

ellajelichoconnor

the lorde of the rings: case solved

newentity

jxhn-mulaney

nyctaeus

goingtopshelf:

punchbuggydragon:

breelandwalker:

irontargaryen:

*cracks neck* my time has come

Okay, first? Pay off all your debts. Take out a small loan and pay it off right away.

Buy several hundred vacant houses. Schedule repairs for said houses with reputable contractors and make sizable down payments in advance. Get everything in writing and hang onto those deeds.

Buy a large open parcel of land that is being auctioned for development. And when I say large, I mean LARGE.

Sink millions into paying off people’s Kickstarters / college loans / medical bills / mortgages, and give generously charity organizations. That alone will carry off a lot of money.

Once you’ve got things down to a reasonable level, say $1m, buy yourself a house, furnishings, appliances, and a dependable car. Pay everything off so that you own it free and clear. Purchase about $200k worth of something easy to liquidate (i.e. gold, gems, bonds, stocks). Put the rest onto prepaid credit cards and wait for Monday to roll around.

NOW THE FUN BEGINS.

You now have commendable credit and a shining public reputation.

Fix up and flip those houses, sell them for fair market value or below to families who need them, or create non-profit homeless shelters. (After all, it’s not like you need to “make” money, this is all running on the proceeds from the property sales.)

Sell the parcel of land to developers, or donate it to public works as a park or open space. Have them name it after you.

Retire to your fully furnished home. Liquidate your extra assets, or leave them to appreciate in value for a later date. Make Christmas epic with those gift cards. Keep the extra money in the bank and keep your day job.

And don’t worry about taxes when return time rolls around, because you’ll be able to write off several millions’ worth of charitable donations.

Basically this

This is someone who paid attention in finance class.

wildrhov

Simple Tricks to Improve Writing

I get many young writers begging for writing tips. Put these five basics into play, and your story will grow in maturity right before your eyes.

Destroy the Was Where logical, replace “to be” verbs with action verbs. Use the “Find” feature to seek out is, was, are, were, and other “to be” conjugated verbs. (”Whole words only” option if you’ve got it.) See if that was can be more exciting. Example: a) The sun was hot. / The sun blazed. b) His eyes were bright. / His eyes gleamed. c) There are many examples. / Examples abound.

There, Here, It If your sentence begins with one of these three, watch out! My bet is they are followed by a “to be” verb. Seek these out as well, while you’re at it. Oh, you’ll find them all over the place, definitely. Sometimes they’re needed. Sometimes … no. Seeking those three “grammar expletives“ (if we want to get technical) will make your writing cleaner and mature. Example: a) There are some writers who struggle. / Some writers struggle. b) Here is something to consider. / Consider this. c) It takes time to write. / Writing takes time.

Adverbs = EVIL! Adjectives = …Maybe Evil For a moment, forget what your middle school English teacher said about filling your writing with adverbs and adjectives. Adverbs are band-aids for poor verb choice. Adjectives can be strong or weak. Don’t hide weakness with flowery descriptives. Don’t feel everything must be described. Really, it doesn’t. a) Adverbs are plain evil. “She spoke loudly” can be “She shouted.” You don’t need to say “She shouted loudly.” I’ve never seen someone shout any other way. Better yet: “She bellowed, she roared, she howled.” Oooh, look at that! If you use good verbs to start, no embellishments are needed. b) Adjectives are trickier. Sometimes we really do need those descriptions. However, only go into detail on items that are important to your story. Maybe a door is blue, but if we’re never going to see that door again and it’s not blue for a damn good reason, we honestly don’t need to know its color. c) Very and Really are often added to this rule. Common advice is to eliminate “very” or “really” from writing and replace whatever it’s supporting with something better. Mark Twain said to replace “very” with “damn” so the editor cuts it out for you, but you’re smart; you can do that job yourself.

Watch Out for Commonly Confused Words You know the ones. You’re/your, accept/except, advice/advise, hoard/horde, lay/lie, it’s/its, past/passed, fast/quick, less/fewer. There are lists. You probably know which ones cause trouble. I sure do! When you know that word is coming up, just take a moment to make sure you got it write … I mean right.

JUST SAY IT! Most of this falls under the same umbrella: be concise! Precision writing beats florid mega-sentences-from-hell. Break the habit those middle school English teachers introduced into your writing. There are moments when lengthy paragraphs filled with description might be important, but if you can say something with fewer words, do so. Less is more.

sexybadassdowney

I kind of wish had someone had told Tolkien about 3… :D

mosellegreen

It’s been a while since I ranted about stupid writing rules….

These kinds of things should not be rules.

People come up with rules like these after reading too many unskilled or beginning authors. Fact is, if you have a few years of practice under your belt, you shouldn’t worry too hard about these. If you’re a beginner or feel you have a lot to learn, keep these guidelines in mind, but don’t treat them like hard-and-fast rules.

Passive voice is not always a bad thing. No, really, it isn’t.

Sometimes it’s necessary to convey that something simply is. Eternally and immutably.

Sometimes your reader needs a damn break from stuff happening. Authors who take this kind of advice too literally exhaust their readers.

Also, I used to beta read for a ficcer whose native language wasn’t English, and she was so phobic of “to be” verbs that frequently it messed up the meaning of her sentences. One example that sticks in my mind is a scene where a German character was having a dream and he and the other people in the dream were speaking English. She wrote, “He wondered why he didn’t dream in German.” I had to explain to her that phrased that way, the sentence meant that he never dreamed in German, when what she wanted to convey was that in this particular instance, he wasn’t dreaming in German and wondered why. There was no way to say this without using “to be”.

It’s okay. I promise it is.

The second rule reminds me of my 7th grade English teacher. At the beginning of the year, she informed us that we were never to begin any sentences in our essays for her with the words “the”, “a”, “this”, “that”, “and”, “but”, “he”, “she”, “I”, or “it”. I think other small words, such as “at”, “if”, and so on were also verboten. If we started a sentence with any of those, she marked it wrong and we had to redo it. Some students got around it by using a person’s name for every sentence: “George Washington was our first president. George Washington was born in 1732. George Washington was married to Martha Washington but they had no children.” As for me, I, who usually loved writing, approached essays for this teacher with great weariness. I tortured each sentence out of any natural flow so that I could put a large word at its beginning. I felt deeply contemptuous of her. Or perhaps I should use a more active verb and ditch the adjective: I despised her. (Both sentences are okay, but I feel like the first conveys my meaning more perfectly.) Didn’t she read actual books? Was she not aware that books were full of sentences that began with small words? Why was she wasting our time with this nonsense?

Well, on the last day of school, she finally explained herself. Children tend to write overly simple sentences - “the cat is on the mat” - so she enforced this rule to challenge us to use different sentence structures.

Had she explained her reason when she first laid down the rule, I would not have spent the entire year regarding her as an idiot. And guess what? It didn’t work! All she achieved was wasting our time with twisting sentences into awkward artificial structures to fit her arbitrary rule. The George Washington example, which was a real assignment handed in by a classmate, shows that she actually made us worse writers. Nice going, Teach.

Like I said: guidelines.

For every enemy of adverbs and adjectives out there, I got an adjective for you: ORWELLIAN. You read 1984? Remember “Newspeak”? It was the fictional totalitarian state’s effort to control people’s thoughts by taking their words away from them. The word “bad” was to be replaced with “ungood”; “worse” would be “plusungood”; “worst” (or “evil” or any other word meaning “very very bad”) would be “doubleplusungood”; “warm” was to become “uncold”, and so on. You wouldn’t say a sunset was beautiful, you would say it was doubleplusgood. Your dessert wasn’t delicious, it was doubleplusgood.

More chillingly, executed dissidents were no longer that, they were “unpersons”. Not victims, martyrs, traitors, criminals, heroes - unpersons.

A quote from the novel: “By 2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of The Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like “Freedom is Slavery” when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.“

Words are beautiful things. Why are some people trying to take them away from us?

Yeah, readers get bored by excessive description, but they do want to know what the room looks like, what the characters look like, and so on. Yes, choosing good verbs means not needing many adverbs, but sometimes there just isn’t a verb that does the trick.

We didn’t invent parts of speech that we didn’t feel a genuine need for. Adverbs exist because we need and want them. Use them sparingly, sure. But they’re not evil.

Besides which… these kinds of “rules” serve a specific style of writing which has unfortunately gained undeserved ascendance. I call this style “the Heming Way” after its most notorious practitioner. I can’t stand Hemingway, I think he was one of the worst writers in history, but for some mysterious reason a lot of people have decided he was the standard to whom all others should aspire. And many are so aspiring, with the result that it gets harder every year to find something good to read.

Personally, I can’t read the stripped-down style revered by these Hemingway groupies at all. There’s some very popular authors who write like that, such as Elmore Leonard and Lee Child. Both of them are bestsellers so evidently someone likes that style, but despite several attempts I have never been able to get past the first chapter of any of their books, and the only time I finished something by Hemingway I was required to do so for school. (That was over three decades ago and I am still pissed about having to plow all the way through The Old Man And The Sea.) In any case, Anne Rice is also a bestseller, and she definitely doesn’t write this way. See what I mean about these being guidelines, not rules?

I’ve seen so many variants on the bad advice above. I hereby set myself a homework assignment: read several fanfics with few kudos and derive some better advice for beginning writers from them.

wildrhov

Umm… I do believe I called them “simple tricks,” not RULES.

These are honestly the five most elementary things you can implement – not must implement – to make improvements and move away from writing like you’re 12 years old. I mentor young writers, and these are tricks aimed for those kids to grow in maturity. I believe I explained that in the very first paragraph. Learn to read and not rant pointlessly.

In other words, write as you like, but when you realize you are writing poorly, these are tricks to make things better, ways to seek out the pitfalls to poor literature.

So, right back at you.

I have no idea where you’re going with Orwellian Newspeak, but it was fun to have that reminder from high school English class.

Adverbs truly are evil. Ask Stephen King. He’s the authority on evil. It was his “On Writing” that showed me how the thing that made my writing feel not quite right was my excessive use of adverbs. Is it a “necessary evil”? Sometimes. They’re like a poison. Tiny doses and you’re okay, but in excess, your narrative DIES. It’s an evil death.

Sure, use them if you like, if they make you feel comfortable, but a good editor will have you remove them, so why waste the keystrokes? Learn to limit them and you’ll make your editor happy.

Obviously, come up with your own style, what’s comfortable, find your VOICE and stick to it. When you’re editing and you realize something is off, implement these tricks, and you’ll most likely find the weaknesses.

It’s a shame you hate Hemingway. A good writer gleans from all sources of inspiration, and a Nobel Prize for literature is a better source than the fanfics you read. There actually is a technically term for your mocking “Heming Way.” It’s called the Iceberg Theory. Read up on it. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceberg_Theory)

The above is not “bad advice,” as you claim. They are the most elementary tricks I learned after 27 years of publishing. Apparently, you think you can make up “better advice” by reading fanfiction. Okay, go for it! I truly urge you. You could probably write novels upon novels if you use the writing of 13-year-old novices as your source, but it could be good practice. All writing, even pointless ranting because you mistook “tricks” for “rules,” is still an exercise that will aid in your progress.

Or… you know… read actual writing guides and see how your writing compares to professionals, not middle school kids. Elements of Style (free here) was treated in university as the Bible of writing. (Ancient, the standard for English literature, good advice but old-fashion at times; figure out how you can break the rules without totally sinning.) I also recommend On Writing, and you’ll realize these five “Simple Tricks to Improve Writing” are pretty much straight from the pen of Stephen King. Those two books are the ABSOLUTE LEAST amount of study in writing practices for serious writers. There and plenty of other books and guides. Find the one that fits you. Stephen King just happens to fit me. Maybe Stephenie Meyer or Sandra Hill fits you.

Each author has their own take in what works, and each generation changes the rules, which is why these are… guess what…

They are simple tricks, dear. It’d be good to at least keep them in the back of your mind as you edit. Not as you’re writing! Write first, edit later.

If you want to find a literary agent, get published, and make it in the publishing world, these are truly the most elementary guidelines to move away from “good enough to get a few Likes on Fanfiction.net” into “good enough to impress the agent and find an editor.“

I hope that one day you’ll be good enough for that agent with your own unique style. Cheers to you!