Hello! My name is Bird, I've been active on writeblr for about a year so I figured a re-intro was in order. :3
About me!
Bisexual, She/her
Fantasy romance writer
Also an artist!
Former D&D player. (current dice hoarder.)
I have a corn snake named Calypso. :3
Fav video games: Hollow Knight, Superliminal, Journey, Ori and the Blind Forest...
Asks and Tag games are always open!!
My main blog is @/silverbird.
What's Thraeia?
Thraeia is a medieval fantasy world that I created when I was 16, in 2021 I started overhauling the world into what it is now. I'm ever expanding and adding to it with each new story I tell. I'll leave some links to stuff if you want to learn more! :3
The Deities
The Races/Species
The Continents & Kingdoms
Or search the tag #thraeiabuilding on my blog for all the worldbuilding!
Current WIPs
Though I have 8 wips total I'm just working on these 3 at the moment!
Lady of Birchgrove
~13k words - 1st draft -
Summary:
Welcome to the world of Thraeia.
Silvia wakes with no memories of herself, no recollection of how she came to be lying on a bed in an unfamiliar room. She certainly does not know the girl beside her, unconscious and wounded, who risked her life to save Silvia.
The difficult task of remembering herself falls onto her shoulders. Though it physically pains her at times it is a job she must complete, not just for the people who claim to love her, but also the entire town depending on her. For she is a Lady, charged with the well being of the town, Birchgrove.
With the help of her family and old dairy entries from her past self, it almost seems doable. But the the magic that has been inflicted upon her is mysterious and unknown, and the caster is still out there somewhere, waiting for an opportunity to finish what they started.
It had to be fate.
As a cub Quirina was taken from the mountains of Brariheba and was sold to Xiren Sharpe, leader of an assassin's guild. The once spirited child became the guild's best against her will, her agile Feli body aiding her.
After one mission she meets Romone, a stupidly confident Feli in the service of Morys Elethron, who promises her a safe place at Elethron House. The chance meeting has her realizing she's tired of belonging to someone else, that maybe she can make a difference.
A frantic escape later and she's greeted warmly by Romone, finally a safe place for her. Though the horrible things she had done under Xiren do not vanish, they dominate her time at Elethron House. When her shadow threatens to drag her back to her cold cell, Quirina fights harder for the opportunity to lead a normal life and the possibility of falling in love than she's ever had before.
Read more here! ⚔
Tags: #CoT: Reclaim
Cramming for Magic Class
Webcomic - 3 eps sketched/ 19 outlined
Summary:
A new school year is about to start at Lilium University of Magic. Zephyrine, who recently moved in with their cousin and her friend, is simply breezing through life. At least until they meet Soulaetia, a high-born magic prodigy with some very poor study habits. When they happen to cross paths, they change each others' lives in ways neither expected.
Read more here!📚
Tags: #CoT: Cramming for Magic Class, #CoT: CfMC
Other Tags
My art: #Bird draws
Characters: Chr: [insert name]
Worldbuilding: #thraeiabuilding
Inspiration: #inspo (paired with a character or region tag)
As someone who grew up bilingual and has spent years watching fiction handle this with the grace of a person trying to parallel park a cruise ship: please. i am asking nicely. stop phonetically spelling out accents in dialogue. stop having your multilingual character "think in english." and stop treating languages as cute flavour when they're actually load-bearing walls. let me explain:
⊹ Phonetic accent spelling-- "ze said zis," "I canna doo eet," "ees very 'ot"--does not convey an accent. it conveys that you find the accent hard to read and mildly comedic. actual accents are not misspellings. they are specific music, rhythm, stress patterns, vowel shapes that cannot be represented in text that way. what conveys accent is word order, idiom, the things a speaker reaches for. A character who says "it doesn't matter, leave it" and a character who says "never mind, let it go" are from different places. use that. not the apostrophes.
⊹ Multilingual people do not experience their languages as separate filing cabinets they access one at a time. languages blur and overlap and interfere with each other in beautiful ways. When you're tired you reach for the word from the other language because it's closer. when you're emotional you revert to your first language because it's where your feelings actually live. when you're angry you swear in the language you learned swearing in. when you're tender you use the diminutives and endearments that don't translate. your bilingual character's language choice in every scene is characterisation. use it as such.
⊹ the thing about not having a word for something is real and it matters. Every language has concepts the others can't carry cleanly. the grief for something you never had. the specific quality of afternoon light. the feeling of wanting to be home while you're already there. when your character encounters something their language doesn't have a word for, they don't just find a workaround, they feel the gap. they feel slightly untranslatable. multilingual people live with the knowledge that some part of who they are exists only in one language and cannot be fully brought across.
⊹ Language loss is grief and almost no one writes it. immigrants who stop speaking their first language regularly lose fluency within a generation, not the language itself but the ease of it, the poetry of it, the ability to joke in it. your character might understand everything their grandmother says and be unable to reply with the same grace. they reach for a word and find a hole. they dream in a language they can no longer speak fluently while awake. the untended first language going quiet is a whole kind of mourning and fiction almost never touches it.
Piece of advice to all writers who need a cover but don’t have the money to hire an artist: use the public domain.
Online, you can find quite a lot databases for photography in the public domain that you could use (always check their specific rules regarding commercial use), like Pixabay, Unsplash, or Pexels.
But, even a tad more charming, there are also hundreds of thousands of paintings in the public domain. If the artist has been dead for over 70 years, the image is (typically) in the public domain and can be used however you want it. This is not a new concept, big publishers like Penguin and the Oxford’s World Classics do the same!
When you use such images, always make sure that
1. the painting really is in the public domain (sometimes the art itself may be in the public domain, but the photograph you are using to see it is not!),
and 2. that it is an appropriate image. Sometimes, an image may look innocent and fitting, but would actually cause irritation, like accidentally using a painting of siblings for a romance or using a controversial image for different reasons.
Some places you can find art in the public domain (always double check!): National Gallery of Art, Artvee, Public Domain Image Archive, and most websites of bigger museums.
[Prompt Calender: April 23rd, World Book and Copyright Day]
I'm just saying, if you're going to worldbuild magic being a "raw, primal force, akin to and interweaving with nature itself" you gotta explain to me why animals don't use it
I know the normal answer is "they just aren't smart enough for it" but idk I've seen enough media where a character uses a spell in a moment of brain-off panic ilI feel like animals could probably stumble into a spell or two like, accidentally
From your tag game: ACTUAL ROMANCE in the story (that's a topic I could rant about forever if anyone wants to hear me screech about it
I am asking you to screech about it, if you'd like. :)
Okay, so starting off I just want to say I am very much pro-creativity and anti-censorship, so I I believe it's important to let people write the kind of story they want. Whether I love it or hate it, I truly respect the creative liberty of writers and believe those stories should exist. ✨
That being said, the mainstream dark romance market is saturated with stories that are really more like dark erotica with varying amounts of emotional depth than actual romance. I do realize it's a marketing issue, but it can be frustrating when I'm like 80% through a book and I'm like where's the LOVE? Where's the intimacy? Even a crumb of romantic depth? Erotica is great but give me the angst, the tension, the pining!
I think it's very important to have actual romance in dark romance, otherwise it isn't a romance story, you know? The genre itself is very varied in terms of 'dark' too. Stories can be anything from a healthy couple in a scary environment to a toxic couple in a setting from your worst nightmares to a story with love interests who are just straight up abusers. So it's always important to always read trigger warnings, especially with this genre, haha.
My personal favorite 'flavor' of dark romance (and usually the one I write) is when characters start off with a toxic, rocky, enemies to lovers type meeting and then steadily become closer and closer as they heal each other's wounds and become stronger united as a couple. 💖💖💖
Zeph works at the Lavender Dragon: Bookstore and Tearoom. Basically a little cafe with a bookstore attached, close to downtown so it gets pretty busy.
They like it well enough, the bustle and fast pace, and occasionally retreating to restock books. They even get to do window art from time to time. Yet in reality, they're not sure what they want to do.
Soulaetia:
Soul is a magical effects assistant at the local theater. She assists the theater's mage in any showy illusions a play calls for.
This is literally Soul's dream job, she's always secretly been a theater kid. Though she would like to be the head mage, and her boss knows it (and doesn't want her taking his job) so there's a little bit of tension.
Juniper:
Junie is a greenhouse assistant, a highly valued job in Slymafrae. She takes care of plants, making sure they're healthy, and helping them along with some magic.
A dream job for Junie, though she would like to work with the more rare plants like her superiors.
Aurelius:
Ellie works at a magic components shop. A store that sells necessary items for spells.
He likes it a lot, the owner is a nice older elf who pays well. It's quiet and they get to read while working. Though it's far from where they would rather be.
Resisting the urge to Um Actually this dragon novel because it has the dragon eggs be like three or four feet wide but there is simply a limit to how large hard-shelled terrestrial eggs can be. No matter how large the animal is, the embryo needs oxygen, and oxygen needs surface area. The larger an object is, the lower its surface area relative to volume, and the less oxygen the embryo can receive. We think of large animals as having porportionately large young because mammalian pregnancy has the unique benefit of allowing for the size of the young to scale with the adult because their oxygen is provided directly through the placenta, and almost all the megafauna remaining on Earth are mammals. But this is not the case for species which lay eggs! For fuck's sake even the sauropods hatched out of eggs barely larger than basketballs! Your hatchling dragon would be impressively enormous if it were the size of a house cat. Stop trying to make me believe that this (ROUND!) dragon egg somehow supplied enough oxygen to develop an infant the size of a large dog or even bigger. If it were possible the dinosaurs woulda been doing it!!!!
Every story should have consequences, but even the most dramatic, plot-shifting consequence ever written is going to fall flat if we didn’t know it was going to happen beforehand. Always spoil your consequences.
By that, I mean that if the reader doesn’t understand what would be so bad about getting caught as the characters explore the sewers, we’re not going to feel any tension—and when they are caught and fed to the sewer creature, we’re going to feel more confused than surprised.
Using our example, this might look like some character at the beginning telling our MCs about the “legend of the sewer monster that eats wayward children”. Later, when they’re in the sewer, this warning would be at the backs of their minds and ours as the reader. When they’re caught and taken to said sewer monster, we would still find it surprising, but not confusing. There’s a very important difference between the two.
There are a lot of ways to bring up the risks or implications of an action. You can…
1. Demonstrate it on a background character
Person ahead in line makes a run for it and is shot. Guy fighting dragon in the news is roasted alive. My neighbour went out to sea three months ago and never returned.
2. Hint at it through the environment
This one is pretty common because it’s subtle but effective. For example, Jack Sparrow sails into port and passes by a hanging skeleton wearing a pirate hat. Before he’s even reached land, we know exactly what could happen to him there. Or entering the sewer and finding some sort of nest, even if the creature is no where in sight.
3. Hide it within dialogue
If the characters react to something as though it’s a joke, the readers will assume it is too, until the thing comes up and is proven real. This is a great way to outline a consequence without drawing too much attention to it.
Otherwise, sometimes the most obvious example that manages to slip by us is: “[Thing] would never happen. If it did, [consequence].” And you better believe not only will thing happen, but so will consequence. “The police will catch escaped serial killer, if they don’t, so many more people will die.” Etc.
This can also look like our example—there’s a myth/rumour/legend that… Or I heard of a friend of a friend who… Or, did you hear across the border there was…
A story about caves, princes, and getting laid in unexpected places
𓋼 FREE PREVIEW CHAPTERS <<<
𓋼 ADD OR REVIEW ON GOODREADS <<<
𓋼 ADD OR REVIEW ON STORYGRAPH <<<
𓋼 BUY OR REVIEW ON AMAZON <<<
A prince lamenting a lost love. A mysterious mineral hidden in the mountains of the Caucasus. A team of scientists, each in their own way ready to turn a new page...
An ambitious geologist and her eclectic team of colleagues turn their lives upside down when a caving expedition goes terribly awry and uncovers a lost subterranean kingdom.
Trapped miles underground in this glittering, antiquated world, the scientists scramble to find the ancient map of legend which will chart their way home. As it turns out, entering a ritual contest of seduction might just be the only way to get close enough to the royal family to find it. Assuming false identities, the three women must scheme, charm, and lie their way through the sensually charged aristocracy of this strange new place, hanging on to a thread of hope that they’ll manage it without getting romantically entangled…
But luck has never been on their side ~~~
Cavernous is a bi4bi ensemble romance with poly themes and a diverse cast!
Basically, "more skilled person just beats the person they're training at sparring until the person they're training improves without doing any fundamentals or teaching them the right way to do things" is a cruel and useless form of "training" and only makes sense if you're trying to show that the "teacher" is being cruel or doesn't know how to teach. Showing it as a legitimate and useful form of training indicates to me that the author didn't bother to do any real research.
There are sort of two ways to look at it as a trope.
It’s either one of those tropes that has no real world basis, but looks/sounds cool in storytelling and is useful for moving the plot along (see: torture, knocking someone unconscious, a lot of medieval fantasy government stuff)
Or it’s one of those things where the overlap between people who write books and people who practice martial arts is so small that most writers trust the trope blindly and never think past it.
Just a few tips from someone who's been doing HEMA fighting (and training) for about a year
-Drills. So many drills. Just doing the same motion, or set of motions, over and over and over until it's muscle memory. And then do it some more. These can be done with another person, so you can get a feel for hitting someone (else's sword), or they might be done to a dummy, or just to the air as part of a series of steps
-there is a surprising amount of reading! A lot of what we do is based on styles that originated in the 11th-15th centuries, and were literally written in manuals for future people to use. Sometimes the explanations and diagrams are very clear. Sometimes they are not.
- There is sparring, with variations on goals. Sometimes the goal is just 'hit each other'. Sometimes you will have specific caveats, like if you both deliver a 'killing blow' at the same time you have to run to opposite ends of the room and back
- Footwork drills
- lots of wrist and arm stretches, both with and without swords
- Moving through different blocks/base positions, and practicing different cuts from each position
- More drills, wearing armor or other appropriate gear
- Weights and cardio training! Both are extremely important for making sure you can 1. Swing your sword and 2. Keep swinging your sword when you're wearing 15 lbs of armor and have been hacking at people for a full 20 minutes
- Learning how to maintain your gear
- Practicing control of the blade- this is usually done by having a dummy target (or sometimes a real person), and swinging with full power but stopping before you actually make contact. Master swordsman can bring their blade within half an inch of their target.
- Even more drills
Obviously some of this is pretty modern, but I can't imagine that it would be incredibly novel even to people from 600 years ago. And if you have any questions, please feel free to ask!
Adding onto this with even more things, now that I'm nearly 2 years in and have done a couple of tournaments!
Footwork drills are really important! Learning how and when to move, and shift your weight on your feet, is crucial
When practicing solo I often do so in front of a full-length mirror so that I can actually see what I'm doing
There is also just a lot of sparring. Unfortunately you can't really get good at sword fighting without getting your butt kicked. A lot.
However! A good teacher will give you tips either during or after the fight, or both! A lot of the time it's things like 'you need to improve your footwork more, here are 10 different drills. Go do them.' However, there is also a fair bit of going back over certain 'plays' in slower motion, where they'll tell you exactly what you did wrong and how to fix it in the context of the fight.
Also, just as a side note, unless your character is the progeny of a wealthy lord, they are probably going to use borrowed equipment. It will not fit right. And it will reek with the stench of 1000 sweaty people. And if you train in it enough, when you do get your own gear that actually fits properly and only smells like your sweat, I swear you get 5x better overnight
At some point, everyone develops their own style. I've fought people who love to just make huge stabby lunges, people who make wild flourishes, big guys who just brute force it, guys who look like they'd blow away in a light breeze but are the fastest people you've ever met. It comes over time, and from learning as many different techniques as you can
Not sure how much they did this in Ye Olden Days but almost everyone I've met in HEMA now fights in at least two different styles (usually longsword and Sabre or rapier). As I said above, the more styles you learn, the better you get at all of them; many techniques that you learn from one style are applicable in some way to the other
Thats all I can think of for now, but if anyone has any questions feel free to reach out!
It's been a while since I've done martial arts, but this reminded me of some other points specifically about sparring as a training tool:
At least in the modern version of sparring, one of the things we learn is how to spar. There are standard protocols to sparring depending on the form you're learning, and it's super important that you follow them.
This is not just about learning how to be the attacker--you also need to know things like how to fall right, which you learn for real life but also for sparring, because it can be really unsafe for both you and the person you're sparring with if you don't know the basics of how to keep yourself safe.
Tapping out! When you're doing particularly forms where you're touching each other/grappling/doing joint locks/etc., one of the main ways you signal to stop is by tapping out. This is key to keeping people safe during sparring.
People can get hurt during sparring, especially if you screw up. I once almost dislocated someone's shoulder doing a joint lock (they were fine, they tapped out, we talked through it, we figured out what I did wrong), and I had someone hyperextend my elbow once. It also seriously exasperated my wrist's repetitive stress issue, particularly from someone repeatedly muscling through something they shouldn't be muscling through.
You can also give people concussions, cause bruises, or even break bones if you aren't careful. I got a bruise that took months to heal (probably a bone bruise) from falling the wrong way during some exhibition sparring on a wooden platform.
If you start sparring/partnered fighting when you don't have the foundation of how to fight, especially if you're partnered with someone who doesn't know how to properly guide you, it's really easy to build bad muscle memory. The right way to do something, is not always the instinctive way to do it, and if you get thrown into partnered fighting unprepared you will fall back on instinct, not training.
If sparring/partnered fighting is 100% losing with no real guidance, it won't teach you how to ever win, it will just teach you how to lose, which is actively unhelpful. The goal of sparring in that way becomes learning how to lose less badly, which may be great for self defense but isn't particularly great for actually learning how to successfully fight.
