my name goes here

writeblr for Legacy, The Pandora Codex, other WIPs + one writer, also a wip. Feel free to tag me in anything! follows as @dreameronthewind

[writer-on-time]

current wip list

It's been a while since I posted blurbs for what I'm actually working on - I think since I started this blog, actually - so here's an update for y'all!

If you want to be tagged in anything, let me know!

tagging already: @klywrites @drist-n-dither @ratracechronicler @starlitesymphony @lady-redshield-writes

WIP list below the cut...

Main projects

Legacy: Aku has spent most of his life dreaming of running away: away from his family, away from his home life, away from his curse. So when he finally does it, and stumbles into a city of mages where a curse gets hardly a blink and he's accepted before anyone even asks his name, he can hardly believe it's this easy to break away from the person he used to be.

Caia is always running towards: towards a future where she doesn't have to hide her magic or her name, where people like her can live the way they want to, and - she'll admit it - where she can attend the mages' college rather than sneaking into the Crescent to practice and pretend she has the life she wants. But despite her dreams for the future, she can't quite stop hanging on to her daydream of fixing her past.

When the two of them cross paths in the Crescent, it quickly becomes clear that both would do anything to call the Crescent home. But it's only a matter of time before their lives catch up to them, and their adopted city has its own problems - the law doesn't care much for mages except when they can be exploited, and there's no shortage of people ready to exploit. The city is on the edge of tearing down the seams, and Aku and Caia's would-be home is caught right in the middle. Can they defend their hard-won future and stay ahead of their pasts? And if not, what happens to the Crescent?

themes: found family, past vs present vs future, ends vs means, justice, identity, coming of age

genre: urban fantasy

The Pandora Codex: In Ocelfos, magecraft is all anyone dreams of, but there's not enough room for every up-and-coming novice. If you're not quite good enough (or not quite rich enough) for a place at the University, there's only one way in: become a Seeker, and recover enough prizes from the monster-ridden Deeps to earn a coveted spot among the best mages in the world.

Or at least, that's the goal for most Seekers.

For Zinn, born in the Deeps and raised in the Archives, unsure whether he's monster or man, the Seekers are all he's ever known. So when something in the Deeps begins to call to him, he's afraid to listen to what it might say - afraid it might really know who and what he is.

Mairli, a would-be knight, only needs to survive a year before she can return home with enough experience to defend her home from lesser monsters in the outlands. But before she knows it, the Seekers are family, and the Archives are home. If it would protect them, nothing in the Deeps could stop her from getting to the bottom of what's making the monsters stronger and bolder.

Novice mage Elodea already has what so many Seekers want, but she can't help but wonder what strange and powerful magic might lie forgotten below their feet. When Mairli asks for her help, she jumps at the chance to find out.

And Silva, the only surviving Seeker to serve as long as Zinn? Well, no one knows what he wants - only that he's got a strange habit of showing up just where and when things are about to go very badly wrong...

When the four of them begin to investigate, the first thing they realize is that they might be in over their heads. The University is built on bones, and the Deeps are always hungry for more. What lies at the very bottom of the labyrinth? And can they stop it before it overtakes them all?

themes: found family, what makes a monster, corruption, loyalty, the nature of being

genre: fantasy, dungeon crawler, adventure, voidpunk

Side projects

The Fall and Rise of Vesper Garnett: Vesper Garnett is dead, and Valerian Garnett knows it was murder. With the case officially closed, though, there's nothing Val can do but go back to work on the crime beat and try not to think too hard about how his brother turned up facedown in the river. That is, until a thief turns up looking for Vesper's necklace, and - they claim - for Vesper himself. Then Val can't afford to ignore his questions anymore, or he risks ending up another victim of the underworld that pulled Vesper in. Who killed Vesper Garnett? And is it possible to live beyond your life?

themes: family ties, identity, forgiveness, loss in the various forms it takes

genre: urban fantasy, noir-ish, mystery

The Broken Compass: Gail Alcott can handle spooks. She's been learning how to dispel them for years, and she's got it down to a science: step one, identify it; step two, lure it out; step three, unravel it and clean up the mess. All she has to do now is convince her teacher that it's just that easy, and then maybe he'll let her tackle more calls on her own.

So when more spooks start to show up in town, popping up from magical residue whose source even the summoners' council can't track down, Gail knows it's her chance to prove herself. Convincing her teacher, though - that's harder. And wasn't she just saying she's ready to investigate on her own?

But as the pieces fall together and hint at a deeper trouble than the aftereffects of a few free-range spells, one rooted in the town's own past, can Gail really handle it by herself? And what happens if she can't?

themes: coming of age, trust and betrayal, redemption

genre: everyday magic (fantasy), mystery

Rosie and Wise Guy (it's a working title): When Rose's aunt asks her to house-sit for the summer in rural Wisconsin, she can't think of any reason to say no. She has one more year to go until she finishes her horticulture degree, and working in a small town garden center while she stays in the house she grew up wishing was hers sounds a lot better than working for minimum wage in the city and paying rent on an apartment. But it doesn't take her long to realize that there's more to the deal than her aunt's long business trip: strange people knock at her door at all hours, she still can't explain that bizarre encounter with Josh Wisdom two weeks in, and the plants in her aunt's garden are definitely behaving... well, not like any plants she's ever seen. She almost isn't surprised when the latest late-night visitor introduces herself as a wood nymph and offers a wreath of flowers in trade for spending the night on her couch.

By the time Rose realizes that Laurel is only one of the fairy tale figures wandering through her back yard, she has bigger problems to deal with, such as: if fairy tales really do live in the woods, why are they all suddenly anxious to leave? Who is her aunt, and where did she really go? And if Rose is going to get to the bottom of this, how on earth is she supposed to still get to work on time?

themes: family, friendship, loyalty, love, home

genre: fairy tale, Americana gothic, mystery, adventure

Continent universe (for lack of a name for it)

Pairbonds (take a summary instead of a blurb): In a land that has long since outlived its magic, there's only one trace of it left - once in every generation, seven pairs of people are born with magic in their blood. In each pair, one has a powerful gift with a curse to dull its edge - a backlash that seems to punish the user for daring to use their gift - and one with a gift that counters the curse. Individually each may be useful, but when they work together, their effectiveness is doubled; and it never takes long for the powerful to begin to seek these pairbonds out.

The Pairbonds main story follows the path of one generation of bonded (yes, all 14, some closer than others) as they are pushed and pulled across the continent. War is threatened and waged, revolution is raised and put down, desperate breaks are made and broken, and through it all the pairbonds struggle to say for themselves who they will become and where their allegiances lie.

This is an ambitious project with a lot of ground to cover, so expect to see mainly musing about this rather than anything solid or even chronological for a while yet.

Dragons wip (set in the same world but on the opposite side of the continent, predating the pairbonds by a few centuries): Senya is an apprentice dragon tamer whose people revere dragons for their wisdom and power. Soziva is a minor prince whose people slay dragons in defense against their cunning and destructive might. Now let's just see what happens when the last of the Shapers takes her revenge on the trespassing prince to make him into what he hates most, and delivers him into the hands of his enemies. And what happens when Senya realizes that her new charge is no true dragon.

Pairbonds Fate campaign (origins): We'll see what this game does to my meticulous worldbuilding for this universe, but I volunteered to run a Fate game in the pairbonds universe. It will follow the first-ever generation of bonded, and (hopefully!) fill the gap between the age of dragons and the age of the pairbonds. I'm mostly mentioning it here because it's taking up a good bit of my efforts lately.

I do have a side blog set up for this with 0 followers and I don't expect to see a ton of interest, but since one player follows this blog I can't @ it. (If you want the url though, message me!)

And that's it! If you're reading this far, I'm shocked. (But pleased! You're a treasure!)

[digitalkiddo]

If you're writing anything involving cons, scams, heists, or morally questionable characters who are very good at lying, here are some free resources I've been using for research. Saving you the "why is this in my search history" anxiety.

1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.

2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.

3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.

4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.

5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.

Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.

Reblog to save for later. Your WIP will thank you.

[dcvina-claires]

i love when a character is a ghost but in a tragic way instead of a scary way. i love when a character has been dead from the beginning but is still holding on to stay in the narrative. i love when a character could choose to resent the living but ends up loving them instead. i love when a character drives the story but isn’t quite there enough to be at the center of it. i love when the ghosts are the protectors instead of the ones causing the harm. i love when a character is at the heart of the story because depending on where you began it, no matter how you told it, the story is about the ghost who struggled to keep their humanity

[fallout-lou-begas]

do you have any advice on character design?

watch The Sopranos

[fallout-lou-begas]

i actually wanted to elaborate on this and say that i think it’s a really bad habit of a lot of artists, influenced by current media casting practices, to unconsciously or consciously make every single character they create super pretty, like everyone is just hot in that very boring, homogenous way, and this also comes as a result of people using actors and celebrities as character references or faceclaims and AI facial generation programs like Artbreeder being trained on people who are generally very pretty-looking. it results in alienating, uncanny worlds and drawings completely devoid of people who just look like regular people. it results worlds populated by mannequins fresh off the CW. I feel like whether a character is attractive or not should actually matter, be part of their character, because that kind of thing absolutely affects the way you move through the world and the way the world treats you.

so i wanted to throw in some suggestions that, whenever I’m trying to find a character reference or otherwise draw very interesting-looking yet regular-looking people, which i usually have to do for bit characters in @ikroah​ or something, I tend to look for references in the following places. these are far from the only reliable way to get inspiration, this is just a non-exhaustive list of places i’ve looked before for visual inspiration when needing to create a character, whether starring characters or background ones:

pre-2000s television (The Sopranos and Twin Peaks especially having incredible character design)

extras in comedy sketch shows

esports players

real photos (not staged stock photos) of line cooks

70s baseball players

athletes from more obscure olympic sports like the javelin toss or greco-roman wrestling, especially if you’re looking for a specific body type

ska, jazz, and blues musicians

firefighters

improv troupes

for teenagers, searching “high school english class project” on youtube and sorting by Upload Date

state senators, small-town mayors, and generally obscure local government positions like comptroller or treasurer (yes i know politicians can be bad sometimes but smaller elections especially don’t really depend on looks)

people who walk by your window (if you live in a city like I do)

and again these are just, in my opinion, deep and easy wells to dive in if you want to get a good idea of what regular people look like. these suggestions aren’t the limits on where you can possibly find inspiration for character design

[roganaut]

Fellini’s movies have remarkably interesting and unique looking actors

[fallout-lou-begas]

Yes!!! There’s an entire book called Fellini’s Faces that’s nothing but portraits of his actors that’s phenomenal for this kind of thing, though it’s fairly rare to get a hold of today.

[sartorialadventure]

(Since I know a lot of writers/artists follow me for costume/character design ideas!)

[theweirdwideweb]

300 year old leather star map by the Skidi, one of the four bands of the Pawnee tribe. The Skidi Pawnee historically lived on the Central Plains of Nebraska and Kansas.

[sequestering]

Winter Sports: Poems by Priscila Uppal, poet-in-residence for Canadian Athletes Now at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games

[uhhsnail]

I love a character raised to be a weapon as much as the next guy. But what really gets me is a character raised to be a shield. Who can’t fathom being needed—or even being wanted— beyond keeping others safe. Who believe they are alive only to insure someone doesn’t die. no matter the cost. Characters who self-sacrifice not because they think they deserve it, but because no one else does deserve it, and it’s their job to protect.

Characters who’ve been told that’s why your important. Your worth something because this other person/ thing is important, and you are here solely to keep them safe.

Bonus points if it’s not a legitimate job they’ve been given. Maybe at one point it was, but now that they are free from it, they haven’t given up that mentality. No one is forcing or asking them to do this, but they need to. They need to in order to be deserving.

[inbabylontheywept]

Someone had to go first

The first ship that arrived was pretty matter of fact about its fate. The pilot introduced himself as Eric, then told us he was part of the first sublight resupply attempt in modern history. He then gave me and the ground control team his bad news.

“So,” he said. “Without real time telemetry, we weren’t even sure which half of your orbit you’d be in. That’s half a solar system’s worth of wiggle room. Decelerating enough to survive contact with your low orbit would take me two weeks, which, you know, it looks like we don’t have. That means that in order to get the second ship in before you lose orbital control to the Kresh, I’m gonna have to make a sacrificial flyby. Ten to the negative four torr is good enough for a lot of things, but at point-seven c it’s gonna be like sandblasting a soup cracker. Good news is that all the expensive toys are in the next ship, so this really ain’t costing you more than a ship and a pilot.”

“You knew,” I said. If they put the expensive toys in the second ship, they knew that the first was likely a sacrifice. No one smart enough to handle orbital physics would miss that.

“I did,” he replied. “But someone had to go first.”

That was, of course, a lie. No one had to go first. No else had had, at least. When our connection to the FTL network was lost, we’d understood that as the end of our reinforcements. Doing resupplies via sublight was just too risky. It was a testament to Earth that it had accepted the risk and continued anyway.

“Is there anything we can do for you?” I asked. This man had come here to die for us. I wasn’t sure how much I could give, but what I had was his.

“I do have a few requests,” he said. “First up, I need as much high-orbital data as you got. The whole lot.”

I began directing tightbeam resources to him immediately. It was an easy resource to exchange - it wasn’t like there was anyone else out to talk to anymore. When we lost FTL, we found ourselves very, very alone.

“Second,” he said. “Right, I know I’m gonna sound like a princess right now, but I have been stuck in this stupid tin-can for almost two-years now, and I seriously overestimated how much I like synth music. If you have anything that’s analog - I don’t care what kind of string or drum or brass you play, but I’d kill to hear something without a beep in it.”

I jumped my own queue in the tightbeam, and added a short playlist that I ripped from the local web. Human Music, it was labeled. 3 Terabytes. I prayed there was something on it that he’d like.

“And third,” he said. “Third. The uh, next pilot is pretty mad at me. Turns out this will just be one of those things left unfinished. That’s all death really is, I guess - a lot of unfinished things. Let him know that he was right: He is a better pilot than me. But tell him that wouldn’t have made a difference here. Bad luck beats skill, and this luck was shit.”

I promised, and he went silent after that. We could see what data he was analyzing, and the short answer was all of it - everything from atmospheric density to troop positions and his own ship’s blueprints. He knew he had one shot at this, and that if the price wasn’t paid here, it would be paid by whoever came next.

--- --- --- --- ---

Ground control didn’t get a verbal warning that he’d entered atmosphere. Just a ping. A little here-I-am, whispered in the dark.

After that, we could keep track with visuals alone.

He hit the outskirts of the exoatmosphere in his first pass, burning bright enough to be seen with the naked eye. He caught the sparse particles like a kite, trying to shed enough speed to hit actual low orbit. Automatic telemetry updates gave us the grim news for the ship: Thermals were holding up decently, but the ablative was wearing out fast.

The entire descent brought us more than two hour’s reprieve. The Kresh hadn’t expected to see a resupply, but they knew what one meant: Get it now, get it fast, or deal with a stream of new troops. They could buy themselves ten days' time by shooting this one ship down now.

That was an eternity during a siege.

The first loop lowered the speed by about a twentieth of light. The pilot responded by pulling the ship in tighter, trying to preserve more ablative plating by trading off with thermal. Seven fighters were close enough to fire off heat seekers. I don’t think the Kresh had ever anticipated shooting down a craft coming in that hot - the missile's decoy avoidance countermeasure actually made it steer around the thing, chasing down loose pieces of shrapnel. Cooled fragments, still hotter than an engine should be at full blast. The simple mistakes bought it enough time to enter pre-orbit, and the fighters had to stop their pursuit. They weren’t willing to die to stop the ship.

Our man, on the other hand, was already committed to that course.

A third loop followed a fourth. Ablative coating went from 65% integrity, to 30%, to 5%. Telemetry scans were exceptionally detailed - the pilot was making the flyby count. The last message we got from him was simple:

Are you EMP shielded? he asked, not even bothering to encrypt the text stream. He didn’t have time to process more than that.

Yes, we replied. We knew what he was thinking, but it was still a shock to see it. The fusion torch that was driving his ship flared hot, burning through the nozzle and feeding directly into the craft’s deuterium supply. The reaction went super critical, and the resulting neutron pulse set off everything in the ship with a z-count higher than iron. Three continuous seconds of EM interference screamed through the comms as the hulk burned brighter than the sun.

The explosion itself wasn’t powerful enough to reach the Kresh ships still in high orbit, but it made enough broadband radiation to blind both sides LADAR. The man must have been a hell of a pilot - half the shrapnel went down and burned up as it entered the standard atmosphere, sacrificed to move the other half past lagrange. Standard evasion would’ve made the pieces easy to dodge, but with LADAR down, all the Kresh could do was sit still and cower as the wrath of a dead man riddled them full of holes. Our best ace had managed to shoot down seven ships before this before getting shot down himself. The wreckage of the freighter took down six.

--- --- --- --- ---

The second ship came in stealth. One second, we were holding attrition in high orbit, the next, something the size of a small station came ripping through the atmosphere.

It did the same trick as the former - swapping between ablative and thermal loads, coming down at a speed that the Kresh fighters didn’t even try to match. Armies could be built in years, but skills like this took decades.

Telemetry connection was established almost as an afterthought. The way the ship casually ate through ablative armoring made my eyes water, but the pilot himself seemed pretty non-plussed.

“You’re down to fifteen percent coverage. You need-

“What I need,” he said, “is to see the previous ship’s telemetry as soon as I land. And I don't need your help landing it.”

He cut off my chance to reply by flicking the channel off. We watched, and we wrang our hands, but sure enough he came in six minutes later with 4% of the ablative left.

I met him on the landing pad. Under normal circumstances, we’d have needed twenty-four hours for the craft to cool enough to even approach, but we’d had cryo ready just in case. Three tankers of nitrogen, and the loading area, at least, was cool enough to touch. Safety would have to take a backseat to speed here - we needed the supplies fast.

But those both would take a backseat to a promised conversation with the second pilot. He was out of the craft as soon as the air was cool enough to avoid scalding his lungs, picking through the workers to try and find who had the telemetry data.

I found him first. The drive went into his hands, but I needed to keep my promise with Eric before letting go.

“You’re better than the first pilot,” I said, and I wasn’t lying. If the previous flier had been a saint, this one was a god. “But you wouldn’t have been able to manage the landing either. There just wasn’t time.”

“Let me see,” he said, tugging on the drive. “Just let me see. I have to know I couldn’t do it either. I have to know that someone had to die.”

I let go of the drive and he stalked back into his ship. I didn’t follow. I figured I’d pushed things far enough.

--- --- --- --- ---

The second pilot left the ship six hours later. He looked bleary in a way that put me at ease. I’d been up the last six hours directing supplies from the ship. Everything from ground-to-orbit rails to AGI targeting systems was inside - to call it gamechanging would be an understatement. It was good work, but I was tired, and I didn’t want to have to pretend otherwise. Seeing the other man with bags under his eyes meant we could just be frank with each other.

“I couldn’t have managed it,” he said, half-ashamed, half-relieved.

“It just wasn’t possible,” I agreed.

We sat there a moment longer. I didn’t mind the break. This was time well spent.

“Did it hurt?” he asked finally.

“Ablative failed before heating,” I said, which was the technical way of saying no. “He overloaded the reactor before the ship actually broke up and did some kind of slingshot maneuver - hit the main body of the Kresh fleet with half a space station’s worth of shrapnel.”

“Good,” he said.

I knew the signs. The tremor in his cheek, the way his jaw clenched - it wasn’t professional, but I hugged him anyway. Let him have the dignity of choosing to weep instead of having it wrenched out of him.

It was a gift we’d all been given at some point in this war. At least now, there was the hope it could be over soon.

[neenarchive]

one thing about me is when i read or watch something and there's an evil child or some sort of monster who was born a monster i'm always going to side with the monster. sorry about your loser parents i would have loved you. skill issue

[x23innocencelost]

I love when there's characters that are pair bonded and you know that wherever one of them is the other is also gonna be there.

[x23innocencelost]

Not necessarily romantic (either in the text or through a shipping lense). Yeah this is my guy don't split us up. No particular reason.

[tossawary]

Learning that a story originated as a fanfiction before having its serial numbers filed off... the filing jobs can obviously vary in quality a lot, but I have found that learning this info often explains something (neutral statement) about the story / world choices that was tickling my brain somehow. The element I've been thinking about recently are the friendships within the former fanfiction story.

Like, it's not weird for wholly original romance novels to have otherwise disposable friend characters who act as author mouthpieces at crucial points in the story. (It's also not uncommon for romance novel characters to have NO close friends or family, in my experience, which is a different thing.) Former fanfics do not even slightly have a monopoly on, "Hey, what's up with this weird friend character? They seem a little out-of-place here? Also seems like you're maybe under-utilizing the weird, comedic relief friend, tbh; they could be doing more in this story."

But with former fanfics, sometimes you get the lightbulb moment of: "Ohhhhh, this was a former Stucky fanfic and this female best friend is Like That (in a same way that every character is probably also a little bit Like That) because she originated as AU Natasha Romanoff before having the serial numbers filed off! I get it now."

[tossawary]

See, in fanfiction as literature, it's pretty much wholly accepted that a character's role in a story can exclusively be... Being That Character in this AU. Which isn't a bad thing. It's just a thing. It's very often fun.

Audience familiarity with (and affection for) the characters and their relationships to one another can be one of fanfiction's strengths re: storytelling. You can play with a lot of reader expectations this way.

Anyway, if I was reading a Coffee Shop AU Star Wars Reylo fanfiction (you could basically use this example fic to ward me personally off like garlic against a vampire, tbh, but let's pretend)... even if Finn had nothing to do as a character in this story besides be Rey's coworker at the coffee shop, I would be even more suspicious and dismayed if Finn was completely missing. We EXPECT to see at least briefly all of the major members of a cast in an AU fanfic of certain length, barring unusual circumstances.

Even if he is almost completely irrelevant to the meet-cute at hand, I WANT to know where Chewbacca is in this AU! I want to enjoy a little chuckle when, idk, C-3PO is turned into a high-strung, middle-aged office guy with either a short, non-English-speaking husband or a Border Collie-Corgi mix dog named Artoo that runs his entire life. It's delightful to see the characters I know and love in the background!

But when you file the serial numbers off of AU fanfiction, a character's role in a story can no longer be Being That Character. Now, you potentially have a bunch of story elements that conflict slightly or conflict very seriously. Now, you may have additional characters whose presence is no longer perfectly explained by the fact that you are expected to include all the Avengers in your MCU fanfic.

Now, Not-Chewbacca's quirks cannot be explained away by him Being Chewbacca. And suddenly, readers are like, "Hey, kind of weird throwaway detail for Not-Kylo's dad to be a former drug runner who lives in a van with an old, foreign war vet! Is that going to be relevant later???" Once you cut the fanfiction strings, your new story may feel riddled with inconsistencies and missed opportunities. Why are these characters here if they're 1) not contributing to the plot, 2) not contributing to character ans relationship development, and 3) not even really contributing tonally (humor, angst, fluff) to the story?

I'm sticking to talking about friendships and background characters here, because it's what I've been thinking about lately, though you could obviously go on forever taking about all the many nuances of what filing the serial numbers off does to a story and the art of adaptation. I just had a "Oh! It's NAT! Hi, Black Widow! Sorry this story made you kind of boring, Nat!" moment recently.

[propalahramota]

They should add "On Horseback" option to Google Maps. For writers.

[kotitontunmanaaja]

"Hevoslinja" (Trans-Horse) is a European art project started in 2014 by Finnish artist Eero Yli-Vakkuri - according to his own words 'skilless in riding and afraid of animals' at the start.

The aim of the project was to travel 270 km / 168 miles between Helsinki and Turku in Finland, and to highlight the possibility of horse travel in modern society. Since then they've took to promoting horseback efforts in urban landscapes with several European collaborators and artists.

Yli-Vakkuri and collaborators first spent eight months practicing riding to become safely self-sufficient in saddle, and bought a Finnhorse gelding Toivottu Poika ('Awaited Son'). The route followed, as closely as possible, the old coastal royal country road of the premodern era, Kuninkaantie/Suuri Rantatie, and took 9 days.

Toivottu Poika is a very average example of his breed, standing at some 155 cm / 15.1 hh tall. The Finnhorse is a relative of for example the North-Norwegian Lyngshest breed, the Icelandic horse, the Swedish Gotlandsruss pony and the Estonian landrace horse and Tori horse breed. It is a mid-sized light draught and trotter, a sensibly realistic mediaeval country travel horse equivalent.

For more hardcore short-term treks, looking into competitive endurance riding can be helpful. Mongol Derby might be one of the most intense races, as it recreates the Chinggis Khan era postal system of swapping horses continuously over a 1000 km / 620 mile route.

By only including skilled endurance riders, keeping up a constant fast speed and swapping horses every 40 km / 25 mil, the Mongol Derby route only takes 10 days even though it's several times the length of the Trans-Horse project. This is the speed of highly organised imperial messengers with the supporting cultural infrastructure, professional marathon runners where Yli-Vakkuri and Toivottu poika were leisure hikers.

The Mongolian landrace horse is a very distant relative of the breeds above, but much lighter and smaller than the agriculturally focused modern Finnhorse - typicaly standing at 142 cm / 14 hh at most. (This would've also been common for Finnhorses before the 19th century.) What really differentiates them from Western breeds, however, is the way they're trained and raised in semi-feral herds, and it's said that while the rider may decide where the pair is headed, the horse is the one to decide how to get there.

[drev-the-procrastinator]

also it's not quite google maps, but there is a lovely site called Viabundus!

the last i checked, the map of roads stretches from Calais, France to Moscow, Russia west to east and from Košice, Slovakia to Tornio, Finland south to north. it doesn't cover all of Europe, for example Sweden and Norway are empty at the moment, but it is quite extensive and still being worked on! in addition to showing the old roads, you can calculate the distance and travel time from one city to another, and there are a lot of options:

and that's not all! here's a description from the site itself (emphasis mine):

"Viabundus is a freely accessible online street map of late medieval and early modern northern Europe (1350-1650). Originally conceived as the digitisation of Friedrich Bruns and Hugo Weczerka's Hansische Handelsstraßen (1962) atlas of land roads in the Hanseatic area, the Viabundus map moves beyond that. It includes among others: a database with information about settlements, towns, tolls, staple markets and other information relevant for the pre-modern traveller; a route calculator; a calendar of fairs; and additional land routes as well as water ways."

it's quite neat and also free! i hope someone else finds it as fascinating and cool as i did :)

[elodieunderglass]

Thank you so much for sending me this, @quandocoeli ! All very cool!

An interesting question: how much do horses help? There are situations (long-haul hikes) where they’re sort of as much of a liability as a help. They really walk at Human Speed, or close to it, and horses weirdly have less stamina over long hauls than humans do. I don’t think a lot of fantasy authors realise this. If you spend time around horses, you will realise it, though.

Human and horse walking speeds match very nicely.

Horses will walk for about as many hours a day as we do (about six-ish, especially if it’s day after day after day, I.e. long travel.)

You can go at faster gaits on a horse. They trot (similar to our jogging) canter (running lightly) and gallop (running fast.) they do not do this for long trav. you might get a horse to trot on and off all day, but would not, not even a little bit, trot from the Shire to Mordor.

If you push too hard and knacker your horse, you have to rest them.

Quite a lot of human history, from military to economic, has been about Dragging the Horses Around.

Anyway, a walking horse goes like 4mph. That’s on Google maps already. Pick the Walking route. It’s the same thing.

But that’s the automatic “it would take an hour for both myself and a horse, or myself ON the horse, to walk 4 miles” answer. Writers who are interested in the problem are probably picturing something slightly more plot-relevant than walking to the gas station for scratch tickets and an Arizona Iced Tea.

I was interested to know if this could connect and hold true in terms of a long-term travel - say, a LotR-esque quest over weeks and different terrains - and thanksfully, I have a relevant interest to hand. Once again, the Camino de Santiago.

today, you may complete the Camino de Santiago on foot or on horseback. There are many horse rental agencies. A reasonable middle of the road pace suggested by one is: Riding between 25-35 km for 6-7 hours a day (normal mode). Various routes include terrain like mountains and plains; they presume you’ll largely camp. You are not allowed to run the horse into the ground (they will get mad at you) and a pilgrimage should be an amble, not a march. Plus, it’s hot in Spain and there are mountains; you’re going to be mooching and drinking water to survive this six-week hike.

but like I said: a keen math-brained person will note that this is basically human walking speed. It’s also about the time walked and distance covered by the human-only hikers. This strongly suggests that experienced horse-rental long-haul pilgrims don’t break above a walk, or do so very infrequently to maintain the average speed. and certainly aren’t cantering the whole Camino.

(This is definitely a modern company being mindful of horse welfare, although pragmatic animal welfare probably doesn’t stray too far from pragmatic medieval people not wanting to kill their horse. But is also the far more immediate concern that 6 hours in a day about as long as an average human wants to be on an average horse. Like, cattle drives are the outliers.)

You’ll see that the matches up to the second post. The horse in the Finnish expedition went about 20 miles a day, which is at the top end of the human Camino pilgrim and about what a Camino horse does, but heat/hydration is a major consideration on the Camino and probably less of a worry in Finland. 20 miles a day at 4 mph is 5 hours of riding on flat perfect ground and wrinkles if you need to add hills and hydration.

As the pilgrimage has thousands of pilgrims per year and excellent travel records going back to the medieval era, it would be really interesting to work out if this is a “fast” or “slow” estimation of horseback travel by fantasy standards. Are we being nicer to horses? Did medieval horsemen make them walk 10 hours a day? Has better diet and better understanding of fitness/gear sped up humans or given us more stamina? Do roads make a difference? There are a million considerations. If any of them are helpful in your novel, there is a very well-documented horse/human walking route across Spain in which medieval records can be compared directly to 2025 forum posts - a very rich seam, if you know what your question is!

But in general, especially for long journeys over many days, human walking speed on google maps is actually a surprisingly good rule of thumb for horse walking speed.

[bigender2]

unfortunately i do love pompous and pretentious characters. ☝️ WHO get their asses handed to them this is pivotal to my enjoyment of them

[bigender2]

if theres a pompous/pretentious character who never gets thrown around like a gross rag, or they never have some ego breaking event happen to them then whats the fucking point

[quasi-normalcy]

Not to sound mushy, but stories about two lonely characters from vastly different worlds finding solace with each other always appeal to me

[quasi-normalcy]

You know what makes it even better? If one of them is sort of evil.

[clementine-kesh]

imo you get the most out of engaging with media when you strike a balance between treating characters as people (reading interiority into their actions, considering the effect of various aspects of their identity, etc etc) and as vehicles for storytelling (what narrative purpose do they serve, how do their actions and personality function to convey the themes of the work, etc etc). because of course characters are literary devices but also there’s a reason we use literary devices written to embody realistic people in order to tell stories

[fullest-circlest]

If you're writing 18th century dialogue, this website lets you search words and phrases to double-check whether they were in use & meant what you intend. It doesn't include every period-accurate use of a word/phrase, but it certainly helped me separate genuine 18th century grammar from the vague tangle of 💬old-fashioned fancy-speak💬 I've internalized from TV and video games.

[my-deer-friend]

Other websites that let you do this:

Johnson's Dictionary Online (thanks @yellowbelliedtoad!) – 1755 and 1773

Green's Dictionary of Slang – 1300s to today

A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue – 1788

Feraud's Dictionaire critique de la langue française – 1778

[zisurru]

A dictionary of the English and Italian languages by Giuseppe Baretti is a bilingual dictionary from 1790!

[tempusedax-rerum]

how do you go about drafting a plot? im so intimidated by figuring out how stories end

that is such a great question, anon. It's very intimidating! And hard! Honestly, most of what I've learned has come from @stump-not-found because they're a master at structuring a story and their advice is excellent.

I'm going to put this into 2 parts...

Emotional:

The best piece of advice that I can regift to you is to write short stories first – or, even better, start smaller: just write some scenes from start to finish.

The cool thing about stories is that they're kind of fractal-like; a paragraph has the same narrative structure as a scene or a chapter or an emotional arc or a whole novel or a series of novels. There's an opening and a resolution and everything in the middle is how you connect those two states. So, you can learn a lot about structuring a plot by writing short scenes with relatively simple openings, middles, and resolutions.

You're building a muscle here. Writing a full plot is a test of endurance and strength. You wouldn't expect yourself to successfully run a marathon or deadlift 200 lbs on your first try, right? Work up to it. Practice finishing. Pay attention to what snags you. Learn from that.

(side note: the emotional experience of actually finishing stories is a whole other topic I'd love to give advice about, but I won't get sidetracked here. If anyone wants advice on actually finishing a story of any length, but especially a long-form story, please send me an ask!)

Another piece of advice I've stolen from stump: write imperfectly. Expect your plots to have problems. Expect your stories to have loose ends and awkward parts. Be ready to feel weird about it. Tell yourself, "yeah, this doesn't feel exactly right..." and then keep writing it. Finish it anyway. This links to the first piece of advice; you're practicing. That's never a waste of time. Allow yourself to write things that suck; they're excellent stepping stones. You can examine them and figure out what you do and don't like, then try something a little different next time.

And that leads into the third thing: have fun (and be nice to yourself!) Writing is play. When you write, you're pretending on paper. Never forget that. It's supposed to be fun and silly and stupid and self-indulgent and full of plot holes. That's the most natural state of storytelling! "I'm a mermaid with a rainbow tail and pink hair who can talk to seaweed and has a bank account full of clam shells and works at the underwater olive garden on the weekends" – that's the foundation of writing, right there! Whatever you pretended as a kid is the foundation of what you pretend now. A plot that makes logical sense isn't what comes naturally to human brains, but if it's fun for you, then you can learn how to make one up too! But remember you're just learning how to play a new game.

Practical:

Every story has a message (often multiple!) Know what you want to say. Some of TIBAP's and AWE's big messages are "Behaviours always make sense when you know the full context," "All people deserve empathy, even if they hurt others," and "Vulnerability is scary, but it's worth the risk." As I'm writing the plot, I ask myself how I can convey those messages to the readers, whether the events I'm writing are making my messages more or less clear, and whether I can say what I want to say in a better way. They also act as guiding lights that lead me to the endings; I knew the end state of TIBAP needed to support my messages, so I kept steering the plot toward them.

Stories are about change; they take characters from one state (emotional, physical, spiritual, etc) to another. In TIBAP, I had a vague idea of the key moments I wanted to happen, and then I strung them together by designing scenes that brought the characters closer to the next key moment. One of the best things you can do is just write down the pieces of the plot that you're already excited about and then link them together. Find the key scenes.

You could even work backwards – decide the end state for the characters first and then decide how to get them there. That's what TIBAP was like in the brainstorming stage; I knew I wanted to end with Bill and Ford in an emotional place where they could maybe make it work even after all the horrible stuff that happened, and then I asked myself how I could get them there.

I wrote TIBAP from start to finish with very little formal structuring in mind (and it shows lol). AWE has been a different experience. With AWE, I spent months before I started writing deciding what I wanted to say, what the end state for the characters was going to be, and how to get them there. I had three key scenes, and then I thought of some scenes to connect those scenes, and scenes to connect those, etc. I just kept expanding out the story until I liked how it felt.

A LOT has changed from my original plan and I expect even more will change as I get closer to the end. The physical act of writing changes a plot all the time – that's why it's so important to keep going. Sometimes you don't know the end (or how you get there) until you write it. As long as you remind yourself what your message is, then you'll have somewhere to steer toward.

TLDR:

Practice finishing shorter stories

Write imperfectly

Have fun with it (and be kind to yourself!)

Know your message(s) and aim for them

Start with the key scenes (maybe even start at the end)

Just keep going

That's what comes to mind as advice, anyway. If you have any specific questions about the process of planning and structuring a plot, including an ending, feel free to send more asks! I've definitely learned a lot about that..... but it's harder to know what to say about it without knowing what specific issues you're bumping up against.